On a Wednesday morning in June, I started to prep the sandwiches that my husband and I would be having for dinner. Our freezer had been besieged by my baguette-buying habit—never want to be without!—and it was time to put one to use. It had thawed overnight, reminding me while I assembled oatmeal and a yogurt parfait in the morning that I’d planned to fill these sandwiches with mushrooms by evening. 

There were four fat portobellos in the fridge from our weekend trip to Costco, and when I opened it up to get them, I noticed that I’d sliced half an onion a few nights earlier before deciding I didn’t want it in my tofu dish. It had been sitting in a glass container, and it seemed fitting that I caramelize the big, thin half-moons for the mushroom event. I heated up my stainless steel pan, added some olive oil, and then the onions with a hearty sprinkle of salt, along with a bit of water to slow down the cooking process. Off they went. 

For the portobellos, I sliced them thin and tore up their thick stems. I considered putting them in a mixing bowl, but instead lined a half sheet pan with parchment and threw them on. They got tossed with a quarter cup of Bachan’s Japanese Barbecue Sauce (dedicated readers know of my reliance on this as a cooking staple) and a glug of olive oil. I had been inspired by a video Hetty Lui McKinnon shared of sticky gochujang mushrooms to marinate them and then roast. While the oven heated, they sat in their sauce and oil, and then in they went, until they had shrunk down and nicely browned.  

They cooked while the onions caramelized. I repeated the adding of water by the quarter cup, using the same one I’d used to pour sauce on the mushrooms, so they got some of that residue. When the water cooked off, more was added—enough to encourage the cooking process at a low temperature but not boil them. 

When the onions were done, I set a small pot of water to boil on the burner I’d been using. I took the lingering three potatoes from the fridge and cut them into shoestring fries, then plopped them in the boiling water for five minutes. During the five minutes, in a large mixing bowl, I made the slurry of starch, olive oil, and spices that I always make for my perfect oven fries. With a spider strainer, I took the fries from the boiling water and put them into the mixing bowl, making sure a bit of the water came along with them—it helps the spices stick. I set them aside to bake later, but because I’d kept the water boiling, I tossed in a few eggs for seven minutes. I like a jammy egg with lunch and I can also give them to the dog. 

At 10:20 a.m., I was done; I’d started at around 8:40 a.m. An hour and forty minutes of preparation for a couple of freaking sandwiches, a batch of fries ready for the oven, and some hard-boiled eggs… 

This was notable to me because I’d stopped doing things like this since I started writing my next book (I began writing in January 2024; it’ll be out in April 2026). I’d accepted some convenience foods into my life, like flour tortillas from the store and frozen vegetable dumplings. Pre-2024 me rolled out the tortillas herself and assembled the dumplings from scratch, starting with the wrappers. My book is about the kitchen, about cooking, about paying close attention to food and appetite and the ways in which they’ve shaped and motivated my life. In order to write that, I had to step back from it a bit.

But that time away from making everything from scratch clarified the intensity of the labor that went into this sandwich. I had to be alert to the onions, checking on the mushrooms, chopping the potatoes, and while they weren’t in need of me, find something else to tend to nearby: restock the fridge with salad dressing, take note of what vegetables we had to eat before the week would be up, realize that we didn’t have enough arugula to make it to the farmers’ market, so my husband would have to figure out a different lunch than usual. 

As I’ve written what feels like a million times before, there is no escape from this labor: Someone will have to know about the half an onion already sliced, the arugula running low, the salad dressing jars emptied. It’s a knowledge and a labor that I respect, not just because I do it, but because there are so many others who do it without pontificating about it—indeed, who just have to do it. It is embodied knowledge, cultural practice. Yet, as Keja L. Valens writes in Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence, the idea of “women’s bodies as living repositories of a natural and traditional knowledge” is a stereotype, and a destructive one at that. This intellectual dance of trying to figure out whether knowing how to cook is damning or invigorating or both, always, is the work. How to make cooking neither trap nor transcendence; how not to absorb other people’s perceptions of a woman who willingly cooks; how to stay sane when one has to work and cook meals.

There’s a piece of writing I’ve mentioned before, a piece I teach because it’s seminal and because I find it very fun to read: Susan Leonardi’s “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie” from 1989 (I’ll drop a PDF after the paywall). She writes of the significance of embedded discourse in recipes that can become lost in a search for a more efficient approach to telling others how to cook. “Would the tensions academic women face between the domestic and the professional make it more or less difficult for them to extend credibility toward a writer who begins with a recipe?” she asks, while doing just that.

For me, in my work, not writing recipes has cost me money—a lot of it, actually. I still do want to talk through the choreography of the kitchen, the work and satisfaction of it, the embodied knowledge and embedded discourse, the way I do things how my mom does them because my grandma did them that way, and the ways in which I adopted movements or habits from people on television. Salt the pasta water like the sea, I think, because a predator taught me. 

These things are beyond the scope of the sandwich preparations; they’re the stuff of the book, the one whose final manuscript I just turned in to my editor. The mushroom sandwiches with caramelized onions, with the addition of arugula and blue cheese, came out great: rich and beautifully balanced. (I hope to say the same of the manuscript.) There were leftover mushrooms, too, that offered new life to future dishes. Indeed, they came out so well that I might slice the pound of cremini mushrooms and do them up just the same. This time, I won’t caramelize onions at the same time. I’ll put the mushrooms in the oven, set a timer, and go do something else.