Sunday Reset: Eat your Feelings.
What you're cooking. Who we're following. How restaurants make us feel.
Mood: Eat Your Feelings. It’s Comfort Food Season.
2020. Bad for: Vacations, democracy, and hugging other people’s children.
(Jean Ellen hopes her reputation among New York’s under-5 set -- “scary distant lady in a mask” -- isn’t permanent).
Good for: Big Sourdough, NYT Cooking subscriptions, and at-home cocktail kits. We see you, friends. You’ve been eating your feelings for seven months now. Summer was not really a time for baked goods and warm meals, but you made it work (and we were right there with you).
Now, finally, we’ve made it to comfort food season. There’s a light chill in the air, the holidays are nigh, the election’s in 16 days, and COVID’s third wave has arrived. Let’s go back inside and put those new knife skills to work.
This week: We eat through a pandemic, drink through climate change, and cook through our anxiety. Let’s get chopping.
Sunday Playlist: Food and Drink, Fall 2020.
1. ENJOY SOME SOCIAL SILLINESS.
If you were lucky enough to follow @nytcookingcomments when it hit Instagram in 2019, we assume it’s been getting you through 2020. We can all rally around commenters like Sarah and Lisa:
Ready for your next great Instagram follow? Meet Thelonious Munk. Food writer Angela Hansberg missed restaurants. So she created her own... for a chipmunk.
On Thursday, Hansberg wrote about crafting her favorites meals in chipmunk miniature on Bon Appetit. Predictably, her account has blown up in the 72 hours since. Ridiculous? Sure. But, as Hansberg explained, that’s the point.
...every day, there is also Thelonious, a chipmunk who sits down to eat in a world without a doomful election and a deadly virus. This is how I am coping, laying out a picnic, watching tiny hands hold my tiny food. It’s silly, yes, but sometimes silliness is needed.”
2. REFLECT ON WHAT RESTAURANTS MEAN TO YOU --
AND WHAT YOU OWE THEM IN RETURN.
If reading about a chipmunk’s dining-out adventures triggered some serious nostalgia, writer Bryan Washington offers a more serious take on our relationship with restaurants in 2020. “In a moment when the very nature of physical space is being redefined, where and how we choose to spend our time has taken an even more pronounced role in our lives.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is this: restaurants are where life is lived. They’re where I’ve lived my life. If we’re willing to sacrifice those venues, then we’re willing to sacrifice our cities as we know them: whether it’s the tiny hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian diners, or the countertop Honduran food trucks... the affection and the connections [we have to restaurants] are changing forms, thoroughly and rapidly: most won’t survive. Others might find a way. But what they’ll look like, in the end, is anybody’s guess.
3. KEEP UP WITH THE PROS AT HOME.
If you’ve tried to level up your cooking through the pandemic like Zack, there’s a good chance you’ve increasingly relied on everybody’s favorite food mad scientist, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. His award-winning cookbook The Food Lab applies rigorous testing to every recipe, and is easily Zack’s most-consulted resource in the kitchen (we know that’s true for many of you power cooks, too).
A discovery for Lopez-Alt fans: his YouTube channel is amazing. The channel includes a produced cooking “show”, informative equipment reviews, and our favorite: late-night POV cooking zen. No commentary added, and none needed. Just Kenji, messing around in the kitchen, wearing a GoPro video camera. See what cooking garlic spaghetti at 2 am looks like through the eyes of the master.
For insight into the masterworks of other master chefs, check out one of our favorite pandemic pivots: #michelinguideathome. Pre-COVID, the Michelin Guide’s instagram account featured gorgeous photos from restaurants around the world. This year, they’ve partnered with Michelin-starred chefs to share the step-by-step recipes for their most acclaimed dishes. Just look at these:
4. PLAN THAT POLISH WINE TRIP FOR 2050.
Pilsners from Germany, Cabernet from France. Europe’s beverage culture is based on climate -- barley and hops grow best above the 50°N parallel; grapes grow best below it. At least, that was the rule. As climate change accelerates, the sweet spots for grape cultivation are moving north.
The new map below, from the National Academy of Sciences, projects how climate change will shift viticultural suitability over the next 30 years: current wine regions that may not survive (the red), regions that may survive in part (the green) and regions that will become viable for wineries in an increasingly hotter climate (the blue). That’s right: we could be seeing dynamite Flemish and Canadian wines in our lifetimes.
Of immediate concern: the impact of wildfires on California and Oregon. Yes, these regions have seen destructive fires for a decade now, but the fires used to occur later in the fall when grapes were already off the vines. This year’s fires broke out in August and September, peak harvest season. Even if wineries escaped physical fire damage, pervasive smoke contaminated grapes and higher temperatures reduced yields. 2020 will be a messy vintage for US wineries -- and may be a harbinger of the industry’s global shift. TL;DR: We’ll see you on the British Columbia summer wedding circuit in 2050.
Show Notes: The week that was
VOTER FRAUD -- IN THE CULINARY WORLD. The James Beard Foundation Awards, the American culinary industry’s most prestigious accolades, have been cancelled until 2022 after a major voting scandal. The foundation violated its own ethics rules to ensure this year’s award winners fit into its new narrative of progress and social justice.
ELECTION AD FRENZY. More than $1.5 billion has been spent on presidential campaign advertising this year; $496 million was spent by this point in 2016. An in-person ground game isn’t a thing in 2020… so it’s all about the ads (and Biden is now the big spender).
COVID THIRD WAVE. You’ve heard the news: the third wave is here. For graphs that go beyond the standard up-and-to-the-right tally, check out the latest visualizations from the Covid-19 Tracking Project.
Your Truth / Our Dare
Your Truth: Fall recipe standbys.
We dared. You delivered.
Credit: Susan @TartesUnknown, Reader Craig, Reader Eric
Roasted Butternut Squash Ravioli from Tartes Unknown. “I was tired of being full of shit when talking about food so I enrolled in cooking school to learn what really goes into making my favorite dishes. This recipe is the perfect comfort food for fall. You can follow my culinary (mis)adventures at @tartesunknown. Email Sunday Reset for the recipe!”
- Food photographer Susan
Sausage and Cabbage, from the “Stevie Nicks of British Cookery.” “I swear by this very simple, minimal recipe. Easy, satisfying, and perfect for cold months. Listen to Norma’s “Most Helpful” comment: Don’t waste time or water by boiling the cabbage. Just cut up the cabbage, layer it raw with the sausage and butter, and let long slow heat do its job. Magical.”
- Craig
The best buffalo wings (fry, fry again). “Applying cocktail-esque science to the chicken wing… I present the long read of J. Kenji López-Alt’s deep dive into frying the perfect wing. Wings are football appropriate, and therefore are fall appropriate? A stretch! Maybe. Happy frying!”
- Eric
Our Dare
You guys have thrown the chicken wing gauntlet, and we have some cooking to do.
Need an extra nudge to cook something new every week?
Check out Reddit’s 52 Weeks of Cooking Challenge. A different theme every week from “Caramelizing” to “Ginger” to “Nepalese.” “Food Mashup Week” starts Wednesday. Dare we try Buffalo Sausage Ravioli? Butternut Squash and Cabbage Chicken?
Until next Sunday, friends. Enjoy our Negroni mash up, and keep cooking.
— JE & Z