On community and chocolate tofu mousse
Plus a side rant about sterile water injections
When we moved to Cambridge, I was 6 months pregnant and knew only a handful of people here. It was daunting — we moved to be closer to family before Diana was born, which was absolutely the right call, but we also gave up a close knit circle of friends in San Francisco at a time when we really needed all the support we could get. It’s so gratifying that almost 2 years later, we have an incredible community.
We started off strong by dint of living right down the street from my brother- and sister-in-law and niece, which is the closest I’ve lived to family in almost 20 years and has been both wonderful and invaluable. Slowly, we’ve made more and more friends that we’ve mostly met through local parent groups (shoutout to the inimitable Moms of Camberville community!) and as such, they mostly have kids right around Diana’s age.
For a long time, the parent solidarity was the main feature of our gatherings, and that’s still critical, but a fun development is that lately the kids have started to recognize each other and the other parents. I’ve always been grateful that I grew up with a network of adults besides my parents (in Turkey as in many cultures, “aunties” and “uncles”) who I loved spending time with, and seeing the bones of that community infrastructure develop for Diana is incredibly special. Slowly getting to become that “auntie” for littles who recognize and want to play with me is incredibly special, too.
What we’re eating:
Chocolate tofu mousse, inspired by a Myers + Chang recipe shared in one of my many Facebook cooking groups. Once I realized that it only takes 5 minutes in a blender, I figured, why not give it a go? The recipe was from the Myers + Chang cookbook, and I used 55% chocolate instead of dark, and less sugar than called for - both mistakes, but the end result was decent enough that my verdict is “has promise, needs tweaking.” Diana had no such qualms and licked the spatula clean.
Thai curry red lentils with roasted squash popped up as an option from Hetty McKinnon’s newsletter last week and was immediately appealing - very similar to dal in vibe but with the curry paste serving as an easy way to achieve a different and delicious flavor profile. The original recipe called for split peas, but I opted for the red lentils to save time.
Boursin and mushroom farro-to and balsamic basil grilled chicken (paywall), which both took me way less effort than I thought they were going to! Since we do not have a grill, I did the chicken under the broiler, and therefore the farrotto on the stove instead of in the oven — I just simmered the farro until soft enough, added the boursin and a bunch of leftover basil in lieu of spinach, and cooked until thickened a little. It looked soupy on the stove but had the perfect texture once spooned into a room temperature bowl. I completely forgot to add parmesan or lemon, but don’t think it needed either!
Smash burgers and oven fries, which are both shockingly straightforward and delicious for a weeknight dinner. I’d make them a lot more if we had a decent smoke hood, or my husband was less (appropriately!!) invested in ensuring our apartment has decent air quality. I am not strong enough to squish the burgers with a spatula as Kenji suggests, so I cover the bottom of a 28oz can of tomatoes with foil and use that instead. A metal fish spatula works fine in lieu of a bench scraper - you may lose some crust but it’s OK, it’ll still be great.
Spaghetti squash is something I’ve honestly seldom bothered making since it’s so often touted as a low carb replacement for pasta. It absolutely is not that, but apparently still pretty delicious if you toss it with olive oil, salt and pepper and treat it as a vegetable. I used this method of cutting & draining it to achieve longer, less mushy strands, and it was a great easy side to some baked salmon.
Seared scallops, because they were on sale and I am always using my child as an excuse to buy fancy allergenic foods (if you aren’t hip to the research, the advice these days is feed your kids allergenic foods early and often to reduce the odds that they become allergic to that thing.) Turns out molluscs aren’t a high priority allergen, but they’re still delicious - Diana was very grumpy that I only let her have half a one for her first exposure!
Turkish chicken and celeriac is something I don’t remember ever eating as a kid, but it’s quickly become a favorite of mine over the past year (thanks for teaching me, Sibel abla!) and is now one of Diana’s favorites, too. Here’s how to make it:
Make your peace with inexact measurements, this is homestyle Turkish cooking. Sorry.
Chop up a packet of chicken thighs into quite small pieces (maybe 1/4”), peel a couple of large celeriac and cut them up into a large dice (maybe 1”), and same for a couple of potatoes.
Heat a pan over medium heat, drizzle in plenty of olive oil and add the chicken pieces. Sauté until they are no longer pink.
Add the diced carrots and cook until they’re beginning to soften, about five minutes.
Add the diced celeriac and potato, stir, and cover for a few minutes. Then take the lid off and add water to just below the level of the vegetables. (I stir in some chicken better than bouillon too.)
