A little pep talk, and a very easy recipe

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Good afternoon (or evening, or morning, depending on where you are and when you read this)! We’ve all been doing this for five months now, and as much as the phrase “the new normal” is overused, this is now just…what life is like for the next six months to a year or so, it seems. I said this on my Instagram story the other day, but this past weekend, I was feeling stressed about how hard it’s been for me to get work done, and how I feel behind on everything (including answering emails from this newsletter!) and beating myself up about it. And the pep talk fairy dropped into my brain and I said to myself “All you can do is wake up every morning and try your best and work hard and do it again the next day.” And that helped me, and maybe it’ll help you too.

And please let’s all talk about what “working hard” means right now. I feel like we’re all just trying to act like everything is normal, and we should be behaving in every other way like it’s all just the same — working as hard as we did before, being great parents, making healthy food, exercising, sleeping well — and then getting mad at ourselves because we aren’t. You know why we aren’t? IT IS A PANDEMIC! WE ARE LIVING THROUGH A NIGHTMARE! This is an incredibly difficult time — 170,000 Americans have died, as of this week, millions have been sick, and all of that means that many of us know people who have been affected by this terrible disease, I know many. And even if you don’t know anyone who has been sick or died, your whole life has been upended. So if your work isn’t up to the standards of what you did before, if your concentration is off, if you keep meaning to exercise but you don’t, if your kids are eating chicken fingers for every meal and having unlimited screen time — please, please, don't beat yourself up about that! Cut yourself some slack, and cut everyone around you slack too. Trying your best and working hard doesn’t mean what it did in January, or last August. You’re doing a great job in an impossible time.

This week I was THRILLED when Reese Witherspoon picked one of my favorite reads of the year, You Should See Me In a Crown by Leah Johnson, for her first YA book club pick! It feels impossible that I didn’t mention this book in this newsletter, but I read it in June and that was a weird time (everything is a weird time now!). (I did mention it in the piece about Black fiction I wrote for Time, which I did link to here!) If you haven’t read it yet, please make this your excuse to pick it up right away: it’s such a thoughtful, joyful, heartfelt book about being a Black teenage girl and first love and friendship and family and being an outsider, and I ended the book with a huge smile on my face. Isn’t that what we all need right now?

Before I give you this week’s recipe, I have to apologize, mostly to myself, about giving you another cake for last week’s recipe. Little did I know that as soon as I sent out that email, the Bay Area would start a week long heat wave which would make my kitchen lava. Why did I say I would make a cake? I did not make a cake! I barely walked into my kitchen other than to take cans of sparkling water out of the fridge and put takeout leftovers away! Also, in the midst of that heat wave, we had lightning storms all over California (which is very very rare here) which started a whole lot of fires (which is unfortunately not rare, but it’s very early in fire season for this many). Farmworkers are still out there picking our food in the midst of the dangerous smoke, and now N95 masks are harder to get ahold of. If you’re able to give help right now, the Norcal Wildfire Relief Fund through the Latino Community Foundation is a great place to start.

But this week’s recipe — while yes, it does use an oven! — is very easy and low temperature and high impact. And so so pretty, see?

I made these because I planted a whole lot of cherry tomatoes in my pandemic garden, and now I have a zillion tomatoes to pick every day, and while I’ve been eating a ton in salads, I don’t want them to go bad before I can get to them. If you also have lots of tomato plants, or if you over buy tomatoes at the farmers market like I also often do and then don’t want them to go to waste, this is perfect.

Slow Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
(adapted from many other places)

Ingredients:

Cherry tomatoes, however many you have
Olive oil
Salt
Herbs or garlic if you want (I use neither)

Directions:

Turn your oven to 200 degrees (the original recipe had it at 225, but I like this even lower). Get a big, rimmed baking sheet, and line it with parchment paper. Cut all of your cherry tomatoes in half, and place them on the baking sheet, cut side up (you can put them as snugly together as they can fit, they’ll shrink in cooking). Drizzle olive oil over the tops of them (for the whole baking sheet shown above, I used about two tablespoons or so), and then sprinkle salt on top. If you want to add herbs (thyme or rosemary work best here, not something delicate like basil) or whole garlic cloves, tuck them around the tomatoes, but I never do so that I can use them in a range of ways. Slide in the oven, and set your timer for 4 hours (you can check at 3 and a half hours if your tomatoes are tiny, but even my littlest ones were fine at 4). I have done this same thing with bigger tomatoes (it works great with Early Girl size ones) and you can do it the exact same way, you just need more time — I’ve done like 6-7 hours for bigger ones.

At that point, you can let them cool, drop them into freezer bags and let freeze flat, and then toss in anything for a big bright sweet tomato flavor all winter. But what I did was put them in mason jars (packed tightly — I showed a picture over on Instagram) and cover with olive oil, and let me tell you, I was so glad I did that that I did the exact same thing again this week when I finished off the first two jars. Here are the things I did with the first two jars: scooped some of these and their olive oil into a bowl along with fresh cherry tomatoes and mozzarella and basil and tossed it with hot farro for a great lunch; scooped some of these and their olive oil into a bowl along with feta and threw hot pasta on top and stirred a lot and had a great dinner; scooped some of these and their olive oil into a bowl with a tiny bit of sherry vinegar and plopped a big dollop of burrata on top and zoned out from the pure joy of it. You see a pattern? Also, any leftover olive oil in the jar is incredible for making salad dressings or drizzling on other tomato forward kinds of meals.

Enjoy!

Have a good weekend, everyone. Be gentle to yourselves!

Jasmine

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