March 29th, 2024

Hi friends,

Closing out a successful pop-up dinner this week and taking note of the many hands that make it all possible. From my hare-brained foodie notions to your plates, I’m grateful for the boundless support I felt this week in putting it all together. So often the work of a chef is a solitary practice–but the best ideas and tastes happen in connection. 

Good eats are a collective event, from the folks growing your ingredients to the people preparing and serving, food is always a collective action. To eat is to participate in community. Whether that’s solo watching Kristen Kish as the new Top Chef host (hello 👀) to dinner out with friends. Unconsciously or otherwise, to eat is to acknowledge a wider effort.

Infinite gratitude for this plant-based, low waste community and everyone contributing to mealtime. Mine, and yours.

Stay hungry,Hawnuh Lee | Founder, Closed Loop Cooking

Flour arrangement inspiration.

The dish >>

• Reading up on the importance of bee culture in object design.

• Watching this zucchini sprouting time lapse on repeat.

• Flan-iture.

• Defining the Symbiocene.

• Eyeing this Manischewitz redesign.

• More Kristen Kish on the latest CB pod.

• Thoughts about the basics of eco-bricking?

New recipes in the works! In the meantime please enjoy this quickle gradient.

Presence in prep: notes from a pop-up chef

Essay by Hawnuh LeeThis week I'm sharing some intimacies of the pain in pop-up prep. A brief, but persronal, behind the scenes narrative in my most recent dinner. Offering some connectivity to my work and hopefully, a bit of resolve. Enjoy. 

I’m rolling out cookie dough, infused with a rich black sesame paste. I notice quick streaks of red across the stainless steel countertop, mixing in smoothly as I knead the dough back in on itself in a fluid motion. Another streak of red, did I knock over the beet powder? It’s a few seconds before I register a steady stream of blood from a new-to-me slice along my pinky knuckle. Something must have nicked me. I’ve been too focused, or too dissociative to even feel it.

I can’t be sure how much of the dough is contaminated. I toss what I’ve been working with and sanitize my station. My hands are pulsing. Cramped, cut, and bruised from back-to-back 16, 17 hour work days. The soft meat of my right hand mimics the shape of the glass bottle I used as a rolling pin in the previous night’s pasta session. At least my nails held up. I loved this latest set, a mix and match of checkers and bright florals.

I’d been at the restaurant too late the evening prior. Kept company by the steady hum of the refrigerators and glow of the stovetop pilot lights, I jumped at the drop in the ice machine every few hours. If you’d walked by you’d have seen me in the same position, folding 35, 70, 105 vegan dumplings by hand. Each set a different color and filled with a textural mix of toasted hazelnuts, shiitake + oyster mushrooms, and okara–leftover pulp from making soy milk. I was doing too much.

A little after 10:30 PM I taste tested my first batch, a turmeric dumpling dough, and said aloud, “Fuck, that’s GOOD.”

I could feel the pinch in my neck, having been in the same heads down pose for too long, forearms tightening with every knead. I saw my hands float away from my body, unsure if I was hallucinating or I’d become one with the dough. I kept rolling and pinching, displacing any physical sensation for fear of stopping. This had to get finished.

– 

I’d planned the menu at the beginning of March. It was my first time hosting at an actual restaurant. My first time selling out an event. I’d pushed for every pop-up dinner I’d done but I wanted this to be memorable. And more than anything else, I wanted to keep my hands busy. On the edge of burnout, feeling the holes in stretching myself so thin, I’d found myself in that oft-familar mental darkness. I was in a spiral, heavier than I’d felt in a long time. And to sit in that would have been unbearable.

So I traded pains. To keep my hands busy was to keep myself focused. Finding flow in the meditation of making, prepping, feeding. I encouraged every complexity of my menu; planning and building layers of flavor in my labor. I stood with the steady pain in my low back and heels of my feet as grounding companions in forced repetition. Not in any effort to romanticize my cooking–there is nothing romantic in the brutal strain of solitary chore–but to honor that time and attention for providing a mental anchor. I was present, until I wasn’t.

–

It’s the morning after my dinner and full body aches have woken me up throughout the night. I’m exhausted to my marrow, fatigue pulling me down in waves, fleeting only in the chronic soreness radiating from every limb. I am in a bad way and I am gentle with myself, moving gingerly from bed to couch to bed. I’m aware the discomfort I’d so intentionally separated myself from would be waiting for me, an unwanted guest.

It’d gone so well, I could sense genuine excitement and curiosity from diners. Recalling one of the servers claiming it “was the best meal she’d ever had” brings real tears to my eyes. In part for my throbbing headache, in part the validation of this work. I float through the prep aftermath of my kitchen, uninterested in my surplus of leftovers. I want pho and a soft cookie and to be swaddled.

Unable to stand in the shower, I draw a bath hoping to dull the body ache. I slowly sink into the too-hot water, feet prickling, then slowly adjusting to the temperature. I run my hands under the surface, lengths of spring green, blue, and purple painted nails contrasting with my swollen fingers. A popped blister stings along my right forefinger. I close my eyes and let tiredness hit me. My eyes close and in a moment of relief, I feel a little lighter. This, I can sit with.

This stunning edible art.

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