No matter where I am and what I am doing, when I open the “notes” app on my phone, what greets me is a grocery list. This is true of journals and notebooks, scraps of paper and backs of envelopes on the kitchen counter, and occasionally the margin of the book I’m reading
For example, this time was OJ, cilantro, and light sour cream, on the phone, in the Thursday night bathtub.
The only place I do not reliably open my notes is the grocery store.
No.
For that, the dedicated app I share with My Person to centralize and systematize the shopping so that we don’t find ourselves flush with TP. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that rolls are currency and Americans are profoundly pathetic about their tushes.
And yet, in apartment living, excess tp is tricky to stash.
We have a list for The Big Box store, one for the local grocery, and one for the special, sacred and endangered Mom & Pops like Mountain Mama’s or Leever’s Locavore or Marczyk’s Fine Foods. He braves the massive carts and electronics to stock us up on eggs and butter, frozen berries and broccoli, and enormous bags of food for the dog. I champion the local grocery with coupons and comparison shop brands of crackers, meticulously seeking out things he can eat without throwing him into the mele of temptations he cannot. Those are the hunt and shoot lists, the penny pinching lists, the essentials. But the third list?
The third list is where we ransack shelves for the precious things you don’t find elsewhere. Mustards and olives, unique salsas and slightly burnt pretzels.
(In case you’re riveted by cliffhangers and dangling antecedents, I have purchased all three items on my forgotten list, by osmosis or willpower, and I’ve paved over its digital real estate with these very words.)
I am fascinated by food. The ups of access and abundance and creativity, and also our bizarrely western worries about documenting macros and intense fixation on ruining cauliflower. What did cauliflower do to my generation America? Was it the Cabbage Patch Kids? Cruciferous rage, by proxy? It’s glorious in gobi and worth roasting, but it is not rice nor crust, and I have both immense judgement and stark realization of my own food weirdness as I type these facts.
Was my early fascination due to a household TV that boasted no cable or networks, but two PBS channels? Snow days and Sunday afternoons filled with Julia and Jeff and Yan preparing and chopping herbs and fish while my mother rotated through a dozen logical and nutritionally sound regulars which relied one pound bags of frozen veggies, steamed?
Was it my mother’s determination to recreate the culinary repertoire of my father’s childhood? Lithuanian cuisine(?) which amounts to every iteration one can scramble of pickled fish, pork, potatoes, and cabbage, which in our house came with 8mm cubes of revived carrot? I’m sorry to say, but there is a very real reason you’ve never seen a Lithuanian restaurant in the United States, and that is because the food is just one very slight click better than starvation. The hallmark spices are caraway seeds (also found in rye bread) and allspice, which came with your spice rack and likely remains unopened.
This week I’m swirling on food. That’s correct. This week’s latte is a list, tied together with a theme. Included are links to some “best of” lattes that add to the party, unlocked for your re-reading pleasure.
First, true confessions of the dearest amiable culinary soul as she finally bore prose to the unfathomable anguish of her past year. Samin quoted Mary Oliver, whose poetry carried her the way I know her cookery has carried others. Have you read her book? Watched her Netflix? She’s just a jolly soul and gosh do I hate what the world has asked of her this past year.
(You can seek out the story if you desire, but I won’t link to it here. It’s too close and too awful, and will haunt me adequately from great distance.)
The second (which I will share), is the writing of a person named Matthew Schniper I first met in the back of a pickup truck sometime in the previous millennium earning a few pennies north of $7/hour. I note this due to my freakish recall for names and faces and places, which has always borne fruit but feels mildly creepy in my own mind (which has to sing a song to remember all twelve cranial nerves, and all days of Christmas). We worked assembling sets for the drama department at Colorado College, and part of this work required riding back and forth between the set building shop tucked behind Wooglin’s Deli and Armstrong Hall. Well, he probably worked. I volunteered my labor and was quickly (and quite accidentally) promoted to stage manager (for which I also was not paid). But for a few weeks or months we rode back and forth, likely restraining set pieces and shoddy furniture with our bodies rather than adequate tie downs.
From my side of the fence we have been friends ever since, because as soon as I was a freshly hatched tiger, his words graced the local paper. The good one. No offense to those who write for the other, and big offense to the other for being a shameful excuse for journalism.
