Full Fridge Club: July 2024
Summer break takes the (herby polenta) cake!
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.
Our July was gorgeous, chaotic, beautiful, and soggy!
If y’all didn’t hear, local drag queen Pinky Socrates was exhumed for our LGBTQuiz Night and Dinner on Saturday, July 20th. (For paid subscribers, you might just get a treat of her performance down below in our Side Dish.)
Beers were provided by Sloop Brewing Co. and wines were curated by Kingston Wine Co. Our incredible, hand-crafted menu included:
Vegan Spinach Artichoke Dip with Pita Chips
Vegan & GF Okonomiyaki Loaded Baked Sweet Potatoes
Buffalo Chicken Drumsticks/Vegan Buffalo Tofu Nuggets with GF Cornmeal Waffles
Vegetarian GF Nachos with Chili, Radish, Pickled Onion & Jalapeño
Build-Your-Own Wedge Salad with Cherry Tomatoes, Bacon/Tempeh Bacon, Scallion & Dressing
Watermelon Wedges with Lime & Salt
Vegan Brownies
And heavy, HEAVY snaxxx
The crowd was impeccable and— despite the downpour ending near minutes before the event started— the night went on without a hitch!
I… I mean, Pinky… spent a lot of time researching fun and engaging trivia bits for the night, which included six rounds of ten questions. Most guesses were so smart and on-the-money! And the ones that weren’t were hilarious! (See below)
If you missed this event, and want to support Common Table and even more drag, we will be popping up at Chaseholm Farm’s Dairy Drag event in one week: Saturday, August 24th. Get your tickets here, because they sell out fast!
Alright, alright, enough with the intro: Let’s Dish. It. Out!
July Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, July 1st
Emmet: This menu stemmed from my love of dishes that are basically just a mix of beautiful local veg, some eggs, and a delicious sauce— enter stage right: Gado Gado! We had never done an Indonesian inspired menu, and since local cucumbers, choys and beautiful purple snow peas were aplenty, we filled in items that would highlight those vegetables. We had never tried making the Balinese Sauce tofu and I think it was the true sleeper hit of this menu— tangy and spicy and nutty and just... SO GOOD. Julia also worked some wild magic on the coconut turnips— an item that can be a hard sell was turned into a buttery gooey flavorful delight.
Monday, July 8th
Emmet: I've been making stuffed collard rolls since culinary school— one of the hippie dishes I learned at Natural Gourmet Institute that really stuck with me. It's such a wonderful way to use collards, which are coming in in droves from Long Season Farm this time of year. You can make really large and satisfying rolls, which braise beautifully in the oven. We also wanted to do a play on chicken and dumplings, which allowed us to play around with chickpea flour braised dumplings. Chickpea flour is a real magical mystery to me— it can do so many things, including (it turns out) make beautiful fluffy gluten-free poached dumplings!
Monday, July 15th
Emmet: There is just SO. MUCH. ZUCCHINI. I know we're not alone in this feeling, and YET: we want to use it because it's so abundant this time of year! Ratatouille is a perfect vehicle for July veg. And a Salad Niçoise does the same job as Gado Gado that I described above!! In classic French tradition (?) this menu was really just designed around highlighting vegetables. And some beautiful local sirloin tips, too.
Monday, July 22nd
Emmet: I grew up right outside Utica, NY, which is home to some of the best Italian food I've had in this state. Every spot does Utica Greens a little differently— some are basically solid with cheese, others are super spicy, some have bacon... This is our take on this weirdly specific regional classic. We also wanted to bless our clients with Dan Pelosi's pesto chicken meatballs— such a simple and delicious recipe by a favorite fellow queer chef! Once we get riffing on Italian favorites, the menus tend to just write themselves.
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok! This month, Timmy was in a bit of an Olympickle…
Imane Khelif is a 25-year-old Algerian boxer. She won gold in women’s boxing in this year’s Paris Olympics. This is the first time an Algerian athlete has taken home the gold for women’s boxing. This also marks the first athlete from Algeria to win gold since 1996.
This should be the headline.
Instead, when you Google Imane Khelif, you are bombarded with articles surrounding the ongoing cyberbullying lawsuit from French prosecutors against the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter (this is the only acceptable form of deadnaming, by the way).
