An orange January

As in the opposite of blue

People talk a lot about January Blues in January, and ordinarily, I’m right there with them. But this past January, the one that ended yesterday and which I was a little sad to say goodbye to, was probably one of the best I’ve ever had.

Maybe it felt so good because I’d been in quite the crisis around October time — professionally, emotionally, financially — and spent much of November and December digging myself out of all that, to find myself, come January in some kind of vortex of positivity, new opportunities, and a distinct feeling of being myself again.

Rothko sure knows his complementary colours.

What’s the opposite of blue, then? Well, I consulted the colour wheel and apparently it’s orange — fitting since it’s citrus season and I’ve been eating a lot of oranges and mandarines lately. So, to bid farewell to my orange January, I thought I would share some nice things that have punctuated my month, and maybe also the biggest lesson I’ve drawn from it.

I’ll start with salad dressing

Because it’s been top of mind lately.

When I came across this particular vinaigrette, I’ll admit, I was a little dubious, but as per

carla lalli music

‘s instructions, I went ahead and made an entire liter container of it. And I’ll tell you what. We ate it all. Every last skerrick! We’ve been having green salads alongside most of our dinners (very ordinary January vibes, I know), and honestly, this dressing made me giddy with excitement every time we sat down to eat. It’s creamy! It’s bright! It’s rich! It’s zingy! Everything you could possibly ever want from a vinaigrette — this one is it.

When we ran out of that dressing, I decided to make my friend Cat’s miso lime one that she has mentioned a couple of times in her own newsletter,

Since No One Asked

. These are her instructions:

In a jar add the juice of one lime, 1 tbsp miso, 1 tbsp hot honey, a pinch of salt, 1 large garlic clove grated, 1 thumb of ginger grated a few twists of pepper. Lid on, shake, make sure all the miso is dissolved, taste, readjust for your taste buds, leave in the fridge to dress leaves and noods.

I just used regular honey + chilli flakes to replace the hot honey, and it worked just fine. I poured it over the most stunning radicchio (also in season right now!) that I bought at the organic shop yesterday. The colours were honestly too much, just look at that. Wow.

How is this even possible?

Other foodstuffs

Andy is on quite the baking and pasta-making kick at the moment, both of which I would like to see continue throughout our long life together. A real baking highlight has been

Alison Roman

’s Perfect Tangy Chocolate Tart — the crust of which I could honestly eat as a cookie on its own. When Andy made it, we thought it wise to take half of it over to our friend’s place so we didn’t just eat the whole thing ourselves. They obviously also enjoyed it because I got this message from Grace yesterday:

On Sunday, we also made Alison’s Seedy Breakfast Cake which is much less indulgent and much more healthy-seeming, but still a very delicious cake which I have been nibbling on all week. In fact, during the writing of this newsletter, I had two toasted slices with butter and flakey salt and it perked me right up. Both recipes are from her book Sweet Enough, which I got for my birthday from my wonderful friend Bridget.

We added pumpkin seeds and cranberries.

Pasta-wise, we’ve done lasagne sheets and tagliatelle to great success. We still need some practice with the ravioli attachment but we took some very useful learnings from our last attempt. The general conclusion that we’ve drawn from our first month as pasta machine owners is that everyone should get one. It’s so fun and the pasta really is banging.

Of the non-edible variety

I am a little late to the party on this one but — Past Lives!

Andy and I watched it the other night and both of us were utterly delighted by it. For any who haven’t seen it, it’s a film about a Korean woman, Nora, who leaves Seoul as a child and immigrates to Canada with her family, leaving her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung, behind. Many years later, when she is married to another lovely guy called Arthur, Nora and Hae Sung are reunited. It’s a beautiful story about leaving your roots behind, revisiting the past, and moving forward with your life, knowing that things could have been so different. What particularly stuck out to me about it was the pacing. Although it’s mainly set in New York, there is a slowness to it that feels really unique, and the pauses and silences make the tension and atmosphere so palpable. As my friend Ebba said when we discussed it over Whatsapp, “It’s a new type of love story.” And I am very into it.

I went for dinner in Chinatown the other day with my friends from primary school Emilie and Alessia. Emilie mentioned a book that she thought I would like called Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood, and Survival, and a few days later it showed up on my doorstep with a handwritten note. What a special thing to come home to!

I am a couple of chapters in now and it’s been such a lovely read about why women so often turn to gardening for comfort and creation, celebration and grief, power and resistance. Already in these first fifty pages, I’ve picked up on so many parallels with my own writing, as Emilie said that I would — finding roots, living with the seasons, finding stability when things are all a bit mad out there. It particularly reminds me of the chat that I shared last week with Kalpana Arias about reclaiming agency within our environment, giving nature a helping hand, and planting seeds and seeing what grows.

Your gut knows best

To finish off, I want to go back to the orange-ness of January for a second. The main thing this past month has taught me, apart from that I should be putting nutritional yeast in my dressing, is that slumps aren’t permanent. I went through a minute there where I was questioning all of my life choices, wondering if I was heading in totally the wrong direction — I even thought I should get a job at McKinsey, for crying out loud!

But from slowing down, making soup, walking the dog, and thinking about what I really want, it became very clear to me that I just need to live in alignment with my values. This will look wildly different from person to person, but from these past few months, I cannot stress enough how powerful it is to tap into what matters to you personally and to live by that!

After trying to force myself into places that I so clearly didn’t fit, stepping back and considering why that might be for a moment, and then taking the path that actually made sense, I’ve ended up in a nice little clearing, where everything feels good and like I’m going the right way. It probably won’t last forever, but it’s shown me that I should stick to what my gut is so clearly telling me — because your guts know best.

See you in the next one,

Annabel