2021 in Review
I.e. the books, recipes, and self-care strategies that got me through the year
Hello, friends! It’s time for my annual year-in-review. As usual, this post covers a fair bit of ground (gratitudes, reading, cooking, personal learnings) so if you’re here for the food, feel free to skip ahead!
Here we are, at the end of another year - it’s been, to use a diplomatic euphemism, an interesting one. Frustrating because of the stubborn persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also peppered with joy thanks to the imperfect freedoms granted by the rollout of vaccines and boosters and rapid tests. I feel a tremendous amount of grief about everything we’ve missed and lost this year - but given how privileged I’ve been, gratitude feels in order right now.
At the top of the list of memories I’m grateful for is, as one might imagine, my wedding day. I got to make it legal with my partner of almost a decade, with treasured loved ones in attendance (and also officiating!) I got to dance with my grandparents, and sit around a fire pit late into the night with old friends, and watch our families get along famously. Every third photo from that day involves me absolutely losing my mind laughing, which is a good indicator of how much fun it was.
And now I get to be married to Sam, who makes me laugh until I can’t breathe, who has both the patience of a saint and an unfailing ability to assume good intentions, who is competent to a fault and eager to deeply understand the world. Plus, despite it being probably his least favorite activity imaginable, he was willing to learn and perform a traditional Turkish wedding dance to make me happy. (Yes, there is video footage.)
There’s so much else to be grateful for. We got to take a few days off after our wedding and see beautiful Big Sur and Cambria; we welcomed a new niece and have gotten to watch her grow and change; we got to attend the weddings of two other sets of close friends, and to safely see much more of our families than many other people. How lucky is that?
Every year, my goal is to read at least 52 books - so one per week. This year I more than doubled that, topping out at 126. Most of my reading is done at night (I aim to get in bed by 9:30 and then read for an hour or so) which makes it hard to absorb nonfiction, but I’ve been trying to incorporate audiobooks into my daily walk routine to close the gap a little bit.
My hope for 2022 is, as usual, to do better at recording the things I learn from the nonfiction I read; I would love to become the type of person who can effectively maintain a Zettelkasten but at this point I’m fairly certain it won’t happen unless writing for public consumption becomes the major part of my job. If you have note-taking methods that have worked for you, I’d love to hear about them!
Without further ado, here are my favorite books of 2021!
Favorite fiction:
Favorite Nonfiction:
If you’d like to see everything I read this year, check out the full list on Goodreads - there are many more on that list that I really enjoyed.
What books have you read and loved this year? I’d love recommendations! (And big thanks to Dian, Meril, Julia and Brendan for recommending many of my favorites.)
Nearly two years into our era of rarely going out to eat, constantly trying new recipes remains one of my biggest forms of fun and creative expression. I tried 118 new recipes this year, many from two of my new favorite cookbooks, Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice and Chetna Makan’s Healthy Indian Vegetarian (as well as her excellent YouTube channel.) The Woks of Life is still a mainstay for dinner ideas, and I can’t wait for their cookbook to come out!
My Sunday morning trips to the Stonestown farmer’s market remain a sacred ritual. I’m forever blown away by the staggering variety of produce we get year-round in the Bay Area; it’s a constant source of inspiration. My general routine is to head out to the Market, buy whatever looks good and interesting, and then sit down with a spreadsheet and plot out what I’m going to cook that week. I tend to plan meals around the vegetables in my crisper; meat ends up being more of an afterthought to add protein, which is probably the right balance. (Hot tip: Having a subscription to EatYourBooks makes actually using all the cookbooks I’ve accumulated much easier.)
The one sore spot is still not really feeling safe enough to host friends for meals - or at least, not feeling there’s enough benefit to pick dining in over an outdoor hike or park hang. Pre-pandemic, I loved hosting events centered around food, like our annual holiday cookie extravangaza and that time I hosted a pasta-making party. It was really special to get to spend several months in Vermont before our wedding and actually cook some of my favorite new recipes for family and friends, and I hope 2022 brings more of those possibilities.
Here are the new-this-year recipes I’ve made most often:
Cooked lettuce with garlic and oyster sauce (The Woks of Life)
Green beans with almond pesto (Smitten kitchen) [I use walnuts]
Japanese spinach salad with sesame dressing (Just One Cookbook)
Green Curry with chicken and Thai eggplant (Derek Lucci / Serious Eats)
For those interested in seeing the full list, here are all 118 recipes!
We’ve just gotten back from spending Christmas with my in-laws, which reliably involves unforgettable meals. My father-in-law is an amazing cook and we share a love language around food, so getting to cook and eat together is always a ton of fun.
This year was no exception - we had the traditional Christmas eve bacon-wrapped veal roast, plus prime rib, an amazing farro salad with smoked octopus, a Mangalica ham, four types of fresh pasta from Raffetto’s in New York, and much more. It was amazing, but I think January is going to have to be strictly vegetarian to catch up on vegetables!
