Soupy summer orzo, 100 best books, and how to help someone through grief
Caroline Chambers selects her top Substack reads
This week’s Substack Reads is guest edited by Caroline Chambers, author of the cookbooks Just Married and the upcoming What To Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking, based on her popular Substack of the same name. Caroline writes What To Cook from her Carmel Valley, California, home, where she lives with her husband and three sons, ages 5, 3, and 1. Some of her most popular recipes are salmon crunch bowls, the Thai chicken chop, and chicken chili verde burgers. If you dig Caroline’s selections here, be sure to subscribe to her on Substack.
I’ve never been an early adopter of anything. My now-husband informed me that it was “kind of embarrassing” that I still had an AOL email address in 2010, I finally started working on my Instagram presence a decade after it became cool, and I still can’t figure out TikTok.
But somehow I wound up as one of the first people using Substack as a paid platform to share my recipes, in 2020.
In 2019 I wrote a proposal for a cookbook titled What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, where every recipe would comprise a complete meal, dirty as few dishes as possible, take under an hour to cook, and use only ingredients that can be easily found at a standard grocery store. I was quickly rejected by every major publisher because I didn’t have enough reach, aka didn’t have enough Instagram followers.
At the time, I was working as a freelance recipe developer, mostly using my Instagram simply as a portfolio to share my work, not at all using it to grow a community. But when the pandemic hit, my freelance work went poof overnight—and I resolved to never have anyone tell me that I couldn’t have something I wanted because I didn’t have enough reach ever again. I spent many months cranking out free recipes and content on Instagram, growing a loyal following who trusted me and my recipes.
Somewhere along the way, I listened to a podcast that preached that having and maintaining an email list is the most important thing that an online creator can do. TikTok could finally get banned, the IG algorithm could change for the millionth time, but you always own your subscriber list, and you know that without fail, your newsletter will show up, in chronological order, in your people’s inboxes.
So I started putting a lot of effort into a weekly newsletter. Eventually I started sharing photos and videos of a recipe on Instagram but sharing the recipe itself exclusively via my newsletter, which led to tons of new subscribers every time. And then one day, I heard about Substack. Lots of food people were turning to Patreon in those days, but I knew that my audience (busy people who like good food but never feel like cooking!) would have no patience for another app. But an email with a really easy recipe, showing up right in their inbox? Consistently, every single Saturday, at the exact same time? That, they could handle.
I moved my newsletter over to Substack in November 2020 and flipped on the paid feature in December. Back then, there were no paywalls, there were no Notes or private chats … everything was pretty spartan, but it got the job done.
I thought having a few hundred paid subscribers would be an incredible side hustle, a nice way to have income security as a freelance recipe developer; 20,000 paid subscribers later, “having a Substack” is my main career focus, and it landed me that cookbook deal that no one would give me back in 2020. What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, the book, comes out on August 13.
I’m really proud to be a part of this community. I’ve loved getting to know so many members of the Substack team, both at cocktail parties and via my incessant “but what if you added this feature?” emails.
But mostly I’ve loved, loved, loved getting to know other writers here. I’ve never been a part of the cool L.A. or NYC food person scene. I’m just a mom writing a newsletter from the chaos of her kitchen table. But as a part of this community, I can shoot Mark Bittman an email to ask him to fill in while I’m on maternity leave. I can get to know my longtime blog crushes Joanna Goddard, Jenny Rosenstrach, and deb perelman well enough to ask them to write blurbs that will live on the cover of my cookbook.
I love being here. There are so many Substacks that I adore. Here are a few of them.
FICTION
“After I had my second son—a short 18 months after having my first son—I experienced a brief but overwhelming ‘Who the fuck am I anymore?!’ bout of postpartum not-quite-depression. Recognizing this, and not wanting to slip back into the definitely-postpartum depression I had experienced after having my first son, my husband and I put some measures in place. Every Saturday: he encouraged me to do whatever made me feel inspired, happy, and ‘like myself’ while he solo-dadded. Go try a new restaurant, hike with a friend, drive down to Big Sur to listen to live music, whatever. One of the first things I did was head to my local bookstore to grab a new book, and that new book was Emma Straub’s All Adults Here. It took me a few Saturdays to finish it, and during those hours, I was transported out of my overworked, over-touched, over-stimulated working-mom body and into the lives of the Strick family, who were way more dysfunctional than I was, and it somehow made me feel like everything was going to be OK. I adore Emma’s writing, and was so pleased to find her on Substack. I loved this post about not being embarrassed about past versions of ourselves because I am often very, very embarrassed by ‘all the other people I have been,’ and Emma’s beautiful words give my past transgressions such a nice PR spin.”
I loved smoking
—Emma Straub in Emma Straub's Newsletter
Sometimes it’s nice to remember all the other people one has been. Especially when settling into hard-core middle age. I love being this me, but I loved being that me, too.
FOOD
“Clare is the owner of Stissing House and co-owner of King, two of Hudson and NYC’s coolest restaurants, but, more importantly, she’s a fellow three-boy mom. I had, full disclosure, never heard of her restaurants before discovering her Substack, but I visited King on a recent visit to New York and was blown away by the way that her team manages to turn even the simplest dish into something you can’t stop talking about. (The panisse!) Have you ever wondered what really fancy, cool chefs actually cook at home, on a normal Tuesday? The Best Bit takes you inside Clare’s home for the real-deal, no-fuss recipes she cooks when she’s not at the restaurant.”
Soupy summer orzo
—Clare de Boer in The Best Bit
Resist the temptation to use it in pasta salads or embellish it with things like olives, nuts and scratchy raw herbs. Orzo inevitably overcooks when you cool it for a salad, and textural additions or intensely flavored approaches are akin to dressing a newborn in denim. Attacks on its innocence!
