there's a rhubarb cake at the end of all this for you
Hello, yes, i am still here!
Last weekend I went upstate for roughly forty hours with a good friend (we’ll call her “Steph” because that’s what her parents do), she found a tiny cabin that was designed and decorated as catnip for Brooklynites looking to escape the city for a while (seafoam-colored retro stove with a bright yellow kettle, subway tile backsplash, one single cast iron pan, twinkle lights lining open kitchen shelves, tightly curated bric-a-brac tacked artfully onto walls, a cool bathtub, wood in all the right stains and colors, etc, etc).
Here are some things that happened:
We slept a lot, like for ten hours each night, and I never onced checked Twitter except for when I had to for work, and it was quiet and there was space inside my brain. this is just a reminder that if you live in the city you should leave for two days every two months, at least.
On Saturday morning we sat out on the little porch on our little yellow chairs and drank maybe three pots of coffee and talked for maybe three hours because that’s what you do when you go on a couple’s getaway with a friend, another thing i greatly recommend, and you can just sit outside and listen to birds (remember birds?) and ask someone about their family and caffeinate yourself heavily and think “right, yes, this is how people used to interact, in the olden days, just sitting and talking!” because you’re an asshole who is normally tethered to some Apple product or another. I made this granola, which I recommend, which we munched in the car then poured over yogurt in the morning, and it did indeed have clumps
I read a bunch of this very good book
Driving up there we listened to a bunch of Julien Baker and Chance and stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts for first dinner and some high school girls asked to take a picture of my boob bag and they were so nice and we just….chatted with them? Imagine! Teenagers! Dunkin Donuts sells the most insanely sized mugs that I think you’re supposed to put iced coffee in but they could fit a small baby, too. I can’t find a link but I think they are 64 ounces. Imagine how much peeing!
We drove into town on Saturday afternoon, went to the farmers market, then wandered into a weaving shop where we met a man named Charles who works on an enormous loom all day and makes $1500+ rugs and I don’t know how many he actually sells but they are very soft, he even let us walk on some of them to try them out, with shoes on and everything. I think he’s on social security and smokes a lot of weed and his sons make hand-blown glass pipes and he just really likes weaving. I think I understand how looms work now but I’m not sure. I wonder how long it will take me to move to the country. I’m awful at asking people questions about themselves when I’m in new places but this was a good reminder to do that because people like talking about themselves and then you learn things.
We did my favorite thing which is to make a big dinner in a vacation home and bake a cake just for two people and drink wine and putter around in a small unfamiliar space because I find this to be the ultimate luxury. I far prefer cooking with people to cooking for them, and I try my hardest not to micromanage.
We made sunchokes sort of similar to these, only with butter because we had no oil. We boiled eggs! I’ve never boiled eggs for a dinner party or not-dinner-party but it felt nice and like a logically austere complement to buttery sunchokes and buttered toast and the buttery rhubarb cake that would come next, no shade to butter. I’d meant to bake this one from Bon Appétit (look how pretty!), but we forgot we needed a food processor, so I turned to Kenzi’s upside-down cake with a biscuitty topping which will now forever be My Spring Cake because it is Easy and Good and Makes For A Very Good Breakfast The Next Day With Endless Cups of Coffee. The bottom is jammy and punchy and vanilla-y, particularly if you use the guts of whole vanilla beans like we did. I used thinned-out sour cream instead of milk for the dough, which is for lack of a better term a very fat dough, lumpy and dense and generous, plopped into the pan of cooked fruit haphazardly before it bakes and rises into a layer of fluffy insides with a crusty, uneven, golden top.
So anyways, not much to say here, except for we should all have a Special Spring Cake that we’re fond of and we should all go away with one friend for a weekend because when else are you going to get all that quiet and all that access to their brain and their insides, and it’s all very intimate in a very safe and happy way, and you learn so much about a person when you know what sorts of car snacks they like.
A few other things to note: I wrote this about poaching mushrooms in oil for the Awl, which is a very good way to cook mushrooms, and I also wrote this rant about a bad food holiday for Food52, which is now over but still, I think, relevant. For Brooklyn Magazine, I wrote about Saltie’s new breakfast menu, which you should check out if you live here, as well as my favorite Brooklyn band, Stabwounds. For Racked, I wrote about the trend of coffee shop-cum-boutiques and boutique-cum-coffee shops.
I’m going to California in a week and I can’t wait, there will be more letters from the west coast in your inbox soon, I promise, I’m gonna smooch the Pacific so hard.