August 18 2025
12:30 at night
When depressed, I find that cooking helps. I made a huge Belgian beef stew. It’s my favorite thing to cook, and I needed to put together something that would take time. So I sliced and braised the onions and browned the beef I’d floured and threw if all together with Belgian beer. Piece of cake. During these hours it’s in the oven I feel as if I'm being productive while I do nothing at all. Sort of like being pregnant. Because the news these days is a movie I’d walk out of when I finished my popcorn and coke. Coca-Cola is the only thing that makes me feel even the least bit patriotic. Used to make me, that is. Not now. Not anymore. Nothing does. Unless this shitstorm ends. Now I’m just a furious bitch cooking Belgian beef stew at midnight in August.
Furious Bitches unite.
I’m reading this less than an hour later and chuckling silently. Beef stew seems heavy for August, normally. But this August it couldn’t be more appropriate.
This afternoon I made a fabulous Italian plum cake from a recipe book I’ve owned for over 50 year, Cooking for a Carefree Weekend. Now there’s a laugh; carefree. The cake came out and it is perfect. I’ll use this dough as the base for all my fruit cakes from now. Sometimes I don’t really get it, whatever the “it” of the moment might be, for a decade or two.
The cicadas are chirping like crazy and it is always a wonderful sound, no matter the horror we are living through.
Plum cake and cicadas: about the best I can do these days.