attention is devotion
and i'm beginning to lack it
there are periods of time where i am so profoundly tired of the internet. i’m tired of always reaching for my phone out of habit, scrolling makes me sick, i am tired of seeing things on repeat that are basically the same, only just a little different. right now, i am the most tired of seeing my own social media. and if we’re being brutally honest, i think i’m just really tired of caring or pretending to care about discourse, the week’s most viral articles, whose doing what, who said what, who is cooking what, everyone’s self importance, my own instagram grid. it’s all grating my nerves. it all feels so trite. i’ve been going through a long period of that; the internet and participating in it and observing it even from a distance feels like a chore. i know it’s a boring sentiment.
i don’t argue that.
sometimes during the week, i stay a night at my apartment because i tell jeremy i have to ‘work’. i don’t know what that means anymore. sometimes it means i open up my laptop and stare blankly at the screen until 1 am, hoping i feel inspired to share something personal and vulnerable enough that will pique connection and interest. i know a simple recipe is not enough. i sit in bed with the tv on in the background, rotating through my rolodex of memories in my twenties and even my early thirties where i fucked up, crawled out of a sadness or had a life changing epiphany that i could share; a memory or a feeling i could translate into words that will make people feel their $8 a month is worth it. but lately, i’ve been wanting to hoard these memories for myself. not because they’re precious, too profound or too intimate; i just don’t have the energy to pick myself apart.
maybe i’m tired of doing that. maybe i am tired of picking myself apart. how many times can i do that before it becomes monotonous? atoning for my past self? maybe, i am tired of explaining and apologizing for how i was and can be an ugly person, irresponsible, irrational, careless and mediocre; revisiting the mistakes and bad decisions i’ve made in hopes of people feeling like they can relate or feel less alone in their own story. lately, i’ve been feeling selfish and greedy with my own feelings. i want to keep them for myself. maybe it’s because for the first time in a long time, i feel calmer than i ever have. i don’t know why but i find myself not wanting to figure it out or think about it too much. sometimes jeremy will ask me what i’m thinking about and i find myself saying, nothing because it’s true. i feel like i am just existing, not to write about on the internet, somewhere not in the past and not so far in the future.
i am just existing, here, right now and it feels blissful and peculiar and unfamiliar and i want to keep that feeling for as long as i can.
i’ve been making a lot of ice cream this summer. my first batch was this very rich vanilla bean and i think it was the best ice cream i’ve ever made. it was so creamy and rich and texturally, it had a slight chew which sounds weird but it wasn’t. i used the nyt ice cream recipe as a general base recipe and have played around with it. the latest ice cream i’ve made is a coffee lover’s ice cream where i used an insane amount of instant colombian coffee (like maybe 1/3 cup because i do not like the faint coffee flavored ice cream) with ribbons of caramel throughout.
next time, i would use a bit less coffee to not make it so pow!!!! but when paired with a fudgy black cocoa brownie, it balanced out and was pretty fucking good. the next ice cream flavor i want to try is a brown butter ice cream base with a fresh blueberry compote swirled in and crushed graham crackers. i don’t know. don’t ask.
very easy black cocoa brownie recipe:
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup white granulated sugar
1 cup melted butter (salted)
1/2 tsp of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
1/2 cup + 2 tbs of black cocoa
1 1/2 cup ap flour
semi-sweet chocolate chunks or caramel
preheat oven to 375 degrees.
mix all ingredients together in one bowl (minus caramel if using) making sure everything is well incorporated but do not overmix. in a 9x9 square pan lined with parchment, pour in batter. drizzle caramel on top before baking for 20-25 minutes or until the edges pull away from the pan and the center is just a touch wobbly but mostly firm.
lunch has been snack plates with a lot of stone fruit, tomatoes, some sort of cheese, bread and sugar snap peas for cleo. one of my favorite stone fruits are apricots. a super sweet and ripe apricot does something to my brain that no other stone fruit does.
jeremy planted a saturn peach tree as soon as we moved into our house a couple years ago. it finally yielded a bounty of peaches and they’re so incredibly sweet and i wish i could bottle the smell of ripe peach skin. he’s very proud.
good things: blueberries from monterey market and perfect english peas.
favorite thing i’ve made this week: clams with spaghetti, peas and fresno chili
saute 1 whole diced shallot and 5 cloves of minced garlic in 2 tbs of olive oil and 2 tbs of salted butter until softened. add the clams and 1/2 cup of white wine to the pan and close with a lid for several minutes until clams are starting to open up and the wine cooks off. add the fresno chili, the cooked spaghetti, peas and 1/2 cup of pasta water if necessary. taste for seasoning and add a heavy squeeze of lemon juice and freshly cracked black pepper.
4th of july consisted of chicago dogs and wine from my favorite specialty grocery store, of all places and a zooted cleo.
a classic chicago hot dog consists of: authentic sport peppers, tomatoes, mustard, onion, dill pickle, celery salt.
molly baz put me onto fresh dill on a hot dog and i have to agree, for dill loving girls, it’s good.
the best garlic french fries and an insanely good blue corn cookie from alta bakery in monterey. i can’t stop thinking about how good that corn cookie was and after posting it on instagram, i didn’t know it was so well known and so popular. i totally understand why. it’s incredibly good.
a porchetta sandwich and the best aperol spritz (x2) i’ve had in a long, long time in a park in the city on a beautiful sunny day which made me tipsy and sun drowsy.
and xoxo to mediocre meals that satiate hunger even if they aren’t the best, or the prettiest, or the most delicious.
fusili with pan cooked chicken thighs, roasted rell beppers, artichoke hearts, basil and parmesan with olive oil and lemon.
a very strange salad with chicken sausage, avocado, sungolds, heirloom tomatoes, red onion, dill, feta, and cucumber with a lot of oregano and black pepper.
thank you for being here.
with loving scrutiny.
the coffee looks so good I’ll risk IBS