My July diary: Gardening blues and tinny ravioli

Plus Herbalism 101 and the limits of a "traditional" diet.

🍋‍🟩She’s so back 

After traveling, consecutive weekend visitors, and a heatwave, I responded to these events by blacking out in the kitchen. Over the course of a week, I made sourdough, focaccia, yogurt, peanut butter, granola, hummus, veggie stock, and several batches of beans. My freezer pantry is thankful. 

Our CSA is back for the season, thank god, and I was thrilled to receive green coriander for two straight weeks. I hadn’t cooked with fresh green coriander (unripe cilantro seeds) before, and now I have to grow it in the garden next year. I used them on Dishoom potatoes, various tomato and avocado toasts, yogurt sauces, in a lime-forward cabbage slaw, and as a simple daal garnish. I even used the stems in a vegetable stock with a months-old freezer bag of veggie scraps, which came in handy when Skylar and I both came down with a summer cold.

We have a jar of “expiring” lacto-fermented sauerkraut in the fridge (from Edie’s Pickles) that I’ve been trying to sneak into everything before it’s too sour: fried eggs, rice bowls, grilled cheeses. What do you like to do with sauerkraut?  

🧙‍♀️Out and about

My friend Aimée hosted an (Italian-themed) Fourth of July bash at her place. She has been recovering from knee surgery over the last year, and this was her first, all-out, Aimée-style dinner party since the procedure. She served homemade gazpacho, olive tapenade crostini, salad, rigatoni with pistachio, and pasta al limon. I was flattered that I was asked to bring my focaccia. For dessert, she made an unreal recreation of Union Square Cafe’s strawberry shortcake sundae with homemade sorbet AND ice cream, which I’ve thought about at least a half-dozen times since. 

This month, I also became randomly obsessed with iced mint and stinging nettle tea, which I’ve constantly kept stocked in the fridge. It was good timing because I corralled my friends into taking a Herbalism 101 class at Remedies Herb Shop. Am I about to enter my herbalism era? Before the class, we met up at the Carroll Gardens Greenmarket to swing by the ACQ Bakery stall. I was trying to decide if I liked rye bread before I committed to learning to make it (consensus: yes), so I picked up their rye sourdough. We turned it on a marathon hang with a hard-to-get Sailor brunch reservation and a matinee showing of Twister(s). We shared the Caesar salad and French toast at Sailor, Aimée and Eric shared the burger, and I got the omelet. The French toast was unreal. 

Otherwise, we didn’t eat out much this month—though my friends Shannon, Chelsea, and I went to Bamonte’s before a birthday party in Greenpoint. I fear I was disappointed—the tomato sauce tasted tinny, and the ravioli was bland. Was it an off day or just well past its heyday? 

👩🏼‍🌾 Why is the garden making me sad :( 

I’ve been feeling oddly disconnected from the garden this year. I don’t know if it’s because I was in Italy for the early season or because of the stress the garden has been under—two weeks of heatwave have exhausted my poor garden (me too). The tomatoes aren’t fruiting like usual, and my GreenStalk is struggling. I have been feeling less motivated and excited—maybe I am coming to terms with the shade and accepting that I will never have the bountiful and healthy fruiting plants of a south-facing garden? I say this now, but I’ll probably change my tune when more of the tomatoes fruit and blush. 

I planted a handful of Rancho Gordo Good Mother Stallard beans and look at them go!

In June, though, I took a local pollinator class at Brooklyn Botanic Garden by Kim Eierman and I’m inspired to convert more space in the garden to native, perennial pollinator plants next year. 

I will say my blueberry bushes are healthy and have yielded more than I expected! Next year, I will have to introduce some netting so that I can share less with the birds. 

🫀Raw dairy?

In July, I finished Nourishing Diets: How Paleo, Ancestral and Traditional Peoples Really Ate by Sally Fallon Morell. Morell advocates for a vitamin-rich diet not unlike our ancestors, one based primarily on animal foods (raw dairy and organ meats) and fermented grains and vegetables. Morell is highly critical of the health efficacy of diets like veganism, vegetarianism, paleo, keto, and even the Mediterranean. To be fair, she is also critical of the standard ultra-processed (and carnivorous) Western diet and goes to great lengths to critique how catastrophic the colonial introduction of industrial food was for Indigenous peoples.  

In practice, I can’t imagine the modern diet Morell espouses would ever work at scale—unpasteurized dairy being the perfect illustration. She does clarify that animal foods should be pasture-raised but with little to no acknowledgment of factory farming nor the prohibitory circumstances required to purchase and prepare pasture-raised, whole-animal foods. But despite some soy-estrogen pseudoscience, I enjoyed the read. I appreciated Morell’s high regard for Native peoples and traditional foodways, and I think environmentally-minded vegetarianism and traditional diets have more in common than Morell thinks. 

I also read Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (sweet) and The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan (fascinating). I’m also halfway through Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t by Chris van Tulleken. I’ll share more thoughts on that next month!   

🥒 ICYMI

What I wrote about on Home Food this month:

It's my birthday party and I can project-manage it if I want to

Everything we ate on our Italian honeymoon

A running list of my favorite internet recipes

🍃 What I’ve been reading

• This was published last year, but I found this wonderful post by

  Pleasant Living
  about baking and cooking with fig leaves. I have a funny little fig tree I’ve been growing and am looking forward to harvesting the leaves at least. 

• As a girl who doesn’t even like mainstream grocery stores, I’m still weirdly obsessed with reading about them. The new-ish Substacker newsletter,

  The Checkout Grocery Update
  is scratching that itch.  

• I need to make this ricotta-stuffed zucchini from

  Hetty Lui McKinnon
  ASAP.

• And this “no-soup” ramen from

  The Ramen Bowl
  .