Matthew Rowley

I go to the gym more than I like, but it’s not to get jacked – it’s so I can have the occasional 4,000 calorie day.

Booklet showing filled breads on the cover. Its text reads: THE LITTLE GEORGIAN COLLECTION Carla Capalbo Georgian Khachapuri and Filled Breads

Same. I like them so much that I had to learn to make them. This pocket-sized booklet (that was bought from Kitchen Arts and Letter in NYC) helped:

I know. I’m sorry. The cheese isn’t the only salty thing in that clip.

Khachapuri, right outta the oven, with a torn-off end used to mix hot egg yolk into the cheese.

YouTube video by Coach's Corner With Dr. K There Will Be Growth in the Spring

Reminded of Peter Sellers speaking as Chance the gardener in Being There:

Poster for the film The Field starring Richard Harris and John Hurt

It’s there as a structural element, helps to keep the soil light and loose. Our dirt is heavy with clay and riddled with river rock, so I’ve been overhauling it and
amending it for about 14 years. Bit by bit, getting this place productive.

Same. The bed right next to the kitchen is all culinary herbs. Nice to just pad out barefoot, cut what I need, and swing back in.

It’s not the fanciest garden in the world. But it keeps my brain occupied in the early morning, nudges me into considering dinner plans, and holds at bay for an hour or so the dread of learning What He’s Done Now

Preposterously overgrown parsley.

Neglected last summer’s parsley a little too long (arm for scale). Almost one meter tall. Too bitter to eat. Will stagger-plant some new over the coming weeks.

Two Birdies raised planter beds. One stripped of plants, the other in the process of the same.

Getting salad beds ready for spring. Fortifying the soil with city compost (a result of our compulsory yard/kitchen waste program), coconut coir, and vermiculite. Blood meal later.

At the base: citrus branches I trimmed two years ago, now obligingly collapsing into themselves. Hugelkultur, baby.

I mean, that does seem the most obvious scenario.

We are so used to friends and colleagues with curiosity about food, roving eyes at markets, and willingness to try new things that when we encounter people who don’t do that, it’s akin to a couple of nun stumbling into a Pride parade: “What do you mean, you don’t wear chaps? Everyone wears chaps.”

I’ve seen tall poppy syndrome up close—that retrograde impulse that flattens individualism and curiosity. Some families will absolutely drag and humiliate anyone who dares bring a dish to dinner that isn’t precisely what the ancestors have been turning out since 1920. Chipotle?! Oh no, you don’t!

Literally all of that is available in the US. Well, maybe that French curry is alien. Dry sour cherries? I can get them by the kilo at Costco. Sumac and za’atar? Any middle eastern grocer sells them. We have all this. Don’t discount the possibility of someone making ragebait content for engagement.

Some people have neither time nor interest for learning more than rudimentary cooking. Everyone eats, not everyone’s into food the way we are

Every nation has the incurious and ignorant. I brought olives to an EU farm last year. Kids knew what they were but their worried mother had never seen them.

I have to recalibrate the shelves here myself from time to time, so I understand. Thank you for taking the trouble to look—I truly appreciate it.

As an author whose works Anthropic stole to build its business, I say: let ‘em fight.

My ex: I told my professor about your smoked ribs. Can he have the rub recipe? Me: Sure. The specs are on the jar. Just take a picture. X: No. Write it, please. He's not going to know what "gollix" is. Me: He's your professor; you write it. X: He's not gonna know! Me: He'll figure it out. Thereafter follows a four panel comic of a head of garlic, trying to pronounce it’s designation.

Worth hauling this one out of the archives. Had an ex who wanted me to do everything for him. Like a fool, I mostly did. But I also pushed back when it was just ridiculous. Case in point: gollix

Ah. Right. Mostly I write those journals so that that others may read them without hindrance, but a few oddball terms come in from Latin, Greek, chemical and mathematical symbols, German, etc. Then there are the things that are just me. Gollix is one. See below.

Hardcover book held in a lap as morning light begins to rake into the room. Ekengren, Stefan (2024). Potato Total: Timeless Recipes for Every Home Cook. Berlin: Gestalten.

This morning’s reading: more from Potato Europe.

Swedish restaurateur Stefan Ekengren’s (2024) Potato Total. Tight book from Gestalten, about 190 pp., 85–90 recipes. Includes the deranged notion of bringing a bowl of hot spuds to the table with a ricer so diners can press their own à la minute.

Handwritten recipe for Tomato Pasilla Soup

I’d’ve begun with this one from 2006—a respectable tomato soup for cheese toasties—with charred tomatoes and poblanos, rice, and a demi-sec smoked chile that I haul back from Oaxaca: the elegant pasilla de Oaxaca, which brings to the bowl a whiff of woodsmoke and good decisions.

Photo of a girl biting into food that she is holding with both hands. Across her forehead is the word “me” while super proposed over her meal is “them clear ice photos”

Barely more complicated than a recipe for ice.

Thank you, George.

Oh, there will be more. It’s surreal to me, however, to find otherwise bright people who’ve outsourced such basic thought when vetted knowledge is *right there*

Sunny D(eez)

Though I have been known to lay a hand gently on the forearm of a friend at his seventh whiskey, I am not so poor in manners as to take from a man his first of the night.

I know. I know. I asked him why he hadn’t called me. It would’ve been so easy to find out what kind of tomato soup he was hankering after and either tell him how to do it or to lay my hands on a recipe from a reliable source.

I have over 3,000 cookbooks at home and a well-equipped, well-used kitchen. A friend who’s known me nearly 15 years came over for porch whiskey. He tells me about his week.

He: I wanted tomato soup, but I didn’t have a recipe, so I asked ChatGPT.

Me:

He: <sips whiskey>

Me: You f*cking what?

Blue hardcover book. MAURA LAVERTY'S COOKERY BOOK LONGMANS

Cookbook friends (particularly in Ireland and the UK): I'm hoping to verify some language in Maura Laverty's Cookery Book (1946).

I have come up empty-handed hunting for a digital copy.

Would anyone with a copy be willing to share whole-page images of her griskins recipe, including any headnotes?