10 Things: Cozy Foods and Crows and Women
All my recommendations for what to watch, cook, read, learn about, make, take, and listen to this week.
Chicago is being slammed by the winter storms making news in the North. My girlfriend Kat texted me that January is supposed to be cold, and I think she’s a maniac, but in other news, bring on the tea, the mystery novels, the cozy television, and the huge bowls of soup.
First three are free! Paid subscribers get my ultimate kale salad recipe, cleaned up and improved, facts about a female ornithologist who will rock your socks off, and a link to my favorite Christmas present.
Dan Levy’s “British Bake-Off”-style vehicle for eating brunch with Sohla El-Waylly and Will Guidara over impossibly posh cocktails isn’t perfect, but it’s quite pleasant. He hand-picked a batch of inherently root-for-able participants, and came up with compelling challenges for them, with the conceit that they would form a community and become close friends in the process. In short: it’s nice. And unlike The Witch in “Into The Woods,” I like things that are nice, particularly in a world where niceness is in short supply. There is also a vegan chef on the show who makes things I’ve never seen before! Which is saying something from a person who has obsessively followed vegan cookery since the early 2000s. The music is heavy-handed, and the inclusion of a $300,000 cash prize muddies the water a bit (on “Bake-Off” the winner gets a glass plate and a bouquet of flowers), but all in all, this will eschew the darkness a little for those who struggle with the season.
COOK: This “seven-ingredient meal.”
Speaking of following vegan cookery, I am ready to commit to the statement that the best thing about the internet by far is short videos of people making food with recipes in the descriptions. I saw this on Instagram last week and thought, “That looks good. It can’t be as good as it looks.” My friend: it really and truly was the most soul-satisfying dish I’ve made in recent memory, and by twelve hours later, I wanted it again. Seven ingredients is bit of a misnomer: you have to buy premade gyoza and red curry paste, but these are readily available at most grocery stores (you can even find both at Trader Joe’s, which famously has no actual groceries), and as I ate this meal I thought, “Why am I such a snob about not cooking with pre-made frozen things?”
This was passed along to me by Lindsay Pugh, and when I finally sat down to read it, it had the immediate effect of reminding me what a joy it is to read excellent writing. Rebecca Makkai is a master of describing her way around ideas, so you see the outline of an event without ever feeling hit over the head with anything. It’s a sort of love story that peppers in some feminism, some queerness, some mom stuff, and some of the fun fantasy of what it would be like to live at a hotel if your main thing was being good at catching trout.
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