The next phase of Pale Blue Tart

Baking buds, hello after a four-month pause!

I want to catch you up on what I’ve been up to, introduce you to the next, ever-so-slightly-different-but-not-that-different phase of Pale Blue Tart, and get your feedback on a question I’m pondering related to Pale Blue Tart-as-cookbook. (Can you tell I’m on my third cup of half-caf? Buzz buzz, it is I!)

When I published a profile of a California baker plotting vegan cafes and flexing srs biceps in December, I didn’t know it’d be my last newsletter for a hot sec. But as luck would have it, I then got real busy with freelance journalism and work related to helping sustain journalism.

Some of those freelance stories are now out in the world, like the one pictured below for Saveur on how climate-fueled hurricanes are upending vanilla harvests in Madagascar (my first print story ever! I’m bellowing!), another one pictured further down, for Table, on how restaurants are bringing climate cuisine to life on their menus (my second print story ever! still bellowing!), and one for Bluedot Living on maple syrup’s sticky future in a warming world. Several others are forthcoming, including a story loosely related to chocolate and climate change (no spoilerz!), and one about how a beloved baking spice is faring in the face of drought.

I’ve also been doing some extremely rewarding grant-writing and a research project to support the future of local and nonprofit news, TAing some journalism courses at my alma mater, and helping design a potential new journalism course there to strengthen the skills of the next generation of writers. So yeah, ya bud’s been busy.

Amidst my work the first few months of the year, I’ve also been pondering what’s next for Pale Blue Tart.

As many of you buds know, I started it going on two years ago to create a space to regularly shout about how dessert can be a climate solution. I also hoped this newsletter would function as a launchpad to do more freelance writing on stories related to food and climate change, and I’m sorta floored that that strategy has worked! Hot diggity. Most of all, I imagined this newsletter as a prelude to a physical cookbook on climate-friendly dessert — a space to draft all sorts of content and share recipes from talented chefs that I could imagine including, a space to gradually build a community of collaborators and readers for this eventual cookbook.

I still hope this’ll become a cookbook one day, if I can land a big writing grant or get a publishing deal that’ll make that possible.

But until then, I’ve decided to just go ahead and make this newsletter the cookbook I want to see in the world as much as I can, and as a result, for now, to shift the energy slightly more toward cookbook scratchpad.

I’ve always pictured that while the main vibe of this dessert cookbook would be climate solutions, there’d also be a series of entries or mini-essays near the beginning explaining how certain crucial baking ingredients — vanilla, maple syrup, certain spices, etc. — are threatened by climate change. Happily, I’ve now written or am writing about a few of those exact issues for various outlets this spring, and I’ll eventually republish relevant excerpts or adaptations of those pieces here.

My question is: What other baking ingredients should I look into for possible climate vulnerability, and potentially write about here?

Drop me a line in the comments or by replying directly to this email — I’d love to hear your thots.