Let's Get Lost

5 time zones in 10 days and Carnitas Taquitos

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:03:13 GMT

Welcome to Let’s Get Lost! I’m Rebecca, a recipe developer, food photographer, passionate people watcher, and chaser of new experiences.

You might know me from my recipe websites, Of Batter and Dough and A Little and A Lot. If this is your first issue - WELCOME!

My husband and I are nomads without a home base but with many modes of transportation, namely an RV, a motorcycle, and a sailboat. I write recipes and stories for curious people who believe experiences are more important than things and who want more adventure.

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

Hello everyone!

After spending most of April in Europe, I flew from Amsterdam to San Diego last Thursday night. On Saturday, we packed up the RV and drove to Phoenix where we met friends for dinner that we hadn’t seen in a decade. On Sunday we drove to Santa Fe and as you’re reading this, we are on our way to Michigan.

So many time zones!

I have much to share with you about Europe, Phoenix, and Santa Fe what it means to manage your work and life when you’re skipping across time zones like jet lag is just a personality trait.

But all of that will have to wait until next week. This week, nearly all my time and energy was devoted to a project I’ve been dreaming about for a while… The Food Writers Business Lab.

I know most of you aren’t food writers. But some of you are! If you’re a food writer, don’t miss the announcement about this exciting resource at the bottom of this email.

For the rest of us, I have some new recipes to share with you!

This week’s menu

Crispy Carnitas Taquitos, Low Alcohol Margaritas, and Hummingbird Cupcakes

Crispy Carnitas Taquitos with Roasted Pineapple Salsa

Before we sold our house and moved into an RV to become full time nomads, my husband and I lived in Colorado. Our two daughters and our extended family still live there, so we make a point to head back to our home state as often as possible.

We generally park ourselves in the small mountain town of Lyons, which is only about 20 minutes from the larger town of Boulder. This location choice is based on several factors, but I’d be lying if I said that one of our favorite Mexican food restaurants doesn’t have something to do with it.

The Rio Grande was founded in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1986. Today, they have 5 locations and one of them is in Boulder. It’s kind of a Colorado icon. 🙂

So, look. I feel that I need to tell you that the primary draw (for us and maybe everyone else) is the Rio’s margaritas. They are delightfully tart, not overly sweet, and potent. We love them. But we also really love the food, I swear!

The last time we were there, I ordered carnitas taquitos with pineapple salsa from their seasonal menu and decided on the spot to go home and figure out how to make them.

This recipe is the result.

Just like the taquitos I ordered in the restaurant, these hit that perfect balance of crispy, creamy, and cheesy. The filling is made from smashed black beans, crispy carnitas, cheese, and green chilies, a combination you honestly can’t go wrong with.

But, friends, the roasted pineapple salsa is the star of this show. I could eat it by the spoonful (and maybe have). It’s gorgeously bright, slightly sweet, a little bit spicy, and transforms these taquitos from really good to something you can’t stop eating.

At least, that’s our experience. I hope you feel the same way!

Carnitas Taquitos

Low Alcohol Margaritas

As you can tell, we love a good margarita around here but have officially reached the age where too much tequila is NEVER worth it, so when we make margaritas at home, this is often how we make them.

Low Alcohol Margaritas

Hummingbird Cupcakes with Coconut Cream Cheese Buttercream

Hummingbird Cake was a relatively recent discovery for me when I created this recipe.

According to the internet, the cake originated in Jamaica and is named after the island’s national bird - the hummingbird. (Incidentally, in Jamaica the Hummingbird is also sometimes called the Doctor Bird. Hence, this cake is also sometimes called the Doctor Bird Cake.)

In the late 1960’s, the Jamaica Tourist Board included a recipe for Hummingbird Cake in a slew of media kits sent out to various cities in the USA. The cake caught on, especially in the South, where it won a favorite cake award at the Kentucky State Fair.

In 1990 it was selected as Southern Living’s favorite recipe and noted as the most requested recipe in the magazine’s history.

Hummingbird Cake is typically baked as a three-layer cake that’s flavored with bananas, pineapple, pecans, and cinnamon or allspice, and covered in cream cheese buttercream.

I wanted to recreate the cake in cupcake form, but without the pecans and with a touch of coconut. This recipe is the result.

Hummingbird Cupcakes

Announcing The Food Writers Business Lab!

This idea been percolating in my mind for a while and I am astonished and nervous and excited to see it actually come to life.

The Food Writers Business Lab is an online learning hub created specifically for food writers who want practical, affordable support for growing their businesses and expanding their reach.

This collaboration between Mastermind for Food Writers and Write Up offers classes and workshops for food writers, taught by food writers. Because who understands this expansive, ever-changing industry better than the talented, hard-working professionals who built it?

Through a mix of free introductory classes and in-depth paid workshops, The Food Writers Business Lab provides content-rich, highly actionable education designed to help participants immediately apply what they learn to their own work.

Upcoming classes and workshops include…

SEO: Build a Bridge From Your Work To Your Readers
Creative Recipe Writing: How to Write Recipes with Voice, Humor, and Story
Creating a Values-Led Brand
The Visual Language of Food Photography

Here’s where to find out more

The Food Writers Business Lab

Earlier this week I kicked off the first class in the Food Writers Business Lab with a free Introduction to SEO for Food Writers. The class was recorded and is available for anyone to watch:

And an article I wrote on the same subject…

Mastermind for Food Writers

An Introduction to SEO for Food Writers

If the idea of SEO makes you want to run the other way, I understand…

3 days ago · 6 likes · Rebecca Blackwell

This newsletter would not exist if not for the members of The Lost Supper Club, who show their support with a paid subscription thus ensuring that the vast majority of readers can keep reading this newsletter for free. As a thank you, I try to provide those paid subscribers with some cool stuff, including three free cookbooks!

A paid subscription is just $35 a year. Find out more about becoming a member of the Lost Supper Club.

❤️ Did you know that if you hit the heart or recycle symbol at the top or bottom of this post, it makes it easier for other people to find this newsletter?

Low Alcohol Margaritas

Rebecca Blackwell — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:13:40 GMT

Photo by Brian Jones on Unsplash

If you live in Colorado, there’s a good chance you’ve been to The Rio Grand Mexican Restaurant. (If you live in Colorado and you’ve never been, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life.)

It’s one of our favorite restaurants largely because of their margaritas. Much of the time, restaurant margaritas tased like sugary limeaid with some tequila in it. I feel the same way about most margarita mixes. They are just too sweet.

The margaritas at the Rio are tart, strong, and not too sweet, which is just the way we like them. And now you can buy their margarita mix. The catch is that you have to actually go to the restaurant to buy it. Which is great news if you live in Colorado and terrible news if you don’t.

And also we love a good margarita around here but have officially reached the age where too much tequila is NEVER worth it, so when we make margaritas at home, this is how we make them.

Recipe Notes:

I suggest an equal amount of real tequila and zero proof and usually use Ritual Zero Proof Tequila. But, how much you add of each is up to you. Ritual tequila isn’t bad but lacks the bite of the real stuff. What we’ve learned is that a splash of real tequila in with the zero proof stuff is enough to compensate.
I learned a few years ago that the quality of tequila really does matter both to the taste of your margarita and how it makes you feel. I don’t know the science here, but it’s my personal experience that low quality alcohol is guaranteed to make me feel like shit the next day where the higher-shelf stuff (as long as I take it easy!) comes with fewer adverse effects.
Like the tequila, it’s up to you how much orange liquor and orange juice you use. I like 1 ounce of the real stuff and 2 ounces of OJ, but play around with this ratio to find what tastes good to you. For a stronger orange flavor use a tablespoon or so of frozen orange juice concentrate.
If you have a favorite margarita mix, you can use that in place of the Rose’s Lime Juice. Another great option is fresh lime juice with a few dashes of simple syrup.
I got this Yeti Cocktail Shaker last year after we bought a sailboat. Because obviously, if you have a sailboat, you must also have the ability to make cocktails on the boat. I LOVE it and have since bought a second one for the RV (our actual home).

Serving Suggestions

For those of us who want some food with our booze (even if there’s not a lot of booze in our cocktail), here are a few meals that are just begging to be served with a cold, crisp margarita.

Mexican Adobo Chicken (Adobo de Pollo) is chicken cooked in smoky, vinegar-based red chili sauce. This one-pot dish is pure comfort food that's super easy to make.
These Crispy Corn Tortilla Quesadillas are super quick and easy to prepare. Each quesadilla only takes about 5 minutes to make. And, they are the kind of lunch or dinner that I always have the ingredients for.
Creamy black beans, buttery potatoes, and plenty of melted cheese tucked into a crispy flour tortilla shell and served with sour cream salsa verde sauce. These crispy black bean tacos are quick and inexpensive to make but will fill you with happiness from head to toe. That, my friends, is what I call a good deal.

Welcome to Let’s Get Lost! I’m Rebecca, a recipe developer, food photographer, passionate people watcher, and chaser of new experiences. You might know me from my recipe websites, Of Batter and Dough and A Little and A Lot.

Welcome to small town, USA

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:01:35 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

This issue is a reheat

If you’ve ever listened to the podcast The Sporkful, you know that when they re-release an episode, they call it a “Reheat”. I love this and am stealing it. :-)

I’ll be on vacation in Europe through must of April and so am re-publishing a few of the most popular past issues while I’m away.

This issue was originally published in June of 2024. It contains a lot of my favorite recipes, ones you may have missed if you subscribed at some point after then. I hope you enjoy!

From the local saloon to the grocery store, this is Small Town, USA

We’ve spent the past two weeks in Reed Point, Montana, a quirky small town with a population of 96. The heart of the town is the Waterhole Saloon, where you can show up on any night of the week for a drink and a burger, and plenty of local color.

One of the things that drew us to RV life is the promise of experiencing what it’s like to live in different parts of the country. This is easier said than done because while we actually do live in every new location (eat, sleep, work, and all the necessary tasks that come with normal life), we are still visitors.

So, the Waterhole Saloon is exactly the kind of place we love to find in small towns because it offers an authentic experience of the local culture. We sit ourselves at the bar and try to gather a sense of what it means to belong in this little corner of the world.

We spent 4 evenings at The Waterhole Saloon during our two weeks in Reed Point and my sense of the town is this: The only rules here are the unwritten ones that, when abided by, will grant you access to Mayberry-like small town hospitality and when crossed, will get you run out of town faster than a speeding bullet (which you might have to be).

Here’s the other thing about Reed Point: We have been to small towns that are the kind of places you get stuck in. The feeling is that the people living there are not there because they want to be. They are there because they haven’t been able to figure out how to get out. That’s not Reed Point.

The people in Reed Point live here because they choose to - many of them moved here from elsewhere because they fell in love with the place - and you can feel that from the moment you step foot inside this clean, cared for small town.

The other place that never fails to provide a taste of local color is the grocery store. Even in touristy locations, grocery stores are filled with local people just living their lives. From the employees who work there to the neighbors who shop there, local grocery stores are an immersion into the energy of a town.

Some of them make me want to settle in and get to know the place and others make me anxious to leave. Both experiences are insightful in their own way.

I have also come across some of the most, shall we say, unique people in grocery stores… such as the grown man happily pushing his cart around the grocery store while wearing a Superman cape, and the man in a full Spiderman costume perched atop the grocery store sign as I turned into the parking lot. And no, it wasn’t Halloween.

Or the checker who gave me an uninterrupted NPR-style monologue of current events while scanning my groceries, and the checker who held up the line for several minutes so he could marvel at a package of mushrooms in my cart and finally exclaiming, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a new kind of mushroom around here.”

Or the somewhat embarrassing experience of the checker calling her coworkers over to gawk at “the biggest order they’ve every seen” after ringing up my $300 worth of groceries.

Also, the items on the shelves of a store is a window into the town. There’s a store in Crystal Beach, Texas called The Big Store that is not very big in size but has a tiny selection of literally everything. I shopped at a grocery store in Wisconsin with three full isles devoted to frozen pizza and a store in South Dakota with an impressively large meat selection and a produce section not much bigger than my refrigerator. I shopped at a store in Oregon with an ice cream counter and nearly every single person shopping there was pushing their cart with one hand and holding an ice cream cone with the other.

I have also shopped in stores where the end caps are filled with locally made jam and jelly rather than big brands who paid the highest stocking fee. And I’ve stuffed my refrigerator and freezer with meat and produce from local farm stands sold by people who know what real food is.

Over the past 4 years, Steve and I have had many conversations that go something like this, “We would have never discovered this place if we didn’t live in an RV.” And that, more than anything, describes why we do it.

Friends from Louisiana that we met in Wisconsin and who visited us in Montana

The beautiful happy people sitting on my living room sofa in the photo above are Jack and Marsha. They are from Louisiana, but we met them two years ago in Wisconsin.

They were two campsites down from us and in between them and us was a little girl, Sophie, camping with her aunt and uncle. Sophie is going to grow up to be the kind of person who is friends with everyone in the entire world.

From the moment we pulled into our campsite, Sophie was a part of our lives and before I knew it I was taking her and her friend out kayaking, sitting around the campfire with her aunt and uncle, and accepting fresh vegetables and homemade wine from her mother’s garden.

One morning, I heard a knock on our door and opened it to find Jack and Marsha, who had, of course, also met Sophie. Marsha (who is basically the exact same person as Sophie) makes pot holders while her and Jack travel around the country (“making pot holders has saved our marriage” - her words, not mine 😂). After introducing themselves and explaining that Sophie told them all about us, she gifted me a couple of pot holders and just like that, they became lifelong friends.

We enjoyed getting to know them so much that we visited them the next year in their home town in Louisiana. And, upon discovering that our campground in Reed Point was on the way to their summer destination in Alaska, they parked themselves next to us for two nights and it was such a treat to have them as neighbors.

In the morning, I looked out my kitchen window to see a “good morning” sign hung in their window and now that sign is on permanent display in my kitchen. Also, Marsha is a photographer with a photographer’s eye and some of the photos above are stolen from her. ❤️

Poblano corn chowder

The Colorado town that I grew up and that we raised our children in is surrounded by farmland. In the summer months, visits to local farmers markets, with their overflowing baskets of fresh picked produce, were an exercise in restraint.

I wanted to take home armfuls (and sometimes did) of everything there. But, two of the things I looked forward to the most were the sweet corn and fresh chilies. In late summer, barrels of roasting chilies would blanket the entire town with a smell that I will forever associate with late summer.

All that to say, this chowder is the perfect thing to make when you have access to fresh summer corn and peppers. But, it’s also delicious with frozen corn and caned green chilies, so there’s absolutely no reason to deprive yourself.

6 large Poblano peppers - roasted, peeled, seeded and coarsely chopped (About 1 1/2 cups) *If you can’t find poblano peppers, or don’t want to bother roasting, peeling, and chopping them, use canned chopped green chilies instead.
1 pound thick cut bacon - cut into bite size pieces that are about 1-inch long
2 tablespoons butter (I used salted butter)
1 large onion - peeled and diced
2 red bell peppers - stem and seeds removed and diced
6 cloves garlic - peeled and diced
1 - 3 teaspoons chili powder or Aleppo pepper (*to taste, depending on how spicy you want your chowder to be)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
6 cups chicken broth or vegetable broth (I used Better Than Bouillon Vegetable Base mixed with water)
1 1/2 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes - scrubbed, peeled, and cut into 1 or 2-inch cubes
8 ounces cream cheese, cut into chunks
12-ounces corn kernels (1 1/2 - 2 cups) - freshly cut from the cob or frozen
2 cups (about 8 ounces) shredded smoked Gouda cheese (good alternatives: Provolone, Monterey Jack, Fontina, and Muenster).
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Roast the poblanos: Place peppers on a rimmed aluminum foil-lined baking sheet. Set a rack in your oven so that it’s about 8-inches away from the broiler and heat the broiler to high. Place the peppers in the oven and broil until they are are almost entirely black, approximately 8-10 minutes. Use metal tongs to turn the peppers over and cook until they are blackened on the other side. Remove the pan from the oven and cover with another sheet of aluminum foil or another rimmed baking sheet. Let sit for 10-15 minutes then peel the peppers and and remove the stem and seeds. Chop and set aside.
Add about a tablespoon of oil to a dutch oven or large stock pot and set it over medium heat. Add the pieces of bacon and cook, stirring frequently, until crispy. Use a slotted spoon to remove the bacon from the pan to a paper towel lined plate. Pour the bacon fat into a bowl.
Add 4 tablespoons of the bacon fat back to the stock pot and add the butter. Add the chopped onion and bell pepper and set the pan over medium heat. Cook stirring frequently, until the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes. Add the chopped garlic, chili powder, cumin, and 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and ground black pepper. Cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute more.
Add the flour all at once and cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Very slowly, pour in the chicken or vegetable broth, stirring constantly as you add it to prevent lumps from forming. Add the potatoes and bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook at a gentle simmer until the potatoes are tender.
Add the cream cheese and stir until it’s melted into the soup. Add the peppers (or green chilies) and the corn and bring back to a simmer. Add the cheese in small handfuls, stirring until it’s melted before adding more.
Stir in half of the bacon. Taste and season with salt and ground black pepper.
Serve in bowls, garnished with the rest of the crispy bacon.

