Week 50

Silly me, I thought there were only 52 weeks in the year, but the way 2020 has turned out, there will be a Week 53 post this year, since the new year starts on a Friday. Of all the years. 

Back in the olden days, this would be the time we'd start gathering at peoples' houses and around the office for Christmas parties, drinking festively and exchanging gifts and cookies. In 2020, this month has been dotted with Zoom happy hours and text threads, lots of package deliveries, and me getting really sick of being in the kitchen and running dumb errands. The thrill of the week was taking part of Monday off to get my snow tires put on and drop off a package at the post office (a J. Crew return from a month ago). 

On certain days I get excited about Christmas, and how unusual this one is. We can make it special and fun. In some ways, we are. In other ways, I'm having a hard time finding the energy for it. I'm trying to shake it off. 

But I will warn you that this was, nonetheless, a pretty blah week, so this report is short.

Recipes

We ate a lot of soup (Mama Leone's with the leftover chicken) and other easy dinners. The best recipe of the week was Melissa Clark's rum balls, a no-bake concoction with gingersnaps, pecans, cocoa powder, maple syrup, spices, and of course, rum. They keep getting better as the days pass. 

Reading

After finishing Zadie Smith's Intimations: Six Essays (loved it), I started on Circe by Madeline Miller. I had a book club Zoom this week and my friend joined the dozens of others who have told me they devoured this book. Greek mythology (i.e., any mythology) is a huge blind spot for me, and this is the first time I've read something about it that has actually captured my imagination. I think this is the perfect way to wrap up my reading year. 

Watching

I finally watched The Family Stone this year. Several friends have told me it's a favorite, and it got me in the Christmas mood. A month or so ago, we watched Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, and this weekend we followed it up with Before Sunset, which follows the same characters ten years later, in true Linklater fashion. Now we just need to finish the trilogy with Before Midnight. 

And we hopped on The Queen's Gambit bandwagon, too. She is such a captivating character. 

Listening

The album that powered me through my first round of Christmas baking was The King's Singer's "A Little Christmas Music" album. I am not ashamed to say that there's something about men singing in spritely falsetto that just feels like Christmas to me. 

Making

Secret stuff.

Week 49

 

Are you tired of these photos from the bluff? Tough. When Joel and I shared things we've been thankful for this year, the bluff was pretty close to the top. This year especially, it's been there to give me perspective in all the ways I've needed. It's helped me appreciate all the seasons - the growth and the death and renewal of things, the change of the sun's path, the muddy paths that become dusty and then muddy again. It has given me a way to view depth and shadow and my ability to be above it all. It's a place where I can watch Luna bound around unleashed, a place I return to each day alone. I hope you have a place like this. If you don't, I urge you to find one near your home (or wherever you're spending most of your time these days). 

This was a tough week, but there was sweetness inside. I've been thinking a lot about the solace of solitude, and my mind often goes to my first apartment where I lived alone for several years. A friend who was part of that era of my life texted me out of the blue, not long after I had been thinking of that, and of her, and we shared how things have been been hard this week. We also got to see friends we haven't seen for months and talk to them from their porch. And I picked up sandwiches from a place we'd never eaten before. And I'm spending a lot of time with the poetry of David Whyte and Mary Oliver who remind me of different ways of looking at the world.

But still, it was a tough week. How was Week 49 for you? I hope 50 offers some joy for us all.

Reading

I finally finished The Mysteries of Pittsburg by Michael Chabon and floundered a bit when trying to think of what I was in the mood for next. I have tended to avoid reading essays about the pandemic as long as we're still in it, but I'll be darned if Zadie Smith's Intimations: Six Essays isn't exactly what I want to read right now. She is one of my favorites, and I love her reflections on this time we're in.

Watching

Comfort watches this week: The Great British Bake-Off and Meet Me in St. Louis. Also, Citizen Kane, in preparation to watch Netflix's new series, Mank -- also worth watching in general after the president and election we've just had.

Making

I made a felt leaf garland because why not? I used this blog post as inspiration. I'll take a picture of the finished project, if I remember. 

Recipes

The best thing I can share with you is my insistence that you make Samin Nosrat's buttermilk marinated chicken before the year is through...or at least soon. Tender, succulent, perfect in every way. 

