Category: Food

A Fortnight in the Life

personby Gillian Polack
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This week’s post is about my next few days. I’ll skip most of the writing and editing and publishing side, because they’re posts all of their own. One day, you will learn more. Keep reading, because eventually there is coffee.

This weekend I’ll be at Octocon. Online in Ireland. This is the Ireland we don’t see in the news. I feel safe there. In honour of an Irish friend who I (alas) haven’t seen in decades, let me share his cure for hangovers to provide a bridge between the antisemitic country we hear about and the kindness and openness of fandom in Ireland and Northern Ireland: 1 part port to one part brandy. Any quantity. If necessary repeat the dose several hours later.

I’m on two panels and giving a workshop on world building. I do love sharing my worldbuilding research. Each time I teach it a bit differently. This time it’s going to be all about Medieval magic. Not all Medieval magic, but how to incorporate certain aspects of that magic into your perfect novel in a way that makes it feel to the reader that they can find that magic portal and enter your world.

Another thing-of-the-moment is waiting anxiously to see if a kickstarter gets up. I have an essay in the book being kickstarted and I so want it to become published. It’s also related to my research self linking with my writing self. It’s the uni classes I would be giving if I were still in the teaching system in Canberra but, alas, Canberra is still not keen on me teaching and I’ve given up asking and instead written an essay: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/benyehuda/again-at-a-crossroads

What else am I doing? Eating fruit and nuts, because it’s Sukkot. Being worried a bit because ASIO tells us that Jews here are still under threat. Dealing with hate. Dealing with hate has been an everyday thing for 3 years now (the anniversary in the Jewish calendar of October 7 is at the end of Sukkot) and you’ve heard enough about it, so I won’t explore it here.

I’m revising my own thoughts about the world. I do this regularly. I’m an ethnohistorian, I know that people change and culture changes and I need to know how I change. Every bit of my own bias I understand, I can factor into my other work. When I realised that being hated was a bad path to take for self-analysis, I decided to watch old TV to remind myself of where I have been and give myself context to explain how I deal with this interesting new world. I’m watching two shows right now to give myself this context. One is Heroes, which was first shown in Australia after I’d started looking into how we see heroes in story. I began on that trail 45 years ago, so it’s a handy trail to look back from and check for change. When heroes was first release I was in the middle of formulating a tool, which I never took up academically but which is a lot of fun socially. If our TV was seen by aliens or our literature read by aliens, how would they see humans? I looked at gender, age, cultural background, religious background, amount of violence, amount and nature of sex-related stuff, material goods, use of tropes… No big project because no funding for it, alas. I still play with aspects of the idea, however.

The other show is Doctor Who. I saw the original when I was very small, and it’s been part of my viewing life. Every twenty years I watch as much as I can and it shows me how I have travelled to reach my current point. Last time I rewatched was the year before the new series, because our public broadcaster showed much of the surviving Who. Oddly, I could remember the bits that were not there. Later, as other bits became cartoonified and put to the original audio, I discovered a strange phenomenon: I could remember the original and, in one story in particular, it was as if the original walked alongside the new version and they argued with each other.

Now I’m in the 70s with Tom Baker. I was in high school when it was first shown, and it’s a wonderful tool for bringing back lost memories. When I say “Tom Baker” people instantly tell me about the scarf, but what I find is that Baker himself acts as himself and so the Doctor is real and so… it’s closer to who I was as a teen and how I saw myself.

My family never let me become properly Gothic and was not kind in the way they prevented it (which is another story), so some of the Baker episodes show me a path I wanted to travel but could not. I suspect this will appear in my fiction sooner rather than alter, because I have a character at hand who needs to discover something related.

Everything returns to story in my life. Always. This is not a bad thing.

Another thing that is not bad at all is that a friend gave me some of the spice mix used in Yemeni coffee. It fits with the way coffee was made in the region in the 15th century. When time permits, I’ll see if I can find out the relationship between the current spice mix and the history of coffee. I need to get through the next few weeks first, however. I’ve told you the tip of the iceberg, but I do not want the actual iceberg to turn my life into another Titanic accident. This takes careful navigation.

