Giving myself a break

And letting things go

A basket of small, wrinkled, dying peppers. (Noah Frank)

So, yeah, hi, hello. It’s been a minute. I’ve got a number of items I’ve been trying to write about over the last couple of weeks, but I’m stuck in the cycle that, if you’re a writer, might be familiar to you — generate idea, get excited, start jotting down notes and thoughts, run into a wall, move onto another idea…and never finish any of them.

The wall, in this case, has been a different one than I’m used to. And I haven’t yet figured out how to reliably scale it.

As it turns out, having an increasingly stressful full-time job, a part-time job that requires both a hellish weekly commute and grading papers, and a newborn, makes for a rather tight and exhausting schedule, one not conducive to the space that I am accustomed to do my best work. Lack of time, lack of space, lack of sleep…it all adds up in a way that has made hitting my marks for this newsletter the thing I’ve had to let slide.

So I’ve let it slide. As the primary cook in our house and as someone whose physical and mental health relies on at least five hours of exercise a week, there are other certain non-negotiable hours beyond those mentioned above in my week. Since I don’t charge anything to read this, it’s the easy call to deprioritize this newsletter. If that changes, obviously so will my commitment.

But it’s not the only thing I’ve dropped lately. And the other one has been killing me.

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Living smack in the middle of a major city, with no backyard, the only way to feasibly grow anything other than some small batches of herbs is to use outdoor planter bags on our rooftop. I don’t garden. But my wife does, and while her horticultural efforts took a backseat this summer to her, uh, other growing efforts, she still managed to deliver us a nice, healthy crop of both habanero and serrano peppers (among other things). As the cook, it was my job to turn these into hot sauces to use in the months to come.

My first attempt at this used a handful of red serranos along with four red poblanos, roasted garlic, some salt, vinegar, and olive oil, along with some cumin and coriander. But I got the ratios wrong. It ended up being somewhere more in the range of a blended salsa, maybe something you’d scoop with chips, but not a proper sauce to dash on morning eggs, or a dinner entree begging for some kick.

I salvaged that result, winging it as a 24-hour marinade on some short ribs, throwing them into the Dutch oven with a bunch of red wine and serving the result over a roasted sunchoke mash. It was a very happy accident.

This was actually very, very good. (Noah Frank)

But that still left the bulk of the crop of each pepper. I bought a pineapple to make a habanero sauce, and it sat on the counter long enough that it spoiled. I bought a mango to do the same, but every day that ticked by, the peppers grew wrinklier and less appealing, brown spots creeping in around the edges, spoiling one by one.

There was never enough time in the day, never a window where I had the energy and the space (with the baby out of the house, so I don’t smoke her out with the capsaicin blast to the house that comes with boiling peppers in vinegar) to actually complete the project. So the peppers just sat there, mocking me each time I looked at them, growing old and dying in front of me in their little farmer’s market baskets.

Finally, on Sunday night, at my wife’s behest, I called off the charade that I was ever going to make the hot sauces. Food waste happens, too often in this country, but there’s an extra sadness when it’s food you’ve grown yourself; worse, when it’s food your wife has grown for your house. But sometimes you just have to let things go.

Thankfully, we were chosen for a compost pilot program run by the city. At the very least, the peppers will go back where they came, decomposing into new soil, another chance for someone else to grow and eat. It’s not what I wanted; it’s not what I intended. But in this case, I’m alright with that being enough.