#273
A recipe quest and all the rest
I am trying to bang together this newsletter before noon today, which means it is going to be about a good amount of not much. I hope you don’t mind.
The weather has turned cooler at long last, but not before I got very cranky on Sunday night while roasting a pork loin. Admittedly this was a self-own! Nevertheless, I feel like a person should be able to roast a pork loin for 40 minutes IN OCTOBER without needing to change into their shorts and t-shirt.
The pork loin in question is Martha Stewart’s porchetta-style roast pork, a recipe I stumbled across years ago and have made many times to decent acclaim. It’s a good feels-fancy-without-being-too-fussy recipe and I’ve shared it very widely.
Imagine my dismay, then, when I could not get the recipe link to show up online, no matter how specifically I searched. I kept ending up at Martha’s full-on porchetta recipe, which is undoubtedly very good but not what I wanted to make. I found the correct link in an old email I’d sent to my sister-in-law and it went…back to the porchetta recipe. Martha has DISAPPEARED this perfectly decent recipe from the internet…unless you pop the link into the Internet Wayback Machine, zoom yourself back to 2017, and bring it back from the dead.
All that to say I recommend the recipe and you should substitute very thin-sliced Calabrese salami for the pancetta, if you can find it.
I’ve mentioned closet purges and donation sprees a few (haha) times in this newsletter, and yes, I agree that it seems like I should have the world’s most tightly edited capsule wardrobe by now. Well the joke is on you, because I still have too much stuff. But I am getting better about it!
The pandemic really fucked me up in terms of having appropriate clothes for doing things outside the house. When a semblance of regular life resumed, my (as my former coworker Carol called them) “fixed-width” pants were apparently outdated (and, it must be said, snug). I also had a lot of leftover corporate drag from previous jobs still lying around. And that is how I found myself earlier this year with a bunch of clothes that I didn’t like, or that were pretty worn out, or that were bad investments to begin with (though I refuse to apologize for any of the caftans).
This week, I scheduled a pickup with the veterans donation service and put a great number of things on Poshmark and eBay. And I am trying something new, which is sending some things to ThredUp for resale that I don’t have to manage. To my surprise, ThredUp accepted all the items I sent them, and I will just use any earnings for site credit. I watched a Business Insider video about ThredUp and the secondhand clothing market in general and while it was not exactly warm and fuzzy, it will be interesting to see how the resale market evolves.
Anyway, my efforts have already paid off in the form of a few Poshmark sales this week. I plan to use these modest funds to get a long wool coat. My mom had me in something like this (probably a hand-me-down from her, initially) since I was about 13 years old and I mostly find them very square, but I can’t deny that sometimes I want something that isn’t a puffer coat.
I like the idea of a collarless coat like this one! And there are some well-priced Max Maras on eBay that are interesting. We shall see what the great Goodwill bin of the internet chooses to send my way. Also, if you like to shop for secondhand luxury items or just to goggle at what other people are finding, I recommend Driving Shoes.
A dog thing: my smaller dog stays having her behavioral issues, and I am trying to get her to lie in her dog bed in the evenings, rather than snugged up against me in a complicated tangle of snoot and feet. The reason for this is that her sleep startle reflex is extremely strong and, rarely but too often for my taste, she will get jolted awake and she becomes somewhat unpleasant.
Anyway, it’s better for her to have her own space. The first phase of this is getting her to lie in a small dog bed on the couch, but she always oozes out of it and usually ends up mostly on my lap. This results in me saying GET YOUR BABY BUTT IN YOUR BABY BED a number of times a night, something that I’m sure is still really really funny to my husband.
It is sweet when she wants to be cuddling with me all the time, but preferable for her to understand that her bed is her place and that she will be fine and safe there. She already seems to feel this way about her bed in the kitchen, something I achieved through a rigorous program of what I call Independent Rest (my dogs: “we hate Independent Rest!”). Independent Rest usually takes place from around 4:30-5:30 pm every day. They really do hate not being able to follow us around and stare at us for this ONE HOUR but they mostly have figured out we are not abandoning them Arms-of-an-Angel style. (Mostly.)
Finally, from my email inbox this week:
You can always count on The RealReal to capture what’s important in the culture.
Ok I’m right on top of that.
Thank you for the recipe from beyond! I'm going to try it. Also, I've had mildly good luck with selling on Thredup - the trick is to be okay with getting, like $3 for an item. I only send them stuff I'd otherwise be donating, so win-win.