We went walking in Beverly in the snow. It was very cold and snowing only a little bit. We walked through town and we walked by the ocean until we got too cold to walk and then we drove home.
When we got home we made brioche muffins filled with blueberries that Cory had cooked down (put them in a pot with a small splash of water and simmered them) a few days ago. We’d made the dough a few days before.
When we make bread we usually use the cookbook Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg M.D. and Zoë François (referral link). The whole point is to make large batches of dough that you can make quickly in the following days (which is exactly what we are doing with the brioche). We were first introduced to the book and the concept in a student-led baking class we took at Harvard one winter.
To make (a lot of) the dough, mix 1 tablespoon granulated yeast, 1 tablespoon salt, 8 eggs, half a cup of honey, 3 sticks unsalted butter, and a cup and a half of water in a large bowl. Mix in 7.5 cups flour. Cover loosely and let rest at room temperature for 2 hours, and then leave it in the fridge for at least 3 hours.
We then shaped little balls of the dough into cups and added the compote. (In retrospect we should have used cupcake cups so that they didn’t stick to the pan.)
Then we tried to fold them up. This was futile; they opened up again while baking.
And we brushed them with an egg beaten in water.
We baked them in the oven at 350 degrees for about 35-40 minutes. (A whole loaf of bread is supposed to bake for 45-50 minutes.)
Бульон с клецками is like chicken noodle soup, without the chicken and without the noodles and with farina dumplings instead. My mom makes it for us when we’re sick and also just as a meal and expression of love, this weekend included. For most of my childhood I took for granted that it was Russian—but when I tried to talk about it with my Russian friends in undergrad none of them had heard of it or anything like it. I decided it wasn’t Russian, so I decided it was Jewish, some version of matzo ball soup—but when I asked my parents it turned out it came from my paternal grandmother, the Russian side of my dad’s family, not the Jewish side. So we decided it wasn’t Jewish, either. When we set out to solve the mystery of where it came from the closest we found was a Polish dish, and then I found a Hungarian recipe, which mentions that it is popular in Eastern Europe as well, and that it is indeed a version of matzo ball soup—so both Jewish and Russian and other cultures’, despite being a mystery to seemingly everyone directly in our lives but us. I asked more Russian friends and one of them had distant family and acquaintances who have it in their families. I have no idea how the recipe got into my family if it didn’t get into theirs; for all I know it came from a friend of a friend and not from a long line of relatives—horizonal transmission rather than vertical, maybe bouncing around between Jewish and Russian and back again and again until it reached us.
Here is my mom’s recipe, passed on from my paternal grandmother—
Ingredients:
Broth
An egg
Farina (манка)
Flour
Salt
Process:
Heat up a bit more than a soup bowl full of broth.
Whisk one egg with a fork in a bowl.
Add two pinches of salt.
Stir about a third of a cup farina into the egg. The exact amount might vary, but the important thing is that it should look like this:
Stir about one eight cup into the egg-farina mixture. As before the exact amount might vary, but the important thing is it should look like this:
The broth should be boiling now; if it’s not then wait for it to boil.
Stick the ends of two spoons in the broth to heat them up—it’s very important that they are heated.
Scoop up spoonfuls of the dough, stick the spoon with the dough in the broth, and let the dough fall off into the broth. If the dough gets stuck on the spoon, use your second spoon to scrape it off into the broth.
Leave the dumplings on the stove for a few minutes. They’ll be ready pretty quickly.
Transfer to a bowl, get a new spoon, and eat.
As a bonus, here’s a fancy avocado salad my grandmother created after doing what she usually does to get recipes, which is to read a ton of recipes on the Internet and then let her neural nets process them into the resulting final recipe.
2 avocados—peel and cut them small.
3 eggs, hard-boiled—cut slightly bigger than the avocados.
A little cilantro or a similar small leafy thing—chop small.
Green onion, 3 stems—cut off the roots and then chop and add the white and green parts.
Juice of one lemon.
Salt to taste.
According to the Internet you can also add mayonnaise, but my grandmother doesn’t.
Here are some photos of the sunset at Shaver’s Creek, in Central Pennsylvania, this past weekend:
listened to 42,636 minutes of music—or 711 hours, or a full month (thanks Spotify wrapped)
listened to Taylor Swift a lot—2,888 minutes, or 48 hours, or only two days (my favorite Taylor Swift song was “Karma”)
though “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback was my fourth most-listened-to-song—lots of loud singing along there
* which I will blog about soon
The worst:
lost my paternal grandmother to covid
the war
The best:
spent good time with family and friends
did work I’m proud of
went to new places
read good books
Here’s the last sunset of the year, from a kayak in Key Largo:
In sporadic bursts from about 9pm through after midnight we watched the fireworks from our rented home in one of the channels, which means we watched the fireworks both in the sky and reflected below on very still water.
Every year for New Year’s my family makes a gigantic салат оливье (salat olivye, which translates to Olivier salad, named after the chef who invented it—and apparently it was stolen by his sous-chef Ivan Ivanov, a proper Russian folk tale).
Here is this year’s салат оливье, made by my grandmother and my mom:
Here is how you make салат оливье, a close version of which I previously wrote up here—
Ingredients:
Potatoes
Carrots
Eggs
Pickles
Green onions
A can of sweet peas, salted
Mayonnaise
Salt
Bologna
Process:
Rinse all your fresh vegetables.
Cook potatoes and carrots in a casserole dish in the microwave for about 15 minutes, covered (or boil them—that’s fine too). Peel the potatoes and carrots once they are soft (or rather, not crunchy) and chop them into cubes with 1.5-cm sides. Put them in a big bowl.
Hard-boil eggs and chop them into little cubes with five- to seven-mm sides and add them.
Peel cucumber(s) and chop them first into fourths the long way, and then into three-mm-thick cross-sections.
Chop pickles into fourths the long way and then into thin cross-sections.
Drain and add sweet peas.
Chop off the white roots of the green onions and put them away. Chop the green parts into three-mm-thick cross-sections and add them.
Chop bologna into half-cm squares and add it.
Add mayonnaise.
Add a small amount of salt.
Mix the salad, lifting it up rather than pushing down on it. Add more salt and mix again if it tastes like there should be more salt.
I’m not including quantities here because I think the relative quantities are a very personal preference. You should make it to look more or less like the photos above, but if it is different it will still be good.
I opened my customary New Year’s gift to myself, a daily Moleskine planner in the cheapest color, which when I bought it this year was a cheerful yellow (referral link, so I get a small percentage if you click and buy). Opening a new planner is the most New Year feeling of the new year. A whole book of blank pages.