RELATIONSHIPS
“You know when you run into a really good friend at the grocery store or at school pickup when you’re having a really rotten day, and they take one look at you and instantly know something’s wrong, and exactly what to say? Receiving a new Platonic Love email in my inbox is the digital embodiment of that feeling of being so cared for and understood by a friend. Every time one of the subject lines pops up in my inbox, I’m like, ‘Wow, I needed this!’
Aliza Sir and Aja Frost have posts about how to be a better friend, how to rock at conversation and get out of the ‘So, how do you like living in Boston?’ conversation slump, and how to be a great business partner, and their regular feature ‘Links we sent our friends’ feels just like … well, getting a text from a friend with a great new rec. I’ve quoted this line many times from their post about how to help a friend through grief: ‘Walk to a wedding, run to a funeral.’ Sprint toward your loved ones’ suffering—they need us a lot more when they’re suffering than when they’re joyous.”
How to help a friend through grief
—Aliza Sir and Aja Frost in platonic love
“Walk to a wedding, run to a funeral.”
It’s easy—instinctual, even—to run quickly towards joy. It’s much harder to sprint towards someone’s suffering. But that’s exactly when our friends need us the most.
This saying—which was shared by our friend Diana, who lost her brother when she was younger—is a powerful reminder to get there quickly, even if you feel scared, awkward, or unsure.
DINING OUT
“Khushbu is the former restaurant editor from Food & Wine, and her newsletter provides vibrant, fun, relaxed, and informative eating guides for cities. She also interviews cool people who live in, or travel often to, certain places to get their top restaurant picks. I love it. Reading it feels like calling your cool friend who always knows the best restaurants, and having a nice long chat about all the delicious things they’ve eaten lately.”
Sohla El-Waylly’s essential NYC restaurants
Sohla has great taste and a very discerning palate. She is my favorite homebody, who loves her neighborhood and would prefer to never leave it if possible (especially now that she has a beautiful new baby). So this guide is dedicated to her favorite East Village restaurant recommendations—plus the one restaurant she leaves the neighborhood for the most.
LIFESTYLE
“The thing that I love most about—and learn the most from—Big Salad, the Substack by Cup of Jo’s Joanna Goddard, is the absolutely brilliant clickbaity (but not in a bad way!) post titles:
‘Ilana Glazer told me the sexiest move to try in bed (gahh!)’
‘How great is this life advice?’
‘My BFF shares her #1 drugstore find’
Like, yes, immediately clicking on all of those! Joanna is so, so good at giving women the relatable, kind, generous advice, tips, and information that they didn’t even know they needed. And she’s so dang good at coming up with the best, most clickable titles!”
How great is this life advice?
—Joanna Goddard and Kaitlyn Teer in Big Salad
I met Oprah the day after my memoir, Know My Name, came out in 2019—all about the trauma of my sexual assault. I asked her who I needed to become in this next phase, like how do I show up for what’s expected of me. And Oprah encouraged me to focus on preserving who I already was, instead of shape-shifting to accommodate everyone around me. I think this is good advice for any life situation. I recently went to an elementary school to promote my new book, and the teacher did affirmations, where the kids raised their hands to give compliments. One first grader in the front said, so sweetly, ‘I love how you are an inspiration to yourself.’
PARENTING
“One of my core philosophies that I like to share with both my personal friends and my IG audience is the idea of raising your first kid like it’s your third kid. With my first kid, I religiously stuck to a sleep schedule that made me absolutely insane. I changed his outfit every time he got dirty. I followed him around the playground like a hawk. I picked him up from his crib the second I heard a peep, far before he started to actually cry. With my third, I don’t have the time or bandwidth to do that. I’ve got three kids now! And guess what: parenting is so, so, so much more fun. Melinda Wenner Moyer is a science journalist who brings science and nuance to parenting advice and basically challenges all of the ‘perfect parenting’ crap we all get served all day long that makes us feel like terrible parents. She pretty much always makes me feel like, OK, I’m doing a pretty good job, science says so! I get so much approachable, non-judgy parenting advice from her.”
It’s OK not to miss your kid
—Melinda Wenner Moyer in Is My Kid the Asshole?
The other day, a good friend of mine texted me. It was the day before she was due to pick her son up from overnight camp.
“I missed him but also didn’t,” she wrote. “I feel pretty guilty about that.”
BOOKS
“A newsletter all about BOOKS! I read a lot (two to three books per week, thanks to audiobooks), so I’m constantly on the hunt for new recs. Becca Freeman is a book enthusiast and author herself, and I love her monthly book reports as much as her ‘currently shopping for’ roundups. Recently, I loved that she denounced the NYT’s ‘100 Best Books of the 21st Century’ and polled her audience to create her own People’s Choice Awards version.”
The 100 best books of the 21st century as voted by us
—Becca Freeman in Book Enthusiast
Two weeks ago, the New York Times shared a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” as voted by 503 writers, critics, and staff members. The list was massively viral, but many takes—including my own—were a little head-scratchy. It felt like there were some major snubs (IMO Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara); plus, where was the genre fiction? The list was stuffed with enormous tomes of Serious Literature™ but few books that represented landmark cultural moments over the past 25 years (Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, the rise of romantasy, Colleen Hoover mania etc.).
Notes from our guest editor
Inspired by the writers featured in Substack Reads? Writing on your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and this week’s edition was guest edited by Caroline Chambers of What To Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking. Substack Reads is edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
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Wow, this made my whole month. Thank you for the lovely, lovely words about Platonic Love — so touched to be on this list!
Caroline!!! I'm so honored to be included here (and amidst such great company!). Thank you!