Oh, hiiiiiii! Hello! Are you enjoying the green green world where you are? Here, it’s all violets and bleeding hearts and fresh, juicy dandelions. It’s so gorgeous it makes my heart ache.
This is a photo from a different year, before we had the Jelly kitten, who eats every single flower that comes into the house and then chokes and throws them all up extravagantly and dies because all the spring blooms are toxic to cats. I will start typing the name of the flower— “li—” — and google will interrupt me to be like, yup, yes, lilies of the valley are toxic to cats.
We brought the cats to New York last week and had an incident. My mom has been unwell (there is obviously a bigger story here), and I thought that having the cats with me for a bit would help me with my homesickness, only I woke in the night to the wet, wet sound of Jelly chewing a plant, and the word cyclamens popped into my head, and I knew it was going to be bad. It was indeed my mother’s cyclamens, and if you google it you will read about kidney failure and certain death, but when I forked over my credit card number to talk to the ASPCA poison control people at three in the morning, they said that they were really just toxic in the wild, and mostly only the tubers. “She’ll be fine,” the person said. “It’s really totally fine.” Who ever offers you that much gracious certainty? Literally the best $100 I’ve ever spent.
Anyhoo, that was none of the three things. Where was I? Oh yes! Book! Have you read this book? Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. I loved it. It’s about the diagnosis of a mysterious illness, but it’s also a love story, and it’s very romantic and philosophical. If there were a sequel where he leaves the hospital and just, like, makes scrambled eggs and rye toast and leafs through the newspaper, I would read that too.
“The great banality, I repeated to myself, commoner than dirt, inspiring a scale of feeling that was ridiculous the moment it passed—as was true of all the immensities, of love and oceans and the night sky filled with stars. Everyone is ridiculous encountering them for the first time, when feeling swells to match them and is laughable for trying, grotesque with bigness, why should death be any different. Where is your philosophy now, I asked myself. But human beings aren’t ever philosophical, I don’t think, not really, at least I was the opposite of philosophical, a minuscule crouching thing, a bit of matter terribly afraid, utterly insignificant, the entire world.”
Also, please don’t tell Garth Greenwell this, but a passage like that? It a little bit reminds me of William Steig’s Amos and Boris in the best possible way. (Full disclosure: in a recent interview I identified A and B as my possible all-time favorite book.)
As I may or may not have mentioned, I, too, have struggled over the last stretch of years with a diagnostic mystery, and I, too, have written a “novel” about it! Maybe I buried the lede here? Ha ha ha.
I’m hoping you’ll preorder my new book! It comes out in October. I’ve said this before, but one reason it’s good to pre-order, if you love your authors and I know you do, is that it signals to the bookstores and publishers that people are going to want to buy the book, and that makes them print more copies of it, and then they work harder to sell it so they don’t end up with a bunch of leftover books. Does that make sense? But also it gives you something to look forward to, of course! Is that presumptuous? I suppose if you were going to dread it, you wouldn’t pre-order it.
Okay. Those are the two books. And here’s the recipe. It’s for that creamy green sauce I keep referring to, and then everyone is like, what’s that green sauce? It’s this. It came from a photo I took of a page from a cookbook before I had to return it to the library. This is a bad habit of mine, because then I don’t always know which cookbook it was. Also, I can’t see the recipe very well.
This sauce! It’s perfectly creamy-tangy-herby-garlicky, and it’s gorgeously, vibrantly green. It goes with just about anything that skews Central or South American. Rice-and-bean bowls (see above), or nachos
or huevos rancheros
or as a dip for veggies.
Peruvian perfection. Okay, here’s my slight adaptation of the recipe, translated from the blur above.
Aji Verde (Creamy Chile-Herb Sauce)
1/2 cup mayonnaise (I use Hellman’s full-fat)
1 jalapeño chile (or Serrano or whatever spicy fresh green chile you have), stemmed, seeded, and chopped coarse (in a pinch I would use pickled jalapeños from a jar)
5 tablespoons fresh cilantro leaves and stems, washed well and chopped coarse (I confess to not measuring this)
2 tablespoons crumbled feta (the original recipe calls for grated Cotija)
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice and a few scrapings of the zest
1 garlic clove, crushed
Kosher salt (to taste)
Put all the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Taste for salt and lime juice and add more of either or both if it’s not incredibly bright and savory. Yummm.
Stay gold, ponyboys.
xo
I love that I just accepted the blurry recipe with no question, squinting aggressively, certain that it would be worth deciphering on my own because you shared it. And then you translated it if I just scrolled a tiny bit further. 😆
I love this blurry recipe. When I was 23 and living in NY and had roughly $12 to my name, one of my hobbies was checking out cookbooks from the library and scanning in pages that looked tasty. I recently found my long lost scan file on an old hard drive and absolutely none of the scans are straight and half disappear right into the fold, and it’s still a perfect memory of that time 🙂