My resolutions for 2023:
Start every day with 20 minutes of a passion project for lab and 20 minutes writing fiction. I’ve been trying 20 minutes each on lab passion projects and writing fiction this winter break and I’ve found that I get more done than I usually do (especially since that 20 minutes usually turns into more than 20 minutes) and I am happier with my day even compared to days when I work more but on fewer things. 20 minutes ensures I make at least some progress every day on the passion projects no one in lab is going to pester me about or care about except me, and 20 minutes ensures I make at least some progress every day on writing the books I want to write and becoming a better fiction writer. On days I commute to lab the 20 minutes of passion project for lab can easily happen on the commuter rail and the 20 minutes of writing can easily happen on the Green Line/Orange Line/Red Line.
Meditate every day when I wake up.
Meet up with friends for meals in person more often.
Read more fiction.
Write a complete fiction book, even if it’s trash I would never show anyone.
Blog at least once every two weeks.
Make an app.
Finish my ongoing lab passion projects and publish them.
Travel outside the US.
See my family at least once a month, like I did before the pandemic.
Get my PhD.
Stop saying mean things about myself and about the perl programming language.
Board games at least once a month.
Learn Шествие гномов (March of the Gnomes) on piano.
Relearn front walkovers and back walkovers.
Get to a point of wellness wherein I take my meds and otherwise don’t think or worry about it.
Less scrolling and fewer phone pings/alerts. On Shabbat I use my phone and laptop only for talking with family and friends or for working on personal (non-work) passion projects that I feel called to work on. I set everything to do not disturb and don’t check email or the news or twitter and so on. I want to extend this practice to most of the rest of the week, only checking messages that aren’t from family or close friends a few times a day and severely limiting my time scrolling twitter or the news and such. This one’s to make time for everything else.
This Thanksgiving we had the usual American Thanksgiving foods (turkey stuffed with apples, plum sauce because I’m allergic to cranberries, and stuffing, recently introduced by my magnificent and magnificently American boyfriend/partner Cory). We also had radish salad made from radishes I grew in our garden and sharlotka, an apple sponge cake.
Radishes
First I will tell you about the radishes. I grew them myself, planted as a bit of an afterthought in the pumpkin patch because they do well in the shade and therefore do well with pumpkins. Under my grandmother’s advisement I left the hose out in the sun for a bit and watered them with warm water. They did shockingly well; we are now enjoying my second round of picked radishes and there are still plenty left for a third. The exact seed mixes I used are here and here (referral links, so I get a small commission).
I grew regular pink radishes, purple radishes, daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, and black radishes. All the exotic radishes had less intense flavor than I was expecting: the daikon radishes were a bit like watered down regular radishes, the black radishes were a bit like turnips with a radish flavor, and the purple radishes had a bit of an onion-like flavor—nonetheless all radishes, maybe more tolerable than the usual radishes (I like the usual radishes, I just can’t eat too many at once). I dragged the radishes from Boston to a friend’s wedding in LA and then to South Carolina to my family (my bag/”personal item” was mostly radishes, my laptop, and a pair of heels). Here’s more or less what the radishes looked like, minus a few radishes because we’d already started to eat them.
My mom made some of the black and purple radishes into a gorgeous, delicious salad (left) and the daikon radishes into another gorgeous, delicious salad (right):
We all thought the salad was very special and delicious especially because the radishes were fresh and also because we could probably taste that I remembered to water them every day (amazing).
Sharlotka
My mom also made sharlotka (шарлотка), Russian/Eastern European/former Soviet Union apple sponge cake distantly descended from the English charlotte (sharlotka translates to little Charlotte). It’s a really cozy comfort food kind of cake, light and moist with a sweet crunchy crust and with apples inside baked just so they’re soft but barely still crunchy.
Here’s our family’s recipe, for my own reference and maybe for yours too—
apples
4 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 big cup flour (“big cup” meaning 250 ml—mom says “technically a cup is 200 ml”)
Chop up unpeeled apples and put them on the bottom of your baking dish. In the mixer, add the eggs first and beat until they are white. Then add the sugar, then add the flour. Bake at 375 F for about 35 minutes, though it’s hard to tell for sure how long. You’ll know it’s done by the color of the crust. You can also touch the crust: it shouldn’t give too much.
Here’s the process:
Here’s how it turns out:
Doing my best
The radishes were particularly special to me because they were a very proud and successful accomplishment requiring months of sustained effort.
One of the lessons/epiphanies I learned (or just drilled into myself with some but not a lot of success) this year is about doing my best. My whole childhood my parents encouraged me to do my best, and especially as it applied to school whatever my grades were was fine with them as long as the grades actually reflected my best. Clearly that worked out but this year, when I was practicing for my driver’s license, aka driving, I decided that actually doing my best is not usually such a good approach.
When a person is driving, for example, they probably shouldn’t be doing their best. Ideally, a person should have such a reserve of skill and experience and muscle memory that their best is completely unnecessary, to such an extent that they could even be a bit distracted or upset and still be a decent driver. (They might even be thinking about the concept of doing their best, and they should have enough buffer to not run a red light or a stop sign. Should.)
And then I thought that probably this applies to most of the rest of the things I do. If I’m coding, for example, I can put on a movie and my code will be just as bug-free as it is usually, because I’ve been coding for 18 years and because I learned in undergrad how to add safeguards to make my code as bug-free as possible. Sometimes I work a lot harder—when I’m implementing a new algorithm or when I need to solve a particularly challenging problem or when I’m chasing one of those dumb four-hour bugs. But even then it’s something I’ve done a lot, and I’m comfortable with it.
I’ve noticed this year that ideally, if I have the necessary skills to do my work, and if I have not overextended myself, and if I am working in a healthy, sustainable way, I should not need to do my best. If I find that I am doing my best that is something to investigate. It might be that I am learning a new skill, which happens often and is not a bad thing but requires extra caution to avoid errors. It might be that I have too much on my plate, which means I need to try to find balance, and soon, and probably need to find partners to share my work with, otherwise delegate, or evaluate my priorities. Or it might mean that I am working on a short-term but very important project, in which case I just need to survive until it is over and make sure I am doing at least the minimum to maintain my health. (Our Cell paper, for example, was a time when I absolutely did my best, but it was not sustainable.) That kind of effort, at least for me, is how I’ve usually done everything but it only works in short bursts, and carefully.
When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. First, my dad taught me how to drive stick shift and then I didn’t sign up for a road test and then I went to college and then a decade went by. Then I practiced on my and my partner’s first car, a 2001 Highlander that made sounds I recorded and sent to my dad every week, with my licensed and very brave partner in the passenger seat directing me around very narrow Cambridge streets where side mirrors go to hospice. Then when the Highlander failed its inspection I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late (though I did forget the cash once and a kind and very smart coworker who unlike me still carries cash lent me the money), and I drove around for 45 minutes with my brave and patient instructor who had and used an instructor brake, and I did that more or less every week. I was terrible at it, then great at it, then terrible again, then more or less okay more or less consistently. I scheduled my road test, did pretty poorly, and somehow passed. This kind of workflow is new to me. I didn’t do my best—I allocated the time, I showed up, and I did the work, a little every week, and then I looked back and I saw that the goal was achieved.
