I did…not…enjoy Things Heard and Seen on Netflix. I will admit, the trailer captivated me, with its teasing of Catherine and George, a young couple and their child moving from the city to a ~quite possibly~ haunted old house in a small Hudson Valley college town. I already want to run away to an isolated farmhouse in upstate New York and bake bread and feed chickens all day (okay, Yvan can feed the chickens, I don’t really care about that part) so this appealed to me on a very base level.
But. With the exception of one character, I did not care for a single person in this film. As it turns out, and I’m not really spoiling anything here, George is not a great guy. You get a sense right off the bat that he’s a bit of a dick and he’s kind of sneaky, and he only gets worse. I don’t think the house would have gotten to him to such a degree if it wasn’t already a bad apple. And by the end of the film, you start to wonder about some things you learn at the beginning of the film and wonder if he wasn’t already rotten to the core.
I didn’t really love Catherine’s character, either. And maybe that’s not fair because I don’t know that we ever got a chance to know her, other than she gave up her art restoration career for her husband’s teaching opportunity, which is why they made the move to the country. And that she’s “the believer” in the family, as George asserts to a colleague who is trying to talk with him about Swedenborgian philosophies and spirituality. But other than his referencing of it, and the fact that she begins seeing and hearing strange, ghostly things, we don’t get much in the way of an explanation or examples of that, or any back story for her at all.
Oh, and a big-time TW here: We also know that Catherine suffers from an eating disorder. We know this has been going on for a while, because George references doctor visits, and weight gain shakes she is supposed to be drinking for meals. An excellent example of this guy’s assholery is how he’s always harping on her for not eating, almost as if he’s actually concerned. And yet. In a car ride home, after they have joined Justine, a fellow professor (Rhea Seehorn, who plays Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul!) and her husband in their home for dinner, George remarks that Justine “can really put away some lasagna.” With commentary like that, it’s not surprising that Catherine has some issues with food and with her body. “That was a really nasty thing to say,” she remarks about his casual cruelty. And it was. Fuck off, George!
Justine Solokof, professor of weaving (?!?!) is a QUEEN and I would love to eat some lasagna with her. She is the very best thing about Things Seen And Heard.
If I am being honest, I utterly tuned out about 20 minutes into the film as I began daydreaming about life in my lovingly restored and gently haunted murder farmhouse. Crisp, clear nights with no light pollution or humidity and you can count every star in the sky and it’s so quiet you can hear the flights of bats and owls. Slow, chilly mornings warmed by endless cups of coffee and something cozy and autumnal to eat.
Like sourdough pumpkin pancakes! It’s 85 degrees in Florida this week, and the pancakes were the only part of this fantasy that I could recreate. I am not a huge fan of maple syrup, so I ate these with cream cheese and honey and they were delightful.
Of course, my haunted country home fantasy needs a rustic autumnal ensemble! Details on all of the items used can be found here; I’m feeling too lazy to list them all at the moment, but if you check back later, I may have done so.
And oh my lord people, you people with comments like “$12K for a bag, I would never!”Of course, you would never! That just goes without saying! We don’t have that kind of money! But what’s the point of daydreaming on a budget? No thanks, friends. If I’m gonna fantasize, even if it’s just a dream of making pies and knitting on a front porch rocking chair with no one in 50 miles in any direction to bother me, it’s gonna be dripping in luxury. You want a cheap murder farmhouse outfit, make it yourself.
10 years ago on September 30th, I rolled into my sister Mary’s driveway in Orlando, after a long drive from New Jersey. My car was packed with everything I owned, my baby sister Melissa, flown out from California to assist me, was driving. I don’t know how I talked her into driving the whole way, but of the two of us, I think I am actually the baby. I can drive, I just hate long stretches of highway driving. But she is so brave. Thank god/s and whoever else for her. Thank god for both of my sisters.
I had lived most of my life in Florida (though I was born in Ohio and spent a few years there as a small child.) But from ages 9-28 I lived in Florida. That’s where most of my small family was, and my friends, all two of them. I packed up and left all of that behind, everything I knew, in February of 2004, to move to New Jersey. That… was a bad idea. And for 7 years I tried to make that bad idea work, but ultimately it failed spectacularly. In February of 2011, over the course of a phone call on a lonely winter afternoon, Mary convinced me to come back home. This was a good idea. It was the Best Idea.
