Full Fridge Club: December 2024
Tell me baby, do you recognize me? Wellington, it's been a year, it doesn't surprise me.
Welcome to the club!
Editor’s note: In order to share all of our musings and photos, this newsletter will be clipped by most email providers. To read our entire newsletter, click on the link that says “view entire message” or you can read in full on the Substack app.
Last month, we were surrounded by good friends, good times, and especially good food.
Our yearly Holigay À La Carte offerings were a smash as usual, with our Mushroom Wellington being the standout favorite dish it always is.
It’s such a gift to be able to connect with and feed our community. December can be a tough month for us all and we are just so grateful to have an “us” at all. Having a community that supports us right back is the gift that keeps on giving.
Above: Our dear friend— and fellow chef— Pruitt recommending our Wellington. Give her a follow at Eat Thaiglish!
In December, we put the chill in Sweet Chili Chicken, the ice in Saffron Rice, and the… cold in Agrodolce?
The last year has come to and end and here we are so let’s Dish. It. Out!
December Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, December 2nd
Stephen: I don’t know if you’ve all noticed but… we kinda love a little sauce. There’s about a 50/50 chance that a dish we make for FFC will come with some lovely little sauce to pour over it, and I think that’s fun! I mention this mainly because this menu was a sauce heavy hitter (3 of 6 dishes, 4 of 6 if you count the sauce already on the chicken). Mixing and matching is half of the fun with any of our menus but, as someone who gets easily bored with leftovers, mixing and matching the sauces is enthralling. Try putting your salad dressing on your protein sometime, live a little.
Monday, December 9th
Stephen: Maybe it’s because I already have sauce on the brain, but I want to talk about Agrodolce. I had never heard of this Italian condiment before our menu planning meeting, and I fear I had been missing out on this beautiful, remarkably simple, sweet and sour sauce. The cannon of Italian American food is largely focused on heavier things: cream sauces, bolognese, the marsala also featured this week, etc. Agrodolce is a beautiful foil to the richness of Italian American food, the acid that cuts the fat.
Monday, December 16th
Stephen: I was on a hike with some friends about 2 years ago, and on this hike my buddy spent a good half hour or so explaining his Wikipedia deep dive on borscht to me and our compatriots. I was gagged. I had no idea the myriad intricacies and colors of borscht, and ever since then I’ve had the idea of white borscht stuck in my brain. So big thanks to Jeff for the education. Also thanks to Emmet for coming up with smoked portobellos in place of kielbasa, that was genius.
Monday, December 23rd
Timmy: On December 30th, we had our Holigay À La Carte pick-up. I always look forward to Holigay, as I get to see not only our friendly weekly subscriber faces, but also clients who only sign up for our holiday menu. As Full Fridge Club was paused for that week, we didn’t get to take any photos of the incredible dishes made for our Holigay clients. Well, maybe there was a photo from pick-up..
Monday, December 30th
Stephen: Coming up with dishes suitable for the harshness of winter without being same-y isn’t always easy. Everything is all soups and stews and root vegetables. By the end of December I’ve had enough. I like this menu because it has all of the comfort, stick-to-your-ribs-ness of winter food but with some nice, bright twists. A little tangy ranch for your roasted roots, a pop of jalapeño in your cornbread to keep you on your toes.
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok! This month, Emmet takes us on a trip.
January 9, 2025
I’m writing this as large parts of the city of Los Angeles are consumed by wildfires. My plan, for the past month or so, was to write something long and flowery about a recent trip I took to Southern CA— time spent in Los Angeles with dear friends, time spent in dusty windy Joshua Tree with my love, time spent hiking and marveling at the beauty and otherworldlyness of it all. My plan was to write about the queer food we ate while we were there, to talk about the queerness of the bathrooms in those restaurants, to wax poetic about queer food spaces and how immediately at home I feel in them, about how they are familiar and how proud I am that Common Table is one of them.
As has been demanded of us over and over and over in the past five or so years (as COVID has continued to rage, as a genocide is fueled by our tax dollars, and as the impacts of climate change have become impossible to ignore), it seems only right to pivot a bit.
Here is a link to mutual aid efforts on the ground in LA.
I don’t have anything new to say about the heartbreak and horrors we are experiencing and witnessing on the daily. I do know that the time to act is now. Act locally, build your networks, support one another. Find joy when you can so that you have something to draw on when things feel impossible..
And so, some joy. Below are a few photos of the spaces I was lucky enough to be in a few months ago. Beautiful meals at La Copine (pictured: the urinal in the bathroom, filled with rocks and dried flowers), The Ruby Fruit (not pictured: the bathroom where the Indigo Girls are piped in on repeat or the amazing hot dog I ate… I was too busy living to take a photo), Night Market (pictured: mind-alteringly good Thai food, not pictured: at the table next to us, a queer couple cried and sat on the same side of the table while they ate, petting each other’s hands and weeping). Also not pictured: the best chilaquiles I’ve ever had, at El Huarachito.
And that was our December!
Below, for paid subscribers, you’ll find our Side Dish, where the crew shows off our own crews— of critters! You will also find two recipes from our December FFC Menus, scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen: Roasted Squash Agrodolce & Creamy Tomato + Coconut Soup.
If you’d like to help our work with keeping our local free fridges full, but you don’t live locally to order a Full Fridge Club service, you can always sponsor meals here!
And, if you are local and interested in learning more about Full Fridge Club, check out our website.
Thank you all for joining the club and we’ll see you next month!
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