Friday Roundup #34
Happy Friday, y’all, and happy National Avocado Day, which I am taking personally this year (hold that thought).
First, though: this past Sunday was Zach’s birthday, and I marked it the way any devoted partner would, by putting “Happy Birthday Zach! I know you hate this. Love you” up on the jumbotron at the Stripers game. He was mortified and laughing at the same time, which was precisely the reaction I was after.
Peak Zach, peak me.
Moving on to this weeks Roundup:
- Coming on the blog: This Sunday’s post is a serious one, “Here We Still Are”. I don’t run many political posts, but when I do, I mean every word.
On the food side, I’ve got two pizza doughs cold-fermenting right now (bread flour versus a pantry 00) for an A/B bake on the Kamado this weekend; the results land in a roundup soon. - Also today: It’s National Avocado Day, which feels personal because I’ve been deep in recipe R&D on an avocado-forward chicken bowl. New recipes I found online, adapted for how we actually eat around here: less sugar, more char, a little more heat than Zach strictly signed up for. Nothing’s blog-ready yet, so this is a promise, not a recipe. It’s also National Mutt Day, which is basically a Remy holiday; Finn and Callie are supervising, unimpressed as ever.
- Garden Update: The Joro spiders have arrived with a vengeance. Walking through the garden now means a face-full of web whether you want one or not, so I’ve taken to heading out with a rake handle held in front of me like a fencing foil to catch the worst of it. On the hopeful end: I’m ordering collard seeds this week to direct-sow in early-to-mid September, with the goal of serving my own collards at Thanksgiving.
- What I’m Reading: A rabbit hole I fell into this week. Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who designed Central Park and Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, also spent the 1850s traveling the South and writing about the slave economy. I picked up the three books that make a loose trilogy: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, A Journey in the Back Country, and A Journey Through Texas*. Slow-sip reading for the next several weeks, and there may be a blog post in it. If you’d rather not track down three separate volumes, Olmsted condensed all three himself into a single book, The Cotton Kingdom*, which is the easiest one-volume way in.
- What I’m Watching: We saw The Odyssey [IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes] last weekend, and I may be the only person in America who walked out thinking meh. The production value is genuinely incredible, no argument there. But the wall-to-wall big names kept pulling me out of it; I spent more time going “oh, that’s [Big Name]” than “there’s Circe” or “that’s Calypso.” And Tom Holland’s Telemachus asking “Mom, when’s Dad coming back?” landed with a thud for me. I don’t need everyone speaking in rolling Shakespearean cadence, but the mom/dad thing just did not work. Sorry, y’all.
- What I’m Eating: Homemade chili crisp, which went up Tuesday and has since ended up on approximately everything in this house. A lot of chicken tenders, which are secretly R&D (see above). And whatever comes off the Kamado this weekend once that pizza dough is ready.
What are y’all reading/watching/cooking/dealing with this week? Let me know in the comments.
P.S. The universe scheduling National Avocado Day for roundup day, the same week I’m elbow-deep in an avocado-topped chicken bowl, is the kind of coincidence I will absolutely be taking credit for.
P.P.S. National Mutt Day landing in Zach’s-birthday week means Remy gets a shout too. Balance in all things.
P.P.P.S. Apparently Emily Wilson wasn’t all that fond of the movie either. Read her review at the London Review of Books.
* Affiliate link. The asterisk is doing transparency work. Details on the disclosure page.
Friday Roundup