67. Don't Write When You Get Work
Getting one last 2025 issue in under the wire.
After the last issue of The Plate Cleaner on (yikes!) July 11th, I had a small uptick in subscribers. To those new subscribers let me just say that there have been a few occasions when I haven’t put out a new issues for several months, but this has been the longest gap by about a good margin. Hopefully in 2026 I will get back to a more regular cadence.
The idea for this newsletter first came about in 2019, just after I was laid off from a job, as a way to keep writing and fill my suddenly ample free time. And since it launched on October 28, 2020,1 freelance work has come and gone and my writing here has fit into the spaces between. But 2025 was different. Freelance work was just gone. No calls. No emails. No one asking if I was free and then ghosting me when I responded, which is what usually happens to freelancers.
It was very hard to convince myself that this silence wasn’t personal. That there wasn’t some specific reason the entire advertising industry had started ignoring me. Was it something I said to someone? Did I inadvertently step on someone’s foot at an awards show? Why did they all suddenly hate me? It’s enough to do a person’s head in, really. So it was oddly comforting that almost every other freelance creative I knew was just as hungry for work as I was.
And so from February 1 to July 11 of this year, I published 9 issues of The Plate Cleaner. What a time to be a subscriber! What changed after July 11? The phone rang! First to work on a pitch for a few weeks and then a longer-term gig that has carried over until the new year. After seven months’ furlough, it has been challenge getting my brain back up to full speed. That meant I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to come up with Plate Cleaner ideas as well. Hopefully, as all of my capabilities fully come back online, I’ll be able to strike a better balance.
In the meantime, here’s a very brief issue.
To mark the newsletter’s fourth anniversary, I uploaded the first Plate Cleaner video to YouTube, showing how to use a milk frother to emulsify small batches of vinaigrette.
Since then, I’ve realized that any time it’s difficult to dissolve something completely into liquid, a milk frother is the answer. Instant dashi, the granulated version of the fundamental Japanese bonito and kelp stock, always has sediment at the bottom when you add hot water, no matter who much you stir. The same with Better Than Bouillon. And Metamucil2 usually takes so much stirring to make it drinkable. With a milk frother, it’s as smooth as the label says it’s supposed to be (but never is).3
My frother has yet to see or taset and milk, but I take extra care rinsing it, lest my Metamucil taste chicken-y.4
I am a big fan of grey-market uses for kitchen tools, whether it’s using a potato ricer to squeeze out kimchi juice to make a sauce for fried rice or a cooling rack to separate two kinds of dumplings in one pot.
Let me know what your favourite gray-market uses are in the comments below.
That’s it for 2025. Again, sorry for the sparse back end. Fingers crossed there will be more consistent content (and work!) in 2026.
Happy belated 5th birthday, TPC!
Do I know my audience or what?
Until now.
Pro tip: You may think you can get your frother cleaner if you turn it on while running it under the tap. This is a very bad idea.
My favourite off-brand uses are a potato masher to break up ground meat in the pan and a spider to transfer short pasta from the water to the sauce.
Happy New Year Mike!
I put oil, vinegar, and mustard in a bowl and use a fork as a gray-market tool to make vinaigrette.
Best wishes for twenty-twenty-six!
Rob@Really Abstract