Listening

We got our Spotify round-up of all the stuff we listened to this year, and listened to the most, and when all was said and done, Joel and I listened to a lot of Steely Dan, Paul Simon and Sting. I am not sure how I feel about this.

Anyway...

Take care of yourselves, readers. Get good rest, and take in more fresh air than you think you need. The Christmas spirit can only get us so far.

Week 48

The Thanksgiving food was made and devoured, the Christmas decorations are up, and we are just a month away from saying ta-ta to 2020. I'll save my reflections on the year for Week 52, but this week was a good variation on the overall theme that things could have been a lot worse. My mood varied wildly - feeling down in the dumps, hopeful, energized and exhausted. Fresh air improved everything.

 

I'll just start with the food situation around here. Neither Joel nor I have held strong opinions on the necessity of a bird on a cutting board surrounded by mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing and gravy on Thanksgiving, but we are happy to allude to these things in other forms. Our meal this year was a turkey cassoulet (recipe from the New York Times) - a stewy bean mixture with sausage, turkey and bacon, topped with freshly toasted seasoned bread crumbs; pull-apart sour cream and chive rolls (recipe from Bon Appetit); warm Brussels sprouts salad with citrus vinaigrette (recipe from Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons cookbook); and cranberry hand pies for dessert (recipe from Bon Appetit).

This week brought some nice outdoor excursions, both solo and with the gang. On Wednesday afternoon I took the longer route on the bluff that heads further up the South Hill, and on Saturday afternoon we drove out to Fort Spokane - an old Army outpost at the confluence of the Spokane and Columbia rivers. We had never seen it in all our years of living here.

I also finished my orange raglan sweater  - I even weaved in the ends and blocked it. I'm still not sure if I'll actually wear it, but it was a fun learning process and way to keep my hands busy for several months. 

As for what we're watching -- Joel got me to watch 1917, which was quite something. I was really impressed by it. On Thanksgiving night we watched Holmes & Watson with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly - the perfect thing for digestion. And after finishing Schitt's Creek, I started on the latest season of the Great British Bake-Off and almost died laughing over the cake busts in the first episode.

What else, what else. Still reading Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which reminds me that I should do my annual book report post. I've read a lot of books this year, until recently. This book isn't really hooking me but I'm enjoying it enough to continue.

My goals for this next week are to finish my book, start an embroidery project (I have a kit coming in the mail) and to find some extremely basic but good recipes for the week to use up the stuff we have and freeze the rest. We still have a lot of leftover cassoulet...

Cheers to another week!

Week 47

These days are so routine as to be absolutely forgettable. Each day is some version of doing a morning workout, showering, administering pet meds, eating the same breakfast (English muffin, poached egg, tea), working, lunching, walking with the dog, working, walking again by myself with a podcast before it gets dark, drinking afternoon tea, finishing work, taking out cheese and putting it on a small cutting board with a few pretzels, pouring a tiny glass of vermouth, sitting at the table with Joel discussing news headlines and recounting our workday, starting dinner, eating dinner while watching an episode of Frasier, cleaning up, offering each other either sparkling water or tea before watching Schitt's Creek or the Crown, knitting, getting ready for bed and reading until I start to doze. The cat crawls in bed on my right side each night around 1:30 and drapes herself over my arm until I get up four hours later. On Mondays and Thursdays we take turns vacuuming. On Wednesdays I try to remember to water the plants and clean the bathroom. When the weekend rolls around, we sleep in until 8:30. We spend more time outside and watch movies instead of shows. I take on a larger cleaning project or do yardwork. We make more involved dinners and I make something more interesting for breakfast and/or dessert. We drink the whole bottle of wine from dinner. 

Each Sunday, I write out a weekly schedule in my journal to plan for the week, but I rarely actually fill it in, because anything out of the ordinary - a trip to the vet, a Zoom happy hour - is easy to remember without writing it down. 

What's more helpful right now are to-do lists to help me break out of these routines and give me something different to do, and something to remember. This is not to say I don't love my routine. It's comforting and it helps the days pass, and these days I'm looking forward further into the future and the routine helps me forget how far off those days might be. 

I am greatly looking forward to a few days off from work, and my task today (Sunday) is to come up with some ideas to make those days look and feel like some sort of vacation. I have a feeling Christmas decorating might be one of those things. 

