One last vintage recipe

And then I rebrand (again)

This has nothing to do with the newsletter, I just wanted to brag about going camping and cooking cinnamon rolls on a skewer over a campfire

Substack started sending me reminders that I haven’t sent a newsletter in a while.

(It’s been, um, five months, so I understand.)

The main reason is: I was feeling burnt out — not from writing this newsletter, just from freelancing and food media in general. And as anyone with any amount of burnout knows, it’s hard to really do anything beyond what you have to do in your day to day. Thus, my time went to recipe editing and testing, writing the occasional assigned article, and trying to muster the energy to come up with story ideas to send pitches.

Besides, how can I really top my last post? It was my ideal for this vintage recipe iteration of the newsletter: a recipe from a random church book that has local-to-me intrigue.

And then it hit me.

It’s time to change the newsletter up again.

I assume you saw this coming.

Yes, I wanted to go through my collection of recipe for the whole year. But ya know, I dug through those books and pamphlets and started to feel like A) I’d never find a molded salad I actually wanted to invest time, money, hopes, and dreams into trying; B) digging into the backstory of these recipes to add necessary context takes a lot of time that I don’t have; and C) if it’s vintage recipes with context you want, there are people doing this quite well already (see: Old Line Plate by Kara Mae Harris, for example).

I also started to feel a little too beholden to nostalgia, cluttered by these recipes that someone, bless their hearts, must have loved at one point but that don’t really reflect the way I eat.

Speaking of banking on nostalgia, here’s a picture from the Coors factory tour

I started a note on my phone, sometime within the last few years, called “All the foods I want to cook.” As it grew, I categorized it, then I split it into two notes (mains and snacks/drinks) because it got too big. In what I’d call a minor stroke of genius, I added a category of “things currently in freezer” because otherwise those foods would be banished to their frozen state and rarely return. I visit these notes often, but mostly to add to it, rarely to cook from it.

Until now. I already ticked a few off the list: a spicy cherry salad, chaat masala ranch, and masa piloncillo chocolate chunk cookies, to name a few. So, yes, the next generation of this newsletter will basically be a cooking blog. Food blogs from food blog heyday (circa late 2000s/early 2010s) were what got me into this mess (food writing) in the first place — might as well lean in and get back to that basic exercise of writing and publishing on a schedule as I figure out the rest of my life.¹

But first, I’m sending off the vintage iteration of the newsletter with one final look into the past, from the 1983 printing of the Colorado Cache Cookbook.

Do you remember the days when people knocked on your door, unannounced, and expected you to entertain and feed them?

I don’t either.

But apparently this is a thing that happened, and the enterprising people from and/or near the Royal Gorge came up several ideas for what to serve their unexpected guests.

(For the record I would love for friends to just drop by and see if I’m around and free to hang for a small amount of time and I do have a stash of snacks and jars of things that’d make ideal last-minute bites, even though I also project the aura of someone who needs to have plans set weeks in advance so I can emotionally prepare to be around other humans.)

So we’ve got cream cheese covered in preserves…fruit wrapped in prosciutto… artichoke hearts with ham…and...ah, yes, the classic, OF COURSE: cherry tomatoes dipped in vodka dipped in curry powder.

Now I love a distilled clear spirit as much as the next person who annually makes vodka infusions and forces her friends to toast to friendship and Pushkin and chase it all down with pickles. But dipping cherry tomatoes in vodka? In this economy???

I briefly (read: not thoroughly) searched online for similar recipes, but the closest thing I could find were “tipsy tomatoes,” aka vodka-infused tomatoes, which is the literal opposite of what I want.

First Braeden and I tried it exactly as described, and you know what was missing?

Salt. It needed salt.

So then we tried it again, with flaky salt added to the curry powder, and this time with company (expected company, alas). For curiosity’s sake, I also stabbed a few tomatoes and plopped them in a little bowl to soak up some vodka. (They weren’t vastly different from merely dipping in vodka.) I included a little bowl of everything bagel seasoning, too, because why not.

Grape tomatoes instead of cherry, also.

But is it good?

Upon trying one, our friend (hi, Kate) said, “It’s not like I wouldn’t have another.” (Reader, she had another.)

Braeden’s review: It’s a sensation where you need to eat another to figure out what’s going on. Is that good? Maybe!

My take: It’s … fine. It’s veering on desperation while also being inventive, which I truly appreciate. It’s maybe sending a message to whoever decides to show up unannounced at your door. (The message being: This is what you get for showing up without calling first.) It left me wondering, were dips that lacking in the early ‘80s that people were using straight up vodka? Is this trickle-down economics? Or is the person who shared this tapping into alcohol’s ability to draw out flavor, and really we should all be dipping things in vodka?

We may never know. But if you’ve got some vodka and tomatoes around, you know what to do.

1. hahahahahahahaha