Starting with the Basics and Diving Into Southwestern Favorites
An Interview with Anna Pulley of San Ramon
Happy Sunday! We have gorgeous weather in the Bay Area today, and I should probably come up with something exciting to do, but I have a feeling that my entire afternoon is going to get used up pulling oxalis out of my front yard. I used to love “sour grass” when I was a kid, but now it’s less of a convenient snack and more of a thing that drowns all of my other plants. If anyone has any suggestions for good things to do with it, send them my way! (There’s a “comment” link towards the bottom of this email.)
For this month’s interview, I got to catch up with an old colleague, Anna Pulley, a writer and editor I worked with when I edited cookbooks and other lifestyle books for Callisto Media. Anna is the author of three lesbian rom-com novels (just re-released in a box set), a book of humorous poetry, and a book of erotic short stories. She also writes a weekly syndicated dating and sex advice column for The Tribune Content Agency. Anna and I talked about the foods she grew up with in the Southwest, the sources she looked to when she started cooking, and how she started learning more about her family’s recipes. She also shared a recipe for her family’s red chile pozole, which I’ll run in next week’s newsletter (photo below to whet your appetite). First, here’s what Anna told me, edited and condensed for clarity.
Anna Pulley
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Neither of my parents were from there. My dad grew up in the South, in Memphis, Tennessee, and my mom grew up in New Mexico. I was in Tucson for 22 years.
The food in Tucson is excellent. They actually fairly recently got some sort of World Heritage designation for their food, specifically, which makes a ton of sense. Amazing Mexican food.
My mom worked on the Pascua Yaqui reservation, so we ate a lot of food from there growing up, which was amazing. We went to a lot of powwows, we did the fry bread, we did a lot of red chili burritos, which were delicious. I've tried to recreate fry bread at home, and it's just not the same. I don't know what kind of powwow magic they do out there, but mine are just not as light and crispy and delicious.
My mom was a therapist, so she was basically the entire mental health department for the whole reservation. It's changed now, but for a long time, she was the only source of mental health on the reservation, which was a lot for her and, I think, possibly contributed to the fact that she had a brain aneurysm. She had to quit doing that when she was in her mid 40s.
We are Native American and Mexican. We have never been reservation Natives, so, my mom experienced sort of a lot of pushback, sort of like, You're not Indian enough. Which I get I totally get. A lot of tribes, a lot of reservations, get people coming in and trying to steal resources. But my mom has always just been like, I want to help. I want to work for the people who need my services. So, she started off at the San Carlos Apache Reservation, which is near Globe, Arizona. (This was before I was born.) But she's always felt a connection to tribes that she's worked with and to the Southwest in particular, where she grew up. My maternal grandparents have roots back to Zacatecas, Mexico. So, she has connections there as well. But mostly for whatever reason, she felt like a stronger sort of pull toward her Native heritage.
The food at home was pretty eclectic. She was a busy working mom, so there were definitely plenty of Kraft mac and cheese nights. But she had this incredible repertoire of things: We would make sopapillas, which are similar to frybread, and she'd never used a recipe—which of course drives me crazy now, because I don't know the recipe. I have to look it up from somewhere else. She loved that. She was a big fan of breakfast enchiladas—which, if you've never had, I highly recommend. They’re sort of similar to chilaquiles in that you just sort of cut up a bunch of tortillas and add enchilada sauce and some fried eggs on top. They’re super delicious.
We also do Christmas tamales every year, and since my mom has gotten sick, I've sort of taken the helm of that. And that's been a lovely tradition to carry on with my step kids now, teaching them about foods from the Southwest. I love Christmas tamales. We do a vegetarian version and a pork version.
I’ve basically only ever moved for women. When I was 22, I moved to Chicago. And then I fell in love with a yoga teacher, and she was like, San Francisco is where the yoga teachers must go. So, I followed her out here. And then Vika—my wife now—she lives in San Ramon, so, she brought me out to the suburbs, which is amazing. I was resisting it for a long time, but you know what? The suburbs are nice.