Reading: The Mysteries of Pittsburg by Michael Chabon- I'm taking my time with this one, especially since I'm mostly just fitting in a few minutes at a time before bed. In the meantime, books-of-the-year lists are starting to emerge and I'm feeling that annual push to aim higher with my reading goals.

I also got a lump in my throat reading this, written by a woman whose mother died of COVID last week in Spokane. There were certain elements that hit close to home, and I'm sure so many others felt the same way. Beautifully written and incredibly sobering.

Watching: The Crown and Schitt's Creek -- we may finish both by week's end. On Friday night we watched a cute but maybe a touch racist Argentine movie called Chinese Take-Away. On Saturday it was the 1983 movie Tender Mercies (available on Prime), for which Robert Duvall won an Oscar. I'd watched it 20 years ago in my American Film class, and neither I nor my classmates fully appreciated it at the time, though I remember my professor nearly getting choked up while describing it as a meaningful film for him. It indeed hit me more deeply this time around.

Listening: It's about time for the annual listen of my Turkey Trotters playlist, a compilation of toe-tapping old gems which I compiled years ago for Thanksgiving food-prepping. 

Making: I finished my little cabled hat and want to make more. But I am also almost done with my raglan sweater, GLORY BE. 

Recipes: This was the last week of our CSA box. Having that box really made our eating lives more interesting this year and was the best way to ensure we were eating lots of vegetables. We could sign up for the winter box but I think I'm ready for the break. But on Friday night I really celebrated what was made possible by all the contents and made a creamy parsnip and leek soup, which also contained potatoes and celery. It looks brown because I had to use beef broth, but it was delicious. On the side we had a kale salad with Braeburn apples and golden beets. We drank wine from our beloved Wanderlust, a local wine and cheese shop where we have a monthly wine club membership. The bowl that contained the salad was made by a local artisan, KJ Pottery. It was a nice way to feel thankful for the people around us here in Spokane.

I made pumpkin scones with oats and crystalized ginger as well as brown-sugar anise cookies, both recipes from the New York Times. 

And finally, a 5-star Melissa Clark dish for Moroccan chickpeas with kale in the Instant Pot. It's even vegan.  

I'll be thinking of my friends and loved ones even more than usual this week. The one comfort I've found during these shutdowns and travel restrictions is that, strangely, I feel less alone when I know we're all alone together. (By the way, Zoom is free on Thanskgiving!) Time to read some Mary Oliver poems and revel in all the beautiful little and living things that fill our lives with wonder. Thank you for reading and for caring about the little pleasures in mine.

Week 46

Mid-November in the neighborhood: wet leaf mulch over the roads, giant puddles, heightened colors against gray clouds. My eye is always drawn to yellows, so I stopped to take a picture of this during my Friday afternoon walk, and within minutes, the clouds burst and I ran the last five blocks home. It was exhilarating.

Leisurely Sunday breakfast (poach pods make the eggs perfectly round for the English muffin) and casual reads.

Luna is a very earnest kitchen companion.

I wish my Oma were here to give her opinion on which vermouth she likes best. 

Saturday night fireside dinner, after sitting several hours by an outdoor fire. Dinner: Melissa Clark's sheet-pan chicken with sweet potatoes and peppers, topped with pickled red onions, quinoa on the side. Watching The Sunlit Night. Also watched two episodes in a miniseries version of The Name of the Rose, not very good. (Very much looking forward to the latest season of The Crown).

Reading: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. Breakfasting on whole-wheat Irish soda bread with goat cheese.

Craft diversion: cabled beanies.

A last-minute throw-together that looked planned: salmon with lemon-herb marinade, pan-charred Brussels sprouts and purple cauliflower, rice.

Minestra di pasta e verdure alla romana, one of my favorite soups of all time, made with a boatload of greens, prepared by Joel.

This week, during the workday, I've been listening to the ambient music of Brian Eno. While some of it gets a little out there, for the most part it's helped me stay focused and calm. 

I'm thinking about Thanksgiving and the holidays. It will be different for all of us, but some new traditions may arise from it that we can share with others in the coming years. Life in a pandemic remains difficult but I'm grateful for things to look forward to. In the meantime, I'm happy to stay home, stay healthy and stay connected in whatever ways I can. 

Week 45

 I'm not sure how it took me 38 years to realize that our national anthem ended with a question mark.

