I’ll start this post by stating unequivocally that Black Lives Matter.
The Second Lunch is a food blog, my personal musings, and most of the time my list of weekly Good Things – Good Things are my weekly reminder to notice the good and opportunity in a world of chaos.
If you are reading this, and you are tired of reading “political stuff” – or you don’t understand why this is here – I’d ask you NOT to click away. I hope that you consider at least skimming this and choosing to do ONE thing to make change in your own community this week.
We have an opportunity to focus and ACT right now on vitally important work: dismantling systemic racism.
This includes reacting not just during times of crisis, but acting proactively during all times. This is challenging work. I can do better. You can do better. We can do better.
One thing that I make a practice of during all difficult times: at each moment of crisis, seize the opportunity not to react hesitantly but to set up a system for yourself that keeps the momentum in the long term. That makes action a continuous part of your life.
Here’s a list of things you can do today – with an eye to making every single day forward an opportunity to act.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed about doing this kind of work, and shutdown in response. We must resist this feeling. We must take a step. Any step, even a small one. The importance isn’t about just the individual act, but it’s what we can collectively do to be anti-racist. It’s about pushing past the discomfort and acting. It’s about actively talking about race.
It helps me to think of racial justice work in the framework of repeatable action. In order to do this work we must both ask ourselves important questions, have hard conversations, and act. We must build ourselves a lifelong framework to structure good deeds and actions.
These questions will likely be uncomfortable. They are often uncomfortable to me. As a non-Black person right now it is our obligation to push past that and get to work.
:: Choose to educate yourself daily.
Make anti-racism reading regular reading. Make yourself a reading list, request a range from the library, buy some now. There are lots of great books to start with. (White Fragility may be a good starting point if you haven’t read it yet; lots of people are reading it right now, and it’s a good place to open discussion with friends who have not started this work.) I’m currently re-listening to the 1619 Project podcast from the NYTimes for a discussion group.
Find a wide range of regular news sources that represent diversity of thought. Does your regular news include Black and brown voices and publications? Just a few: Boston-based Basic Black is a long standing excellent TV news source – and has phenomenal interviews. Theroot.com has consistently good blog content. Callie Crossley is a fellow Wellesley alum whose work I follow.
Read books and watch tv and films written by BIPOC. Actively seek these out, in your genre of choice. YA, Fantasy, Romance, sitcoms, you name it – there is opportunity to expand your thinking and viewpoint.
Read books with your children about race. EmbraceRace has a great list here.
:: Identify opportunity to make change in your own workplace.
Right now we are working to support our Black teachers directly during this time, but our work here needs to be at every stage, now, and the future.
We’ve NOT been quick enough to reach out to our own community – we need to continue to speak out and work regularly on this work. “We aren’t particularly active on social” is not a good enough reason NOT to step up during times of crisis.
At my company, Inclusion is one of our core values. We take it into account daily in who we serve, our teachers and our students, the partnerships that we seek. We are committed to diversity in hiring. In how we go about choosing our vendors. In our partnerships. We are committed to working with BIPOC businesses and SaaS vendors, and with those who share this value.
We are committed to donating our time, volunteering, and financial resources to causes that matter to us, our teachers, our students, and our community.
This is the opportunity to take our work several steps further: we are making anti-racism explicitly a part of the work that we do. I’ll be writing and sharing more publicly about this work in the coming weeks and months.
:: Focus and Invest in the Community.
Actively donate time and money to support local BIPOC businesses. For Boston folks, here are 60+ Black owned restaurants to support right now. On that note, Lots of roundups happening right now – grab and bookmark for your next gift, retail therapy, or holiday purchase.
Yearly or quarterly review of your giving (volunteering or financial support) This is a practice that I try to build upon yearly: reviewing the global, national, and local causes that support BIPOC members of the community, or are specifically anti-racist.
Community Infrastructure – working to dismantle systems of oppression – and focus on rebuilding community resources. Vote. Get active in the neighborhood. Ask questions of your officials and leaders: where is the funding going in our community? Who is benefitting from funding? Who is NOT? This has a robust list of actions that can be taken for racial justice in your community. Even a small step here helps: sign up for your Mayor’s newsletter. Engage.