These prolonged pandemic-times forced me to be extremely intentional about establishing routines and behaviors that look after my mental and physical health. I’d like to spend a little time talking about three of them: namely, 1) daily physical activity 2) being very strict about work-life balance, and 3) carving out time for pure fun.
Firstly: exercise. I talked a little about taking a longer-term, habits-centric view on prioritizing movement during last year’s review, but didn’t properly internalize it until midyear. I kicked off 2021 by doing a lot of Peloton workouts (we don’t have the bike, just a Schwinn + the Peloton app on a tablet / smart TV) which slowly fizzled out until some minor health issues totally derailed me for a few months.
I finally got back on the horse by being very, very gentle with myself and ruthlessly prioritizing long term habits and health vs short term “progress”: my new goal was to make time for intentional physical activity any day; didn’t matter what, or how much. I did operationalize this by setting a modest Move goal on my Apple Watch (400, which is high enough that I can’t meet it just by walking around the apartment all day, but low enough that even a 20 minute walk will push me over.)
I’m really proud of how successful this has been. I haven’t met my move goal every single day, but my “hit rate” is far higher than it’s been at any point since college. More importantly, I now automatically seize opportunities to get outside and go for a walk, which is exactly what I was trying to accomplish. In 2022, my hope is to take far better advantage of the amazing nature we have in the Bay Area and go for longer weekend hikes - if we know each other in real life and you’d like to be added to my Facebook group for coordinating these, shoot me a note!
A quick sidebar on why I stuck “progress” in quote marks above (FYI, some discussion of bodies and weight forthcoming in case you’d prefer to skip to the next paragraph) - for far too long I measured success in terms of pounds lost, but as time goes on, I’ve finally managed to internalize that shrinking my body is the wrong goal. This is a topic that deserves a much more thoughtful discussion than I can give here, but I’ll say that Aubrey Gordon’s fantastic book What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat and podcast (with Michael Hobbes) Maintenance Phase, have been big influences on my thinking and I’d recommend engaging with either of these resources if you believe that body size predicts health, or are unfamiliar with the concept of anti-fat bias.
Secondly: work-life balance. I’ll preface this by saying that I feel extremely lucky to be at a company where every boss I’ve had has set a great example around separating work and life, and actively pestered me to get offline when they notice me violating those boundaries. But I had a realization midway through the year that I was burning myself out by staying plugged in, even passively, at times when I didn’t need to be.
So now I’m no longer reachable outside working hours, except by cell for emergencies. I power down my laptop at the end of the day and on weekends so I’m not tempted to check email or Slack. I still work late when I need to, but once I’m off, I’m totally off. Having that complete separation has done wonders for my mental health and honestly, for the level of focus and creativity I can bring to my work. I’ve found it’s a lot easier to buckle down and get stuff done when you can’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll do it late at night or on the weekend.
If the thought of fully disconnecting makes you itch, here’s what’s helped me manage:
I know people who’ll need to reach me in an emergency have my cell phone, and I set the expectation that they should use it if they really need to.
If I’m feeling particularly anxious about missing something, I stick “offline for the day, reachable by cell” in my Slack status before I log off.
I very explicitly block off my working hours on my work calendar to mitigate the fear that someone will reach out when I’m still offline and won’t realize I’m not looking at their messages yet.
These ideas may seem extremely neurotic, and honestly, I’m confident I’d have still experienced no issues had I simply started disconnecting and not done any of the above. I also have colleagues who share similar values and don’t call me when stuff isn’t urgent, which helps a lot. But the above strategies made it easier for me to bite the bullet, so I’m including them here in case they help you too.
Lastly: carving out time for pure fun. You may remember my ill-fated experiment with the ukulele from last year’s review. I ended up upgrading to a slightly less cheap instrument and limiting myself to five minutes of practice per day for a while, but I’m pleased to share that I am back on the horse and have so far managed not to give myself any more long-lasting fingertip damage.
The main reason I picked up the ukulele in the first place is that I love to sing. I took regular voice lessons for about 15 years, and while any real skill I had has long since atrophied, I still sing to myself constantly while I clean, cook, and drive. (See my point above about Sam having the patience of a saint.) These days, especially mid-COVID, opportunities to jam with friends or go do karaoke, etc are sorely limited, and I liked the idea of being able to mess around and accompany myself.
Friends, messing around and accompanying myself has been exactly what I’ve accomplished! I am not a very good ukulele player and probably never will be, but I’m at the point where I can bang out a recognizable rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for my five month old niece and various pop hits for myself, and that’s more than enough.
This isn’t to say that I don’t want or don’t try to get better - just that I recognize that the only benefit of improvement is my own personal enjoyment, vs an international pop career, and that fundamentally changes my relationship with practice. When I’ve had a particularly stressful work day or find myself doomscrolling on Twitter, I can instead grab my ukulele, pull up one of the endless array of great free tutorials on YouTube, and take my brain somewhere entirely different for 15 minutes. It’s been an absolute blast and I highly recommend it.
Alright, that’s all for now! Wishing you all a happy, healthy 2022 - see you in the New Year.