"O! say does that star spangled banner yet wave
o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

While I feel an overwhelming sense of relief right now, I don't feel like using this space to write about the election. But. This is one of the best things I read all week. 

It doesn't come as a surprise to me that I did next to nothing outside of work this week. I had grand plans for Tuesday night: eat an early dinner, take a bath, read my book. Instead, we ate less-than-satisfying takeout burritos, tuned in to PBS all night, and I knit my boring sweater and drank chamomile tea, hoping these things would ease my blood pressure. 

At least I kept up my afternoon walks, even in the rain. The earth smelled sweet and one afternoon I watched a hawk circle above me. As an added treat, I came in and put the kettle on for tea and had a bite of apple cake before returning to work. I'm finding my cold weather routine.

I also made a few cold weather related purchases: a humidifier for my office, resistance bands for my workouts and a new bathroom scale. If I gain or lose weight this winter, I can now know it to the nearest tenth of a pound. Our old scale made me believe I was five pounds lighter. I'm still keeping it nearby.

But my brain has been all over the place. We learned on Wednesday that my brother has COVID, and we were waiting to hear the test results for the rest of the family who were all experiencing symptoms. On Thursday, my city's public health official got ousted. Cases are rising everywhere and it feels like we've lost ground. 

I didn't feel much like knitting, I didn't have a huge appetite, and I didn't care to watch much TV after a day full of screens. 

But I did find a daily escape at The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. 

Each evening, I lost myself in the seasonal menus that Mademoiselle Vivette and Mademoiselle Ray prepared at their valley inn in the Chartreuse Mountains in southeast France, and in Roy Adries de Groot's descriptions of how it tasted when he stayed there in the 1970s. He lists all the seasonal menus for lunch and dinner, starting with the aperitif and ending with the eau de vie and/or coffee and dessert, with several different wines between each course.

He describes going to market with Mademoiselle Vivette, the early morning trip itself a scenic feast, and the different farmers and vendors they visit with as Vivette selects the freshest frog legs, eggs, leeks, herbs and mountain cheeses. And how, in the fall, they roast birds who have recently eaten blueberries or juniper berries, on a spit over a wood fire. 

In my research about de Groot, who wrote this book after discovering this inn by accident while traveling the area to learn more about his beloved Chartreuse liqueur, I found out that he was blind -- the result of injuries during World War II. He had been a writer with the BBC then, and as his blindness progressed to completely eliminate his sight, he focused on food writing for the remainder of his life as his sense of taste heightened.

The second half of the book contains the recipes. The inn still stands today, and while I know the food will be nothing like these glory days, I am dreaming of post pandemic trips to the area, maybe even stopping at the inn for lunch. 

My own cooking this week was comfort-food focused - a curried butternut squash soup, apple snack cake, and an easy stirfry. 

On Saturday, the clouds parted, and after spending the morning in the yard, we ventured out of our neighborhood for drive-thru coffee and a curbside pickup to restock our winter bar. I made zaletti, a Venetian cornmeal cookie with boozy currants and orange zest. We ended the day - and the very long week - by the fire, watching our president elect. I felt my shoulders relax and my heart fill with hope.

Week 44

It occurs to me that it is the 45th week of the year that will (maybe, if we're lucky) determine the fate President #45. I am nervous, I am weary, I am ambivalent, I am emotional, and I am fired up. 

During a week when I elected to not seek out the news, it still found its way to me. If I thought I could refocus on something other than Trump, the election or COVID, I was clearly dreaming. I was on a text string with friends who were fuming over the fact that our local newspaper ran an unsigned editorial endorsement of Trump (though it was clearly written by the paper's owner). Of course I couldn't help but read one of the columnist's responses, followed by the editor's, in which he outlined how unsigned endorsements will no longer run in the paper. Later in the week, I learned during a Zoom meeting that Spokane's top health official either resigned or was terminated. Meanwhile, I listened to someone I think the world of describe Trump as a man appointed by God who will bring this country together. I found out through another friend's tweet that future stimulus checks she desperately needs won't be coming anytime soon. I received 18 text messages from strangers about the election, voting and volunteering. 

It's not that I didn't want to know any of these things. I can't pretend to be a responsible citizen while ignoring the state of the world and my local community and how my own friends and family are feeling about it all, and how it's directly affecting them. It's just that I temporarily wanted to feel less distracted by it, and therefore less stressed out, and less saddened by the state of the the world. It was an attempt to reclaim control of what information goes into my brain, and to give myself space to sort things out.

