It’s always rice and eggs

The water was at our backs, but everything still looked blue.

It was a Saturday, and the sky above the lake was shockingly clear. The breeze hurried the fluffy clouds along like an invisible, impatient dog walker trying to jostle a pack of Pomeranians past the more interesting signposts and fence posts: a brief stall, then a fluid push forward.

Usually, all that blue would have felt like a gift. That day, walking home from a particularly sad documentary interview, I wasn’t sure it was helping.

Outside of writing this newsletter, I work on radio documentaries with my partner, Stephen. They are creative projects with the sneaky ability to hollow you out sometimes, especially when the story requires you to watch someone move through a series of the hardest days of their life. Not every documentary I’ve worked on has gone that way. This one has.

I carried my messy notes as we walked slowly. Stephen carried a neatly packed bag lined with recorders, headphones and batteries. We were quiet, as we typically are after interviews that heavy, letting our thoughts jostle and cure until we reached a coffee shop — always a coffee shop — where we could log the tape and our first responses to it.

That was when I spotted the Little Free Library.

It stood outside a brick six-flat, also fittingly painted blue, and decorated with a few stickers: “Protect Native Plants,” a rocket ship from a regional space camp, several iridescent birds. Inside, wedged among some children’s CDs—the kind I imagine hip parents buy, with sock monkeys and mandolins on the covers—a book about angel investing and a sweet, self-published chapbook of nature poems, was a copy of “The Secret Garden.”

Eerily, I had made a note only a few days earlier to see whether the real library had it.

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As we dug through the shelves, one of the building’s residents emerged from the front door with the stride of a woman on a mission. She wore no-nonsense sneakers with pink swooshes and carried two FedEx boxes.

“That is very good!” she called as she breezed past.

I couldn’t tell whether she meant the jazz CD Stephen was holding or “The Secret Garden,” but I took it as permission nonetheless and slipped the book into my purse. I’ll return it to another Little Free Library when I’m finished.

At home, I put it on my bedside table, pausing to start the rice cooker on my way. 

I could say that lately I’ve been regarding the things I find nourishing with renewed appreciation. But that sounds more composed than I actually feel. What I really mean is that, in my downtime, I’ve been steeping myself in things I already know will bring me comfort.

This morning, I actually squealed when the library emailed to say my hold on “The Wind in the Willows”—a book I first read in sixth grade—was ready for pickup.

And, more nights than not lately, I’ve been making rice and eggs.

The bowl first entered my regular rotation in 2023, during the great feta-fried-egg boom, though I suspect its staying power has less to do with TikTok than with the state I was in when it found me. I was badly burned out: singed and shaky, waking so often with heart palpitations, sweaty palms and a vague sense of catastrophe that I became intimately acquainted with the way my apartment looked at 3 a.m. Every familiar object — the chair, the laundry basket, the glass of water beside the bed — seemed to acquire a slightly accusatory moonlit outline.

Getting better took a while. The thing that helped most was finding my own secret garden, a nearby bird sanctuary that crags out over Lake Michigan. Each day, I made the three-mile round trip to inspect the warblers, chipmunks and generally mysterious rustlings of the underbrush.

On my recent rereading of “The Secret Garden,” I was delighted by the moment when Mary, initially pale and peevish and uninterested in her breakfast, begins wandering the grounds with a jump rope in hand. The exercise and fresh air work their plain Victorian magic; soon she is ravenous for the porridge waiting at Misselthwaite Manor.

I understood completely. I would come home from the sanctuary hungry and make rice and eggs—if not that evening, then the following morning. Millennial porridge.

It’s funny, my mother used to look at me with an expression that was neither mocking nor exasperated, merely seasoned, and say, “Baby, not everything needs to be a production.”

This applied to rearranging my childhood bedroom furniture after reading about feng shui in a magazine, redoing my makeup when we were already late and, eventually, cooking. Once I learned what a roux was, I wanted every meal to have one. There was a period when dinner seemed to require a mother sauce, three pans and a 45-minute drive to the crunchy health-food store for microgreens that wilted almost immediately.

My mother, an excellent cook, understood repetition better. For years, I would come home from figure-skating practice bruised from falling, exhausted from trying not to fall and tender from the ambient heartache of being a teenager. She would make bowties in a light Parmesan sauce with peas, ham and an indecent amount of black pepper.

Surely she fed me other things. But when I remember that stretch of my life, I remember that bowl arriving again and again. What I failed to appreciate then was that familiarity was part of the offering. Having something good to return to is not a failure of imagination. Traversing the same landscape does not make it less beautiful.

My rice and eggs began with a feta-fried egg over steamed white rice. The rest accumulated slowly and, for the most part, logically: lemon zest for brightness, bacon for savory crunch, avocado for cool richness. Scallions and soy sauce arrived because I add them to almost everything, occasionally without proper cause. Red pepper flakes and everything bagel seasoning cover the remaining territory — heat, funk, nuttiness, crunch — in a few economical shakes.

At some point, the bowl was finished.

Naturally, I continued to interfere with it.

I swiped chili aioli over the top. I added enough hot sauce to drown out the lemon. I became overly generous with the bacon and avocado. I stirred miso butter into the rice, which was delicious but made the entire meal feel as though it had changed its name and moved to another neighborhood.

None of these were bad ideas. They simply were not my bowl.

There is a popular idea that good cooking is a matter of building flavor, and often it is. But it is also the quieter skill of noticing when the building is complete and putting down the hammer.

In my perfect version, the yolk breaks over the hot rice and mingles immediately with the lemon zest, becoming a kind of lazy hollandaise. The soy sauce deepens it; the bacon crackles; the avocado cools everything down. It costs only a few dollars a bowl, even with the avocado behaving like an avocado, but I feel rich when I eat it: nourished, complete and relieved that dinner did not need to become a production before it could take care of me.

Here is exactly how I make it.

This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

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