Hi! This is Dinner Diary, a casual log of what I’m eating, reading, and thinking about. It’s like The Grub Street Diet feature in NY Mag, but I live in Somerville and barely leave my apartment.
Thank you so much for reading and being here. If you’re new to this newsletter, you can read all my previous Dinner Diaries, advice columns, and posts by going to my home page. You don’t need to wait until a newsletter lands in your inbox. xo, Maddy
Friday, April 28th
I wake up feeling gloomy and anxious. I’m behind on all my work. I’m also waiting on some big writing news that will probably be a NO, so I’ve been a lot more online than usual, refreshing my email and generally feeling batty. This is my last time engaging with the creative writing industry complex, I swear. No good can come of it.
I eat some freaking toast, wrangle out an advice column (“Queer Advice #59: I will never date a Capricorn again!“), and walk the dogs. Louis refuses to go more than a house away, so I drop him back inside and continue on with Weezy. Lou is a complicated guy with a lot of issues. He’s afraid of skateboards, men, and large groups of people. It’s normal for him to stall out when we’re walking in the city, but this past week he seems especially fearful. He wants to go home immediately. He’s only like this when I walk him, not Liz. He will follow her into the dark.
Weez and I log an honest 20 minutes before it starts raining. It’s so chill just walking one dog, I love it. I listen to an Articles of Interest episode about Cher’s closet in Clueless and how it envisioned touch screen technology before touch screens existed (so in this one small way, you could say Clueless is science fiction). We go home, where I do the dishes and chew off my gel manicure.
I want to order pizza, but I swore off restaurant food after a bad experience Tuesday night. I’m still so salty about it. Living in Boston is so grindingly expensive--I’ve never felt more scammed by my environment, so wasting $60 plus dollars on stale food feels brutal and I can’t move past it!! To cope, I make an improvisational chili based around sweet potatoes, corn, and black beans. I used to Google a different spice mix whenever I made chili, but I’ve recently settled on two parts chili, one part cumin. I also switched to Penzey’s chicken base from Better Than Bouillon and it has such a nice flavor. Plus, I don’t have to use nearly as much. My other favorite Penzey’s product is this fruity little sauce called Raspberry Enlightenment. This sauce is a true vers. You can pour it over ice cream or cake, or use it as a salad dressing. The packaging says to add it to savory tomato-based dishes, which I honestly haven’t tried yet. I’m more into using it in place of jam to accompany chocolate or brie and crackers.
Last weekend, I went back to Wisconsin for my mom’s birthday. I was waiting to board my flight at BOS and the kid in front of me turned to his dad and said, “I can’t wait to get on the plane so I can eat my sweet chowder.“ Nothing prepares you for a child with a Boston accent, but a child with a Boston accent talking about sweet chowder?! I died. Also his dad was being such a gentle parent and explaining the boarding process, and that E and F seats were next to each other. It’s very touching to me when a kid is being annoying and their parents are calm and regulated. I was raised in a house of SCREAMS!!!
Anyways, the two books I started reading on my trip: And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready by Meaghan O’Connell, a memoir about birth and motherhood which I liked, and The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand. Do you know Elin Hilderbrand? She’s written dozens of books, all set on Nantucket. In this one, The Hotel Nantucket, an eccentric billionaire buys an old, shuttered-up hotel and pours millions into renovations because he’s obsessed with winning the approval of an anonymous Instagram account that ranks and reviews hotels. He hires a celebrity chef and a crack team of hospitality workers, including a lovelorn GM, a celebrity chef, and a dyke pastry specialist. The hotel is haunted by a kind yet irascible ghost who wants the world to know the truth about how she died. There’s a good concierge and a slut concierge. The bellhops are gay married. There are queer characters and people of color and the diversity does not feel haphazard or thoughtless. There are also really good descriptions of food and a real sense that service work is skilled, important labor. The head of housekeeping, for instance, is secretly a millionaire who only works for something to do. Maybe the fantasy is that everyone at the Hotel Nantucket is making a living wage and that elite tourism can be a vehicle for equality, instead of like, choking out local economies and housing markets in return for creating a lot of underpaid, subpar jobs.
I always admire the boom, boom, boom of popular fiction. It’s like, here are the characters. Here are the stakes and the conflicts. Let’s goooooo. This was my first Elin Hildebrand novel and even though it was goofy af (here is an actual description of a character, “She is a pineapple: standing tall, wearing a crown, and sweet on the inside!“), I will absolutely read another. But take that with a grain of salt because I fucking love to read.
Saturday, April 29th
For breakfast, I enjoy a bowl of Twix Trix and 2% milk. Then I spend all morning trying to write before deciding what I really need is to go outside and touch grass. Liz and I take the dogs on a long walk and end up in Medford, which is like Somerville if Somerville were hushed in quiet.