Home (Cooking) for the Holidays

My friend Samin Nosrat and I have made one more episode of our podcast, Home Cooking, which will apparently never fully go away! After a two year hiatus, we have a special holiday episode (anything you release during December can be called a “holiday” something, regardless of how flimsy its connection to any holiday it might be). It’s called Frankly, We Have a Lot to Ketchup On. Samin expertly answers some questions about oversalted vegetables, how a college student can up their sweet potato game, and listens to me wax rhapsodic about the cardamom bun from Buns from Home that I ate (three times in three days!) when I was in London recently. I missed our silly, chaotic show, and it was so nice to go back to it. You can find it here.

I also released the last Song Exploder episode of the year this week, which was with pop megastar Sabrina Carpenter, about her pop megahit, “Please Please Please.” It’s so wonderful when someone’s persona within a song is entirely consistent with their actual personality, and that’s what I found to be the case. The song is wryly funny, a little sarcastic, and brutally honest, and that’s what she was like in my conversation with her and producer Jack Antonoff. And the production and instrumentation are much stranger and more idiosyncratic than you might expect from a #1 radio song. You can listen to the episode here.

Normal Gossip, the great, beloved, hugely successful podcast about low-stakes drama, just aired its last episode with its original host and producer, my friends Kelsey McKinney and Alex Laughlin, and I was the guest! I got to hear a juicy story about a family’s history, and got to share a little about how gossip brought my parents together, with an arranged marriage. It was really fun to record. You can find links to listen to that here.

On the music side, I remixed one of my favorite songs by the band Local Natives, and they released it this month on the deluxe edition of their album. (I’m just realizing they missed an opportunity by not calling it the deluxe holiday edition.) You can listen to it on Spotify here or on Apple Music here, or even better, buy it on their Bandcamp page here.

And my last little update is about a voiceover gig I had this month. I got to narrate a video for the Obama Foundation’s 2024 Democracy Forum. The video was about pluralism, and features President Obama talking about tolerance and empathy. I didn’t write the script, I just read my part, but it felt like a relief to do something, anything, that felt like it pushed back against the darkness. If you’d like to see it, you can watch it here.

A few things that have brought me cheer recently:

• The opening titles to Dan Da Dan. Even if you never actually watch this anime, I recommend the main title sequence, which has incredible music and visuals.

• The new season of Queer Eye. My new identity, I guess, is just a guy who cries all the time now. But episode 2, “Special Delivery,” was especially moving. One of the best episodes of the series.

• The films A Real Pain and Anora. I loved them both, especially for the way they were able to juggle very different tones throughout their respective stories. (If you want to keep up with what else I’m watching, I’m on Letterboxd @hrishikesh.)

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is not a new book, but a great Christmas book, and would probably make a wonderful Christmas gift. (I haven’t watched the film adaptation that came out recently, but hope to over the holiday break.)

Have a wonderful end of the year. Eat lots of treats.

Hrishikesh