spice cabinets
inherited traits, recipes, and the next best strawberry.
It’s natural to not want to be like your parents. Nobody wants to be like their parents. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that nobody wants to be like their extended family, either. The negative behaviors that we see around us while growing up tend to get so exacerbated that they override anything positive— even the family members that aren’t painful to be around still have that faint sense of dread accompanying them when they come to mind, because nobody’s perfect and they probably yelled at you a few times when you were a kid and you’ve never forgotten it or maybe they’re just always going through something and it consistently gets messy.
Who knows, though. Could just be my family. God knows that we’re a total fucking disaster.
Regardless, the emphasis on negative traits— and subsequently trying to avoid having those traits (or denying them, if you can’t figure out how to get rid of them)— means a lot of other, less harmful traits slip through the cracks. For some people, that means rinsing out plastic bags. For others, it’s the way they like to load the dishwasher. For me, though, it’s immediately asking friends if they’ve eaten as soon as they set foot in my house.
I’m not joking when I say immediately. It’s the second thing out of my mouth, right behind saying hello, if not the first. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until a friend pointed it out, and although I didn’t give it much thought at the time, after they left I sat on the couch and went oh, shit, that’s what my father does. And he does it because that’s what his parents do, and they do it because that’s what their parents did, and if I felt like retracing my family line, I could probably go back dozens of people and they would still be asking me if I’m hungry. This is a trait, like the shape of my eyes, that’s survived hundreds of years through uncountable horrific events. If I ever have children, they’ll probably be asking their friends if they’ve eaten, too. It’s a whole lot to realize on a Thursday night, isn’t it?
Food is never an easy subject. I don’t think anyone has a completely healthy relationship with it, honestly. For a lot of people, there’s some sort of lingering, residual damage from either societal attitudes towards being fat or food insecurity or even sensory difficulties surrounding food and the act of eating. The psychological and cultural ties we have to food run so deep that they’re near impossible to express, and thanks to the way society treats food, most of those ties carry guilt and shame. I’m definitely not perfect on this front— it’s impossible to deny that growing up with both financial instability and a parent with disordered eating tendencies hasn’t impacted me. How can growing up post-heroin chic and seeing every female celebrity get fat shamed on the covers of tabloids while you’re in line at the grocery store not fuck with your head? I mean, we’re bombarded by diet propaganda on all sides. You can’t escape the torture chamber.
Despite all that, I go to the kitchen when my heart gets heavy. If I’m not making brownies, than most of the time, it’s pasta.
ONE. RED SAUCE.
INGREDIENTS:
One onion, diced. If you’re in the mood for a little sweetness, go for a yellow onion, but white works just fine here.
About four tablespoons of olive oil— enough to cover the bottom of whatever pan you’re using.
Two to four large cloves of garlic, minced.
One 15 ounce can of diced tomatoes.
Salt. I can’t tell you how much, you just have to feel it in your soul. Taste tests also work, though.
Chili flakes. This depends on your spice tolerance, but it’s probably best if you keep it under four teaspoons.
About a tablespoon of chopped parsley, ideally fresh. If you don’t have parsley or just don’t like it, pretty much any herb works here, but I’d suggest Italian seasoning, basil, oregano, or thyme.
Noodles. Maker’s choice, but I recommend anything that comes in a long, stringy sort of shape. As long as you’re not using penne lisce, I have no quarrel with you.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Start boiling your water for the noodles now, because cooking them at the same time as the sauce will take a lot less overall cooking time. Put a large skillet (about the size of your forearm) over medium low heat. Add your oil. After the surface of it begins dimpling like a golf ball— that’s the general rule of thumb for knowing oil is hot, so don’t wait until it starts smoking or something— add your onions and a bit of salt, maybe around a teaspoon. You’re not going to fully caramelize them, as we don’t want them to be totally brown, but you’re going to render them, which is a fancy way of saying “cook until soft and translucent”. Once your onions have rendered, you’re going to add the minced garlic and the chili flakes to the center of the pan. Let that simmer for a minute, and then mix them together— this is so the heat and flavor of the garlic and chili can really come out and shine. Take your can of diced tomatoes and drain some of the liquid out into a cup, because you’ll need it later, and then add the tomatoes into the pan. Nightshades (including potatoes) are like little salt vampires, so you’re going to want to add a bit more salt, too. Bring the sauce to a simmer over medium heat. Once your sauce starts to sound dry— think “crackling”— add some of the tomato juice you put aside earlier. Let it simmer again, for a total simmering time of five to ten minutes, depending on how patient you are. Add the salt and your herb of choice to taste, and then you’re done.
