October 22

Cranberry Gingerbread Crumble Bars

I recently made these Cranberry Gingerbread Crumble Bars that are extremely delicious. Recipe is by Asha Loupy, who is a genius recipe writer. They are a riff on another bar she makes with strawberries and pistachios, which I make all of the time. Now we have a version for each half of the year. And for the record, I think these are especially good cold (they need to be stored in the fridge).

Doma Cafe

Somehow took me longer than it should have to try Doma, a Croatian cafe in Chicago. I am in love. Not only is the food great (the hash brown is a work of art). But the design of the space is so rad. Feels like a mini-vacation. Can’t recommend highly enough. Also, they sell a t-shirt with the motto: “It’s Healthy if You Like It”, which—WORD.

Rachel Connolly

You know that feeling when a baby is so cute you want to bite it? I sometimes feel that way about writing. Like, the writing is so good I want to do more than just read it. I feel this way about Rachel Connolly. I’ve followed her work for years and she is one of a handful of people who seem to regularly make me better at thinking. She recently wrote a beautiful essay for The Cut called My Childhood Under Northern Ireland’s Abortion Ban, which tries to unpack the consequences of the environments we grow up in.

Gohar World Lunches

The Gohar World gang are now texting us all recipes for lunch. They come through on Thursdays and I love both the recipes and the format. The green minestrone is becoming a staple in our house and features a cup and half of olive oil. If you want to join in your text YUM to 833-648-0911 . As my friend recently said, imagine having one of the phone numbers that are like a digit off and getting random texts that just say “YUM”.

Interview With the Vampire (2022)

I have an uncomfortable relationship with vampire stuff because tweenage me was a little too into vampire stuff.  The retrospective cringe I feel about a genre that is often objectively pretty cringey kind of taints the whole thing for me. But I am pushing through and genuinely enjoying this AMC series. I like that they’ve made it more obviously queer and the production is fun. My only real complaint is that it somehow feels too reserved, I wish they’d gotten a little more explicit in almost every direction.

Watcher (2022)

We try to watch as many horror films as we can in October. Watcher was definitely the best we’ve seen and one of my favorite films of any genre in recent years. A young woman moves to Bucharest with her partner and believes a man across the street is watching her. At the same time a serial killer is active in the city. The tThe production design is beautiful, I was genuinely tense from beginning to end, and Maika Monroe is incredible (as she was in another favorite of mine, It Follows).