The same thing happened with the radishes. I planted them, I watered them every day, I reluctantly (with Cory’s help and insistence) culled them when I had to, and then some months later I had radishes—and then I had radishes again, and there are still more that might grow even bigger, more radishes than I know what to do with.
What happens when a person does their best
As evidence that doing your best is a bad idea, here is our gingerbread house, which we made in earnest as a family:
The Summer of Shit
Unrelatedly I am reminded all of a sudden that there was one summer recently but pre-pandemic when, no joke, a bird pooped in my eye on two separate occasions (two separate birds, presumably, but I can’t be sure). I wear glasses (all the time, or I’d walk into a pole (with my luck a pole from which a bird is just taking off)), so that means the bird would have needed to aim so precisely between my glasses and my eye, at just the right angle, just slightly closer to my eye than to my glasses. Twice.
I remember one of the incidents was under a stoplight, which is probably why I had trouble noticing them while learning to drive. Something about repressed trauma.
An Early Resolution
Since my driver’s license/radishes revelation I have been trying to apply some kind of sustainable, gradual-progress type of workflow to all my work. It is very different from how I usually or naturally work, which is in short, passionate bursts followed by long periods of burn-out. (Of course, because my work is tangential to public health and the pandemic specifically I don’t always get to work sustainably, but I am trying when I can. (Not trying my best, though—as just established that is not the goal.))
Gradual, sustainable progress requires difficult planning and facing reality, the former of which I enjoy and the latter of which I do not: breaking a goal into small steps, being realistic about how much I can get done and prioritizing my goals accordingly, and doing those steps bit by bit every day or every week, with or without passion, efficiently during the day rather than in happy bursts of hyperfocused all-nighters. I haven’t entirely gotten the hang of it, or figured out how exactly it works for me specifically: do I, for example, work on one project on Mondays and Wednesdays and a different project on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do I let myself follow my interests, so long as I make a bit of progress on each of my active projects every week? Or do I work on each project a little every day, perhaps optimized by the type of work I do best in the morning, afternoon, or early evening? Maybe, since school worked so well for me, I should break my day into two-hour “class periods,” giving each project a class period and stopping when the time runs out?
(So far, it’s looked like working on whichever of my active projects I’m most excited about at the moment, switching when I get stuck, and getting unstuck during the semi-rest/not thinking about it of working on the other project, like epiphanies showing up in the shower but instead more like epiphanies showing up while I’m working on something that is at the moment more fun.)
Figuring out a productive, happy, sustainable workflow is one of my goals for the remainder of the year and for the year to come—or in other words, to do the work I care about in a productive, happy, sustainable way and learn how to do that as I go.
Reaching
This is my favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. She’s reaching for something in the water—reaching quickly, judging by her hair. She’s definitely not going to get whatever she is reaching for, because she is a statue, and every time I see her she is still reaching. I like the motion captured in her body and her hair and I like that the water is also a part of the sculpture, and that the reflection of her hand is also part of the sculpture.
The Fates
This is my grandmother’s favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. The three fates: one spinning the thread of life, one directing it, and one cutting it.
Lights
Brookgreen Gardens is a magical place to spend Thanksgiving, because it is when they are in the midst of decorating for Christmas and you get to see their progress from day to day. They put up every conceivable kind of light in every color, including lights in glass bubbles floating in fountains. It’s an enormous, unimaginable effort by many volunteers. My favorites are these string lights hanging from a small forest of oaks and a few other trees at the edges:
Butterflies
I was talking with a volunteer who told me that the paths in the gardens were originally shaped like a butterfly, proboscis and antennae and all, and butterflies are special in the gardens. Then he pointed out to me that the ceiling was covered in butterflies glowing gold in the lights. He had put them all up the previous day. Apparently there were monarchs before but they switched them out. My photos absolutely do not capture the overwhelmingness of the quantity of butterflies, but this is what they look like:
New Fruits
We didn’t get to spend Rosh Hashanah together so we marked one of our family traditions for the new year (which we do sometimes on Rosh Hashanah, sometimes on the calendar new year, and sometimes both) both late and early over Thanksgiving: trying some new fruit.
This year’s new fruit was a kiwano melon. We spent a few days admiring its exterior (we didn’t google it so as not to spoil the surprise). We were very surprised when we cut it open that it was bright green. It was like a sweet-sour cucumber:
I dragged it along with a bunch of mangos, avocados, a papaya, dragon fruit, and four varieties of persimmon in a trash bag together with my radishes as a carry-on when I realized in LA that I had a carry-on for my flight to South Carolina, that I wanted to use that free space for fruit, and California had more exciting fruit than the non-Florida East Coast.
Here is a kiwano melon and a dragon fruit:
Ocean
And here is the ocean on the beach, and a bird flying over the ocean on the beach.
Gratitude
This Thanksgiving I am thankful for:
sharlotka
an excellent crop of radishes
a garden for my radishes, and for our other crops, and all the crops that grew
my mom, who made the radish salads and the sharlotka
my grandmother, who taught my mom how to make sharlotka
my dad and my brother, who in addition to being wonderful also give the sharlotka and the radishes and the radish salad their whole purpose (my dad loves radishes, and my brother loves food)
my family abroad
my partner Cory
our housemate
Cory’s family
all our friends
and our health and survival
the covid vaccines
modern medicine—oh, especially modern medicine
that I get to do work I’m passionate about, and that I get to choose what I work on, and that I get to chase ideas down rabbit holes, and that, though I would of course prefer it be more money, I get paid money to fuck around and find out, irrespective of whether or not I actually end up finding out anything of value
my dissertation committee
my mentors and coworkers
the people who made my career and my life possible, at various stages
my growing ability to apply sustained, sustainable effort towards a goal and achieve it
and my progress in no longer doing my best, when possible
I spent a year in seventh grade at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago before my family moved to Pennsylvania. At the start of the year the seventh graders were counselled to be working all the time, and efficiently—if you’re in the back of a car, you bring your textbooks and you work; if you’re on the bus, you bring your textbooks and you work; if you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, you bring your textbooks and you work. I think that year was the year that set me on track for the rest of my career—seventh grade was the year I learned how to work hard, high school and then undergrad at MIT was where I learned my limits and how to work through and around them, and grad school has been where I learned to self-motivate and direct that work (and I am very much still learning). MIT and grad school (and life) have also both taught me that work should not be my top priority, and that prioritizing work above all else does not end up being productive or happy for me in the end.
I don’t think I’ve ever been able to work through actual depression. But more minor or time-limited depression, or even burnout, if I can’t take time off, I have found I can work through, and I use the same strategies for standard low-motivation days or days when it’s just hard to get started or days when I’m scatterbrained or overwhelmed or can’t get myself to focus—Mondays, or days when I intend to work on a challenging task, or Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays or Fridays.
