Welcome to the twenty-eighth edition of The Department of Taste, Tastyble’s newsletter for food writing so good, it should be stamped and made official. Please help great stories spread — forward this email to a friend.

THIS IS NORMALLY THE TIME when I go on a rant about what’s unique about this time of year. But I look through the window as I write and all I see is gloom. It’s cold outside, and the sky — even here in LA — is gray.

That’s October for you, folks. Gray. Mundane. The vibes, at least for this Angeleno, are off. Until I took to Google as I sometimes do, and realized that there’s nothing mundane about gray.

It turns out that to produce gray, you ought to mix two complementary colors. And you must do it in the right proportion, so that they cancel each other out. Those colors? Either orange and blue, or green and red.

Orange and blue like the sun’s warm embrace during the summer, and the crisp breeze of the Pacific Ocean in the fall. Green like the fronds of the palm trees that tower over the city and cast large black shadows across the ground. Red like the sky at 6-something p.m., when the sun lines up with the open ocean (unlike in the summer, when it sets north of west over Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains) and makes the sky blood-grapefruit red.

So, on second thought, there’s nothing ordinary about gray — a most miraculous concoction of Mother Nature.

Let this be the opening of this month’s roundup of the best Tastyble stories you do not want to miss.

I’ll start the roundup with October’s “Ingredient of the Month” stories.

We’re doing this new thing: a multi-author series, which anyone can contribute to, about one food item every month. As a reminder, Tastyble is an open pub, which anyone can submit stories to, even though we have certain editorial standards and not all of the submitted stories end up making the cut.

I suppose that makes it … a writing prompt? Anyway. I, for one, prefer to think of it as a multi-author series. October’s theme was flatbread. We challenged our writer community to send us stories about flatbread, and boy, flatbread we got!

Rivelkuchen, a sweet flatbread, from Linda Lum. A second piece from Linda about naan. Flatbread without the flatbread from Kitano Komachi. Navajo frybread from Thomas Wolsey, the many (and oh-so-wonderful) flatbreads of India from Verde Curated Lifestyle, and a hands-on introduction to dosa from Ninad Kulkarni.

Lentil gnocchi, anyone? Get ’em while they’re still hot and crispy! A protein power bomb from Chris DeCap, with lentils cooked in homemade beef bone broth (none of the guilt, all the marrow!) and tapioca swapped in for flour before the bite-sized lentil-and-tapioca nuggets are browned in a cast iron pan.

The key word for this time of year is warmth. And what better way to warm one’s soul than a nice and hearty eggplant sausage casserole? If the very idea makes you nod along in agreement, head on over to the recipe that Peggy Woods just shared in Mediterranean Eggplant Sausage Casserole, courtesy of her husband. God bless you for sharing it with us, Peggy, and God bless your man!

For dessert, check out Linda Lum’s recipe for Moravian spice cookies. Suzanne V. Tanner also reminds us, in When You Dream of Blueberries, about the star role that frozen blueberries can play on your dinner table this fall. (Blueberries. Frozen blueberries, I hear the late and great actor Sean Connery say in my head as I write this, in his Edinburgh accent and seven-time James Bond voice —okay, six, unless also you count the non-Eon Productions 1983 remake of Never Say Never Again as the seventh.)

Oh, and while we’re still on the subject of dessert, why not go and check out Peggy’s Fruit and Nut Christmas Cookies? True, there is still time until Christmas, but who said Christmas can’t come early?

Tis the season, Mediumites! Thanks for reading and see you next month.

And, please, help spread the joy. Give this newsletter issue some love with a few claps and, if you’re feeling generous, a share on your feed. We, your favorite food pub in this neat little corner of the internet called Medium, could use all the love we can get.

Orange Plus Blue Equals Gray, and Other October Miracles was originally published in Tastyble on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the twenty‑seventh issue of The Department of Taste, Tastyble’s newsletter for food writing so good, it should be stamped and made official. Please help great stories spread — forward this email to a friend.

ISN’T IT FUNNY how we humans work? We spent all summer craving the cold. Ice-cold margaritas. Gazpacho straight from the fridge. Brisk air blasting from the AC vents at home, at the office, and in the car. Now that it’s finally cooler out, we want the warmth back.

