hello there, friend.
A box showed up at our door last week from Moroccan Olive Grove, full of olive oil, preserved lemons, and harissa, more of it than two people could reasonably need. I put it on the counter and just looked at it for a minute. A stranger packed all of that into a box and sent it our way. Hurriedly opening one of the packages, i broke one bottle, you know the thing that happens when one opens a champagne bottle with a knife? that happened to this bottle of olive oil because i was too lazy to look for scissors, so high polyphenol, high grade, expensive oil was splattered all over the kitchen, then a practice in acceptance, taking it slow and letting go insued.
That kind of thing tends to catch me at the right moment lately. Using the tools that we write about. Mostly balancing, acceptance, doing whats necessary at the right time, being at one with the process and letting go of results.
I wrote a piece last week called “Everything Is Change, Flow With It, Create With It”, about how a tomato on your counter was alive a few days ago and is becoming something else entirely by the time it lands on your plate. Preserved lemons are that idea taken further. Someone salted whole lemons months ago and let time do the rest of the work.
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. - Jordan P
Harissa is chilies and spice turned patient. Extra virgin oil, cold pressed within hours of the harvest, straight from groves in the foothills of the Atlas and Rif mountains. All of it slow food, made by people I’ll likely only ever get to thank from a distance.
So I cooked with it. Roasted vegetables, a good glug of the oil, a spoon of harissa stirred through, chopped preserved lemon over the top at the end so it stays bright. Simple, and better than anything I’d have made on my own with what was already in the fridge.
If you want more where that came from, I put a small pile of easy summer recipes, along with a playlist to cook to, in “50 things to do before summer ends”. And if you caught my note about beans, tomatoes, and tofu a while back, this is the same instinct. Good, simple ingredients, treated with a little patience, turn into something worth sitting down for.
Here’s the part I keep circling back to though. I made that meal for both of us on pure instinct. I’ve made meals like it plenty of times. What I’m slower to do is treat myself that well when I’m the only one around and the only one to feed.
“Be the Friend to Yourself You Already Are to Everyone Else”
“At the most basic level, self-compassion simply requires being a good friend to ourselves.”
That’s the tired I felt looking at that box on the counter. Quick to cook something good for the people I love.
Slower to believe I’m worth the same effort on a random Tuesday, just for myself, for its own sake.
Tattoos
Sarah’s been working on something in the same spirit lately, a small botanical piece from her Snow Tattoo botanical collection, an olive twig, fine line, drawn by hand for the person wearing it. Olive branches have meant peace and renewal for about as long as people have been drawing them. Simple leaves, on skin, meant to outlast a season. It felt like the right symbol for the week the olive oil showed up. A reminder that the plainest things, oil, salt, a few leaves, tend to be the ones that last.
The song that’s been playing while I write this is “Come Along With Me”, an old release of ours that I’d half forgotten about until it came up on shuffle this week. It’s built for exactly this, a slow start to the day, coffee, the bottles of oil catching the light on the counter, an unhurried pace, plenty of time. If your morning has five minutes to spare, that’s the length of the song, let it play while the kettle’s on.
M.F.K. Fisher said it better than I can.
“First we eat, then we do everything else.” — M.F.K. Fisher
Feed yourself first, friend, and mean it the same way you’d mean it for someone you love. Roast the vegetables. Use the good oil. Let it be enough that it’s just for you.
I got hundreds of Vegan recipes to cook 🧑🍳
More soon, Paolo
p.s. Tell me what you’re cooking this week, or which line here stuck with you. Hit reply, or leave it in the comments.
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