Every week I make my boyfriend 6 egg, cheese, and turkey bacon sandwiches (recipe here) for his lunches (he has overnight oats for breakfast). He really likes these sandwiches, and I’ve never tried one but every week I am worried that they won’t taste good. Because he’s on an aggressive cut, every calorie is accounted for, so there isn’t room for me to cut off a piece to taste. I also don’t eat cheese, and I’m not really a “taster.” I have a habit where instead I just want to smell it (most flavors come from your nose, not your tongue). My boyfriends have always been annoyed that I don’t want to sample from things. My ex boyfriend would always eat from both spoons when he ordered dessert to make it look like we had shared it. I’m not trying to make myself sound virtuous for not eating dessert. I just don’t like the idea of having a taste – I either want the item or I do not want the item.
Anyways, the sandwiches. Every week I make them in the same way, with the same ingredients, and everything is carefully measured during these weeks because I have to enter it into an app so it can provide data and insights. But for some reason every week I feel nervous that they will be bad this time. This feels like an essence of a psychological problem; I follow a ritual (egg sandwich recipe) that has always yielded the same results (my boyfriend likes them) but feel disconnected from said ritual, because I am doing the labor but not participating in its output (eating the sandwich), so I feel certain that this time it has gone afoul. Although I have done my preparation, I feel anticipatory failure. Why? I guess that it is a disconnection between the execution of something and what it yields. There has not been a lot of try hard and succeed lately, instead chaos seems to reign, and I’m stuck in a holding pattern where different methods always yield the same result: FAIL.
It’s like rain on your wedding day. It’s like feeling upset once the tulips reach a certain level of beauty because you know that they’re closer to being dead than they are to being born. It’s like lying on a shakti mat and reciting the rosary every day for 2 months to ask for a specific job even though you aren’t Catholic. (But did I get that job? I did.) It’s like how all my writing is about my boyfriend. It’s speaking like a little child all the time and feeling stupid. It’s like applying to 10 jobs every morning and hearing back from 2 a month. One might as well be screaming into the void. But I still say the same prayers every morning and night and I still throw the I Ching and I tend to the well of my inner strength (this is all you have).
Still, I have been feeling susceptible to psychic attacks in the form of chronic illness grifters with things like histamine intolerance and hypermobility. I adore this kind of content, but my current stress level makes me feel more, oh yes, I have that too, and less like I am an impartial observer. I realize that histamine intolerance and hypermobility are real, and I’m intrigued by both, but these people are so often trying to sell you something. I’m sympathetic, because I also would love to be paid for my recipes, or just general info about the supplements I like and the way I clean, but I think introducing a chronic illness to people who need community is lecherous.
I recently read Dominick Dunne’s “Another City, Not My Own,” a (semi) roman a clef about the OJ Simpson trial. Dunne is a great crime reporter. A family friend was OJ and Nicole’s children’s preschool teacher. Strangely, she and her husband fled LA for Santa Barbara after the Rodney King riots, where she was then killed in a car accident. Dunne’s story is sickeningly name-drop-y, and every person he name drops is singularly charmed by him. I think that he leans into this and his writing has some awareness of it, but not enough – you could tell there was not a ton of humor he talked about knowing Sinatra, or Jack Nicholson, or his close relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. This was probably more fun and made more sense in writing columns for Vanity Fair. This LA based crime book made me reach back into the archives for Chandler - I devoured The Long Goodbye on a reread. Chandler impresses me more each time; it doesn’t matter if you remember who perpetrated the crime, the way Philip Marlowe gets there is always more interesting. After reading a lot of Simenon and Manchette earlier in the year, it was lovely to be reminded of Chandler’s beautiful prose. His books cast a large shadow over his imitators. After The Long Goodbye, I picked up Killer in the Rain. These short stories weren’t published until after his death because he cannibalized all of these stories for his novels.
Lately I’m obsessed with BEVERAGES. I shouldn’t say lately; I’ve been drinking 4-5 pots of tea every day for like 8 years now. Before I started (and then stopped) drinking coffee I would have green, black, or oolong before noon and then switch to kukicha until about 3pm, after which I would have herbal. Here are some of my tea rules:
Start the morning with caffeinated tea. Green is for warmer, sunny days and Black is for colder, dark days. Oolong is vers.
Lean into the features of the tea – I love the deep richness of Yunnan Gold for Black Tea, and the intense grassy lightness of Japanese Gyukuro for Green Tea.
