[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, I'm Megan and I'm Sarah.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're two women in our 40s who live in different states and have a lot of different interests between us.
[SPEAKER_01]: On this show, we talk about all the midlife lady leisure pursuits.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're enjoying at the stage of life like travel, hobbies, food, wellness, style, and more.
[SPEAKER_00]: while I'm super excited today to chat about the recipes that are making cooking really fun for me lately and where we're both finding new recipes to try.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm excited too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Today's episode is brought to you by our exclusive season sponsor and a longtime partner Fionic shoes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fionics are the perfect combo of stylish and super comfortable and they really help keep me moving.
[SPEAKER_01]: Use the promo code midlife at vionicshues.com for 15% off when you log into your account and be sure to check out the special page we've set up where you can see our favorite vionic styles.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can look for that in the show notes for this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, thanks so much to Vionic for sponsoring this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Megan, let's dive right into talking about recipes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought it might be fun to start by talking about a single recipe that actually connects the two of us in our friendship and in our kitchens.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you talk about your granola recipe?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it's not yours, you didn't invent it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But where you got it, how you've made it your own.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I will talk about how you shared it with me and how I've been making it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh, I love this story so much because it's sort of delightfully old school to me, like how the song came about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have this book called The Hands On Home by an author named Erica Strauss.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got it at the library and I love it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's a very lovely book, felt very sort of early 2010s, just in that, it was like a lot of projects.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there's still books like that coming out, but maybe I was just consuming a lot of those kinds of books, you know, like the 2010s.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's no longer in print.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I returned it to the library, I was very sad.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then somehow my stepdaughter, Sammy,
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe Eric tipped her off or something, but she found a used copy for me online and that was my Christmas gift.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was really, so I had this used copy and I've tried to look up the author.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I don't think she's blogging anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really can't find her.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, she doesn't have any internet presence that I can find right to give her a shout out, but thank you to Erica Strauss.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a choose your own adventure gunola where it's sort of like, if you just follow these, the sort of ratio, which I've now completely like spun off of anyway, don't really even follow the ratio anymore, but it was just sort of this really easy process and granola was something that
[SPEAKER_01]: I have wanted to make myself for decades, and I just never did.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's so easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think I overcomplicated it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also the kind of thing where if you look for a recipe, you'll find a zillion, and they'll all say they're the best, which is I think why sometimes just having a book that just puts one option in front of you is so useful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, just do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just do this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, I've been making it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we'll make
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, you kind of, I sold me on the idea of granola.
[SPEAKER_00]: My, I have never eaten that much granola and the biggest reason is I really don't like raisins.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care for coconut.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's almost always something in somebody else's granola that I'm like, and I'm gonna skip that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like most nuts and seeds, but sometimes there's like a whole bunch of a certain, anyway, almost always a granola looks to me like,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to really be picking around those raisins or usually the the biggest culprit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you were the one who were like But you can put anything you want in this room.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like it all granola is I don't even really know what makes it granola mix of grains and other things I guess, you know what made and that it's a crunchy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: And then high-end store-bought granola or not high-end, but like healthy, um, not overly processed store-bought granola is quite expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big, it's not so big.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's yogurt or cereal either.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but for all of these reasons, I did not feel I was.
[SPEAKER_00]: looking for a granola solution in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I am cooking and baking a lot lately as I'm sure we'll get into in this episode in future episodes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you kind of inspired me and I looked at the recipe and the very first time I made it I left out the coconut flakes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I left out the chocolate chips even though I do like chocolate chips, but I was like that's just not what I'm feeling for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I used for the fruit.