Coconut Pineapple Rice Pudding

My three favorite ways to use up leftover rice are Costa Rican beans and rice, Blackstone fried rice, and THIS coconut rice pudding. In fact, whenever I make rice, I almost always make extra just so I’ll have some leftover for one, or all three, of these dishes.

This recipe calls for 2 cups cooked white rice. I usually use Jasmine rice, but any medium or long grain rice will do.

If you want to cook the rice fresh just for this pudding, rinse 3/4 cup medium or long grain rice in water until the water runs clear. Add the rice to a saucepan along with 1 1/4 cups of water and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat. Cover the pan, reduce the temperature to low, and let the rice cook for 15 minutes, or until all the water has been absorbed. Spread the rice out onto a plate to let it cool and then proceed with the recipe.

A quick note about coconut milk: In most supermarkets, you'll find both canned coconut milk and cartons of refrigerated coconut milk. The main difference between the two is how much water the coconut milk contains. Cartons of refrigerated coconut milk are much more diluted than what you'll find in the can.

In this recipe it's important to use full fat coconut milk that comes in a can. Typically, you'll find canned coconut milk in the Asian foods section of your supermarket. You can also order coconut milk online.

3 tablespoons honey
16 ounces fresh pineapple, cut into 1/2-inch chunks (about 3 cups)
3/4 teaspoon salt, divided
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut
14 ounces full-fat coconut milk from a can
2 tablespoons white granulated sugar
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
2 cups cooked rice that’s been allowed to cool completely (this is a great way to use up leftover rice)

Add the honey to a non-stick skillet and cook without stirring for 2 minutes. It will bubble and start to smell a bit like caramel. Add the pineapple, 3/4 cup water and about 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Bring to a simmer, cover, reduce the heat to medium low, and cook, stirring every once in a while, until the fruit is very tender and the moisture has evaporated. This will take about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, toast the coconut until about half of it is golden brown. Stir in the coconut milk, sugar, vanilla, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook, stirring frequently, until slightly thickened - about 5 minutes.
Remove 1/2 cup of the coconut mixture to a measuring cup with a spout and set aside. Add the rice and 1 cup of water. Cook, stirring frequently, until the liquid is absorbed and the rice is creamy. This will take about 15 minutes.
Allow the rice pudding to cool in the pan for 10 - 15 minutes. Serve warm in bowls drizzled with the reserved coconut mixture and topped with the pineapple.

Pepper jack potatoes

In the last issue, I wrote about one of my most treasured gifts - a recipe book of my Grandma’s favorite recipes. In that issue, I shared her recipe for Denver Chocolate Cake. (And if you haven’t made it yet, what are you even doing with your summer?)

In this week’s issue, I’m sharing her recipe for pepper jack potatoes.

I’ve never met a potato recipe I didn’t love and these are covered in cheese, so there was never any possibility this wasn’t going to be one of my favorite recipes. These make a delicious side dish for any kind of roasted or grilled meat or, do as we did and use them as a base for vegan taco meat, salsa, and some fresh tomatoes.

Here’s what you need:

Potatoes - peeled and cut into 1/2-inch wedges (We like Yukon gold potatoes)
1 yellow onion, cut in half and sliced crosswise into very thin slices
Butter - about 1/3 of a cup per 6 medium potatoes, melted
Chili powder, paprika, cumin, and salt
Grated pepper jack (or any kind of grated cheese); 2-3 cups for a 9x13 pan of potatoes

Heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Add the potato wedges and sliced onion into a 9x13 rectangle baking dish (I love my Caraway non-stick baking pan for these potatoes because the non-stick surface really does keep everything from sticking).

Pour the melted butter over the potatoes and onions and stir everything around so the vegetables are coated in butter. Sprinkle with spices and salt and top with half the cheese.

Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake until the potatoes are tender, about 40 minutes.

Remove the foil from the pan and sprinkle with the rest of the cheese. Put the pan back in the oven and cook until the cheese is melted and bubbly, about 5 minutes longer.

Homemade muffin mix

This recipe for homemade muffin mix is adapted from a recipe in Bravetart by Stella Parks. She uses virgin coconut oil in her muffin mix, a genius trick because it’s nonperishable so you can stock your pantry with a bag of this muffin mix where it will keep for many months.

As opposed to refined coconut oil which is liquid at room temperature, virgin coconut oil is solid at room temperature. To measure it, pack it into a measuring cup with the back of a spoon.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup sugar: white granulated sugar, brown sugar, or a combination of the two
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt (or 1/2 teaspoon table salt)
1/8 - 1/2 teaspoon spices: nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, or cloves (this is optional; use as much or as little as you like)
3/4 cup virgin coconut oil

Add all the ingredients to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and mix on low speed for a couple of minutes until the coconut oil completely disappears into the dry ingredients. Store in a zip-top bag or other air tight container at room temperature (do not refrigerate). The mix will keep up until the sell-by date on your container of coconut oil.

This mix makes enough to bake 12 muffins.

How to use this mix to make muffins:

Add one recipe muffin mix to a mixing bowl and add 1/2 cup milk (any kind, including buttermilk and any non-dairy milk), 2 large eggs, and 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (or 2 teaspoons vanilla extract and 1 teaspoon almond extract). Use a wooden spoon or rubber spatula to stir until blended.

Divide the batter among 12 paper lined baking cups and bake at 350 degrees for 18 - 22 minutes.

Add ins: Gently fold in about 2 cups of fresh or frozen berries or peeled and diced apples, peaches, or pears. To make chocolate chip muffins, add about 1 cup regular size or mini chocolate chips. You can also add a handful of nuts or shredded coconut. To make zucchini muffins, press as much water as you can from 3 cups shredded zucchini (I usually twist it in a clean kitchen towel) and fold that into the batter.

If you like crumb topped or streusel topped muffins:

Top muffins with the oatmeal streusel in this recipe for Blackberry Muffins with Oatmeal Streusel
Top muffins with the butter crumb topping in this recipe for Raspberry Muffins

My 10 Favorite Cookbooks (as of today)

Someone asked me recently to share a list of my favorite cookbooks and I’m not sure a more challenging question has ever been asked of me. 😂

It is difficult for me to express how much I love cookbooks. Before we moved into an RV I had stacks and shelves of them in every single room of the house except the bathrooms and the kids’ rooms.

When we decided to move into an RV, we spent months getting rid of almost all of our stuff and making really hard decisions about what we would bring with us. Out of all the things we sorted through, deciding what cookbooks to bring with me was probably the most difficult.

Steve would argue that we have too many cookbooks in our tiny home on wheels. I would counter that in comparison to how many I want to have with us, I should be awarded a medal for Herculean self restraint.

So, to answer my friend about my favorites, I looked to the ones I choose to cart around with us. Every time we move to a new location I have to pack them all away and then unpack them again and this never feels like a burden. I actually kind of love it. I feel inspired just by holding them and setting them on the shelf. Like somehow all the delicious ideas inside might be absorbed just by having them near me.

For context, before writing this, I counted how many I actually have with us - 48. Plus a growing number on kindle, which is not my favorite format, but I’m learning to live with it. Out of those 48, here are my current top 10:

Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (this is a two volume set, but I’m counting it as one just because I can).
How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi (although it’s a true tossup between this and my other favorite Ottolenghi book, Flavor)
Baking With Dori by Dori Greenspan
Bravetart by Stella Parks
Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen by Rick Bayless
Bake Wise by Shirley O. Corriher
Simply Julia by Julia Turshen
Bouchon by Thomas Keller

I also want to mention a book called The Flavor Matrix which I rely on heavily during recipe development, especially in the idea stage. The book breaks down the flavor compounds of specific ingredients and groups them together in charts that let you discover unexpected combinations.

For example, it might sound surprising, but strawberries and mushrooms have a lot of the same flavor compounds. Learning this, I created this recipe for Mushroom and Noodle Stir Fry with Strawberries. The combination is not something I would have expected to work - but it really does.

So, if your interested in what flavors go together and why, this will likely be an interesting book for you.

A paid subscription is just $35 a year. Find out more about becoming a member of the Lost Supper Club.

❤️ Did you know that if you hit the heart or recycle symbol at the top or bottom of this post, it makes it easier for other people to find this newsletter?

Humans are funny and ridiculous and other obvious statements

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:02:02 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

This issue is a reheat

If you’ve ever listened to the podcast The Sporkful, you know that when they re-release an episode, they call it a “Reheat”. I love this and am stealing it. :-)

I’ll be on vacation in Europe through must of April and so am re-publishing a few of the most popular past issues while I’m away.

This issue was originally published in May of 2024. It contains a lot of my favorite recipes, ones you may have missed if you subscribed at some point after then. I hope you enjoy!

Hello from our home state of Colorado!

Both Steve and I were born and raised in Colorado and lived here until we sold our house and moved into our RV in early 2020. Our daughters live here as do both sides of our family and many of our closest friends so our time is always packed with activity. And even though we do our best, we never manage to see everyone we want to see.

These return trips to the place where we spent the first 45 years of our lives is an interesting experience. I thought that I would always think of Colorado as home, but as the years go by, it feels like home less and less. It’s strange to be in a place that’s so familiar but in which I feel like the visitors that we are.

Being in Colorado also causes me to spend more time in the past. I’m sure anyone reading this who has moved away from the place they were raised knows exactly what I mean.

For me, there is value in trying to understand the past. And anyway, I’m compelled to introspect on where my thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors come from. It’s who I am. I try to understand the systems in which my life has played out, how I’ve contributed to and been affected by the whole mess, in ways both good and bad. We either repeat the past or repair what’s broken and do something different and I don’t know how to do that except by thinking about it.

But at some point we have to recognize that who we were in the past is over. Those moments no longer exist except in my mind. All I can ever do is be who I am now.

The only tangible thing I can do with the past is decide today to be better than I used to be and recognize that joy comes from being present.

This is a daily practice, isn’t it? Being present in each moment is a gift we give ourselves.

I actually laughed out loud a little bit when writing that last sentence because what a funny, ridiculous thing us humans are to have to remind ourselves to be present.

5 Things to make next week

A few recipes to consider adding to the week’s meal plan:

1. Beer Battered Fried Fish

Beer does several fantastic things for fried fish batter, but the main effect comes from the carbonation. The bubbles in beer aerate the batter, which helps to make it light and crispy. The same effect can be achieved by adding plain club soda, but beer also adds flavor. Recipe: Beer Battered Fried Fish

2. Skillet Vegetable Lasagna

This cheesy, saucy vegetarian lasagna is packed with zucchini, cauliflower, walnuts, mushrooms, roasted red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, and garlic all layered up with creamy parmesan béchamel, pasta, and three kinds of cheese.

The veggies are chopped up in a food processor and create a meaty texture that's as close to cozy lasagna perfection as you can get. Recipe: Skillet Vegetable Lasagna

3. Crispy Coconut Lime Chicken

This recipe is such a great example of how salty, spicy, sweet, and sour can balance and complement each other to create interesting layers of flavor that keep you going back for more.

And, holy smokes, the sauce. If you love tart citrus flavors, you're going to want to pour this sauce on everything. Recipe: Crispy Coconut Lime Chicken

4. Cherry Crumble Bars

These buttery cherry crumble bars are little slices of heaven, that's what they are. The buttery shortbread base is topped with orange liquor-spiked cherry preserves and crispy, crunchy, sweet butter crumbs for bars that resemble cherry crumb pie in cookie form. Recipe: Cherry Crumble Bars

5. Chocolate Chip Cake with Peanut Butter Fudge Icing

This easy Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake is extra soft and fluffy, with the most delicious balance of chocolate chips and buttery cake. Topped with Peanut Butter Fudge Icing, it's the kind of crowd pleasing cake recipe that's perfect for nearly any occasion, including your run of the mill Tuesday night. Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cake

Red lentil and oxtail stew

Oh my, this recipe was a happy accident. I have never before in my life purchased or cooked oxtails and honestly, wasn’t interested in trying.

But, while my intention was to purchase 4 packages of short ribs, what I actually purchased was 3 packages of short ribs and one of oxtails. Not knowing what else to do with them, I added them to this red lentil stew and wow! So good!

The thing I love the most about this recipe is how meaty it tastes without containing much meat. An oxtail is just the tail of cattle. Most of the time it’s sold in pieces that include a tailbone with some marrow in the center, and a bony portion of meat surrounding the tail. It’s mostly bone and marrow with a little bit of meat.

For this stew, I simmered a few pieces of oxtail in broth flavored with onion, celery, garlic, paprika, cumin, and tomato for a couple of hours, until the meat was tender. This long simmer created the most luxurious and rich broth in which to cook red lentils and rice.

The meat from the oxtail is pulled from the bone and added back to the stew - there’s not a lot of meat, but honestly, you don’t need more. This stew is richly satisfying in a rustic, homey, super comforting way and I hope you’ll love it as much as we did.

3 tablespoons vegetable, canola, or extra virgin olive oil
1 large yellow sweet onion, peeled and chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon smoked paprika (more to taste)
2 teaspoons ground cumin (more to taste)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons Better Than Bouillon Sofrito Base (optional)
2 pounds of beef oxtails
Water or broth (If using Better Than Bouillon Sofrito Base, use water. Otherwise use any kind of flavorful broth or stock, or just use water.)
1/4 cup long or medium grain white rice
1 cup red lentils
Chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

Add the oil, onion, celery, and garlic to a saucepan or braiser and cook until the onions are soft and beginning to look translucent. Sprinkle with a small amount of salt and pepper and add the paprika, cumin, tomato paste and better than bouillon sofrito base (if using). Cook, stirring for another minute or two to open up the flavors of the spices and caramelize the tomato paste.
Add the oxtails to the pan and pour in enough water or broth to come about 3/4 of the way up the sides of the oxtails. Bring the liquid to a boil, then cover the pan and lower the heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Let the oxtails simmer for about 2 hours, until the meat is tender. Lift the lid of the pot every now and then to check the volume of liquid. Add more as necessary to keep enough liquid in the pot to come 3/4 of the way up the sides of the oxtails.
Remove the oxtails from the pan and set them on a plate or cutting board. Add the rice and lentils to the pan and bring the liquid back to a boil. Cover the pan, lower the heat to maintain a gentle simmer, and cook until the lentils are very tender and falling apart, about 30 minutes. (*The thickness of this stew is up to you - as the rice and lentils cook, add more water or broth to achieve the desired consistency.)
When the oxtails are cool enough to handle, tear the meat from the bones, and cut or tear it into small pieces. Add it back to the stew and taste for seasoning. Add more salt and pepper if desired.
Serve with a sprinkle of chopped fresh Italian (flat leaf) parsley.

Double chocolate rye cookies

If you are not a chocolate lover, move along, these cookies are not for you. BUT, for all you chocolate and brownie lovers, gather up your ingredients and get baking because this is about to become one of your new favorite cookie recipes.

Chocolate and rye is a delicious combo (have you tried these double chocolate rye muffins???) The rye flour adds a subtle nutty complexity that balances the bitterness of the chocolate and just makes everything sing.

These double chocolate cookies have a brownie-like texture, with a soft, fudgy interior and slightly crispy edges.