Here are ten strategies I use to work through burnout or mild depression or scatterbrainedness and other low-motivation moments—
I. Make it a priority to take good care of yourself.
Sometimes when I am having trouble focusing it helps me to first go through a checklist of my basic needs as an organism with a corporeal form:
drink a glass of water (1 minute)
clean my space, especially the space where I will be working—this tends to be speedier than I expect and have an outsized effect on how put-together I feel (5-30 minutes)
light exercise, like a jog if the weather is nice or spinning the stationary bike if the weather is not nice (10-20 minutes)
eat a nice meal, especially a nice, large breakfast—preferably something with protein, carbs, fat, and some fruit and/or vegetables (20 minutes)
get enough sleep, ideally in one big-but-not-too-big chunk at night like a respectable adult human person (hours and hours)
This is my list of things I need to do to feel physically well. Maybe you have other things you need to do to feel physically well.
All of this takes some time, but I always feel at least a little better after going through it, even if I can only get myself to go through two or three of these items. The time it takes to do everything other than sleep is usually a few hours, which is a lot less time than I am capable of losing to unproductive unhappy scattered feelings. Even if I step away from productivity entirely and spend a day on this list and nothing else, I am usually far more productive with far less struggle when I return the next day.
One month when I was feeling very stuck I found the Fabulous app to be helpful in reminding me to prioritize my health and giving me nice little dopamine rewards for doing some of the above things.
I use Headspace for meditation. I like that there are meditation series, which give me some continuity and a feeling that I am building something, as well one-off meditations on specific topics that I might want to focus on in a given moment. I also like that I can customize the length of time I would like to meditate, because sometimes I feel up for meditating for ten minutes and sometimes I am only up for meditating for three minutes. Lately, I have been meditating on the commuter rail on my way to or from work.
Here are some photos of my fancy breakfasts:
I like pickles and brie as a combination, or brie and chopped prunes, or brussels sprouts chopped small and fried, or oats with bananas and blueberries or bananas and cinnamon, or oatmeal with jam, or toast with butter, or an omelet with some vegetables, or some deli turkey, or maybe some chocolate or some berries.
If you like pancakes and you like oatmeal and you think you might enjoy a combination of pancakes and oatmeal, here is a recipe I like:
Mash a banana, the more overripe the better.
Mix in an egg until you can’t tell the banana and egg apart.
Add between half a cup and a cup and a half of oats, or however much that the mixture looks to be about the consistency in the photo below and more or less kind of has some structure.
Add a bunch of cinnamon, however much cinnamon is the amount of cinnamon you like (I like cinnamon).
Heat some olive oil on a pan on medium heat.
Spoon some of the oat mixture onto the pan. I like to make four pancakes at a time.
Once the bottoms are solid enough that the pancakes can be flipped (you can tell by looking at the edges or poking under them with a spatula), flip them. Once the new bottoms are solid enough again, transfer to a plate.
Repeat until you’re out of oat mixture or patience.
I don’t usually make it through the entire amount in one meal, so I usually end up storing leftover cooked pancakes for the next day’s breakfast or snack.
This is a tricksy food. It does not seem like a large meal, but the dry-ish oats keep expanding once they’re in your stomach and absorbing moisture and you can feel nice and full for a long time and trick yourself into eating a good amount if eating is a challenge at the moment—and a banana and oats and an egg are not the worst thing to eat a lot of.
II. Clarify your goals.
The point of this exercise is take the disorganized, scary, overwhelming pile of tasks in your brain (or at least that is the natural shape of tasks in my brain) and convert them into an organized, approachable, actionable system that is not overwhelming and is actually usable.
Digitally (easy to edit) or on paper (no distractions), write out everything you need to do or would like to do. This can be a very long list, and that is okay.
Decide which things can possibly be delayed or dropped, including meetings on your calendar. When I feel very overwhelmed, removing things from my plate helps me feel much better rather quickly. Send quick messages to the people who are counting on you for those things or are planning to meet with you and ask for extensions or to reschedule. This can be challenging, but do it and do it quickly and move on. People are usually very amenable to delays or reschedulings if those delays or reschedulings are clearly communicated and do not happen too often.
Decide which things you would like to focus on today. Make this set of things small and not overwhelming, maybe just one or two things. (You can always add more things later, if you get these done.) I recommend starting with things that are weighing on you—for me, that’s things that I have external pressure to complete, things that I worry I will let someone down by not doing. From these, start with the fastest things, because getting them done will feel like a weight off your shoulders and remove a bit of suffering and that will make the next task or set of tasks easier and the next day happier.
Start a new document or chunk of document with just those few things you are focusing on today. Write out in detail and in order every step you need to take in order to complete the tasks, breaking the tasks down into the smallest possible steps—small like “find and download file X,” or “write a paragraph about Y.”
Emphasize (highlight or make to have a dark font) those tasks that you can do now, that don’t depend on other tasks. De-emphasize (cover up or make to have a light font) those tasks that depend on things that haven’t happened yet.
This is your to-do list. Hopefully it is composed of small, doable tasks, and doesn’t contain any big tasks or big-picture goals. Try not to think about things that are not on this list.
I go through this process about weekly, on Sunday night or Monday morning, adjusting it as the week goes on or I gain new tasks or new information about my tasks or priorities. During the week I select small tasks from my large, digital to-do list for my daily, pen-and-paper to-do lists.
III. Reinforce your reward system.
I try to give myself some nice dopamine whenever I complete a task or move in a direction that I find productive or which contributes to my goals. The primary way I do this is in my to-do list notebook. My to-do list notebook is sacred to me. I buy a new one every year, identical but in a new color, and I carry it everywhere.
Every morning, or the night before if I can manage, I make a list of my tasks for the day, work tasks in a column on the left and self-care or other non-work tasks on the right. I include things I want to do that are not tasks but which I want to make sure I make time for, like calling my family or reading a chapter of a novel or building a Lego with my partner Cory. I write this list with my fancy flowy pens.
Every day, I select a gel pen for the day, sometimes a sparkly gel pen with glitter in the ink. I use the day’s gel pen to cross out tasks I complete. I cross out each task three times, with three lines, so I get to experience the joy of crossing out the task multiple times. When I complete a task that was not only on today’s list but also unfinished on a previous day’s list, I cross it out from each list it appears on, which means I get an extra rewards for completing a task that has taken me multiple days (or weeks) to get myself to do.
When I complete a task that brings me closer to a larger goal that is important to me, like a paper or another project I am working on, I give myself a shiny star. I also give myself a shiny star when I complete a task that is an important and challenging self-care task, like exercising or meditating. I stick the star in an empty part of the day’s page in my to-do list notebook, next to my to-do list. I write a short description of what I did to earn the star and I draw an arrow from the description to the star I earned.
I try to give myself my sparkly task cross-outs and star stickers as immediately as possible after I have completed a task, to make sure I associate the reward with the task.
I keep my to-do list notebook open next to my laptop all day as I work. Throughout the day I like to look over at my list and look at how nicely my gel pen cross-outs glitter in the light and how nicely my stars shine in the light. It is extra nice to get to see all my progress as glitter and sparkle; it is very, very satisfying.