:: Make it personal: take a look at your personal communities and be prepared to ask questions and act directly – this is often the easiest way to help conceptualize our complicity – taking a good hard look at our own communities, asking hard questions, having difficult conversations, and doing the work.
For me that’s my (largely old, predominantly white) educational institutions that I’m active with – Exeter and Wellesley. It’s the food world. My fitness, running, and yoga communities – all of which have deep work to do.
Some of the questions I am asking myself:
What can I do to actively support BIPOC members of each of my personal communities? How do I promote the work of my BIPOC colleagues, peers, and friends?
How can I make sure that the narrative and stories about our community are truly representative of all members of our community? How do I make sure that I’m focused on and amplifying these voices? (WellesleyUnderground is a great example!)
How can I support the work of anti-racism and inclusion efforts in the admissions efforts of my educational institutions? How can I work to promote diverse leadership in all levels of the institution? The alumni boards? The board of trustees?
For groups that I’m actively in leadership: how can I actively ensure that our boards are diverse, our events are welcoming, and our work is inclusive? (This includes specific attention to diversity and intersectionality at every stage: leadership, planning of events, considering cost, location, and programming.)
Critical self-assessment: We can not do this work without shining the spotlight directly on ourselves. How do I perpetuate racism within my communities? Where am I complicit? (See below.)
:: Make it *really personal*: we are all racist. It is important to take regular opportunities to reflect upon ways that we as individuals are racist. It’s not IF, it’s when. I do this. It’s hard. It’s important. I’m not good enough at it, but I’m putting in the work, and ask you to as well.
Questions I ask myself:
When have I been complicit with a racist system or institution?
When have I remained silent when I should have spoken up?
When have I centered the narrative around myself?
How can I support my Black friends to take back and reclaim time for themselves to practice self care?
For this particular moment: When can I do the work to educate others on why Black Lives Matter is important – and the work of anti-racism is so desperately important – so that a Black woman does not have to be doing it for me?
If you can not answer these self critical questions, or you believe they don’t apply to you: I urge you to dig deeper. Use the opportunity to educate yourself on examples of each of these – it helps to read anti-racism literature with an eye to your own participation in racism. It’s just as important to identify the small ways that we participate and perpetuate racism as identifying overt acts. (In many ways, it’s MORE important.)
Collect resources and provide them to your own communities. Do not assume that because YOU have knowledge on a topic that your neighbors and friends do. Talk with your friends. Talk with your family members. Have the hard conversations.
Choose One Thing to do NOW. More important than resources: bias towards action. If you find a list of things to ACT on – ACT. It will feel overwhelming. Choose ONE thing. This is a principle that can be applied to pretty much anything in your life – fitness, food, career, and yes, dismantling systemic racism.
Please join me in doing the work, and reach out if you’d like support and accountability in doing this together.
Good Things – I’ll start with the lamb. Last night for dinner I made a meal that easily was in the top-five dishes of the year. In the morning I took some lamb stew meat, and coated it my Turkish dry rub spice that my grandmother (z”l) made for me.
This batch is probably a decade old and still has KICK. I have bags of various “vintages” – lately I’ve been trying to go through the older ones, but even though everyone is obsessed with good fresh spice, these seem to last forever. It’s heavy on cumin, oregano, chile, some coriander, and who knows what else.
One key to success in my kitchen is that if I don’t feel like being fussy, a heavy spice mix and TIME will always do the trick. I let it marinate all day and then roasted the meat in the oven at 400. Maybe about 25 minutes? I tend not to worry too much about temperature and time, just keep an eye on things. I cooked until it was done enough and I was hungry enough to pull it out and eat it. The lamb stew is fatty enough that you can’t really over cook it, so I keep things relatively flexible when I go in to cook. That’s how I cook most often these days.
The final treatment: served it over rice with tomato, fresh mint – while I try my hardest to avoid food waste, the fresh leaves were pulled from a generally withering stalk shoved accidentally in the back of the “crisper” drawer. Last up – I mixed a little Trader Joe’s European Style Nonfat yogurt (it’s Straus!) with some dorot garlic cubes and topped with some pul biber for that final Turkish kick. Perfection.
