Emchap's Shit from the Internet 12/2/20 🍠
As previously mentioned in this internet publication, I purchased a cardboard house full of little jars of jam for the holiday season. (So did at least one of my coworkers, making for a fun jam twin experience.)
The jars are teensy little single-serve things, like you would expect, but I am loathe to throw them away. There’s some little dumb part of my lizard brain that thinks I can reuse them just like I do their larger siblings, despite them being able to hold, at most, a shot. The first one is now sitting on my counter like a tiny little guilt jar, and will no doubt be joined by others before I give up and recycle them.
I had a dream of turning them into shot glasses but of course I haven’t used the shot glasses I have in possibly a literal decade; they’re the same set that my high school best friend gave me in, like, 2010. One of them has Dorothy Parker on it.
There’s something very 2020 feeling about holding on to garbage in the hopes that you might figure out something to do with it. At the very least they’re recyclable.
Shit to read
None of what’s in AHP’s newsletter about Mom labor is new but it is nonetheless very satisfying to read.
Please god can we just sleep the rest of 2020.
I loved this piece on services attempting to make virtual parties not just total garbage.
I will read pretty much any essay about the Wing’s collapse, and I thought this one was particularly great.
This starts as lingerie industry drama and ends in QAnon and there’s some star child cult shit in the middle.
Really enjoyed this piece about what the future of COBOL development looks like for legacy systems, including the entire aspect of how deploying and testing them seems HARD.
This was just start to finish tremendous and grim.
There is an alt-universe version of me who took Paul Carr’s job offer to be an intern in Las Vegas for the publication he mentions in this piece about Tony Hsieh and I have been considering how my life would be different as the memorial pieces for Hsieh have come out. He was by all accounts a very kind person.
Hugh tells his side of the story!
If you have to ask a question in a headline the answer is no.
Making food right now is an absolutely unmitigated bummer.
I hate jello almost as I loved this piece about a family jello salad recipe.
Shit to eat
Go to the mountains for Thanksgiving and eat exclusively roast chicken and cheese for four days.
Realize that you are old now, and you have heartburn, and you should eat a vegetable.
Add some lettuce to your grocery delivery order, despite not really being a lettuce enthusiast normally.
When it comes time to make dinner (ideally two hours before, do not do what I did or you will be eating at 9pm), cut the top off a head of garlic (or two, why not, you’re already putting in the effort), cover it in some oil, and wrap it up in foil.
Into the oven at 350 for 30 minutes.
In the meantime, separate two eggs. You’ll do the shell method and it will work embarrassingly better than when you use your hands.
At the 30 minute mark, pop in 2 cups of whatever nuts you have on their own tray for 10 minutes; keep the garlic going.
Use the immersion blender whisk to whisk the whites to foamy but not soft peak stage.
Add three tablespoons of brown sugar and a glob of honey to the whites.
Take the nuts you just toasted for 10 minutes, and dump them in the glop you’ve made.
Set a wire rack on top of foil, and strain the nuts + glop through a mesh strainer into another bowl. Take the much less glop-covered nuts you now have, and scatter them on the wire rack. Use the glop for caramel corn later.
Turn the oven down to 325, sprinkle with salt and cook the nuts for 25 minutes, turning halfway through. When you go to turn, take the garlic out and put it in the freezer.
In your food processor, combine the yolks, a single garlic clove (raw), 2 teaspoons of mustard, 1 1/2 tablespoons of rice vinegar (white wine vinegar in the original), 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar (sherry in the original), 5 anchovies, half a lemon’s worth of juice, and a pinch of salt.
Take the freezer garlic and add five cloves of it to the mix. (The freezer was just to make it easier to touch.)
Blitz all that together and then stream in 3/4 cup olive oil while blending. If you’re me, cheat and use slightly less because that shit is expensive.
Taste, add salt and pepper as needed, decant into a jar.
At this point the nuts are probably done.
Find some lettuce, wash it, and put half of it into a bowl. Pour some of the dressing on top, then more lettuce, then more dressing. Massage everything.
Add some candy nuts on top.
Grate some parmesan on top of that.
Have yourself a lovely evening.
(Recipe very much a bastardized version of this Smitten Kitchen Roberta’s Roasted Garlic Caesar, which is great.)
Shit to listen to
Jingle Rock Bell, which made me literally cry laughing last night.
Shit to buy
This giant mutant block of chocolate orange.
I love these little magnets.
These things fucking rule.