The impossible contradictions we live with every day

+ Smokey Braised Beef Brisket, Brown Buttered Carrots, Buttermilk Whipped Potatoes, and Oatmeal Cookies

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.

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.

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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.

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The week in photos

1. Birthday cocktails at Hotel Del Coronado.

2. Birthday dinner at Nado Republic.

3. 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.

4. 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. ❤️

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Three things I’m really into right now…

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