Thanks for your patience while I get this essay delivered to your inbox—a bit delayed. Between the radio station’s Easter keg hunt campaign and actual Easter itself, I wasn’t able to record until Sunday night. Either way, here you go and I hope you enjoy! Thanks for understanding! -Shannon
I never thought I’d become the kind of person who looks forward to stew. As a kid, stew was basically the food equivalent of a shrug—some watery chunk parade my mom called dinner when there were still leftovers in the fridge but not enough dignity to call it a meal.
It wasn’t a burrito. It wasn’t spaghetti. It was just… hot matter. Suspended in other matter. With a name that sounded like it was apologizing for existing. She called it “caldo.” When I was 6 years old, I just called it an atrocity to my taste buds because my palette refused to maturely taste a green bean until I was 37 years old.
And yet, here I am—at 9:00 p.m., in a dimly lit radio station, actively romanticizing stew. Not just eating it—waiting for it all day, like it’s a scheduled emotional support session with carrots.
With everything that’s been cascading through my life for the past nine months, cooking and eating stew has become my brain’s way of filtering for control. Which isn’t saying much, considering I’m just chopping shit up and throwing it into a pot. But it counts.
And in a year where every day feels like that scene in Office Space where they drag the printer into a field and beat it to death—I’m the printer—even that feels like structure.
I recently told a friend about the endless field of fires I’ve been trying to put out with a plastic spray bottle that mists more than it sprays and squeaks every time I squeeze it, like even it’s tired of my shit. I’m sure the second I finished explaining my situation, he quietly upgraded my status to “walking train wreck.”
Being the kind of friend who genuinely wants to help, he asked, “Do you have an outlet? What are you doing for yourself?”
At first, that question hit like a corporate wellness memo—vague, slightly performative, and delivered with the energy of someone who thinks “self-care” means buying a candle at Target.
But I knew what he meant. What he didn’t know was that I don’t post on the internet about my 4:30 p.m. appointment with Diamond Dallas Page and DDPYoga—my actual outlet. The one where I hold a warrior pose and fantasize about the bubbling cauldron of peasant-level joy waiting for me at 9 p.m.
Initially, I thought he meant therapy. And look—I’ve done the therapy thing. It works. I’m not here to trash it. But lately it feels like I’m paying someone $100 a week to nod along and tell me I’m already doing the right things while I rehash how big I am on “personal ownership.”
That $100 could go toward avocados and eggs for three months. Or more stew ingredients, if we’re being honest. Hell, with current food prices and whatever tariff war we’re pretending not to be in, I could stretch that money into either a week of gut-friendly fiber... or five minutes of emotional validation on a TikTok Live hosted by a 40-year-old woman sitting in LED lighting, surrounded by crystals, whispering “thank you for the support” every time a lonely dude named “BigRig47” sends her a digital squirrel in a cowboy hat.
So yeah. I journal. I walk. I do yoga. I feed my body well. And somewhere in the middle of that responsible chaos, stew has quietly become the thing that prevents an actual meltdown. Not because it’s healthy. Not because it’s Instagrammable. But because that moment is mine and mine alone.
These days, the Instant Pot is my therapist, and dinner is whatever I can make without triggering a financial meltdown or a digestive hostage situation. I gave up red meat—not for ethical reasons, but because it costs more than a therapy co-pay and plugs me up like a mud-plugged culvert in Alabama.
Chicken, though—chicken’s still in rotation. When it’s seasoned right and air-fried into submission, it’s downright restorative. I chop it up and toss it into my stew, because it’s the only protein I can eat without feeling like I swallowed a sandbag and gave it three days to settle. That’s why stew works. It’s flexible. It’s forgiving. It absorbs the chaos and turns it into flavor.
But that’s not even the point.
The point is that every night, sometime between the third loathsome Staind song and whatever commercial I’m ignoring on the air, I sit down with a bowl of homemade stew, and I disappear. The world just…pauses.
HOA dues? Doesn’t matter.
Family drama? Muted.
Car issues? Doesn’t exist.
In that moment, I don’t have to fix anything. I just let the flavors take me from behind while the paprika whispers, “You deserve this.”
It’s less of a reward and more of a warning: Do not talk to me while I’m eating this stew. This is my window of calm. My edible forcefield. The one thing keeping the mental collapse at bay.
There’s something to be said about making your own stew. And I don’t mean just dumping a can of soup into a bowl and microwaving it while doomscrolling on what Trump said within the past 40 minutes. I’m talking about what some people—myself included—might call a “fuck-it stew.”
As in: fuck it, throw in the onions.
Fuck it, dump in some potatoes.
