We Must Cultiver Notre Jardin

Three lists for right now

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Where I’ve been

Hello, friends.

Happy new year, I guess?

:-/

I have been housebound with some horrible virus since we returned from Venice¹. This wasn’t how I wanted the year to start, me with my hopelessly naïve, fresh new diary and big plans for the kids’ first day back at school. Instead, I spent the bulk of this mensis horribilis staring at my phone, weeping (or raging) into the moat of Kleenex that gathered around my sickbed.

The awfulness of the world right now is enough to make anyone clam up and I am no different. Everything I try to write to make sense of the horrors unfolding left, right and center seems trite and silly. But we must cultiver notre jardin and my jardin is, among other places, here. So consider these lists my offerings in this impossible moment, imperfect though they may be.

Thoughts on three books² I recently read:

• I asked for The Book of Love by Kelly Link for my birthday. The reviews were so glowing, they were practically incandescent. Plus, I love books about time travel and alternate realities, so I was sure I would love this book. Reader, I just absolutely did not. The length of the book was absolutely baffling to me. I kept thinking about what kind of a wild and exciting romp this book would have been if she’d kept it to 200 pages or less. Oh well.

• Jenny and Andy gave me a copy of Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte when I was over at their house for dinner in October. Described as a collection of linked stories, though I think of it more as a kind of novella, I finally read it last week and oh my goodness, I literally howled. It was so funny, so smart, and so dirty omg, and so very of-the-moment. The ending of the book didn’t really work in my opinion, but I enjoyed reading the book and the respite it gave me so much. Hugo was home sick and reading on the couch with me one afternoon and I kept having to angle the book away from him because I was laughing so much and he kept trying to read what was so funny over my shoulder. (It is emphatically NSFW.)

• Hot Milk by Deborah Levy was my book club’s pick for this month, but I couldn’t go to book club and see my lovely friends because of the aforementioned virus from hell. I sort of puzzled my way through this book, thinking that I much prefer her memoirs to her fiction, which can be annoyingly inscrutable a lot of the time. But when I got to the end, I found that I was, somewhat surprisingly, quite moved. And since finishing it, I’ve found that vivid moments and images from the book keep cropping up in my thoughts. So I think I liked it.

Three delicious things I recently made:

• Healing Chicken Soup

  One of the best chicken soups I’ve ever made, which is saying a lot?! So delicious and nourishing and beautiful to look at, too. Even the kids, who don’t like chicken soup (don’t ask, I have no idea, children are nuts, etc), loved this. It’s amazing what the holy trinity of sliced ginger, chopped garlic and turmeric can do - and the splash of coconut milk at the end is perfect. (I used three full legs of chicken.)

• Cauliflower Shawarma
  10/10. Made exactly as described. So good. My only mistake was to budget just one pita per person.

• Meat Loaf
  Whenever I make meatless meals now (which is most meals), Hugo asks plaintively when we’ll be eating meat again. So I pulled out Kathy Brennan and Caroline Campion’s Keepers (a fantastic cookbook, by the way³) and made their meat loaf, which is very satisfying and somehow even better cold the next day, cut into thick slices and placed between two slices of squidgy white bread with extra ketchup and mayonnaise and fermented cabbage for crunch.

Three things I’m looking forward to:

• A week off from family life when Max takes the boys skiing in February. I have a few days at home on my own (!) and then I’m going to Trieste with one of my best friends. We’ve never been and we are staying at a Hilton omg.

• I started taking ADHD medication towards the end of last year (Elvanse, which I believe is called Vyvanse in the United States). The effect it has on me when I am primed and ready to work is really something and I’m excited to finally be healthy enough to get back into my work routine. Getting an ADHD diagnosis during the year in which I was also diagnosed with anxiety and depression and spent several months⁴ on a cocktail of hormones to treat a smorgasbord of perimenopausal symptoms was quite a journey. I wasn’t sure that medication was right for me at first, but I’m feeling really good about it now.

• We have a huge apartment project ahead of us this year: moving our kitchen from its location in the back of our apartment to one of our big rooms at the front of the apartment. This will involved pulling up parquet flooring and laying pipes, as well as building a whole new kitchen (with an induction stove, eep!). The old kitchen will then be turned into a bedroom for one of the boys, who currently still share a room. We’re still at the very beginning stages of this project, which is super complex as you can imagine, but I will be documenting it all on Instagram (and here, if you like?). When I think about how different our apartment will look by the end of this year, I feel happy.

There. I kind of can’t believe it worked? I actually feel better. Hugs to you all and lots of love from Berlin. Be gentle with yourselves.

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1. I keep starting and abandoning a newsletter about our trip, because my feelings are complicated and I am finding it really hard to be eloquent about them. I hope to find a way at some point. Stay tuned.

2. Book links are affiliate.

3. Once we finished the meat loaf, I made their excellent pork tenderloin, which is first marinated in pineapple juice and garlic all day long and then roasted in hoisin sauce. I served it thinly sliced over rice with sliced baby cucumbers and more of the fermented cabbage (for me). Excellent and zero leftovers.

4. I stopped taking hormones in the fall, but I still take a daily antidepressant.