I’ll be honest here, the past few weeks have put myself and many around me through the wringer. A family member has been in the hospital – non-COVID, thank goodness, work has been demanding (for which, truthfully, I’m grateful!), many in my communities are grieving, and everyone around me is struggling in their own way. Good Things isn’t a highlight real, but my specific practice of noticing and observing the good – even during the darkest of times. I was particularly touched over the past few weeks by the people who reached out to let me know that it matters. (And as always, you, you reading this – you matter to me.)
Good Books. I know that many of us voracious readers have been struggling to sit and READ over the past few months, our focus zapped from too many hours on Zoom, or time spent connected to devices. (Let’s be honest, I have a library book from January that has been sitting 3/4 of the way read in my office.) I’ve found however that I’m craving books again, and have been taking advantage of my long walks to listen to more audiobooks than my normal routine.
I’ve been enjoying Bob Iger’s book – The Ride of a Lifetime. I’m an unashamed Disney fan, and the book was pretty riveting. (I did some vision casting with my women’s leadership group this weekend, and let it be known that if I could serve on any corporate board, Disney is at the very top of the list. #superbowlgoals)
After a phenomenal coaching session with my good friend Stephanie Stiavetti, who is building her coaching practice, I picked up a copy of The Empath’s Survival Guide.
For work, I’ve been reading a variety of books to kickstart my workday. I find a few chapters of a business book is generally enough to kick start me into productivity for the day. This week was The Team That Managed Itself (Christina Wodtke), Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within, and I’m starting off on Andy Grove’s High Output Management and David Epstein’s Range. (I’m always heavy on systems and processes!)
A quick note on long walks in the neighborhood – I’m so thankful to have my little walking buddy back in action after a winter bout of disc issues and a LOT of house rest pre-COVID. Watching him explore the neighborhood is such a joy. (For those who asked, baby-geese are still doing well!). And here’s a quick peek at my dream Wisteria.
{Good Eats} I already shared the perfect Turkish Lamb dish – but that in itself was a bit of a theme – with the same spice mix, I made a pot of Turkish zucchini, stewed with onion and tomato.
There was a GLORIOUS tuna melt on a bagel – the bagels are Whizzo’s which I get in my farm share, and I mixed in a little bit of Trader Joe’s Garlic Spread as the mayo, and a spoonful of my dad’s copy-cat Flo’s Sauce: a spicy onion relish that reminds me of summer in Maine.
Another standout dinner: in support of good things, I convinced my brother to order the Xi’an Famous Foods Chili Oil – and we shared an allotment. I made noodles with chili oil, vinegar, and baby bok choy, and I ate it gleefully as a late night meal.
My Bean of the Week was Rancho Gordo Large White Limas. I cooked them with a large piece of ham from my Walden Meat Share, and they found themselves happily participating in MANY different meals this week.
I think the favorite treatments were:
as a large lunch salad with Gotham Greens Basil Caesar, fresh tomatoes, and Dorothy’s Keep Dreaming cheese
with leftover striped bass (cooked with a mix of garlic mayo and mustard), over arugula with lemon
with fresh Valicenti Ramen with pesto, arugula, lemon and parmesan. SO GOOD.
Odds and Ends: Good Foods that Weren’t Meals, Per Se.
I’ll give another shout out this week to The Humble Roasted Potato, which I ate by itself with a variety of dipping things on a handful of occasions this week.
And another nod to my favorite late night snack: Cottage Cheese with salt, pepper, and good peppery Bariani Olive Oil.
And the perfect prepared food: the Cafe Spice Chicken Tikka Masala.
And finally, my dessert of note: the end of a container of Ben and Jerry’s Justice Remix’d: Cinnamon & Chocolate Ice Creams with Gobs of Cinnamon Bun Dough & Spicy Fudge Brownies – a flavor, that also serves a good cause: benjerry.com/justice – the flavor and action campaign dedicated to criminal justice reform.
With that, I bid you adieu until next week. Here’s to a very good week!
