The other evening the air was goldenrod yellow — as if everything outside had a yellow tint to it, like I was living in a Wes Anderson filter. (Braeden swears it was purple, not yellow. I walked out of my office, by which I mean the bedroom, into Braeden’s office, by which I mean the living room, and he — unprompted! — brought up how strange and vividly purple the light was. How did we see two totally different colors?)
The air as I’m writing this, Thursday night, is violet. I don’t remember light doing this, penetrating everything in its path so that whatever it touches is also changed. Has light always done this?
Anyway, hi.
Today’s newsletter is eventually going to be about gift giving, but first, it’s about hot toddies.
I’m pretty sure the first hot toddy I had was made by my college roommate, Cassidy, and I’m pretty sure it involved gin, because that’s what we drank. (By “pretty sure” I mean almost positive, because there exists on the world wide web an old blog written by yours truly, my mom, and my sister, which we stopped writing many years ago but which I am so glad exists, because it offers a little snapshot of the three of us that I don’t think I’d remember otherwise. And on this blog — which will remain unnamed and unlinked because I’m one of those writers who gets terribly embarrassed when reading things she wrote almost 10 years ago — I wrote about hot toddies and how I don’t really use a recipe to make them, opting instead to just eyeball it and call it a day. …not much has changed.)
This is the hot toddy I make these days: I brew a pot of Now & Zen blend from Teaism, a lovely tea shop and restaurant in DC run by even lovelier people. In a tea cup, I add one small spoonful of honey and squeeze the juice from the butt end of a lemon. (Slice about 3/4 inch off the end of a lemon, so there aren’t any seeds yet. That’s the butt end.) I pour in the hot tea to leave about 1/2 inch headspace, stir slowly to dissolve the honey without splashing tea over the side, add a lemon slice and muddle it a bit with my spoon, and finally, top with Irish whiskey. (I don’t love Irish whiskey, or at least I don’t love the Irish whiskey I’ve had to date, but in a hot toddy it is magic.) That’s it.
I think I need to branch out with my warm winter beverages, though. Apparently it’s amaro caldo season, something that is extremely up my alley (“In a winter wonderland of Hot Buttered Rum, toddies, mulled cider and Irish Coffee, the amaro caldo is an austere, two-ingredient, moody stranger” — swoon). Toni Tipton-Martin has a recipe for a large-batch toddy with apples in her cookbook, Jubilee, adapted from Mississippi caterer Jesse Lewis. And in Gran Cocina Latina, Maricel E. Presilla has a recipe for canelazo de naranjilla, which she calls an Ecuadorian hot toddy (I found a similar recipe on a blog here), made with a syrup of naranjilla and cinnamon which is added, hot, to aguardiente (cane liquor; the blog post linked prior has more info for which types are best). Both of these recipes make enough for large batches, which seems like it’ll be useful in the coming months of meeting friends in parks to hang out in a non-covid-catching-or-spreading way.
Speaking of friends, I’ve been thinking about gift giving, or more to the point, gift purchasing. If you find yourself with some dollars to spare and people in need of gifts, then I’d urge you to seek out small businesses to do so. “Buy local” and “shop small” pre-date the current times, obviously, but you don’t need me to tell you that during covid small businesses are struggling and that bigger ones (read: Amazon) are not, or at least not as much. (This isn’t me saying Amazon is pure evil — though imagining Jeff Bezos as Bane is making me lol right now — nor am I saying you should buy nothing from Amazon ever. Sometimes you need convenience and to spend less money, and also some small businesses that I really like and admire sell their wares on Amazon; it’s more complicated than big = bad, small = good.)
The topic of why people should buy small came up in a group chat last month, and Kevin, a friend who was a math major and therefore knows of which he speaks, put it this way:
Promote competition
Your local community is like a micro-economy in and of itself! If businesses do well there it encourages more activity and investment in the area
Bigger impact for the people receiving the $. Your $20 at Amazon means so much less than $20 in the hands of a mom and pop. Or put another way, a job at a thriving big chain is (probably) more secure than a job at a local place.
If you’re local to DC or close to it, here’s a few places that I love and want to support. Most of them are food-related because food gifts are the ideal gift to me: something thoughtful that will go away eventually and not clutter your space! If you’re not in the area, perhaps these ideas will encourage you to find shops near you that offer something similar (but also, most of these spots sell online, too):
Teaism! They’ve got lots of tea, tea-brewing implements, and other gift-y things. Also just an FYI, ICYI, you can buy their chai chocolate chip cookie dough to bake at home.
La Coop, our neighborhood coffee shop. The owner works with farmers in Guatemala (including his family’s farm) to bring high-quality beans to the shop for roasting and selling; the farmers make 30 to 40 percent more than they would from selling to local export companies. Stop by the shop and you’ll find other things worthy of giving, like bags and picnic blankets. Also while you’re there get the jalapeño cheddar bagelitos and a dirty horchata for yourself.
Z&Z, purveyors of za’atar and sumac and manoushe! You know a good way to show someone* you really love them? Send them a box of manoushe. Alternatively, buy them at several local shops in the area to hand off to your recipient in person. You can also buy their za’atar and sumac lots of places, but if you go buy it from Thamee on H St. then you can support another small business and look at all the other pantry goods available, too. (*You can only tell your someone you love them with these manoushe if your someone lives in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, DC, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Indiana, Michigan, or Ohio.)
Stitch & Rivet: Leather goods! Made by a person (plus a small team of people) whose good humor I can personally vouch for! The DIY leather earring kit seems pretty perfect for a gift, in particular.
Hill’s Kitchen for cookware, etc. This in particular is almost definitely more pricey than buying the same product online, buuuut when shopping at a place like this you also get personal interaction. Early on in the pandemic I needed to buy a Bundt pan for recipe testing purposes, and I talked with owner Leah who helped me choose a type (idk anything about Bundts) and also provided a Bundt tip: grease with butter, dust with flour, then refrigerate the pan before you add batter. The butter firming up beforehand helps with releasing your baked good. Jeff is not sending me tips for using Bundt pans.
Literally anything from an independent bookstore. Ditto disclaimer on price being worth it because it’s personalized. I’ve recently bought stuff from Politics and Prose, Loyalty, and Mahogany Books, but DC’s got lots of bookstores! Choose one that’s new-to-you.
Tamales from Tropimart on Kennedy Street (or tamales from anyone selling them, really). These are Salvadoran style; I like the corn the best (slightly sweet), but they’ve usually got a bean or a chicken one (all near the checkout counter). They freeze well! Buy several and freeze them, then write your boo a cute card to go with their bag of tamales.
Did your friend get really into baking bread? Get them a bag of locally milled flour. I like Migrash (especially the ryes, all of them) but there are quite a few in the area.
Other food-related things to order online that would make good gifts:
Cider and wine from Ploughman Farm Cider.
Canned smoked herring from Deckhand’s Daughter.
A fiesta box from Chaski’s Creations.
Peanut butter from Hell’s Kitchen.
Anything from Burlap and Barrel.
Anything from Diaspora Co.
What are you favorites? Or maybe you’re making charitable donations as a gift this year? Reply and lemme know — I’ll include your suggestions in the next newsletter, along with part II of this post: a non-exhaustive list of free or homemade things that make thoughtful gifts.
Stay safe out there!!!
Kara