Leftovers #86

This is the last Leftovers of 2023, so I’m opening it up to all subscribers – it’s a short and sweet one!

I’ve been keeping myself tucked away for various reasons, but made my way out for an evening in a stable (Natural Born Wine’s HQ and home, which they opened up as a pop up wine bar on Wed/Thurs night; I was so enamoured that I asked them if I could live there. They politely declined), and also a pot luck Christmas meal where I made an endive salad dressed with lime miso vinaigrette (what’s new) and adorned each little leafy boat with dates, parmesan and orange slices. Someone looked at the salad and shouted, “who’s Jolene?”, and that about sums me up.

By contrast I spent last night scouring the streets for a Crosta Mollica frozen pizza (specifically the one with ham and mushrooms) but could only find the CM pizzettes (opted for a spicy salami with pepperoni crumble and a reduced packet of ready-to-eat Caesar salad; I didn’t scour the streets for very long). It’s important to highlight that life is sometimes fancy salads eaten amongst friends, but just as wonderful is the supermarket pizza you eat in your pjs watching Harry Potter with your phone notifications turned off, in total, blissful silence.

There’s one more essay coming to you on Sunday, perhaps the final one of 2023. A manifesto of sorts to round off the year. Thanks again for reading!

Watching

The Palestine Festival of Literature, the theme of which this year was “How Empires End”. I found British-Egyptian poet and playwright Sabrina Mahfouz’s reading from her 2019 play, A History of Water in the Middle East, so moving, especially the final part of her reading which evokes this important refrain: This Is An Old, Old War.

Cooking

– A few dishes I’ve saved to make over the holidays: a plate of green olive, oregano, olive and lemon labneh; a Vietnamese pork meatball salad; if I can ever be bothered, Poppy Cooks’ garlic and parm Pommes Anna; some ricotta gnocchi bathed in sage butter.

– The same salad (an 'Everything Salad’ of sorts), filled with sweet potatoes/potatoes (recipe-not-recipe below), shredded brussy sprouts, kale, rocket, dates, parmesan, crispy rice and a lime miso vinaigrette, eaten from a big metal bowl because who are we kidding, it’s not being portioned out for leftovers.

Everything Potatoes

– Also this breakfast on repeat: scrambled eggs made in a non-stick pan (a small high-sided one, not a wide shallow one) with a thick slice of butter melted on a high heat then turned down; pour the whisked eggs (with a little salt and pepper) in and turn the heat to low-medium; let it sit for a minute or so, push it to one side so the insides curl in on themselves and the top runs over into the empty space of the pan; turn the heat even lower and let the eggs cook for another minute or so; slide onto a plate with sliced cold avocado dressed with dukkah or za’atar or tajin, and pour over some chilli oil or hot sauce; add a nest of rocket leaves dressed with lemon juice and olive oil.

Reading

– Stephanie Danler, always. I love how she writes about food and relationships, and I found this essay that she contributed to My First Popsicle, an anthology of food essays edited by Zosia Mamet. It’s about falling out of love with her husband, herself and cooking, until one lavender teardrop-shaped shallot reminded her of what could be.

Depression is always a taste to me. The tongue desiccated and parched, the oversteeped and forgotten tea, the tilting-toward-decay fizziness of sour grapes. An ambient and unspecific sense of death that keeps you from your senses. I lost food and accepted it. Though I quit cooking, I still walked to the Union Square Greenmarket in all seasons. Out of habit, I still checked out Lani’s Farm, Guy Jones, Keith’s, and still waved to the farmers I knew. On an unremarkable winter day I bought a shallot. A smooth, lavender teardrop of a shallot.

– Like many people irrevocably plugged into the online scroll, I was eager to find out more about Matthew Perry’s death. But why? Poorna Bell wrote an excellent Substack interrogating why we want to place a morality clause on the lives (and deaths) of public figures. She writes from a personal standpoint of someone who has lost the love of her life to addiction, and it really made me think about the insidious culture of surveillance that we live in.

On wanting to know how Matthew Perry died

Writing

I was commissioned by my friend Auste from Studio Playground to write a piece for the inaugural issues of their eponymous magazine. I decided to pen a piece on being a generalist, mainly as an attempt to convince myself that what I’ve been doing over the past decade hasn’t been in vain. You can buy a copy of the magazine - which is brilliantly designed, wonderfully illustrated and stuffed full of great essays from the likes of

Emma Gannon

. Here’s a little extract from my essay, “The Perks Of Being A Generalist”.

I don’t think my career has much to do with ‘talent’ per se. I’ve always been keenly aware that the world is full of creatives who could all fulfil the same job that I might go for. I am not the best writer, nor the best strategist (and clearly not the best self-promoter), in the world. Instead, it’s my curiosity that has fuelled my career the most. And in turn, the everythingness of my life over the past decade – the ups and downs; the opportunities and the failures – has pushed me to find different ways of communicating who I am and what I do to a multitude of different people. Some cynics might call this networking; I call it creating community wherever you go. I’m not sure whether I emerged from the womb a curious person who gets on with people; I believe this is a skill that I’ve accumulated and cultivated over years of doing many things. And while being a generalist has not necessarily enabled me to save that much money to buy a house or given me the dopamine hit of promotion after promotion, I feel genuinely excited when I think about what I’ve done and what I could do. Who I could be. 

The other day a friend said to me: “you can’t do it all. But you can try.” Sure, the current self-care trope of our generation prioritises slowing down and doing less (of which I am a huge proponent), but I don’t believe that these two concepts are mutually exclusive. I guess for me, at the heart of being a generalist is allowing yourself to take risks, fail a little, be the person in the room who doesn’t know it all, ask questions, discover hidden passions and accept that you might just be a jack of all trades, master of none. This is no bad thing. Being a specialist is an incredible skill; chapeau to anyone who can hone in on a career or a subject for years at a time. But being a generalist has its perks too. 

Listening

I can’t stop listening to this song, on repeat, as the light fade, as the candles glow, as the wind raps against the windows.