📍provisions from nowhere: #21

my best tip of the year, and other nonsense

Nov 04, 2024

A big week is coming. But … isn’t a big week always coming?

I don’t know the particulars of your Sunday-to-Sunday, but the rise-and-fall of mine often includes a building, anticipatory tension for whatever unknowable thing is around the corner (if I can just get every piece of tupperware in the kitchen cleaned and put away, I can probably handle whatever is coming for me this week?!), a peak (ok yes *this time* is definitely the most exhausted I’ve ever been, no chance I can survive this again), and the inevitable—though nonetheless surprising—relief of having reached, and then passed, the peak (have Fridays always been this good?! g-dang I love Fridays).

All of this to say: collectively, we have something unknowable coming this week in the form of the 2024 Presidential Election results—and while this is Big Time Stuff™️, each of us has all kinds of other unknowable things coming this week, as we always do (avocado smeared on a sock, a pumpkin-pecan cinnamon roll, the sound of a door opening when you didn’t expect it to). Sending you curiosity and openness with which to greet all of the above.

*can’t be too wary of the dogs with these purples from my alleyway spilling out just so*

Joy blaaast (🔪 edition)

Last year, I denounced textureless food. To quote myself: “I want food to be something that, like the moon, refuses to be capture-able on film, or reduced to a mushy copy of itself.” Dang, past me is kind of a genius. Except … then I had a second kid. Yes, of course I want to be cooking the crunchy, chewy, perfectly-accessorized meals of my dreams every night of the week, but like … I do not have the time or the knife-work1 for that life. And yet, I found myself unable to loosen my grip on regular overly-ambitious meal-planning. Until I read about The Food Director.

In her newsletter The Purse,

Lindsey Stanberry

publishes more than one smart series about how the people are gettin’ it done (my favorite of which is called Division of Labor, where she profiles a family over the course of one week, chronicling who owns which household responsibilities … the fact that I find this profoundly juicy is … really a sign of the times). Earlier this year, Lindsey shared a guest post from

Katherine Goldstein

of The Double Shift
describing a surprisingly-straightforward approach to sharing the work required to feed a family: you trade off every other week.

Here’s Katherine on what it means to be Food Director:

One person is fully in charge of all aspects of shopping, prepping, cooking, and kitchen cleaning for a full seven days.... and then we switch off the next week. When it’s not your food week, you are totally “off” from both the mental load and the execution tasks of feeding the family.

It almost sounds too … obvious to work?! But we’ve been FD-ing for over a month now and run don’t walk to this guaranteed way to make your life better, is my advice, you guys!!! Ok yes it’s possible I’m overstating this and it certainly won’t work for everyone, but this strategy has meant during my “on” weeks, I have the time and the energy to be as absurd as I want to about garnishes, and on my “off” weeks I am this. JOY ✔️