📍provisions from nowhere: #12
trying to be a pie guy
Happy holiday-weekend Monday!
Today we’re serving Notes from Florida, a Nowhere House Special that you’re bound to find circulating the menu from time to time. There’s salt and dense seaweed on the air, and Mike took our niece and nephew out for a moonlit kayak to the sandbar tonight. After losing sight of them in the ascending darkness we momentarily panicked—but Mike had rigged up headlamps for all (bless), so they came back into view as blinking stars, whooping and hollering as they paddled homeward.
In hyper-local news, our brother and sister-in-law got a place a few blocks from ours in our Florida neighborhood (!!!), meaning with Mike’s dad’s place in between, we’ve got a near-full family compound. The rest of the fam collected for the long weekend and I’ve been reveling in how good it is to be together. Also, sweating. I hope this Monday finds you somewhere hot, warm, breezy, cold, or freezing! Which is it for you? Please share a little vignette in the comments. We need to know!
Joy blaaast (homemade edition)
Driven by my belief that pie is the perfect food, I’ve been working on my crust-making skills. This week, I fashioned, out of flour, butter, lemons, and love (lol classic ingredient), a lemon shaker pie. It came out so photogenic!
It’s called a lemon Shaker pie after the Shaking Quakers, who were known for their ecstatic shimmying during worship and for using the entirety of anything in a bid for ultimate frugality: an animal, a piece of wood, and in the case of this pie, a whole dang lemon. It gets sliced and macerated in sugar, whisked with flour and eggs, and then baked in a double crust. Alison Roman promised me it would taste like a lemon bar, only better. When I lived in San Francisco, our backyard had the most prolific Meyer lemon tree—and those lemons would have been 🤌 in this pie. But this version, despite how cute she looked, did not win me over in the taste department (the rinds were vvv bitter). But this is why we practice, y’all.
What did win me over, in quite frankly the everything department, is a homemade sweater my dear friend Ethelia made for Nova. This impeccable creation was made not only from its maker’s patient and practiced hand (honestly, so impressed by the craft of this garment!) but so obviously with love and time, which made me feel so grateful. Thank you, Theils! 💌
Cooks, reads, listens
… are all reads this week! I hope you have a minute to lay back and soak up whatever words are taking you to new places lately.
Architectural Digest’s Inside the Barbie Dreamhouse, a Fuchsia Fantasy Inspired by Palm Springs, mostly for the pictures. I wasn’t a the biggest Barbie gal growing up (too busy staging a full Swedish Christmas feast with my American Girl doll, Kirsten Larson), but I shall definitely be viewing the forthcoming Barbie movie just for the spectacle! And maybe the cultural commentary?
How Frog and Toad became queer, anti-capitalist, cottagecore icons for Vox, which paints a different-colored fantasy than Barbie’s and one that made me, too, nostalgic for a time when technology felt less oppressive. Like a steaming cup of tea served from a thimble, simple rituals “are largely the patterns of Frog’s and Toad’s lives in the stories, when the act of making cookies or going on a long walk or waiting for a letter to arrive can consume a whole day.” 🥲
the unbearable rightness of being (a toddler) by
, for his Substack . I loved this hilarious and sweet read on parenting a little maniac, which, although decidedly not fantasy, makes the reality feel a lot less like reality (I’m amazed by/obsessed with writing that does this).
No poem share this week! But please drop a line in the pond of my soul (? hmm, metaphor lost the plot a bit there, but regardless) and let me know about the homemade creations you’re failing or nailing, the fantasy worlds you’re escaping to, or just a little picture of your weekend. Love you!
Becca
We are in the middle of wildflower season here in Colorado. Need to plan a trip to the mountains to take in the beauty.