In undergrad at MIT I kept my to-do lists in Habitica, formerly known as HabitRPG. You create a little virtual pixelated avatar. You list out your tasks on the site and when you complete your tasks your virtual avatar is rewarded. You can earn pretty outfits for your avatar and you can earn cute pixelated pets or steeds, some of them very exotic and fun, like octopuses (a famously exotic and fun animal) or mammoths and baby mammoths. You can go on special quests, which can last days or longer. It’s very motivating and fun. Habitica was very popular in my very nerdy dorm, Random Hall, and got me through a lot of challenging and overwhelming weeks at MIT. Habitica is also cited by one of my favorite authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, in the acknowledgments section of her latest book, The Relentless Moon.
Here is my Habitica avatar:
For some reason, another thing I have found helpful is Animal Crossing. I didn’t play video games as a child and am now very bad at them, but I do play Animal Crossing (and it is the only video game I play). I like that Animal Crossing rewards me immediately for doing small tasks. Somehow the feeling transfers over to real life—especially when the real-life thing I am doing feels like a slog with a distant or intangible reward, playing Animal Crossing seems to retrain my brain to remember that I should feel rewarded when I make progress. I found Animal Crossing bizarrely helpful for my motivation when I was studying for my qualifying exam, which felt endless. It’s an effect beyond just feeling refreshed from taking a break—Animal Crossing seems to remind me that positive feedback is possible and that I am capable of completing tasks.
Here I am being a grad student obsessed with little libraries and being comfy with books in Animial Crossing just like in real life. I am full of exactly no surprises.
IV. Rolling for Initiative: remove decisions.
We call this strategy Rolling for Initiative. I do it almost every day. I learned it from friends from MIT. It is one of my favorites.
I find Rolling for Initiative to be day-saving on days when I feel overwhelmed and can’t figure out how to prioritize, or when I feel unproductive and can’t get myself to feel willing to do anything. Sometimes, the thing that is holding me back from starting a task is that either the decision to start a task or the decision of which particular task to start becomes a huge hurdle. Often (almost always), the actual choice made matters a lot less than that some choice is made—and that there is some forward movement.
First, I make a list of the tasks I need to do, usually by clarifying my goals using the previous two methods. I make this list in my sacred to-do list notebook (above), but you can make your list anywhere. This list always also includes non-work and non-urgent tasks and self-care, like cleaning or laundry or meditation.
I also add activities that I am genuinely interested in doing, like reading a book or going outside for a walk.
Looking through my list, I identify the six tasks or activities that I find the most tolerable at the moment, that I actually feel able to engage in from whatever happens to be my current state. I number these tasks one through six. If I am not able to identify six tasks that feel tolerable, I give the most tolerable-feeling tasks two numbers.
I roll a dice. Whatever number it lands on is the task or activity I engage in.
I use my partner Cory’s fancy DnD and board game dice. I use a new die every day. It is a fun ritual to select the die that feels best today (and matches my to-do list gel pen for the day). Sometimes I have more than six tasks I want to choose from all at once (or selecting six tasks is itself too challenging a decision), and then I like to use a die with more faces.
Here is our very modest dice collection:
V. Group tasks with similar tasks or with things you enjoy.
Like in Rolling for Initiative, the goal here is to do whatever it takes to remove the challenge of starting a task.
If possible, pair something you don’t want to do with something you do want to do. If Cory and I want to run but also really don’t want to, we run to a nice destination. When we lived in Cambridge, Cory and I ran to Union Square Donuts once a week on the weekends. We ran and we got donuts at the end. I also pair laundry or cleaning or exercise with television. Lately I have been watching documentaries: on eugenics and Prohibition and Mark Twain and Hemingway and tuberculosis. If I’m watching a documentary it is easier to exercise or clean or do another task that does not actually require my eyes and ears.
You can also decrease the challenge of starting a task by removing the “start” part of it by tacking it onto the end of a similar task. If you need to write a bunch of emails, write a bunch of emails, instead of writing each email on its own. Task-switching is really hard for me—I find it a lot easier to do a task that is similar to the preceding task I did. (Of course, if “write a bunch of emails” as a task is overwhelming, then maybe just write one.)
VI. Schedule as many tasks as you can.
You can also make it easier to start a task by turning it into a routine. Where possible, try to do things at about the same time or in the same sequence every day. If you run or go for a walk right before lunch, then it becomes easier to do it. It helps remove the decision, which makes it much easier to get started.
One way to do this is to schedule something with other people.
VII. Join or form an accountability group.
On weekdays I meet up with a group of other trainees over zoom for a little more than an hour at 9:30am. We are all overscheduled, so there are between two and four of us on any given day, and there are four of us in total. We start by asking each other how the previous day went and setting goals for the following 45 minutes. Then we leave the zoom meeting and work independently on the goals we set. We meet back up at 10:30 and report on how the 45 minutes went. Finally, we set goals for the rest of the day. In addition to setting productive goals, we also try to each set a wellness goal.
On my least productive days, I don’t get anything done after our meeting ends, but at least I move forward during that hour. Accountability group usually breaks through the difficulty of starting work in the morning and always breaks through the difficulty of starting work for the week. While I still have days when I don’t get much done, the stretch of “dark” time is much shorter. I no longer have entire weeks when I don’t make progress toward my goals.
Accountability group has also made me better at setting realistic goals and estimating how long a task will take. I get daily practice setting both 45-minute goals and goals for a day.
Not to mention that the group has become my very good friends and an important part of my support network, and that I look forward to us seeing each other and starting our day together.
VIII. Pomodoro.
Pomodoro is also helpful for getting me to start working on a task (or start working at all). In the Pomodoro technique, you work for a set length of time (I set my sprints to 20 minutes). Then you take a break for a short amount of time (I set my breaks to 5 minutes). Then you work, then you take a break, and so on. After a certain number of sprints, you get to take a longer break (I set my long breaks to 15 minutes). During your sprints, you turn on “do not disturb,” don’t open email or social media, and put your phone away. It is much easier for me to resist distractions when I know I can be comfortably distracted by them without guilt in 20 minutes.
Pomodoro means that instead of approaching a whole task, I approach the concept of working on it for 20 minutes. Sometimes it is easier for me to convince myself to work on a large or ambiguous task for 20 minutes than it is to convince myself to work on it until some benchmark, especially if the task is ambiguous enough that there aren’t any benchmarks. Those 20 minutes are usually enough time for me to become engaged in a task (and then I just keep working), understand an ambiguous task enough that I can break it down into well-defined smaller tasks or ask for help, and identify and possibly resolve the barriers that were making the task difficult to approach.
I use the Be Focused desktop app. I like that I can make a to-do list and select which item I am focusing on for a sprint, and I like that the app tracks how many sprints I have dedicated to each task. I also like the sounds it makes. My friends from accountability group recommend the Bear Focus Timer app.
