On Confusion

But first: TV! Books! Video games! Food!

Not going to lie, I wish all video games arranged their quests this way.

A few exciting food and media updates before I dive into the heart of this post. (Everything except the tiny little essay on confusion is free to all readers; the last part is paywalled to subscribers.)

MEDIA

TV-wise: My partner and I finished Scavenger’s Reign (HBO Max) and I thought it was tremendous. Very beautiful and eerie and simultaneously spare and lush, with some truly hard-to-get-out-of-your-head body horror animation sequences. (This series is not for the weak of stomach—I definitely felt queasy during some episodes, which is pretty hard to do with me.) We also just finished The Curse (HBO Max), which took forever because it felt impossible to watch more than one episode at a time. But this show is such an uncomfortable, bleak masterpiece, dragging all the ugly subtext in real estate and house flipping and HGTV and reality shows and capitalism and whiteness—squirming, squinting—into the light. And the finale is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen. (I’ve also been really loving Gretchen Felker-Martin’s recaps/reviews over on her Patreon—if you’re a big movie/tv buff and you want to read brilliant, insightful reviews about new and old movies alike, definitely consider checking out her work.) The Curse took a lot out of us, so we’ve now reverted to watching old seasons of ER (NBC/Hulu), which has been a nice change of pace.

Some book recs: 2/3 of these recommendations are books that are not yet out in the world, but they will be soon, so keep an eye out for them: Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (almost impossible-to-describe short stories that will take the top of your head off, out September 2024 from William Morrow), Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s MAGICAL/REALISM (paradigm-shifting essays about genre and gender and music and pop culture¹, out May 2024 from Tiny Reparations/PRH), and Kelly Link’s The Book of Love (gorgeous, funny, heartbreaking, weird—a perfectly Linkensian² debut novel from my favorite short story writer, out now from Random House).

Lastly: Like everyone and their sister, my whole entire brain/personality was taken over by Baldur’s Gate III last month. If you are a horny weirdo who loves absorbing RPGs and phenomenal writing, you will love this game. (Honestly, I’m not normally a turn-based combat person and I’ve only played D&D a handful of times in my life, but you would not know it based on how quickly I inhaled BG3). I seriously could not get over how good the script was, especially considering the unbelievable scale and scope of the game—not just the size of its map, but the multiplicity of choice-driven storylines and character options. It seems like it would be hard to do consistently solid writing with that much material—as is true with so many large-scale open world games—but they absolutely pulled it off. (FWIW, I did a Dark Urge chaotic good runthrough with a Shadowheart/Halsin³ romance, and I’m already plotting a second, more evil path.) After that, I decided to try my hand at Alan Wake 2. Well, actually, first I tried the original Alan Wake, but it was terrible? And I got stuck in a place in a very annoying way and decided to just drop the whole thing. But the second one is delightful—still a little silly, but great gameplay in the style and spirit of its cousin game Control, which I also really enjoyed. I’m close-ish to the end; if you have any recs for games to try, please send them my way.

FOOD

I managed to achieve most of my snow day cooking projects over the two-week-long winter bonanza we had over here (a week of back-to-back blizzards followed by a week of a deep freeze where the high was in the negative digits). The weather has since gotten warmer (yay/alarming!), but I’ve got preserved lemons in the fridge, a bottle of dirty martinis and rosemary cubes in the freezer, and made some luscious, perfect chicken stock. I already demolished the mayak eggs, made a second/better batch the same marinade, and have since dumped the marinade. Some experiments were more successful than others.

1. The stock lasted exactly one day before I made the actual most delicious ramen of my life for me and Lauren. I’ll probably do a post on my homemade ramen journey at some point, but essentially I made this vegan peanut butter ramen recipe except I started with ground pork, used more peanut butter than the recipe called for, and used my homemade chicken stock. Topped it with blanched broccolini and this fun garlic/sesame topping we found at our local Asian market. Truly god-tier noodles. If you’re vegetarian/vegan, I’m sure the original recipe is delicious—the tahini and peanut butter made it so creamy, and I bet the original recipe’s tofu is delicious.

2. Rosemary cubes were successful but I have yet to use them.

3. The mayak eggs were delicious but I overcooked them, so the center was not as jammy as I wanted. I used the marinade for a second batch, did a better job with the yolks, and ended up adding them to my (incredible) Valentine’s Day dinner. (I think I actually want to make a whole post about this dinner and about adapting recipes and meal plans to circumstance—look for that soon!)

4. Re: the dirty martinis—calling all math-heads! This experiment was a tad frustrating. I’ve made J.M. Hirsch’s freezer-door espresso martinis before and it’s a great recipe. You use baker’s powdered espresso instead of liquid espresso, so it doesn’t freeze in the freezer. But this recipe made my head spin. Because the original video is based on having a 750mL bottle of vodka, all the instructions come from there—take that bottle, pour off six ounces, etc. (It’s also mixing imperial and metric measurements, which doesn’t help.) But for Christmas I bought some lovely liquor bottles⁴ that happened to be 500mL instead. No problem, I thought, I’ll just do some conversions for that size. But when I converted 750mL to ounces, then did all the math according to his instructions, and then converted it back into mL to make sure I was doing it correctly, the resulting number was never right—it was always over 750. I’m sure there’s some dumb reason for this I can’t figure out—no one is paying me money to do math, thank god—but eventually I just decided to roughly equivocate the proportions and hope for the best. So I either added too much olive brine or too much water—the resulting dirty martini is tasty but in the freezer ends up as a slushy consistency. It’s not a huge deal—I just pour myself a glass, putter around for a few minutes, and come back when it’s liquid—but ideally it would be liquid from the start. J.M. Hirsch has a freezer door cocktail book coming out this year, which I think I’ll pick up—maybe it’ll be easier to do the conversions from a book, or maybe the book will have a method for adjusting your container size. Anyway!

5. Preserved lemons turned out gorgeous. After a month of preserving at room temp in my pantry, I put them in a new/better jar and stuck them in the fridge, and have been tossing them into every recipe I can think of. (Including making them into a kind of dressing with olive oil/lemon juice/pepper and tossing it with some RG buckeye beans and topping it with some canned gilthead bream and toasted breadcrumbs.) The preserved key limes (truly a random experiment) don’t look nearly as good—the lemons are bright and held their shape well, the key limes look kind of bloated and lost a lot of their color. Gonna do a taste test today, I think.

Lastly, I recently made Smitten Kitchen French Onion Baked Lentils and Farro and it is just as satisfying and exquisite as everyone has been saying. Sweet and salty and cheesy and hearty and nutty and a bit chewy—everything I want from a baked dish. This recipe makes a huge amount—we ate leftovers for days, and exclaimed over their tastiness every single time. Three notes for anyone about to embark on this recipe: 1.) This is not a surprise, because the instructions are clear, but just be aware that this is a time-consuming recipe. It took me almost an hour to get the onions as caramelized as I wanted (as a first step!), and then there’s another solid 50-ish minutes of baking on the other end, with steps in between. (Whole farro is delicious but it takes forever to cook—you could use pearled, but I think whole is better.) So start this earlier than you think to avoid a late dinner. 2.) The recipe is vegetarian and calls for veggie stock but I used beef stock because, well, French Onion Soup, and it was very good. I think you can’t go wrong with whatever stock you choose—chicken would also work. 3.) I’d use more cheese than the recipe calls for. Easily 50% more? But what can I say? I’m a cheese girl.

ON CONFUSION

This is another tiny essay adapted from several novel-length comments I left in someone’s Facebook post. The original context isn’t super important, but I (and some others) were talking about the way readers identify a text as “confusing” and what that can mean.