Cheese, Book, Restaurant, Thing #32
Car pizza, gifting cheese, complicated intergenerational friendships
Hello there, I hope your deep summer is going well and the mosquitos are being kind to you.
Cheese: I had a pleasant re-visit with Cypress Grove’s Purple Haze, a goat cheese with fennel pollen and lavender I frequently devoured in my 20s as I was “getting into cheese.” The flavors sound off putting—I will never actively seek food with lavender—but this is a near-perfect flavored cheese. It’s not floral (a good thing) but instead, surprisingly savory and tangy. It needs nothing but good crackers. This also makes a nice “gift cheese” if you need to bring a small host or thank-you gift. It’s special enough that people probably don’t already have it in their fridge, but it’s not so extravagant that it feels like too much when you want to give a small gesture of thanks.
Book(s): If you want to get the wind knocked out of you while reading, try Here After by Amy Lin. It’s a memoir about a young widow, written in short chapters and spare prose. Lin celebrates love and family while writing about grief with incredible rawness and frankness. The vignettes she shares about her life with her late husband Kurtis are beautiful yet never sugarcoated—this is not a story about a blissful marriage but rather a realistic one that’s full of beauty and flaws, quiet moments and banality. It’s excellent. You must have tissues next to you. You will be ugly crying.
In Same As It Ever Was, Claire Lombardo is a master at describing the ambivalence and all-consuming love of motherhood. Even though Julia, the narrator and main character, felt less developed than all the secondary characters, I would absolutely recommend this 500-page novel. Lombardo is great with dialogue, and at describing all the bumps of a marriage over decades, from young couple to near-60s. She’s also created a real gem of a character with Helen Russo, an older woman who Julia befriends and then things get… very complicated. If you haven’t read Lombardo’s first book, The Most Fun We Ever Had, do that as well. She’s so good at writing about semi-dysfunctional families.
Restaurant: We spent last week in Vermont, which involved taking the Amtrak to New Haven first… which meant a call-from-the-train order to Sally’s Apizza, and then eating pizza on our laps/car seats as we drove north for potentially my best car meal ever. While I’m far from a New Haven pizza expert, I am def Team Sally’s over Team Pepe’s. It’s a great tomato sauce with a crackly thin crust that nears the borderline of too charred. Also, it’s welcomingly salty. Despite my tomato sauce endorsement, my two favorite pies are actually both white ones: the potato and rosemary special (when do I not love a thinly sliced oven potato?), and the fresh tomato white pie with basil (sort of like deconstructed tomato sauce?). While I suppose some people delight in waiting in the neverending lines (at 2pm on a Thursday there were at least 20 people queued up), we felt quite happy-smug to eat on paper plates while driving on the highway.
Thing: In the past two years, I have been hyper aware of my body getting older and slightly lumpier (and my shoe size is larger now? This feels needlessly cruel). I will never be a runner, but I do need to do something semi-regularly, and have found the workouts from the Juice & Toya YouTube channel to have actually stuck for the past several months. I deliberately haven’t delved deep into the lives of this fitness influencer couple as I don’t actually want to have a parasocial relationship with them… but I do like their workout videos! They are fast paced, easy to modify based on ability, and I’ve discovered that I (almost) like to lift (light) weights. Am I swole? No. Am I using the word “swole” correctly? Unclear. But, it’s a small something.
Speak soon.
-c