IX. Do as much of a task as you’re willing to do.
Sometimes a task is too large for me to feel willing to do, even if it is not a large task. Sometimes I’m able to make progress by being okay with doing one small part of the task, whatever that small part is. For example, I might not feel up for doing laundry, but I can get myself to put all the laundry in my laundry bag and leave the laundry bag by the door. Or cleaning the kitchen might feel impossible, but cleaning a small part of the kitchen feels doable. Or I might feel up for working on something for just 15 minutes, and then I let myself work on it for just 15 minutes and pick it back up later. At least it is progress and that is what matters.
X. Schedule breaks, accept your needs, and give yourself time.
Finally, I find it helpful for my productivity to not be productive all the time. I think it is important to schedule breaks. I think it is very important that these breaks are scheduled—that they happen regardless of whether or not you have completed your tasks and that they are not something you have to earn. During these breaks, you should do things you actually enjoy, not things you think you should enjoy. (I once again recommend Animal Crossing.)
In addition to vacations, I give myself a break for a full day every week by observing Shabbat: every week, I try not to work between sunset on Friday until after sunset on Saturday. I don’t observe particularly strictly, but I try to only do the things I genuinely want to do and I try not to do or even think about anything related to my job. I also write planned breaks and other things I am looking forward to into the monthly calendar view of my to-do list notebook.
Similarly, often when I am having trouble motivating myself to be productive (especially if it’s not the start of the week), I just need a break, preferably guilt-free. It is hard to face that I am not going to be productive for some chunk of time when I had hoped to work, but feeling guilty and struggling usually is not as pleasant or productive an experience as calling it earlier and trying again in a few hours or the next morning.
Things you can purchase:
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!
My sacred to-do list notebook is a Moleskine daily planner, this year in green. (I buy whatever color is cheapest in December, which gives me a nice variety of colors from year to year.)
I write my to-do lists with black 0.5 mm uni-ball pens. I also use these pens for line art, and otherwise I do not use them. They are my sacred to-do list and art pens.
I cross out completed to-do list items with gel pens, usually but not always glittery. I keep them in their nice carrying case they came in. I took out the ones I didn’t love (and left them in a little library) so that my daily choice of gel pen would not have any possible wrong answers. I do not use these gel pens for anything other than for crossing out to-do list items. They are my sacred to-do list gel pens.
Being Russian, we get to enjoy a lot of different kinds of pancakes, a wonderful diversity of pancakes that I think greatly enriches life. (The big, fluffy, American pancakes usually eaten here are actually considered a kind of omelet, at least among my mom’s side of the family, at least after we first moved here.)
Today I want to teach you (and the future me reading this) how to make сырники, really delicious Russian cheese pancakes I remember fondly from my childhood and have just this year finally learned how to make myself. I am also going to share with you оладьи (oladi), small fluffy pancakes made with kefir, and an old, traditional recipe for блины (bliny), Russian crepes that my mom remembers from her childhood and which she shared with me for my birthday this year.
Сырники (Syrniki, Cheese Pancakes)
Very early on in the pandemic, when one day I had half a tub of ricotta left over from making lasagna, my maternal grandmother, who had covid at the time but didn’t know it yet (and who is thankfully alive and well, knock on wood), spent an inordinate amount of time with me over Skype teaching me how to make сырники, she in Moscow watching me in Massachusetts and guiding my hands through the physical process.
Here is the recipe, modified a bit to reflect my own experience with it.
As a note before we start, I am going to assume you have an effectively infinite supply of:
all-purpose flour
olive oil
I am also going to assume that you are wearing an apron or a shirt you don’t care about, and that your skin is either covered or emotionally prepared to dodge hot oil.
You will want the following:
16 ounces ricotta cheese—a small half-container, or half a large container
2 eggs
2 teaspoons sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons flour, with a peak of flour rising up from the spoon
some blueberries or frozen blueberries or another berry or anything else you might like in fancy pancakes—no more than a quarter cup or so, nothing overwhelming
Having gathered that, you will now do the following:
Mix everything together in a big bowl. It should turn out liquid—not too thick.
Pour enough olive oil into a large non-stick pan that the pan is comfortably coated in olive oil. Leave it uncovered on the stove at medium heat to heat up.
Pour some flour onto a big plate in a small mountain. In addition, coat a cutting board with flour. (This is of course more flour, not included in the 4 tablespoons you mixed into the ricotta.)
Scoop up some of your ricotta mixture with a large spoon and plop in onto your flour mountain. Drizzle some flour on top of it. Gently, reach your hand into the flour under the blob and scoop up the blob. Toss it between your hands a few times, touching only the floured parts, not getting into the wet insides, rolling it about and smushing it a bit. This part is baffling, especially the first time, especially watching an experienced pro, but it gets much easier after a few tries.
Your ricotta blob won’t gain any actual structural integrity, but at some point it will feel less like liquid and more like liquid with a substantial amount of flour-covered surface tension. Place your precious flour-coated ricotta blob on the flour-covered cutting board. Repeat until you have four or so delightful ricotta-mixture blobs on your cutting board.
At this point, your pan and the olive oil should be hot. You can test out that the pan is hot by taking a bit of flour and dropping it into the pan, which is something my grandmother likes to do because she is epic. The flour should sizzle in a way that is frankly violent and terrifying to anyone who is not a grandmother.
Scoop up your ricotta blobs and plop them onto the pan. Smush them a little with the flat part of a spatula. Because your pan is hot (and you made sure your pan was hot), your blobs should sizzle aggressively. This is important. Sit and feel the violence of this particular part of nature and contemplate that we as a species have turned it into something delicious, because some things in life are beautiful and because of course we have.
Once your blobs have formed a nice crust on the bottom, flip them over. Lower the heat and cover the pan and let your blobs cook through to their insides for a little bit. While these pancakes are cooking, get to work on the next round of blobs.
After a while, remove the lid and flip the pancakes over a bit more until you are satisfied with the crusts on both sides. (This is where I diverge a bit from my grandmother’s initial advice, which was more organized.)
Remove your cheese pancakes. Replenish the olive oil, add more blobs, and repeat until you are out of ricotta mixture.
Serve immediately with honey and/or sour cream and enjoy.
Оладьи (Oladi, Kefir Pancakes)
Another pancake that is similar to сырники is оладьи (oladi)—оладьи are made with кефир (kefir) rather than ricotta cheese (though I think you can make them with other dairy products instead) and come out smoother, more pancake-like, and less cheese-pancake-like. Almost three years ago, or two years before I started drafting this blog post, in August in 2018, my good friend Masha, whom I met in 7.02 and who at the time still lived in Boston, came over and taught me how to make оладьи. The recipe we used is here. It is a very very special memory. We were squeezed into my tiny kitchen and Masha taught me how to use our roommates’ (who are also very close friends and are one of the two also Russian) cast iron pan. (They later gifted us a cast iron pan when they moved out to their own new home, and thanks to Masha I know how to use it.)
