Week 21

The gang's all here

This week's weather was atrocious and as you can tell by my last two posts, I found comfort in cookbooks. On Friday evening, we sat on our friends' porch and drank a bottle of wine, and the skies eventually cleared and things got better after that.

Polly Judd community garden

Between rainstorms I bought some tomato plants and rosemary and finally got around to planting them on Saturday. My social media feeds have been filled with pictures of friends' raised garden beds, and while I wish I had that kind of gardening urge, I just don't yet. But I'm happy to do tomatoes, maybe some peppers and herbs, and call it good. I have a CSA share starting next month and feel good about that, too.

Got some of these

Recipes

We've made good use of the most recent issue of Milk Street, with recipes for carnitas, cilantro rice, and a chicken orzo soup. And I made the biscotti and chocolate carrot cake I posted about earlier.

And now I'd like to resume my reducitarian lifestyle of a low- to no-meat diet. Especially after reading this.

Reading

I finished a fantastic graphic memoir, Belonging, written by Nora Krug, a New York-dwelling German woman searching for family history and reckoning with ancestral guilt.

I'm also working my way through The Seven Culinary Wonders of the World, which has me searching for Youtube videos of people harvesting salt in Brittany and where to buy jamon iberico de bellota ham, perhaps the finest ham in the world (it ain't cheap).

And this was a great longread from Ann Helen Petersen about not wanting to buy stuff anymore. 

Making

I've lost my mojo in this area for the moment. With all the rain we got this week, you'd think I'd relish the opportunity to curl up in a corner with my knitting or something, but it turns out all I felt like doing was reading.

Watching

Joel's COVID read has been Les Miserables and he's nearly finished, so we started re-watching the PBS miniseries of it this weekend. And we're halfway through Unorthodox on Netflix, which has been refreshingly different from the things we normally watch.

Listening

My recommended anthem for the week: Have You Been Good to Yourself by Johnnie Frierson