Show soup some love and it will love you back
Plus a recipe for spicy black bean and butternut soup
Hi everyone,
Happy Lunar New Year’s eve to those who celebrate. I didn’t grow up strongly connected to this part of my cultural heritage, and once I became a young adult I maintained a sense of distance from the holiday, thinking it wasn’t for me or that I somehow wasn’t “Asian enough” to partake. But in recent years I’ve had conversations with many other AAPI folks who are empowering themselves to reclaim LNY as adults, often through a shared forging of modern traditions rooted in community. Tonight, I’m attending a community altar building hosted by my friend Kim at Prima in Brooklyn, open to all. We’ll collectively offer fruits, sweets, good luck objects, and more offerings to our ancestors, write wishes for the new year, and participate in a metta (loving kindness) meditation. If you’re in the area, come by from 6pm onward—it should be a sweet time.
But first, soup. Last weekend I taught a live virtual cooking class as part of my Nourish Yourself collaboration with
of Brooklyn Strength and I have to say, making a pot of soup while on Zoom with other people making soup is a wholesome-ass way to spend a Saturday night. The theme of the class was bean/legume soups, so everyone chose a different bean/legume, aromatics, spices, veggies, and toppings and we each ended up with a totally different soup; I left feeling like I had 5 new ideas to try. I enjoyed this format so much that I’ve started thinking about whether I’d like to offer live virtual classes (with recordings available) to folks here on the Substack or on another platform. If that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know.