Makes 16 large cookies

9 ounces bittersweet, semi-sweet, or milk chocolate bars - OR 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chips
17 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/3 cup granulated white sugar
1 cup packed dark or light brown sugar
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract or vanilla paste
2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk
1 cup + 2 tablespoons dark rye flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
7 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon kosher salt

If using chocolate bars, chop them into small-ish pieces that are about the size of chocolate chips. Add half of the chocolate to a heatproof bowl and set it next to the stovetop.
Add the butter to a light colored saucepan and set it over medium heat. (Dark bottom pans make it difficult to see when the butter is browned.) Heat the butter, stirring often, until it’s melted and begins to boil. As you stir, pay attention to the color of the butter underneath the foam. When it's done, the butter beneath the foam will be golden brown with dark brown specks on the bottom of the pan and will smell nutty. (For images of the process of browning butter, take a look at this recipe for brown sugar cookies.)
Immediately pour the brown butter over the chocolate. Let it stand for 10-15 seconds then stir until all the chocolate is melted.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper.
Add the butter and chocolate mixture to a bowl with both sugars. Beat briefly with an electric mixer (or whisk vigorously with a wire whisk) to combine then let rest for 10-15 minutes to allow the mixture to cool slightly.
In a small bowl or measuring cup, whisk the egg and egg yolk together with the vanilla. Add this mixture slowly to the butter, chocolate, and sugar mixture, using an electric mixer to beat the dough as you pour it in. Beat on medium speed for about 30 seconds after all the eggs have been added.
Add all the dry ingredients to a bowl and stir with a wire whisk to combine. Add the dry ingredients and the remaining chopped chocolate or chocolate chips to the batter and use a wooden spoon or rubber spatula to stir until everything is combined.
Form the dough into 16 balls (approximately 1/4 cup of dough per ball) and set them on the baking sheets, spacing them at least 3 inches apart.
Bake the cookies for 8 -10 minutes then remove the cookie sheet from the oven and let the cookies rest until they are firm enough to be removed from the sheet without breaking. When done, the edges will look set but the center of the cookies will look under-baked. As the cookies rest, their centers will firm up.

Breakfast tacos

Having made these earlier in the week, there was a container of rice and beans and some corn tortillas in the refrigerator when I sat down to write this recipe. Immediately after adding the photo, I went to the kitchen and made some for my lunch because writing about tacos without eating tacos is an unreasonable ask.

I have been making these simple, nutritious, delicious tacos every single week since returning from Costa Rica earlier this year. We mostly eat them for breakfast and keep it pretty simple - a few warm homemade corn tortillas filled with flavor-packed rice and beans and some salsa. Sometimes I add some chopped cherry tomatoes and usually drizzle mine with hot sauce.

But there are an endless number of variations on this theme and so I’ve listed a few ideas below to get you started. But first, the basics:

All you need to make these tacos is corn tortillas and a pot of rice and beans and corn tortillas.

Homemade corn tortillas
Beans and rice
Your favorite salsa or hot sauce

That’s it. Pile some rice and beans into a warm tortilla and pour on some salsa or hot sauce or both. Here are a few ways to elaborate on this theme:

Add more protein: The combo of beans, rice, and corn is a complete protein but if you want to really boost the protein content of these tacos add scrambled or fried eggs, bacon or ham, sausage or chorizo, tofu, or pork carnitas.
Add some veggies: top your tacos with diced tomatoes, bell peppers, thinly sliced radishes, shredded cabbage, marinated bell peppers, quick pickled onions, or roasted corn. We also often have some leftover crispy fried potatoes in the refrigerator and they are so, so good in these tacos.
Sauce it up: Drizzle some vegan nacho cheese sauce, chimichurri sauce, or roasted tomatillo sauce over your tacos. Or, top them with almond salsa with green chilies or homemade pico de gallo.

Sangria mocktail

This is my new favorite summer drink. It’s light, refreshing, and fruity and even though it contains exactly 0% alcohol, it comes with strong carefree, day-drinking vibes and no regrets.

Ingredients:

Brewed black tea - any kind you like. For the sangria pictured here I used peach black tea which made it extra fruity.
Orange juice - fresh squeezed, or 100% juice
100% cranberry juice or 100% pomegranate juice (not cranberry juice cocktail)
7-up or zero sugar 7-up, or ginger ale
Fresh fruit

So, I do understand that it’s difficult to believe that this list of ingredients could produce something that mimics sangria which is made with red wine and brandy, but you’re going to have to set your skepticism aside for the time being and just try it.

The combination of black tea and cranberry or pomegranate juice mimic the acidity and tannins of red wine especially when mixed with orange juice. Also, it’s just plain delicious, which is all I want anyway from any beverage, with or without alcohol.

How to make:

Brew some black tea and let it cool.
For each cocktail, mix 2 parts tea with 1 part orange juice, cranberry juice, and 7-up.
Add some fresh fruit and ice to a cocktail or wine glass. Pour the sangria into the glass and garnish the glass with a slice of whatever fruit you like.

To make this for a crowd, I like to mix everything except the 7-up in a pitcher. Allow guests to pour their own and add as much or as little 7-up as they prefer.

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A fun, unique idea for easy entertaining

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:00:22 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

This issue is a reheat

If you’ve ever listened to the podcast The Sporkful, you know that when they re-release an episode, they call it a “Reheat”. I love this and am stealing it. :-)

I’ll be on vacation in Europe through must of April and so am re-publishing a few of the most popular past issues while I’m away.

This issue was originally published in April of 2024. It contains a lot of my favorite recipes, ones you may have missed if you subscribed at some point after then. I hope you enjoy!

The build your own soup bar!

Hello friends! I am so excited about this issue! Instead of several recipes, this issue is devoted to one super fun and unique idea that you can use for easy entertaining any size group.

Everything can be made in advance 👏
Scale up or down to feed as many people as you like 👯
This idea is just as well suited for a sit down meal as it is for a buffet or an open house 😌
There’s only one thing to keep warm - everything else can be served at room temperature 🙌
Serve this meal inside or outside - it’s perfect for camping or entertaining in a small space - AND if you’re not in an entertaining kind of mood, it’s also a great way to meal prep 😍

As most of you know, my husband and I sold our house in April of 2020 and moved into a 43-foot 5th-wheel RV. In comparison to many RV kitchens, mine is humongous. But, compared to the kitchen in our former suburban house, it is absurdly tiny - especially for someone who makes a living as a recipe developer and food photographer.

I was nervous about how I could work in my new tiny kitchen and kind of thought that my days of entertaining more than a small handful of people were over.

But since moving into our RV, I’ve cooked my way across 38 states, created and published a few hundred recipes, and hosted gatherings with as few as 2 guests and as many as 40. (For those of you with a small kitchen, I piled a whole bunch of tips and tricks for organizing a small kitchen into this article.)

Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about easy entertaining.

But regardless of the size of your kitchen, the idea I’m going to share with you today is my new favorite way to cook for a group.

The Build Your Own Soup Bar

Here’s the basic idea: Prepare a really flavorful, super delicious and complex broth. Then, prepare as many different ingredients as you like for people to build their own bowls of soup. Set all the options out in separate containers and let your guests go to town.

Every single thing can be prepared in advance and the only thing that needs to be kept hot is the broth.

Every good bowl of soup begins with really good broth

If you are the kind of person who occasionally makes a roast chicken, you can turn the bones into a pot of rich chicken broth for nothing more than the cost of the water in the pan. Here’s how to make chicken broth.

So, you can start there if you like, with a pot of homemade chicken broth.

But you can also just start with some veggies, herbs and spices, Better Than Bouillon, and some water and have a rich, flavorful broth in about an hour.

Ingredients:

A few cloves of roughly chopped garlic
An onion or two
Carrots
Celery
Bell peppers
Mushroom stems - remove the caps from mushrooms and roughly chop the stems. Save the caps to sauté for one of the soup ingredients. (If mushrooms are not one of the ingredients you want to offer, just leave them out.)
Tomato paste - about 1 tablespoon for a small pot of broth and up to a 1/4 cup for a large stockpot of broth. I like to use the tubes of concentrated tomato paste that you can find in most supermarkets.
Dried herbs and spices - about 2 tablespoons for a small-ish pot of broth and up to a half cup for a large stockpot of broth. Use whatever herbs and spices you like. Scroll down for herb and spice combos I love.
Better Than Bouillon soup base and water - OR your own homemade stock. If using Better Than Bouillon, choose the flavor that matches the flavor profile you want to create.
Chopped fresh herbs (optional)
Lemon juice

Add a couple of tablespoons of oil to a large saucepan or stock pot (any kind of oil you like). Roughly chop all the veggies and add them to the pot. How many vegetables you use depends on the amount of broth you are wanting to make.
Set the pot over medium heat and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are starting to brown. This could take as long as 20 minutes if you’re cooking a lot of veggies.
Add the tomato paste and whatever herbs and spices you are using. Stir everything around in the pan for a couple of minutes.
Add the Better Than Bouillon and water OR your own homemade stock to the pan. How much you add depends on how much broth you want to make. Please note that as the liquid simmers, some of it will evaporate. Also, the veggies will be strained out of the broth before serving - so add more liquid than you think you’ll need. For example, if you want 6 cups of broth, add at least 8 cups of liquid to the pot.
Bring the liquid to a boil then lower the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and let the broth simmer for at least 20 minutes and up to an hour.
Pour the broth into a strainer that’s been set inside a large enough pot or bowl to hold all the broth. You want to strain the veggies out of the broth. Use the back of a spoon to press all the liquid out of the vegetables, then discard.
Taste the broth and add as much salt and pepper as you like.
If chicken is an ingredient you want to include in your soup bar, return the broth to the stockpot or saucepan and add pieces of chicken. You can use bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces or boneless, skinless chicken pieces. Bring the liquid to a boil and then lower the heat to a gentle simmer until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken from the broth and let rest until cool enough to handle. Shred the chicken into bite size pieces.
If you want to add some chopped fresh herbs to the broth, add them now along with some lemon juice. Lemon juice adds a remarkable brightness to the flavor of the broth. Start by adding a couple of tablespoons, taste and add as much more as you like.
The broth can now be poured into a covered container and stored in the refrigerator for up to a week or frozen for up to 3 months. The shredded chicken can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 3 months.

Delicious flavor profiles for your broth

These are a few of my favorite ways to flavor broth for a soup bar.

For Thai inspired flavors: Lemongrass, turmeric, ginger, coriander, and basil. Or use a good Thai spice blend and/or red or green curry paste. Stir in some coconut milk and/or coconut cream and lime juice instead of lemon juice.
For Chinese inspired flavors: ginger, garlic, scallions, star anise, cinnamon, and Sichuan peppercorns
For Japanese inspired flavors: chili powder, sesame oil, wasabi, sansho pepper, ginger, and garlic
For Indian inspired flavors: turmeric, cumin, coriander, cilantro, garam masala, ginger, or a good curry powder or Indian spice mix + thicken the broth with a cornstarch slurry as described below
For Mexican and Latin American flavors: anchiote, allspice, cacao, cinnamon, chili powder, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, paprika, and Mexican oregano. You might also want to add some chopped green chilies and enchilada sauce to your broth.
For Italian flavors: basil, oregano, rosemary, marjoram, and thyme + the egg and cream enrichment described below
For Greek flavors: basil, oregano, cinnamon, dill, marjoram, parsley, rosemary, nutmeg, thyme. Serve plain yogurt or tzatziki sauce as one of the toppings.
For Cajun flavors: paprika, garlic and onion powder, oregano, cayenne, thyme + thicken the broth with the roux described below

It’s also important to add at least one ingredient that adds some umami to the broth.

Umami is a savory flavor that's one of the five basic tastes, along with sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. It's that thing in a dish that makes it taste rich and satisfying. Tomato paste (in the broth ingredient list) is an umami ingredient that I add to nearly every pot of broth, but you might want to add another one or two - or more!

Some of these ingredients are quite salty so add them to the broth before adding any additional seasoning. Also, be cautious about how much of each of these you add to your broth - they are highly concentrated flavors. Add a little bit, taste, add more, taste, etc.

Miso paste
Soy sauce
Fish sauce
Worcestershire Sauce
Anchovies or anchovy paste

How to thicken and enrich the broth

Here are 5 easy ways to thicken up and enrich the broth.

1. To thicken the broth with a roux:

A roux is a nothing more than mixture of flour and fat that’s cooked, then used to thicken soup or sauces. To make a roux, use equal amounts fat (I usually use butter) and all-purpose flour.

A good ratio is 1 tablespoon of fat + 1 tablespoon of flour for each cup of broth.

Add the butter to a saucepan and set it over medium heat.
When the butter has melted, use a wooden spoon or whisk to mix the flour into the butter, stirring constantly until smooth and lightly golden in color- at least 5 minutes of cooking time.
Remove the roux from the heat and add some of the broth - Add the broth very slowly, bit by bit, while you whisk constantly to prevent lumps. When the mixture is the consistency of a thick gravy, whisk it into the rest of the broth.
Bring the broth back to a boil and cook for a few minutes to thicken. If your broth isn’t as thick as you would like it, add more roux.

2. To thicken the broth with a cornstarch slurry:

Add a few tablespoons of cornstarch to a small bowl. Slowly whisk in some broth to create a slurry.
Whisk the slurry back into the broth. Bring it to a simmer and cook for a few minutes.

A good ratio is one tablespoon slurry to 4 cups of broth.

3. To thicken the broth with starchy vegetables or grains:

Add some peeled and chopped potatoes (any kind of potato, including sweet potato) to the broth and let them simmer until they are so tender that they are beginning to fall apart.
Pour the broth and the potatoes into a blender and puree. The starch in the potatoes will start to thicken the soup before you puree it, but blending it will thicken it further.

Corn and squash also work well if you’d rather use them instead of or in addition to potatoes.

You can also use rice or quinoa. Add some rice or quiona to the pot (you won’t need much - about a tablespoon per cup of broth) and let it cook until very tender then puree in a blender. Arborio rice works particularly well for this.

4. How to thicken broth with cooked beans or lentils:

Add some cooked or canned beans or lentils to a blender and about an equal amount of broth.
Puree until completely smooth then stir the mixture back into the rest of the broth.

1 cup of beans or lentils is enough to thicken 6-8 cups of broth. White beans and chickpeas work particularly well for this purpose.

5. How to thicken and enrich broth with cream and eggs:

This is one of my favorite way to create a slightly thickened, silky broth that tastes utterly indulgent.

Add a few egg yolks to a bowl along with some cream. A good ratio is 2 egg yolks + 1/2 cup of heavy cream per 6 cups of broth.
Whisk the egg yolks and cream together to blend then very slowly drizzle in some broth, whisking constantly as you trickle it in.
After you’ve added a cup or so of broth, whisk the mixture back into the rest of the broth. Cook for a couple of minutes, stirring constantly, then remove the broth from the heat.

Please note that if you enrich the broth with eggs and cream it cannot be frozen. It will still keep well in the refrigerator for a few days. Or, you can just add the enrichment right before you serve it.

Soup bar ingredients and toppings

This is the fun part!!! You are really only limited by your imagination when it comes to ingredients to add to your soup bar. My only suggestion here is that you match the soup bar offerings to the flavor profile of the soup.

For example, if you flavored your broth with Thai spices and coconut milk, the soup bar offerings might include:

rice noodles
cooked white rice
caramelized mushrooms
a handful of veggies that have been sautéed with some oil over very high heat until slightly charred: bok choy, sliced red bell pepper, and carrots
Cubes of sweet potato that have been boiled in salted water until tender
Toppings: thin sliced red chilies, scallions, chopped fresh cilantro, peanuts, chili garlic sauce, fresh lime slices

If you flavored your broth with Latin American flavors, the soup bar offerings might include:

cooked white rice
black or pinto beans
Red bell peppers and sliced onion that have been sautéed with some oil over very high heat until slightly charred. Or, char the peppers and onions on a grill or in the oven under the broiler.
Roasted corn
White or yellow potatoes, or sweet potatoes, or yucca, peeled and cut into cubes then boiled in salty water until tender
Chopped chilies - roasted poblanos, Hatch green chilies
Pickled jalapeño and quick pickled onions
Aleppo pepper oil
Any kind of squash, roasted until tender
Toppings: toasted pumpkin seeds, fresh chopped cilantro, sliced avocados, chopped fresh tomatoes, tortilla chips for crumbling

For Italian flavors, include cooked pasta, tortellini, ravioli, or gnocchi plus plenty of veggies and shredded parmesan cheese.

For Cajun flavors, include Andouille sausage, cooked shrimp, potatoes, beans, and shredded cheese in addition to several types of veggies.

You get the idea.

You can add additional protein to the spread:

Italian sausage, cooked crispy bacon, chorizo, ham, pork carnitas, Andouille sausage Polish sausage, cooked or smoked seafood, Italian meatballs, or Greek meatballs.
Tofu, hard or soft boiled eggs, or any kind of cooked beans or lentils.