Both of my grandmothers have made me оладьи, just as both of my grandmothers have made me сырники, though their recipes produce smaller, limper cakes, while Masha’s are fluffy and more solid. I especially fondly remember from my childhood оладьи with small apple slices in them, still crispy even in a cooked pancake. All options are excellent.
(And I have very fond memories of my paternal grandmother, who lives in Perm, saying “Практика, Лидия, практика” while teaching me how to cook.)
Here are the оладьи that Masha and I made, so perfect and fluffy:
A translation of the recipe we used, with some of my own embellishments—
Here is what you will want:
½ liter kefir
1 egg
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
olive oil
And here is what you will do:
Beat the egg lightly with a fork. Add the kefir and stir. (The recipe suggests warming the kefir up a bit in the microwave first to bring it to room temperature, since you’ve probably refrigerated it.)
Stir in the sugar, salt, and flour. Finally, at the end, stir in the baking soda.
Stir the mixture and let it stand for 15-20 minutes.
If you would like, stir in berries or thinly chopped apples—a satisfying but not too great density of berries or thinly chopped apples.
Heat a frying pan and pour in some olive oil. When the oil is warmed up, reduce the heat.
Spoon some of the pancake batter on the pan to form small pancakes, multiple pancakes on the pan at a time. Cook over low heat. (The recipe suggests cooking without a lid over medium heat if you have a heavy pan with a thick bottom, or on low heat with a lid if you have a light teflon pan. The important thing is that the pancakes have a chance to cook all the way through.)
Serve with sour cream or honey or jam or berries or anything else.
Traditional Блины (Crepes)
I got to see my family for the first time in a long time for my birthday a few months ago. My mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and my answer was cakes: lots and lots of cakes, cakes for every meal. For one of our cake meals, my mom made pancakes—specifically, my mom made traditional Russian блины (bliny, crepes), following a recipe we do not usually use because it involves too much butter. It gives a feeling of a very special and loving multigenerational full circle—my great-grandmother Lydia, whom I was named after, used to make traditional блины for my mom and this year my mom made them for another Lydia: me. It feels like a meal and a love shared over a century, a bridge by people who are lucky to have overlapped—my grandmother, my mom, and me, Lydia; and my mom, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother Lydia—connecting two lives that did not overlap—us two Lydias.
Here is a loose translation of the recipe my mom used—
You will want the following:
300 g all-purpose flour
300 ml milk
7 g dry yeast
70 ml butter
3 eggs
60 g sugar
1 tablespoon sea salt
200 ml water
olive oil
And you will want to do the following:
Combine the eggs with the sugar and salt and beat thoroughly until an even layer of foamy bubbles appears on the surface. Add the yeast, butter, flour, milk, and water. (The recipe notes that it is better to add warm, recently boiled water—but make sure you don’t kill the yeast with the heat.) Mix well so that there are no lumps and the mixture becomes homogeneous. (My mom notes that she added everything at once and mixed it in a blender. It turned out great and is easier, so you should probably do that instead.)
Cover the container with a towel and put it in a warm place (the recipe suggests a warm place by the radiator) for 40-50 minutes.
Thoroughly mix the risen dough and leave it in the warm place again. (My mom notes that she did not do that.)
Without stirring, cook in the usual way for pancakes: preheat the pan and lightly grease it with oil. (The recipe suggests using a culinary brush or half a potato to grease the pan.) Gently scoop the dough from the top with a ladle and pour it into the pan, letting it spread evenly. When the surface of the pancake is dry, flip the pancake and fry the other side.
Serve with caviar, butter, sugar, jam, or honey. I have very fond memories from my childhood of блины (our usual recipe, not this one) buttered and then folded into quarters for the butter to melt and then sprinkled with sugar; they are alternatively very good buttered and then with caviar spread over the butter and then the crepe rolled, or with sugar sprinkled on or a light coat of jam or honey and then rolled. Many magical options, all excellent—best to enjoy a few of each.
Here are some photos of our crepe experience (crepe-sperience, if you will):
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This part of the blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!
In case you see any of them and are considering looking for them, here are my things that appear in these photos or were barely off-screen:
This large non-stick pan, which I bought because my parents had the same pan and liked it. It has lasted three years so far and stood up to near-daily heavy use with none of the usual non-stick pan misery and speedy demise. I don’t think I’ve ever had a non-stick pan last three years. I have no complaints and am very happy with it, which for non-stick pan is a huge compliment. I liked it three years ago and I still like it a lot now.
This huge lid with ridges on it that fits on any size large pot or large pan. I have one and I bought one for my parents because I like it so much.
This dish set we bought when we first moved into our apartment. We bought it because our friend we subletted from had the same dish set, and when we tried to remember what we thought of it we couldn’t remember it at all, which is an excellent compliment. We have since broken a few of the pieces, but most of the set survives six-ish years later.
This very pretty set of small plates that I bought more recently to complement the surviving dish set after we broke all the small plates. They are all different and all pretty and a small happy experience of their own to add to meals.
These mixing bowls, which we bought because our roommates had them and moved and then we missed them (the roommates, but also the mixing bowls). The roommates also had colorful lids for the mixing bowls, which I will probably end up buying eventually.
Happy and colorful yet classy and sturdy and grown-up measuring spoons.
My adorable powder blue toaster, which I chose entirely for its color and aesthetic and which brings me joy every single day, even when I do not use it, and which I will never regret paying a little extra for just because I like the color.
My adorable powder blue tea kettle, which matches my adorable powder blue tea kettle and has a glorious extra feature of keeping my hot water hot after it has boiled and after I have forgotten it, so that when I remember it again I do not have to boil it again, thereby risking forgetting again and starting the whole tragic cycle anew.
In our home it is mostly my partner Cory who cooks, especially when it comes to fancy things, though I occasionally have a burst of cultural inspiration and cook something Russian or Jewish or Russian Jewish or something I found on the Internet. (Usually I also like to contribute a side dish or two, especially a carb or vegetable, and play line cook while Cory does creative things. (I chop and peel, because I enjoy chopping and peeling.) This is how we every evening end up with something our roommate Helen says resembles Thanksgiving dinner in workload.) Right now we are both working from home most (he) or all (I) days, which means more meals at home, which means more cooking—so I have been trying to handle lunches. I am 1. lazy, 2. usually very focused when I’m focused, which I try to be on workdays. We are also, for pandemic reasons, trying to keep grocery shopping to a minimum. My lunches reflect those restrictions. I am very proud of some of my go-tos and I want to share them with you.
Of course, all of these do include some chopping and stove time—but that is the point. It is all minimal: you only chop one thing for each “recipe,” and that is about where I draw the line most workdays.
