Saturday 22nd January 2022
Another third crumpet to start the day, this one simply with a bit of butter, a fried egg, salt and pep. I draw a jaunty smiley face on top in sriracha and take a photo. I forgot to spread the butter so bite into a startling, yet of course well received, creamy chunk when I get to the middle.
Listening to the Off Menu podcast, recommended by L, and learn that Bob Mortimer has six sugars in his tea, a habit that started after his dad died when he was a child, and that he is also 'pre-yoghurt'. That is, pre-yoghurt being in the supermarket in the UK. I wonder if I'm pre-sriracha although I probably just didn't know about it until the avocado based brunch boom of the mid-2010s.
After a long catch up with S at her exhibition watching the anti-vaccine march go past, I walk through the Batgirl set being taken down. Little ledges of snow, a shop window full of vegetables and hanging meats, and a giant billboard with a coffee cup on it. Filled with black coffee, the cup has bright lashed eye and plump orange cheeks. Why is it that giving the cup is face is supposed to make the coffee more appealing? Are we supposed to see our own face in that giant smiling cup, drinking coffee out of ourself? In S's film, a large rock is carved with small undetermined portraits. I think about drunk octopus wants to fight.
Later, blueberry friandes made with five frothed up egg whites which make the batter very mallowy. For dinner, with the five leftover egg yolks you can make a carbonara, just add some crisp salty pancetta cubes or mushrooms.
Imagine being described as cold coffee like Macabéa in The Hour of the Star. It's probably the most glamourous and literary way of being established as drab. I'm reading this very slowly because it's so small and dense I'm worried about missing something. Last summer, over a big ice cube and milk, I would pour the ends of a cafetiere and feel really pleased with myself.
More, this poem by Frank O'Hara in 1961:
oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
Sunday 23rd January 2022
Me and the cat both have bad stomachs. B says that when her Grandma who was a twin broke her arm when she was little her twin felt it too. So maybe it's like that. Ate massive Spanish feast last night and end the week like the way I started it wondering if I have some kind of intolerance. Can you have a small seafood intolerance? Like if you eat more than two pieces of squid or five mussels then it's bad? Maybe it was the sweet non-alcoholic beers plus the seafood all glugging around in my stomach like a murky aquarium.
On the 1st February 1976, Elvis Presley flew to Denver Airport at 1 o'clock in the morning on his private jet Lisa Marie. There, inside the aircraft hangar, he was met by the owners of the Colorado Mine Company restaurant who he had requested to make and bring 22 fresh Fool's Gold sandwiches, which he, joined by two friends and the pilots, guzzled down with champagne and Perrier, and then flew back to Memphis. A Fool's Gold is an entire loaf of bread coated in butter and cooked till golden, the insides are then scooped out and replaced with grape jelly, peanut butter and a pound of crispy fried bacon. I learn this whilst watching a pretty bad rom com from 2013 featuring Daniel Radcliffe and Adam Driver, What If? M leans over and says that that's what he's going to get me for my birthday.
I spill some south indian garlic sauce onto my grey trackie bottoms and the cat lunges to lick it off. Later on, we watch Spirited Away, and I watch through my phone screen whilst trying to take photos of some good food scenery when Chihiro's parents are turning in to pigs at the beginning. Loewe have just done collab and made this amazing bucket hat with the Susuwatari ("wandering soot" that also appear in My Neighbour Totoro) on it eating konpeitō, the Japanese colourful sugar star candy that Lin throws to them like chicken feed on their lunch break.
A sad week in fashion, Thierry Mugler died today. My favourite fashion insta account posts this video of his Fall Winter 1983 presentation where the models, leaping and laughing down the catwalk, are dressed in mounds of delicious confectionary-coloured tulle. Googling a synonym for 'delicious' and then 'gorgeous' I accidentally Google 'delicious gorgeous' which as it turns out is actually a café specialising in afternoon tea and baby showers in Eastbourne.
Caitlin is a programmer and writer based in Glasgow. (@caitlinmerrettking)
Thanks so much to Caitlin for contributing to the Gazette this last week. It’s been delicious gorgeous tracking your eating both real and cultural.
xx
Kate and Sinae