Full Fridge Club: June 2024
Pride & Prep-the-dish
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.
Boy howdy— what a month!
Stephen, Emmet, and I (Timmy, your breathtaking editor) started June by giving our lovely patio space a much-needed facelift to prepare for our event season— and events we’ve had!
First, on Monday June 3rd, we had a cute, casual Patio Dinner Party with our Full Fridge Club clients. Some of our FFC subscribers have been with us for over a year and some for only a few weeks, and we all agreed it was high time for all of us to finally get a chance to truly meet one another and enjoy the fantastic FFC dishes together. Though not a Pride event, the evening certainly set the theme for the month: a mutually supportive community enjoying laughs, good foods, and company.
Then, on Tuesday June 18th, Emmet and I participated in the Kingston YMCA Farm Project’s Summer Celebration Fundraiser at the Fuller Building in Midtown (you can see the two of us giggling here). If you don’t know the Kingston YMCA Farm Project, you should check them out— they provide educational programs for local youth to learn the entire cycle of food production on their urban farm: from seeding to eating! We were just one of many food vendors, volunteering our time and resources to support the next generation of farmers.
Next, on Saturday June 22nd, we had our first ever Pride event: Pride on the Patio!
The all-you-can-eat menu crafted by Emmet and Stephen was superb!
Tahini Yogurt & Queerdités
Pulled Chicken with Strawberry BBQ
Sloppy Jacks (Jackfruit & Peppers)
Pickley Slaw
Potato Salad with Grilled Radicchio, Grainy Mustard & Spring Onion
GF Pasta Salad with Garlic Scape Vegan Aioli
Grilled Zucchini in Elotés Drag
And don’t even get me started on Stephen’s show-stopping Vegan S'mores Blondies.
Our team was outstanding: our dear friend/bartender Hands and my incredible spouse/door person Quay. The party was the perfect mix of friends and community members, both old and new.
Finally, we hosted The Meat Wagon’s 4th Annual Sausage Party. I had the honor of working with Stefano during the first and second Sausage Party, back when they were hosted in downtown Kingston.
Stefano is an absolute gem with the highest quality meats around. He was grilling up house-made Kielbasa, Hot Italian Sausage, and Chicken Chaurice— as well as some all-beef franks for fun. Emmet even contributed a vegan option: his soon-to-be-famous falafel burgers. The party was just right— the weather was perfect and the crowd was lively and intimate.
Outside of our work at Common Table, some of us crew members also had a few extracurricular Pride events… but Emmet will get into those details later in our Side Dish (for our paid subscribers). As a taste, below is your distractingly gorgeous editor being as butch as her body can handle.
Lastly! In just one week, next Saturday July 20th, I will be hosting an LGBTQuiz Night & Dinner at Common Table… in drag! To learn more about the event and purchase tickets head to this link.
Okay, okay! Enough is QUITE enough. Let’s Dish. It. Out!
June Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, June 3rd
Julia: A funny thing about Full Fridge Club is that all of us and our clients are never all together in the same place at the same time, even though we all take home the same food. Emmet had the sweet idea to invite everyone for a 'patio hang' during pick-up in early June so we designed this menu with that gathering in mind. Full of picnic-y items like cold salads and gazpacho, we figured all of these dishes could be enjoyed outside without having to be heated up, and leftovers could be enjoyed throughout the week at home. For paid subscribers, scroll down for my grandmother's cucumber salad recipe, a dish I grew up with and was so delighted to share with our FFC community.
Monday, June 10th
Julia: Starting in March, I've been filling in for G. Daniela Galarza, the writer behind the Washinton Post's 'Eat Voraciously' newsletter, while she's on parental leave. It's meant getting to research The Post's extensive archive of recipes and when I found the Tofu Veracruza in there, I instantly knew it'd be a great fit for FFC. We designed this menu around that dish. Stephen suggested elotés as a great complement to the other dishes but when we realized sweet summer corn wouldn't be available yet, Emmet had the ingenious idea to treat zucchini (which is so abundant from our local farms in early summer!!) just like Mexican street corn. Voila! For paid subscribers, scroll down for the recipe for my father's Tex-Mex meatballs, another favorite dish of mine from growing up.
Monday, June 17th
Julia: This week's theme was 'Breakfast for Dinner' and started with Emmet's smart thought of making hash browns in the waffle maker. Everything came from that menu item, including asking our friend Stefano who runs The Meat Wagon to make us breakfast sausages. It's so fun to be in community with other small businesses in the area, especially other trans-owned food businesses. If you eat meat, head to The Meat Wagon!
Editor’s note: You can find Julia’s recipe for her “Cheesy Egg Bake Soufflé Thing” here!
Monday, June 24th
Julia: The starting point for this menu was a text I got from Andrea, one of the crew members at Long Season Farm, who shared a recipe for zucchini scarpaccia and said it was her favorite way to use up zucchini which grows so prolifically it can be hard to know what to do with it. I had never had scarpaccia before and was so excited to learn about a new thing. The rest followed the Italian theme, including the turkey bolognese Emmet regularly makes for their private clients, and Stephen's brilliant idea to make tofu marsala. Buon appetito!
