TAMARA KEITH, HOST:
On some days, the very last thing in the world you want to do is cook. It was a long day at work or at school. You got into an argument with a family member or a friend, or maybe you just don't feel like it. And yet, you have to find the energy to make something. How can you find the strength, the joy, even the beauty in that experience? Well, author Tamar Adler set out to document her relationship with food in short musings, journal entries and poems that highlighted the joy she finds in food. Her book is called "Feast On Your Life: Kitchen Meditations For Every Day." Tamar Adler, welcome to the program.
TAMAR ADLER: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.
KEITH: What sparked the idea for this book?
ADLER: You know, what sparked the idea for it is sort of the condition that I think most of us find ourselves in most days, which is kind of malaise. Like...
KEITH: I think that's a fair word for how I feel sometimes.
ADLER: Yeah, I mean, maybe I shouldn't say most days, but definitely I was going through a period where most days, I sort of just felt like, what is it all for? And I felt like it was the middle of my life, and I didn't really know how I'd gotten here or what I was doing. And I certainly didn't feel like I was finding joy and pleasure in my surroundings and the choices I'd made about my life.
KEITH: But to be clear, you are an award-winning cookbook author.
ADLER: Yeah, I feel like we all have a list of something - you know, of our accomplishments. So what I started doing was writing down what was good in a general sense. And then I narrowed the field to be, what is beautiful and good in the kitchen or having to do with food? - because I thought that would maybe do a double duty of helping me see what was beautiful and good around me but also helping me actually want to cook because it was this thing that I had to do every day, but I was like, I don't even want to stand up. It gets dark at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and publishing is probably dying, and I'm a writer, and, you know, I probably should have had more kids, but now it's too late. And I was not feeling inspired to serve meals. I wasn't feeling inspired to do anything. And so I sort of figured I could maybe try to trick myself by doing a gratitude practice that focused on food.
KEITH: And did you succeed?
ADLER: I mean, I - you know, it sounds so cheesy to say it, but it worked. It totally worked. And then over the course of a year of doing it, I started feeling less anxiety each day that I would have some good experience. You know, I kind of thought, well, if I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that and the day before that, it's very likely that at some point today, I will find something delightful or beautiful in the kitchen. And that dependability of delight really did cheer me up a lot and really did make me feel better about all the big and small questions I was having about my life and because I was really committed to finding them in the kitchen. It really helped me cook.
KEITH: I want to try to describe this book because it's sort of an unconventional structure. It goes day by day by day through the year with different sorts of musings or observations, sometimes poems, the occasional recipe thrown in for an entire year. Is there one entry that is your favorite?
ADLER: That's such a hard question. But I - you know, the ones that I actually like the most are often from the hardest and coldest times of the year. So I think I would choose January 3...
KEITH: OK.
ADLER: ...Because that is just a kind of - there's not a ton of joy right then. You're committed to going to the gym, but you're still feeling kind of bad from December 31. Yeah, I think that's the one. It's called Amid The Pots And Pipkins.
(Reading) God walks among the eggs - figuratively true. God walks among the puddings. God walks among the milk, among the crockery, among the children. God walks among the pots. All are complete. None has corners. Their shapes ask God to let them remain whole, to keep their wholeness and privacy, of a kind. So many interactions with food are hurtful, embarrassing, stressful. I like that these rounded private words forbid harm. There is no jagged pudding. There is no scary pot. There is no embarrassing egg.
KEITH: I key in on this line - so many interactions with food are hurtful, embarrassing, stressful. Can you expand on that?
ADLER: You know, I think of it every single time I hear anybody ask about a guilty pleasure. I get a little bit angry because I feel like here's this really incredible and necessary thing that we have to do three times a day, which is eat or feed. And, you know, most grown-ups have to feed someone or some pet, some friend, some child. And instead of taking that opportunity to reconnect with our community or with whomever we're feeding or with our own bodies, which move us through space and keep us alive and keep us doing all the things we love doing, we turn it into this really kind of painful, stressful thing associated with guilt and associated with what we shouldn't do and what we're doing wrong. Certainly, if we're parents, every time we cook, we're telling ourselves all of the things we could be doing better or differently or healthier.
It's such a shame, and I want so badly for it to be the opposite. Like, not just neutral - I want it to be acts of nourishment and of grace and of pleasure and joy. And so there's a lot of softness in this book and certainly in that entry because I found myself realizing that there are so many opportunities for softness and kindness and tenderness in this thing that we just have no way of avoiding doing. And I wanted to kind of press on that and show it lots of different ways.
KEITH: You mentioned guilty pleasures. You write more than once about Cape Cod potato chips.
ADLER: (Laughter) They're so good. And, I think, Cape Cod potato chips and really any unflavored potato chips should not be called junk food. I'm on a mission to wrest them from that - the terrible insult of junk food.
KEITH: Is there a particular dish or perhaps a few that you gravitate towards making when you're feeling down or when you feel just like not cooking at all?
ADLER: I think it would have to be rice and beans for a bunch of reasons. One is that beans, you can trick yourself into making, which I really like. I like anything that you can kind of get ahead of not wanting to do in some way. And the way you trick yourself is you just soak two cups of beans. Whenever you hear this, when you hear me saying this, you do that...
KEITH: OK.
ADLER: ...Because then in 24 hours, you have to cook them. You can't let them sit there any longer. They'll start sprouting. You have to cook them. And then an hour later, you're going to have a pot of perfectly cooked beans, and then you will have cooked because of a very quick thing that you did while listening to the radio. So I do that all the time, which means that we usually have beans.
KEITH: Future you thanks past you.
ADLER: Yeah, exactly. And then rice is wonderful because you measure the rice, you measure the water, you put in a little salt, and that's it. That is the whole effort. And then you smell when, you know, a few minutes later, you're like, oh, that's the smell of rice cooking. And then 20 minutes after that, you've got a pot of rice.
And with either of those things, you don't have to do anything else to have a meal. I mean, with rice, you can fry an egg or just put some tinned fish - you can tell I've been in Spain a while - tinned fish on top or, you know, marinated tofu or leftover meat or whatever. And with beans, you don't have to do anything. I've - also have noticed in this book, at least once, I put chili crisp on beans, which I think...
KEITH: Ooh.
ADLER: ...Is the highest form of bean, bean and chili crisp.
KEITH: That's new on me, but it will not be long. Maybe just 25 hours from now...
ADLER: Exactly.
KEITH: ...I'll be trying that. So people often say that it's important to find joy in the small things. And it's one thing to say that and even to write about it for a year. But has writing about it moved you more in that direction?
ADLER: I think it's such a good practice. And I think it certainly has. I notice - I think I'm just better at noticing and then feeling the pleasure of observation. And I've really noticed that I am cheered up by the smell of, you know, when - I talked a minute ago about the smell of rice cooking, and that smell really does kind of lighten my heart. And I don't think it - I don't think I paid attention to it before.
So all of the things that I took the time to notice in the book, I still notice. And that seems like a great sort of tool to have sharpened because it's amazing how many good things we taste and good things we smell and good things we hear about every day that just go unnoticed and how much just noticing them makes us feel like our lives are richer.
KEITH: Tamar Adler is the author of "Feast On Your Life: Kitchen Meditations For Every Day." Thank you so much for joining us.
ADLER: Thank you for having me.
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