I spent the summer packing and divesting, Melissa flew out at the end of September 2011, we stuffed my car as full as it could be, and I left that place and never looked back. When we finally pulled into Mary’s driveway…that was one of the happiest days, most glorious of my life. And every day since, even the tough ones, even the impossible ones? Have been even better. I am so grateful for both of my incredible sisters, for their fearlessness and wisdom, and for their unflagging support of their eldest sister. I mean it in every way that you could mean such a thing: my life is better because of them.
Today (well, actually yesterday but October 1st sounds more dramatic) marks ten years since I have been back!
I made a cake (Nigella Lawson’s Rosemary Remembrance cake) to celebrate with Yvan, who has been at my side for the majority of the time I have been back in Florida, and he too makes my life better in so many ways. I never thought I would have a partner that I could laugh with and share my secrets with and who will enjoy all of my weird, experimental meals and compliment all of my perfumes and support my wildest dreams…but that’s him. I’m wild about him. Turns out he was a good idea, too. (Thanks, past Sarah for being the aggressor in this matter and asking him out on a date!)
Totally unrelated, but as it is October 1st, the first day of the very best month, I’m going to attempt, in my typical lazy way, to participate in 31 Days of Horror. Now…to be clear here, I’m not going to try and fool you into thinking I’m watching and writing about a new movie every day. I mean, there are some days that I might do that! But I think I will be talking about some books and movies that I’ve watched earlier in the year, too. I’m tired, man. I’m burnt out. I just wrote a book. I may soon be starting another one (this is a thing that is super up in the air and not a sure thing, but it’s a possible thing!) So I haven’t got it in me to do 31 Days of Horror perfectly, but I’m going to do my best!
To start with, I am totally half-assing it, and pointing you to some horror-related things from the past! Hee hee! Classic Sarah! Check back throughout the month of October to see what else I think I can get away with!
I made a little video about getting out of my head when I am feeling bad, and spending time in the kitchen. I hope that you’ll give it a watch! It’s mostly me puttering and clanking spoons, but put me on in the background at a reasonable volume and we can keep each other company while we kitchen witch our crappy feelings away!
I’ve written about bean soup before. Probably right around this time last year. Well, here it is again, friends. And thanks to the brilliant friend on Instagram who gave me the idea for this blog’s title!
I hated my grandmother’s bean soup when I was a little girl. If I’m being quite honest I always cried when I had to eat it. I sobbed through every spoonful. There was nothing wrong with it. I just wanted something more familiar like a salami sandwich with yellow mustard. That was my favorite! Bean soup was just so…ugly. I hated looking at it. I hated smelling it. No thanks!
Anyway, I must feel awfully guilty about it these many years later, because anytime I am inspired to make a soup, it’s usually of the beany variety. Here’s a recipe, if you are interested and you’ve got some of these ingredients lying around. I’m really bad at keeping track of amounts, just eyeball it and make it soupy, you know? It’s still an ugly soup, but holy beans, is it delicious.
As they say, “beauty is in the eye of the beanholder.”
“I’m Sorry, Mawga” bean soup
-a bunch of beef of vegetable stock (from scratch is best.) Maybe 6-8 cups?
-a few cups of dried beans, whatever you’ve got, soaked overnight
-3-4 strips of bacon
-one onion, diced
-however much garlic you like, minced
-hefty squirt of tomato paste
-a few bay leaves
-sprig of fresh rosemary
-several leaves of fresh sage, chopped
-salt and pepper
Chop bacon and fry in a deep pot for a few minutes until some of the fat is rendered out. You don’t need it to be crispy. Toss in your onion and sauté for a few minutes until fragrant. Add the garlic, stir it up and sauté for a minute or so more. All of this is on medium heat, I suppose. Squirt in your tomato paste and stir around until everything is coated and let it cook for a minute. Add all of your both, beans, and herbs and bring to a boil for a few minutes. Reduce heat, cover and cook until beans are tender or to your liking. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
We served the soup with some focaccia that I’d made using a not-too-peppy sourdough starter and whole wheat flour, with a recipe from Pro Home Cooks. I mean… even mediocre fresh-baked bread is good bread, but I would definitely like to try my hand at this again, with better, fresher, more lively ingredients. Still, to accompany a humble bean soup, I think it worked well, and it was made tastier with a dollop of the compound sage butter I had made this past weekend with loads of fresh sage from the garden. GOOD LORD this stuff is good. Just make it and put it on everything.