I did not learn to cook until way later in life. I do not know why. I mean, I was a vegetarian for like 10 years, so you kind of have to get a little creative there. But I was also quite lazy. The same pasta over and over again. It wasn't actually until I started working for Callisto as an editor and started working on cookbooks, that I really started to up my skills in that department. I was exposed to all these different ways of cooking, and when you see that around the clock, you start to get curious. So, I started cooking a lot more and branching out.
I try to make primarily vegetable-forward foods, for sure. The kids don't eat anything, so, I kind of have to make, like, three different meals. We co-parent [with Vika’s ex], which is nice. Gives us a slight break. The nights we have the kids, one will have plain pasta, the other one will have meatballs, and then with Vika I try to do veg-forward stuff. We're into soups right now because of the winter. Tonight, I'm going to make a cauliflower-sweet potato thing with cheddar that I think is going to be delicious.
One of the hardest things to get right when I first started learning how to cook was a pot of beans. What I found out from an auntie was that you have to use a ham hock when you're cooking the beans. I was vegetarian for a long time, and I didn't know that you put lard or ham hocks beans. I think that was probably the biggest challenge—getting the simple stuff right instead of wanting to jump in and do the more complicated recipes.
I also made macarons, which are hard. Those take, like, 16 hours, and most of it is waiting. I was editing a book, and it was called Macarons for Beginners or something. I was just obsessed with that book, and I was thinking about it all the time. So, I finally bought all this equipment that goes into making them, and I made one batch of macarons.
Cooking in California, there are obviously so many more fresh, delicious produce available. In Tucson, it's a desert environment, so a lot of things did grow year-round, but we didn't have the kind of access to produce that we do in California. So that's big. Where we live there’s tons of Mexican grocery stores everywhere, so I have pretty easily access to things that I need, certain kinds of chilies or lard for tamales, masa, corn husks—those kinds of things. And some of those are right at the local Safeway, which is lovely. I didn't have that in a lot of places, certainly not Chicago.
When I moved here, I had the pleasure of meeting Samin Nosrat, who wrote Salt Fat Acid Heat. She was a friend of a friend, and we hung out just once or twice—and also my friend Wendy MacNaughton illustrated that book. I was blown away by just the concept of basically taking these four elements and using them to broaden your knowledge of recipes. That was a big game changer for me, for sure. There was also Heidi Swanson; she does vegetarian recipes and she lived in San Francisco. She was a big game changer for me, too. I use a lot of her sort of more basic recipes for how to make a pot of beans or how to make a very basic vinaigrette. A lot of that was very foundational for me as I was teaching myself how to cook as an adult.
I really try to bring recipes and flavors from my childhood into what I do. I got more into it when my brother had kids; they’re six now, I think. There's something about having kids where you sort of start to get nostalgic for the things you had in childhood. You want to impart that knowledge and those sorts of experiences at home with your kids. And because my mom always cooked in her head, my brother didn't have any of the recipes. So, we started sharing stuff back and forth, so that's been great. And now his kids are learning about fry bread and those sorts of things from our childhood as well.
I didn't really cook that much before—much to the chagrin of my mom. She was always trying to get me to do it. And then she has this brain damage, and she can't remember now. And so, there was this very, kind of like, “come to Jesus” moment of, like, Now you have to learn this all, because you didn't learn it before, when you had the chance. And it was this like, Okay, learn from your elders while you can, people. That's the lesson I took away from that.
But there are lots of mentors out there. Sometimes I call my aunts. I'm trying to get better about that. I think American culture is very nuclear family focused. And I have so many aunts. My mom's family is very Catholic. She has six brothers and sisters, and they're all wonderful people. And I forget sometimes that I can reach out to them and be like, What was it like for you, growing up? What are some recipes from your mother? What were the things that she was teaching?
I don’t get to make those foods as often as I would like to. It's sort of centered around holidays—Christmas, birthdays, those kinds of things. It’s more of a celebration.
Photos: Courtesy of Anna Pulley (3), Georgia Freedman