Week Six: Lesbian Potlucks & Buy Nothing Week
Welcome back to Dinner Diary!
Sunday 3/19/23
Turkey chili and colcannon cakes
Okay, so these two foods are not traditionally served together, as far as I know. But the theme of this week is using what you have on hand, and what I had was turkey chili from the freezer and just enough leftover colcannon (mashed potatoes with cabbage) to make these colcannon cakes, which were wildly delicious. I could eat these every day.
Writing last week about Too Good to Go has made me think more about food waste. An estimated 30-40% of food in the US gets thrown out! And while Anne and I are pretty good about cooking thoughtfully and taking our food scraps to the compost bins at the community garden, we could always do better and waste less. So I’ve decided to challenge myself to a Buy Nothing week: seven nights of meals using only what we have. Good for the grocery budget, good for the planet.
This could be difficult because, like my parents, I’ve been known to go grocery shopping for fun. Anne teases me about going to our Stop & Shop so often I know all the cashiers by name (come on, they’re wearing name tags!) But the rule this week is that I can only go to the store if I’m out of a staple, like olive oil or garlic. So I’ll be relying on the pantry, fridge, and freezer to feed us this week. I keep us pretty well-stocked, but we’ll see how it goes.
I recognize that we’re enormously privileged to choose a Buy Nothing week, instead of having it forced on us by circumstance. Hunger is a widespread problem in America, especially since the pandemic; lots of families are struggling financially. And this week, 30 million people lost extra food stamp assistance, leaving even more families at risk of food insecurity. It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of these facts, but there are so many organizations doing great work to combat food insecurity and fight food waste. Like City Harvest! They rescue millions of pounds of unused food and deliver it to community food partners across NYC.
So I’ve decided to start a fundraiser for my birthday this year: my goal is to raise $300 for City Harvest before May 7th. If each of my subscribers donated just $7, we’d crush that goal! So please consider donating if you can. If it’s not possible for you right now, consider sharing this link with your network. Either way, I’m glad you’re here with me on Team Dinner Diary.
Monday 3/20/23
Tofu fried rice
This meal is meant to use up leftover rice, but I actually made fresh rice this morning just so I could make this recipe. It seemed like a good start to my Buy Nothing week, because I needed to use up some tofu, carrots, and half a can of peas. Day-old rice works best for fried rice, because it dries out slightly in the fridge, but you can also spread fresh rice on a baking sheet and let it cool in the fridge for a few hours.
I turned on the Zojirushi rice cooker and braced myself for the baby to start crying. When you turn it on, our rice cooker plays the first few bars of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, which happens to be the baby’s bedtime song. When we sing it during her bedtime routine, she snuggles happily in our arms, but when she hears it at any other time, it makes her confused and upset. Even saying “twinkle twinkle” makes her cry. One day, it occurred to me to sing her the ABCs, but she got this devastated look on her face and started crying, because it’s the same tune as the Song Which Must Not Be Named. I guess we’ll need to get that cleared up before she starts preschool. In the meantime, the rice cooker makes the baby cry, and I have to explain that it’s okay, no one’s going to bed right now! We’re just making rice!
But you know who was not crying when dinner time rolled around? Anne and me, because this fried rice is absolutely incredible. I always follow this recipe, but with a few tweaks: instead of pork, I use pressed tofu, cut into tiny cubes. I always use at least twice the amount of peas and carrots called for, and tonight I threw in some shredded cabbage too. It was delicious. Anne always says it tastes like fried rice from a restaurant, which is the highest praise I can imagine for fried rice.
Tuesday 3/21/23
Big Salad
Confession: I went to the grocery store today.
I know. I know! But before I declared a Buy Nothing week, I’d promised Anne that we could have Big Salad for dinner one night. And we were out of greens. And flour, and tomato paste, and bananas for the baby... So off I went. But I stuck to my list of staples, and resisted any impulse purchases.
Tonight’s Big Salad was kale and spring mix with chopped carrots, red kidney beans, boiled eggs, dried cherries, and toasted walnuts and pepitas. And my favorite homemade lemon vinaigrette.
As we were building our salads, Anne asked if I was worried my readers would get bored if I started repeating meals. I admit, the thought had occurred to me. Would it be like a celeb wearing the same couture gown to two awards shows? Would I have to cook a new and exciting dinner every night for the rest of my life? (Honestly, I can think of worse fates.) But actually, I’m not worried, because a) it’s just reality that meals are going to repeat, and b) I feel like I have plenty to say about any given meal.
Like tonight: I could write about how I’ve learned the secret to really palatable kale salads is to both chop it finely and massage it with olive oil. Or how the dried cherries, a last-minute addition, really kicked things up a notch. I could talk about how I refused to eat salads for most of my life, insisting rudely that they tasted “like the ground,” and have only recently gotten enthusiastic about them.
But what I most want to say is that today’s weather was so lovely (it got up to 60 in Jersey City!) that it was finally warm enough for Anne and me to eat dinner on our balcony for the first time since we moved here last fall. It wasn’t a grand affair, just two folding chairs and salad bowls in our laps, but it was perfect. Light breeze, crisp cold seltzer, feet up on the railing, rich blue sky fading to night. I’ve made Big Salad before, and—fair warning—I’ll make it again, but it’ll be slightly different next time, and we’ll never have another evening exactly like tonight.
Wednesday 3/22/23
Spaghetti with shrimp alla marinara
Shrimp alla marinara sounds so fancy, but it’s just shrimp in tomato sauce. I followed this NYT recipe, but I used a jar of Carbone tomato sauce instead of making marinara. The Carbone sauce was a “roasted garlic” sauce, or so its label alleged, so I didn’t add smashed garlic cloves to the pan where I fried the shrimp, worried that it would be too much. A miscalculation I came to regret.