[SPEAKER_00]: They recommend or she recommends dried cranberries at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: berries and actually freeze dried different fruits.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it comes in a bag and it's really, really light, right, because all the moisture has been taken out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought I bet that would work really well in a granola, because it's going to rehydrate when you add the vegetable oil and some of the moistness, but then it's going to dry out kind of again in the in the baking process.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the very first time I made it, I used
[SPEAKER_00]: free-stride raspberries raspberries are my very favorite berry and like fruit flavor of any kind um so I left out everything I didn't like I also put in some pumpkin seeds with the sunflower seeds and like you said I stuck to the ratios and it's so good it's a little like salty sweet I think some of the nuts I used are not overly salted but at least one of the nuts maybe the pecan pieces that I buy might might might be a little bit salted so
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, with the maple syrup.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it comes out kind of salty sweet, which I love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the only fruit in mine is free-strived raspberries.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I've really, I could make it with, um, you know, dried apples, strawberries, like blueberries.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it does feel so good to claim a recipe and make it exactly how you like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, the whole family eats it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you kind of break it up and sometimes it sticks together in like cookie-sized like chocolate.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will just eat that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like, you know, when I'm feeling snacky instead of grabbing pretzels or chips or whatever, it's like, I'll just grab like a, like a brittle eat it like a cookie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have had a couple of times in the past few months to buy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like granola on the go I I travel with this granola now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I bring it with me But I've been on longer trips and I've had to like go to the grocery store and buy whatever And it makes me so sad now because first of all it's not as good.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's never as many nuts in it the stuff that you buy at the store It's a lot like as the ratios are always way heavier probably on the cheap kind of like the cheaper greens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just doesn't do anything for me, and it's very expensive, and so you can make an enormous amount of, you can make a lot of this granola in expensively and all at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I fill up tubs of it and I give it to my parents, my dad, especially loves it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, yeah, it, I wasn't like I said, it wasn't even looking for a granola recipe and this has become a really regular part of my cooking and baking.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thanks to you and to what was her name, Erica Strauss.
[SPEAKER_01]: Erica Strauss.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shout out to her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we can link to my blog post where I actually detailed the recipe too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and in our show notes too, I will just type out my exact like substitutions because I think it is fun to see how you can take a recipe as written and then kind of alter it because there's two or three significant alterations I've made to this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and I'm sure you have to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, moving on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about another specific recipe, but not just to recommend the recipe more because I want this conversation to be about like where we find recipes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why a recipe might become a thing that we make over and over again and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
[SPEAKER_00]: This little example is a recipe that starts with the food blogger Jenny Rosenstratch who's dinner a love story was her is her blog and I think the first book is titled by that title that way she has a sub-stack her more recent cookbooks are weekday vegetarians there's like weekday vegetarians and then there's another one she has a lot of cookbooks she's been around a long time
[SPEAKER_00]: But I didn't find it from her materials, her books and sites.
[SPEAKER_00]: I found it because my friend Kelsey Warden, who's another blogger and podcaster, said to me on Voxer, have you made this salad from the weekday vegetarians cookbook.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I actually had checked it out from the library and flipped through it, and I totally did not make this salad.
[SPEAKER_00]: So something about having a, having a trusted food blogger that I know, but then having a friend be like, I need you to go make this salad.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like the social proof, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I made it once.
[SPEAKER_00]: It uses tofu.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, I'm not the most familiar with cooking with tofu at home, or I wasn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was a nice little, I always like a challenge with the recipe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love learning a new skill by following a recipe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I have that skill when I'm just cooking on my own.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's a grain salad.
[SPEAKER_00]: It calls for wheat berries, but I use ferro.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I don't, I didn't change this recipe other than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, make it exactly as described, except that wheat berries were really hard for me to find in ferro's a good substitute.
[SPEAKER_00]: Farrow ferro.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is called wheat berries with crispy tofu grapes and arugula and feta.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is a it's from her weekday vegetarians cookbook, but there is a free version of the recipe online.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will link it up because I think everyone
[SPEAKER_00]: should make this salad and actually Kelsey and I have taken to calling it the midlife lady salad because it just is like everything that those of us wanting to eat like whole grains and vegetables and like it it's kind of fussy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes a while to make and put together but then it stays good in the fridge for days because it's not overly there's not a ton of lettuce.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some arugula but everything else like it's so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And don't you feel like you're willing to put the extra time into something like that that does hold together in the fridge well and that you can make in quantity because then it's like you're just a one and done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you're kind of taking care of yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's something that you talked about in your book.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think is a recurring theme in this stage of life is like a return to like, no, I want to make this salad not for my kids to eat for dinner or for the family.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to make it because I want to eat it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I want to nourish myself over the next several days.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, um, anyway, that is a great recipe, but it kind of brings me to this general question of like, where are we finding new recipes to try these days and what might inspire the desire to even try a new recipe because obviously you have a lot of you've been cooking in your kitchen for decades.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what inspires you to want to find a new recipe?
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, um,
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a really good question and it's a big question because I feel like I'm someone who just as often as not likes to throw out the idea that you even have to have a recipe because I feel like it can be so overwhelming at times and yet and when I say overwhelming I mean the number of recipes out there like if you feel like you have to find the perfect recipe before you could cook anything I have a blog post that says you don't need a recipe to make soup.
[SPEAKER_01]: and loved that post.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like all that means it's not that there's anything wrong with soup recipes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love them, but also we can trust ourselves a little bit that we know what soup looks like.
