Decluttering Tricks and Heavenly Carrots 🥕
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start cooking familiar things through unfamiliar eyes, following the 20min-20$ rule, and celebrating any root's desire to go to Heaven
Hi there!
They say that pressure makes diamonds, but the metaphor works better than the science.
For those shiny gems, you need the right combination of pressure, temperature, and carbon source.
Sometimes, pressure is just pressure. It can cook rice quickly or break you.
June is coming, I bet you need some decompression.
I certainly do.
Piero
✹Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness. The novel draws upon Vuong's real-life experiences in the service industry, as well as elder care.
Make It Dirty
British Filipino filmmaker Jill Damatac chronicles her family's 22-year existence as undocumented immigrants in America, weaving together brutal personal history with Filipino recipes that serve as both cultural anchor and survival tool. Unlike nostalgic food memoirs, Damatac's kitchen becomes a space of reckoning—where dishes like sisig aren't cozy inheritance but reminders of colonial exploitation, where SpaghettiOs represent the diet of American poverty, and where learning to cook her birth country's food becomes an act of documenting herself into existence.
Dirty Kitchen. A Memoir of Food and Family by Jill Damatac
→ Shortplot: 🇵🇭 🪪 🍝 🍚
Do not cook new things, cook things new
Last week, I was watching a YouTube video about Ernst Haas. He was an Austrian photographer who revolutionized color photography in the 1950s and never sought spectacular subjects.
Instead, he transformed the mundane into poetry through motion blur, selective focus, and imperfect cuts that conveyed feeling over literal documentation. Haas understood, somehow, that innovation doesn't require exotic ingredients.
It requires seeing familiar things through unfamiliar eyes.
This philosophy echoes in the kitchens of chefs. I'll go with two Netflix Chef's Table examples.
René Redzepi, who turned Nordic foraging into haute cuisine at Noma, earning four "World's Best Restaurant" titles in the 2010s. Or Grant Achatz at Alinea reimagined American comfort food through molecular gastronomy, serving memories rather than meals. Both chefs took carrots, potatoes, and herbs—ingredients any grandmother would recognize—and presented them as edible stories.
The magic wasn't in discovering new flavors. It was in discovering new ways to make the familiar feel extraordinary. Sometimes the most profound innovations come not from adding complexity, but from stripping away assumptions about how things should be done.
It can be a good exercise for us all.
🧈Let's Steal This Butter Cookie (★recipe)🫙The NYTimes Visual Guide for Storing Condiments 🍫Raspberry Brownies (★recipe) 🧘♀️I Love This Decluttering Hack: If You Can Replace It in 20 Minutes With 20$, Trash It 🌮Selena Gomez's Cheesy Chicken Tortillla Casserole (★recipe) 🔥BBQ's Sides (★recipe) 🥭Fancy a Tropical Ganache? (★recipe) 🥔This Might Be Fun: Potato Foam (★recipe) 🔘This Dotted Bread Cooked in Hot Pebbles is something, it Reminds the Iranian Sangak (★recipe)
How America Became Meat Stick Nation
Adam Chandler/ Sherwood
The US meat stick market has exploded to $3 billion annually, driven by "better-for-you" brands like Chomps and Righteous Felons that emphasize clean ingredients and attractive packaging. These premium products have moved from gas station impulse buys to planned grocery purchases, with Americans now buying multipacks for daily snacking.
Supply Chains Are Us
David A. Mindell / The MIT Press Reader
Supply chains are vast networks connecting farms to your kitchen, with each ingredient traveling through multiple tiers of suppliers before reaching your plate. When you buy food online or throw out a moldy strawberry, you're participating in a global system that embodies ethical choices about farming conditions, environmental impact, and food waste. Unlike tech's "disruption" ethos, food supply chains prioritize reliability—keeping fresh ingredients flowing smoothly from farm to table.