And so instead, in the evenings, I sorted through my recipe binders. I took every recipe out of its plastic sleeve and reorganized everything in the most thoughtful ways I could think of. Soup recipes go together; soup recipes with butternut squash go together; vegetarian soups should be separate from ones with meat. Does bacon garnish count as meat? Yes, it does. 

Handling these old recipes from various points of my adult life was comforting -- the lemon chiffon pie I made in 2005 with Splenda for Dad, who was visiting with Mom for Thanksgiving at my brother's that year; the autumn minestrone I made when my best high school friend came for the weekend; the green bean casserole I brought to my boss's comfort-food birthday party; the skinny soup recipe I printed off a decade ago with the best of intentions and still have never made; the pop art raspberry ice box cake I made for my best college friend.  None of this was connected to the internet or any news source. Unlike with reading, where my mind can wander back to something else I read or heard earlier in the day, my brain was fully engaged in this activity. It was completely within my control. It was just what I needed.

And so we wait to see how things will unfold this week in ways that are out of our hands. I know that no matter the outcome, I will continue to mourn for this country, but I will keep engaging with it and working for a better version of it. I think of Rebecca Solnit's words from Hope in the Dark: "Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity -- seeing the troubles of this world -- and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable." 

An extra hour of sleep couldn't come at a more perfect time.

Reading

 

I'm close to finishing Can't Even (Anne Helen Petersen) and while I continue to identify with it, I am feeling more and more fortunate, and a bit guilty, about my lot in life. I have taken so much for granted, especially my workplace, i.e., the ways it operates from an almost bygone era. With a few exceptions, it employs all of its workers (rather than hiring contract workers), and grants the same benefits to the custodians as it does the vice presidents. I've never taken more than 15 minutes to think about my healthcare plan each year. Though I won't receive a pension, I've built up my retirement with one of the best employer matches I know of (until recently, due to the pandemic). And for the most part, I'm not expected to work over the weekend, or check email. I may complain about managing our social media accounts and how they never really allow me to truly unplug, but it's rare that I spend more than 20 minutes per day checking on things when I'm not technically on the clock. I know if something is truly urgent, my boss will text me, and she never abuses that access. My coworkers feel a lot like family and we take time to check in on each others' lives.  This could not always be the case, and I'm appreciating it more than ever.

Also, check out the new Little Free Library my neighbor just installed...all the books inside are about Godzilla and Dracula. 

Recipes

It was risotto Milanese on Sunday, compliments of Joel -- a treat and a dream of our travels. I also made my annual tradition of molasses spices cookies, which I believe are my favorite cookies of all time. Otherwise it was fried tilapia and slaw one night (inspired by this) and a red lentil soup from the Instant Pot with homemade sourdough and salad. 

I'm trying to learn to tolerate, maybe even enjoy, radicchio, because it keeps showing up in my CSA box. I am generally not averse to bitter greens, but this one has always been challenging. Then I learned if you soak the leaves for 20-30 minutes in ice water, they lose some of their bitterness. I tried a Martha Stewart recipe for a radicchio salad with chopped lemon and mint dressing on Saturday night and it was actually very good. 

Making

This has become the boring-est category on here, but I'm pleased to report that I made significant progress in my sweater by tackling the most complicated part where you join the sleeves with the body, essentially converting three tubes into one big one. It should be smooth sailing from here on out.

Watching

We have been watching so much Schitt's Creek that we are starting to talk like Moira, Alexis and David. We only have a few episodes left and I'm making plans to fill the void with the latest season of the Great British Baking Show. 

On Halloween night, we watched Blackbird (trailer), starring Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill, Kate Winslet, Rainn Wilson, and other recognizable actors, about a family who is gathering one last time around their mother/wife/friend (Sarandon) before she ends her battle with ALS. Somber, for sure, but worth a watch. We followed it up with a very palate cleansing viewing of Clue from 1985. 

Listening

I found the perfect song (and album) for the week, specifically for my windy walks on the bluff. 

Glory by David Crosby

...And when the weight
is layered in rounds
like clouds
you can't find your way out

Let me be your glory in the sky
Circling your shadow
Cradling the light