Hey Jen: Long December

Hey, Jen: A newsletter on food, home, life, and things I pick up off the side of the road.

Jan 27, 2025

Long December Bowls

What’s healthy isn’t often convenient. Maybe it’s all too much to ask for, that something truly nourishing could also be simple, quick, easy to prepare.

Maybe I should get one of those meal kit deliveries, the ones where someone else has done most of the work, the kind that let you open plastic packages of perfectly cubed potatoes without the hassle of acknowledging your prep cooks. We can avoid all that because somebody slapped a vanilla-girlie-friendly corporate logo on an insulated styrofoam box shipped to your door via FedEx that helps us avoid having to look the person who prepped those healthy-white-girl-veggies in the face. The garbage truck will absolve us of any residual guilt when we’re done.

But, I need so much more than that.

Building a life that reflects my values and desires, telling my own story, experiencing delicious things, working hard for those experiences, and believing that work should fucking get me somewhere has always been inconvenient. My wants are deep and motivating and I don’t know how to settle and it makes me embody so many things that a woman should absolutely never ever be: intense, outspoken, angry, dramatic, demanding.

How dare I?

~
Ingredients:

For the rice:
4 cups brown rice
8 cups water
Sea Salt
Confirmation that you are, indeed, paid less than your male colleagues with equal titles

For the shishito peppers:
12oz. package shishito peppers
Olive oil
Sea salt

For the potatoes:
3-4 Okinawa purple potatoes, cut into small cubes (sweet potatoes or yams also work perfectly)

For the quick-pickled onions:
1 onion, thinly sliced
1/2 cup vinegar
2 Tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
water, to cover

For the mushrooms & cauliflower:
1/2 lb. crimini mushrooms
3 oz. Maitake mushrooms
1/2 a head cauliflower, any color (I used purple)
Long December by the Counting Crows

For the spigarello:
1 bunch broccoli spigarello (kale, baby broccoli, or broccoli rabe are all great substitutes)
Olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup water
Salt, to taste

For the toppings:
2 carrots or golden beets, thinly shaved with a vegetable peeler
1 can sardines
Cilantro
Lime

For the sauces:
1/3 cup Mandarin juice (3-4 mandarins)
1 Tbsp. Tamari
1 tsp. Sesame oil
1 tsp. Chili in oil

2 Tbsp. Tahini
1 Tbsp. Honey
1 cloves Garlic, minced
2 Tbsp. Olive Oil

Start by preheating your oven to 425 degrees F.

On the stove, in a very large pot, bring 4 cups of brown rice and 8 cups of water to a boil. Stare blankly at the water and rice for a while, watching the starchy foam swirl slowly on the surface of the water. Mindlessly stir the mixture with a handmade teak spoon you brought back from Bali when you were a single mom of three teenagers, a proud new Bay Area homeowner, freshly laid off from your tech job, and in the middle of a divorce. You couldn’t afford Bali. You couldn’t even afford that fucking spoon.

Think about what you plan to say to your manager when you confront the concrete evidence you have of being paid less than your male colleagues, despite your experience, value, and work ethic. Wonder if your outspoken intensity will cause you to lose your job and make you have to start all over again, like you have so many times. Clench your jaw and tighten your grip on the spoon that is one of several artifacts you’ve collected from Brave Acts That Have Saved Your Heart. You always find a way.

Maybe you should care less.

Maybe you should be less ambitious. Maybe you should think about your health and the way your anger could be having long term adverse effects on your cellular structure. Maybe you should want less, work on being happier with what you have. Maybe you should let yourself be run over, inadequately compensated, and used for someone else’s profit. It’s a good job, after all.

Brace for being disliked as though the spoon can save you, add a few generous pinches of salt to the pot, and when your anger and the water come to a boil, reduce the heat to low and cover it. You’ll deal with it when you’re in the office next week.

Cook the rice for about 45 minutes, or until it’s soft, yet toothsome, behaving just as good rice should - not too hard, not too soft - and can be easily fluffed with a fork like the girl next door you never knew how to be.

While your rice simmers, drizzle your shishito peppers with oil, and toss them until fully coated. Spread them out on a flat sheet pan, and sprinkle with sea salt. Roast for about 10 minutes, give them a good stir, and cook for five or so more minutes, until they are blistered and charred. Remove from the oven and set them aside.