And so, as we bid September farewell, we sit by the fireplace and sip on our pumpkin spice lattes as memories of sunny days by the beach or pool play out in our heads.

The Portuguese have a word for this, which we English speakers do not. They call this saudade, when you miss something or someone that’s no longer there. Or, as Portuguese writer Francisco Manuel de Mello once put it, saudade is “a pleasure you suffer and a sickness you enjoy.” What a sweet form of torture.

Enter October — a time to reconnect with the side of ourselves that craves comfort and warmth. And what better way to soothe yourself and those you love than with hearty food meant to warm the soul and fill the belly?

We start with stew. In Stew: A Brief History of Humanity’s Favorite Comfort Food, Tastyble editor and resident food historian Linda Lum explains why every culture has a stew recipe and lets us in on the story behind each and every pot. (Spoiler: Linda starts off her story with a poem about stew.)

In Ditch the Protein Mania. Eat a Lentil Instead, frequent Tastyble contributor and nutrition enthusiast Khushboo, who goes by the name Verde Curated Lifestyle, makes the case for legumes — beans, lentils, and peas — over protein powders and protein bars. As someone obsessed with a Moroccan lentil and bean stew this fall called harira, which I may or may not have been making on repeat all week long, I share Khushboo’s fascination with legumes, and hope you do, too.

We can’t talk about fall without mentioning pumpkin pie. And of course, we won’t. Because Peggy Woods found an old pumpkin icebox pie recipe in her mother’s recipe box and was kind and generous enough to share it with the rest of us in Vintage Pumpkin Icebox Pie Recipe. Yes, just like there was a time before the internet, there was a time before refrigeration, when home cooks stashed food away in non-mechanical refrigerators full of ice. Yet Peggy’s recipe is timeless.

I hope you have a sweet tooth because we’ve got another pie story coming: Linda’s Apple Pie, Deconstructed. As I told Linda in the comments, I love a good technical guide to cooking, and her guide to everyone’s favorite apple pie, which will leave you smarter and decidedly hungrier, is a great example why. There — I even made it rhyme.

Last but not least, in September we kicked off a new Tastyble series called “Ingredient of the Month.”

I’d like to officially thank our star contributor Kitano Komachi, who came up with the idea, my fellow editor Linda for getting the party started, as well as everyone who took the idea to heart and excitedly joined in.

September’s focus was none other than the humble potato, with Kitano writing about the Japanese dish nikujaga, me about fries, and Thomas Wolsey about the tortilla española and stuffed baked potatoes.

I can’t overstate how much I appreciate the community we have here in this corner of Medium called Tastyble. If you’re reading this and want to submit a story, consider this an invitation — our publication is open for submissions from everyone (of course, please read the guidelines first).

I guess this is it, folks. What a month!

Follow Tastyble, subscribe to get emails when our pub’s fine writers publish something new, and see you in October.

Godspeed.

A Sweet Form of Torture (And Two Kinds of Pie) was originally published in Tastyble on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An opening note from the author: I’ve left this story outside the paywall to invite discussion.

MEDIUM HAS ITS PROS AND CONS. And while I, like any other Mediumite, have sworn at the occasional decision that the team behind the platform has made, overall it has treated me well, and I’ve found many a like-minded friend here since joining.

I used to be a pro blogger, at least until that business model became unsustainable, and God knows I’ve tried to make Substack work. To this date, I have yet to find a platform — and medium — where I get the same return on my time spent writing. And so, I keep writing.

One of the most transformative experiences I’ve ever had was back in my corporate days when a colleague at Coca-Cola, in the middle of an ugly fight caused by a political showdown, dropped the armor and said, “We can either make our lives worse or better, but we both know that decision is entirely ours to make, so let’s at least make it consciously.”

That one little moment changed how I saw collaboration at work and reminded me that I should bring my best self to the job, and to the rest of my life, no matter the circumstance. So in the spirit of making each other’s lives better instead of getting in each other’s way, instead of criticizing Medium for what’s missing, I’m going to suggest a few features that would make it more fun and rewarding for me as a user to stick around.

