Fast soup, video updates, book updates ...
and important guidance for chapped lips
New here? Hi! Scroll down for the video link and all the way to the bottom for the recipe!
In this missive
A soup that’s fast, pescatarian, veg-friendly, and nourishing
What’s happening with me and YouTube??
What’s happening with Book Three?!?
My lips are so chapped! Three balms that help to fix
With just three recipe videos left to post on YouTube (more on that, next), I’m ignoring all the data and metrics and digital trends and leaning into CLAMS. That’s right: clams. I love them in my spaghetti, I love them with ginger and butter, and I love them in soup.
This particular concoction was inspired by the soft tofu soup I used to order every time I went to Dok Suni in the East Village, a tiny and very cozy restaurant where I fell in love with Korean food in the 1990s. (Dok Suni is long gone, sadly, but chef-owner Jenny Kwak’s food is alive and well at Brooklyn’s Haenyeo.) Dok Suni’s sundubu jigae was served in an earthenware bowl and had strips of clam, squid, and mussels in a mildly spicy broth, with silky pieces of tofu bobbing about. I would eat it by putting a little rice on my spoon, then dunk the spoon into the broth to flood the rice with liquid and collect seafood. Bite by bite I’d work my way to the bottom of the bowl, delighted by the texture of the chewy seafood against the custardy tofu.
My reinterpretation starts with a very simple kombu broth that takes about 20 minutes to make—the exact window you’ll need to get the rice cooker going, scrub your clams and slice some scallions. There’s not much more to it than that. If you don’t want to use clams, double the tofu. If you don’t want that much tofu, use shrimp, thinly sliced beef or pork, or small pieces of a flaky fish like cod.
Scroll to the bottom of this post for the recipe!
What’s happening with me and YouTube??
After 4+ years of posting weekly (!!!) on my YouTube channel, I have decided to take a hiatus. I will write more about this in the next couple of weeks, and plan to share a lot of info about my production expenses and Google ad revenue for the benefit of anyone who is interested in the economics of the platform. The main reason I’m hitting pause—forgive the pun—is because I have less than 100 days to meet my book deadline. 90 days, but who’s counting?! I did an amazing job, as usual, of whittling the amount of time down to the absolute minimum that is required for me to finish this project. I could give you a million excuses for that, and most of them are malarkey. But being in a constant, every-weekly churn of prep, production, post-production, publish, and promote ate up about 20 hours of my time. Shoot days used to be my favorite part of my work, and in the past year or so, that feeling has faded. I love making videos, and that fizzle has been sad for me to go through. Additionally, I watch and give notes on two rounds of every edit. I don’t think you have to be a shrink to know that watching and re-watching your own footage would start to take a toll on the mentals! Whooof.
There are two more videos in post-production after this one, and after that, I will be shifting to shorter-form videos that I’ll publish here. You’ll still get new recipes regularly, and my other posts and writing. Just taking a lil break from the YouTubery of it all.
What’s happening with Book Three?!?
In 90 days, by the love of all celestial beings, I will deliver the manuscript for my next book. I’ve taken a longer pause than a lot of authors do between That Sounds So Good and the next one, which will come out sometime in the first half of 2026. It was October 2021 when TSSG came out, and I didn’t have the capacity to come up with a new recipe for about six months post-publication. I took my sweet time waiting for a feeling of urgency to hit, for an idea to gel, and pitched a few real lackluster concepts to my agent. We both new my heart wasn’t in them. I focused on videos and Substack and percolated.
In the most unlikely and unplanned turn, the shifts I went through during my separation in 2023 and the many months that followed inspired me to write a very different kind of book. There will still be dozens of recipes, but I’m writing a lot more about my relationship to food and cooking and how it buoyed me through the roughest year+ of my life. It’s more personal than anything I’ve ever done before, making the writing that much harder. Writing is already torture. Food, though, is the best—I am so grateful for having this outlet and for the experiences cooking has created for me. That’s really what the book is about. More to come on that front. Pray for me.
My lips are so chapped! Three balms that help to fix
And now for something completely different! Anyone else’s lips dry and burning? Flaking and cracking? Red and rough? I slather my face and body every night, and somehow the lips just can’t get with the program. I have some sort of lip balm in every jacket pocket and tote I grab, but I love some more than the others. Here’s what I’m using the most. Would love to know what you have found that works!