[SPEAKER_01]: And once we've made the same sort of soup like three or four times, whether that's creamier, broth based, or whatever, we can probably start to replicate that on our own with whatever we have.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for me, recipes are sort of the entry point into what's possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually made a put it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I rarely actually cook from a recipe, unless it's something I'm totally unfamiliar with.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if it's something I've never made before, I might follow a recipe really carefully, but I'm bad at it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm really bad at following recipes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I get lost a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm starting to wonder if there's something about the way my brain processes information, then just does not lend itself to like a list of directions because I can't tell you how
[SPEAKER_01]: I skip over some really important part that should have been obvious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if I'd been thinking it would have been obvious, but because I was so focused on the recipe, yeah, I my common sense, just like got left out of the equation entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so all that to say, I still love recipes because I love the inspiration part.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love to look at a photo or even an illustration of what a food might look like, because some of those, you know, some of the more artsy I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, recipe books are just illustrations in the historic ones too, and I like that as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like for me, it's like, what's sounds good?
[SPEAKER_01]: I did steal your idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this was your idea that we probably talked about on the mom hour.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, of checking out like cookbooks from the library and then using those kind of like magazines almost.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just did that last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: I checked out a huge stack, brought him home.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't give most of them more than five minutes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I almost never do either.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the excitement of bringing them home and flipping through.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I often just like return them a week later.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I did too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, if I don't return these now, they're just going to sit around and I'm going to get fines.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the stack was so big.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was actually blocking the view of the TV for Eric.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to take them back, but I'll do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I flip through magazines.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tear recipes out of magazines before I toss the magazine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And lately, this is very midlife lady of me.
[SPEAKER_01]: For me personally, I've been reading a lot of historical books watching a lot of documentaries about history, and I find myself really inspired by the accounts of how
[SPEAKER_01]: people cooked throughout time um you know that I'm a big Ruth Goodman fan and she had a whole book about how coal changed cooking because whereas before that everything was either like in a you know a big cauldron over an open flame or being roasted over an open flame when coal came in you didn't want the coal smoke to get into your food.
[SPEAKER_01]: So everything became more enclosed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, just like things that I wouldn't necessarily have thought of, I'll sometimes go back and read like, uh, Eliza Acton's recipes and things like people from, you know, like the 18th or 19th centuries, but the recipes don't really make a lot of sense to a modern reader often.
[SPEAKER_01]: The proportions are weird.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, the measurements are different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, the way they describe cooking things is sometimes
[SPEAKER_01]: Over or under involved.
[SPEAKER_01]: They make a lot of assumptions about what people know because we don't know things that they knew.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're like, wait, what?
[SPEAKER_01]: But I find it very inspiring and I'm actually Gearing up to make a pottage, which would have been a medieval Stue essentially just because I'm curious about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So basically
[SPEAKER_01]: In the days when you would just have a hearth with a fire going and a big probably I just always see it like in my mind a big cast iron culture and hanging over it right you would just have stuff in it just kind of bubbling away all day because people had a lot going on and you didn't have like a fitted kitchen that you were.
[SPEAKER_01]: making these kind of elaborate meals in, you basically had something that you would just throw the vegetables in, throw a grain into, you know, had some kind of a broth that if you were lucky it might have meat, or if it was the day of the week that you got meat or whatever, and when you think about it, it's actually a pretty healthy way to eat because it's like you've got, it's sort of like the food pyramid in a
[SPEAKER_01]: in a cauldron.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just really curious about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a feeling that we think we have these preconceived ideas about the way people used to eat that probably are incorrect, and I would just like to try it out for myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like everything from cookbooks and magazines to, you know, the 1500s.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it brings together a lot of
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's great and I think that's true of cooking and kitchen life in general.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can be creative, it can be nurturing, it can be mathematical and challenging.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can be soothing, it's sensory, like there's a lot that happens when we choose to cook.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, um, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me, I do love cookbooks from the library.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't done that in a little while.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now you're inspiring me to get a stack.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not on sub stack constantly, but it does feel like when I am and when I'm reading.
[SPEAKER_00]: The newsletter's I subscribed to, I seem to be drawn to food lately.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I mentioned Jenny Rosenstratch, Catherine Newman is a writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've both followed for years, and she's not specifically a food writer, but she does, I think she's a very good home cook, and she does talk a lot about food, and she shares a lot of recipes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just find myself drawn to regular people, often other midlife women.