Since this is my great-grandmother’s recipe, I will defer to her serving instructions— serve everything hot. And yeah, it’s really fucking good like that, but the secret about pasta sauce is that it kind of does taste better after a day or so once all the ingredients have fully mingled. There’s a good amount of sauce here and it refrigerates and freezes perfectly, so you can do both. Honestly, I’ll eat it completely cold and it’s still delicious, so go nuts and have fun.
We’ve discussed some of my earliest memories on here, so why not continue the theme? There’s a point— after my third memory, pretty much— where the timeline gets a little nebulous and it’s difficult to distinguish exactly what order I’m remembering them. This is all to say that I have no idea exactly when I started watching my father cook, but I’m pretty sure it began once I had enough motor skills to sit on the counter and stare, wide eyed, at whatever was currently on the stove. On Saturday mornings, it was usually pancakes. On weeknights, it was some sort of meat and rice combination— pork chops, chicken, whatever was on sale. If it was cold out or if someone was sick or if he just felt like it, it was chicken soup. The real treat came when he wanted to spend time on something. At that point, you had no idea what was about to come out of that kitchen, but it was guaranteed to be delicious.
Despite my mother having more than enough skill, the kitchen has always been my father’s domain. In the 90s and early 2000s, he was the head chef of the highest rated Mexican restaurant in the city and created so many staple recipes for them that their current menu is still almost entirely his work, despite him having left the restaurant over two decades ago. Before that, he had been working at restaurants (with the occasional dude ranch or ski lodge or modeling gig in between) since he was old enough to earn a wage. Suffice to say, I’m not kidding when I say he’s incredible at cooking. I’m also not kidding when I say that the real fun happened when my mother would leave town.
Frankly, her relationship with food is fucked. And she endured a lot of terrible stuff surrounding food during her childhood, which will obviously impact anybody negatively, but it was heightened when she got a degree in nutrition and promptly became what pop culture now calls an “almond mom”, which meant no sugar or saturated fats or artificial flavoring were allowed in the house. She sometimes allowed treats, but was so blatantly disappointed that we preferred cookies over raw carrots that it hardly counted as something pleasurable.
Whenever she was out of the house for a week or so, the first thing my father would do was buy sugar. The second thing he would do was make something sweet like pound cake, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, or a pie— something that would last us the week, but would be gone by the time she came home. The third thing he would do was tell my sibling and I that focusing solely on food that’s “healthy” instead of food that makes you happy is worse for you than not eating any healthy food. Not only did he give us sweets, he also taught us ways to make food delicious while still having nutritional value. Of course, he still made us eat our fruits and vegetables because balance is important, but his insistence that we shouldn’t feel bad for getting pleasure from food felt revolutionary.
There’s a lot of things I feel immensely grateful towards my father for— showing me how engines work, teaching how to hold my own in a fight, having a brain that works like mine to the point that I never felt misunderstood— but the years he spent disarming the bomb that was my mother’s ideology around food changed my life.
TWO. POUND CAKE.
INGREDIENTS:
One pound of butter, which is about four sticks. It’ll help you in the long run if it’s room temperature.
Three cups of sugar. Preferably white sugar, but mixing a little brown sugar in makes it taste a little more caramel-esque, if you’re into that.
Six eggs.
Four cups of flour. It’s best if you use cake flour, but all purpose works just fine.
3/4 cup of milk. No idea how this would work with a cow milk substitute, but let me know if you try.
One teaspoon of vanilla extract.
Powdered sugar, which gets sprinkled over the top at the end.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Well, first of all, you should probably go and divide all of that by two. This is one I’m directly lifting from my grandmother’s recipes, so it’s a bulk batch— how else is she supposed to make enough for all seventy-something cousins (it’s probably into the eighties, at this point) on that side of the family? But I digress.
Preheat your oven to 325F degrees, or 162C if you live literally anywhere that’s not the United States. Cream the sugar and butter until it’s light and fluffy. Add the eggs and vanilla, and then beat them again until it’s fully blended. Now you’re going to alternate adding the flour and the milk, mixing as you go. Make sure to scrape the sides of the bowl. At this point, start digging through your kitchen to see if there’s a pan that can fit all of that. The last time I made a batch, it fit nicely in a 4 inch by 6 inch pan, but I don’t remember if I was making a half or a third batch, so you’ll have to eyeball it. Once you find something that works, grease it— I recommend doing this by putting a little warm butter or oil in the bottom and using a paper towel to wipe around the sides— and pour your mix in. Bake that for about an hour and twenty minutes, or until you can stick a toothpick or wooden chopstick in there and it comes out clean. Let it cool completely, until the cake is room temperature. At that point, sprinkle some powdered sugar on top, and you’re ready to go.
