In which I make salad. For the second time in under a fortnight

A consequence of my veggie box subscription is I Have Lettuce To Use Up. Now, I'm not a fan of most leafy salads (you go to all this effort of chasing a leaf and putting it in your mouth for, like, zero substance!), and even the salads I do like I don't normally make because they don't fit in my regime of leftovers. But! I have made salad! I made this red leaf salad with lemon vinagrette the other day, and today had a more all-round satisfactory experience modifying this red leaf salad with sweet potatoes.

( Diet and accessibility notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

Makes... about two small meals? Depends on the size of your lettuce, and indeed your sweet potato. Probably 3-4 side servings.

Weekend Listening Post!

Right now I am listening to The Mountain Goats, Talahassee, because... there's a never a bad reason for that album, honestly.

I have been listening to a fairly consistent rotation of Dessa and Grace Petrie, with Fiona Apple and Gillian Welch for variety. Garbage for running to.

I also bought the earlier album, 'Leaving Eden' by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and it's quite good, although I don't love it like I do Genuine Negro Jig.

Finally, I added Heartlife NFP to my Patreon subs, in order to acquire some music associated with the podcast Unwell - chiefly the song 'Lost', attrib in-verse to Rusty Standish. It is an extremely good track that reminds me a lot of early Fleetwood Mac. It's described in the show as fitting the mid-70s aesthetic, and gentle, but "Something with a little bit of blood on it. Like a hawk gliding back to its nest with a sparrow in its claws." Undoubtedly there's a more obvious reference point than early Fleetwood Mac, but my 70s music knowledge tends toward the pub-rock end of blues rock, and less toward the folk-blues. I suspect kayloulee would have three or four citations immediately, courtesy of her parents' music collection.

Podcasts and Audiobooks:

I have finally finished part 1 of Garth Greenwell's 'What Belongs To You', which is beautifully done, but because it doesn't flinch from the awkward, the embarrassing, the morally murky but rather fillets them with a fine knife - well, the audiobook format wasn't as good a choice as I thought. I keep shrinking away from the narrator as he does things he will later regret. But I am in awe of Greenwell's craft. A friend said on their locked twitter they were getting sick of the relentless imperative to Happy Morally Upstanding Gay Content and turned to Greenwell, and that is exactly the need this is filling for me. Greenwell doesn't give two hoots about establishing that queers can be *happy*: he is interested in displaying, in an art work of words as sharp as a dagger and as carefully wrought as blown glass, particular and distinct shades of emotion, experience that it would be a huge disservice to render down to "loneliness", "regret", "desire", "gratification", or, least of all, "happiness". (I wonder, is the Anna Karenina maxim true here? Happy queer stories are all alike, but unhappy queer stories are all unhappy in their own way? The way other people talk I gather most people see uniformity in those that end with anything less than HFN, but... I do not.)

Also making some more progress with Unwell - less than i'd hoped, partly because I had a revival of work-related energy this past week and kept going into the evenings, partly because I devoted reading time to 'The Mercies' and partly because I wanted to prioritise What Belongs To You and was flinching from it, resulting in no listening at all.