Full Fridge Club: January 2025
Out with the cold, in with the newsletter...
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.
January: the month of new beginnings.
To welcome any new customers to the club, we are offering 15% of any first order using the code “NEWBIE” at checkout!
You can order here if you or anyone you know would like to try out Full Fridge Club— supporting us and our work, so we can support you: our cherished community.
Another new addition to Common Table this month: Chef Eryn Stutts!
Blending her Southern upbringing with influences from her travels around the world, Eryn began her career in cooking while working in the fashion industry, penning the food blog Ugly Food Tastes Better. She became— and still is— a judge for the NYC Hot Sauce Expo, worked as one of the first private chefs in the KitchenSurfing launch, and trained under Chef Sung Kim, learning and honing her skills in high-end catering.
In 2014, she moved to the Hudson Valley and opened a legendary restaurant specializing in Southern Brunch and catering: PAKT. From 2016-2020, PAKT was a HUB for our local queer community, with endless brunches and events.
Editor’s note: Don’t believe me? Almost seven years ago to the day, I was hosting a Drag Race viewing at PAKT as my drag persona, Pinky Socrates:
AND— back in May of 2019— PAKT hosted my spouse’s 25th birthday party:
Eryn continued to cater countless events, worked at the incomparable Cafe Mutton, and has even shot a few spots for the Food Network— most recently in season 36 of Guy’s Grocery Games!
We are so thrilled to have Eryn bringing the heat to the Common Table kitchen:
To give a warm welcome to our new crew member, our new clients, and our newsletter…
Let’s Dish. It. Out!
January Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, January 6th
Emmet: I'm pretty invested in serving up food that is colorful and vibrant, and Indian spices lend themselves so well to achieving this goal. The chicken was marinated in yogurt blended up with beets and spices, and the cauliflower got a hearty dose of turmeric.
Monday, January 13th
Emmet: We are so lucky to be able to get beans from a local purveyor— Milestone Mill! The pinto beans they offer are truly one of my favorite beans to cook… they get really tender and plump but maintain their shape without turning to mush. They're super flavorful, too. So, we started there with this menu! Since it's the dead of winter, we're getting creative on how to work in local storage vegetables— hence the beets in the salad. And we all deserve a little citrus in the winter, to remind us that sunshine is a thing.
Monday, January 20th
Emmet: Ridiculously, this menu was inspired by the fact that I had a case of GORGEOUS Italian gluten-free noodles that arrived too late to be used in another menu. Stephen's grandma used to make sauerbraten when he was a kid, and his idea for this tempeh application really turned out beautifully— gingersnaps in the sauce, who knew?! Maybe the real star of the show were the buttery sautéed winter radishes… never let the smell of cook radishes turn you off— they taste incredible!
Monday, January 27th
Emmet: This was another menu brought to you by food waste reduction! A while back we made a beef goulash for Full Fridge Club, and we were left with an abundance of paprika broth, which we froze for a future application. So here it is, doctored up and thickened and filled with herbs. Nobody but Julia knows what liptauer is, but we always trust her instincts because she just knows what is delicious, and this dish was no exception.
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok! This month, Timmy offers some radical trans art to feed the soul…
Ethel Cain is not real. And she released a new album in January. It’s a brilliant trial of an album— a drone experiment that is often more noise than music— at only nine songs over the hour and a half runtime. It’s inspired by her sexual fascination with a Pennsylvanian power plant. Oh, and it’s titled Perverts. If you don’t appreciate that title, you probably won’t appreciate the title of her 2021 EP: Inbred. You may like her first (and possibly more palatable?) album from 2022, Preacher’s Daughter, until you thoroughly break down the lyrics and lore to understand the album’s story is about Cain escaping an abusive Christian household, struggling to find love and connection while processing intergenerational trauma, and ultimately winding up with a monstrous man who kills and cannibalizes her. Fun, right?
Obama thought so, ironically including her anti-war, anti-patriotism track on his year-end playlist! Yes, the same Ethel Cain who, after Biden’s weapons shipment to Israel of over $1 billion, posted to Instagram "we need to bring back assassinations”. Yes, the same Ethel Cain who, just a few days after the release of her newest album, posted “#KillMoreCEOs” after a certain event back in December— a post that got her airtime on Fox News. How surprising!
I know watching a Fox News clip makes one lose braincells by the nanosecond, but the best part of that clip is not that they do not know her work (“the 26 year old entertainer— if you can call her that”) nor the mention of college students “studying woke curriculums” (take a shot!— not alcohol, but HRT), but that over the entire segment, the hosts (if you can call them that) are completely unaware of her transness and gender her correctly the whole time.
Ethel Cain is not real. And she is the weird, freaky trans icon that girlies like me need these days— not hiding or sanitizing the darker sides of our psyches, but exploring, rejecting, and embracing the perversion of America, religion, and human complexity in uncensored and maybe too honest ways.
Enjoy, my darlings!
-Timmy
And that was our January!
Below, for paid subscribers, you’ll find our Side Dish, where Timmy reminisces over how it used to brie. You will also find two recipes from our January FFC Menus, scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen: Lentil + Sweet Potato Pie and Liptauer Dip.
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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