Wednesday Cafe: Strong Weakness Edition!
In which we create a cult of cookies and comic books.
Hey inbox pals! Turn off your You Tubes and your Tick Tocks, it’s time to hear about all the great things we’ve been watching, reading, and making this week.
What We're Watching
Week Four of the Artist’s Way includes a reading fast. Julia Cameron writes that words can have a tranquilizing effect for artists and prevent them for creating. For me the reading fast meant I would do my job normally, but no extraneous reading, no newsletters, no reading, no random googling. I And let me tell you, I do a lot of random googling.
On Monday, I just binged the YouTube channel Sideways. On Tuesday, I talked to a friend. On Wednesday, I did a double workout and threw out my back. I slept on an ice pack that night. Hurray, aging! On Thursday, I finally did something productive and worked on an essay.
Overall, the whole experience was tainted by the bizarre delusion that exercising was a good use of my free time. I didn’t feel much more creative that week, though I might have been more productive. ~ Natalie
Recently I finished the first season of Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet, the show with a name so dumb it makes me love it even more. It's basically a workplace comedy about a game development studio full of familiar faces (Mac from Always Sunny! Abed from Community! Hey Ash, that's where you went!). You can see where it has borrowed from shows like The Office and Silicon Valley, and yet the dynamic is slowly starting to shift from "bad boss vs put-upon staff" to "ecosystem of passionate weirdos who probably could not function in any office except this one". As somebody who has only ever had eccentric bosses and am not sure where this leaves my skills as an employee, I relate to it maybe too much? Its first season also concludes with the only good coronavirus episode ever made, which made me cry happy tears and is reason alone to watch it. ~ Tracy
What We're Reading
During Covid, I joined a women’s group. For the month of August, the theme is strengths and everyone’s been talking about the Clifton’s Strengths. I had balked against taking the assessment, because it costs money, and the science behind personality assessments is sketchy.
In an article titled “Strengths-Based Coaching Can Actually Weaken You,” the Harvard Business Review have to say about strengths assessment, “Thus your top strengths could mean that you are truly exceptional at displaying those qualities — because you possess them much more than other people do — or that you are just worse at all your other strengths. Say, for instance, that I’m a lazy person but that I’m even more selfish, narrow-minded, and stupid than I am lazy — would that make me hard-working?”
Ouch.
However, a week in, I caved into peer pressure. I was hoping I’d learn something new about myself. I secretly wished I had previously untapped people skills. The assessment claims it measures talents, not ability.
But before we get to my results, first some context:
Taking the assessment is actually pretty fun. It’s over a hundred questions in which you’re made to choose which of two things you identify more strongly with.
Some of the questions are related, like choosing between whether you want to be liked or adored. Others felt more random, like making you choose between neatness and independence. There is also a neutral option.
The Clifton’s strength assessment ranks 34 strengths or “themes” in four categories: executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking.
EXECUTING themes help you make things happen.
INFLUENCING themes help you take charge, speak up and make sure others are heard.
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING themes help you build strong relationships that hold a team together.
STRATEGIC THINKING themes help you absorb and analyze information
I, of course, fixated on my weaknesses. Folks, I did not have a single influencing theme in my top ten, which means that my dreams of being a cult leader are officially dead.
On the positive side, I’m trying to play more on my strengths aka avoiding people situations. ~ Natalie
Crowded #7 Variant - Gaby Epstein
The latest treasure I've trawled up from the comics section of Hoopla is Crowded, a zany near-future tale of the gig economy gone wild. A seemingly-innocuous woman finds herself the target of a million-dollar crowdsourced assassination campaign, so of course she hits up the Dfend app to hire the only bodyguard willing to take the job. Hijinks, mysteries, and flirting ensue. The vibe is kind of John Wick meets Tumblr, with the hyper-violent premise undercut by colorful cartoony art and the rare ACTUAL laugh-out-loud-funny script. The only downside is that there are only two volumes out so far and I want SO MUCH MORE.