To a Good and Sweet New Year

personby Gillian Polack
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We in one of those times when it’s not easy being Jewish and not always safe, either. And yet, the new Jewish year began on Friday evening. How do Jews get through times like this? Where it’s possible, food helps. This year I[‘m sharing my family’s most made honey cake recipes, in the hopes that the good and sweet year will spread. These recipes create much goodness and also much sweetness. They’re at their best cut into small pieces and enrobed in really good dark chocolate… but they’re never not good.
The recipes are mostly metric, being Australian.
I use the first recipe as a guide and change it considerably. I use real coffee instead of instant coffee and boiling water, for instance. This year I sued grapeseed oil, other years I might use a but oil. For one cake I used blood orange. And I added my homemade candied dekopon peel. For me, each and every eyar is different and I want the incoming year to be good and sweet and enver boring.

GRANDMABLACK’S JEWISH NEW YEAR HONEY CAKE (GILLIAN’S VERSION)

Ingredients:

500 g honey (or a bit less)
1 cup sugar
1 ½ cups plain flour
1 ½ cups SR flour
juice and rind of one orange (a nice big one – but you can replace some of the juice with brandy or other alcohol)
at least two heaped tbs. good, rich cooking chocolate (not too sweet)
1 dessertspoon instant coffee
approx. 1 cup oil (a salad oil is best, but not olive)
3-4 extra large eggs
½ tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. bicarbonate of soda
1 cup boiling water
about a cup of your favourite dried fruits and nuts (chopped)
1 tsp. of cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg and a taste of cloves (NOT 1 tsp. of each)

Method:

Beat eggs, sugar, oil and honey. Add orange rind and juice. Add spices. Sift both flours with soda. Add to liquids. Add chocolate, coffee, vanilla, fruit and nuts. Mix well. Add boiling water.

Pre-heat oven to 500°F. When you put the cake in, reduce heat to 350°F. After and hour, reduce heat again, to 300°F until the cake is done (normally another 15-20 minutes).

Cool on greaseproof paper. Store in an airtight tin, preferably in the fridge. The cake will keep for weeks this way – if you can keep greedy fingers away from it.

HONEY CAKE (THE OTHER GRANDMOTHER’S RECIPE)

Ingredients

1 lb honey
1 ¼ cups plain flour
1 small cup sugar
2 eggs
1 small cup oil or melted butter
1 tsp cocoa
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp cinnamon
a heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method

Melt the honey and sugar over a low flame. When the are cold, add the eggs (which should be well-beaten first – a form of domestic discipline), the oil and the remaining ingredients. Put the bicarbonate of soda in last.

Pour into a well-greased cake tin and bake in a moderate oven for 1 ½ hours.

My Space

personby Gillian Polack
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Last week on Facebook, Yaritji Green asked the history of the space I live in. I answered her post directly, and then I realised some of you might be interested, so I’m copying it here.

“I live on Ngunnawal land*, currently owned by the Federal Government and managed by the ACT Government. I don’t own any land, but I lease the space along with many others. I don’t even own the structure of the building – I am part of a body corporate. I own the possessions in my flat, though, and so that flat is my space, even though it’s on the land of others
It was first taken from the Ngunnawal people by farmers and the occasional bushranger. The family that farmed this particular valley is still in the region and one of their ancestors wrote the first Australian Gothic novel. So this valley has consistently been science fictional since White settlement. Then the government took it, when we Federated and the regional was made into the capital.
This space has layers. The most ancient is the geological with a faultline running alongside my flat. Until quite recently, this was part of the Bogong Trail, for corroboree near Yankee hat in the Brindies**, so that was the most stable layer for humans. I don’t know how long the Bogong Trail was used or enough about other uses of this little valley, but we have clear evidence of it being 900+ years, in some paintings near Yankee Hat. My block of flats is the most recent layer. It was built in the 70s, before self-government in Canberra, and my flat was owned by the builder of the whole complex and then by a young couple and then by me. it still had the 70s carpet and kitchen when I moved in.
This has been my place since 1991. Me and my books.”
I am now remembering… the first thing that comes to mind is an Auntie (I won’t use her name because she’s no longer around, but it’s the same first name as the poor child who was murdered last December) who taught my Israeli dance class the dances of this country. Specifically this country: she was a Ngunnawal elder and these were her tradition. She was willing to teach us women’s business, but young Irwin refused to recuse himself.
“You can teach me anything,” he said.
“You’re male,” Auntie said, “And so you deny everyone the learning.” and so we only learned the dances.
Irwin explained his view to me afterwards. In his world, he had the right to learn everything. Mind you, in his world, also, he was a missionary. Totally lovely, and very very Christian.
I remember three steps, but I do them very badly.
One of the things I’d like to do this year is get to one of the bush tucker workshops at the National Museum. Since I cannot do this without a friend who has a car, I’d love to hear from anyone who’d like to do this with me. I can cook using local foodstuffs, but I only know them as adaptations of European foodways and they’re a lot more than that. I need to re-learn from someone with the right knowledge and that is (among others) a guy who does workshops for the national Museum.
For me, living anywhere requires constant (and respectful) learning. I wish the same applies to those who hate. It’s been bad this week.
*Canberra, Australia, just in case a reminder helps.
**Canberra slang for the Brindabellas, a local mountain range. If you know Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, this is where she grew up. Mt Aggie is named after her aunt Agnes.

