The return of Sabzi

And the beginning of a new project

The logo for the original Sabzi food blog, drawn by my sister GS.

Once upon a time I had a food blog called Sabzi. It was a lot of fun—I was soaking up tons of new knowledge about cooking and baking, supported by the fact that Minneapolis’s best thrift store (with a killer cookbook section) was on the way to my 4x/week psychoanalysis. I started building a solid cookbook collection, built internet friendships that in a few cases turned into IRL friends, joined a virtual cookbook club, and cooked a lot of incredible meals. Eventually I couldn’t find time for it and I didn’t want to keep paying for the domain name, so I deleted it all.

Back in those glory days of food blogging (circa 2009), my favourite blog to read was Tipsy Baker by my friend Jennifer Reese. Her project was cooking through her cookbooks and she wrote exquisite, witty prose that often had me crying from laughter. It’s still up and if you have time on your hands, I strongly recommend going back to the beginning and reading it all in sequential order. Trust me.

There’s a lot of food content here on Substack, but I haven’t found anything that comes close to giving me the same pleasure, with one major exception: Back to the Garden, a publication about old vegetarian cookbooks by Bryan Rucker who, like Reese (and me) is very into both cookbooks and film. I always open new posts immediately. Also, the title is a Tori Amos reference. Highly recommend. Reading Rucker and staring at my shelves of books (279 after a recent cull, according to my Eat Your Books account), I decided that I want to do this “cook through my books” project too.

That’s what this new publication will be about going forward: cooking through my cookbooks (and occasional film, music, and book recommendations). To begin, I will borrow an idea that Reese used on Tipsy Baker: make 5 recipes from each cookbook going through my shelves randomly. Because my first shelf is all the Time Life Foods of the World books and because I am not as brave as Reese (she heroically served all manner of challenging things to her children with no “safe” foods prepared alongside and endured much negative feedback, someone give her a long overdue medal), I will pick the books by closing my eyes and randomly touching a book on the shelf.

Thankfully, the first book will be To Asia, With Love by Hetty McKinnon, a gorgeous vegetarian cookbook. My next post will cover my first attempts.

All this to say, this blog is no longer what it was before (“short writings on love, care, and culture”). Thank you to those who paid for subscriptions. Together we donated a good amount of money to individual Palestinian families, UNRWA, Covenant House, CAMH, and other organizations. Going forward all posts will be free for everyone and I will be turning off paid subscriptions.

P.S. If food and cookbooks aren’t your thing, feel free to unsubscribe. Peace.