Bring to a boil and then turn down to simmer until the vegetables are soft, about 20 minutes.
In a separate bowl, stir together the juice of a small lemon or half of a large one, a heaping teaspoon of flour, and a little of the cooking broth from the pot until mostly smooth and not lumpy. Stir that back into the main pot and cook a few more minutes.
Serve over rice, bulgur, or by itself! Also freezes well.
On the roster for next week: roasted parsnips and carrots (again, sigh, I have yet to work up the courage to peel them all), Instant Pot sticky Asian ribs, warm butternut squash and chickpea salad, maybe a reverse seared steak and crispy smashed potatoes for Valentine’s day. If you have the capacity, you should absolutely make these chocolate puddle cakes, which are extremely easy (I mix them up in a pyrex cup measure.)
What I’m reading:
This week I finished up The Five Principles of Parenting and overall would recommend - it’s easy to come away from parenting content feeling like the stakes are higher than ever, whereas this is peppered with firm reminders that the goal is to be the parent you want to be most of the time. I also loved the focus not just on the developmental psychology of babies but also of the transition to parenthood.
Fiction-wise, I’m tearing through Iron Flame and my prior assessment of the series stands: incredibly cliché, somehow still entertaining as hell.
Diana is still on her The Pigeon Needs a Bath kick (requested by signing/yelling BAF and pointing at her bookshelf), plus Arkandan Ağlar (MONKEY!!) and Hug (HUG!! but also, MONKEY!!)
Other things I’m thinking about:
Although I am currently taking my annual sabbatical from Twitter / X / whatever we’re calling it these days, a friend looped me into an outcry about the UK’s new guidance recommending sterile water injections as a pain relief option in labor. For the unfamiliar, this is when you get a little bit of water injected into your lower back, often in a little bubble under the skin like you get with a TB test. It feels like a bee sting at first, but the idea is that it triggers a release of endorphins that help reduce your pain.
I can’t find a non-paywalled article from a reputable source, but the criticism seems to boil down to the fact that birthing people deserve better pain management options and this is a symptom of medicine’s general undervaluing of women’s pain. I’m sure I’m missing plenty of context about NHS underfunding and rationing of care, etc, and I’d be furious if sterile water injections were offered up as a reasonable alternative to an epidural. But while most of the outrage allegedly claims that they are “pseudoscience”, there is some evidence that they work! And as somebody who used them to manage back pain during labor and found them helpful, the backlash feels like it’s overlooking the fact that preferences differ.
The idea of preferences came up a lot back when I worked in research around contraceptive use. For example, a clinician might say that an IUD is the best method of birth control, because it’s the most effective under real world conditions. An individual patient, however, might prefer a “less effective method”, say, condoms, because it has other qualities they find important. Maybe they want something they can discontinue using without having to go get it removed by a medical provider, maybe they prefer something that doesn’t have hormones, maybe the idea of a painful insertion process is just not up their alley! Their reasons may not make sense, or you may think they are basing those preferences on faulty reasoning, but your job as a clinician is to educate them on risks and benefits without imposing your own bias. And at the end of the day, the most effective method for a particular individual is one they’ll actually use.
It’s the same, in my opinion, for pain management in labor. People are different, labors are different, preferences vary. Some people want their epidural placed ASAP, and that’s fine! Others might prefer to avoid or delay one, and that’s fine too! And of course, in a small percentage of cases an epidural might not work as well as you’d hope, and you might need a backup pain relief strategy. Having options is awesome. One of the reasons I chose to deliver at Mount Auburn was that they had a 60% epidural rate, which I figured meant whichever anaesthesiologist was on call was probably experienced enough that it would go OK, but also that if I decided I didn’t want one, they’d have lots of other options to offer me.
Were sterile water injections as effective or long lasting as an epidural would have been? No! But I had terrible back labor that persisted between contractions and the shots gave me solid relief from that for about half an hour, which conveniently was long enough to get me through transition. Had my labor been longer, I probably would have gone for the epidural, but it wasn’t, and I didn’t, and I had a positive experience. I’m glad the option is now available to more birthing people in the UK.
Whew, only took me 2 newsletters back to get into my Very Strong Opinions about labor! Comments & feedback are always welcome, and I’d particularly love to hear from anybody who followed the sterile water injections Twitter drama as it happened about whether I’ve misrepresented anything. Thanks all for your kind notes on last week’s edition - it’s always nice to know I’m not writing into the void!
Reach out if you need access to paywalled research!