Squash Soup with Lentils and Herbs
my cat's name was originally Lentil, a story for another time
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Happy 2024, the year it will all be different. Today I’ve already woken up early, worked out (and stretched after), transitioned fully from coffee to herbal tea, ate several bunches of dark leafy greens and many grams of protein, went to bed at 9:45pm, drank “the right amount” of water, had therapy, got my inbox to “0”, moisturized (twice), made peace with all my enemies and written one newsletter for every week of the year, just to get ahead. Feels good to turn a new leaf!
Anyway, not that you asked, but I’ve been in an intense anxiety spiral the last few weeks/months about my work and how it shows up in the world. Contemplating the value of a recipe without a video, spending my time writing books that take a year and a half to make, continuing to be endlessly interested in writing and creating still images. Ask most people in any industry over a certain age and I’ll bet they have (or will) experienced the same sort of “what am I doing, is it still good, do I have to do or be or make something else?” meltdown at least once in the last little while.
Like a lot of strife across media, I can also blame (part of) my spiral on network politics. I spent all of 2022 making a TV show for CNN+ that then became a show for CNN (gone but not forgotten, the CNN+ promotional poster pose– does it haunt you? It haunts me). For that whole year, I was quite satisfied laying low “on social media” knowing that I would soon have something very large and meaningful to share with the world– a culmination of all the work and efforts I had put into my career over the last 15 years learning, cooking, eating. A real, 2-season television show, with a real budget and real everything. Until it was not real– Two months before the scheduled premiere, the powers that be at CNN decided to shut down their original programming department, and alongside W. Kamau Bell and Stanley Tucci, went the never-before-seen More Than A Cooking Show with Alison Roman.
This wasn’t the first time the work I made was in the hands of someone else that could ultimately decide its fate– but it didn’t make it any less painful. Painful might seem dramatic, and embarrassing might be a better word– though, I gotta say, it was embarrassing (and, frankly, painful)! And we (humans) really, really hate to be embarrassed, especially publicly (as an expert on the subject, I can tell you it feels bad).
Anyway, I never really talked about it because A. I wasn’t sure I was allowed to B. I had other things to focus on in 2023 and C. it was embarrassing! Even if the decision had nothing to do with me, the show, or the dozens of really talented, hard working, creative people who helped make it, I was still embarrassed. Embarrassed that something I was so publicly excited about simply didn’t pan out, embarrassed I had once again put my creative, hard working eggs in the basket of “the man”. Embarrassed something I cared about so deeply, something I thought was so good, something that took so much effort and care to make was deemed utterly unimportant by the people who decide what’s important.
If you’re reading this and thinking “I’m just here for the squash soup”: Thank you for subscribing, the soup recipe is at the bottom and I’ll get to it in a second.
Why am I talking about this now and what does it have to do with squash soup? I don’t know. After feeling stuck on this for a while, I felt like I started the year with a burn it all down (in a good way) energy. Burn it down to build it back, burn it down to unstick the things that feel stuck, and since I was old enough to write, I knew that writing always helped unstick the stuck things.
The other day a friend of mine told me a story that a friend of hers told her, and I’m paraphrasing here, but the moral of the story was something to the effect of “do you want to be the last person in a horse and buggy when everyone else is driving a car?” And obviously I don’t, because I hate to be left out of things, but also cars make so much pollution and cause lots of accidents, so maybe? Yes, of course, everyone has been saying this for years, that making books and TV shows are the horse and buggy and making Reels and TikToks are the car, but horses are beautiful and still very much worth riding and I refuse to stop riding the beautiful horse!!! Don’t make me get off the horse!
Anyway, soup. Instead of letting myself become paralyzed with anxiety about the future, if there will or won’t be a TV show, if I should or should not just quit everything else and become a front-facing-camera creator of content, I decided today I will just do the thing that I know I can do, and that’s cook. Make some soup. I don’t have to figure it all out before I cook some onions (chopped) in olive oil until they’re starting to brown. I don’t have to reinvent myself before I add one whole squash (peeled, cut into small-ish pieces) and some spices (cumin seed, crushed red pepper flakes). I shouldn’t pressure my career to entirely evolve before I cook the squash until it’s a coarse little mash (it happens faster than you think) and adding red or yellow lentils and some water or broth. I will not have all the answers before the soup comes to a simmer and both the squash and lentils melt into each other, creating a luxuriously creamy, nearly smooth soup without having so much as to look at a blender.
Last year, I told myself I would have all the answers figured out by the start of 2024, but that’s now, and I’m already two days late– but for today, there’s soup, and that’s fine with me.
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