001: Here's some food photos
menu
food for thought / on my mind | reflection: deciding the next steps after quitting my job
recipe | tamago sando (Japanese egg salad sandwich), à la Lawson's
restaurant | my go-to for cheap, fresh, fluffy bread buns in SF's Chinatown
bite | how to make and peel a flawless hard- or soft-boiled egg
bite | free Joe + The Juice
food for thought
reflection: deciding the next steps after quitting my job
The end came anticlimactically and without resolution. Then again, I wasn't expecting credits to roll, but I would have wished for a stronger feeling of closure upon concluding a stressful chapter in my life.
Texts from friends and former coworkers started coming in. How are you feeling? Congratulations! What are you up to now? Wendy is a free elf! What I had envisioned as a fun last day of school was dampened by news of a layoff announced later that evening, and I found myself feeling glum and numb instead of empowered and excited, even as my partner came home early to celebrate with me.
I stayed in this melancholic headspace for a while, not exactly knowing how to name the emotion I felt and therefore not sure how to accept it and move forward. I'd later come to realize that this emotion was grief, from what my therapist likes to call "a fusion of yourself and your identity with your environment."
In business classes, they teach you that the value of a product is how much others are willing to pay for it. The curse of being a good student is that 1/ you recall random facts like "mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell" when you least expect to and 2/ you probably unintentionally internalized some of those school lessons as truths about life. In fewer words, I was now spiraling, thinking: Now that I don't have an income, do I still provide any value?
One of my former colleagues had quit about a month before I did. He was always a pleasant, kind person who found a way to stay positive and encourage others in every situation. He, like I, had also quit without something lined up afterward but was taking the time to travel and relax at home. After he learned that I had also left, he checked in. While he asked the typical questions, he also sent me a random message: here's some food photos.
Truthfully, I was thrown off guard by the spontaneous sharing, a bit of a nonsequitur from the general messages coming my direction. At the time, I was severely burnt out and without a sense of what I enjoyed anymore. Food tasted bland and cooking became means to eat so I was barely thinking about food, but the lighthearted message from my thoughtful friend was a welcome wish, reminding me about something I had once loved.
I thought back to when he and I had first befriended each other more than a year before—over a conversation about cooking in the booths of our kitchen's eating areas. Subsequent conversations were also frequently food-related, as he traveled to Hong Kong to see his family and shared about his mum's chili oil and other delicacies he got to try. Even our conversation in his last week of work was over coffee at a local shop, as we mused on company culture and future career paths.
I used to show him pictures of the food that my partner and I would make at home, and how we were slowly improving as we weaned ourselves off meal kits to more complex recipes and original dishes. "Oh, wow, these are really beautifully plated," he'd commented. "This is inspiring me to cook, too." From the photos he had just sent me, I was happy to see that he was. Moreover, I was happy to see someone doing so well after being in my same spot barely a month earlier.
. . .
In the first few weeks of my newfound unemployment, I started skimming self-help books and watching TED clips in an attempt to kickstart my drive to create new goals. Most of that effort bore little fruit (and reaffirmed that I do not like self-help books), but one tip that I engaged with was "find what gives you flow"—flow, being the state where you are totally absorbed by and deeply focused on something, beyond the point of distraction.
I realized that I had actually become quite distractable, as there were very few activities in my life that still gave me flow. Writing used to be one of those activities—creative writing in particular—but in recent years I had found myself so exhausted from work that I had little imagination to spare for words. Moreover, writing was so extremely anguishing—I was never content with what I created and would drive myself nuts staring at a blank screen waiting for the words to come.
Cooking, on the other hand, while being an activity I liked, was never one that I had associated with flow. But in the opposite way with writing, where I struggled to measure "progress" and "value" and "quality," cooking was fairly objective in certain aspects. How uniformly and well-sized you dice your veggies, how precise of a temperature you cook at, the rise of a cake or evenness of a crumb—while there is still always a subjective element, I did feel the dopamine hits of knowing that I was improving in my objective cooking skills over time. Moreover, given how tactile of an activity it was, it could be mesmerizing, even meditative, at times.
And so—partially spurred on by my feelings of listlessness and the lighthearted message from my friend, I decided on a first, simple, goal: to cook more frequently, and record and document more of that process so that I could reflect upon it more.
Sure, cooking and writing might seem like small activities and goals, not nearly as impactful as say, fixing the healthcare system or solving climate change. But for someone who's picking herself back up and deciding what brings joy and life again, I decided that it didn't matter what I started doing, so long as I had taken the first steps toward figuring out what my next steps could be.
recipe
tamago sando (Japanese egg salad sandwich)
Now that I'm home most days, I needed to figure out what to feed myself. An easy, light, delicious, (and affordable) lunch I started making was tamago sando, Japanese egg salad sandwich. Popularized by Anthony Bourdain and a certain LA restaurant, Konbi, Japanese egg salad sandwiches made a comeback in 2019 and I am obviously still all about it 3 years later. Why? Because they're delicious and so much better than the American variety.
Interested? Here's a link to the recipe.
restaurant
yummy bakery & cafe
I wouldn't give you a recipe demanding milk bread without giving you a place to buy it, would I? Thankfully, this place offers much more than just sliced bread—folks on the internet rave that this is the new go-to bakery for egg tarts ever since the ever-so-fickle Golden Gate Bakery closed during the pandemic. I go here for pineapple buns and to surprise myself with how many I can eat in one sitting. Get other facts and what to know.
bites
how to make and peel a flawless hard- or soft-boiled egg
Some people peel away half the egg white as they remove the eggshell... including me and many other people on the internet. I was surprised by the number of articles teaching you how to make and peel hard-boiled eggs flawlessly. Here's one of the most helpful articles, with videos as well. Now you, too, can have beautiful, flawless, easy-to-peel eggs.
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free Joe & the Juice at participating locations! (not sponsored)
I get targeted ads on Instagram all the time. I've gotten better at not clicking on them, but I couldn't resist the call of a free sandwich:
All you have to do is download their app and place an order to get a free sandwich gift card. I walked into a Joe & The Juice nearby and validated that the offer is indeed still going on. Joe's not my instinctual sandwich place, but hey, free usually tastes pretty great.
Wendynoms is an independent newsletter that provides you with 1 restaurant recommendation, 1 recipe, and (at least) 1 fun link or food for thought every week, so that you will always have something to eat and chat about while eating. Please send questions to hello@wendynoms.com. Happy reading and happy eating!