The plan is that I make every single one of the NYT 100 Easy Dinner Recipes For Right Now. The plan is that somehow helps me riddle out the right now.
Tonight I made what Melissa Clark casually refers to as pizza chicken. I recommend adding a shallot just prior to the garlic and chili flakes, upping the anchovies by one and deglazing the pan before you add the tomatoes. Your call.
Accompanying drinks: One Harris Gin and tonic ( it was the end of my bottle of Harris Gin, which is my favorite and, as of yet, still unavailable for purchase in North Carolina). One glass of fine but nothing to write home about Italian red also used to deglaze the skillet (Canonica a Cerreta Chianti Classico Riserva 2016, if you’re interested).
Soundtrack: Olivia Rodrigo, “Guts.” I’m trying to understand the youth because I’m old and irrelevant. But this is actually pretty good, even if I don’t completely love the Taylor Swift vocal tic thing. I also chatted with my best friend in California, MM, who talked me all the way through her safeway self-check (“How are these eggs $13?”) and never said a word about the uncomfortable burbling of the pot when it came out of the oven. We went down a rabbit hole about family and illness and all the middle aged lady things including the post-9/11 appetite for twee. The at-the-time understandable appeal of things that were childlike, sincere, innocent. The Shins, “The O. C.” Arcade Fire. I wondered whether I squandered my peak youthful revolutionary energy on cardigans and books about precocious children. “Things were also kind of weirdly, creepily sexist too.” Manic pixie dream girls. Going out tops. Boys in hip glasses complaining about their love lives over cheap beer before they got weird and angry about it on Twitter.
We really dropped the ball in the 2000s.
“Do we blame The Strokes?”
Only because it’s easier than blaming ourselves.
The Night: The second active shooter since the beginning of the semester (about three weeks ago) locked down the UNC Campus and the local public schools today. I did a lot of despair, and then a lot of fury. This has been a week (month? couple of years?) if you give a fraction of a shit about education, the kids, and the future. Sometimes it feels like a not insignificant portion ff the population wants kids to be afraid of being murdered if they go to school, afraid of being removed from their parents and penalized if they present as anything other than the most stereotypical version of their birth gender, afraid of anything that goes against traditional Christian, white orthodoxy, and so afraid of not getting a job or going into debt that they’ll never pursue higher education, and if they do, they’ll stick only to something pre-professional of vocational. God forbid they study the humanities. What a waste of money for an obviously communist plot to get people to understand that money is not the only force in the world and other people also have lives and feelings worth considering. Learning things is dangerous. Best keep them at home.
It is such bullshit, this timeline.
Pizza chicken is delicious, by the by. I served it with a nice rocket salad with a lemon/dijon vinaigette, a little grated parm and a lot of cracked pepper. If you’re local and want some leftovers, let me know.
Next up:
Gochuchang Butted Noodles. And maybe I talk about books.
Tiny Commotions 