Julia Turshen is a New York Times best-selling cookbook author, home cook (one of the all-time greatest, per Epicurious), podcast host, and food-equity advocate. Her newest cookbook, Simply Julia: 110 Easy Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food,
out March 2, celebrates the many meanings of “healthy” and “comfort”
through simple, varied recipes, and also gives readers a closer look at
her life through personal essays on body image and volunteering. For her
podcast, Keep Calm and Cook On, Julia interviews interesting
people in and around food, talking cooking, mental health, volunteering,
and more. She also founded Equity at the Table, an inclusive digital
directory of women and non-binary individuals within the food industry.
She currently lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her wife, Grace,
and their dogs, Hope and Winky. Here’s how she gets it done.
On mornings: I
don’t have much of a regular anything. I have battled anxiety and
insomnia, which are close friends, for most of my life, so the time I
wake up depends entirely on what happened the night before. This makes
every day a little different. On average though, I would say I get up
around 7:30 a.m. I’ll often wake up to my wife, Grace, reading the news
on her phone, then I do the same, and we compare what we’re reading. The
only other definite thing I start every single day with is a very
strong cup of coffee that she [Grace] usually sets up for me, which is
incredibly sweet. Then we’ll take our dogs out to the backyard, feed
them their breakfasts, and drink our coffees as we work on puzzles and
listen to NPR’s Up First and the New York Times’ The Daily podcasts before going about our days.
On procrastination and prioritization: I describe myself as the most productive procrastinator. This basically means I’m always doing something, but I’m rarely doing the thing I should
be doing. So, when it comes to how I prioritize things, I’ve just come
to accept that the to-do list will never be done. It won’t. So, instead
of focusing on crossing everything off, I revolve my schedule around the
things that can’t be shifted around. I use the immovable things as
anchors for the other tasks I add to my week. I’ve also found that
breaking down tasks into very manageable chunks, and then setting a
timer, works well for me. If I’m really struggling with something, I’m
comfortable stepping away from the task I’m doing and coming back to it
later, instead of just forcing it. I like to combat distractions by
weaving work tasks into daily activities too. For example, I love taking
really long walks. We live in an area with a lot of trails, so I’ll
walk a section of one almost every day. If I need to edit audio for my
podcast, I’ll listen to it while walking and take notes on a little
piece of paper or on my phone.
On a typical (pandemic) day: My ideal
typical day involves equal amounts of time spent on my computer, in my
kitchen, and outside. That doesn’t always happen, of course, but that’s
the goal. Grace and I have both worked from home for our entire
relationship, so we had no idea that our lives were so, kind of,
well-suited for the stay-at-home aspect of a pandemic. We both have the
freedom and flexibility to make our own schedules, and we take advantage
of it.
On community-supported agriculture: Grace and I do a weekly cooking shift at an organization called Angel Food East,
a non-profit that delivers hot, home-cooked meals to home-bound
individuals living with HIV+/AIDS and other chronic illnesses. I also do
a lot of other community volunteering and run an online database called
Equity at the Table. I am
also a very, very, very big advocate of people joining their local CSA
(Community Supported Agriculture) because it’s a great way to support
farmers, is good for the environment, good for your community, and good
for your home cooking. We belong to a few different CSAs, including one
run by this wonderful, wonderful farm called Long Season.
They do a winter CSA, which is pretty unusual in our area, so we’re
able to get fresh vegetables all year round. I love, on CSA pick-up day,
to unload all of the vegetables and get the fridge prepared. I’ll make
trays of roasted vegetables, make a soup, clean a bunch of greens, etc.
It is such a stress reliever for me to do that. It’s very meditative,
makes me feel really prepared.
On managing stress: Cooking
is a great stress relief for me. I spend so much time in my kitchen,
it’s where I feel most grounded. I also try to spend a lot of time
outside (I have never felt worse after taking a walk) and limit my time
on technology. I try to remind myself that the things that matter most
in my life are the things that don’t happen on my phone or computer.
On work-life balance: I’m
one of those very, very, very fortunate people in the world who has
known what they’ve wanted to do their entire life and has gotten to do
it. I have loved cookbooks for as long as I can remember, and they’ve
been such a special part of my life, so [my work] has been incredibly
personal. In my own books, I share a lot of my personal stories, so the
lines between my life and my work are very blurry. The more I do my work
though, the more interested I am in setting boundaries around it. I
focus on setting boundaries around the time I put into things and being
really present in my work and personal life. If I’m not done with
something by the end of the day, I leave it. I know it’ll be there in
the morning. There is no such thing as a cookbook emergency, and it’s
not worth losing a night’s sleep. I don’t want to be typing on my phone
as my wife is telling me something, I want to look her in the eyes, so I
make sure to put the phone down. Setting those kinds of boundaries is
really important to me, and it all comes back to my desire to be as
present as I can possibly be. That’s how I want to spend my day-to-day
life.
On diet culture and mental health: I
currently have two therapists. One is a cognitive-behavioral therapist
who helps give me a lot of really helpful tools to manage my anxiety,
and the other is a body justice therapist. What I was trying to do in my
new cookbook, and what I’ve been working at personally for years, is
disentangling myself from diet culture. [Diet culture] is one of the
things that has definitely caused the most stress in my life. It was
this language that was spoken for so much of my life, and I’m now
learning a new one. So I listen to many podcasts on the topic, my
favorite being Aubrey Gordon’s Maintenance Phase,
and have changed who I follow on social media, which has really helped
me. I’ve struggled with body image and the self-doubt around that much
more than I have struggled with self-doubt in my career.
On ambition: My
ambitions have evolved so much throughout my life. I think my work in
therapy, and my work within myself, has led me to care so much less
about reputation and so much more about connection. My ambitions used to
be very much tied to things that can be quantified, like book sales,
and now my ambitions are very much about “did I do work that made
someone feel heard? Or help someone feel seen? Did I do work that made
someone feel less scared in the kitchen or did I do something that
helped me truly connect to someone?” Those are the ways I measure my
success now.
On people who are intimidated by the kitchen: Home
cooking is just one of the most positive forces in the world. Just
think about how many people are cooking at home right now [during the
pandemic]. A lot of people want to start with things that seem
impressive, but impressive to who? Who’s going to be eating it? You
should just focus on cooking something you really love. And look, simple
food is really, really good food. You don’t need fancy ingredients to
make good food, you don’t need to make complicated food for it to be
good. If you’re feeling intimidated about cooking, or about doing
anything really, I would try to follow that thought through and figure
out where it’s really coming from. Like, who is telling you that it’s
complicated? Question their motives!
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