Catching Up

Whew, I didn’t mean for my pause to go on quite that long. Three months is the longest period of time I’ve gone without posting on Big Girls, Small Kitchen in eight years, a break in routine that should have seemed shocking - except, it didn’t! It seemed exceptionally natural to take a little break, especially from social media. I found relief in not thinking about likes on instagram or links on twitter or sharing on facebook at all, and relaxation in cooking for family, friends, and me without simultaneously drafting posts about every bite.

But I am here and working! I recently wrote about a diamond dealer who opened his own shelf-stable hummus biz, a pastor who runs a rooftop farm whose harvest supplies her food pantry, and what it means that venture-capital money is seeping into the food world. I went deep into the world of breakfast potatoes, developed Thanksgiving leftover recipes, and learned about wok cooking from Fuschia Dunlop. This semester, I helped teach a class about the New York City economy as an adjunct lecturer at a journalism program for graduate students.

I have also been cooking. Over the summer, I soaked raisins to create my own sourdough starter and have been baking dozens of loaves of sourdough bread from Sarah Owens’ book, Sourdough. I used discarded starter to make pie crusts, biscuits, puff pastry, and veggie pancakes. For weeknight dinners, I’ve made curries and dals, pot pies and beef stews, and a poached chicken with ginger-scallion sauce from the first issue of Chris Kimball’s Milk Street.

To round out the explanation for my absence, there’s one more thing I’ve been doing: taking care of my first baby, whom we welcomed in August!

Though I’ve been cooking more than ever and writing plenty too, this happy shift in the amount of time I have to do my work forced a parallel shift in priorities, and BGSK kept ending up at the bottom of the to-do list.

Yet, I am working on a plan for this space. I think what I’d like to do is fill it back up with the recipes I’m really cooking, rather than produced and scheduled and developed dinners that I hoped you would like. I’d like to talk about incremental cooking, cooking for the week, and the simple dishes that are delighting me right now - perhaps without the perfect pictures and lengthy intros of the current blogger aesthetic. We’ll see.

In the meantime, thanks for reading and cooking from the archives. I’ll be back soon! -C