Top tips for ingredients for your soup bar:

Cook everything ahead of time. The beauty of the soup bar is that all the ingredients can be made in advance and served at room temperature. As long as the broth is piping hot, it will heat up everything in the bowl.
Season the ingredients. It’s important that every ingredient taste good on its own. If boiling vegetables, add enough salt to the water to make the water taste salty. This will ensure that the vegetables are properly seasoned. Likewise for sautéed, roasted, or grilled vegetables.
Cook vegetables until crisp-tender. No one likes mushy vegetables in their soup. Whether boiling, sautéing, roasting, or grilling, cook vegetables just until they are crisp-tender then dump them into a bowl of ice water to stop their cooking.
Don’t forget toppings. The main ingredients for your soup bar will include foods you would put in a soup - vegetables, beans, noodles, rice, etc. But, it’s also great to add some toppings: toasted pumpkin seeds, croutons, thinly sliced radishes, thinly sliced chilies, tortilla chips, fresh herbs, thinly sliced scallions, etc.
Add enough ingredient options for your guests to have fun picking and choosing what they want in their bowls but not so many as to be overwhelming or exhausting for you, the cook, to prepare.

Putting it all together

About an hour before you’re ready for everyone to dig in, pour the broth into a large saucepan or stock pot and set it over low heat so it can reheat slowly. Then set all the ingredients for your soup bar out so they can come to room temperature.

That’s it! Give everyone a bowl and let them have fun choosing the ingredients they want in their bowl then ladling the hot broth over the top and adding any toppings.

Bread and dessert options

Buttery homemade dinner rolls are a delicious accompaniment to pretty much any kind of soup.
Tall, flaky buttermilk biscuits pair particularly well with creamy soup or flavor profiles that are warm and comforting
Homemade flour tortillas are a must with Mexican and Latin American inspired flavors

In keeping with the spirit of the make-your-own soup bar, I think serve-yourself dessert options are also appropriate.

Anything Cookies {One Basic Cookie Dough, Endless Kinds of Cookies}
Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies
Brookies (Chocolate chip brownie bars)
Cherry crumble bars
Lemon bars
Raspberry cupcakes

Two more ideas before wrapping this up:

This is also a great way to meal prep. Prepare the broth and a variety of ingredients and dinner for several nights of the week is just a matter of putting everything into a bowl and heating it in the microwave.
Instead of making everything yourself, do a soup bar potluck. You make the broth and a couple of the essential ingredients then ask your guests to bring what they like to contribute to the soup bar.

A paid subscription is just $35 a year. Find out more about becoming a member of the Lost Supper Club.

❤️ Did you know that if you hit the heart or recycle symbol at the top or bottom of this post, it makes it easier for other people to find this newsletter?

Not Believing Our Own Bullshit

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:03:26 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

This issue is a reheat

If you’ve ever listened to the podcast The Sporkful, you know that when they re-release an episode, they call it a “Reheat”. I love this and am stealing it. :-)

I’ll be on vacation in Europe through must of April and so am re-publishing a few of the most popular past issues while I’m away.

This issue was originally published in February of 2024. It contains a lot of my favorite recipes, ones you may have missed if you subscribed at some point after then. I hope you enjoy!

Not believing our own bullshit

“I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.”- Virginia Wolf

This time last year, we were camped on the Texas gulf coast, parked right on the hard packed sand of Crystal Beach with the sound of ocean waves as our constant soundtrack. We had intended to stay for 2 weeks and ended up staying for 7. (If you’re curious about what that was like, I wrote about that experience here.)

The first week there I got up early and went for a morning walk just as the sun was starting to rise over the water and got caught in a conversation with another camper. I shared that conversation with some folks back then and wanted to share it with you now because it taught me a lesson that I am currently still trying to learn. Here’s what I wrote last year…

While on my morning walk today, a man camped on the beach started a conversation with me. “Conversation” is probably not the right word. More accurately he talked AT me for a few minutes while I contemplated my escape.

He railed against the world for all of its ineptitude while simultaneously telling me all the ways in which he was smarter, tougher, and just generally better than “all those sissys” who can’t get their shit together. I determined that there was no polite way to escape this encounter (and honestly, why did I even care about being polite???) and just started walking away.

As I did, I said, “It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Too bad you’re surrounded by a world full of idiots.” He shouted after me that he doesn’t have it all figured out and the good lord teaches that we should show love and kindness to everyone and that’s what he’s “TRYING TO DO GODDAMMIT!”

Love and kindness wasn’t exactly the vibe I was getting from him. The problem is, he believes all his own stories and tells them on repeat. And for the rest of my walk, I thought about the one important lesson this man taught me:

Freedom is realizing you don’t have to believe your own bullshit. Or anyone else’s.

So here I am a year later still trying to not believe all my own bullshit. Dang, it’s hard.

Our thoughts are not the truth of things. They are not facts. A lesson I must continue to learn is that I do not have to believe all my own thoughts. This is different from ignoring them or trying to hide the most difficult thoughts in some isolated corner of my mind in a futile effort to pretend they’re not there.

In fact, the best way I know to deal with painful, difficult thoughts is to bring them fully into awareness. To shine a spotlight on them and not only acknowledge their existence, but allow them to take center stage.

In doing so, it is sometimes possible to see the thought for what it is - as just a thought.

Likewise, the narrative of who I am and of who I think others are is not the truth. They are just stories, constructed in my mind.

What I’m trying to say is, we’d do well to hold the stories we tell ourselves loosely.

On that note, let’s talk about food.

Recipes for citrus lovers

I keep a huge bowl of citrus fruit on the table from around October through May and in addition to eating it straight from the bowl, I juice it and add it to everything from salads and tacos to cake.

In this issue you’ll find two recipes that include crispy panko crusted avocados - one for tacos and one for salad, both including slices of juicy, sweet CaraCara oranges. And also, the most delicious, sloppy, sticky orange drizzle cake.

Here are a few of my other favorite ways to make the most of citrus season:

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

Love is the way I feel about this plate full of creamy, cheesy, saucy, perfectly cooked pasta and roasted mushrooms topped with plenty of cracked pepper and fresh herbs.

Just to be perfectly clear here, when I say I love this plate of pasta I am not speaking metaphorically. I love and adore it with each and every silky, creamy, earthy mushroom bite.

And I promise that all of you all you fellow pasta and mushroom lovers will also fall head over heals for this dish. I know because I am you.

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

Homemade Mushroom Pizza

My oh my. This homemade mushroom pizza is a stunner. It deserves your complete, undivided, wholly devoted love and adoration. This will not be difficult or a sacrifice, believe you me.

It’s the kind of thing you make when self care means an evening at home tucked in with rich and cozy, deeply comforting, simple-meets-decadent, cheesy, saucy mushrooms on a soft and chewy homemade pizza crust dripping with truffle oil and roasted garlic.

Homemade Mushroom Pizza

Crispy fried avocado tacos

If you’re an avocado lover, you’re probably going to want to add these tasty little tacos to your plan for the week. This is the kind of recipe that you can easily scale to make as many tacos as you need, from two to twenty. And the combination of crispy panko and creamy avocado + cheese + all the bright fresh flavor from orange slices, quick pickled onions, and salsa verde is just plain dreamy.

Ingredients:

Corn tortillas
Vegetable or canola oil
An avocado or two - or however many you need for the number of tacos you want to make
Chili powder, salt, and pepper
For the breading: Panko bread crumbs, all-purpose flour, an egg or two
Cheese: Cotija, Queso Fresco, Machego, or Oaxaca
Orange slices (I used CaraCara oranges): use a sharp knife to cut the peel from an orange and then cut each segment away from the segment wall (seperate the fruit from its “skin”)
Quick pickled onions
Salsa verde - We like Herdez

Brush the corn tortillas with a little bit of oil and stack them on a microwave safe plate. Cover with a damp paper towel and set aside.

Cut the avocado in half, remove the peel and the pit, and cut each half into 1/2-inch thick slices. Spread the slices out on your cutting board and sprinkle them on both sides with chili powder and a generous amount of salt and pepper.

Add about a cup of panko bread crumbs to a plate, dump a couple tablespoons of flour onto a separate plate, and crack an egg or two into a bowl. Add a teaspoon or two of water to the eggs and whisk to combine.

Working with one avocado slice at a time, dredge each slice in flour, dip it in the eggs, then coat with panko bread crumbs. When coating with panko, use your fingers to really press the bread crumbs into each slice so you get a nice thick layer. Lay the breaded slices out onto a plate.

Pour enough oil into a large skillet to come up the sides of the pan about 1/4 of an inch and set it over high heat. When the oil is very hot, use metal tongs to add the breaded avocado slices to the pan. (To test that the oil is hot enough, dip one corner of a breaded avocado slice into the hot oil. If it sizzles, the oil is hot enough.)

Cook the avocado slices in the oil, turning them every once in a while, until they are a rich golden brown. Remove the slices to a paper towel lined plate.

Place the plate of tortillas in the microwave and heat for 45 - 60 seconds to warm.

To serve: lay a couple of tortillas on a plate and add some cheese. Top the cheese with a couple of fried avocado slices, then a couple of orange slices, some pickled onions, and a spoonful of salsa verde.

Recipe notes:

There is no need to try and keep the avocado slices warm. The tacos are perfectly delicious at room temperature.
You can skip the flour and egg and simply season the avocado slices before coating them directly with bread crumbs. The downside is that the avocado slices will not be as firm after they are fried. In fact, they get kind of mushy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer the firmer texture of the slices that have been breaded with flour and egg.
The point of brushing the corn tortillas with oil and then microwaving them is to soften them so they don’t break in half when you fold them over into a taco. You can also do this in the hot oil left in the pan after frying the avocados. Simply keep the oil over high heat and use metal tongs to dip the tortillas, one at a time, in the hot oil, flipping them over after 2 or 3 seconds, then removing them from the pan to drain on a paper towel.
Not sure what I’m talking about when I say to cut the fruit from it’s skin? Here’s a video of someone doing exactly this.

Crispy fried avocado and citrus salad

We loved the crispy fried avocados in the tacos above so much that I made some more the next day and added them to a salad. Here’s how to make this salad:

Whisk up a quick citrus vinaigrette. Check out last week’s issue for a basic vinaigrette formula and a couple of hacks for getting all the ingredients to come together a they should. For this salad, I used lime juice, a diced shallot, honey, about a teaspoon of mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and extra virgin olive oil.
Follow the instructions in the taco recipe above to bread avocado slices and fry them in hot oil until golden and crispy.
Use a sharp knife to cut the peel from an orange and then cut each segment from the segment wall (the “skin” around each segment).
Add salad greens to a plate and drizzle the greens with vinaigrette. Lay a few slices of orange and a few crispy avocado slices over the greens then top with toasted, salted pumpkin seeds.

*To toast pumpkin seeds: add the seeds to a skillet along with enough olive or canola oil to coat the seeds. Sprinkle the seeds with salt and then cook the seeds over medium heat, until about half of them are brown. Stir often while the seeds are cooking to prevent burning.

Orange drizzle cake

This orange drizzle cake is so rich, buttery, and tender you might actually call it creamy. The cake includes a few whole oranges stirred right into the batter and a generous drizzle of orange syrup. But don't think the drizzle means it's overly sweet. This cake isn't anywhere near the neighborhood of cloying. It's just bright orange flavor and sunshine on a plate.

Orange Drizzle Cake

BBQ chicken nachos

This was one of our kids favorite meals growing up. I almost always made it following a trip to Costco where I would purchase chips, grated, cheese, BBQ sauce, and a rotisserie chicken.

After getting everything from my Costco haul put away, I’d throw together a large tray of these nachos which, thanks to the precooked chicken, only took a few minutes. Who wants to spend a bunch of time in the kitchen after a family-sized grocery store run? Not this girl.

Now that it’s just my husband and I, I don’t make these nachos nearly as often. But every now and then they hit the spot. There is an endless number of ways to top these simple nachos, but I prefer to keep the whole thing pretty simple - just chips, cheese, BBQ chicken, and onions. Here’s how to make them:

Coat some pre-cooked chicken with your favorite bottled BBQ sauce. This is a great way to use up leftover chicken, or follow the super easy method for cooking chicken in Issue #1 to cook a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts or thighs. You can also just use a rotisserie chicken.
Heat the oven to 450 degrees F and line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.
Spread some tortilla chips out onto the baking sheet (I usually made my own because it’s easy and they are so freaking delicious - here’s how to make homemade tortilla chips).
Scatter BBQ chicken over the chips and then add a generous amount of shredded cheese (cheddar, Monterey jack, pepper jack, or a grated Mexican blend).
Pop the baking sheet in the oven and cook until all the cheese is melted and bubbly.
Remove the baking sheet from the oven, scatter some quick pickled onions over the top of the nachos, then just dig in.

A great alternative to pickled onions is to cook a sliced red or yellow onion in some oil in a skillet until they are caramelized to a rich golden brown.

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Creamy Mushroom Soup with Gruyere Crisps

Rebecca Blackwell — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:48:28 GMT

This creamy mushroom soup tastes like something you might have eaten at one of Julia Child’s dinner parties (I wish!) but in reality, it’s a soup for real, actual life.

It comes together quickly and can easily be the entire meal, especially when served with a few buttery biscuits or dinner rolls. But it’s also the perfect complement to any number of main dishes. It’s equal parts comfort and sophistication, a truly satisfying meal that won’t break the bank, and I think we’re all down for that these days.

Years ago my mom gave me the 2 volume set of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for my birthday. Or maybe it was Christmas? Regardless, I dove into those books like they were the actual holy grail and for a while dinner at our house was all Julia all the time.

I think we all look back on those butter soaked days with a kind of sleepy satisfaction that’s not dissimilar to the hours following a really good Thanksgiving meal. It was a good time while it lasted, but I did realize the importance of relegating all that rich food to more of a special occasion category.

When we moved into the RV I had to make some tough decisions about what cookbooks came with us. Mastering the Art of French cooking was nonnegotiable.

Still, the techniques in those books continue to influence the way I cook and there are recipes I make on the regular that I can absolutely trace back to Julia’s influence. This creamy mushroom soup is one of those recipes.

There are two genius tricks in this recipe that are plucked straight from the pages of Mastering:

Separate the mushroom stems from the caps and use them to make a rich mushroom broth.
Slice the mushroom caps and caramelize them in a skillet before adding them to the soup. This deepens and develops their flavor in a way that’s simply impossible otherwise.

You will find those techniques in play in many of my other recipes, like this creamy chicken noodle soup with garlic and mushrooms.

This is the kind of soup that will impress the socks off dinner party guests when served as a starter. Around here we mostly eat it as the main event, often on a weeknight because it doesn’t take long to make and includes a relatively short ingredient list, sometimes with good crusty bread, buttermilk biscuits, or homemade dinner rolls, and a stack of gruyere crisps.

Recipe Notes:

I keep several kinds of Better than Bouillon in my refrigerator at all times and the mushroom base is one of my favorites. It’s not always available in major supermarkets, but easy to order online: Better than Bouillon Mushroom Base

Serving suggestions

The Ultimate Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits: If you’re craving fluffy, tender buttermilk biscuits with hundreds of flaky, buttery layers, stop right here.
Here’s how to make homemade buttermilk biscuits that are soft on the inside, slightly crispy on the outside, and rise to impressive heights with layer after delicious layer.
Homemade Dinner Rolls: These dinner rolls are incredibly soft and pillowy, with the perfect amount of chew. The enriched dough is easy to work with and the whole process only takes a few hours and most of that is hands-off.
Cinnamon Biscuits with Cream Cheese Frosting: These tender, buttery biscuits are filled with a swirl of cinnamon and sugar, topped with more cinnamon and sugar, and include the option of serving them with cream cheese frosting.

Apple Dutch Baby

Rebecca Blackwell — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:05:42 GMT

Dutch baby is the American name for a German pancake - a simple puffed pancake that’s baked in a skillet, preferably cast iron. I’ve read that a real German pancake is cooked on the stovetop and a Dutch baby is cooked in the oven. But I believe that’s the only difference.

My mom used to make German pancakes for us on special occasions. Her grandparents were German and it was one of several German recipes I remember her making.

I loved those pancakes but until recently, had rarely thought to make them at home. That’s just silly because they are the PERFECT weekend breakfast.

In this recipe, I added thinly sliced apples cooked in butter, sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The result is a creamy, custard-like pancake with the warm flavors of apples and cinnamon. It’s easy to make and so very delicious.