I also managed to read an entire novel: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose books I keep hearing great things about but haven’t tried until now. It starts out as an intriguing but fairly by-the-numbers "what's going on in this mansion?" gothic horror story (I'll rank it a 4/5 on the "scared to go to the bathroom in the dark after reading" scale), and soon plummets into a nightware world of eugenics, colonialism, and of course GHOSTS. It strikes a nice balance between exploring the expectations and responsibilities that would have shaped the life of a wealthy young woman in 1950s Mexico, and yet the heroine has a contemporary-leaning plucky attitude and sassy sense of humor. In the end it veers too far from "spooky" and into "gross" for my liking but I blitzed through it in three days just to find out what would happen, and in this day and age that's a successful book for me. ~ Tracy
What We're Making
Sorry about the photo. This is the only one I have.
For a friend’s socially distanced birthday, I made the New York Times’ gluten free chocolate chip cookies and they were delicious! I did this trick where I didn’t tell people they were made of almond flour — after checking no one had nut allergies — and they thought they were regular cookies!
I liked them more than the Levain cookies I made a few weeks ago. I used a combination of chopped chocolate and two types of chocolate chips. But if you have enough chocolate bars, use them. I loved the puddles of chocolate.
I used my “big” cookie scoop and it yielded 14 large cookies. The original recipe yields ten 5-inch cookies so I guess if I followed the instructions, they’d be as big as the levain cookies. Still, they’re still big enough to buy for $5 at a Bay Area farmer’s market.
The almond flour browned nicely and got all craggly at the edges. The texture was excellent -- crispy at the edges and chewy closer to the center — and gooey with chocolate. Best of all, they held up better than Levain cookies and were still tasty two or three days later. ~ Natalie
Recent Recipes:
Someone asked me for the recipe for this pasta dish I made and when I showed them the link they said "this is NOT AT ALL what you made!". Okay okay I made a few minor alterations, like changing the pasta type and adding meats and vegetables and changing the cheese and adjusting the spices.... Anyway, here is my version of that original recipe, as requested. (You may worry that this was written by an imposter Tracy, as it contains NO GARLIC AT ALL. The andouille I used was plenty garlicky, but obviously feel free to rebel and add all the garlic the real Tracy would have wanted.)
SUMMERTIME SAUSAGE + PEA PASTA
1 cup panko
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried oregano
1/4 cup grated parmesan
2 lemons, zested and juiced
Handful fresh parsley, finely chopped
1 lb spicy andouille, sliced on a vertical or crumbled
1 bag frozen peas
1 lb ziti or pasta of choice
4 oz mix of goat cheese, cream cheese, feta, whatever you've got
1 cup heavy cream
Salt n Pepa
Start boiling your pasta water. (You may have heard otherwise from sailors, but I live by the tenet "pasta water should be as salty as a soup". If you taste it and think "mmm yeah I'd eat a bowl of that if only it had ingredients in it" then it's good to go.) Whenever it's ready you can cook and drain your pasta as usual, setting aside a bowl of starchy water.
Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a small skillet over medium. Add the panko and toast for about 5 mins, stirring every 20 seconds or so, until it's starting to look dark brown. Pour it into a bowl and set it aside — once it's cooled, add the thyme, oregano, lemon zest, parmesan, parsley, a big pinch of salt and some pepper.
Cook the sausage in a big skilet over medium-high — try to let it sit undisturbed for 2-3 mins so it can brown up before flipping and cooking the other side for another 1-2 mins. Use a slotted spoon to scoop it into a bowl, leaving the oil.
Add the peas right into the andouille-flavored oil and heat them on medium-low until they're warmed up, then dump them right into the same bowl as the sausage.
Add the cream and cheese and cream cheese to the skillet and heat it on medium-low until everything melts and starts to bubble a little around the edges. Add the lemon juice slowly, stirring constantly so it won't curdle. Add some salt and pepper then TASTE AND SEASON. Depending on the zestiness of the cheese you used, you might want to add more lemon — remember it will be competing with spicy andouille for flavorspace, so if it tastes a little too lemony it's probably perfect.
Add the pasta, andouille, and peas into the sauce and stir for a few mins to get everything warmed up. If the sauce is looking too thick or gloopy, add a spoonful or two of the starchy water and stir until it's looking nice and smooth.
Serve topped with the toasty breadcrumbs, alongside a salad if you want to be respectable, or else in a bowl that is slightly too small so it looks like an impossibly decadent amount of pasta. ~ Tracy
THANK YOU for reading all the way down here to the BUTTON ZONE! One of these buttons will fill you with corporate strength and vitality but I won’t tell you which one.