Salsa Verde

[mallorys_camera]

Dreamed that Ben was dying (again!), and I was trying to take care of him. Except he didn’t want my help, he wanted Sarolta’s. So, I was trying to liaison with Sarolta, figure out a plan where we could split responsibilities. Except Sarolta didn’t like me; in fact, Ben didn’t like me, if it came to that. They were going to Arizona.

Eleanor was in the dream, too; I think in some capacity of, Why the fuck should you care?

A question to which there isn’t any answer. Because in what’s laughingly known as “real life,” I don’t care.

###

The humidity made yesterday a very strange day. It wasn’t that it was super hot. It was that the air was so heavy that with every step I took outside, I felt like I was displacing my own body weight in water. It was an effort to move. Really uncomfortable.

So I stayed inside the air-conditioned house and waited for it to rain.

Which it never did.

I generated revenue in the resentful manner of one being forced to do something they do not want to do, only they have to do it because Bad Guys have guns pointed at their head.

I cooked!

An awesome salsa verde from the tomatillos, tomatoes and peppers! I added some lime juice and cilantro.

I am thinking that next year, all I will grow is tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers and basil, because I could live very happily on salsa verde and pesto. This stuff was just incredibly delicious, and invigorating! I could feel every cell in my body perk up after I doused my scrambled eggs with it.

I also did a complicated Indian lentil dish, which was good but not that good, so I will not do it again.

I was not exactly teary.

But, you know. All I needed was a show about some dog embarking upon a 500-mile journey to find the human boy it loved to set me off on a five-hour crying jag.

Fortunately, I do not own a TV!

###

In the evening, I thought: This is what happens when you don’t exercise and garden. And make iMovies.

So, I will be heading out this morning. Shortly.

Today, I intend to take videos and pix of the FDR Presidential Library and throw something together.

Springwood, the FDR manor, is an incredibly ugly house. Not so bad from the outside, but the inside is ghastly, just the most uninspired mishmash of furniture and mementos, thrown together without the slightest deference to eye appeal. Gruesomely utilitarian.

Springwood reflects the taste of FDR’s dragon of a mother, Sarah Delano Roosevelt.

The Delanos were Waldoons who migrated to the New World from the Spanish Netherlands in 15-something; they got rich smuggling opium into China and lived in Newburgh across the Hudson.

Sarah Roosevelt was actually marrying down when she wed James Roosevelt, a fact that no one in her immediate circle—most especially young Eleanor who had the misfortune to be a Roosevelt by birth and by marriage—was ever allowed to forget.

Poor Eleanor!

She was married mostly to be a brood mare. To provide the Roosevelt family with sons.

That she managed to rise above that and become one of the most remarkable women of her generation is a testament to her charismatic personality and talent for grace.

Comments

[gale_storm]

I am thinking that next year, all I will grow is tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers and basil, because I could live very happily on salsa verde and pesto. This stuff was just incredibly delicious, and invigorating! I could feel every cell in my body perk up after I doused my scrambled eggs with it.

Oh, would that tomatillos grew well here on our balcony. We tried once, but the winds take them by their little skirts — hee! — and dash them to death. We can get salsa verde from wherever, but it’s not the same as growing the tomatillos ourselves.

I also did a complicated Indian lentil dish, which was good but not that good, so I will not do it again.

Unfortunate, as Indian lentil dishes can be really really easy, like this:

https://thewanderlustkitchen.com/indian-red-lentil-dal/

(I admit that I’m curious as to what you’d made!)

[asakiyume]

That's a lovely photo of Eleanor. People always say she was plain, and then show photos of her as an older woman, but almost none of us are at our best as older women--not in the looks department, anyway! she looks great here.

Smuggling opium into China! You know such juicy details.

yes, walks, i-movie... do those things.

[mallorys_camera]

It was a dal in fact! 😀 It just took wayyyy to long to chop up all the ginger and the coriander. I could have used the food processor, but that was bespoke for the salsa verde.

Can you buy tomatillos in Denmark?

[mallorys_camera]

Yes, Eleanor was very pretty. I think the feature that made her "plain" was her overbite, which grew progressively more pronounced with age.

(You probably don't remember this detail from that story of mine you read, but she really did look like her cousin Alice who was considered a great beauty.)