Some moments, 2020 feels like an endless bizarre loop, other moments I’m jolted out of the dream sequence with something new – good, bad, or otherwise. It’s a weird sensation. Time is doing funny things – the endless March, a non-existent April, somehow we are past the halfway point of May. It’s all a little unsettling, so I’m doubling down on routine with a dash of adventure and hoping for the best.
This week was my birthday. I had some reservations about a birthday during this pandemic, but all in all, I toasted myself to a year of getting older, wiser, and making it through. I shucked some oysters, literally and metaphorically. I took a stab at a list of hopes and dreams for the year – one for each year that I’ve been alive, and somehow made it to about 16 before giving up on list making. I’ll come back to it this week if I get the chance, it seems like a nice way to focus my thoughts.
I’ve been pausing to snap photos of the blooming flowers in the neighborhood at every turn. I rescued a Weigela from destruction in a neighbor’s discard pile. In one of my daily loops, I stop to say hello to the family of geese – each day counting to make sure that the five little ones are still together. Last week on my walk a coyote darted right past me, so I’ve been checking in each day and hoping for the best.
The Garden Commences! One of my generous birthday gifts was an allotment of plants from my mother – with a nod to my brother who generously dropped them off.
We started this week with herbs: the planter got four parsleys, dill, and the first of the basil. In the pots: lemon verbena, lemon balm, swiss chard, kale, rosemary, and mint. In the two long planters, three types of thyme in one, three rosemary plants in the other. I have early girls and sungolds, and variegated nasturtium ready for planting once I find the self watering planters of a certain size this afternoon. A strawberry plant is waiting to be hung up.
More to come in the next few weeks: a trip to Russo’s and Mahoney’s, weeding the back plot, and planting potatoes and other hardy herbs that won’t require much watering back there. A few more flowers: dahlias and others that I’ll be able to snip for blooms as the summer progresses. It’s a good beginning.
While I try not to collect too many material things, I did get myself a few small gifts: a new signed copy of Joe Yonan’s Cool Beans from Celia at Omnivore for inspiration for my Rancho Gordo hauls, and a new painting of the ocean from my friend Judith.
{Good Food} The one consistent thing has been my farm share, home cooked meals, mostly simple. I’ve not had the patience for much elaborate cooking. My dad made me a batch of Flo’s sauce, an onion-relish to eat on hot dogs, or with eggs, or in tuna salad. My brother picked me up a handful of treats at Sevan: stuffed grape leaves, pastirma, and kazandibi (my favorite pudding), as well as the small green Turkish plums that I love with fish.
Oysters. I picked up 8 Wellfleet oysters, and set about shucking them at home. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve done my own, and was relieved that it really wasn’t much of an ordeal.
Ham and Cheese and Egg Pasta. Too lazy to make myself a carbonara, I made thick cut Canadian bacon, egg, cheese, and arugula with lemon, and tossed in some fresh Valicenti spaghetti.
My “bean of the week” was Rancho Gordo black caviar lentils. I cooked them with an onion and two bay leaves. They had a variety of different iterations. First: with tomato, feta, and cucumber. Then they got lovingly tossed into palak paneer with yogurt. Another bowl had pesto and a few soft boiled eggs.
Roasted potato with garlic aioli. I’m of the firm belief that there’s nothing wrong with an entire meal being a potato every so often. Potatoes are too far oft maligned, which is disappointing because they are bursting with nutrients, taste good, and there are so many wonderful varietals! On one evening I roasted a filling amount, and ate potato gleefully with garlic aioli and some of my dad’s Flo Sauce. No greenery in site.
Lemon Pudding: Sticky Toffee Pudding Co.A notable dessert.It’s a nice lemon sponge with a tart curd. Served with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. I absolutely adore this brand, and freeze the single serve desserts for emergency cake whenever needed. (The Sticky Toffee and the Molten Chocolate are also perfection.)
I leave you with Bertram in our weekend office, planning the week ahead.
The Second Lunch is a (mostly) food blog by Sam Tackeff about recipes, food writing, ingredient hunting, travel, healthy living, fitness, and everything in between.
Please do not steal! Email me at sam [at] thesecondlunch.com – if you’d like to use one of my photos, and I’d be happy to share my terms. Thanks!
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