Dear Tamar:
I write to you at my wit's end. I have been in a serious food-funk. As someone who is always in the kitchen, and has prided herself as a "home chef" for many years, it is a terrible feeling to be both uninspired... and hungry. I am anxiously awaiting the return of spring and summer produce, hoping their arrival will bring me out of this spiritless state, but in the meantime, am in dire need of some guidance. So...what do you cook when you simply cannot?
Dear Feeling Bleu,
I am convinced there are certain wisdoms so true that they only visit occasionally. There’s a chance they remain with the very old, who can offer them dark couches in which to settle. Or maybe the old don’t get enough visitors to notice if on a given day, truth has stayed or left.
I have welcomed such occasional wisdoms. Rarely, but memorably. Once was just after my husband and I had gotten engaged. We were in Biarritz, sitting at Chez Albert waiting for a celebratory Plateaux de Fruits de Mer—we’d gotten engaged while grubby, on a backpack-cycling trip with only the clothes we wore, staying at hostels. Half drunk after one glass of wine, we mused on a serious question: If we had children, what lessons would we confidently teach them?
I remember the sunlight, right then. I say this in both a non-religious way, and in a prayerful one. I remember the sunlight slipping down over the water, and feeling suddenly that I knew the answers. I remember looking at at the water, which required squinting, and saying: If something hasn’t happened, it only hasn’t happened yet. I had more lessons—two more. All three tumbled out, quietly and simply on the cold wine.
I can’t remember the second or third lesson. I don’t know why the first one dawdles. Perhaps I’m getting old. Or perhaps I need that one so often that it turns, over and over, in my mind, a pebble shined by use. I turn to the small wisdom and it rattles: not yet, not yet. I shake it like dice: This isn’t permanent. Not yet, not yet.
Dear cook, it is a rare gift to feel inspired. Gifts of that sort don’t desert you forever—they rest, they wander, they make quick visitations to other homes. Let your gift be. Let it rest or wander or visit. In its absence, make a pot of rice. Make quesadillas with pickled chiles. Cook short pasta and combine it with stewed canned chickpeas. Buy a slab of focaccia—or make a pizza bianca—and sliced mortadella and olives and salted almonds. Shake the almonds in your hand , and listen as they remind you that your malaise is temporary. All it is is: now and yours. Trust that you’ll look forward to cooking again. Maybe even later today. Or maybe not quite yet.
This is the most beautiful thing I have ever read on what to do when feeling blue in the kitchen. Thank you, Tamar.
I made a tonic soup with 2 cups of nettles, potato onions . It called for milk and i used instead a can of coconut milk- does that nullify the tonic effects?