Weekend Reading
October 27, 2024

This week, a friend of mine mentioned that her mother lives in a part of the world that’s currently seeing violence and instability.

In the midst of it, she told me, her mom has rediscovered cooking.

Her mom’s children left home decades ago, and she hasn’t taken much interest in experimenting with new recipes in the years since she’s lived alone.

In the past month or two, as the world around her becomes increasingly unstable, my friend’s mom has had an unexpected cooking renaissance.

She’s been growing herbs on her balcony, trying new recipes, and texting her kids a photo each day of the new recipe she tried for dinner.

My friend noted that the act of making these meals and plating them artfully has given her mom a sense of stability in an otherwise frightening and distressing time.

I was thinking about this story as I did my weekly meal prep yesterday.

My situation is nothing like the circumstances that my friend’s mom is facing. Nevertheless, I was anxious and fearful last week, unmoored in my personal life and worried about the state of my country and the rest of the world.

I didn’t begin my meal prep with the intention of getting much out of it besides some nutritious meals for the week ahead. Yet as I began chopping and slicing and stirring, I could feel myself taking comfort in those familiar movements.

I ended up throwing in a few extra things that I hadn’t planned on making, just for a little extra flavor and fun.

I plated my dinner with more than the usual care. Living alone, I often pile things onto a plate or into a bowl at the end of the work day and scarf them down. Last night, I chopped up some herbs and broke out my nice olive oil and flaky salt and garnished with care.

My worries didn’t evaporate entirely as I sat down to eat, but I felt better: stronger and calmer, full and satisfied, pleased that no matter what was going on with me, I’d managed to make myself a tasty dinner (and extras for the days ahead).

It’s easy to see the therapeutic value of a homemade dinner in the context of my life yesterday. It becomes much harder, I think, to find solace in a bowl of pasta or soup when circumstances are more serious.

Even so, I thought about my friend’s mom as I finished my meal. I thought about raising a spoonful to her, a quiet gesture of “bon appetit” from a stranger many miles away.

I could understand why she’s taken to cooking again when things feel uncertain and incomprehensible.

Making a meal, if one is fortunate enough to have ingredients and kitchen tools and time, fills a basic human need. But it’s also a way of asserting one’s will to keep going, which begins with self-nourishment.

I’m wishing you a moment of feeding yourself well—and finding comfort in what you make—in the week ahead.

Happy Sunday, friends. Here are some recipes and reads.

Recipes

1. Give me all the vegan pumpkin pecan sticky buns, please.

2. I love green beans, but I tend to make them the same way over and over again. I think this green bean and potato stew will be my next recipe.

3. A truly mouth-watering avocado salad.

4. Some scrumptious stuffed mushrooms for all of your holiday entertaining.

5. Eggplants are still very much in season near me, and I think I’ll be using my next few in this barley risotto.

Reads

1. A writer reflects on the bibliotherapy—or act of turning to books for solace and healing—that helped her as she grieved her mother’s death.

2. This article in The Walrus addresses the decline of family medicine in Canada, so much of its analysis is about the Canadian healthcare system.

As a healthcare provider, however, I saw plenty of parallels with the state of medicine in the US. And as a dietitian whose job becomes easier and more properly integrated when my clients have good primary care, it evoked a lot of my worries about the shrinking field of family medicine, which is so important through the life cycle.

3. The home cook’s never-ending quest to find a perfectly shaped kitchen utensil.

4. While people of all ages can thrive on vegan diets, there are some special considerations to take into account when it comes to infants and young kids. This includes the fact that many non-dairy milks lack nutrition that’s appropriate for early life, and until recently, sourcing infant formula that’s suitable for babies yet compatible with a soy allergy has been a challenge.

This article touches on some of the advances and innovations that are making infant formulas and kid food for vegan babies and toddlers better and better. As an RD who works with families, I’m glad to read it and will be eager to see how the field expands.

5. In more concerning nutrition news, a new cross-sectional analysis from NHANES (an ongoing program of health studies that gives us insight into nutrition patterns in the US, among other things) indicates that consumption of Vitamin C, Vitamin A, and iron dropped among women of childbearing age between 1999-2018.

Vitamin A in particular is important for fetal development, but all three nutrients are of concern.

An analysis of the data suggests that reduced carbohydrate intake (carbohydrate intake has been declining for the past two decades) might track with less consumption of fortified grain foods, which may in turn offer some explanation for the change. Socioeconomic factors, including food insecurity, may also be responsible.

More inquiry will be necessary in order for us to understand the change in nutrition status. And I’d imagine that policy change and fresh dietary guidelines might become important if the trend continues.

An overhead image of a white baking dish, which is filled with baked apples.

One of the things that I didn’t plan on making yesterday, but am glad that I did, was a batch of my simple ginger cinnamon baked apples.

Such a good recipe if you’ve got more apples on your hands than you know what to do with, which is what happens to me each year as they come into season.

I’m going to have them with vanilla ice cream tonight, and I’m thinking of doing some sort of breakfast parfait with layers of the apples and my standard overnight oats in the week ahead. I’ll let you know if it’s a resounding success!

In the meantime, I’ve got a simple, comforting soup that I can’t wait to share with you ASAP.

xo

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