Jan 24, 2023

cold snap/all sauces

here we are, again, friends

January is the longest month of the year, as measured by the heart. Cold. Grey lit. The year not out in itself, yet. And currently, at the time of writing (Tuesday, the 17th, is when I started this newsletter) (yes, it took me a week to get it all out, gradually, in bits) I am absolutely freezing. My younger sibling made me a snood, which helps at my desk - and I'm this close to becoming a person who wears fingerless gloves while typing. Dickensian stuff. The frost eats the soft of the ground, and today, after a meeting in the museum, I walked through Stephen's Green in the 'everyone has just gone into work' quiet - and saw seagulls standing on the frozen pond. They're too large to be inland, driven here by hunger. Jurassic looking, red in their beak.

cold boys

The evenings make me so tired I feel like folding in on myself like bad origami, half asleep on the sofa, chaining together old episodes of The Crystal Maze, comfortable, comforted. I have a lot of clarity at the moment and therefore, confident that if I have somehow made it through 34 Januaries so far, I can get myself to February again, I can handle this cold, with my new snood, with my strong, good heart, with CMAT's new absolute banger, MAYDAY, on repeat. Temper this with the humming television, full of Richard O'Brien's inexplicable charisma and slightly menacing harmonica tunes, which he only ever plays when his teams are about to fail, or get locked into one of the rooms in his opulent labyrinth.

he also sometimes uses a P.E whistle, which is somehow less stressful than the harmonica

a banger

tysm if you hung out with me this month

look how many times i said love in that picture. love love love love. it just comes out. i'm not fixing it. it's the truth

here is the very lush cover, keep an eye out for it, and buy it in your local indie if you can!

i'm a rising libra, my moon is in gemini, but i'm aquarius all the way down

I have bookended this time on both ends - December, and to the start of February, with travel. More on that, when I'm home. I haven't worked out how to talk about travelling, just yet, other than it is something I value more than almost anything else. If I could sling a backpack on me and take CB by the hand and just go, never turning back, I would. Once I figure out how to become the Anthony Bourdain of international supermarkets and malls, then we're in business. I feel like that's a good way to see the world, right? From the Monoprix to the Carrefour, from the Family Mart to Safeway to the Price Chopper of Upstate New York. Look, a girl can dream. In the meantime, I'll settle for the springtime seasonal aisles in Waitrose, Canary Wharf, where I intend to spend at least an hour on my birthday, staring at little expensive bottles of sauce in peace. I mean, I'm also travelling to see my friends and some good art, but I'm also not going to lie to you about the real reason I travel: condiments.

crescent moon above the price chopper. i walked out in front of a moving car to get this picture

This feels like the right time, then, to talk about sauces. Well, not sauces per se. Tinned pears.

pears, baby. graphic design is my passion

I'd be a fairly weak animal in a supermarket, to be fair to me. If I see something different, or unusual, I'm a mark. I will buy jars and shakers and rubs, I will buy preserves and essences and stock cubes. When we went to the Price Chopper, pictured above, over the Christmas, CB & Jeffrey were pacing their journey a perfectly normal amount for two men buying ingredients for dinner. I was skinless with the curiosity, inspecting the yoghurt aisle like it was a museum (it is a museum, kind of). CB eventually looked over at me, admiring perishable dairy produce I could simply not take home, and said very fondly, 'You can go, we've got this,' and released me off into the supermarket, for what I can only describe as half an hour (I think, time all but melted away) of pure bliss.

I got as much out of it as I did from our quiet walk through MoMa on New Year's Day and I say that with absolute sincerity. When I eventually found the pair of them again, my arms were full of little bottles. Twix seasoning, which I just used this week on and in apple muffins, Lipton tea for icing - it really does taste the best for that 'Diner Iced Tea' vibe, and I have almost used up every bag already - a jar of bright green lime pepper, and something mysterious called Gravy Master which I feel is going to really zing up a bolognese, when the right week comes. Look, I was frankly kind of feral. I am not at all joking, or doing a bit when I say I love supermarkets, that I find them valuable and peaceful and stimulating. I know it sounds kind of like I'm taking the piss, but I'll find the right way to talk about them, sincerely, at some stage.

Right now though, I'm going to talk about tinned pears, because they've shown up for me in two dishes I ate last week (outside of the mountain flat) and now I'm obsessed with them. They cost anywhere between 80c and 1.30, which is a bonus, because they add an old-world fanciness to any dishes they show up in, but they don't cost an arm and a leg, as some fancy sauces do. I ate lunch outside my flat twice this week gone, once with my sibling, and once with good friends. With my sibling, I had a bacon, cheddar and pear sandwich at the Pepper Pot, in The Powerscourt Centre (on incredible slabs of bread, like really astonishing bread) - and with my friends, in Two Boys Brew, I had granola, garnished with pomegranate seeds, and finely chopped pear. Both little meals were absolutely fantastic - and I find my appreciation of other people cooking for me has gone through the roof since the pandemic, and that my excitement about food I didn't prepare myself has also disproportionately skyrocketed: but these were great, and I'm almost certain that the pear was the making of both dishes.

I doubt the pear in either case was tinned, rather, poached, but if I'm honest with myself, I am simply never going to poach pears at breakfast, or lunch. I'm just not. I will stare at pears in my fruit bowl, then grumpily put them into muffins when they have ripened just a tiny bit too far to be enjoyed by themselves (or with little bits of Serrano ham). A tinned pear, however, we can handle. They hold their structural integrity really well in juice or in syrup: no mush about them, no artifical tang. They last fine for three or so days in the fridge once the tin has been opened, happy out in a covered container. I'm going to use them in my own bacon sandwiches in future, and every morning in the last week I have used some on my granola (I'm having an enormous Granola Moment, which probably warrants a newsletter of its own at some point, we're already running long here). I feel like I've unlocked some kind of secret. Sweet, but not Too Sweet. Sandwiches, breakfast, I'm sure I'll find somewhere to put them for dinner - if you have any pear-related suggestions, please do leave them in the comments.

can i interest you in a nice egg at this trying time

once he put one in a glass, which i did not see and filled with ice and coffee. i found it many hours later, cold and weird. i ate it, anyway

Thank you for reading, folks. And a masso thank you to Louise Bruton, who included Griffnotes in a really sound article in the Indo just a few days ago: it was really cool to see it all laid out there, in print. Thank you for subscribing, and to the stunners in the S Tier gang, your creative practice newsletter is coming very shortly, with a set of queries about legacy, and the naming of things, and a bit about where I'm at with my own work right now. I'll leave you with the dog, flat on her back, belly to the world.

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