Is it Still Monday in California?

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m so late today that I’m (almost) posting on your tomorrow… which was my tomorrow over 15 hours ago. It’s been a busy day and was a busy yesterday and I’m so tired that I want to use colloquialisms. I shall refrain, because Australian colloquialisms can read as rather rude to North Americans.

Yesterday afternoon I finished with my end of the proofs of the forthcoming novel, then I went to a book launch. Then I had an online meeting and we updated each other on antisemitism. There were other things, too, but I forget. I did all this with the eye problems and every minute the world felt funky.

This morning was a grocery delivery and an emergency printout of stuff for a friend (at which point my printer failed) and we have a weather shift (it being spring here) and so my joints reminded me they hate weather. All my joints. Why the little toe aching is more annoying than the back aching is something I cannot work out.

I ought to be celebrating receiving copies of the German translation of one of my favourite short stories. There is an academic comment on my sense if humour, so my sense of humour is officially an academic thing now. In German academia. This is important, because a French translation of another story, a while back, turned all the subtlety into sarcasm and the story was not funny at all.
I’m also giving a workshop for ConSYDeration in two weeks. ConSYDeration is part of the Sydney Fringe Festival and this is my first time even getting to the Fringe. Which means, of course, my next thing is to update my handout for the workshop because I forgot to add my list of publications. It’s not gratuitous advertising this time round – my non-fiction is directly relevant to the workshop.

And all this is why, in a few minutes, I’m going to make a cuppa and watch some William Hartnell Doctor Who for a bit. I have so much to do but my body tells me to be gentle. I might put a bit of cinnamon in my tea. Later I’ll do more of the things.

I have been considering my New year, which is way soon. If anyone wants either or both of my grandmothers’ honey cake recipes here, next week, just say and I will oblige.

Gefilte fish and chicken and being Jewish in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I am currently adding recipes to my Patreon page, and thought that this little piece might be of interest to everyone here.

Growing up as an Orthodox Jew (Modern Orthodox, Australian Orthodox – more interested in learning, community and food than in matters religious, unless we could argue about them – my favourite argument will always be how kangaroo can be seen as potentially kosher) in Australia is a most extraordinary thing. For one thing, it doesn’t matter how many generations your family has been in the country, too many people assume that you are a recent arrival, simply because you are Jewish. Some even try to spot an Israeli accent. In my case, this is very imaginative of them.

The classic case of this was at a New Year’s Eve party in Canberra. I was in a group of people, one of whom had recently taken out citizenship. We were talking about where our folks came from, and when, as one so often does. We were all very open about our origins, religions and background. We also had a lengthy discussion about date of arrival. Of the group, my family was the earliest arrival by at least one generation, and the new citizen’s was the most recent. My family started coming here about 150 years earlier than hers. After a bit (conversations can be very long on New Year’s Eve) we turned to weddings. The new citizen turned to me and asked intently, “What would your parents do if you married an Australian?”