[SPEAKER_00]: talking about food and recipes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I weirdly, I don't spend that much time on sub-sac, but I do think that has been a way that food ideas have started percolating.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I might go back and look at their specific recipe, or more likely, I might just be like, ooh, a chickpea salad, that or like roasted chickpeas, that sounds really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just figure out another way to make that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So inspiration from sub-sac.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to quickly ask you, have you, um, do you follow Emily Nunn, the Department of Salad?
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I think I follow her, but not subscribe, which if you're a substector, I'm already probably in my eyes, but you know, yes, like you, you're aware of who she is in the social media side of things, which you're not like getting her new sletters for really.
[SPEAKER_01]: What I love about hers is you and I have talked before about salads and how hard it is to get excited about salad at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, um, like you're you're green garden salad.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I did dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot be bothered.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's so many ways to salad and especially I feel like this time of year because the heart like what's in season is so diverse.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got
[SPEAKER_01]: root vegetables and fruit and they're still greens.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: So like there's so many ways to salad.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll just say that again that I feel like some salad in Spau whether or not you read her recipe and make it exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just like I like looking at a picture of a salad being like, oh, I could do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's kind of exactly how I think of that kind of inspiration is it's almost like a reminder that I like those flavors and it just gets your brain like it refires your brain because we have a lot of I think you and I both have a lot of food knowledge, we know what flavors work, we know what we like, but
[SPEAKER_00]: We forget and we get in happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say the same about eating at restaurants.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we really enjoy trying new restaurants and eating out as much as we can.
[SPEAKER_00]: And often I will have something at a restaurant that I'm like, hey, we could figure out a way to make that or just to use that protein or to like, oh my gosh, we haven't bought shrimp in a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like why don't we, you know, it's so, it's that exposing yourself to a little bit of variety and then going to hunt down a recipe if you need one for that thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Eric and I go to a restaurant, um, it's like halfway between here and our place in the U.P.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we love it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a Polish restaurant.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's off the beaten path.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it does, it's not on the way home.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, you have to kind of take a little detour.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we go there maybe twice a year.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the last time we were there, I was like, I love this place, but this is, this is all home cooking.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like this is peasant food.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could make.
[SPEAKER_01]: This stuff myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm actually thinking I might make Polish cabbage cabbage rolls later and yeah Like I found the recipe online, but it never would have occurred to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right to make that had I not seen it in Had I not had it in the restaurant like yep 10 times.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, so totally same
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just going to say the New York Times cooking.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an app or you can just get it on the browser and they'll send you newsletters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just think they're doing a really good job.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that they must be gaining traction because I feel like other people in my real life would be like, did you see that recipe?
[SPEAKER_00]: That looked so good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we tried several brand new recipes to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: for family dinners this summer and with with good success.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's almost become like my go-to online source rather than having a bunch of different ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just kind of where I go to type in ingredients to type in a protein.
[SPEAKER_00]: The search is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: The photos are great.
[SPEAKER_00]: The comments are really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of people, you know, saying how they may be modified the recipe or what worked for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just represents a bunch of different food writers and cookbook or cookbook authors, food writers, recipe developers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just a big fan and it's worked really, really well for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: It speaks to the having one source in simplifying a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like one good source sometimes is better than a million places you could look.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what feels particularly mid-lifey about the way you're approaching recipes lately?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, can you talk a little bit about maybe how things have changed in the last few years as you've had fewer kids at home?
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, we already talked about where we look and what inspires us, but what feels mid-lifey about it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, when they just kind of came to mind, I hadn't really thought about before we started recording, but just hearing you talk about having that time available and maybe also like that self-care aspect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I hadn't really thought about the fact that I'm more, I have more time in my hands and I'm more varied in the way I do everything from shop and
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, guard, like, the way I'm acquiring my ingredients has shifted a lot and the actual ingredients I'm acquiring has shifted a lot when when I just had a like a big family to feed I wasn't I was kind of doing a lot of the same things on repeat, which is great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a time of life for that, but I had my formulas and I knew what I was going to make and there wasn't a lot of going off.
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't a lot of going outside of that whereas now I have a pretty decent container garden where I'm getting.
