Rollercoaster pasta making

And other attempts at staying sane.

One shelter-in-place legacy that lives on (unlike my sourdough starter, RIP) is making pasta from scratch. Kneading the dough (a combo of egg and semolina flour), rolling it and then threading it through the pasta maker to get finer and finer sheets is immensely satisfying — and as calming as the end result is nourishing.

Other food-related joys of late:

• Eating ripe blackberries straight after picking them; oven-roasted cherry tomatoes — both of these offering sweet, tart summery explosions

• Raw, torn-up basil — that freshness, that zing! (Also, consider replacing lettuce with it when making a BLT; it’s hard to make a BLT even more perfect, but the BBT proves it’s possible)

• When you remove a stem’s worth of rosemary leaves with your fingertips in a single, sliding movement. Totes kitchen ASMR vibes…

• Making (and eating!) Katherine Hepburn’s brownies (while they’re easy enough to make blindfolded, watch this yummy NYT Cooking video first anyway)

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It’s been a weird, intense, rollercoaster of a summer. Sources of succour that have been keeping me on a (relatively?) even keel include:

• Poetry: Thom Gunn’s electrifying Selected Poems (I’m reading the Faber one edited by Clive Wilmer); Finuala Dowling’s Pretend You Don’t Know Me (sometimes sad, sometimes funny; always smart, always exquisite)

• Essay: Quarry by Rachel Cusk (dense and shimmering — like marble, one of its themes). If you can’t be bothered to order the book, then read this edited version published by the NYT

• Memoir: Real Estate, the third and final instalment of Deborah Levy’s “living autobiography”. Crackles with wit, wisdom, power. I’m super bummed she’s stopping at three

• Biography: Edward Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham (I’m Ed obsessed!)

• Schlock TV (because I don’t really have the bandwidth rn for any other kind): The Lake, Why Are You Like This (hilarious, silly); the endearing, adorable Heartstopper; Young Royals (the right blend of frothy and melancholic; so much less portentous than the The Crown; also love its soundtrack)

• Tunes on repeat: RAYE’s “Hard Out Here”; “Los Dos” (a collab between El Mukuka, Kreative Nativez & XAS)

• Music video: Spice’s sublimely preposterous “Clap Clap”

• Pool swims, ocean swims, river swims, any swims

• Newsletters: by Jess Stanley, Ella Frances Sanders, Carmen Maria Machado

• Newsprint: The FT Weekend can, at last, be delivered to our remote corner of Northern California. I am ecstatic to be reunited, once more, with the salmon pink *paper* version of my absolute favourite publication

Otter sighting! In the satiny warm waters of the Eel River, Humboldt County.

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A poem of mine was published by SPECTRA Poets. Also: On TONGUES, listen to me and Catarina chatting to the wonderful South African Brett Murray about making-as-therapy (!), materiality and his latest body of work, Limbo. Actually don’t do that — put your phone away and take the dog for a walk ;-P

And enough about me. I’m dying to know what your hacks are for getting through 2022. (Not least because there are over four months left of it!)