Seizing the Season + What is Reading for Pleasure?

Springy Salad + Real Life

Gosh: It’s fucking SPRING. In LA, the alleged land-of-no-seasons (a lie if I ever heard one), everything is in bloom, the market is spilling over with crunchy green things, and people are swapping knit hats for the baseball variety. (PSA: I just purchased the Cervo’s hat and can report that it is the *perfect* shade of salmon and has a bill that actually blocks sun.) In the spirit of the season, below: a salad that expresses spring’s bounty, plus a book that stopped me in my tracks.

Read

Real Life by Brandon Taylor, pub. 2020
Buy: Bookshop.org or your local bookstore

I could wax poetic about the importance of bookstores (and libraries!) for the rest of my life. Browsing for books IRL leads you places you never knew you’d go. I recently visited Three Lives, a wonderful and special bookstore in NYC, and boy, did it deliver. Full disclosure: Despite my knowledge of book blurbs being total BS, I was drawn to today’s book, Real Life, by the Kiese Laymon quote on the front (have you read Heavy? If not, get thee to a bookstore!).

As longtime readers might’ve ascertained, I look out for books written by marginalized groups in order to further my understanding / lessen my ignorance. I always leave with a deeper sense of someone else’s experience. This is one of those books that devastated while simultaneously enriching me. It also made me consider the act of — and meaning behind — reading for pleasure.

Real Life didn’t fill me with the kind of joy, levity, or escape I often seek from novels. Instead, it challenged me; made me squirm. Despite its tough subject matter, I read it quickly, not just because it’s beautifully drawn, but because I felt invested in the main character’s story and future, and challenged by Taylor’s powerfully resonant depictions of racism — a subject so vast it can feel unwieldy and incomprehensible. Reading is a portal: toward deeper meaning and understanding, or flights of fancy when life gets too real, to name a few. Sometimes I read a book that’s emotionally draining but I can’t put down. Real Life is one of those and I couldn’t recommend it more.

Set on a campus in the Midwest, we meet our main character, Wallace, the first Black member of a PhD program. He spends his days (and nights) breeding nematodes (some of the descriptions got so specific that my right-brained eyes clouded over – just a heads up for the science-dense). Queer and from the South, Wallace is all too familiar with the feeling of alienation that comes with being other; not to mention he has a history of deep trauma that keeps him in his head, afraid of intimacy and avoiding genuine connection. It’s a recipe for sadness, an uphill battle at every turn.

Wallace has a group of friends whom you slowly grow to know, including a guy, Miller, who publicly claims to be straight but gets into Wallace’s pants about 20 pages in. Their relationship is a complex one for obvious reasons, but the two are drawn to each other, each using the other to express long-stilted desire and buried trauma. The scenes are hard to read but deftly written and made me ache for those dealing with unresolved pain when it comes to sexuality.

When Wallace isn’t stealing away with Miller for clandestine sex, he’s at the lab: He dives into his research — sometimes pulling all-nighters there — in a fruitless effort to prove himself to his mostly-white advisors, and to avoid socializing with / creating deeper intimacy with his friends. Then he feels guilty for not socializing and forces himself to do so. Both the lab and the social interactions prove to be highly contentious environments for Wallace to operate within as a Black man. He’s undermined time and time again by white people who ignorantly believe they know what’s best, and who don’t appreciate or consider the complexities of his situation. Taylor writes racism with a dexterity that can only come from years of personal experience; reading it as a white person I felt physically uncomfortable, pissed and frustrated that Black people are consistently doubted, othered and belittled. Some of the situations Taylor describes are so nuanced and piquant they left me motionless while my brain tried to fully grasp the everyday microaggressions non-white people face.

I am so grateful I found this book. It was an intense one but feels like required reading if you’re looking for a deeper understanding of the way racism slyly thrives in the day-to-day. Not pleasure, per se, but deference and expansion.

Eat

There’s no appropriate way to segue from trauma to salad, so….here's a crunchy, springy dish to ease our transition into warmth and sunshine. It’s a combo of cooked and raw veg with healthy omegas from hemp hearts and good fat from avocado and coconut — AKA a salad that won’t leave you hungry.

Spring Salad
Serves 2

2 heads little gem lettuce, bottoms chopped off, leaves separated and kept whole
6 Brussels sprouts, shaved on a mandolin or sliced very thin with a knife
8 Brussels sprouts, halved (to roast )
1 cup snap peas, stems removed and sliced on the bias
1 large handful dill, chopped (you can include some finely minced stems, too)
1 large handful basil leaves cut into a chiffonade or torn
½ fennel bulb, shaved on a mandolin or sliced very thin with a knife
2 tablespoons hemp seeds
2 limes (one for the salad, one for the avo-coconut puree)
3 tablespoons evoo
Kosher salt
Maldon, to season
Avo-coconut puree ( recipe below)

Avocado coconut purée*
Makes approximately 1½ cups

1 avocado
¼ cup full-fat coconut milk (I love Aroy-D)
1 lime, juice and zest
¼ teaspoon ground cumin

*You won't use all of the puree; it’ll keep in your fridge for 3 days. Use the rest as a dip for crackers, crudités, roasted veg or fish.

Preheat your oven to 425F. Toss the Brussels sprouts on a roasting tray, drizzle with olive oil and Kosher salt, and roast for about 12-15 minutes, or until you can stick a sharp knife through (this depends on the size of your sprouts). Meanwhile, make the avo-coconut purée: In a blender or food processor, blend the avocado, coconut milk, lime juice and zest, cumin and sea salt. Blend until creamy and set aside. To a mixing bowl, add the little gems, roasted and raw Brussels, snap peas, dill, basil and fennel. In a small jar, squeeze the juice of one lime with the olive oil and a pinch of salt and shake well until emulsified. Drizzle the lime-olive oil vinaigrette over the salad. Mix well with your hands and season with salt. To serve, grab a shallow bowl. Using the back of a spoon, create a bed of avo-coconut purée on the bottom of the bowl. You want the purée to serve as a luscious bed that makes every salad bite more delicious, so don't skimp! (I used about ¾ of the purée). With your hands, bundle a beautiful salad nest on top of the purée. Sprinkle with hemp seeds and season with Maldon.