Bow Down: It's Dessert Queen Abi Balingit
Bow Down: It's Dessert Queen Abi Balingit
Plus: How we should be thinking about food waste, on-the-spot vegan pancakes, and one of my favorite Marcella Hazan recipes
This Week’s Marksisms
Food with Mark Bittman: Abi Balingit
When I got Abi Balingit’s first cookbook, Mayumu, in the mail, I was blown away by how beautiful and cool it is. It’s filled with Filipino-inspired desserts, not “traditional” Filipino or American — Abi lives in Brooklyn, and was raised in the Bay Area and the Central Valley of California — but Abi’s own wonderful melding of the two. Like: sapin-sapin, a tri-layered rice cake that typically features tropical flavors but Abi’s version is inspired by Good Humor strawberry shortcake bars, with toasted coconut curds and freeze-dried strawberries.
Abi started her blog, The Dusky Kitchen, in 2020, and shortly after was offered a book deal; it happened very fast, to the point where she wasn’t even sure she could come up with enough recipes for a book. Turned out she’s friendly with Holly, and Holly is also obsessed with Abi’s baking, and so the three of us decided to chat. These two have wonderful energy, and their adoration for each other is clear — we had a great time.
The recipe featured on today’s episode, Abi’s Fiesta Fruit Salad, can be found here.
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What Is Food Waste, Anyway?
We are working on a piece we’re calling “A More Enlightened View of Food Waste” – you’ll see it soon. It’s led me to re-consider everything from idling my car for five minutes to these potato peels in my sink:
Those in turn reminded me of my second editor, back in 1980, a guy named Andy, who was the boss of my weekly editor, George. George was in charge of my weekly food column (this was in New Haven, at the Advocate), but had little interest in food. In addition to assigning me non-food stories (in those days I wrote about everything from nuclear power to Gang of Four), Andy liked to gab about cooking.
In those days there was a trend to eat food in a more “natural” form. (This often translated to dishes of steamed broccoli with no seasonings on brown rice with no seasonings and a few dashes of bad soy sauce.) You mashed potatoes with the skin and you ate carrots raw without peeling them. “But suppose I like my carrots peeled?” asked Andy, while I was working on some piece about all of this. He had a point; I liked them peeled, too, because they usually taste better that way. But we felt that eating them unpeeled was the right thing to do.
I looked at my potato peels in the sink, which were destined for either the compost (an important part of farming) or the pigs (an important part of pig-raising). What they were not destined for was my mashed potatoes, and therefore, they’d certainly they’d be counted in the official food wasting numbers. Not as much as they would be if I’d let them rot, which was on the verge of happening. And suppose I’d let them rot because I felt compelled to eat the peels, and wasn’t in the mood for that? Does that make me a bad person?
It's not that simple. In fact it’s way more complicated than even this bewildering if not-that-important scenario.
No conclusion here: I want you to be thinking about food waste, but what you really think, not the current noise that’s happening around it.
Give Us a Hand
There was a lot of feedback on two different pieces we ran last week – my little rant about climate change, and our appeal to help Liz Adler’s GoFundMe for her farm in Easthampton, MA (you can still donate — here). That, and the response to a number of things we’re doing differently these days, gives me more hope than any time in the last five or so years that The Bittman Project can not only remain viable but actually grow. As one of our subscribers said about it a couple of weeks ago, “The Bittman Project has integrity, I trust everything from the recipes to articles about regenerative agriculture, and that credibility speaks volumes — especially now that anyone can publish anything.”
That’s what we’re trying to do here: build trust, talk about food in an honest and sincere way. If you like what we’re doing, and want to see more of it, please subscribe, and please consider a paid subscription, which is what’s really greasing the wheels.