six fun things

I’ve never considered myself a skilled soup maker, the kind of cook with a grounded intuition about herbs and acids (like the head chef at Magpie who is an actual soup goddess), but I think I may be improving. This year I’ve done more riff soups, kitchen-sink soups, and non-recipe soups than ever before and most of them have been quite fine. Some have even been splendid.

And then a couple weeks ago, Adam Roberts did a post about soup over at Cup of Jo. His approach is both practical and inspiring, the exact sort of slapdash, there-is-no-one-right-way philosophy that opens me up to explore and grow, and now I feel liberated to soup* with even more abandon and conficence.

*Make soup, make verbs. The sky’s the limit.

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Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste was my favorite book of 2020 and now it’s been made into a movie.

I haven’t seen it yet (have you?) but I’m eagerly awaiting its release on Amazon Prime.

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Two weeks ago, we scored three free tickets to Drum Tao, a Japanese drum and dance ensemble.

The physicality of the show was absolutely mind-boggling: a little bit like Cirque du Soleil but with drumming and martial arts, flute playing, acrobatics, chanting, and an enormous variety of drums and sticks, some as big as baseball bats. At first I was a little edgy — the way they were wailing on those drums just a few feet from my precious noggin! — but I soon realized that these were some seriously skilled people who had a good handle (literally) on what they were doing. 

Our seats were in the very first row, which I didn’t know until we arrived (squee!), and then another attender told me that the tickets had sold out within 24 hours of going on sale: There’s nothing like a good scarcity story to make me feel lucky!

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I’ve always been in awe of Rosanna Nafziger’s writing. Our parents were friends when we were children (I have fuzzy memories of gathering around their kitchen table, big loaves of her mama’s brown bread, and us kids running around their hilly West Virginian yard), and back when she had a blog, I followed along religiously (and still mourn its ending). She’s been writing essays, though(!), and her recent piece about money and poverty and giving and religion is both honest and generous, a balance which can be hard to strike as a writer. Highly recommend.

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I have not read many books in recent months but I devoured Feast by Hannah Howard, pun intended. The food, the stories, the inside look at kitchens, the excruciating detailing of disordered eating — it was truly a feast.

Note: I recommend the book with one caveat. Even as a person with a pretty grounded relationship with food, some of the descriptions of her eating disorder were difficult to read. Know your limits.

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Wise words from Tim Minchin.

What will you do with your one meaningless life?

This same time, years previous: labor pains, a family milk cow, the quotidian (2.4.19), twelve, the quotidian (2.6.17), loss, cheesy bacon toasts, eight, in which we enroll our children in school, travel tips.