Lifestyle
Are you truly infatuated with your co-worker, or do you just see them 40 hours a week?
Does having an affair with a married co-worker (who is in a loveless marriage, and whose wife is having an affair too, but they’re staying together for their child) make me, morally, a bad person?
That depends on what you believe a “bad” person to be. If your married co-worker and their spouse have both communicated and acknowledged the refined terms of their relationship to each other — that their romantic relationship is over, and that they are both free to pursue connections outside of their marriage while continuing their domestic partnership and performing whatever outer auspices of their relationship to ensure their child has a stable home until they come of age — then your co-worker and their spouse are essentially in an open relationship that prioritizes co-parenting. But the nature of this agreement, and the consequences of actions stemming from it, all depends on whether this agreement is mutually consensual and clear.
The word “morally” carries a weight with different subjective meanings. Generally it refers to undertaking an action in accordance with certain principles or values decided by an individual. So in that sense, what is “moral” in this situation can take on a variety of forms, depending on which definition of what is “right” is prioritized in your own mind.
Oftentimes we decide what is “wrong” for us based on how a certain idea or action makes us feel. That feeling can present in many ways — rumination, a knot in your throat or your chest, an unease in your stomach, the tensing of muscles. The fact that you’re asking this question tells me that something about this situation is likely making you feel a certain way. I invite you to explore what shape that feeling takes, not just in your mind, but in your body.
Instead of obsessively over-rationalizing or avoiding, try making friends with that feeling. If it’s uncomfortable or unsustainable to live with continuously, ask your body why — and how it can help you make decisions that are the kindest possible to your nervous system.
I would encourage you to get more clarity from your co-worker on the terms of their marriage, and exactly how open and honest they and their wife have been with each other. Have they both acknowledged to each other that they are seeing other people? If so, does their agreement have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” clause, or is your co-worker being asked to give details on the who, when, or how?
If one party isn’t as aware of what’s going on as the other party, this isn’t an objectively “right” or “wrong” vignette, per se. But it does mean that your new partner may come with some baggage, and perhaps with some growth opportunities in the area of communication. Ethical open relationships (ethical meaning different from morality, meaning more about a general societal consensus around what’s most evolved versus an individual’s codes for behavior) take a lot of maturity, humility, honesty and willingness to constantly grow. Taking on a partner in an open marriage, especially if a child and mutual source of income are involved, will likely present a certain requirement of effort for your heart and mind. And I would contend that even if you’ve already set a mental boundary that this relationship will be short-term or temporary, or purely sexual, chances are you’ll still have to undertake a degree of risk tolerance and emotional navigation through it, given the unique circumstances of the situation. Are you comfortable taking that on? Only you can answer this question for yourself.
Oftentimes we decide what is “wrong” for us based on how a certain idea or action makes us feel. That feeling can present in many ways — rumination, a knot in your throat or your chest, an unease in your stomach, the tensing of muscles. … I invite you to explore what shape that feeling takes, not just in your mind, but in your body.
Goth Shakira wears a Miss Claire Sullivan corset and skirt, Shushu/Tong shoes, Blumarine earring, Hirotaka earring, Pianegonda ring, Xeno underwear and stylist’s own collar.
The most important question here becomes: Is this a situation that is sustainable for you? Are you comfortable with the degree of honesty present among all three people involved in this (four, counting the child)? If there’s something that bothers you about it, what is it exactly that leaves you unsettled? Sitting with these questions will lead you to the best course of action for you, because you are the only person who has to live with you at the end of the day.
And if you were my friend, what I would say to you is this — are you truly infatuated with your co-worker, or do you just see them 40 hours a week? Consistency and proximity, especially in the professional context of teamwork, collaboration and problem-solving, can make a work connection feel like it has more potential for romantic intimacy, depth and longevity than it actually does. Dating your co-worker can be hard (there’s no workplace escape from your personal life if you get into a fight, and one or both of you can find your material stability threatened if the romantic relationship sours). Dating someone with a child can be hard. Dating someone in an open marriage can be hard. In your mind, body and heart, is your connection with this person worth what it comes with? Considering all angles of the situation through the lens of your own well-being first and foremost will give you all the answers you need.
Photography Eugene Kim
Styling Britton Litow
Hair and makeup Jaime Diaz
Visual direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo assistant Joe Elgar
Styling assistant Wendy Gonzalez Vivaño
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Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
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This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
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On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Stephen Malkmus and panelists Emmy Blotnick, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, and Gianmarco Soresi. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
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