Be generous. Even if you only have a small amount of a very expensive and/or special tea, it’s better to have one perfect cup to really taste it than to spread it out over 4 cups without much flavor.
Peppermint and Chamomile are at the bottom of the pyramid for herbal tea. They are easy to find and can cover most bases. Above that row is raw whole ginger, which is nice to have on hand for other things besides tea, hibiscus, and spearmint (important for me because of its anti-androgen properties). Above that is roasted dandelion root, nettle (helps with allergies), lemon balm, and other “remedy” herbs like oakstraw, moringa, chrysanthemum, etc. This is all according to taste and ailments - I really enjoy things with medicinal tastes but I know some people hate them.
The best way to make peppermint is to put a pot on the stove with 2 quarts of water and bring it to a boil. Once boiling, add 2 tea bags (or 2 tbsp of loose leaf dried peppermint) and simmer for 10 minutes. It should reduce and be quite dark in color by this point. Pour into a large jar or tea pot and enjoy.
Mixing herbs: Chamomile with lemon balm before bed. Add a generous amount of chopped fresh ginger to peppermint to fix any ***tummy trouble** (sorry).
Buy dried Sorrel (hibiscus) in bags next to dried chiles in the Hispanic food section of the grocery stores. I like to pair it with ginger or roasted dandelion.
These tea-infused liquors were sold at my favorite now shuttered teahouse - Teahouse 29B. I held onto the little bottles for a long time after finished them.
Now into my more special beverage recipes… starting with MATCHA. Get a nice quality matcha and be generous with it, otherwise it’s not worth it. This way it will be good plain – you won’t have to make a coconut peanut butter and jelly matcha latte (looking at you blank street).
I’m an almond milk apologist. I know its watery and flavorless, but I still kind of love it? That being said, SIlk Unsweetened Soy milk is a nice texture, and I get Elmhurst Hazelnut milk or Cashew Malk as a treat. Coconut is a nice idea, but the flavor can be quite overpowering.
I always add collagen powder to my lattes for a nutrition boost. I like this one.
Really tired, have a busy day ahead of you, but don’t want to spend 11$ at the coffee shop? Get an espresso shot and bring it home - add it to an iced matcha latte with a good amount of cinnamon. I used to drink these throughout my shift when I worked as a barista.
Make it Blueberry or Strawberry by microwaving your frozen berry of choice in a bowl for 1 minute, until it is warm. The liquid will release at the bottom of the bowl. Mash or blend it up and layer it at the bottom of your iced latte.
Once it is True Summer, the nicest 2pm treat is a matcha lemonade. Heat 1 tbsp of honey using a quarter cup of hot water and mix with the juice of one lemon. Let cool, pour over ice, and add your prepared matcha. Sip slowly while sitting in the sun.
For my other special drinks, I love a kombucha. I’m a GT girl - Healthade just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a good reward for grocery shopping. In the summer, I like to pour half a bottle over ice and top with sparkling water, add a quarter of a lime, and sip slowly through a straw. My favorite flavor depends entirely on my mood but right now I really love the anniversary one. I’m not a huge fan of mango or strawberry. For almost a year in 2016 I made my own kombucha, and it was so fun to flavor, but it just got kind of nasty, and it can be annoying to have to constantly take care of. My other Special drink right now is “nature’s gatorade:”
Half cup of Coconut water
Sprinkle of salt
Juiced citrus (Lime, Lemon, Orange)
2 tbsp ginger shot (I don’t have a juicer so I blend peeled ginger root with water and then push the pulp through a mesh strainer. I usually have this stored in the fridge)
Half cup of water (expert level: use cooled spearmint tea instead for its anti-androgen properties)
My mom recently sent me dried herbs from her garden, wrapped in paintings. I would like to get these framed, but more than getting them framed I would like to buy a house to have a garage so I can have a workshop area to make the frames myself. My desire for candles and produce is the same - if you give a mouse a cookie, she is going to want a house and a garden to grow the wheat, mill the flour, collect the eggs from her chickens, and to make the cookie herself. If you give a pig a pancake, she is going to want a family dressed in matching gingham pajamas to feed them to. My desire to live like this, to make my own clothes, frame watercolors in the garage, and collect eggs from chicken coops, isn’t just a tradwife larp. It’s the solution to my disconnection from the end product, my current seeming inability to affect outcomes.