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok! And this Pride month, a few of us reflected on Pride itself…
Emmet: I’ve had the extreme privilege of being surrounded by queer and trans people most of my adult life. I came out as queer at 19, and again as trans at 25. In between those, I found myself working at Willie Mae Rock Camp— a social justice/feminist music camp in Brooklyn, run by over 150 volunteers each summer. Most of those volunteers were queer and trans, and so so so many of them were friends and mentors and bandmates and housemates and comrades and co-conspirators of mine over the years I lived in Brooklyn. This work connected me to the larger queer and trans community in ways I could only dream of. Over the years I have been witness to absolutely unfathomable levels of brilliance, creativity, resilience, rage, spit and grit and wisdom and vulnerability and community care. I learned from and was ushered into adulthood by living legends, by the absolute best. For this I will always be so grateful.
When I think of Pride, I think of how I felt every time I went to Riis Beach and how it was the first place I ever felt at home in my body. I think about Trans Day of Action and how it was a place to bring our anger and agitation. I think about the Drag March and how it was right after Trans Day of Action— how it was a place to bring our joy, a place to play. I think about all of the gorgeous queer and trans people in my life— how proud I am that we have stuck it out and kept in touch and that we continue to witness and hold each other… how we’re still out here fucking things up and fighting for what’s good, even if it looks a little different than it used to.
Julia: “Queerness in a way saved my life,” the writer and professor Ocean Vuong said in 2020 in a conversation with writer Bryan Washington. He continued, “Often we see queerness as a deprivation, but when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me, I had to make alternative routes. It made me curious, it made me ask [if] this is not enough for me because there’s nothing here for me.” My spouse, Grace, has a print of this quotation framed in our shared home office. I look at it just about every day. We have built a home that celebrates queerness and embraces all the alternative routes Vuong talks about. Our home is not just a queer home because of the art on our walls; it’s because of us, the people who live in it. Our family is a queer family, which isn’t merely about our marriage, our gender identities and expressions, or our sexualities. It’s about our way of living our day-to-day lives. Grace and I both approach things through queer lenses. Grace is a question-asker, a researcher, a person who never hesitates to press pause, instead of just going along with the status quo. Of the many gifts being married to Grace has given me, this regular reminder that pausing is an option is one of the most important. Grace reminds me so often that life is more abundant when we don’t just pick the first option available. I like to queer just about everything, to look at things from alternate perspectives and question if the norm is the only possibility. This could be as simple as when I write recipes and permit myself to wonder whether there’s another way to make something, or as big of a life decision as my career and being willing to create my own stability if it means I get to make my own path. This approach, for me, isn’t about substituting one thing for another. It’s about expansiveness. When it comes to choosing this or that, I am always interested in “and.” For whatever it’s worth, this makes me a fun person to order food at a restaurant with.
Timmy: The first Pride March— March, lol, it’s a Parade— I ever attended was on Sunday, June 29, 2014 in NYC. I went with my future spouse. I was 20 years old, I thought wearing glittery heels and standing for hours was a smart decision, and Laverne Cox and Jonathan Groff were Grand Marshalls (I know, I know, I exude youth…). The next year, our little drag troupe “The Hudson Valley Drag Brigade” was performing at our local Pride event in New Paltz— the headliner was Lady Bunny. I didn’t know who the hell that ol’ broad was but I did know two things: 1) I didn’t like her and 2) I was destined to become her. Over the next few years or so, drag had become my life and I was hosting or performing at every Pride event I could get my little twink hands on. It was amazing, exhausting, and unsustainable.
It’s funny. I never had to come out as queer. I thank that to many factors: my tolerant family, my liberal hometown, the queer elders who paved the way before me. I just was queer. The first label I ever put on my identity and the only one that still rings wholly true today. I did have to come out as a drag queen, but that’s a story for another day…
Kingston has “finally” had its “first” Pride weekend this year. Sure. Sure. My spouse, my friends, and I didn’t really attend any of these local events— though many were put on by other friends or acquaintances. No, instead, we waxed nostalgic about the glory days of the local queer community: when we all gathered once a week at our local bar “where everybody knows your name”. (Does anyone remember that bizarrely out-of-pocket transphobic lyric from the Cheers theme song?)
Ah yes, the glory days… of less than ten years ago.
When these feelings come up— this unearned old-biddy-shouting-at-clouds bitterness— I think of that little, fiery f-slur wearing fishnets on the southbound Poughkeepsie train. I think of what Pride meant to him. Out, loud, and visible; righteous and radical; fresh, hot, and novel; amazing, exhausting, and unsustainable.
Pride to me now (the wise old bird I am) is quiet and thoughtful. Grateful and vulnerable. Intimate and secure. Internal and gentle.
The first kind of Pride is important for those of us who need it. The “Go out there and make me proud, kid!” kind. The need to prove yourself via external validation. It has to exist (and I’ll fight for it ‘til my fishnets rip).
This new version I’ve stumbled into feels much more real.
The jarring morning peak in the mirror as you take in “Oh, right. This is who you are.”
Followed by the tender, subtle nod you give yourself when you realize— despite all odds— you’re still here.
You’re still queer.
And, damn, you’ve gotten used to it.
And that was our June!
Below, for paid subscribers, you’ll find our Side Dish, where Emmet shares how he and his partner Lauren started a Queer Softball League. You will also find two recipes from our June FFC Menus, scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen: Julia's Grandma's Cucumber Salad (from Now & Again) and Doug Turshen's Tex-Mex Meatballs with Salsa (from Simply Julia).
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!
Happy Pride you cuties!
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