Stir the Pot

Flora Yukhnovich, Maybe She’s Born With It, 2022. I’ve been having the same argument, with the same person, for 13 years. It sounds petty when you hear about it because it sounds like two people fighting over who did more work. And it was—trust me—but it was also about how entitlement leads people to believe their own bullshit. You can read about it HERE and HERE. Last week, it finally ended. I’m ready to start a new chapter. I left my old newsletter, The Broiler Room, in February 2024.

This week I shared a photo of a lunch I made my wife and got lots of DMs asking how to make it. I am nothing if not helpful so I pushed off the soup I was planning on sharing and went with this instead. I think we’re all better for it. I eat some version of this bowl once a week when the weather gets warm, so consider this my attempt at bringing spring weather to all of us ASAP. I’ve shared a recipe for a Vietnamese style bún salad before, but this week I’ve added some quick pickles to the mix.

Hey Potheads, Everyone I talk to these days is struggling to have fun in the kitchen. The love of cooking is giving way to tedium on having to make another goddamn dinner. I know the struggle well. In times like these I like to run to my bookshelf and pull down some of my most beloved cookbooks. Flipping through the pages, reading the intros and my favorite recipes, makes me feel like I’m grabbing lunch with an old friend.

just some hits from the last year here at StP Hey Potheads, Before we get back in the kitchen, I wanted one more opportunity to hear what you would love to see around here. I am finally going to have a little more time and a lot energy to pour into Stir the Pot and I want to make sure I am giving you all exactly what you want. So before I run headfirst in the wrong direction, would you mind taking a… Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Michelle Albanes-Davis.

There are some recipes that I hardly ever revisit. I might have burned myself out on it while testing it, I might have never liked it but knew that you guys might so I cooked it up, or it might be attached to some bad memory from my life at the time I wrote it that I would rather not relive. But there are some recipes that I remain obsessed with. In my third cookbook, there’s a recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip cookies that I love. I still make them all the time.

Hey Potheads, Last week I introduced you to one of my favorite new spice blends and a lovely stir-fry noodle dish to use it in. My Last Days of Darkness blend is a little bit smokey, a little bit spicy, and full of so many layers of flavor that you’ve got to get on it. Some of you messaged me asking for a scaled-up version of that recipe so that you can keep a small jar in your spice drawer so obviously I’ve obliged and that’s attached below.

If you could teleport anywhere, where would you go? Between growing up watching Star Trek, Quantum Leap, and that weird teleportation subplot on Family Matters, I’ve thought about this a lot. I’d want to visit faraway friends for dinner and see the wonders of the world, of course. But once I got all of that out of my system, I’d start getting goofy. Instead of ordering delivery, I would simply appear at great spots to eat all over the world and order everything I could afford.

It’s been a chilly winter in Seattle compared to what I’m used to in LA. I’m weak and I know it because every Seattleite will tell you this is the mildest winter in memory. On the Stir the Pot video call meet-up on Thursday night, we were all chatting and I was bemoaning the lack of snow this winter. (FYI: The meet-ups are super fun and we will be doing more in the future.) Well I woke up this morning and bam, it snowed in Seattle.

I love a comeuppance. There’s just something about watching someone finally have to answer for their bad behavior that feels so good. Maybe it’s the latent bully in me, but nothing gets under my skin like hubris. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be proud of your accomplishments, but once you start thinking that your accomplishments make you a better, more valuable person than the rest, you’ve taken it too far. If someone acts like the rules don’t apply to them, then my sympathies won’t apply either.

This is always the time of year when I start missing fresh summer fruit. Instead of settling for some shitty out of season strawberries, let’s bake with citrus. You already preserved some lemons, so why not show them a little sweetness too? Typically, I’m not the biggest fan of lemon desserts. They are usually cloyingly sweet or taste like a cleaning product to me. No thanks. But when I started thinking of the perfect sweet to go with my midday London Fog, I landed on something with lemon.