[SPEAKER_01]: new greens and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing a CSA, so I've got that coming in.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been buying a lot of greens in bulk, which I didn't ever use to do, so I've got huge buckets full of things like barley and ferro and things like that in my basement and little jars with them in my pantry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I'll look at those things and go great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so this is a really economical way to acquire healthy ingredients.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now what?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what that does is bring me down a whole rabbit hole of things like grain bowls and salads that have some of those ingredients and things like that that it maybe maybe five years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just wasn't, they just weren't on my radar as much.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was like restaurant food for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: it's funny that I would often gravitate to those things like I would love to go to a restaurant and get a really good like grain ball with root vegetables and maybe some arugula and an egg on top or something like that and I'd happily pay 17 bucks for it, you know, in a restaurant setting but it would never occur to me to make that at home because it would have been me eating that and everyone else would be like, so now I feel like I can bring the restaurant
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and I have the interest in doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's, so there's that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I guess the other thing for me is that what I mentioned before, the historical aspect, that, that interest like the time and the nerdy that I'm willing to put in, not just like, oh, I'm going to learn about a new grain that I've never, you know, used really in the kitchen before and I'm going to figure it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: I also like to look up like, okay, how would someone have made this dish 200 years ago, or why did this fall out of favor?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole clashing of my interests that are like playing out in the kitchen that I find really fun and creative and again, it just wasn't really quite there when I was just trying to feed everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know how about you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so much the same when you said the word nerdy, that's kind of what I feel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just as an example, I have been wanting to find or develop a go-to muffin recipe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was looking at blueberry muffin recipes, but I actually back to the raspberries.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're my very favorite.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would sub in raspberries, using frozen or freeze-dried raspberries.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I took the time, I found two different recipes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made one of them once.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was so sort of happy with it, but I had like feedback for myself on these recipes that I had found.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made the second recipe and I made a tweak based on something that happened with the first one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this is very, like I'm spending a lot of time and thought to achieve a muffin that is purely for my own.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's mostly for me, although my youngest,
[SPEAKER_00]: does like a grab and go breakfast and she does like them, but I'm not doing them for her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing them because I love a raspberry muffin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody makes blueberry muffins and I, anytime I see a raspberry scone or muffin, I'm like, yes, that I'm like, I can, and of course, yeah, and having a recipe that's just kind of a go-to, it takes a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's either, you find the perfect one and then you memorize it and it's yours, but often there's a, there's an evolution like we talked about with the granola, and so I just have more
[SPEAKER_00]: desire to stick with something and kind of develop the perfect recipe for me, which is very unlike how I would have approached any of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I probably would have spent more time looking online for the quote-unquote perfect one, and then if it wasn't, I just would have lost interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it would never mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, tweaking, and the trying again, and another thing that has come up just since school's been back, and
[SPEAKER_00]: routines are back a little is I just find myself cooking in the middle of the day like weekday weekend I'm just like find myself like oh, I'm gonna and sometimes it's planned sometimes I've shopped for the ingredients and I'm like, oh, I really want to make that sometimes I'm just like, okay, what do we have?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm gonna roast some vegetables.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm gonna make some rice like
[SPEAKER_00]: And those things often are to feed my family, because I still have all my kids under one roof, and I'm still feeding my family, but this sort of creative indulgence of cooking when I want to, and maybe not doing it all in that four to six PM hour, where you're cramming to like, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of that is also, I'm not working as much right now, so I have like weekday flexibility, and I just find myself in the kitchen, and that feels very specific to this stage of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I agree.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find that it actually is restful in a way that it didn't necessarily always yield to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like for me right now, I might spend, I get up a lot earlier than I used to, or at least I should say, I have more early morning time than I used to.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like I used to sleep till 10, because I have always had to get up and get up with my kids and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I get up well in advance of when they're up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I kind of just jump into work because my brain is firing by the time they're off,
[SPEAKER_01]: And I might work from, let's say, 8 to 12 and then take like two hours, just put her around the kitchen and it, then I feel like I can get back to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very tactile, it's a step outside of the kind of work I'm usually doing, which is all a computer-based.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think you and I both really need and like those breaks from computer work and so it could be a walk or it could be laundry or it could be, you know, being outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: recipes and food.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is physical.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a robically physical, but it is tactile and sensory and you're on your feet and you're, yeah, so I agree.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like picturing both of us just puttering around our kitchen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, two o'clock my time.
[SPEAKER_01]: 11 o'clock your time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that might be a little early for you, but maybe, you know, I never know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like baking is an all-day thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like you could do at any time of day and it makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a reminder that you can find all those links we mentioned in our expanded episode show notes on Substack at midlifeladyleisurepresuits.substack.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's also where you'll find the special page we've set up with some of our favorite vionic styles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Use that promo code midlife at vionicshoes.com for 15% off when you log into your account.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here, everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk to you soon.