If you’ve never made an Apple Dutch Baby before, consider this your invitation. It comes together with minimal effort, uses pantry staples, and bakes in the oven in a single skillet, no flipping required. The result is a breakfast that feels both special and simple, the kind of thing you could serve to friends for brunch or eat straight from the pan, standing in the kitchen in your pjs.

This recipe makes one 10-inch pancake, enough for 2 very generous servings or 4 moderate and restrained servings.

Recipe Notes:

Looking for a gluten free version of this Apple Dutch Baby? Try this recipe from , a chef, cooking teacher and recipe developer focused on creating incredible gluten free recipes: Next Level Gluten Free Dutch Baby

A few more cozy, apple dipped recipes

Apple Cinnamon Muffins with Apple Butter and Brown Sugar Streusel: These tender apple cinnamon muffins are packed with chunks of fresh apples, contain a gooey apple butter center, and are topped with a generous amount of crunchy, buttery brown sugar streusel.
Apple Streusel Cake: This is the kind of simple, satisfying cake that you can make anytime for anything and it will be exactly the right thing.
Apple Upside Down Cake: This apple upside down cake includes a thick layer of apples drenched in an excessive amount of buttery caramel sauce, because in my opinion that gooey baked-on-the-bottom sauce is the best part of an upside down cake.
Apple Cobbler: There are many ways to make apple cobbler but this recipe is my all-time favorite. The recipe includes saucy cinnamon and clove spiced apples baked under a chewy cookie topping. The gooey brown sugar topping takes about 5 minutes to make and tastes like a soft, buttery sugar cookie.

IRL. But with magic.

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:03:09 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

Last week I attended a Food Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania. After returning home, I posted a note about it here on Substack and , a visibility coach and former publicist, commented that “IRL is where it’s at these days.”

I started to reply with words of earnest agreement, exclamation point capped of course! And then had to stop and walk away from my computer for a bit to consider the absurdity of my mind treating IRL as some kind of new, trendy thing, like it was a bandwagon I wanted to jump on.

In Real Life.

It’s the REAL part of that phrase that’s tripping me up.

What’s real right now: It is 9:56 am on Thursday morning. I am sitting on my sofa, my feet propped up on the ottoman, laptop on my lap. We are at an RV resort in San Diego, California. It is sunny and 66 degrees and the windows are open. You are reading these words from somewhere else… Maybe you are also on your sofa, or standing in your kitchen, or sitting on the toilet. Or, perhaps you are in your car, or standing in line at the grocery store, or laying in bed. It might be early morning or late at night. Perhaps your windows are also open. Perhaps not.

Once I’ve written what I want to write, I’ll click a button and within seconds, these words will be distributed to you and a few thousand other people scattered all over the world. This is magic.

I LOVE magic.

This kind of magic has existed for a while. Long before digital screens. It existed in the pages of books, and in oral traditions that moved stories through great distances of space and time. Long before we could watch actors on a screen, we were watching them on a stage.

Storytelling is the backbone of humanity and we haven’t restricted ourselves to first hand experience or a believable narrative. We have always gravitated towards fantastical tales of supernatural happenings, often as a way of understanding our real lives.

And also magic isn’t real. We know this and it’s why we have an abbreviated short hand to communicate when something is, in fact, happening in real life vs our magical, digital reality.

What is real, is how the magic hits us. How it makes us feel. How it changes our perspective. How it is powerful enough to alter our behavior and change our course.

I wonder… if we’ve gotten too wrapped up in the magic and now need the reminder that its effects are experienced, for better or for worse, IRL. Perhaps we’ve gotten a little bit confused about which part is the story and which part is the moral of the story.

Humans tend to behave worse when we are anonymous, when we forget that the things we create in our magical digital reality have an impact IRL.

What is real is the real person behind the magic.

At 51 years old, most of my life up until this point existed in a world without the internet and smart phones. We didn’t have an abbreviation for in real life because our digital lives did not exist.

And yet, I can’t remember how I ever got around without a digital map to guide me. I have no idea how I stayed in touch with anyone outside the walls of my home. How did we make plans? How did we spread important information? How did we find each other when we ventured out into the world to meet up?

I am being dramatic. AND ALSO even those of us who grew up in a non-digital world would have a hard time functioning if all that technology suddenly went away.

But at the retreat, I carried my phone around with me but didn’t use it except to check the time. I didn’t post about it. I didn’t check in with my husband. I didn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t physically there, in the flesh.

This wasn’t a concerted effort. I didn’t put myself on a digital diet. I just did it. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a sacrifice. I wasn’t giving anything up. I just really wanted to be there.

When I returned home, I felt a bit disoriented. Like Pinocchio after he’d been turned into a real boy, some of the digital people in my world had been made real. I wanted to ask, “did that really happen?”

There’s a weird commentary there that deserves further examination, that a few days spent offline can feel disorienting.

For the past couple of years I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the days when we didn’t walk around with the whole world in our pockets. When the phones were on the walls and stopping to ask directions was a normal thing to do. But, feeling nostalgic for another time is not the same as wanting to go back to it. I feel nostalgic for the days when my children were small but I don’t want to relive them.

Technology has made a lot of things easier and better for me. It’s opened doors to a life that might not have been possible otherwise. A life I love. All of the work I do offline is recreated and distributed around the world in a way that is accessible to most anyone who wants it. This is magic and like I said, I love magic.

For that matter, the Food Writer’s Retreat started online. Every single one of us met here before we met there. And I think that’s maybe the point. This morning I read words on a screen, “IRL is where it’s at these days”, written by someone I’ve never met and did not know existed before she clicked send. I clicked on her name and read about her life and her work and then returned back to a digital page and a blinking curser where I’ve been trying to work something out about what it means to be a real human in a digital world made of magic so that I can click a button and send the words over to you where you will do with them what you will. In your real life.

Like magic.

A few photos from the Food Writer’s Retreat

The retreat took place at this gorgeous house in the Pocano mountains of Pennsylvania.
, the retreat founder and organizer, is the hostess with the mostest and I mean that in every sense of the phrase. She thought of everything, attended to every detail, and created a truly magical experience.
I got to take my youngest daughter Anne with me to the retreat and it was wonderful having so much time with her. I also love that she got to meet all of the incredible, talented, generous food writers in attendance.
I’ve been working with for over two years (she’s done all the artwork for this publication) but the first time I met her in person was when she came bounding out to greet me wearing a Let’s Get Lost t-shirt with her own design on the front.
Jen packed her car with her own china and crystal and drove it from New Orleans to the Pocanos, and then laid out a table with candles and hand cut boughs of evergreen.
All the meals at the retreat were cooked by those of us in attendance. Jenn divided us into meal teams with the instructions to come up with a team name and a menu. My group was the Badass Breakfast Bitches and we did our best to live up to the hype….
… The kind of breakfast you get when the Badass Breakfast Bitches cooks it for you.
I got to teach a photography workshop! I was very nervous about this and honestly would have backed out at the slightest opening, but ended up having an absolute blast.
I was also super nervous when said she was going to lead us in some improve exercises. Once again, the worry was 100% unnecessary because the games were an absolute riot and almost made me want to join an improve group. (not really)

This Week’s Menu

Creamy Mushroom Chicken and Rice, Homemade Honey Wheat Bread, and Brown Butter Citrus Shortbread Cookies

Creamy Mushroom Chicken and Rice

This one-pot creamy mushroom chicken and rice is the kind of comforting meal that can solve anything. Or, at the very least, it will take your mind off of the day and make you feel a little bit better about the world.

Tender chicken, rice, caramelized mushrooms, sweet onions, and a splash of cream come together into a meal that’s generous without being complicated, luxurious without being fussy. The recipe includes instructions for using raw chicken and rice, but it’s also a great way to use leftover pre-cooked chicken and rice. You’ll also find instructions for how to make this dish dairy free.

I first developed this recipe as a way to use up leftover French onion soup. It was back in the days when our kids were young and they gobbled it up with such enthusiasm that I realized I couldn’t wait for leftovers before making it again.

Cooking some onions until golden brown and then adding a packet of dry onion soup mix to the broth was an easy substitution to French onion soup. And including some caramelized mushrooms added a gorgeous earthy flavor that felt both elegant and homey all at the same time.

As you might imagine, I made this dish many, many times over the years. It was a family favorite, especially loved by our youngest daughter who requested it frequently.

This is a one pot meal that’s easy to prepare and can be cooked entirely from scratch. But it’s also a fantastic way to use up leftover chicken, or rotisserie chicken, and leftover rice. You’ll find instructions below for making creamy mushroom chicken and rice with both raw chicken and rice and cooked chicken and rice.

I hope your family loves it as much as we do.

Creamy Mushroom Chicken and Rice

Homemade Honey Wheat Bread

Just like my favorite homemade white bread recipe, two loaves of this simple Honey Wheat Bread will be ready to eat in about 3 hours, with only about 20-minutes of hands-on effort.

Thanks to a touch of olive oil and milk, this bread has an exceptionally soft and tender crumb. The loaves are hearty and substantial, but not heavy, dry, or overly dense.

Lightly sweetened with honey (or molasses), each slice is slightly nutty and supremely comforting, like only homemade bread can be.

Homemade Honey Wheat Bread

Brown Butter Citrus Shortbread Cookies

Nutty brown butter shortbread and the the bright, sunny flavor of citrus come together in these irresistible cookies that are so tender they literally melt in your mouth. When properly chilled, these shortbread cookies retain their definition when baked, so cut them into whatever shapes you like. Drizzle them with sweet tart lemon icing and just try to not eat them all yourself.

Shortbread is a simple combination of flour, sugar, and butter. And what’s not to love about that? But shortbread is also the perfect base from which to showcase other flavors... like nutty brown butter, bright citrus, and a generous amount of vanilla.

Brown butter and citrus is an enticing flavor combination. The earthy, nuttiness of brown butter seems to ground the bright, dazzling flavor of citrus. The combination reminds me of something from a romantic comedy, where a fun character who’s prone to flights of fancy meets a reliable sort with a tendency to get stuck in their ruts, but together they bring out the best in each other.

Not only are the flavors in these cookies a match made in heaven (or Hollywood), the texture positively melts in your mouth, which is exactly what I want from something made with a delightfully exorbitant amount of butter.

You too? Then put on an apron and pull out the butter because this just might become your new favorite cookie recipe.

Brown Butter Citrus Shortbread Cookies

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Chicken Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce

Rebecca Blackwell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:58:32 GMT

This chicken pasta with tomato cream sauce is one of those cozy, one pot meals that’s easy to make in any size kitchen. The entire dish can be prepared and served in one pan (a large saucepan, deep skillet, braiser, or Dutch oven) and includes plenty of wiggle room to swap in one ingredient for another based on what you have and what you like.

It’s the kind of meal that requires very little effort but delivers big on comfort: tender pieces of chicken, silky noodles, crisp green veggies, and a rich, velvety tomato cream sauce that clings to every bite.

But the thing I love the most about this dish is how flexible it is.

Thick, fat homemade fettuccini noodles are my first choice, but it’s honestly just as delicious with any kind of pasta you like.
Swap out the chicken breasts for chicken thighs or go rogue and use sausage, pork tenderloin, or fish.
Crisp-tender spears of asparagus add fresh flavor and texture to this dish, but it’s just as good with broccoli, green beans, Brussels, tender green peas, or pretty much any kind of veggies you like, fresh or frozen.
Make it dairy free by using coconut milk or cashew cream.
Make it vegan by using coconut milk and tofu in place of the chicken.
Make it gluten free by using gluten free pasta.

Speaking of pasta…

My preference is always for homemade fresh pasta. If you’ve never tried your hand at pasta making, perhaps this recipe will give you the excuse to give it a go.

To easily fit pasta making into a busy week I usually make the dough on the weekend, when I’m doing other meal prep stuff for the week. Then I wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until I’m ready to use it. The night before I want to cook the pasta, I use my pasta machine to roll out the dough, cut it into noodles, and hang them on a pasta drying rack. The pasta is now ready to cook whenever I am.

Having said that, I meant what I said earlier about using any kind of pasta you like and a box of dried pasta makes this the perfect weeknight meal.

Recipe Notes

Add just enough water to the pot to cover the pasta and give the noodles some room to move. This will ensure that plenty of starch from the pasta makes it into the reserved pasta water. The starch in pasta water helps thicken the sauce.
It’s important to add enough salt to the water that will cook the pasta to make the water taste salty, like seawater. Most of the salt will stay in the water, but adding enough salt will ensure that pasta is properly seasoned. Because you’ll be using some of the pasta water in the sauce, go easy on the salt when cooking the rest of the dish. Taste the sauce at the end and add more salt if you wish.
If you’d like to try your hand at homemade pasta, this recipe will walk you through the process with step-by-step photos and instructions: How To Make Homemade Pasta

More creamy, saucy, comforting pasta recipes

Mushroom Ravioli in Garlic Butter Cream Sauce: Homemade mushroom ravioli blanketed in creamy garlic butter sauce is a labor of love in the truest sense - You'll love the process of making ravioli and, most importantly, you'll love the delicious, impressive result.
Creamy Mushroom Pasta: Love is the way I feel about this plate full of creamy, cheesy, saucy, perfectly cooked pasta and roasted mushrooms topped with plenty of cracked pepper and fresh herbs.
Brown Butter Sauce Pasta with Crispy Bread Crumbs: Brown butter sauce pasta with parmesan cheese and crispy bread crumbs is one of the most deliciously unapologetic meals I know how to make. (And I am not in the habit of apologizing for anything I cook or eat.) It's the kind of meal you allow yourself to really truly need on those days when pasta and butter sauce might actually be the answer.
Pasta Bolognese: Meaty, rich, and slow simmered bolognese sauce is one of the world's all-time greatest comfort foods. This recipe is a bit untraditional in that it includes bacon and red wine. But try it and you just might find a new favorite.

Seat of my pants cooking

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 11:01:57 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

This week’s issue was written by a guest author, one of my favorite Substack writers, who writes Small Sailboat Life. Nica and her husband live aboard a 28-foot sailboat named Calypso and are currently sailing around French Polynesia.

Nica is endlessly inspiring to me. Last summer, Steve and I lived on our newly purchased sailboat for 7 weeks. Our boat is 38-feet with maybe 150 square feet of cabin space and, I’ll tell you what, we could barely manage it. Meanwhile, there’s Nica and Jeremy, sailing through French Polynesia on their even smaller boat, living their lives in its tiny cabin and making it look so damn easy.

One of the things I love the most on Small Sailboat Life is Tasty Thursdays, a once a week post about what Nica is cooking. It’s incredible what she makes in her tiny galley kitchen… homemade bread, muffins, and other baked goods, drool-worthy pasta dishes, falafel with homemade yogurt, chicken marinated in fig jam, garlic, lime juice, ginger, finely chopped lemongrass, and a splash of soy sauce. YUM.

I feel like I learn something new about economy and thrift with every issue and she gives me hope that someday, Steve and I might have it in us take off and sail across the world.

I asked if Nica would be willing to contribute a guest post for this newsletter and was just pleased as punch when she said yes. Enjoy.

And, if you’re as fascinated by Nica’s life as I am, please subscribe to her newsletter. You’ll find it here:

Seat of My Pants Cooking

There are 4 cookbooks and a wooden box of recipe cards on the bookshelf on our small sailboat, and to be honest most of the time they serve only as decoration. Out here, where the nearest store of any kind is a 4 hour sail away and what’s on the shelves can depend on how recently the monthly supply ship arrived from Tahiti, reading a recipe that calls for something exotic (read: unavailable) can be more frustrating than anything else.

While I do pull out those references occasionally if my imagination needs a jog, usually my cooking is done fully by a wing and a prayer. I’d say the success rate is closing in on 99%.

Meet Calypso, Nica and Jeremy’s 28-foot sailboat.

The odds are improved significantly by only having things we like to eat aboard, aided by an understanding of spices (again, the ones we like) and how they might complement each other. I’ve got some favorite “kitchen sink” kinds of concoctions that are good places to use up those small amounts of whatever.

box of lardons, too many eggs, 2 tablespoons of hummus, cheese - lots of feta, brie, cheddar, chèvre, emmentaler, half a sausage stick, butter, 3 tablespoons of salsa, quarter of a purple cabbage, half of a baguette . . . it’s not supposed to rain . . . sundowners on the beach this afternoon . . . just had pizza . . . oh there are avocados to eat too, and cabbage. Carrots. A lot of lime juice. Star fruit. Yogurt

The litany of what’s in the fridge, what needs to be eaten, what the weather’s like runs through my head on a constant loop. We’ve barely finished one meal before I’m figuring out what the next one will entail.