My grandmother would like to add that you should try to serve it with whipped cream and fresh fruit (although canned fruit works, too), and she’s totally right. Fresh strawberries are a dream— so are canned peaches. You really can’t go wrong.
When I think of the online culture that I’ve surrounded myself with, two things come to mind. Number one is how completely different from everyone else’s online cultures it is, because the ecosystems of Tumblr and Instagram are completely disconnected to the point where my non-Tumblr friends have no idea what I’m talking about half the time. Number two is the mass romanticization era we went through from like 2021 to 2022. Of course, most of that era faded away after we took a hard right back into blood, guts, and angst, but I still think about it sometimes. Even though I wasn’t as deep into it as some people were— I tend to get skeptical about any sort of internet movement— I still enjoyed it. It was nice to see people try and get a more positive outlook on life without entirely negating their misery, the way that so many other positivity movements do. And yeah, maybe the webweaving posts about how sharing an orange with someone was the ultimate act of love got old kind of quick, but it was nice. It was nice. We used to think love was stored in the kitchen. Remember how we used to run?
I still do tend towards romanticizing things, to be honest. I’m a simple girl. I’ve also been doing it pretty much since elementary school, because I kind of gained sentience when I was nine and everything got a little worse after that. Operating under the illusion that the world can be beautiful if I want it to be is, well, nice. And I like to think there are nice things out there. I want to believe that. Maybe, just maybe, love could be stored in the kitchen if I ever felt like storing my love.
THREE. “FUCK IT, GO CRAZY” SALAD.
INGREDIENTS:
Some sort of leafy green— whatever you have works just fine. I will say that I’m big on spinach, so most of the time I make this, it’s with the king of edible leaves.
Literally anything. I refer to it as Fuck It, Go Crazy Salad for a reason, and that reason is “I need to eat a vegetable or I’ll die and also I have a bunch of produce that’s about to go bad so I guess I’ll put it all in a bowl and call it a day”. Tomatoes, beets, avocado, carrots, celery, cucumbers, strawberries, anything— if it can be called a salad ingredient, you can put it in here.
Some sort of vinaigrette. You could probably just put vinegar on this and it’d work.
Chopped apples. Enough apples to have a bit in each bite. Apple apple apple.
Feta is really nice here, even though it’s a bit pricey.
If you’ve also got some sort of meat in the fridge that needs to be eaten soon— chicken, pork, steak, whatever— might as well throw that in, too.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Put it all in a bowl. Call it a day. When I feel like making something low effort that can be halted with zero repercussions but I still want to feel like I actually made something, this is what I do, because vegetables are good for the soul. Never trust someone who is too childish to eat vegetables. And you can trust me on that, because I eat my vegetables.
There are very few things in this world that make me cry, and they’re hardly expected. You could show me a devastating movie or make me read a notoriously sad book and I won’t even tear up. Listening to a beautifully written piano line or biting into a delicious strawberry, though? My eyes immediately start burning. I really am a simple kind of girl in some ways, I guess— you just can’t top the little things, in my opinion. I’m sure some of that comes from having no access to the seemingly little things at varying points of my life, but honestly, I could care less about the why. And through all the pain, the days of being stuck in bed, the days where noise makes me feel violent, I’m still happy to be alive, for some reason.
Oh, well. More time spent on this planet really just means that I’m always a little bit closer to eating something exceptional, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? The next best strawberry.
Autumn is coming. It's been getting darker earlier. The grieving process is difficult. Surely, in the Biblical-level downpour that’s just begun, there are worms dying for my joy. I have to go into it. There’s things to do. The streets flood when the storm drains are clogged— I’m standing in a puddle that’s almost five inches deep, reaching my hands into the murky water to pull heaving globs of mud and weeds out of the grates, watching the way the water rushes in when unobstructed.
Bit by bit the leaves come swirling; overhead, thunder bruises the sky. Light possesses the surge into a living thing. Out goes my hand through the muck and the dark. Slowly, the storm washes it all away. Hovering, somewhere in my future, is the next best strawberry. And that’s enough for me.