I have cooked SO MUCH GOOD FOOD lately! Last Thursday I printed out five new recipes, picked up all of the ingredients I needed on my way home from boneshaker, and then made us something really delicious for dinner each night, with leftovers for lunch the next day. The day before this started I made a cake because I wanted to use up some fruit in our fridge. The day after this ended I made another cake for Gus’s mom’s birthday. It was a ton of fun, and I will probably never do it again.
I am not going to run down every thing I cooked, that would just be bragging. I have nothing against bragging, but I don’t want to type that much, and I would just make myself hungry. Instead I’m going to single out one recipe which felt like a revelation. I clicked on this recipe for Tian from the New York Times recipe page because I didn’t know what it was. In this version it’s thin cut layers of potatoes, onions, and zucchini doused in olive oil, topped with little tomatoes and breadcrumbs. The flavors melt into each other, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, this is basically the fancy ratatouille dish from the pixar film Ratatouille. I read a bit about the history of the tian, and there were multiple recipe bloggers annoyed at the movie for getting things wrong. It is so delicious.
I’m not a zucchini person at all, but I love this. This is the best way I have ever eaten zucchini in my life, including chocolate cake recipes where it’s thrown in to add moisture and you don’t really know the zucchini is there. This makes me excited about zucchini! Gus, who is very skeptical of soggy vegetables, loved this recipe. I’ve made it twice, I will make it many more times. It’s relatively simple. You layer vegetables in the pan, let them steam as you prepare the next layer, and then finish the whole thing off in the oven. The hardest part is waiting an hour for it to set. It’s terribly impressive looking. I can’t wait to serve it at a dinner party.
PICTURE OF THE CAT
a bug observes the outside world!
WHAT I WATCHED
Gus and I went to the theater! We saw Born with Teeth at the Guthrie, and it was a pretty good time! It’s about William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe writing together, and Elizabethan era espionage. It’s about the amount of gay I wanted it to be, and it was really fun to go be at the theater. I do sort of feel that the ideal medium for this story isn’t a 90 minute stage play with two actors, but a four season tv show that’s a co-production between syfy channel and the BBC that everyone gets mad at for queerbaiting. That version would absolutely be worse, but I would have watched it and loved it.
I rewatched The Lighthouse because M, the number one spooky lighthouse fan in my life hadn’t seen it, and we needed to fix it. I checked what I had written the first time I watched The Lighthouse, because it happened within the era of this blog, and I didn’t really have anything interesting to say. I stand by all that. It’s good! It’s weird! Watching it a second time does not make it make more sense! I don’t need it to make sense, I’m satisfied with it as vibes-based cinema. I don’t want to go looking for any greater meaning! I really should watch The Northman.
SONG OF THE DAY
Remember how last week I said something about how Viagra Boys (and other factors we don’t need to get into) led to me being a person who just listens to jazz now? Yeah. Sam Gendel’s COOKUP is an early entrant for album of the year. It’s a collection of smart fun jazz versions of r&b songs from the 90s and early aughts, including Cat Baby Special “I Swear” (if you know, you know). It’s a mix of songs I recognize and have never heard of, and I think it’s all great. (M & Gus have both asked me to change the music to something less weird, which is fair, but I think you gotta embrace it.)