Some of that is practical: Will something need extra lead time? There’s no point in deciding at 5 pm that you want pizza for dinner that night when the dough requires a few hours to rise. Want Indian food? Oh, crap, we finished the yogurt for breakfast, so scratch that idea. (Now go make yogurt right now, while you’re remembering. Your future self will thank you!)

Some of that is frugal. When a cabbage here costs $10 a pound, and any that comes in on the ship is snapped up as soon as the shops open at 5 am, every leaf that goes bad before it can be used is money down the drain. This might be why you notice a lot of small amounts of whatever in the list (an actual list, by the way) above.

A lot of it, though, is that eating well for us is a hallmark of successful cruising. We could, of course, eat black beans and rice for every meal (at least until the black beans run out - they’re not available here in French Polynesia but rice, white rice, is in every small store) but why settle for that when creation is begging to be employed?

I start with what’s going to go bad soon if it’s not used. We don’t have a freezer, so buying time by chucking something in there is not an option. That list above? The hummus, the lardons. Avocados. Salsa. Almost everything else will keep for a few more days.

We could do a nibble dinner. That would use the hummus (with some carrots), the avocado (turned into guacamole, maybe with crackers or I could make tortilla chips), the baguette, the salsa (a second vote for those chips). Ugh I just don’t feel like pulling out the masa harina, making the tortillas, and then making the chips. Plus we just did chicken patties for dinner last night, which involved frying.

We could do a frittata, a crustless quiche that’s a favorite when we have excess eggs. That would use the lardons, the salsa, some of the cheese. I could add in the hummus but that might be too weird a combination - or would it just make it creamy? must consider - or we could have carrot sticks and hummus for nibbles before dinner. Or take them as our sundowner snack offering! A frittata would also use the baguette up very nicely. Added benefit with this is that it can be made ahead of time, since it’s delicious hot or at room temperature; this also means the oven will have a chance to cool off before bedtime. When was the last time we had a frittata? Oh yum.

This does not take into account the avocado, but I discovered the other day that if I cut avocado into chunks and toss it with lime juice, then pack it into a mason jar, it lasts for a couple of days in the fridge no problem. (Side note: avocados freeze incredibly well, if you happen to have a freezer. Peel them, toss the pits, and either freeze as entire halves or in chunks, or you can make guacamole which also freezes amazingly.)

Frittata it is!

Nica’s tiny galley kitchen!

If you’re looking at your fridge, doing the “omg there is nothing to eat in here” thing while staring at an overstuffed cold box, a couple of suggestions might help.

Start by taking everything out. Handle everything. You might organize the counter piles by something intentional - dairy, veggies, leftovers, as an example - or you might see what comes in a natural order.

Step 2 is to then pitch anything that is too far gone, but remember that if part of a vegetable is past its prime some part of it might be salvageable. Set aside your squeamishness because those bits and pieces can create some memorable meals!

Chances are very good that you’ll be drawn to a certain ingredient. Red pepper, maybe. Oh I love stuffed peppers! What else could go in those? Leftover rice! How about the three olives left in that jar? Hey, that cilantro bunch is getting wilty. Or a condiment. Hoisin sauce! Wow, I’m in the mood for something Asian-flavor-y. Dumplings in the freezer, some of that leftover rice and the half an onion and one of the carrots. That knob of ginger I keep meaning to use that’s getting shriveled up . . . Listen to your intuition and your leanings.

It might be that it’s snowing when yesterday was 75 degrees (hello, Maryland. I see you.) so soup sounds amazing, or a casserole with warming scents wafting through the air. Or alternatively, it might be 85 and the sun is out and all you want is to be outside now that it’s light past 5 pm. Let yourself play!

Don’t be afraid to riff on ideas - a lasagne is just layers of pasta and sauce and cheese, for example, and you can do the same thing with rice and salsa and meat, or tortillas, or even handfuls of leftover cooked spaghetti as the pasta layer. (I call it a kitchen sink casserole. Lots of cheese is my secret.) A sandwich can pop unexpected flavor with the 2 spoonfuls of chili crisp or fig jam.

Trips to the grocery store are getting more and more expensive. Making the most of all you buy is a key to keeping that budget in check!

The bounty from a successful provisioning expedition!

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The impossible contradictions we live with every day

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:02:44 GMT

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Friends of ours from the Palm Springs area came to San Diego this week to celebrate my birthday with us. The morning after a delightful birthday dinner on Coronado Island, my friend Judy and I drove to an area of San Diego with a high Korean population to visit Aqua Day Spa, a traditional Korean bathhouse.

Judy had been there before and knew the ropes, which was excellent because I think I would have made a half dozen social errors in the first few minutes had she not been there to guide me.

Traditional Korean bathhouses (Jjimjilbang) include hot tubs, saunas, and salt rooms and the option to get scrubbed down like you’ve never been scrubbed before.

After checking in, we were given baskets with a towel, robe, and a key to a locker. The protocol is to strip down (all the way, no exceptions, naked as the day you were born), put your stuff in your locker, and then head into a room with a couple of saunas, a hot tub, a cold plunge and massage tables with surprisingly strong and energetic middle-aged Korean women diligently scrubbing away on their completely nude clients.

The key, if you’re a stereotypical American white woman with all the hang-ups and baggage you’d expect from a stereotypical American white woman, is to leave all that bullshit at the door and get comfortable fast. And also, do what the strong and energetic middle-aged Korean women tell you to do.

I learned later that the colloquial term for these no-nonsense women who spend their days scrubbing, polishing, washing, and massaging client after client is ajumma, which can be translated as auntie.

When it was my turn, my ajumma took my hand and led me to her table, and for the next 60 minutes I obeyed her every command. She scrubbed me down from head to toe, moving me this way and that, absurd amounts of dead skin sloughing from my body like I was a reptile slithering out of my skin. I turned when she told me to turn, showered when she told me to shower, and allowed her to polish and oil my skin to a level of softness I doubt I’ve experienced since I was an infant.

At one point, as I lay on the table, buffed and polished, a cucumber mask on my face, while she washed my hair, I was overcome with the tenderness of it all… these women spending their days caring for other women.

It was breathtakingly beautiful.

I returned home and listened to news reports of an American bomb dropped on an elementary school full of children while I prepared dinner for friends.

We humans are violent animals. We are intent on inflicting harm on others, on ourselves, on our environment, on everything we touch. We’ve had many years of practice and we are exceptionally good at it.

And also there are aunties. There are mothers and fathers, nurses, child care providers, hospice workers, social workers, and therapists. There is me in my kitchen, preparing a meal for friends.

The gift of caring for others is offered in a thousand different ways, in every location on the globe, imperfect people taking care of imperfect people. We are violent and we are kind. We are terrible and we are wonderful. We harm and we heal. We destroy and we repair.

All these things are true.

I do not know the name of my ajumma. She did not offer it. She did not ask my name. No attempt was made at small talk, no energy given to pointless social niceties. She was all-business, completely focused on the task at hand, and the task at hand was to care for the person on her table. To care for me.

And this is the part in the story where I offer some little nugget of insight that helps us make sense of a world that includes bombs and school children and kind aunties, tucked into a neat little package, a pretty bow covering the strain of the string that’s fighting to contain the impossible contradictions stuffed inside. But the string will break. The bow is a mirage.

Because as I type this word and as you read it, there are terrible, unspeakable things happening everywhere. And also, there is a no-nonsense middle age Korean woman diligently caring for the person on their table.

I cannot explain it, let alone contain it. I just know that both things are true.

This is the world, beautiful and terrible. May the side of us that cares overcome the side that destroys.

The week in photos

Birthday cocktails at Hotel Del Coronado.
Birthday dinner at Nado Republic.
Our server at Nado Republic and the other waitstaff got the whole room going with a birthday song, complete with a Happy Birthday sign and a sparkler, and followed by shots of Limoncello. I loved it.
The next day, after Judy and I visited the Korean spa, we gathered at our place for dinner. It was a good birthday. I felt enormously loved and cared for. ❤️

Recommended listening

I know a lot of you are already This American Life listeners, but if you haven’t heard the most recent episode of This American Life, Give A Little Whistle, please listen. It’s a story that needs to be heard.

“Every word we whisper to ourselves in the middle of the night, or proclaim boisterously in broad daylight matters.” - my friend Charlene

This week’s menu

I’m going all in on the comfort level with this week’s menu of Smoky braised beef brisket with onions, Brown butter carrots, Buttermilk whipped potatoes, and Oatmeal raisin cookies

Smoky Braised Beef Brisket with Onions

Brisket has a reputation for being dry and honestly, its earned that reputation fair and square. The problem is that brisket is a tough cut of beef that needs to be cooked low and slow for a long time to soften the muscle fibers and render them tender. This long, slow cooking often results in dry, chewy meat that even a generous spoonful of gravy or BBQ sauce won’t cover up.

The solution was inspired by a recipe I found in an issue of Cook’s Illustrated and it’s genius. Oven-braise the brisket in a sauce made from wine, broth, and caramelized onions until it’s very tender. Then, let the cooked brisket rest overnight in the sauce.

While the meat chills out in it’s saucy bath, it reabsorbs some of the juice it lost while cooking, resulting in plump, juicy slices that are far from dry.

Another benefit to this cooking method is that most of the work is done in advance. This makes it a fantastic dish to serve when you’re having guests for dinner, or on busy weeknights when you’ve had a chance to do some meal prep the weekend before.

Growing up, one of my favorite meals at my grandma’s house was brisket. And (sorry grandma), it was pretty dry. But, I still loved it. It was full of smoky flavor and later I learned that was because she added some liquid smoke.

I’ve done the same thing in this recipe, adding a couple of teaspoons of liquid smoke to the sauce along with smoked paprika and some tomato paste. The combination gives the sauce a gorgeous rich, smokey flavor that I’m certain she would approve of.

Braised Beef Brisket

Brown Buttered Carrots

Slowly cooking carrots in brown butter creates a rich, indulgent side dish that's the perfect compliment to a wide variety of main dishes. This simple recipe requires just 5 ingredients and is the perfect match for nostalgic, comforting dishes like braised brisket and meatloaf.

Brown Buttered Carrots

Buttermilk Whipped Potatoes

Buttermilk and plenty of butter gives these whipped potatoes a creamy, light, and fluffy texture and tangy flavor that is out of this world delicious. This recipe uses Russet potatoes and includes instructions for additions and substitutions.

Buttermilk Whipped Potatoes

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

I find that oatmeal cookies most often fall into two categories - thick, soft, and chewy or thin and crispy. This recipe is unusual because it produces oatmeal cookies that are thin, soft, and chewy.

You can make them whatever size you like, but I prefer to bake them into huge two-handed cookies because they are the kind of thing I crave when I need an excess of all things warm and cozy.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

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Three things I’m really into right now…

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Crispy Fried Avocado Tacos

Rebecca Blackwell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:42:59 GMT

If you’re an avocado lover, you’re probably going to want to add these tasty little tacos to your plan for the week.

This is the kind of recipe that you can easily scale to make as many tacos as you need, from two to twenty. And the combination of crispy panko and creamy avocado + cheese + all the bright fresh flavor from orange slices, quick pickled onions, and salsa verde is just plain dreamy.

This recipe is exclusively for members of The Lost Supper Club (paid subscribers).

The kind of life we wanted

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:02:27 GMT

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My grandma and I in 2007.

My grandma and I were both born on March the 11th, her in 1928 and me in 1975. She always said I was her favorite birthday gift and, thanks to my Dad, I even gave her a birthday card on the day I was born. It read, “You didn’t think I’d forget your birthday, did you?” Growing up, I kind of thought everyone shared their birthday with a grandma.

One year she bought me a card that said, “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday to we,” and when I opened it, she sang the words to me. That little song stuck and we sang it to each other every year, much to my teenage annoyance as I got a bit older. (It was only a facade, the annoyance. I didn’t really want to be too cool for our birthday song.)

There is a lot of my grandma in me. We both married at the absurdly young age of 19. I told her we were getting married before Steve had even proposed. I knew it was coming and couldn’t wait to tell her. She was, understandably, a little bit horrified and started to tell me that we were way too young until I pointed out that she was also 19 on her wedding day, and what was she going to say to that?

She was the kind of person who showed you she loved you by feeding you. I adopted this trait and passed it right along to our kids. When he was 20, our son Corey asked for the recipe for grandma’s snickerdoodles. He made her a batch in the weeks before she died, when she was still able to eat one, and she was exuberant in her praise of the young baker’s abilities.

From what I can tell, my grandma lived exactly the kind of life she wanted. The life she wanted does not resemble the life I wanted, but that’s not the point. The point is that we both knew what we wanted and then went about getting it.

With my birthday right around the corner, that’s mostly what I’m thinking about. I have a long list of regrets, of should haves and wish I would haves. There are things I wish were different and things I wish I could change. We are who we are and the demons who chased me at 13 are still in pursuit at 51, they are just a little bit slower, perhaps a little bit softer, and not nearly as scary.

But the life I have is the life I want.

Many of the choices I have been afforded are exceedingly generous in a world where choices are generally quite limited. We don’t choose where and when we are born, the people we are born to, and the circumstances we are born into. We don’t choose our personality, or our brain chemistry, or the overall state of how everything grew together before we even were allowed to take our first breath. We are born with the genetic makeup of the many generations that came before us and we had no say in its particulars. We are the product of everyone else’s choices long before we have a chance to make one of our own.

There is no such thing as a self made anyone.

I am happy to take credit and give credit to my grandma and I for creating lives we love. But our ability to do so was a pure stroke of luck.

Year by year, I am trying to see the truth in that and to not take it for granted.

This week’s menu

Crispy Ground Beef and Broccoli Bowls and Lemon Bundt Cake

Crispy Ground Beef and Broccoli Bowls

I have recently “rediscovered” ground beef. For years, I rarely used it, opting for whole cuts of meat in nearly everything that called for beef. But, over the past several months, I’ve been using it more frequently.

I’ve used it to make the homemade krautburgers of my childhood, super easy and affordable stuffed peppers topped with cheese and tortilla chips, and these cheeseburger quesadillas, which are not something I ever thought would come out of my kitchen but they are SO GOOD we can’t get enough.

What I’m trying to say is that ground beef is having a moment around here. So, a few weeks ago, when I went into the kitchen to make beef and broccoli bowls, I reached for ground beef instead of something like strips of flank steak.

My first attempt was ok, but it also lacked the texture I was hoping for. I wanted the ground beef to clump together and have a crispy exterior, almost like the edges of a smash burger. I also wanted the ground beef to be rich and flavorful all by itself, even before coating it with Asian chili sauce.

After some experimentation, I discovered that mixing ground beef with cornstarch, egg whites, soy sauce, a bit of toasted sesame oil and rice vinegar did the trick. 🙌

The idea is based on a technique called “velveting”. Velveting is most often used to improve the texture of strips of beef before cooking with vegetables over high heat. But, it works with ground beef as well, producing tender clumps of flavorful meat with a gorgeously crispy exterior.

The crispy chunks of ground beef combined with rice and veggies in a delicious, spicy Asian sauce is deeply satisfying. I hope you love it as much as we do.

Crispy Ground Beef and Broccoli Bowls

Lemon Bundt Cake with Tart Lemon Glaze

Citrus is one of my favorite flavors and as we do with things we love, I use it a LOT. So this is not the first lemon cake you will find on this site. But, I wanted something a little different from say, my lemon olive oil loaf or this show-stopping 8-layer lemon cake.

I wanted the kind of tall, generous slices you get from a bundt cake that rises all the way to the top of the pan as it bakes. Bundt cakes are both beautiful and unfussy. They stand on their own and don’t require any filling or frosting. They are a study in simplicity, easy to transport, slice, and serve.

But also, I wanted a very soft, light, and tender texture with a lot of bright lemon flavor, and this can be tricky. Lemons are highly acidic and when it comes to baking, acid is key to achieving a soft and tender texture. But, too much acid and the whole thing falls apart.

So, to add a lot of lemon flavor without a level of acid that would destroy the cake’s structure, I included a generous amount of lemon zest which I soaked for a while in lemon juice. This soak tenderizes the zest, allowing it to melt into the batter. I also added some lemon extract or lemon oil and then glazed the cake with a double layer of tart lemon icing. This produced a cake that’s exceptionally light, with a sliceable structure, and rich, buttery lemon flavor that any citrus lover will swoon over.

