It’s been a beautiful week, and we got a glimpse of close-to-summer weather yesterday. Charlotte’s been wild about the chance to get outside and is loving spending time on the swings and slides in the neighborhood parks.
Here’s what I’ve been eating and reading this week:
Weekly menu plan (in case you need inspiration):
Sunday: Sausage, onion, and peppers skillet with drop-biscuit crust
Monday: Leftovers
Tuesday: Celebrated my dad’s birthday at Shepard in Cambridge
Wednesday: Cheesy chicken and kale pasta bake
Thursday: A pre-show nosh with my mom and sister at Bin 26 in Beacon Hill before the Alvin Ailey show
Friday: Restaurant leftovers (an asparagus and shrimp scampi dish)
Saturday: Cheesy chicken and kale pasta bake
Here’s what I’ve been reading this week:
Bon Appetit’s Back of House column on Brooks Headley’s cookbook-writing process was one of the more enjoyable non-recipe pieces in a food magazine I’ve read in awhile. It’s in the May 2017 issue, but I can’t find it online at the moment (the rest of the issue, unfortunately, was a bit underwhelming). Headley also had a list of some favorite cookbooks, which was dominated by excellent female chefs including Dorie Greenspan, Claudia Fleming, Caroline Fidanza, and Selma Miriam. Some of these books are now out of print (bummer), but some are interesting names to keep in mind for growing a vegetarian recipe repertoire.
Also, this.
I also read Outline by Rachel Cusk and absolutely loved it. It was a fantastic, quick read, but the language was beautiful, layered, and complex in a way you don’t usually see in breezy reads. I can see this one cracking the top 10 of the year, though I’m also now planning to read her new release, Transit, that came out just this January, which might give it some competition.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
“No matter how busy you are, no matter how many kids and commitments you have, if there’s passion, you find the time. A couple of years ago they gave me six months’ sabbatical, six whole months just for writing, and you know what? I put on ten pounds and spent most of the time wheeling the baby around the park. I didn’t produce a single page. That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.”
“I felt I could swim for miles out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity.”
“One’s existence as a wife and a mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman’s creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of these other things – when she wouldn’t dream, for instance, of sacrificing the interests of her husband or son – has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion.”
“He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offense, because he knew that view to be under threat.”
The whole character of Anne, a traveller and teacher we meet quite late in the book, is an interesting study that intersects closely with the work I actually do in my practice. I was curious to read how she and her eating patterns were presented, completely unattached to any bigger or pointed message about binge eating or recovery.
