What I Cooked & Ate in a Tiny Home Cabin in Rural Wisconsin
Hello, it has been a busy summer.
As some of you may already know, my partner and I threw a glorious love celebration (biggest party of my life so far) in early June. Our people flew in from all over the world to play together, eat our fill, hug each other, and to be together again after 1, 5, 7 years. It was incredible, powerful, and very vulnerable… in a good way! I wrote about my sentiments around the cake in this post, in case you missed it.
Sadly, I caught COVID at the tail end of my trip which has put me out of commission after I was already burnt out from hustling too hard (yikes). That’s COVIDx2 and bronchitis in just 6 months. It’s been a shock to me mentally and physically, especially after being extremely careful and not catching COVID those initial 3 years.
After a few months to a year of BIG activity, I dragged my exhausted, calm, homebody partner with me on a trip that I planned on my phone in just 2 1/2 days. My heart told me that, this year, our annual Midwestern summer road trip should first take us west to chase quiet in a design-conscious tiny house on a farm in rural Wisconsin. We were promised a grill, single-burner kitchen set-up, and a 2-person sauna for use at our leisure.
The next leg took us further west to Saint Paul/Minneapolis, where I hoped we’d be able to humbly experience the lively food culture that I know so many immigrant communities — Somali, Hmong, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Salvadoran — have built over the last few decades.
The wedding planning had me creatively and socially at a deficit, so the Wisconsin leg took shape as a creative retreat, a nice respite. The Cities would be a “mini-moon” trip, where we’d explore the city as lovers, as friends, as people chasing beauty and knowledge and connection. I wanted to learn.
A place 6 hours away is still a new place. So is the route you don’t usually take home. Or the place you’ve been meaning to try, just down the street.
This post is about what I cooked and ate in that cabin in Wisconsin, but it’s also a meditation on what it means to be confused, at rest, in metamorphosis. My body is forcing me to be still, and yet I also have the privilege of experiencing a life with so much less chaos than ever before. More joy than ever before. The world is burning, and I have been able to carve out some peace in it. It’s what I’ve been asking for all along. I am blessed.
This is about what I cooked and what I ate when I ran away from the city to a place many of my friends and comrades have warned me about. I had to find out for myself. This is about what I did when I felt utterly exasperated, and yet too restless and frustrated to continue going about my day carrying the weight of existential angst, of curiosity, of yearning for more.
This is me, getting back to the basics. This is what I had in my fridge. This is what I imagined I would eat. This is what I brought to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. This is what I unwrapped, washed, cleaned, sliced, lit on fire, drenched, stabbed, photographed, shared, thought about.
You are what you eat.
Love,
V