Issue #153: The Complete Joy (and Terror) of Learning a New Skill

What chili oil has taught me about myself.

📺 “My Lady Jane” on Prime: Closer to fantasy than anything resembling historical fiction, this surreal new series is a very loose retelling of the tragic figure, Lady Jane Grey. As a reference point: About ten minutes in, a chambermaid turns herself into a hawk. It’s over-the-top (the “bad” characters look like Disney villains, there’s a narrator who unnecessarily narrates everything, and the Cool Vibes are made known by a contemporary playlist)… which, depending on your mood, may make it an ideal lazy weekend show? I, for one, recommend playing it in the background as your deep-clean your house.

📚 The Wedding People by Alison Espach (out next week, available for preorder): I kept seeing this book around, but was finally motivated to pick it up after reading

Michelle Martin

’s review of it here (from an idyllic-sounding vacation). Like Michelle, I read it in a little over a day and fell in love with the characters, especially Phoebe Stone, who is mistaken as a wedding guest at an inn in Rhode Island. In reality, she’s on the heels of several failed rounds of IVF and mourning a husband who just left her, in the darkest season of her life—as Lila, the bride, is in the brightest season of her own.

🎥 ‘Twisters,’ in theaters: A summer blockbuster in its truest form, this remake of the ‘90s classic about daring storm chasers delivers with romance, one-liners, and exciting chase scenes. It stars Glen Powell as the brazen cowboy in it for the thrill, and the YouTube subscribers, and Daisy Edgar-Jones, as the meteorologist returning to the field at the request of her old friend (Anthony Ramos). Tornadoes abound.

P.S. Morning Person Book Club is meeting over Zoom next week! Scroll to the bottom for the link to join my editor Taylor Rondestvedt and me, to chat about my novel You’re Safe Here on Tuesday, July 30th at 5 PM, PT. Free for all paid subscribers. Hope to see you there!

Chili oil, with its spicy, garlicky punch, is my desert island condiment. I douse my eggs in it every morning, and am more likely to have a jar of it on my dining table than I am salt or pepper. I order 32-ounce jars of it so often that I emailed my favorite online purveyor to ask about wholesale pricing (they declined, which did nothing to curb my consumption). And yet, I’ve never made it myself. I worked for years as a food writer, and consider myself to be a more-than competent cook, but, as I confessed in my conversation with the Chinese-Australian cookbook author Hetty McKinnon last year, “I’m nervous!”

The combination of ingredients I rarely have on hand, like Sichuan peppercorns and bird’s eye chiles, with unfamiliar-to-me methods, including pounding spices and the use of hot oil to cook them, intimidated me out of trying. Despite the fact that Hetty did her best to assuage my concerns, it took me an entire year to make it myself.

As I strolled through the aisles of my favorite local Asian supermarket, the familiar doubt began to creep back in—I compared what looked like thousands of dried chiles, unsure of their difference and self-conscious of the incompetence radiating off of me. The moment I got home, I began cooking, following the carefully-written recipe for “Garlicky Chili Oil” in Hetty’s cookbook, Tenderheart.

I broke it down into parts, chopping the chiles I finally selected in my food processor, mincing fresh garlic, and heating oil in a copper pot, beginning to find my footing as I went. I may not know how to make chili oil, but I do know how to follow a recipe. Twenty minutes later, I poured the hot, dangerously red concoction into a glass jar, feeling a sense of empowerment. I had done it, and in doing so, I had unlocked an entirely new skill for myself. No wholesale pricing needed: I can now make chili oil!

It’s the same song every time I learn a new skill: Intimidation, followed by an attempt, and, more often than not, a victorious sense of empowerment. It’s one that’s played frequently over the past two years. Splitting with a partner of a decade means that there were entire categories of skills I never had to learn because they fell under his division of labor, like booking a flight using credit card points, signing up for utilities, changing out the air filter in my car, finding health insurance, de-icing a freezer. Bundled together, the tasks feel unsurmountable, but just like the chili oil, I learned to break each skill down into approachable parts.