I require an explanation regarding muesli. I was startled out of sleep last night when I realized that I didn’t know what the difference was between muesli and granola. At first, I thought muesli was basically toasted nuts and grains but without the fat or sweetener, like granola. Both then I see that sometimes muesli is just raw grains and nuts, soaked. Both seem to have the addition of dried fruits and various toppings at some point. So then… what’s the difference between muesli and overnight oats or even oatmeal? Is it all just semantics? Also, is “overnight oats” basically just a term that some dumb fitness blogger coined because they thought they came up with something clever, but in reality, it’s something people have been doing for a million years? Because I sure wish someone had said to them, oh, so you’re making MUESLI, then?
Anyway, if you can’t tell, this confusion is making me cranky and mean. And also I hate fitness bloggers.
The internet is confusing me with conflicting information and I swear I just watched Jamie Oliver dump half a damn can of cocoa in his wacky version so I don’t even know what’s what anymore. If you are a muesli eater and you can explain to me the difference, I’d love to hear it! And armchair muesliosophers, keep outta this–I don’t need conjecture, I need hard facts!
I have included a screen capture that confuses things even further, from the video I just watched.
I don’t think it’s possible to capture an egg salad sandwich in an attractive pose but the Japanese milk bread and accompanying egg salad recipe from Chef John made for an incredible tamago sando. It’s never gonna be in Vogue or whatever but I’m here to eat, not sell magazines.
While I actually like egg salad, I have a tough time eating it and not thinking of the decaying egg salad sandwich that Fry bought from a toilet vending machine in Futurama, whenever I eat one. It’s such a dilemma. Keep the space parasites that are making me the most amazing and best version of myself? Or get rid of the worms taking up residence in my body?
Sigh. 6am is too early to be thinking. Or eating egg salad, probably.
Anyway, this dough was such a joy to work with. It was so plush and luxurious! I couldn’t stop fondling it! Ok, stop being weird, Sarah. Also: loaf of milk bread? Or corgi butt? It’s hard to tell, right?
I must have been thinking of Daft Punk when I came up with the title for this blog post. The end of an era. Dang. But the following thoughts have absolutely nothing to do with the legendary Parisian dance music duo, so enough of that.
I’ve been in a cake-making mood, lately. I don’t even really like cake, although I do have preferences (and none of them are chocolate because apparently, I am some sort of perverse contrarian weirdo.) I don’t want to make a cake every day, but I decided I was going to make a sort of cake-a-month challenge. And you may laugh at my reasons.
I don’t want to eat cake. I want a visual document of a cake I made. I just want to take pictures of my cakes.
Flipping through my grandmother’s Betty Crocker cookbook was one of my favorite past times when I spent weekends visiting my grandparent’s home as a child growing up in our tiny Ohio town. I would park myself in an old armchair with a stack of them on my lap and flip through the pages, tracing the photographs with my small fingers, dreaming of making these delicious desserts myself.
Often times on those weekends, my grandmother would bake a pie* and I would “help” by rolling shapes out of the leftover crust, sprinkling them with sparkling sugar, and baking them up in the still-hot oven, after the pie had finished its time there. I was always rather disappointed that my creations looked absolutely nothing like the colorful confections in the pages of those books that had inspired me so.
*Speaking of pie, I found this image yesterday and I have been cackling about it for the past 24 hours.
Birthday bundt cake fail. We couldn’t get it out of the pan, so we piled on pillowy mounds of espresso icing and ate it straight from the vessel with large spoons.
