october '21 pt. ii
welcome newcomers to eat with your ears— a bi-monthly-ish newsletter devoted to the food eaten and music heard in one month of michael thorson’s life.
it frequently diverges into countless obsessions from poetry, to physics, to arboriculture (love them trees), to chinese tea cultivars. it’s not clear how anything in this newsletter—or in my life—is connected… but this is my attempt to draw lines between the far reaching corners.
let’s think of eat with your ears as a digital dinner table. you have no clue who the other guests at the table are, but someone is going to serve your inbox a hot, steaming, delectable plate of recipes, sounds, and images every month. eat with your ears believes that the best company is formed during the pleasure of sharing a meal. unfortunately, there isn’t a table big enough to fit all the people i love, so an e-meal will need to do… get it?! like email? but food…?
eat with your ears newsletter is a table of strangers and strange ideas linked together through quality food and music. thank’s for joining me at dinner.
amuse bouche
a bite sized piece to cleanse your palette and prepare your appetite— a poem, a song, maybe a photo to welcome you to the digital dinner table.
Wish - W.S. Merwin
Please one more
kiss in the kitchen
before we turn the lights off
The Man Who Has Many Answers - Mary Oliver
The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.
While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.
the morning stew
[indie rock / r&b / chill out playlist]
always pair your morning brew with a little morning stew— a music station of songs for before the coffee hits. like my grandmother’s winter soup, these songs are full of surprises—who knows you’ll get but god knows you’ll be full as hell by the time it’s over.
last month’s sound was full of late summer fatigue but spiced with optimistic desire for the calm of autumn. in japan they call this late-summer feeling natsubate (pronounced nat-soo-ba-tay for the dirty minds on this mailing list). natsubate is the feeling “where you look outside your window and see a beautiful day, but you can’t seem to get off of your sofa because all of the energy has drained from your body.” lethargy craves overcast days. this month, i embraced natsubate with a playlist of luscious melancholia to spark a little nostalgic smile while gaze out my sunny window on a workday.
there’s no “skip track” on the radio.
what’s cooking?
devoted to foods i ate this month that i wish i shared with all of you. the what’s cooking column simulates a meal across space and time using visual / textual representations of food that YOU can recreate in your own home. the future is now, i’m emailing you flavor [some assembly required]
the war is over, and guess what? oats won. if you’re looking for mother nature’s most filling meal or disproportionate muscular gains, oats are there for you. i used to boil my breakfast grains with blueberries and brown sugar until they resembled an off-gray bird feed. at some point in my corporate career, i started optimizing my morning routine and soaked my oats overnight which produced cold blue mush. i could eat overnight oats while also obliterating the last of the little joy i had in this life.
who the hell wants to eat a luke-warm-gluten-free-liquid muffin for breakfast? enter: savory oats. somewhere between ris-oat-to (lol get it? like risotto) and japanese raw-egg rice (tamago kake gohan), oats serve as the base-layer of a breakfast grain bowl. make mornings happy again <3
*note*: there’s loads of chili oils out there, but just stick with the classic laoganma fried chili oil. most grocery stores sell it
in a quest for hearty fall time umami (sesame, chili oil, egg) sometimes the heavy artillery is needed: miso… and mayo. marry them together in an aioli, these two sauce hedonists create a veggie dressing that will hug you from the inside. i found the sweet, creamy glaze matched the bitterness of charred eggplant, but i bet most veggies would. remember kids, always make double batches of sauce!
*note*: go buy kewpie mayo at your local asian grocer (extra egg yolk makes it extra rich)