Fuck it, what even is coriander? Who cares—put it in.
Add water. Hit manual. Let the machine make your feelings edible.
But here’s the thing: a real fuck-it stew has layers. Emotional ones. It’s not about throwing random ingredients together like you're auditioning for a chopped episode where sadness is the secret ingredient.
No, a proper stew—my stew—is built with intention, with care, and with the quiet hope that by the time it’s done, so is whatever spiral you were stuck in.
My particular ritual goes something like this: olive oil, then onions. Not just sautéed—meditated upon. A salt dump that’s less of a pinch and more of a full-body middle finger to my cardiologist. If flavor kills me, at least I’ll die seasoned.
Pepper, paprika, the obligatory garlic drop-in (after the onions go translucent, obviously), then in go the mushrooms, zucchini, and celery like I’m building a salad that knows it’s about to die nobly.
At this point, the Instant Pot is borderline overflowing. Good. Let it. That’s part of the point—controlled chaos with a lid. Potatoes, grape tomatoes, half a cup of quinoa for “texture” (but really to trick myself into believing I’m doing something healthy), and a dollop of Better Than Bouillon because I’m not a monster.
And, oh—carrots. I almost forgot the carrots. I always forget the carrots. Somehow, no matter how many times I’ve made this stew, they get left on the counter like a metaphor for everything I’ve overlooked this week. But when I remember? It hits different. A little sweetness. A little beta-carotene for my vision, I guess—just enough to look back at the week and ask, with absolute clarity, “What the actual fuck, dude?”
The final product? Five bowls of steaming, tomato-based mental stability I can live off for a week. And here’s the kicker: it also makes me digestive-Teflon. No bloat. No regret. Just a 48-year-old man trying not to feel like that guy from Big Trouble in Little China—you know, the one who explodes because he can’t process emotion... or probably gluten.
This isn’t just a meal. It’s maintenance. For the body, sure—but also for the part of me that still believes something I cooked, something I built, can hold me together just a little longer.
There’s something else stew gives me: time. Not just time to cook, but time to be. When I’m making it, I’m not racing a deadline. I’m not spiraling. I’m just in the kitchen, chopping things like I’m filing a grudge in vegetable form—not because I want to hurt anyone, but because it’s cheaper than therapy and the carrots don’t talk back. Then I close the lid and pretend that 25 minutes of pressure cooking is the same as working through my shit.
But it’s not just the cooking—it’s the after. It saves me time. One pot. One lid. No stovetop drama. I’m not juggling three pans like a stressed-out line cook in my own kitchen. I rinse out the Instant Pot bowl. Maybe soak the air fryer grates if I’ve done chicken. That’s it. As long as I haven’t nuked the rest of my dishes into crusted shame, cleanup is basically done. And that kind of low-effort recovery feels like a tiny, domestic miracle.
So yeah, when I crave stew, I’m craving warmth, sure—but I’m also craving efficiency. I’m craving the illusion that I’ve got my shit together. I’m craving something that tastes like I cared without requiring me to prove it with ten dirty dishes and a ruined sponge.
Other small comforts hit the same way. Like grocery store mini birthday cakes. The kind with vanilla frosting, rainbow sprinkles, and absolutely no occasion. They sit in that weird corner fridge like edible apologies, and somehow they always find me.
I buy one on occasion when I’m feeling defeated. Not to eat all at once—because I’ve done that before, and the sugar hangover made me rethink my entire life—but just enough to feel like I got away with something sweet and stupid. A couple bites here and there. A personal celebration for surviving whatever flavor of chaos the week tried to serve.
I think I realized I was setting my emotional baseline around broth sometime near the end of 2024. That wasn’t the plan. At first, I made stew just to save time. I was juggling too much—family stuff had gone sideways, my car was falling apart in slow motion, and Christmas turned into a high-stakes episode of What Did I Break This Time?—a show where every fix leads to three new problems, and the prize is realizing you should’ve just stayed in bed.
What started as “let’s just change out the valve cover” turned into “oh cool, now I need motor mounts” and “surprise, you broke a hose.” All this, of course, happened while parts stores were closed for the holidays, meaning I got to spend my “vacation” under a car hood instead of recovering like a normal person.
Somewhere in the middle of that mess, I made a pot of stew. I didn’t even eat it. It sat in the fridge while I ran back and forth helping my parents, chasing parts, trying not to scream into a cracked serpentine belt.
Eventually, the stew went bad. But I kept making more—because even when I wasn’t eating it, stew became the one thing that didn’t ask more of me. It didn’t talk back. It didn’t cost me $300 in labor. It didn’t look at me with judgment or send me an invoice.
