The Art of Decanting the Mind

L.A. Fires, Kitchen Journaling, and My Only New Year’s Resolution

Morning.

On Wednesday January 8th, I woke up not knowing the sun had risen. Our room was full of muted blue light. It looked like dawn but my phone said 8 AM. Bleary, I slipped off the covers to look outside. Smoke in a thick, grey veil was smothering the sun. I tapped the weather app for the AQI reading: 455: Extremely Hazardous. 

In just a few hours, my world was distilled into these peripheral words: 0% containment, 100 mph winds, arson, go bags, evacuation orders, air purifiers, PM 2.5, Watch Duty, LAFD. I watched a digital map sporting cartoon flames just miles north of our neighborhood. We sat helpless in front of the TV, phone, and laptop, watching flames pour from the mouths of canyons, gushing orange-colored smoke which filled the air in central L.A. like a fog. At sunset, the smoke turned black and blue, like a bruise stretched over the horizon.

I had two answers to what I would pack should we have to evacuate. The first came to me the second morning of the fires, when it still seemed that we would escape the worst of things. I sat in my chair, perfectly still and monk-like with my matcha, planning it out: computer, one journal, marriage certificate, social security cards, sourdough starter, baby pictures, cast-iron, underwear, and knives. I almost smiled at myself. Not so materialistic after all, I thought.

Several hours later, the Sunset Fire five miles from our home was still not contained. I looked at my phone to see 56 text notifications from the neighbors. Everyone had received an alert to evacuate. People were sending lists of what to bring and others were asking where they should go. In that instant, the word everything flashed across my mind in big block letters. I imagined shoveling all my prized possessions into our pickup: the silver cutlery, a painting from France, an espresso machine, a cushion from the couch where my husband proposed, my copper, my Bottega Veneta mules, the bed where we both made love for the very first time. Maybe I’d take a chip of plaster from the walls for good measure. I was ravenous for every part and particle of my house, which I finally realized with a clarity that only comes in the face of turmoil, was also my life.

Moments later, we were alerted that the text warning was a mistake—something that became commonplace for residents in the days to come. There was no need to evacuate; the text had been sent out by accident. Huge, enormous sighs of relief poured from me like tides. They were so strong I wondered if people could sense them like gusts of the Santa Ana winds. 

Home.

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Central L.A. is a hard place to live when it comes to physical beauty. The only place you are guaranteed to not get a parking ticket is in your own driveway. At precisely 7:30 AM every morning a symphony of sound fills the air: leaf blowers, helicopters, sirens, weed whackers, and the crackle of tired, old power lines from up above. The only time it is truly quiet here is when there is an emergency: a pandemic, a wildfire, or a state-imposed curfew. I did not feel like I’d cut my teeth as an Angeleno until my husband had a gun pulled on him and our house was robbed a few months later. People move to this urban purgatory hoping to make enough money to eventually escape the crime, grit, and endless slabs of cool, grey concrete.

Angelenos all have a place they one day dream of living. It’s different for every person, but for those of us in the middle of LA, it’s somewhere up north. If we become ludicrously wealthy, the dream is Malibu or the Palisades, preferably Mandeville Canyon. If we are handed a more reasonable deck of cards, the dream is a place like Topanga, Pasadena, or Altadena.

My real dream has always been the Palisades. The Palisades are the Eden of L.A. Spread out over 20 miles of bluffs, Pali glows like a city on a hill overlooking the ocean, the highlands, and the rest of L.A.’s working class. It is one of the only places that feels sufficiently green; trees, shrubs, brush, flowers, and man-sized aloe plants line every single street. Many places in  L.A., including my own neighborhood, feel like a bald spot on the crown of Southern California. The Palisades were lush, verdant, and smelled like security, like children who’d been breastfed since kindergarten and maybe a little bit longer.

I drove there many times just to walk around and imagine my life there. I wouldn’t have to sit through an hour of traffic to find a beach free of homeless encampments or syringes. My kids would go to good schools. Finding a patch of grass without dog—or human—feces would not be such a hassle. I’d join some sort of women’s club and teach the WASPs in my area the difference between good chardonnay (Burgundian) and bad (Californian). More than anything, I would not fall asleep to the sound of sirens and helicopters swirling around my house at 11 PM.

After 72 hours of waiting to be evacuated while watching flames gulp down all of L.A.’s crown jewels, it finally hit me: the most beautiful parts of our city are actually gone. My husband turned to me and said, “If we had gotten everything we wanted, we would have nothing now.”

Indeed.

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A week before the fires began, I wrote down a single New Year’s resolution: make more space for beauty in 2025. It makes me chuckle now, reminding me of how gifted the subconscious is at knowing what we need before the rational mind. Beauty, in my experience, is often the first thing to drop from a life that is too full, especially if it is full of grief or chaos or some other horsemen of the unknown. It requires time, but more than time—space. As a gardener with a paved yard, I know that plants never blossom when the pot is too small, the water is too frequent, or the sun is hidden by smog or marine layer. So is it with our souls and whatever beautiful thing we are trying to create in this world.