Recently, something befell the small paper. I imagine Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, sweeping in and selling it for scrap. Ugh. One of the few vestiges of sanity in a strange district that makes the Handmaid’s Tale feel much more possible than most places do is over as sanity seems to loosen her grasp on the 21st century.
He’d been telling us where to eat, and why, and how, for twenty years. Even as I’ve ebbed and flowed into the 719, I’ve saved a google map with some of his recommendations for the next time I’m in town.
He’s migrated to Substack, and I’m glad that this ecosystem exists to welcome those displaced by greed and stupidity. Now everyone everywhere can know where to eat when in town, and how to talk about food. If you’re the sort of person who eats, or wants to eat better, or (like me) reads about food you would never eat in places you’ll likely never go, give him a subscribe over yonder and see what’s… well… cooking?
Third, I got my invitation to Dining Out for Life this week, which is a remarkable event hosted by a number of dining establishments whereby on one special day a year, they donate 25% of their receipts to programs like Project Angel Heart.
I’m uniquely positioned to advocate for the practice of dining out for life, which I’ve been doing since 2005 when I worked for the Southern Colorado AIDS Project, and now as we once benefitted from their medically tailored meals, which were lovingly prepared, frozen, and delivered to our door for nearly a year.
In February 2021, we received seven meals that were safe. Medically-tailored to a perplexing diet that casts a dark shadow over recipes and grocery shopping. Meals that let me open, heat, and serve without combing through macros and praying we wouldn't anger The Pancreas, aka The God of Pain. When he took his first bite, he said, “this is really good.”
And he was right.
Project Angel Heart got us incremental progress back from the edge. They support people with all life-threatening illnesses, even the obscure and unimaginable.
Thursday, April 27th, a sweet handful of Colorado restaurants are devoting portions of their sales to this life-changing org.
—> Here is the Whole List —> Dining Out for Life
I promise I will rarely (if ever) offer my opinions on where to eat and why - that’s the job of Side Dish Schnip, but for today, because I can, and because maybe you can make the sort of micro shift that ultimately moves mountains for someone else, I’ll give ya the scoop.
If you have disposable income and the opportunity to spend it out, here are my picks from the list, harvested from the back of an envelope that I used to draft this ditty.
When in Boulder…. Mountain Sun is my jam. It’s all cash or check (aye!), but you can do that. I believe in you. The fries are cut fresh and seasoned with magic dust, and unless your pancreas has an opinion on the matter, worth the indulgence. Indeed the salad dressing is lovely, and the wait staff will kindly listen to your bizarre requests and honor your medically necessary modifications.
In Colorado Springs (ask him!) but also the 3.14 Pi place because hi. Pie. It has been on my Google Map for three years now, and I’ve never been, so instead of me recommending it to you based on experience, I’m hoping you go and can report back so that I can make it a priority next time I visit.
In Denver, my big vote is Little India, which is indeed Desi owned and operated and offers so much yum. They have a few locations and I’ve only been to the one on 32nd, but yeah. Exceptional takeaway if you’re hoping to have something for the weekend, or if you prefer to shop out, dine at home.
In Golden we go to Bob’s Atomic which is one of the three places we eat monthly because they make food my person can safely eat! They also do never frozen local beef, and veggies cut to order, and have a narrow window of veg options. They give you a superhero name for your order. You will likely bump elbows with School of Mines students who will likely either save the planet or at minimum break it down into its constituent parts so the aliens roll up on a landscaping shop for their mineral refueling needs. Do not dine in, kittens, brown bag it two blocks to Clear Creek and eat hot sandwiches as God intended.
And for the sweeties, Sweet Action, which was recently acquired (gulp!) but lore has it that it was founded by tiger kin and specializes in vegan and environmentally friendlier tactics. I haven’t been in a few years, but when I did go it was with Bob & Adam and I consumed an ice cream sandwich larger than my head, made with actual cookies.
The list is bigger than my belly, populated with some ballsy locally-owned folks willing to skim their slim profits in service of neighbors who - I can attest - benefit tremendously.
If you’re elsewhere, or will be, you can donate directly or randomly text a Colorado friend. Forward this ditty or some derivation thereof?
Thanks for reading,
K
PS: Some of my best food-adjacent lattes.
The Dinner Party
Recipe(s) For Success
relevant backstory —> Etched
and finally, a bit about me and what I’m up to —> Med School or Bust