Vegan Apricot Ginger Cobbler

Apricot and ginger mingle and marry beneath a layer of fluffy, ginger-scented biscuits.
Use those summer apricots to make this vegan apricot ginger cobbler,
to fill your home with the scent of sweet fruit and ginger.

You may be thinking, But Lisa! You just posted a blueberry cobbler in June. Why are you making YET ANOTHER cobbler?

Because I wanted to, okay? I deliberated over making so many other things for variety’s sake: apricot cake, apricot tart, apricot hand pies, apricot scones… but in the end, I simply love cobbler too much. It’s so easy and so satisfying. I love the fluffiness of the biscuits, and how you can simply just toss everything into the food processor and you’ll have a perfect, fluffy dough to adorn your precious summer fruits. Sure, crumble, crisps, and buckles are great. And what’s not to love about flaky, wonderful pie?

I’ll tell you what’s not to love about pie: Once you make the dough, you have to chill it. Then roll it out. Then cut it. Then chill it again. Then you have to pre-bake the crust in order to get that lovely, flaky base. But cobbler? You just toss everything together and out comes a magnificent dish of bubbling goodness topped with golden, sweet biscuits. I’m sure I’ll take a pie over cobbler if you handed me both as an option, but if I need to make it? Cobbler is the way to go.

In my last post I talked about my reaction to someone calling me emotional. It’s given me a lot to think about and it’s made me reflect on how I process my emotions and how others process theirs. Everybody reacts to various moments of their life differently: in times of stress, some will bury themselves in work. Others, like myself, will manifest their stress through the body, typically through physical activity. Some others will simply become paralyzed and avoid the root of the stress altogether—a temporary fix that often comes back to rear its ugly head even bigger and more stressful than before. Some people may use a combination of all three methods depending on the degree of stress—and that’s never a fun time.

I’ve definitely felt that paralyzing stress before. It crept up on me, I didn’t realize it was in my life until it was too late and it had taken over my body, my mind, and my livelihood. When I feel any sort of emotion, I have the urge to deal with it immediately. Whether it’s seething anger, a nagging discomfort, or even a profound sense of affection, I voice my feelings immediately. Not everyone in my life has been able to handle my frankness, and as a result there have been a few bouts of heartbreak along the way. Sometimes my emotions are met with open arms. Whatever problem or situation I’m in is mitigated immediately, while other times, those problems don’t get resolved completely, leading to me pushing the problem onto the back burner, where it simmers too steadily and bubbles over if I’m not paying attention.

After a lot of thought and discussion, I’ve come to the conclusion that my method of dealing with my emotions has its advantages and disadvantages. Whenever I feel emotional—be it anger or happiness—I almost always voice it as soon as I’m aware of it. Some say it’s brave, while I lean more towards a certain naivety that’s comparable to ripping off the emotional bandaid. It’s not a method that works for everyone, and to an extent, it didn’t work for me a for a long time. I would trick myself into thinking that I had dealt with my emotional issues, when really all I had done was voice it and not resolved the root of the problem.

On the flip side, I know that I don’t function at all when I bottle up the emotions. When I feel out of control, I tend to numb all the emotions altogether and scramble to control other aspects in my life. In some cases that can be productive (my apartment had never been cleaner), but in the most extreme case, I grasped at anything I could control, and that ended up being food and my body.

Some readers responded to my last post negatively, saying that the person who called me emotional didn’t feel emotions himself, or that the he was unfounded. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily true. I think in the end, he was right—I am emotional. When I live, I feel with my all. Love, sadness, anger, happiness—in order to feel any range of those emotions, I open myself to feel it all completely.

I’ve had to learn how to deal with my emotions in different ways in order to function, and it’s constantly an uphill battle because life has been surprising me with more curveballs than I anticipated. But he was right. I am emotional and it’s important for me to know how to process my emotions in a healthy and productive manner. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. We all have our off days, but it’s important to know that it’s okay to be off sometimes, so long as you find a way to be back on.