A nasty reminder (well before the present thrum of hate) that Jews are somehow considered different, even in a very tolerant country was when I was nine years old, and was personally accused of killing Christ. At the time I was very bewildered, because I knew who he was and when he lived, and I also knew that I was nine years old. I could not reconcile the contradictions, so I nursed the puzzle until I had antisemitism sorted out sufficiently that I could deal with it. What I asked at the time was “Does this mean I invent time travel?”

What has this to do with cooking? Well, one thing that regular hints of prejudice does is to drive one to reconsider. I have friends who, when discriminated against, or subtly insulted, reject their past and tried to “fit in”. That is a legitimate decision, but has never been a road I have followed. Nor has it been a road my parents followed. What we do when faced with “not belonging” is to strongly reassert our complex cultural identity. That is to say we share it. And the easiest way to convince someone that to be Jewish is still to be human is to feed everyone in sight. After all, everyone eats, even if our religions are a bit different.

If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then a way to a person’s cultural appreciation follows the same route. People around me are forcibly introduced to Judaism. You know the method. It is stark and awful. Eat this chicken soup! Have a kosher chocolate! Try one of my Mum’s famous biscuits, after all, it is Passover next week!

That is the skeleton in the closet, the dread reason for me handing out food to everyone in my vicinity. It’s sort of nice to be thought a human being, and food definitely helps smooth the way. Mind you, the food can end up taking over your life. I no longer feed people to convince them I’m human. I feed people because I’ve fallen in love with feeding people. And the great thing is that many friends return the favour.

That’s the skeleton in the closet and explains why one whole tier of my Patreon contains recipes and food stories. It also explains why I was once a pro blogger. The skeleton under the bed is a different matter. As well as studying history at university, I studied some archaeology, so Mum let me have her old skeleton (not the one inside her, but the one she used before she dropped out of medicine). I called it George and I called it Yorick, depending on which head I was using. A skeleton with two skulls is very useful for understanding mandibular articulation. And, since my bedroom at this time was 5’3” by 7’, the only storage place was under the bed.

To get back to food (which neither George nor Yorick was/were, not having been kosher at any stage in his/their spotted past – the spots were some sort of mould, Mum suggested, but dissuaded me from running tests) my family demonstrates that minor prejudice can lead to the most wonderful, food-based friendships. That’s a good reason for a whole chapter on it in this book. This is the food that led to the friendships which make up the rest of the book. Isn’t there a children’s rhyme that goes something like that?

My father’s mother’s cooking was very Anglo-Australian. Mum says that her favourite desserts were blancmange, jelly, icecream or stewed fruit. Her standard Sunday dinner was soup (mostly “Jewish penicillin” ie chicken soup), a roast of lamb plus three vegetables, salad, with fruit and icecream for dessert. As you can see by the dairy product at the end, she did not keep kosher. She also followed the Anglo at the expense of the Jewish – I was brought up with Friday night dinners of the same menu (sometimes the lamb was replaced by chicken or beef, and the icecream was always replaced by a non-dairy dessert) with the leftovers for Saturday lunch. This was the natural compromise between Dad’s Anglo upbringing and Mum’s strong Continental Jewish tradition.

Mum was in tears when Dad proposed to her and said, magnanimously, that he was prepared to tolerate a kosher kitchen, as long as it was “done properly”. He was very good at keeping the rules once he started, even though he wickedly told people about an atheist friend who “knew he was Jewish because he could not bear to drink a glass of milk after his ham sandwich”.

This post would be lost without recipes. Let me share my family gelfilte fish recipe, and its very important alternate.

 

GEFILTE FISH

I have, alas, been unable to try out or even taste test this recipe. I am also told I’d be a lot nicer as a person if only I had been able to eat gefilte fish when I was young.  How I obtained it was by asking my grandmother. She explained it in detail, went away, made gefilte fish, then updated her explanation.

Ingredients

minced fish (use three different types of white fish – Grandma’s standard varieties are Murray Perch, garfish and mullet – she says to avoid anything pink. My suggestion is that if you get tuna or something then just put frills around the plate holding the pale rose gefilte fish and serve it as the Barbara Cartland variation)

eggs

fine matzah meal (made of ground-up matzo – unleavened bread – a yeast free bread that tastes like very bland dried biscuits, but is brilliant to cook with.)