Lemon Bundt Cake

Next week is St. Patrick’s Day and in our home that means Corned Beef and Cabbage and Irish Apple cake

This is my all time favorite way to cook corned beef and cabbage. Corned beef brisket and cabbage cooked in a Guinness spiked broth until the meat is so tender it falls apart and the cabbage is soft and buttery.

Right before serving, glaze the brisket with brown sugar mustard sauce & serve with creamy parsley buttered potatoes.

This recipe includes instructions for making Corned Beef and Cabbage in your Slow Cooker or in your Instant Pot.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

This is a soft vanilla cake that’s subtly sweet, packed with apples, and gently flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. It’s equally delicious smothered in vanilla custard sauce or buttery whisky sauce, or eaten plain and perfectly unadorned.

I should tell you that there is some variation in what’s considered a classic Irish apple cake, so here’s what you can expect from this recipe:

Tall, thick slices of vanilla cake flavored with a hint of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves
A LOT of tart, crisp apples
A crunchy, sugary topping that’s the perfect contrast to the soft vanilla cake and tart apples (it’s my favorite part of this cake!)

Irish Apple Cake

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What happened, as best I can remember it

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:00:30 GMT

Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.

When our son was a freshman in high school he played on the junior varsity golf team. Corey had been playing golf since he was a toddler, thanks to my Dad who made him a tiny set of clubs and took him out to the back yard to show him how to swing.

My mother in law has a video of Corey and his little sister Kate, not two years between them, hitting golf balls in their front yard with Corey’s tiny set of golf clubs. Corey had a knack for it. Kate did not. Corey, a very serious little human, cared that he had a knack for it. Kate, hair flying in every direction and a smile on her face, did not.

Corey did not go to traditional high school. He attended Connections Academy, an online public school program that was originally designed for child actors and such, kids who required a normal high school education but who were spending their days doing less than normal things.

School through an online program takes up a considerably smaller portion of your day and Corey could usually get through his day’s lessons in a couple of hours. This left a lot of time for golf, guitar playing, and video games, his three favorite things.

So, as a freshman on the junior varsity golf team, he was pretty good. To secure a spot on the varsity team, you had to challenge one of the varsity team members to a game. The winner either retained or stole the varsity spot.

One day after practice Corey announced that he was going to challenge one of the varsity players for their spot. I asked him what I thought were natural follow up questions about how he’d been playing and if his scores for the past few games were as good as the varsity players.

No, he said. But, I still think I can beat him.

Today is Corey’s birthday. He should be turning 30. But the last birthday he ever celebrated was 24. And I have been trying, for weeks now, to piece together memories of him that tell me something new about who he was.

One of the things hardest to deal with when you’ve lost someone you love, is that there are no new memories. There are no new discoveries about who they are and what they think. In so many ways, at 24, we were just getting to know him.

For my daughters, my two living children, memories have a different purpose. I piece them back together in my mind to better understand who they are now. To know them better now. I bring the memories up in conversation and listen to how they remember it. All clues to the inner workings of their mind and what it’s like to be them.

I cannot do this with my son. I put him back together in my mind for my sake, to remember what it was to be me, back when I was a different person, back when I was a mother with a son.

Who was I, that day he came home and told me he was going to challenge someone for a varsity spot? It’s frustratingly hard to remember the specifics. I try to remember what it was like to see my son through my past self’s eyes, but I am reconstructing her too. I don’t remember her with accuracy. I remember her through the lens of the current moment and the current moment includes everything that came after that day.

I remember that he impressed me, my son. The audacity of it. I thought he was brave and bold and fearless. I don’t think I cautioned him. I think I encouraged him to go for it. I have always been impressed by boldness. I love a good story of the underdog. I light up in the face of those who don’t ask for permission or wait for the perfect moment and just go for it.

So, when he told me he was going for a varsity spot, it’s likely I approved. It’s likely I saw his actions through the veil of my own attitude towards fearless action.

But is that the truth? Was he fearless? Was he bold? Or did I just assign those attributes to him? Did I observe his actions and then decide who he was?

Probably. Almost certainly.

Memory is like building a vision board. We flip through all the moments of our past, the ones our brains saw fit to encode, and cut out pieces, pasting them to the board, bits and pieces from other moments, other scenes, other circumstances, all in mid-action and mid-conversation, all out of context. Then we stand back and say, “yes, that’s how that was.” But was it? I don’t know.

If the person is no longer around to tell us the truth, does it even matter if we remember them accurately? They are no longer the author of their life. We are.

Here are things I don’t know for sure about the moment Corey told me about going for the varsity spot: I don’t know where we were. In my mind, we are in our house. I am in the kitchen and Corey is across the counter, having just come home from practice. This doesn’t make sense because as a freshman he wasn’t driving so how did he get home without me? Perhaps he told me in the car. Perhaps he didn’t tell me until we got home. I don’t remember.

Were we the only two people in the room? I think so. But again, I can’t be certain.

What was I doing? Was I giving him my full attention or was I distracted? Was he seeking encouragement or approval or just offering information? Was he excited? Was he nervous? What did he need from me in that moment? Did I provide it?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I tell the story as a way of describing who Corey was, but it’s really a story about who I thought Corey was. It’s what I have. It’s all that’s left.

Earlier this week, Kate and I talked about the pointlessness of what ifs and what should have beens. It’s easy to go there. To say things like, he should be turning 30. We should be celebrating with him.

But there’s no such thing as should have. There is only what is. There is only what happened.

And here is what happened: 30 years ago I gave birth to a baby boy. I loved him.

I love him.

The week in photos

We are in San Diego at a resort-style RV park where we can see the city skyline and the bay from our back deck.
Our site has a patio with a large propane fire pit and Adirondack chairs. I take my ipad with me in the evenings to read by the fire.
The park also has a cafe with a roof top patio that faces west and it’s a great place to have a drink, order dinner, and watch the sunset. In case you were wondering, living in a resort does not suck.
Several times a week, we get on the motorcycle and head to Coronado beach, which is only about 10 minutes away from our RV park. It’s our favorite beach and our favorite place to spend golden hour.
Hotel Del Coronado is a gorgeous hotel on Coronado beach built in 1888. Last year, I found this mug in one of the hotel gift shops and fell in love with it. The design is taken from some of the original wallpaper in the hotel and there’s something about it that captures me. Sadly, the mug broke a few months later but I was absolutely thrilled last week to discover that they still had some in stock and it’s back to being my favorite mug.
Steve and I have always stopped when we could to walk around marinas but now that we know how to sail and have a sailboat of our own, the experience is more meaningful. This one is in Oceanside.
We got to enjoy some time on the water last weekend on a sunset sailboat tour of the San Diego coastline. The boat had beanbags on the bow, a brilliant idea that we might steal for our own boat!

This week’s menu

Salmon Bowls and Almond Cake.

Salmon bowls

These super simple, extremely versatile salmon bowls are the kind of thing I love to make when I want a meal that tastes decadent, feels virtuous, and doesn’t take a lot of effort. In other words, salmon bowls are on the menu all the time over here.

This is one of those meals that can easily be scaled up for a crowd. The recipe makes enough for two main dish servings. If you’re cooking for more people, simply increase the amount of rice, salmon, and veggies.

Saucy Salmon and Rice Bowls

Almond Cake

I’m not sure when I first made this cake, but it was many years ago. Most likely, it was after reading Thomas Keller’s book Bouchon, but it’s difficult to remember.

Regardless of the origins of this particular recipe, versions of this simple one-layer almond cake have been around for centuries. A quick internet search will turn up a wide variety of recipes, served plain or dressed up with whipped cream and fruit.

This particular recipe includes a generous combination of almond paste and butter, a surprisingly small amount of sugar, plus amaretto mixed into the batter and brushed over the cake after it’s baked.

The result is a decadently buttery cake that’s incredibly moist and tender, richly flavored with almonds, and not overly sweet.

We fell in love with it the first time I made it and it’s been a favorite in our house ever since. This is also a very simple and easy cake to make and will keep well for several days.

I’ve made it for every occasion you can think of, dinner parties, birthdays, work parties, holiday gatherings, and just because I was craving it. It’s one of those cakes that’s gorgeous in it’s simplicity and always the perfect thing.

I honestly don’t know what took me so long to share the recipe, but here it is. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Almond Cake

The February Cooking Club!

joined me this week to co-host the February cooking club and friends, I’m telling you, cooking together is a fun way to get dinner on the table. We made Salmon Bowls (scroll up for the recipe). Betty showed us how to slow roast salmon to perfection, I demonstrated a super simple method for poached salmon, we made two different sauces and then enjoyed a delicious meal together.

The monthly cook alongs are exclusively for members of the Lost Supper Club (paid subscribers). Look for info about the next Cooking Club soon!

In the meantime, here’s this month’s recording.

February Cooking Club Recording

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Saucy Salmon and Rice Bowls

Rebecca Blackwell — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:37:41 GMT

Rice + veggies + salmon + sauce

The rice: Use any kind of rice you like, but be mindful that different varieties require different cooking times. White rice cooks relatively quickly, in about 20 minutes. Brown and wild rice can take 45 minutes to an hour or longer. If using white rice, it’s a good idea to rinse it first: put the rice in a fine mesh strainer and rinse it under cold water until the water runs clear. This rinses off excess starch for fluffier, less sticky cooked rice.

The veggies: The kind of veggies you use is up to you! Choose one or a couple of these options: Asparagus, Broccoli, Broccolini, Broccoli rabe, Baby Carrots OR Large Peeled Carrots, Cauliflower, Fresh of frozen corn, and Fresh or frozen green beans. Salmon bowls are also a great way to use up leftover veggies!

The salmon: This recipe includes instructions for poaching salmon but check out the Recipe Notes for my favorite roasted salmon recipe. Both methods rely on slow and gentle cooking to produce tender, flaky salmon that’s moist and flavorful.

The sauce: This recipe uses Aji Sauce (Peruvian Green Sauce), which is a bright green, slightly spicy, creamy herb sauce that’s made in the blender. But scroll down to the Recipe Notes section for Asian gingery sauce which is another great option!

*NOTE: The recipe below will give you about a cup and a half of Aji sauce, which is more than you’ll need for two people. If you’re cooking for more than two, there’s no need to increase the amount of sauce.

Recipe notes

For extra flavorful rice, use vegetable broth instead of water. I like to use Better Than Bouillon Vegetable Base mixed with water. If the broth you use is seasoned, you’ll likely want to omit the salt.
Consider poaching extra salmon just for the leftovers. It takes no more time to poach 4 salmon fillets than 2 and the leftover meat can be used in another dish later in the week, like this recipe for poached salmon salad.
The easiest way to know when salmon is done cooking is to gently press down on the surface of the fish with a fork. If the salmon flakes, separating easily along the white lines running through the fish, it’s finished cooking. Once it’s reached this point, remove salmon from the pan immediately to avoid overcooking.
These salmon bowls are endlessly versatile. They are a great way to use up leftover veggies. To add some crunch, sprinkle on some chopped roasted nuts or french fried onions. If you’d like, opt for some roasted salmon instead of poached. This recipe from is my favorite: Slow Roasted Salmon.
Instead of Aji sauce, try this Asian Gingery Sauce recipe from . Add all of the following ingredients to a jar with a screw top lid: ½ cup cider vinegar, ½ cup molasses, ⅓ cup canola oil, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, 2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger, 1 tablespoon minced fresh garlic, 2 chopped green onions (chop the white and light green parts only). Shake vigorously until well combined.
How to use leftover Aji Sauce: This sauce is delicious on so many things. Try it over beef, chicken, pork, fish, pasta salad, sandwiches, eggs, and absolutely any kind of vegetable. But, besides these salmon bowls, my favorite way to eat Aji sauce is over breakfast tostadas with scrambled eggs, country fried potatoes, and some chopped tomatoes.

Recommended equipment:

My 3.8 quart enameled cast iron braiser is the hardest working pan in my kitchen. It’s visible in photos of so many of my recipes, including this one, because I really do use it for almost everything. Unless I’m making food for a crowd, it’s the perfect size for nearly everything I make. Braisers come in a variety of sizes, but I’ve found that 3.6 quarts or larger are the most useful and versatile.

A few more recipes for seafood lovers

Adobo Fish Tacos: These vibrant, flavorful fish tacos include flaky white fish cooked in a delicious red-chili-based Mexican adobo sauce and topped with citrus fruit, salsa verde, and crispy fried onions. Every bite is a riot of flavors in the best possible way.
Light and Crispy Beer Battered Fried Fish: This Crispy Beer Battered Fried Fish is light, flaky and packed with fresh flavor. Serve with tartar sauce, cabbage slaw, and French fries for delicious fish and chips at home.
Weeknight Sushi Bowls: This is how to enjoy delicious sushi at home in about 30 minutes. Perfectly seasoned bowls of sushi rice topped with fresh veggies, chives, avocado, sesame seeds and wild caught tuna fillets. Add even more sushi flavor with spicy, creamy sushi sauce or wasabi soy sauce.

Poached Salmon Salad with Honey Lime Dressing

Rebecca Blackwell — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:58:45 GMT

This recipe is for when you want something light but also delicious and don’t want to spend a lot of time making it. To be honest, that’s where I’m at most days and this salad fits the bill 1000%.

I love this method for poaching any kind of fish: Simply lay some lemon slices across the bottom of a skillet, sprinkle in some chopped shallots, then add some water and some wine (or dry vermouth). Lay the fish over the lemon slices, bring the liquid to a boil, and cover the pan. Let the fish cook at a very gentle simmer for about 10 minutes.

So simple.

Adding alcohol to the pan lowers the boiling point of the poaching liquid. This produces more vapor which helps the fish cook more evenly.

Laying the fish on top of lemon slices creates a part poaching and part steaming situation that prevents the fish’s flavor from being washed away and keeps the bottom of the fish from overcooking.

Like a lot of the recipes I publish here, this salad is easy to scale up or down for as many or a few people as you’re cooking for. Plan on about a half of a pound of salmon per person.

And, by the way, the honey lime dressing here is just a variation of this basic vinaigrette recipe, which is endlessly customizable for any kind of salad.

Start to finish, this salad will be on the table and ready to eat in 30 minutes or less.

Recipe notes:

The easiest way to salmon is done cooking is to gently press down on the surface of the fish with a fork. If the salmon flakes, separating easily along the white lines running through the fish, it’s finished cooking. Once it’s reached this point, remove salmon from the pan immediately to avoid overcooking.
As is the case with most salads, this one comes with plenty of variations. Use any kind of salad dressing you like and use different or additional veggies.

Serving suggestions:

When I make this salad for Steve and I for lunch, I like to serve it with slices of crusty bread, toasted if the bread is a day or two old.

But, this is also one of my favorite things to make when we have guests over for dinner on summer evenings. Everything can be prepped in advance, leaving only the salad assembly for the last minute.

When entertaining, I usually step it up and serve homemade bread. Sometimes I make a loaf of homemade sourdough, other times I opt for homemade dinner rolls, flaky buttermilk biscuits, or blueberry corn muffins.

Homemade Dinner Rolls: These dinner rolls have been a staple recipe in my family for decades. They are easy to make, soft and pillowy, and have the perfect amount of chew.
Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits: These are soft on the inside, slightly crispy on the outside, and rise to impressive heights with layer after delicious layer.
Blueberry Corn Muffins: These blueberry cornbread muffins are tender and buttery, lightly sweetened with honey and brown sugar, and packed with blueberries.

Double Chocolate Rye Muffins With Miso and Maple

Rebecca Blackwell — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:02:34 GMT

“Umami” is not typically a word we use to describe muffins or other sweet treats, but these deeply chocolate muffins are full of it. The combination of rye flour, white miso paste, and maple syrup gives them a rich, complex flavor that is so much more interesting (and addictive) than your typical chocolate muffin.

To be clear, no one will mistake these for anything other than chocolate muffins. The rye flour, miso, and maple are supporting actors in this show, and honestly deserve an award for the way they make chocolate shine.

For everyone who loves chocolate for breakfast as much as I do

Chocolate Chip Buttermilk Scones with Cinnamon Streusel: Buttery, flaky, and filled with the flavors of chocolate and cinnamon, these chocolate chip buttermilk scones with cinnamon streusel are unapologetically indulgent.
Chocolate Chip Muffins: Sometimes you want a muffin that is the epitome of simple, homey goodness. The kind of muffin that says, I know I’m not fancy, but I will never, ever let you down. That’s what these chocolate chip muffins are.
Chocolate Blackberry Muffins: These chocolate blackberry muffins are such a treat! They are packed with juicy blackberries and chocolate chips, and are so rich and fudgy they are almost brownie-like.
Double Chocolate Muffins: These chocolate muffins are rich and chocolaty enough to satisfy even the most dedicated chocolate lover and guaranteed to start your day in the sweetest, most delicious way.
Vegan Banana Chocolate Muffins with Miso Maple Glaze: As a card-carrying chocoholic, these are exactly the kind of generously proportioned, dreamy, creamy, banana chocolate muffins that I would happily sink my teeth into every morning for the rest of my life.