As I grew older, I never completely lost my love for cookbooks but found myself more frequently drawn to food blogs on the internet, where I had begun to find recipes to experiment with. When I created my own blog (not this one, but its very distant cousin) back in 2002, one of my biggest inspirations and motivations was to one day feature delectable images on my website that rivaled the beauty of those that had captured my imagination. This, as it turns out, was no easy feat for a person with no eye for design and no photography skills or training. I mean…that’s a lot of work. And not necessarily work I was interested in investing in what is basically just a personal blog.
As we’ve talked about here before, I want to be the best! No work, only best!
Cranberry oatmeal bread (I’m not sure what recipe I used for this?)
I eventually came to the conclusion that I was going to have to learn something if I wanted to improve my cake pictures. And while I won’t pretend I put a lot of effort into it, I did watch a class on Skillshare that I do think was pretty helpful and I think I’ve actually leveled up a tiny bit! I’ve shared pictures willy-nilly throughout this post, and none of them are in any sort of order, chronological or otherwise–but I think you can spot the few that I did post-video classroom.
Now please remember, I am coming at the subject from someone who knows next to nothing, so obviously if you’ve got some of these skills under your belt already, then there’s probably not much insight to be had here. I watched Olena Hassell’s course on photography, composition, and styling but there are probably free videos on YouTube that may share similar tips, tricks, and techniques. It was actually a YouTube video that convinced me to pay money for Skillshare, ha! I am too easily influenced.
I’ve obviously got quite a ways to go, and I’ll probably never get there, where ever “there” is. That’s fine. I think I have reached a point where some of these photos are exactly as good as the photos on those cooking blogs of yore that I was so enthralled with. But that’s just my opinion, and even if they’re nowhere even close, I am pretty excited to continue trying my hand at it and sharing beautiful photos of cakes, while fobbing off on someone else the actual cakes themselves, for purposes of digestive disposal.
1. A marvelous sourdough loaf with loads of encouragement and everything bagel seasoning suggestions from @clockedoutandcookin on Instagram. Original recipe from the foodbod blog. I had made a few loaves of sourdough earlier in the summer, and at the time I thought it was a really tedious, stupid, shitty process and that maybe it just wasn’t for me. But something finally clicked yesterday as I was folding the dough for the umpteenth time, and I realized that every time I approached the bowl, I was actually looking forward to working with it, to gathering portions and pulling it up and over itself, with feeling the texture gradually change from shaggy and sticky to bouncy and bubbly. That was an unexpected revelation. Isn’t it great when you realize you’re not too stuck in your ways to change your mind about something?
We were a frozen pizza and Hamburger Helper household mosts night while I was growing up, and we definitely never had any type of formal Sunday dinner, so as an adult, I guess I get a kick out of doing something a little fancy on Sunday nights. And while I suppose it could be argued that stew isn’t exactly haute cuisine, it sure beats Digiorno’s.
3. And lastly, chocolate chip cookies made with a hefty dollop of sourdough starter discard. Although this made for some really freaking incredible raw cookie dough, it resulted in very… fluffy cookies. Which, if this is your thing, then you might really enjoy these lil puffers. But I don’t love cookies and I especially don’t love cakey cookies, so eh. Not a fan of this version. They can’t all be winners!
From the time I was old enough to have a job, I have always worked weekends. As a teenager, starting out as bottom-bun girl and working my way up to cashier at Checkers (yes, that was my first job!); working both as a staffing manager AND a weekend caregiver for a home-care company in my twenties; working two jobs for nearly a decade in my thirties, full time in an office during the day, and part-time in a health food shop in evenings and on weekends. When I moved back to FL, my weekends were *almost* free there for a few months, but I quickly realized my elderly grandparents were not doing so well, and so my Saturdays and Sundays again became consumed doing all of the things for them that I did not have time to do during the workweek. All the while, every second, every breath in between, writing, writing, and writing some more. Scribbling for various venues, and for my own blog, which I’ve had in various incarnations for the past twenty years. And though I enjoy writing (mostly, ha!) this too, is work.