 

Method

Mix minced fish with eggs and matzah meal and knead until firm. For proportions, what you want is a firm-ish mixture that holds its shape when you knead it. Start with the fish, then add eggs and matzah meal until it is a smooth, heavy paste (a damp, dumpling like consistency). Let stand a while.

Mince again, and mould into balls. Flour hands with fine matzah meal between each shaping.

In a big saucepan, place fish bones, topped by sliced onions and carrots. Add water. Bring to the boil. Add the fish balls, one at a time (use a spoon and be very gentle). Keep the broth on a slow boil until the fish is cooked through. Season to taste.

 

What does a good Aussie Jewish family do at Passover when several loud-voiced members have nasty fish allergies? Grandma makes them gefilte chicken, and everyone prods me under the table and asks “Where do you think Grandma got her three types of chicken from, eh?” My ribs were fragile the first night she served this delicacy, as almost every family member had the same idea and dug me in the ribs to emphasise their pungent wit. Gefilte chicken goes excellently with pickles and a bit of salad.

GEFILTE CHICKEN

Ingredients

take 2 chicken breasts and mince (if you don’t want this to look traditional and white, you can just use chicken mince – but the fat content may make them shrink; if you are using mince, I suggest 400 g and medium sized egg)

2 large eggs

salt

pepper

chicken stock

 

Method

Mix all dry ingredients and let stand a while. If the mixture is at all liquid add fine matzo meal to stiffen it. Make into balls using at least a tbs of mixture at a time (coat your hands with matzo meal to stop the mixture sticking).

Bring chicken stock to the boil, then lower the heat and place balls gently in the broth. Let cook gently, with the saucepan covered. Test to see when cooked (should take around 45 minutes).

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

Regency Comfort

personby Gillian Polack
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This week, we all need a distraction. Too much bad stuff is too close to home for too many of us.

Food is a fine distraction and a bunch of people in my vicinity are talking about Jane Austen and about Bridgerton, sometimes in the same sentence but mostly in quite different conversations. I happen to have some well-tested recipes from events past. I actually have several cookbooks worth of recipes from Jane Austen’s family and from the south of England at precisely the right time, but the ones I’m giving here are tested and are delicious. They are, in fact, from a cookbook I wrote many, many years ago, when I was younger and more charming. They are in Australian English and I’m quite happy to translate if translation is needed. One dish is for summer and one for winter, for obvious reasons.

I hope these dishes improve your week.

Ice-cream

Ingredients:

Twelve ripe apricots
375 g icing sugar
600 ml cream


Method:

Pulp apricots. Blend with icing sugar and cream. Freeze it then mould it. Keep frozen until ready to serve.

 

Moonshine Pudding

Ingredients:

A loaf of thinly sliced bread
Butter
Currants
Glacé cherries
Candied pineapple
Other glacé fruit900 ml cream
6 egg yolks
½ nutmeg (grated)
Sugar

Method:

Layer the bottom of a baking dish with bread and butter. Add a layer of currants and candied fruit. Add another layer of butter, then more candied fruit. Continue until the dish is full.

Mix cream, egg yolks, nutmeg, and sugar. Pour the mixture on the pudding. Bake it in a moderate oven for three quarters of an hour.

And, if things get too bad, have this for breakfast and then go back to sleep:

Windsor Syllabub

Ingredients:

1 bottle of sweet sherry (750 ml)
6 dessert spoons sugar (or thereabouts)
1 ½ teaspoons nutmeg
1 teaspoon of cloves

Whisk

Add 1.200 l milk and 300 ml cream (thick, but not thickened).

Mix well and serve.

Weighty Matters

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Every time I see an article about losing weight, it asserts that one cannot lose weight by exercise alone. And yet the only times in my life when I have lost a significant amount of weight, it was due to exercise.

This wasn’t ever a planned program, just the side effect of a significant increase in exercise. The first couple of times, I lost weight because I was suddenly doing a lot more walking.

That happened when I started college and lived on campus without a car at the University of Texas (the original one, in Austin), which was a large campus. The summer afterwards I also worked at the state capitol and walked to work as well as around campus.

