Foodcation #15: Little Forest
How a quiet Japanese film is helping me joyfully reflect on a year (plus) of cooking for myself
Hi!! I’m back (?) Don’t quote me on that. If you’re still reading (thank you for cooperating with months on end of silence from me - it’s been a busy few months!), keep reading! Today’s newsletter is a nice one.
Everyone’s pandemic looked a little different - I think the same could be said about our at-home culinary journeys. It started with a failed kombucha brewing project for me. Which then led to some more promising sticky buns, panic buying a lot of canned chickpeas anchovies and citrus fruits, and basically powering through the Nothing Fancy cookbook. Oddly, no banana bread in the mix. Still it was all...a lot.
Looking at it now, I realize that while my life has always revolved around food, it revolved around making it and enjoying it with and for other people. But now my roommates were away, my family lived far, and my friends and I could not gather. I think I jumped into quarantine with this subliminal mindset that I would have an avenue to share the food but then when it hit dinner time every night, it was just myself and a giant roast chicken. With time, I learned how to not burn my hand on hot Dutch ovens and not burn out on feeding myself to establish more sustainable covid cooking practices.
And ultimately, I figured out what worked for me. It was mostly routine - big salads, practical, scaled-down dishes, and one-pot meals that I could stretch out for a week with lentils and roasted vegetables. One night a week, I would also take on a small, simple cooking project that struck my curiosity. It was a nostalgic cosmic brownie style snacking cake one week, a jar of preserved lemons the following, olive oil muffins the next. The emotions to describe the majority of my time in quarantine exist on a barometer between silent sorrow-saturated confusion on one end, all the way to uncontrollable anger-anxiety-induced crying sessions on the other. Yet to carve out time a week to do one edible project brought me the joy I needed to carry on.
This very joy brings me today, July of 2021, when I’m alive and well to write these words. Subtle signs of normalcy are blooming; I’m fully vaccinated. I’m able to safely socialize with friends. I’m out of the city visiting family. I can lean a bit more on takeout or outdoor dining if I wanted to. I can go out and live my life unsheltered a bit more but I still spend a good portion of time indoors. When I’m not working or leisurely cooking for joy, I’ve turned to watching video clips from the Japanese film series, Little Forest.
Based on a Japanese manga of the same name, Little Forest follows a young woman living by herself in a small village house in the Japanese countryside. While she spent her formative years at the house with her loving single mom, her mom now is no longer there. but what remains is her spirit and memory through the “little forest” she has created for the daughter and the love for home cooking she instilled. It all unfurls through scenes of picturesque food preparation. She makes numerous dishes, all truly in the name of satisfying her hunger and senses, the way her mom taught her. Each cooking scene captures her cooking process from the mise of ingredients to unveiling the finished product and taste test. Some of my favorites include her homemade Nutella (affectionately called “nutera”) and her small yet sophisticated mini Christmas cake. I haven’t been able to find the full movie to stream online so I rely on video clips on YouTube and truthfully, it’s still very satiating. The girl in the film isn’t cooking for survival nor is she in self-isolation during a global pandemic.
With that said, I find that after a full year and a half of rigorous home kitchen sessions, I can resonate with her calm joy of cooking mostly for herself - what she wants and feels the need to eat. She also eats by the seasons with what’s available to her in the small town she resides; this full belief in the supply chain is miraculously something I too managed to hold onto throughout the pandemic, even when grocery shelves were completely bare.
Naturally there are differences, the obvious being the divide between fiction and reality. While the girl in Little Forest seems to easily fall into a calm grind of cooking in silence, I readily needed the help of a good podcast or folk album.
But I'm coming out of this whole thing a firm believer in home cooking - despite the ruts I’ve encountered, the dread I so often faced looking at a fridge full of food without an ounce of knowledge or desire to make another meal with any of it, the dregs of Greek yogurt I resorted to eating when I just could not. I did not get vaccinated to run away by myself to the middle of nowhere a la Little Forest - but quite the contrary: to finally visit Tokyo for the first time. But watching the clips from this film allows me to look back on this scary time with a faint glimmer of fondness.
read
about my journey exploring a internet food hack
my review of the best can opener ever on Epicurious. Though you might have to wait to order one because well…it’s basically sold out on Amazon.
why you really shouldn’t add anything in your coffee
watch
Little Forest! It’s available through clips on Youtube. There’s also a Korean film adaptation (available on Amazon Prime) that’s great too.
listen
to the Either Side Eaters podcast from Jen Phanomrat and Katie Quinn. I’ve been loving every new episode. Some standouts are the one about Nut Butter and Chili Oil.
do:
drink water.
not drink 4 cups of cold brew four days in a row and expect to feel great. I’m struggling.
have a lovely rest of your holiday weekend!
Talk soon,
Justine