Heat
It feels hotter than ever this summer. Is that because I’m not trapped inside a 62°F office every day? Is it because any activities away from the apartment are outdoors? Am I more sensitive to the weather because I have fewer distractions? Or is it just a really hot summer?
Some days we don’t eat after breakfast, not until the sun has gone down. My stomach grumbles, but when I go into the non-air-conditioned kitchen I find it too difficult to think about food. At least this season offers produce that needs almost nothing done to it. I learned about the Tomato-&-Mayo sandwich this year, which is just that, hardly a recipe, but which I’m not sure I would’ve considered if I didn’t know it was a Thing. But it is a Thing and it’s the only Thing that makes sense when it’s hot; extremely easy but luxurious enough to bother with.
Other than the sandwich, I make dishes that require some heat at some point but can be served cold or at room temperature. Eggplant and summer squashes are good this way. I came across a recipe for “zucchini escabeche” which may not be a traditional escabeche, but is nevertheless good. It involves pan frying planks of zucchini and then letting them marinate for hours in a mixture of brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, olive oil, and salt. I've also tried to recreate an eggplant dish we've had in Ukraine, and found a close approximation by pan frying eggplant slices and then simmering them in an onion-and-tomato mixture, eventually turning off the heat and coming back to it whenever we're ready to eat. And we've had a lot of cheeseboard and dips meals, with bread and radishes and cucumber slices.
The heat envelops me in a kind of stasis that makes it harder to envision the future. My culinary school, which was set to open last Monday, has begun to dither again and hasn’t given me much information about what will happen. I’ve begun to look into WWOOF or other farming opportunities. There’s a lot I could learn about food from that angle. Maybe being on a farm, in tune with the growing cycle, would give me some of the sense of movement and change that quarantine has lacked.
What I’m reading
What to eat for how you feel, by Divya Alter
Modern nutrition measures each ingredient according to its biochemical components and tells us how many calories or grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrate a food has and what vitamins and minerals it is rich in. These nutrition facts are helpful and necessary, but they only give us the quantitative information about a food’s basic chemistry.
With Ayurveda, we can talk about food in the language of qualities that capture the food’s physical and energetic properties. Instead of using measurements, we describe food according to how we experience it in our digestive system—what are the food’s taste, texture, post-digestive effect, or healing benefits?
I got this cookbook on a recommendation and I’ll admit that I’ve been skeptical. My thinking tends to be very traditional Western scientific and evidence-based reasoning, and there are a lot of rules in this book that seem arbitrary and just annoy the hell out of me.
That said, I do believe that Western nutrition science is extremely reductive. Our scientific tools don’t work so well in this domain; it’s basically impossible to control all the factors that affect nutrition over a long period of time, and longitudinal studies are what we should be looking at. By breaking foods down to their cellular components, we often ignore the complex ways foods interact with each other, and with people who have different bodies.
Some aspects of Ayurvedic cooking make sense to me, like balancing meals with taste and color and considering easier-to-digest foods for dinner. All the recipes in the book make good use of spices, which make them taste more interesting and probably do help with digestion or nutrient absorption. And I love turmeric.