All of this is on my mind today. Someone recently remarked to me, in an off-hand yet weirdly skeptical-bordering-on-suspicious sort of way, “why would you spend all weekend cooking? That’s so much WORK.!” No, friends. I know work. And I have spent a great many weekends working. Most weekends of my adult life! But, for me, cooking is never, ever work*. Days spent hovering over simmering soups and yeasty bubbling bread dough, chopping, mixing stirring, sprinkling, concocting something delicious and heart-warming and filled with love, these are sacred acts of the most joyful magic. This is time well spent –best spent!– and I cannot think of a better way to spend my Sunday.
*I sometimes feel a little weird and not…self-conscious, exactly….but I begin feeling some kind of strange, shy, sheepish way when I share my excitement about how much I love cooking. I understand that not everyone enjoys cooking, or even gives a fig about it. I personally know some of these people (and I might even be related to them.) And I worry I might be coming across as self-congratulatory, like LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM AT THIS THING THAT YOU CAN’T DO/DON’T LIKE TO DO. And that’s not my intent! But I guess I am always worried, all the time, about inadvertently making someone feel lesser-than. And so I downplay or diminish or sometimes completely secret away the things that I love or find important or…that I’m good at. And that really sucks.
But it is okay that I like something you don’t, that I do something you don’t! There are plenty of things that other people like to do that I can’t be bothered with in the slightest. There are all kinds of people in the world obsessing about all kinds of stuff, and the way I feel passionate about making soup is maybe how someone else feels super jazzed about whittling spoons or hula hooping or playing the accordion. And what a wonderful world it is, full of all of us, enthusiastically just doing our things. And anyway, people who like to cook have got to have people to cook for, so I think it all works out.
The above photo? That is concrete evidence that even if it takes you forever, you may eventually become better at something. I’ve been attempting to bake bread for decades and this is the year that I finally got it, if not “right”, well, it’s definitely not wrong, either. Don’t ever give up on your dreams! Especially if they involve pillowy loaves of delicious sandwich bread.
This loaf makes wonderful toast, and there’s no snack so enchanting as a thick-sliced, crunchy piece of homemade bread, toasted and slathered with butter. A drizzle of honey is nice too! Buttered toast calls to mind keeping warm and safe on blustery nights in cozy pajamas with milky tea and nursery rhymes and Mother Goose and it’s just…simple-gentle, magical nourishment for your inner child, as silly as that might sound.
When we were very young, our mother would prepare a supper of scrambled eggs and toast for my sisters and I when we were having a rotten day (or maybe she was having a bad day?) Even now, these many years later, the comforting fragrance of slightly carmelized and charred bread, the soothing hum of the heating filaments, and even the mechanical whir of the toaster gears springing up the now toasted bread is enough to lower my blood pressure and slow my breath when I’m feeling off-kilter and panicked. Buttered toast forever, please.
https://www.buzzbybakes.com/post/don-t-discard-the-discard…And for kindred spirit kitchen witches who are interested, this wonderful recipe is courtesy Buzzby Bakes.
Inspired by a conversation with my sister that’s really too long to get into but the gist of it is that I struggle to reconcile living a life of refinement* with my fierce devotion to disgusting junk food: she suggested that I make a little ritual of it. A small portion of, say, Funyuns, with a fancy whiskey or somesuch. I liked this idea very much and I love my baby sister for suggesting it!
When I tweeted about it (I’m one of those people who keeps a twitter for the sole reason of spouting ridiculousness) @cheesesexdeath adroitly suggested that I pair it with a super gooey, spruce-wrapped Harbison, and with that, a Saturday night supper was borne! Sadly, my grocery store did not have the Harbison–sad trombone–so I grabbed a triple creme Fromage d’Affinois, and I don’t think that’s at all similar but it’s a buttery ooze that’s providing a wonderful contrast to the salty, crunchy, top-of-the-mouth-scratchy skanky funk of the Funyuns.
Thanks to my life-advisor and my spiritual cheese advisor for tonight’s divine/unholy meal. Amen.
*P.S. I blame my misguided ideas and obsession with “refinement” on reading too many Alexandra Stoddard books in my late teens/early twenties.