What ever happened to Edna?

Rebecca Blackwell — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:02:28 GMT

I wrote my first People Watching story when we were here in in San Diego last year. A few spaces down from us was a woman who fascinated me. I never met her. She was only visible out my kitchen window, and as I chopped and sautéed, I named her Edna and gave her a history and a story. Then I put it on paper and gave it to an artist and asked if she would use her sketch pad to bring Edna to life.

And suddenly, there she was.

Even though the story I wrote was entirely fictitious, the spark came from a real person and since our arrival in San Diego last week, I’ve found myself wondering what happened to her. I suppose I’m wondering about both the real woman and the one born from my imagination. Is she still traveling around in her dilapidated RV? If I drove through the RV park where we were last year, would I find her there again? Did she ever finish painting her front door?

It’s been a year since I’ve shared the story of Edna, and many of you are new to this newsletter since then, so I’m republishing it in this issue along with a menu that I imagine Edna might have made for herself. She would serve it, of course, on mismatched plates and eat it outside, by herself, with thrift store flatware, next to a campfire. Since Edna uses her broken oven to store her clothes, the meal would be cooked outside.

And I can’t imagine Edna using a recipe. There’s a service here in SoCal that delivers boxes of “ugly produce and rescued food” and I imagine that’s exactly how Edna might prefer to do her grocery shopping, combining the ingredients in interesting ways to create meals as mismatched as the rest of her belongings.

So this week’s menu includes Blackstone Fried Rice, which can be made with leftovers or raw ingredients and pretty much anything in your refrigerator. And Crispy Cabbage Salad which can be prepared with any kind of veggies you like and is a great way to use up leftover bread.

Blackstone Fried Rice

Fried rice is exactly the kind of thing a Blackstone griddle was made for. You can, of course, make fried rice in a skillet or wok on the stovetop but it’s important to maintain a high temperature throughout the cooking process.

There are 2 important things to keep in mind when making fried rice:

Medium grain rice works best (my favorite is Jasmine rice). Rinse it well before cooking to wash away excess starch and spread it out on a baking sheet to dry before frying.
Cook everything for fried rice at very high heat.

If you’re cooking fried rice in a skillet or wok, it’s important to fry the rice in batches, adding no more than about a cup of rice to the skillet at a time to prevent the rice from getting all clumpy.

On a Blackstone you can cook the rice all at once. Not only is the cooking surface larger on a Blackstone griddle, the cast iron surface heats evenly and holds the heat much better than most skillets.

Blackstone Fried Rice

Crunchy Cabbage Salad with Toasted Bread Crumbs and Parmesan

The concept for this salad is so simple and adaptable to any kind of veggies you like, with or without the cabbage. And, it’s an excellent way to use up leftover bread. Here’s what we’ve got going on here:

Cabbage and veggies cooked at very high heat until charred (you could also do this on a Blackstone griddle or a grill).
Drizzle the veggies with a basic vinaigrette.
Top with crispy garlic bread crumbs and some parmesan cheese.

The result is a very satisfying salad with so much flavor and a plenty of crunch. It’s delicious served with almost anything but is also hearty enough to serve all on its own. How much you make is up to you, but be sure to make enough bread crumbs to include a generous proportion of crispy crumbs to veggies.

Crunchy Cabbage Salad

For dessert: Pineapple Coconut Cake with Toasted Coconut Frosting

This is NOT a cake that Edna would make. But it is a cake that many of you will be interested in and it’s a brand new recipe, so I’m sharing it anyway.

Let’s just set the scene for this decadent tropical pineapple coconut cake, shall we? Here’s what we’ve got going on here...

Take two layers of juicy pineapple cake with real fruit in the batter that are drenched in crushed pineapple syrup.
Spread a very generous layer of rich toasted coconut pastry cream in between the layers of cake.
Then cover the whole thing with toasted coconut frosting.

This cake is a rich and creamy tropical dream on a plate. And just like its coconut cream cake cousin, don’t even try to be dainty with the serving sizes. Moderation can wait. This is the kind of cake best served in thick, messy slices and eaten with abandon.

Pineapple Coconut Cake

Edna

Illustrations by

What you would never know about Edna just by looking at her is that she has quite a lot of money. Less than some of course, but much more than most.

She lives in a dilapidated Fleetwood camper, circa 1987, with a half painted door and some ratty bed sheets, one white and one brown, and another that maybe used to be either white or brown, that she likes to tie from the camper to whatever trees or bushes are nearby to create a sort of enclosed front yard.

The other thing you’d never know about Edna is that she’s only 37. Built the same year as her camper and less dilapidated than she appears.

She likes to wear shorts over her pants and threadbare aprons over thrift store floral house dresses and is always bundled up even when it’s warm.

She shuffles around in her thick soled, orthopedic tennis shoes and moves with the kind of hunch that you typically only see in people who are much older than 37.

If you found yourself in San Diego camped next to Edna, you would not suspect any of these things about her and you could count yourself in the majority because no one knows her. Not really.

She’s the kind of person that many people know of, but don’t actually know.

The truth is that most people steer clear of Edna because she frightens them. It’s not that they feel physically threatened by her. She does not seem like an ax murderer and no one worries that she’ll steal their things or kidnap their children.

Rather, they feel frightened in that way that makes them cross to the other side of the street rather than risk getting caught up in a conversation that might be difficult to escape.

Or, frightened in the way that people are when confronted by someone whom they perceive to have a lot of overwhelming problems. The fact that the problems may not be real, that they were invented and then assigned to Edna, does not make it better. It usually makes it worse. Problems that exist inside the mind are usually much worse.

Edna does not see any of this as a problem.

Edna does not see much of anything as a problem.

Her half painted door, one side white and the other side school bus yellow, is the consequence of having gotten halfway through the project and realizing she didn’t want to continue.

Edna rarely does anything she doesn’t want to do and on the rare occasion when she discovers that she doesn’t want to do something that she’s already doing, she stops doing it.

She doesn’t particularly like school bus yellow anyway. She knows that now.

If you were to tell Edna that she should finish painting her door, she might look at you as if she doesn’t speak your language. Edna doesn’t believe in the tyranny of should and should not.

Maybe it’s her mother’s fault for not being diligent about imprinting all the unspoken rules and allowing her to pick out her own outfits no matter how outlandish or inappropriate.

Or maybe Edna wouldn’t have heard the rules no matter what.

Edna loves old, broken things. When she spends too much time around shiny new things in shiny new places, she starts to feel peaky. Like that achy, ominous feeling in your spine right before you come down with the flu.

Her treasures spill out of her camper, piling up on the picnic table, in the back seat of her faded red hatchback, and in neat little stacks around the fire pit. She keeps things where she likes with no interest in the fact that most people keep their waffle irons in the kitchen and their underwear in the bedroom.

What’s it to her where you keep your waffle iron or your underwear? The oven hasn’t worked in years and her limited wardrobe fits inside it almost perfectly.

The bed sheet walls she hangs outside to enclose her space are more for the containment of her things than for privacy.

She has no use for privacy because she has no use for the opinions of other people. It’s more than that…

She has no use for other people. They are, mostly, superfluous.

Even though she could go anywhere, she rarely leaves San Diego. She likes the weather and the beaches (who doesn’t?) and also, two of the fancy RV resorts don’t have the restrictions of other resorts.

Most RV “resorts” (sometimes the name doesn’t match the experience) don’t allow campers from 1987 and absolutely will not allow you to hang bed sheets in your space.

Their uniformed staff point to the piles of stuff on the picnic table and then to rule #487 that says, clearly, “clean up your trash.”

The piles are not trash. But there’s no point in trying to explain.

She is aware that there are places, like the beach, where people expect her to be and therefore pay her little attention. And other places where people don’t expect her to be and therefore watch her very closely. Like the gift shops at Hotel de Coronado, where they’ll let her stay if she buys something and doesn’t linger too long.

She likes the floor of the hotel with all the old photographs and the gift shop filled with new things that look old. She always buys something then drops it off, unopened, at the local goodwill on her way home or hands it to one of the homeless people on Park Blvd.

Or Liberty Public Market where the vendors eye her nervously as she wanders through the colorful stalls filled with handbags, and jewelry, and candles. She could buy anything she wants.

But she doesn’t want.

Instead, she goes back to her camper and washes the bird shit from the collection of old water bottles on her picnic table and lights a campfire where she animatedly tells herself stories and laughs at her own jokes.

What you would never know about Edna just by looking at her is that she enjoys her own company most of all.

Have you registered for the February Cooking Club?

What is the Cooking Club? Live Zoom classes held once a month just for members of the Lost Supper Club (paid subscribers). This month we are making Salmon Bowls. They are fresh and flavorful and come with plenty of options to customize them as you wish. So, just like we like it. Here's where you'll find all the information....","cta":"Read full story","showBylines":true,"size":"lg","isEditorNode":true,"title":"The February Cooking Club!","publishedBylines":[{"id":126756528,"name":"Rebecca Blackwell","bio":"Nomad, cook, baker, food photographer, and passionate people watcher. Optimist to the core even when life is unbearable. Driven by new experiences, creativity, and words.","photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!l3xr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5a786e92-bb47-4aa7-8b65-00ccc2f3ddde_1200x1600.jpeg","is_guest":false,"bestseller_tier":null}],"post_date":"2026-02-13T15:29:02.505Z","cover_image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OF7T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcced5a87-4344-4d12-a82f-b53f74f9312a_1200x1200.jpeg","cover_image_alt":null,"canonical_url":"https://www.rebeccablackwell.com/p/the-february-cooking-club","section_name":null,"video_upload_id":null,"id":187866027,"type":"newsletter","reaction_count":1,"comment_count":1,"publication_id":2222296,"publication_name":"Let's Get Lost","publication_logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gkK4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb28841d-6089-4ef8-ace1-f6e7e5e92bfb_1280x1280.png","belowTheFold":true,"youtube_url":null,"show_links":null,"feed_url":null}">

February Dinner Party!

Once a month, my friend Betty Williams sends out a dinner party post that includes recipes, conversation-starting questions, and even a Spotify playlist. The goal is to make it easy to throw a casual dinner party and this month’s theme revolves around one of my favorite books and television series - A Gentleman in Moscow!

Latvian Stew, Cucumber Dill Salad, Russian-style Rye Bread, Napoleon Mille Feuille, and Elderflower Martini. St. Basil's Cathedral photo by Olga Nayda on Unsplash.

This post is exclusively for Betty’s paid subscribers BUT if you’re a member of The Lost Supper Club, you get it too! Send Betty a direct message and she’ll give you access!

Betty Eatz Newsletter

February Dinner Party with Rebecca Blackwell

Hello from sunny Southern California! If you like tacos, kimchi, seasonal produce, and bright flavors, you’re in the right place…

3 months ago · 16 likes · 10 comments · Betty Williams

❤️ Did you know that if you hit the heart or recycle symbol at the top or bottom of this post, it makes it easier for other people to find this newsletter?

Crunchy Cabbage Salad with Toasted Bread Crumbs and Parmesan

Rebecca Blackwell — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:54:37 GMT

Cabbage and veggies cooked at very high heat until charred (you could also do this on a Blackstone griddle or a grill).
Drizzle the veggies with a basic vinaigrette.
Top with crispy garlic bread crumbs and some parmesan cheese.

Super Easy Basic Vinaigrette

Making a basic vinaigrette takes about 5 minutes, allows you to make only as much as you need, and is a kind of blank slate for incorporating whatever flavors you like.

At it’s most basic a vinaigrette is nothing more than oil and vinegar (or citrus juice). Oil and vinegar do not like to combine and honestly, you don’t have to combine them at all. You could simply drizzle your salad with a bit of oil followed by some vinegar. Or stir oil and vinegar together in a bowl with a pinch of salt and pepper, drizzle that over your salad and be done with it.

However, if you don’t do something to emulsify the vinegar and oil (force them to combine), you’ll end up with oil clinging to the top of your salad and all the vinegar pooling at the bottom of your plate or bowl. Also, the greens in your salad will wilt faster.

In contrast, an emulsified vinaigrette clings to salad greens, providing an actual “dressing” that flavors each and every bite. It also keeps the greens crisp and fresh tasting for longer.

So, taking a moment to fully emulsify vinegar or lemon juice and oil is essential to a salad that’s crisp, fresh tasting, and full of whatever flavor you’re hoping to get from the vinaigrette.

The easiest way to emulsify a vinaigrette is to include a surfactant - an ingredient that attracts both water (vinegar) and oil.

There are three surfactants that work well in vinaigrette: mustard, mayonnaise, and honey. I like to use a little bit of all three. Here’s the basic ratio:

2 parts oil to 1 part vinegar or lemon juice
1 teaspoon each of mustard, honey, and mayonnaise
Additional flavoring: chopped shallots, salt and pepper + anything else you want to add. At the moment, I’m obsessed with adding some crushed roasted almonds that I’ve pulverized in the food processor. OMG, it’s so good! Here’s a list of more flavoring ideas.

How to make it: Add the vinegar or lemon juice to a bowl and add the mustard, honey, mayonnaise, shallots (if using), salt and pepper, and any other flavorings you’re adding. Use a fork to whisk it all together then pour in the oil while continuing to whisk. In mere seconds, the dressing will come together in a delicious, creamy sauce that will cling to your salad and flavor each and every bite.

Let's Get Lost

5 time zones in 10 days and Carnitas Taquitos

This week’s menu

Crispy Carnitas Taquitos with Roasted Pineapple Salsa

Low Alcohol Margaritas

Hummingbird Cupcakes with Coconut Cream Cheese Buttercream

Recommended reading

Announcing The Food Writers Business Lab!

Here’s where to find out more

Low Alcohol Margaritas

Recipe Notes:

Serving Suggestions

Welcome to small town, USA

This issue is a reheat

From the local saloon to the grocery store, this is Small Town, USA

Friends from Louisiana that we met in Wisconsin and who visited us in Montana

Poblano corn chowder

Coconut Pineapple Rice Pudding

Pepper jack potatoes

Homemade muffin mix

My 10 Favorite Cookbooks (as of today)

Humans are funny and ridiculous and other obvious statements

This issue is a reheat

Hello from our home state of Colorado!

5 Things to make next week

Red lentil and oxtail stew

Double chocolate rye cookies

Breakfast tacos

Sangria mocktail

A fun, unique idea for easy entertaining

This issue is a reheat

The build your own soup bar!

The Build Your Own Soup Bar

Every good bowl of soup begins with really good broth

Delicious flavor profiles for your broth

It’s also important to add at least one ingredient that adds some umami to the broth.

How to thicken and enrich the broth

1. To thicken the broth with a roux:

2. To thicken the broth with a cornstarch slurry:

3. To thicken the broth with starchy vegetables or grains:

4. How to thicken broth with cooked beans or lentils:

5. How to thicken and enrich broth with cream and eggs:

Soup bar ingredients and toppings

Top tips for ingredients for your soup bar:

Putting it all together

Bread and dessert options

Two more ideas before wrapping this up:

Not Believing Our Own Bullshit

This issue is a reheat

Not believing our own bullshit

Recipes for citrus lovers

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

Homemade Mushroom Pizza

Crispy fried avocado tacos

Ingredients:

Crispy fried avocado and citrus salad

Orange drizzle cake

BBQ chicken nachos

Creamy Mushroom Soup with Gruyere Crisps

Recipe Notes:

Serving suggestions

Apple Dutch Baby

Recipe Notes:

A few more cozy, apple dipped recipes

IRL. But with magic.

A few photos from the Food Writer’s Retreat

This Week’s Menu

Creamy Mushroom Chicken and Rice

Homemade Honey Wheat Bread

Brown Butter Citrus Shortbread Cookies

Chicken Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce

Recipe Notes

More creamy, saucy, comforting pasta recipes

Seat of my pants cooking

Seat of My Pants Cooking

The impossible contradictions we live with every day

The week in photos

Recommended listening

This week’s menu

Smoky Braised Beef Brisket with Onions