Mac and Cheese (From a Box)—With CaramelizedOnions
Ingredients:
boxed mac n’ cheese (I like Annie’s)
one or two onions
olive oil
some kind of milk and/or butter, depending on the package instructions
optional: panko or other bread crumbs
Instructions:
Peel and chop your onions. I chop them in half, then slice each half in thin-ish, parallel lines, then chop each chunk in half perpendicular to the long slices. That makes strips of onion that aren’t too long. But you can chop the onions however you want.
Put some water on the stove in a small pot for the mac and cheese and leave it on medium-low or low to start boiling.
Caramelize the onions. Caramelizing onions is fancy but is very hands-off. You put them in a small pan in olive oil, bring them to sizzling on medium heat, stirring often, then turn the heat down to low and let them simmer gently in olive oil while you work on whatever you’re working on that day, coming by occasionally to stir them when you need a break and might otherwise open Twitter. Eventually, they will get soft and wilty and clear. Some time after that, they will start to brown and will shrink. That—when they just start to brown—is when you want to start making the mac and cheese in earnest.
Make the mac and cheese according to the instructions on the box. (A tip: take the mac and cheese box very seriously when it comes to the order of operations and general process of preparing the cheese. When it says to do it while the pasta is draining, you should do that. When it says to make sure the cheese powder dissolves fully in the hot milk and butter, you should do that. That way your cheese won’t be lumpy.) When the onions are done, turn them off or leave them on low.
When the mac and cheese is done and cheesy, stir in the carmelized onions. Serve on plates or in bowls. Sprinkle panko or other bread crumbs on top if you’re feeling extra fancy.
It’s boxed mac and cheese!—but the carmelized onions make it fancy.
Rice Pilaf (From a Box)—With ChoppedStuff on It
Ingredients:
boxed rice pilaf (I like Near East rice pilaf with almonds)
olive oil (for the rice pilaf)
fresh avocados and cucumbers (or another vegetable or other food you enjoy eating raw)
Instructions:
Prepare the rice pilaf according to the instructions on the box. I like to make rice pilaf in the microwave, because then once I put everything in a casserole dish and put it in the microwave I can forget about it.
When the rice pilaf is done, while it is resting at the very end of the instructions, peel and chop a cucumber and an avocado. I recently-ish learned how to peel and chop avocados—first, cut it in half, going around the pit in the middle. Hold the half with the pit in one hand; with your other hand, thwack the pit of the avocado with the sharp side of the knife. Hopefully the pit sticks to the sharp side of the knife and you can lift it out of the avocado and into the trash. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does.
Serve your rice pilaf with avocado and cucumber on it. So yummy, and so fancy—and it feels well-balanced.
Veggie Pasta—With Spinach and Garlic Olive Oil Sauce and an Egg
This one is a bit more hands-on, but it is also very filling and feels the most like a real meal.
Ingredients:
boxed veggie pasta—I like the spirals, or the little tubes, or the big nests
olive oil
one or two or three garlic cloves
frozen spinach
egg(s)
Instructions:
Peel the garlic cloves and chop them into thin slices. I like to chop each clove in half first, to make slicing it easier.
Cook the veggie pasta according to the instructions on the box.
While the pasta is cooking, hardboil your eggs. Put another small pot of salted cold water on the stove with an egg (or however many eggs you want to eat) just submerged in the water. Put the water on medium, boil the water with the egg in it, and then, once the water is boiling, turn the stove off and leave the egg for 10 minutes or, probably, until the pasta is done.
Cook the chopped garlic in lots of olive oil in a small pan on the stove, stirring occasionally. Once the garlic cloves start to brown, add some frozen spinach, mix it up with the garlic, and let the spinach melt and heat up.
When the egg(s) are done, drain the pot and submerge them in cold water a few times. Peel them. I find it easier to peel eggs while they are submerged in cold water.
Serve the veggie pasta with the garlic and spinach sauce on top. Serve the egg on the side, sliced into little boats.
Chickpeas With Asparagus
Ingredients:
a can of chickpeas
fresh asparagus
olive oil
Instructions:
Rinse the asparagus. Chop the white ends off, then chop the rest into pieces several inches long.
Open and drain the can of chickpeas.
Fry the asparagus and chickpeas in olive oil on medium heat until the chickpeas are very lightly browned and the asparagus is ready to eat.
You might have noticed a pattern here—usually boxed carb and something else, usually something that lasts a long time between grocery trips. Most things can be swapped out for most other things—another protein instead of the egg, fresh for frozen, frozen for fresh. If you buy all the different kinds of boxes of mac and cheese, and all the different kinds of boxes of rice pilaf and couscous and similar things, and all the different kinds of other boxed carbs you like, you can get a real sense of novelty in your meals.
We used to go grocery shopping sporadically once a week or so—usually with backpacks on to walk home with. During the pandemic we are limiting our grocery trips. It’s now just me, solo, no backpack and no browsing, filling a cart as fast as I can and then waiting for Cory to pick me up in the car. We do most of our shopping at Market Basket in Union Square, which is cheap but crowded at the best of times. Instead of doing lots of weekly small trips, we are now doing one big, expensive trip about once every three weeks or so. I plan the whole thing out ahead of time and organize my shopping list by aisle. I go during the day, when people who aren’t grad students are working. Our recently-ish acquired car helps a lot. I speed-run it. (My parents didn’t let me play video games as a kid except when my mom had to bring me to work, so this is the only thrill I’ve known.)
On these trips, I buy a truly absurd quantity of my favorite boxed carbs (Near East rice pilaf and couscous and others, Lundberg risotto and quinoa and rice and others, every single variety of Annie’s mac and cheese, and whatever veggie pasta is in stock). I stack them high on an extra floating shelf we installed in the kitchen, which means I can store as many boxes as I like in the vertical space to the ceiling. I also buy frozen spinach, which is limited only by our freezer space, which is limited but a lot less limited than the shelf-life of non-frozen vegetables. Fresh vegetables (and berries and chocolate and tiny fancy canned coffees) are exciting in the days after a shopping trip, but frozen facilitates holing up safely at home. (Perhaps this, after the car, is the start of our final slide to suburbia.)
These meals—and, to a large extent, the style of grocery shopping that comes with them—is something I think I’ll take with me when the pandemic is over. I really enjoy the amount of time I save by not going to the grocery store as often—easy meals are good too.
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When we do cook actually fancy fancy things, these are our favorite fancy cookbooks—
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Zoë François. Last winter we took a bread-making class at Harvard during J-Term and it changed our lives—specifically, we starting baking a lot of bread. By far one of the most excellent decisions I’ve made in grad school. The recipes from that class were based on the recipes in this book.
Also useful, for the food in this blog post in particular:
This really lovely set of four small blue plates, all different, is one of my favorite physical items that I own and brings me small but very valuable bursts of joy every day.
This electric can-opener we recently bought, which is a new and still terrifying concept for me but is very fun, especially compared to opening cans with a regular can-opener.
This large non-stick pan, an earlier version of which we bought years ago and still use every day with no complaints, which is unusual for non-stick pans that live in our home.
L. A. K. 