“There are a thousand thousand ways to live this life, every one of them sufficient,” Marilynne Robinson says at the end of Gilead. I have to believe this is true, even in the aftermath of a natural disaster which will cost more than 9/11 to rebuild. In older civilizations, it was believed that whatever was left after the crucible of a fire was imbued with special powers. I am still looking for that thing, even as I have a meltdown after burning the pancakes and filling my kitchen with a different kind of smoke, the domestic cloud which reminds me that my kitchen is still standing.

Part 1: Give Past Beauty A Body

For my birthday this year, my husband drove me two hours north of L.A. to Los Olivos for a special dinner. As we climbed closer to the highlands, the air thickened to the consistency of shredded cotton. Tony told me we were in the middle of a cloud.

I stared out the window as he asked for my favorite moments of 2024. Images crowded my mind. I thought of the Bonnes-Mares we drank in Paris, of sitting outside our favorite restaurant with friends while eating pureed John Dory. I thought of trick-or-treating with my friend’s kiddos. I thought of the meatballs in broth we scooped over polenta almost weekly. I thought of smuggling our own popcorn into The Chinese Theater to watch “Twisters.” I thought of all the people that reached out after the break-in, and then, several months later, after the fires. I thought about how good life was and how easy it is to forget these things amid some really tough days. 

In the years I’ve helped people sort themselves out in the kitchen, I’ve discovered that most of us are preoccupied with our culinary flaws and aspirations instead of our actual likes. This is a recipe (pun intended) for disaster. Skill follows affection. Opulence is found in a chocolate mousse, or it can be appreciated in a corndog with mustard and a diet coke. Taking just 30 minutes to write down the most beautiful moments of the past year helped remind my brain of what true beauty looks and feels like in my body. It put me back in touch with my own palate. It also reminded me of the good which I had passed over and gave it a place to live and breathe.

The glow from the flames at night.

Part 2: Decant The Mind

In December, I read this article about the making of A Christmas Carol. For six weeks while writing the book, Charles Dickens walked a twenty-mile loop through London, immersing himself in the world of Marley, Cratchett, Scrooge, and the other spirits. His first draft was written in one fell swoop, and was the only version ever completed. We can suspect that so many nights spent saturated in the world he was creating made the actual writing part much, much simpler.

It has never been easier in the modern era to fall for counterfeit inspiration. We are always halfway in, halfway out for the sake of “staying informed”. Every chore is accompanied by a podcast, every drive a playlist, every walk a FaceTime, every morning coffee a slurry of news apps. Older creatives were thrust into a realization which we have to choose by force: mundane tasks help us decant our creative ideas.

I’ve had wines taste like cardboard at first blush turn fruity, bold, rounded, and full of expression after hours in a decanter. What exactly does the wine do in a decanter? Nothing. It breathes. It rests. It opens. It becomes more of itself in a relaxed environment. I’m convinced that this is what the modern mind needs more than anything else. I’m convinced I need this more than anything else; less knowledge and more boredom.

The biggest wakeup call for me in this arena was watching The Taste of Things. Unlike The Bear or Chef’s Table, which focus on the performative, stressful nature of cooking in a restaurant, this film captures the mystical nature of home cooking at the highest order for someone you love. It also has no music whatsoever. It was a reminder to me that the kitchen fills us with its own music each and every day. It was a reminder of what I miss every time I try to do more than one thing at a time, even if that thing appears, at first blush, to be extremely dull. 

Italian Ranunculus.

Part 3: Record When I Feel Most Alive

My current form of journaling is to record the four to five moments I feel most alive every single day. These moments cannot be feelings or intuitions; they must be physical and visceral events, moments involving taste, smell, sight, sound, or feel. It can, and often is, just a single sentence. I do the exercise first thing every morning and it feels like putting my glasses on each day. It helps prepare me to see the world through a more refined and open lens.

I don’t have an exact formula and what I write is rarely earth shattering. I usually jot down one thing involving food, another involving nature, and at least one or two things regarding the people I love and/or current events taking place. I’ve written about the single patch of grass by our driveway, a spot which actually belongs to the neighbors. I journal about my husband’s neck a lot. And if there’s time, I journal the recipe for dinner: massaman curry, a sheet pan with sausage and gnocchi, oatmeal with cornflakes. Most of the time, it’s unbelievably simple, just the four to five parts of the day that surprised me most and kept me rooted in the present moment. When I do sit down to write a scene, a lot of what I need is already there.

Part 4: Laugh

Several days after the fires, I was in a bookstore. The young man at the register asked me if I had an account. 

“Yes,” I replied with confidence. He then paused, making space for me to recite my account number, which was just my phone number.

“I need your number, ma’am,” he prodded gently.

My eyes were fixed in the middle distance as I realized that my phone number had flown to the moon, along with my name and address, and a good chunk of my sanity.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t know my own name today,” I chuckled, once the numbers finally pushed through. 

His face got grave, the kind of look people get when they remember the world is still on fire.

“I’m pretty sure we’re all fried today,” he said.

“Nice use of the word fried,” I said, and then he laughed. It was like the moment someone tells you a very expensive dinner is already paid for. Relief. For a second, I felt the same as Tony and I driving through that cloud, naming every good part of life.

Lunch.

Edits by Lauren Ruef