The Pantry Purge: "Everything-Must-Go" Dinner
Recipe: our berry crisp with gluten-free flours
Thank you for reading. If you’re a paid subscriber, feel free to forward this to someone you think might love it here. And if you’re a free subscriber, think about becoming a paid subscriber to have these recipes to cook in your kitchen.
On Thursday — 6 days as I write this — we are moving all our belongings to an apartment in West Seattle.
We’re leaving the island home we’ve known for 15 years. (20 for me.) We’re all four of us sad, although that is starting to evaporate now, like the steam that rises from a hot berry crisp, which dissipates as soon as the dessert is cool enough to eat.
Mostly, we’re excited. New people to meet! 3 good restaurants in a row on one block on California Avenue alone! A 5-mile bike path on the water, protected from cars and flat, unlike the endless hills of Vashon. A new school of Deej. A new, independent commute back to the island for Lucy — the 7:40 ferry — to continue going to the island high school with her commuter friends. New yoga studios, a polar-plunge Sunday group, and a Carnegie-funded library branch that was built in 1910.
I think I’m going to like it here.
Honestly, we have all worked through our feelings. We’re ready to surrender to what arises in our new life.
But first, we have to finish packing and get everything out of the house.
Ugh.
This move is easier than when we moved two years ago. That was a pretty horrendous move. It included a trip to the ER after I tried to carry a desk by myself in muddy weather and felt my ankle wobble, then bend down to touch the ground. Sprained, not broken. Boot cast. Back the next day to move furniture and try to clean.
I didn’t know yet that I have an ADHD mind. Now, I do. And I have the medication that helps me to focus and go at a slower pace.
This time, we’ve been doing 1 to 3 hours of work, in 30-minute segments, to let go of everything we can. We’ve put all the boxes we have packed into the Blue Room, which has double doors that lead out to the garden. This time, we had enough money to hire strong and reliable people to carry all our boxes and put them in a truck and drive it to our new home.
This time, I have long COVID, so I’m not going to be stupid enough to push my limits in a futile attempt to prove that I’m not growing older, nearing 60. This time, we asked for help.
Dan and I both feel like we’ve grown so much in the past 2 years that there truly is no comparison to our move in 2022, here in nearly March of 2024.
Except one thing.
No matter what you do or how efficiently you pack, there’s always that awkward week and a half of packing up the kitchen.
At a certain point, you realize you cannot cook anymore.
This morning is when I realized we are in the “run a plastic fork through the peanut butter jar for breakfast” (a la Ted Lasso) phase of moving.
We have a stack of paper plates, a casual spread of plastic forks, knives, and spoons, and red Solo cups on the sideboard we are moving to our apartment soon. Everything else is packed.
To be honest, I kind of love this transition time, the bardo of moving from one kitchen to another. We’ve emptied out the cupboards of muffin tins, cocoa powder, canned peaches, and all the platters we use. There’s something about the emptiness that reminds me of how little we can rely on in life. For two years, this kitchen felt like our kitchen. And now, it’s a series of cupboards. We don’t own them.
They will never hold our Earl Grey tea, gluten-free penne, or our favorite brand of kosher salt again. This is no longer our kitchen.
I like to use this experience as a chance to contemplate how little we know. How many things we cling to, in order to pretend that we command a moment, demand that things go the way we perceived them long ago, and lament when our preferred choices and comfort spots have left us.
Everything in life is a chance to let go.
Look, I know it’s hard to think about this. No one really wants to embrace this. We are made up of thousands of little preferences and unconscious biases. Most of the time, we forget that we are not our thoughts. That the stories we tell ourselves are not true. That our tiny fists of rage we shake at people who are not like us and make us feel bad are the reason we suffer.
I am grateful for the transitions now.
Once, I thought my husband would never recover from his depression. He has now. Who will he be in a year from now? I have no idea. The conversation we had about this in bed this morning, while we drank our coffee, is now a memory.
A year from now, I hope he’s here.
I hope I’m here.
We never know.
So, for me — and now for our kids — moving is a way of welcoming transitions. Seeing ourselves new. Fresh start.
Also, this is a chance to let go of preconceived notions of WHAT we should be eating too.
Last week, when we were still cooking, we made odd meals by laying out the hot organic crescent rolls that came in a can from Trader Joe’s (the kids and Danny can eat those), the cauliflower pizza crust we found in the back of the freezer, which we topped with the last of the pesto, 3 cooked sweet Italian sausages, some green chile calzones, and 8 fried slices of whiting we found at the food bank that had been sitting in the seafood section of our freezer.
The kids loved that dinner.
Look at the buffet and choose what you want to eat. No pressure. No shoulds. No kale. No insistence that they eat vegetables.
Deej ate with gusto. We watched a Marvel movie while we ate our weird buffet.
That’s all we’re making for dinner from now on, in our new home too: weird buffets.
What do we have? How can we cook it so it’s delicious? Let’s use up the last of the cans of pumpkin puree to make gluten-free pumpkin bread and eat it for breakfast. Who says we have to play by the “healthy eating” food rules?
They’re almost all made up anyway.
We’re using what we have and we’re making it good.
Sometimes, dinners like this are the best of all. Like the evening last week when Dan pulled all the bags of frozen berries we had in the freezer and made this crisp. He told me, “I could tell when I was making it that this one would be good.”
When it cooled, we scooped out portions of 1/4 of the crisp each, put the mounds of berry crisp on paper plates, and gave everyone plastic spoons.
Damn, that was a good dinner.
Long after this in-between week of moving and not being there yet has become a memory, I think our kids will remember fondly the evening we had warm berry crisp for dinner.
And they asked for more.
If you’re a free subscriber, think about becoming a paid subscriber to have these recipes to cook in your kitchen.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Our Kind Kitchen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.