While your peppers roast and your rice is on the stovetop, cube your Okinawa purple potatoes. Like most things in life that are really good for you, they can be hard to find if you don’t have Whole Foods proximity or privilege, though I will say that the Hawai’i ‘Ulu Cooperative sells them online, and good ol’ sweet potatoes or yams also carry deep history, tradition, and good, earthy nutrients, and are perfect alternatives. Using what’s available to you is both practical and honest, and carries significant beauty in connecting you with a place, time, and way of life. Make friends with the farmer if you can. They need us to keep them going.

When your shishito peppers are ready to come out of the oven, move them to a bowl, and add a little more salt, if needed. Toss your cubed purple or sweet potatoes in olive oil, sprinkle them with sea salt, and roast them for about 30 minutes, until soft with just a little crispiness on the outside.

While those roast — what?

Are you getting overwhelmed? Is this too much to juggle? Is it, like, the fact that you wake up at 5:30 every morning to get ready for work and get the kids ready for school so you can wait in that horrendously long drop-off line of traffic and there’s not enough coffee in the world to make it easier to watch the stay-at-home moms in their Alo Yoga matching sets and yesterday’s blowouts waving to each other from their Rivians and asking whether Chelsea is also coming to pilates after school drop-off?

Is it your hour-long commute to the job that you’re underpaid for? Or is it the way that you have to be responsible for all the grocery shopping, and the sports transportation, and taking the dog to the vet, and making sure the school fundraiser links are sent to all your family members, and explaining how to make the online jog-a-thon pledge to your grandma, and how nice you have to be when you explain “No, I’m sorry you can’t write a check and send it to the people on the app, Grandma,” and then picking up the kids from soccer practice after work (thank god for the mom who gets them to practice after school) just to scramble to make dinner, help the kids with their homework, try to get somebody to scoop the goddamn litter box, and then somehow be super hot and super nice to your husband when he gets home because he had a hard day in his corner office and needs a blow job?

Is that what it is?

Fuck it, just throw a frozen pizza in the oven.

But if you do decide you want to continue down this unreasonably ambitious path, god bless your eternal soul, we’ll pause here to take three inhales together just like Stacy does in her morning yoga class, and three long exhales, along with a shot of vodka for good measure.

As I was saying, while the rice is cooking and the potatoes are roasting, cut an onion in half and thinly slice it. Add it to a medium pot with 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar, 2 Tbsp. sugar, 1 1/2 tsp. salt, and about 1 cup water, so the onions are drowned just enough to understand you. Bring the mixture to a boil, then turn off the heat, stir, and allow it to sit in the pickling juices until ready to serve.

Cut half a head of cauliflower into florets. Quarter your cremini mushrooms, take another deep breath because you find that it actually might help a little, and cut the maitake into pieces that match the size of the cauliflower florets. Do that thing again, where you toss them in olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and roast for about 30 minutes, until just becoming crispy at the edges.

Think to yourself that cooking is both labor and rhythm, it’s earth and nourishment and everything good about living. It’s also the chore that stares you down every day, making you wonder if you have what it takes to meet your life with a smile and a handy time-saving hack. It isn’t cooking that you resent, it’s the fact that you don’t have time to do it with love.

Without really understanding why, turn on Long December by Counting Crows and sink into the memory of the way you were in 1996 when this song came out, before life was full of, well, the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls. Put the song on repeat and revel in memories of you; memories of long drives on country roads with friends and stolen cigarettes and thrifted tee-shirts, singing loud with the windows down. Nah-na-na-nah, yeah.

Chop the stems of the spigarello and sauté in a pan with olive oil and sea salt for about 2 minutes. Add the rest of the chopped leaves and sauté for about 3 more minutes. Add minced garlic, sauté for one more minute, and then add the water, allowing the spigarello to simmer until tender and the water has evaporated. I promise, you’re almost there.

Peel the skin away from the carrots or beets with a vegetable peeler. Continue peeling strips of the root vegetable until you have a pile of shreds. Open a can of sardines, pull the leaves from the cilantro stems, and quarter a lime.

In two small, separate bowls, mix the ingredients for each of the sauces, whisking until combined.

Assemble your Long December bowls, beginning with brown rice. Top the rice with shishito peppers, potatoes, pickled onions, the mushroom and cauliflower mixture, spigarello, shaved beets, a couple sardines, cilantro, and a wedge of lime. Dress with a few spoonfuls of both sauces, and squeeze the lime over the top.