Imane Khelif is a woman. Imane Khelif is a cisgender woman. But, while boxing in the Olympics, prominent bigots accused her of being a man. These bigots include: former U.S. President Donald Trump (better known as a convicted felon and perpetual sexual assaulter), X owner Elon Musk (better known by saying his trans daughter was “killed by the woke mind virus”), and TERF Professor Joanne “J.K” Rowling (better known as Robert Galbraith, a male pseudonym she hides behind to write transphobic crime novels, which– according to her– was created in no relation to Robert Galbraith Heath, the real life psychiatrist and pioneer of gay conversion therapy).
The concept of this specific flavor of transphobia is colloquially known as “transvestigation”— a hateful conspiratorial assessment of any individual’s body or behavior that relies on harmful gender stereotypes to “prove” that someone is trans. Like most ravenous conspiracies, this phenomena chronically lives in online spaces, where images of celebrities, or any victim-of-the-week, has often bright red circles or arrows indicating phantom sex characteristics not attributed to that person’s perceived gender identity: Have you seen Amy Adams’ Adam’s apple?
They’ve even gone so far recently as to reverse transvestigate Dylan Mulvaney—arguing she was born female, forced to transition, then forced to detransition back to female— just in case you needed proof that they have lost the plot.
In the never-ending discourse surrounding us trans people, our lives, our rights, and our safety— this is, unfortunately, a part that is noted as beneficial. Those of us who have more than two brain cells are well aware from the outset of any sort of oppression that, eventually, it will bleed into the privileged to uphold right-wing patriarchy: ie. abortion bans eventually affecting *gasp* even wealthy, Republican white women?!
So, a cis woman being able to legally fight against the bigots is a good step. A reactionary step, but a good one nonetheless.
And then came.. the takes. The well-intentioned allies fighting their version of the good fight with scientific arguments about testosterone levels in average cis women compared to Olympic athletes (totally helpful and not weird at all you guys) or how Algeria has made all LGBTQ+ rights illegal so there’s no way they would send a trans Olympian (cool cool that makes me feel so much more at ease) or how Katie Ledecky, the most decorated American woman at the Olympics, has been transvestigated for years and she’s fine (right right we don’t need to acknowledge this pattern as an issue of course not).
Even the mainstream news messages all boiled down to one topic: everybody calm down, she’s. not. trans.
Thank God!
Because it’s not that people are misgendering Imane and calling her a man. It’s that they are accusing her of being trans— clearly, the worst thing you can be.
You know, us secret-secret transgenders lying in wait to… idk do bad stuff! (Like, in my case, forget to pay a parking ticket.)
This is the “we can always tell!” crowd who also calls us “traps” and then relies on the gay/trans panic defense to get away with murdering us. If you can always tell, then was it at least premeditated panic? Like first-degree panic?
It is a good thing— once privileged groups feel the effects of intersectional oppression that hopefully change can begin, since the issue is harder to ignore. I just wish we didn’t ignore it.
I wish Imane hadn’t been transvestigated. I wish the conversation wasn’t about cis people and their safety at all.
I wish we weren’t here. So, so far away from trans women competing in the Olympics. Seemingly so, so far away from trans women being celebrated in the mainstream at all.
Because, while it is mostly over social media and I luckily can go out and touch grass, the internet is a hotbed microcosm of our society.
I don’t want to pay for TSA PreCheck just to make sure I don’t get singled out at the airport even though I don’t like traveling. I don’t want to worry about how much neck stubble is showing before deciding against using the bathroom in Target. I don’t want to have to change out of my sweatpants when buying gas in the winter so the attendant stops staring at my crotch.
I don’t even want to be an Olympian. I do wish I could be.
To crawl out of my despair, I cling to my community. I’ve got our queer softball games started by Emmet and Lauren. And my incredible spouse has Transcenders.
Back in high school, my spouse did track, specifically shot put and discus. They were so excited for the Olympics this year, especially watching the throwing competitions. They signed up for the Transcenders Track Meet, a local Trans & Nonbinary team, and competed on Saturday, August 3rd (photo below by Dana Lewis Photo).
And that’s what we do. We carve out the little spaces for ourselves. We give each other the victories that the world is too reluctant to give.
When we parked for the meet, I saw a double rainbow above the field.
My first thought, obviously, was GAY FIELD GAY SKY GAY TRACK GOTTA GET MY PHONE.
My second thought, out of all pitiful things, was the Bible. That quiet recovering-Christian voice in the back of my head: “Remember, this is a sign of hope.”
-Timmy
And that was our July!
Below, for paid subscribers, you’ll find our Side Dish, where you can watch Pinky Socrates’s original song “Coffee Grindr” from her performance at our LGBTQuiz Night & Dinner. You will also find two recipes from our July FFC Menus, scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen: Corn Pudding and Utica Greens & Beans.
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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