Collaborative Stories

Publications are one of the reasons I stick around on Medium. That’s because when you’re the editor of or contributor to a pub, writing no longer feels lonely and turns into a team sport. It becomes collaborative, fun.

Although I miss the money I used to make as a boost nominator, I think Medium got things particularly right with the Editor Partner Program, which rewards and incentivizes good editing by giving editors 25% of what the stories they edit earn.

But why stop there?

I think there’s even more that can be done to boost (forgive the pun) the collaborative aspect of writing on Medium.

I’ve often wished I could team up with another writer on a story, or even with several writers, and split the earnings between us. This is a common practice in the media business—newspapers publish coauthored pieces by staff and freelance contributors all the time.

Take, for example, the story in The New York Times below:

There are many reasons to coauthor a Medium story, and I can think of countless ways in which the community on this platform could use a feature such as this one.

You’ve also seen this on YouTube lately, where up to five YouTubers can collaborate on a video shown to all their audiences in a way that displays each collaborator’s name and allows viewers to subscribe to their YouTube channels.

Creators on YouTube have naturally embraced the feature because it helps them reach new viewers and grow their channels as a result. I’d love to see something similar here on Medium, where collaborations between authors can result in entirely new types of stories being born.

Exclusive Friend of Medium Perks

Medium has two membership tiers, as you and I both know: Medium Member for $50 per year (when billed annually) and Friend of Medium for $150 per year (also annually; the monthly option is more expensive since there’s cancellation risk, and therefore revenue risk for the platform).

Until recently, there was little reason to become a Friend of Medium other than knowing your membership paid writers four times as much for reading their work and being able to customize the icon of the Medium app on your iPhone.

This changed, somewhat, with TK—Medium’s new writing app—but I still can’t shake the feeling that a Friend of Medium membership is more of an altruistic decision than an egoistic one. And in times when jobs are scarce and prices are on the rise, those are the first decisions to get cut.

My self-published 2022 cookbook, Cooking Methods & Techniques: A Crash Course on How to Cook Delicious Food at Home for Beginners, used to bring in ten to twenty dollars a month. Chewing-gum money is nice, but considering the work that went into writing, editing, designing, and promoting it, the book didn't even break even. I eventually pulled it from Amazon.

I would gladly offer a digital copy of my book as a Friend of Medium perk if doing so brought more subscribers to this tier and boosted my earnings per story over the long haul as a result. I’d also love to see Medium partner with a print-on-demand service so readers could order physical copies of my book that earn me higher royalties than those on other marketplaces.

Not only is this where most of my readers hang out, but the economics add up, too: the more reasons Mediumites have to upgrade, the more we writers make from posting our work on this platform and not somewhere else.

Writer (Or Publication) Pledges

The business model of Substack is built on subscriptions to individual writers — and right now, it’s under strain. Medium’s is built on a single subscription to the paywalled content of every writer and every publication.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like if there were a middle ground.

If given the option, I’d gladly give extra support to the two or three writers I read nonstop, or the publications that publish most of the stories that keep me subscribed to Medium.

There’s probably more than one way to get this done (though doing it is easier said than done, too, and this has probably been on the Medium team’s radar in one form or another as they ponder the platform’s economics). Still…

Why send readers to Buy Me a Coffee or Patreon when you can let them pledge an extra $1–$3 per month to specific writers and/or pubs directly on Medium? (Subscriptions to pubs could be split among that month’s active contributors, based on the percentage of reads that they brought in.)

Or why not let Friends of Medium choose three favorite writers and publications for an even higher payout? It’s a win-win: As a reader, I would love knowing my subscription directly supports the writers who keep me on the platform. As a writer, earning more from my most engaged readers would incentivize me to produce more—and better—stories.

Here, too, I would gladly offer my self-published book as a “perk” in exchange for recurring income that boosts my monthly earnings and makes my writing time worthwhile. At the end of the day, we all write for pleasure yet have bills to pay and mouths to feed. To be able to combine the two would be a win for those who write and their readers.

Three Features I’d Love to See on Medium was originally published in Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.