While we ate, I told Anne, “This sauce barely tastes like garlic at all! I really could’ve pumped up the volume on the garlic.”
“You can always pump up the volume on the garlic for me. It can never be too much,” Anne said. “Even if we were just eating roasted garlic on bread, that would be a perfect meal.” Note taken. That does sound perfect.
But even with the garlic volume turned down to a sad whisper, this meal was delicious, and a good example of something solid coming together from kitchen staples. I always have pasta on hand, and a two-pound bag of shrimp in the freezer (because I am my parents’ child). I stock up on Carbone sauces when they go on sale at the ShopRite, because Anne loves them. Now I know to skip the “roasted garlic” kind, though. What kind of racket are you running here, Carbone?
Thursday 3/23/23
Farro bowls with tempeh, kale and chickpeas
These turned out fantastic: chewy farro with crispy crumbled tempeh, sauteed kale and crunchy roasted chickpeas. I made this creamy tahini dressing, threw in some dried cherries, and fried up a few garlic chips. The juxtaposition of textures and flavors was out of control. Anne performed a convincing mime of hitting a ball out of the park and running the bases. Who needs Michelin stars when you’ve got this kind of feedback?
I was going to make an offhand joke about how this meal is full of stereotypical lesbian foods (for the uninitiated, that’s anything vegetarian, organic, indigestible, and vaguely humorless). But then I got curious and googled “stereotypical lesbian foods” to see where that idea comes from, and found this fascinating article by Reina Gattuso about the history of lesbian potlucks. Gattuso writes:
Now, lentil stews and tofu bakes are stereotypical “lesbian” food, the punchline of community jokes. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, these dishes represented new ways of thinking about power, violence, and equality. For many lesbians, the rejection of meat was practical: Women simply couldn’t afford it. But refusing to eat animals was also deeply political…These beliefs led to culinary experimentation. White lesbians, many of whom grew up on standard Middle-American fare, began using ingredients outside their culinary repertoires: tofu, brown rice, hummus. Meanwhile, women rejected processed foods, boycotting brands engaged in corporate practices they viewed as harmful to women and workers.
The article adds that these early lesbian potlucks were often racially segregated spaces dominated by white women, and that these emerging practices didn’t always make space for women of color, an ugly and harmful legacy of white feminism. It’s not a new problem, and it’s not yet history. As a white woman, it makes me want to keep educating myself so I can do better, and make sure everyone feels welcome and celebrated at my table.
Reading this kind of queer history also makes me so grateful to be alive in this particular time and place: things aren’t perfect, but damn, I get to be legally married to my beautiful wife, we get to have a beautiful kid together, and we don’t have to hide our beautiful love from anyone. We can eat our lesbian grain bowls in peace.
Now I'm feeling energized to organize a good old-fashioned potluck. Who’s in? I’ll bring the lentils and my Indigo Girls playlist.
Friday 3/24/23
Carrot soup with red bean and cabbage fritters
A couple weeks ago, the Stop & Shop had a two-for-one deal on these big bags of baby carrots. Free carrots! How could I resist? I brought home my prize and, thinking of reducing food waste, immediately made a big batch of simple carrot soup, with just sauteed onion and some vegetable broth. I poured the soup into our amazing Soupercubes (thanks, Claire and Delaney!) and stuck it in the freezer.
Now that I’m nearing the end of Buy Nothing week with almost no fresh veggies left, it’s this soup’s time to shine. All it needed was a splash of lemon juice to brighten it up. But it wasn’t enough to make a full meal, so I browsed the odds and ends left in the fridge: some red beans, a couple of eggs, a quarter of a cabbage. Inspired by the success of Sunday’s colcannon cakes, I decided to combine these into fritters. I consulted one of my favorite cookbooks, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and followed his helpful tips for creating a batter to bind veggies together: flour, eggs, a little milk, salt and pepper. I added some grated Parmesan to the mix and melted some butter on the griddle.
This meal wasn’t the flashiest thing I’ve cooked all week, but it was simple and comforting, and only a little austere, like something a hobbit might grudgingly enjoy at a roadside tavern run by lesbians.
Saturday 3/25/23
Fried chicken naan sandwich at The Hutton
Dinner out! I met up with my sister and brother-in-law at The Hutton, a restaurant in our neighborhood that’s been on my list to check out for a while.
We shared a small plate of cauliflower wings, which were delicious, crunchy and tender, but not as spicy as we would’ve liked. I’d heard a lot about their fried chicken naan sandwich, so I had to give that a try. It did not disappoint. An enormous portion of juicy chicken, deep-fried and crunchy, tucked inside a grilled piece of naan, topped with cheddar sauce and corn—it shouldn’t have made any sense, but it did.
For dessert, we shared a plate of the Hutton donuts, warm and delicate things that reminded me of sugar-dusted hush puppies. I might go back just for these.
After a week of carefully and creatively using up leftovers, bound by the limits of my pantry and resisting the siren song of the Stop & Shop, it felt downright decadent to enjoy a restaurant meal, complete with apps and zerts. And it was very cozy to sit out on the heated patio, with rain coming down on the glass roof, enjoying good food and great conversation with family. What a treat.
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Thanks for reading! And a special warm sugar-dusted thanks to my proofreading crew—I appreciate you. Here’s a link to Week Five, in case you missed it. And I’m serious about that potluck, by the way. Riverview-Fisk Park? End of April? Let’s do it!
XO,
Hannah