Posts Tagged ‘sauces’

Postcard from my mid-30s:
Parsley & Walnut Pesto

I spent the first three weeks of my thirty-sixth (not my thirty-fifth, as I’ve learned) year of life more or less somewhere on the sick spectrum. The day after my birthday, I woke up with the sore throat of the century, the inside of my mouth a sickening yellow, tongue furred and covered in white spots. I sequestered myself to my bedroom, but I kept working. I had deadlines. The next day, my brain was a lost rowboat floating in fog and my sinuses were denser than a Tolstoy. I stopped working and started watching season one of The Witcher. On day three, it settled its way into my lungs, seeding its territory with cotton balls and occasionally sending out expeditionary forces of phlegm. I finished season two of The Witcher.

The next day, my brain was a lost rowboat floating in fog and my sinuses were denser than a Tolstoy.

In my lungs it stayed, lingering long past days four and five, accompanied by staccato bouts of coughing. Was it corona*? My acupuncturist seems to think so, in spite of every negative test I took.

Yes, I have an acupuncturist. I also have masseuses (plural), a bodywork therapist, an osteopath, an energy healer, a Shakti mat, subscriptions to Headspace and Essentrics (quite technically, it’s Mom’s subscription to Essentrics), regularly visit the sauna, take hot herbal baths every Sunday, drink two liters of water a day, and try to do some kind of fitness regimen every morning (with so-so success).

Still, the sole of my left foot is strained, my back and shoulders constantly ache, my hips are tight, I have an iron deficiency and hormonal insomnia and a stubborn patch of eczema, my eyesight has deteriorated rapidly over the last year, and I’ve strained some ligaments in my wrist that hurt more or less depending on how many jars I’ve opened lately or how stale the loaf of bread I’m trying to slice for breakfast is. » Continue reading this post...

Feel the Burn:
Sun-dried Tomato Butter (Tomatenbutter)

Tomatenbutter (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

A few days after our apartment burned down, we went grilling in Tempelhof. “We don’t have to buy coals,” I said. “We can just shovel up the remains of the bedroom.”

Hey, I like a joke as much as anybody.

Nevertheless, we did buy a bag of non-homemade coals, and – after discovering that the grill I’d been storing in the damp basement was rusted beyond use – a new grill, too. The humor of a grill being the first household good replaced post-fire is not lost on me.

Tempelhof in the summer is a haze of smoke from the barbecues clustered in the two sections of the park where grilling is allowed. The air is scented with pork fat spitting from the paprika-spiked belly kebabs, sausages, steaks, and good char smell.

Not the toxic char smell that currently blankets the old apartment.

Our barbecue was smack-dab in the middle of the denial phase of my grief process, and it didn’t seem real to me that when the guards came around kicking people out of the closing park at dusk, we didn’t have a home to go to, didn’t have covers to crawl under, wouldn’t have a sleepy Sunday morning to lounge into.

But I also remember how deliriously happy I was, between scoops of salsa and a bratwurst dipped in mustard. I was so thankful to be alive, thankful I was living the life I’ve built for myself in Berlin, thankful for the people who surround me, so sappily thankful for the city itself and all the beautiful people in it.

I was so thankful to be alive, thankful I was living the life I’ve built for myself in Berlin, thankful for the people who surround me.

Long ago and before there ever was a fire, one of those people gave me a recipe for a sun-dried tomato butter called, in German, Tomatenbutter. » Continue reading this post...