By the time the new year rolled around, everything was rising—HOA dues, insurance, emotional damage. Every bill felt like a little slap, and every “important update” email made me want to tell the entire world to go eat a bag of dicks. The only thing I wanted to eat was my stew—because it was warm, quiet, and the only thing in my life that didn’t make me feel like a complete waste of oxygen.
And yeah, sure—technically, a bag of dicks could also be warm and quiet. But stew never ruined my credit score, made me spiral at 2 a.m., or asked me to wear a ball gag while Venmoing someone named “BrittanyWith2Ts.”
There’s something about soup when everything feels hard and cold—like it’s the last edible hug on Earth. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it physically. It’s soft. It’s warm. It goes down easy when the rest of the world wants to be sharp and loud and too online.
When life gets bleak—comment-section bleak—like saying soup is good and someone replies, “typical lib take—bet you think Sleepy Joe makes soup too,” and it spirals into a 57-comment thread about crock pots, the deep state, and what Jesus would’ve cooked if he owned a Traeger—I don’t want a salad. I don’t want something crisp and vibrant and full of potential. I want something that’s been simmering in its own feelings for hours. Something I can hold in a bowl like I’m cradling the concept of stability.
Soup brings me back to childhood—to that exact moment where you’re in the back bedroom blowing into a Nintendo cartridge like you’re performing sacred tech CPR, and someone from the kitchen yells, “Dinner’s ready.” That slow walk down the hallway. Your dad half-asleep in the recliner with the 6 o’clock news buzzing in the background. Your mom clanging dishes like she’s scoring the soundtrack to domestic order. That whole scene felt like the world wasn’t falling apart—even if it was.
Outside? Cold, gray, probably raining. But inside? Stew.
That’s what soup is. It’s not just food—it’s a force field. A pause button. The original Do Not Disturb setting.
Culturally, I grew up thinking soup was something you ate when you couldn’t afford better. But the older I get, the more I realize: soup is the smart food. Soup is the quiet flex. It’s not poor—it’s strategic. My parents weren’t just making food; they were hacking the economy with vegetables and beef boullion cubes. That wasn’t struggle—that was survival with seasoning.
And yeah, sometimes the same soup my mom made in the '80s because it was cheap... is the same soup I make now because I need to feel like I’m not going to emotionally disintegrate just because my storage unit raised its rates $100.
There are other soups in my life—ones that don’t involve bowls, burners, or bouillon. Like the 40-minute video I once watched of a guy restoring a wooden pinball machine from the early 1900s. Not even a flashy one—just old wood, rusted hardware, and dead bells. But he took it apart. Sanded it. Stained it. Replaced the felt. Polished every last bolt. I watched every second. Didn’t skip. Didn’t fast forward. Just stared, jaw loose, watching this man slowly reassemble something that didn’t ask to be saved but was getting saved anyway—or maybe someone did ask to refurbish it because, you know, creator economy.
That’s soup.
Same with those rug-cleaning time-lapses—the ones where a carpet that looks like it lost a war gets pressure-washed into some pristine relic of domestic glory. The sound? Hypnotic. The transformation? Biblical.
Or the woodturning lathe videos—where someone shapes a resin-and-wood hybrid bowl like they’re handcrafting a galaxy. Shavings curl like ribbons, colors swirl like dreams, and I’m just… there. Watching. Letting the drone of the machine cancel out everything else. Bills. Noise. People online saying shit like “Sleepy Joe can’t even boil water.” Gone.
Those are my other stews. Not meals—rituals. Digital talismans. Tiny windows where the world is quiet, repetitive, and fixable. I don’t know if that counts as survival or just adult pacification. But if I have to choose between watching a guy restore a rusted World War II canteen for 36 minutes or scrolling through another thread about how the economy is tanking—I'll take the canteen.
So yeah, if soup is the thing getting me through—is that sad? Or kind of beautiful?
Honestly, it’s the only thing that still makes sense.
Because even when tariffs are wrecking my 401k, and HOA dues feel like a monthly fine for having walls, and avocados are priced like luxury emeralds—I can still walk into a store, grab a bundle of celery, a bag of carrots, and some golden potatoes, and make something that doesn’t ask me for a login.
Everyone else is out here watching TikToks on how to boil water with intention, Googling “meals that feel like hugs,” or asking AI to explain how to feed a family of four during the collapse of Western civilization using three ingredients and no hope.
But I’ve been doing it this whole time.
Making stew like some doomsday monk with a Costco membership.
Because here’s the truth: the world’s on fire. But my soup is warm.
And tonight, that’s enough.
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