February Peels

a new, monthly entry for The Onion Papers; (audio)books, polenta, etc.

If we were in the kitchen together, you’d hear me say: ‘Let’s take a look at the peels box.’ The peels box is a white and grey Ikea container in which I collect all the scraps and stems from the vegetables I chop and cook. Eventually, I’ll throw what’s inside the peels box and make broths for my soups, risotti, etc. I’m a gatherer and the pace of online publishing and the media often puzzle me: I’m comforted by the fact that my newsletters are stamped by an IP address and the time at which I dispatched them, but they also seem to be running away from the moment they were written as soon as they hit a mailbox. Still, they hold tiny ideas that’ll root over time, as much as small pockets of joy, thinking and hope do each month. I’m going to quote my dear friend J., who summarised it for me on Friday: ‘Gratitude is such a powerful tool.’ It is. And this is what this new, monthly feature will be about: carving some space to be grateful, or to acknowledge at least, instead of moving on weekly.

The Onion Peels will come out on the first Monday of each month, patching up some loose ends from the past weeks before looking ahead. The form will vary/adapt with the exercise of putting some things in perspective through the (dis)grace of the passage of time.

February Peels:

Bread update:

I’ve moved my sourdough starter back inside the fridge, both the weather and my timetable are too capricious for counter talks these days. I folded and stretched some strong loaves – 350g water; 300g wholemeal, 200g white flours; 120g starter; 2 tsps salt, dissolved in 2 tsps of warm water – and baked some no-knead tuna loaves to pack for hikes.

I’ve loved to read, and to re-read, this detailed, thorough and enjoyable interview between Andrew Janjigian of Wordloaf and Ian Lowe – ‘Starting the Sweet Sarter’:

‘Ian is the inventor of the “sweet starter” sourdough process, a method for creating a sourdough culture that yields a product with virtually no sourness to it and an extended shelf-life, not unlike the grandi lievitati products such as panettone that inspired it. It involves building a starter with a very low hydration and a precise amount of granulated sugar added to it, which basically decimates the lactic acid bacteria in it, so that the final fermentation is almost exclusively yeast-raised.’

There can’t be a bread update without naming the atrocities of a world where two words like ‘Flour Massacre’ make another headline. Flour Massacre means at least 112 Palestinians were killed while waiting for food.

At least 576,000 people in Gaza one step away from famine, UN says.

artwork credit Maya Mihindou / @mayamihindou on IG

Listening, reading:

This month, I’m indebted to libraries. I was able to keep researching and typing words from my local library when my laptop stopped working, it’s warm and the 70s carpet always brings me happiness at first sight. Thanks to libraries and the Libby app, I’m also entering my audiobook era.

Two recent highlights are A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson, which made me travel back to Canada for a tender novel about the aftermaths of loss. Set in Northern Ontario in 1972, the novel intertwines the lives of Rose, whose sister is missing; Liam, who has just returned after losing his job and a divorce; and Elizabeth, who, at the end of her life, is haunted by the memory of a crime she committed years ago. I thought the audiobook production was great.

The second took me on a journey through eight decades and four generations: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Sunja was born in a small fishing village in Korea in 1911. When she falls pregnant but the father is a married man, her family faces ruin, until a Christian minister offers Sunja a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Sunja moves to a country where she is not welcome, has no friends, and whose language she cannot speak, and, with Isak, she begins a long journey through motherhood, friendships, love and death. It’s a beautiful and powerful story about resilience, which has moved me deeply.

(Talking about libraries, a reminder that authors get paid every time someone borrow their books. UK-based authors, remember to register your books with PLR, via the British Library, so you can receive your royalties.)

On the page, I was grateful to Daunt Books for sending me a copy of Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel. This is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. This novel took me by surprise—and I loved it. It was punchy, complex and subtle, and relatable.

‘Nobody can ever possibly know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it.’ — Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Talking about gym settings in novels, I always recommend Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe, about one woman’s metamorphosis into an online phenomenon.

In February, my small world was also rocked by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. I came to this one after watching Poor Things (the movie based on another one of Gray’s novels, which I highly recommend too). People! Human and compulsive characters. My only advice is to inhale the sentences slowly – Lanark is marketed as a ‘modern vision of hell’ after all. 

In the kitchen:

Polestrone. A Minestrone, but with polenta instead of broth. This one-pot, spoonable dish has become a new favourite after fixing a headache.

Ingredients: sage leaves and one onion, chopped; carrots, celery, cavolo nero and leeks, chopped; canned cannellini beans; tomato purée; polenta, veggie broth.

Method: In a casserole, fry up some olive oil, the sage leaves and the onion until translucent. Add the vegetables and cook until tender. Pour in the cannellini beans, the veggie broth and a generous squeeze of tomato purée. Start adding the polenta, mixing continuously with the help of a wooden spoon, until the polenta is cooked. Serve and season to your taste (we went for black pepper and Parmesan shaves).

From The Onion Papers:

Maman’s oeufs mouillettes and a tell of two cities – on Visual Memory and re-reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Eribon’s Returning to Reims.

*

‘Bitter radicchio on a hostile Monday; the crunch of risotto melts, one ladle of stock after the other; homy dinner on a Monday, nutty Parmesan cheese and bittersweet radicchio.’

– on the taste of bitterness and a recipe for a radicchio risotto.

*

‘En Attendant Godot, Waiting for Godot, is as much about waiting as it is about the lack of introspection. I gathered that, if Vladimir and Estragon waited for that long, it’s because to move on would force them to contemplate a potential return, thus summon them to confront the memory of an event versus the reality of the said event. There, then is when a linear temporality reaches its limitation’

– Time Fantasies, on relative temporalities; reading Beckett, Morrison, Pessoa and making bread.

*

‘Reciprocity meant that I had become homesick too, and we didn’t want to eat something comforting; we wanted to be there and here, home. We found ourselves in a pickle, so we had to break a rule: we fried food in our home kitchen.’

– a recipe for cenci and some notes about carnival in Florence

*

‘This February marked the return of sage in my cooking. The Mediterranean plant, who has earned a reputation for its hardiness, suffers from the lack of light inside my kitchen.’

– three recipes to cook with ‘my winter mint’, frogspawn!, about February

*

‘Living away from most of my friends and my family influences the way I communicate with my close people. One anecdote I can share with you, with no strings attached: every day, I receive plenty of (involuntary) weather updates.’

– on the sentence, reading Lydia Davis and Clarice Lispector, and a recipe for (maltagliati) pasta e fagioli  

Looking ahead (from Glasgow, GMT):

2nd March 2024, 18:10

In March, things are expected to get busy in the garden. In the kitchen, it’s a good one for the bitter tastes: radicchio, endives, chard, and I’ll attempt to make a rosemary and rock salt focaccia. The Vernal Equinox – the moment at which the centre of the sun will be directly above the equator – will fall at 03:06am on the 20th day of March. At solar noon, the same day, the sun is expected to reach 38 degrees in the Glasgow sky.

Et l'aurore m'apporte le sommeil
Je ne veux pas qu'arrive le soleil

Margaux

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