A few small joys this week

Trying to be patient, a thing I'm not good at

Happy last weekend of August, friends. A few weeks ago, I was driving behind someone who had a bumper sticker that said “I hope something good happens to you today” and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s been a weird week here in Northern California. Sepia skies, smoky air, so much fear and uncertainty and worry about loved ones. Yesterday and the day before the air was so much better than it had been for well over a week — I watered my plants, I sat outside for a while, I drove around with the windows down and enjoyed the fresh air so much. Today it’s back to beige skies and unhealthy air quality, but I’m so glad we at least had a few days of respite.

I have a handful of brief, but enthusiastic, recommendations for you today. First, for your nails. I’ve always had short, relatively weak nails, but this lockdown period has made them awful. I don’t know if it’s the frequent hand washing or the hand sanitizer or the stress (most likely, all of the above), but they were short and breaking off and snagging on everything. It got so bad that one thumbnail broke all the way down to the center of my nail. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been regularly using OPI Nail Envy, which is supposed to strengthen your nails, and it has been really working for me. My nails no longer feel fragile, and when everything else in the world feels that way, it’s nice to have something I don’t have to worry about.

Second: two books I loved this summer but somehow never mentioned here. Something to Talk About, by Meryl Wilsner, is a slow burn joy of a romance, which is sometimes somewhat of an anti-recommendation for me. I often don’t like things that are described as “slow burn” because sometimes that just means boring at the beginning, but for this book I was all in from the start. I really loved both characters and their romance, and it has two tropes in it that I generally shy away from (workplace romance and age difference) but, as with any trope in the hands of a very skillful writer, they both worked for me here. And wow did I love Here for It, by R. Eric Thomas. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s thoughtful, it’s nuanced — I underlined so much in this book, both lines that made me laugh out loud, and lines that made me tear up. A great read for this moment in time.

Third: a food mill. Last night I made homemade tomato sauce (more on that in a second) and pulled out my food mill for the first time in a long time, and it’s one of the few kitchen tools that I rarely use but every time I do use it, I think “damn, I love this thing.” It’s just so much fun to use, and so easy —you throw everything inside, and turn the little wheel, and it crushes it all and gives you a smooth sauce (or dip, or whatever), with no real effort and no electricity. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my food processor and immersion blender, but there’s something extra delightful about this thing. If you’ve ever read a recipe that calls for one and used something else, I bet you’ll love this thing.

And fourth, the tomato sauce I made last night, which is more of a technique than a recipe. I made it because I was making the King Arthur Flour Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza again and because I’d picked a whole bunch of little tomatoes when I ventured out into my garden when the air got better, so I thought I’d try to use the tomatoes to make a sauce. I sort of accidentally planted mostly cherry size tomatoes this year, and while the sungolds are perfect for snacking on, the other varieties are pretty acidic, and better after some heat, so I wondered how they’d work as tomato sauce. I googled recipes for tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes, but everything I could find was either for huge quantities, or just said the number of tomatoes to use, which didn’t help me when I had really small ones. So I just made something up, and I’m writing it down here as much for myself so I can do the same thing again. I cut all of the tomatoes in half - about 55 or so of them — (I didn’t use the sungolds, because I knew they’d be too sweet), and put them on a roasting pan along with six or so small cloves of garlic and one small onion, cut into quarters. I drizzled plenty of olive oil over everything and sprinkled salt on top, and slid the whole pan in a 350 degree oven. After about forty five minutes, I took out the garlic, turned over the onion quarters, and added one small cored sweet pepper and slid the pan back in the oven. When the tomatoes looked like they’d given up most of their liquid — at about the hour and fifteen or so minute mark — I took the pan out of the oven and let everything cool. Then I poured all of the contents into my trusty food mill and crushed them all together. (If you don’t have a food mill, you can throw everything into the blender and then press it all through a colander or sieve to get the skins out.) At that point, the sauce tasted delicious, but wasn’t quite thick enough to use as pizza sauce (would have been perfect for pasta though), so I poured it all into a saucepan with a small dollop of tomato paste and let it simmer on the lowest heat for about twenty minutes. And then I had the best tomato sauce I’ve ever had. It made about…a cup and a half, I would guess? I should have measured, but I didn’t. But there, now you have a method if you also have lots of tomatoes around and want to make some sauce — I only used some of it for the pizza last night, and put the rest into the freezer for future pizzas, since I make this recipe every few weeks or so these days.

I hope something good happens to you today,

Jasmine

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