Glimpsing Joy in the Kitchen With Tamar Adler

How noticing something delightful every day can change your life.

Tamar Adler was struggling, and her husband suggested some sort of gratitude journal. “I kind of resisted, just because I was like, oh, it’s cheesy,” she tells me in this week’s podcast conversation.

But she knew he had a point. “This is a proven technology for mood improvement,” Tamar says. “I read one of those meta reports of all of the different scientific studies of what happens to you neurologically when you do a gratitude practice, some sort of mindfulness about what you have. It works. It makes you happier.”

So she began to write, aiming to find one little bit of delight in food and cooking every day. It didn’t come easy. But “just by writing down something good,” she says, “the experience of having to conceive it, feel it, articulate it...I would come out the other side of it just feeling less like I was wearing a pain suit.”

Looking for those moments of goodness in the necessary practice of feeding oneself, Tamar says, “ended up being super lucky because when you’re depressed, even if you’re a food writer, you know, you don’t really want to cook, you don’t want to do anything. And so it was this secret mind trick that really changed my life.”

I’m not sure I’d want to read a gratitude journal from just anyone, but I’d follow Tamar (who also wrote one of my all-time favorites, An Everlasting Meal) anywhere. In each of the 365 entries of Feast on Your Life, she moves over and over and over from darkness into light.

The book offers so many reasons to find your way back to the kitchen on days when you just don’t want to cook. Though sometimes there’s a particularly satisfying bite of cinnamon toast or a spoonful from a pot of beans, it’s not about elaborate meals, or really the final product of your cooking efforts at all.

“My son rejects most of what I make,” Tamar writes. “I am in training to enjoy the effort, which must suffice. I train at loving the cracking of the egg and whisking, at noticing when it comes together in saffron-hued uniformity.”

The practice of engaging the senses begins to feel like a gift. You might not want to cook, but when you just stand up and go in the kitchen, and begin to chop some garlic, Tamar says, “you will smell it. You will feel it. And as soon as you’re doing that, those will be the things that you’re thinking about.” After all that resistance, suddenly, “you’ll be in the middle of cooking.”

I talk to Tamar about the pleasure of getting up close and personal with your ingredients, the winter meals she’s craving most, and a creamed spinach method that she believes cannot be rivaled. “It just looks like spinach,” she says, “but it tastes like angels’ food.”

You can get the recipe for that, reprinted from an earlier book of Tamar’s, by scrolling down, but don’t skip our full conversation, especially if you just don’t feel like cooking this week.

Win a copy of Feast on Your Life

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2. Free subscribers can still enter to win. Here’s how: Just send in a “what’s in my pantry/fridge/freezer” voice memo. My guest will come up with a dinner idea just for you! Follow the instructions here by end of day Friday, December 5, 2025.

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U.S. addresses only, 18+. Giveaway not sponsored or administered by Substack. Ends Dec 5, 2025. This newsletter includes affiliate links—I may receive a small commission from your purchase which helps to cover the costs of making The Dinner Plan podcast.

Tamar mentioned:

• Erin Jeanne Mcdowell’s Flourless Cocoa Cookies (NYT Cooking; gift link)

• Walnut marjoram pesto (101 Cookbooks)

• Mapo tofu ramen (Leite’s Culinaria)

• The Kitchen Shrink on cookware

• Duck confit (Serious Eats)

• The pork roast with rosemary and brussels sprouts Tamar mentions is from Rotis: Roasts for Every Day of the Week

• Bull Cook Volume II (AbeBooks; Amazon)

• Sunflower oil from Hudson Valley Hops and Grains

• Lamb mechoui recipe in The Blue Apron Cookbook (Bookshop here)

• Franny’s Pasta al Limone

• Yemisi Aribisala: Longthroat Memoirs (Bookshop here)

• Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: The Physiology of Taste (MFK Fisher translation, Bookshop here)

• Rufus Estes: Good Things to Eat (Bookshop here)

• Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor: Vibration Cooking (Bookshop here)

• Fuchsia Dunlop: The Food of Sichuan (Bookshop here)

Discount codes from the ad break:

• The Zero Proof: Use code DINNERPLAN20 for 20% off

• Early Bird Granola: Use code DINNERPLAN15 for 15% off

• Saturday Sauce: Use code DINNERPLAN20 for 20% off when you purchase two jars.

• Made In Cookware: Head to madein.cc/dinnerplan to unlock your discount offer.

• Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California by Sylvan Mishima Brackett with Jessica Battilana (Bookshop here)

Maggie mentioned:

• Bulgarian Walnut Pâté from Kapusta by Alissa Timoshkina

• Green Bean Pâté (Jane Brody / Maggie’s mom’s version)

• Cookbook recommendations list

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Italian Creamed Spinach

Excerpted from Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised by Tamar Adler. Copyright © 2018 Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

“Italian spinach is as much better than French spinach as French spinach is than American spinach,” wrote Waverley Root in The Food of Italy in 1971. He noted elsewhere that it might be as much a matter of seed as technique. Jane Grigson averred, with admirable lack of national bias, that “the thought of spinach is a pleasure.”

The best spinach I’ve ever had was Italian in seed and technique. It was moreover and unexpectedly creamed. To describe my mind I must mix the observations of the other two: the thought of Italian creamed spinach is a pleasure with few equals. This is the recipe I was given in broken English and well-formed gesture for a dish I ate in Italy one shadowy day long ago.

3 pounds spinach, washed
3 tablespoons olive oil, plus more if needed
6 to 8 tablespoons (¾ to 1 stick) unsalted butter
kosher salt
1½ cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1. Wash the spinach. Cook it in two or three batches until just wilted in a large pan over high heat, with just the water clinging to its leaves from washing, adding the barest drizzle of olive oil if needed to keep from sticking.

2. Drain in a colander, pushing to rid it of all liquid—which can be saved for vegetable soups—then wrap in a clean dish towel and drain completely, wringing the dish towel like a wet washcloth, until it is completely dry.

3. Puree in a food processor or chop very finely by hand.

4. In the same pan, melt the butter in the olive oil over medium heat. Add the spinach and salt to taste and cook, letting it fry slowly, 2 to 4 minutes. Once it tastes good, turn off the heat and add the Parmesan, mixing well. Serve immediately or reheat in a little butter or olive oil before serving.