My second year in law school, my financial aid didn’t come through, so I loaded trucks for four hours for UPS every morning before school. I dropped a lot of weight and got into good shape despite the fact that I stopped for donuts for breakfast on the way to work and drank Coke from the machine while I was there. And then often got biscuits and gravy from the cafeteria when I went to school.

(That may sound great, but I also recall I never got enough sleep that year and also had several colds. The exercise was great, but the lifestyle wasn’t.) Continue reading “Weighty Matters”…

Radical Hospitality

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Last weekend I saw a movie that combined science fiction with political activism and food: Earth Seed: A People’s Journey of Radical Hospitality. It was the start of the documentary’s national tour; you can see the schedule here.

The name Earth Seed, of course, comes from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. These books have not only resonated with science fiction readers over the years, but also have become focuses for activist groups. They seem all too relevant, in part because they were written in the 1990s about a future starting in 2024 that isn’t as far removed from our own as we would like it to be.

The People’s Kitchen Collective – an Oakland group that has been providing meals for events and gatherings for many years – decided in 2023 to do and film a pilgrimage up California from Los Angeles to Mendocino that echoes the path taken by Lauren in Parable of the Sower.

Along the way, they meet with various community groups and prepare amazing meals while having deep discussions with the people.

It is a movie that inspires activism and community building and, to use their phrase, radical hospitality. In fact, a great deal of the movie as well as the discussion after the screening focused on what those words truly mean.

The film begins in Los Angeles, particularly in Altadena, where it includes a visit to Octavia Butler’s grave. Many of the places where they filmed were destroyed in the fires earlier this year, which made the screening especially poignant. Continue reading “Radical Hospitality”…

Treading Lightly – Glass

personby Pati Nagle
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Treading Lightly is a blog series on ways to lighten our carbon footprint.

So in 2022, I wrote a Treading Lightly post about cheese. Recently I realized that one of the photos in that post needs an update. It’s this one:

Still grating my own cheese and loving it, but I no longer keep it in plastic. I am working to eliminate as much plastic as possible from my life. Single-use plastic for sure. I recycle as much packaging as possible and I prefer to buy products that aren’t packaged in plastic (or made from plastic).

Regarding this obsolete photo, I have also been ditching things like my massive collection of Tupperware, some of which is pictured here. I did not do this lightly! I spent years and a ton of money building a Tupperware collection that served my every need. I was even a Tupperware sales person for a while. (That didn’t last long; not my scene.)

Recently, with growing awareness about the health problems caused by microplastics, I began to want to minimize my physical contact with plastics. Does Tupperware shed microplastics into the food it contains? Does it shed them into the water that’s used to wash it? Into the food that’s (Ghu forbid) cooked in it? I have my suspicions, and I’m definitely more comfortable storing my food in glass.

Enter my new collection of glass jars. It took a while to move everything out of the Tupperware or the original plastic packaging and into this array of canning jars. I love them! I can see the contents better, and they have this lovely gleaming glass aesthetic going on. Shiny, kinda old-fashioned and homey.

For stuff that I’d been keeping in its original plastic packaging, I discovered that not only could I see it better, the jars are more efficient for storage than the plastic bags. Case in point: brown sugar.

Stored in the “resealable” plastic bag, my brown sugar would always dry out. Even if I cleaned all the sugar out of the seal, and then folded it down and clamped it shut with a binder clip, it dried out. I tried adding a little clay thing that you soak in water, no go. The sugar dried out. As soon as I put it in a glass jar, it stayed moist without any fuss.

Even better, it’s easier to get stuff out of the jars without spilling it than to get it out of plastic packages. That brown sugar, when I tried spooning it out of the plastic bag, would end up all over the counter. With the jar, I spoon it out and rarely lose a grain.

That goes for the cheese, too. Here’s the updated photo:

The cheese looks prettier in this glass! (The cheddar is white cheddar, btw.) The jars are easier to open and close. Measuring from them is a breeze. They fill the shelves more efficiently. And they cost a fraction of what Tupperware costs.

I absolutely love keeping my staples in glass.

Give it a try! At least for the brown sugar – you will love that.