It's a ritual, I guess
This one is about pizza, mostly.
First: an easy pizza crust recipe:
- 1 cup flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1.5 cup Greek yoghurt (thick is good here)
- two sheets of parchment paper
- toppings that only need 10 minutes max in an oven (precooked meat, veg, etc)
Before anything, get the oven pre-heating to 500 degrees F/260 degrees C.
- Mix the flour and baking powder and yoghurt. We use a tiny food processor, but stirring also works.
- Put a piece of parchment paper in a baking sheet, oil lightly.
- Slop the dough out onto the paper, its very goopy.
- Press the second piece of parchment paper on top of the dough.
- Flatten out the dough between these two sheets.
- Remove the top sheet of parchment paper.
- Put the baking sheet with your dough into the oven.
- Bake for 10 minutes - you're par-baking it here.
- Take the pan out (it will be so hot), flip the crust over and remove the parchment paper. (you can leave the crust flipped or not, your choice).
- Add toppings.
- Put back in the oven for 6-10 minutes.
Okay, that's out of the way. Because I break the steps down kind of small it seems like a lot, but this is what the recipe card stuck to our fridge looks like:
Image description: A digital snapshot of an unlined index card with instructions hastily written on it in permanent marker. It is mostly the cooking directions listed above, but in a staccato way that only takes up eleven lines. End ID.
So you know, it's vibes actually.
Rituals and habits are funny. I guess the primary difference between the two is that a ritual has some sort of meaning beyond it and the meaning of a habit is just that it is done? Let me go look at the words. Hm, I'm not far off, basically. I feel like I've read a particularly pithy Tumblr post at some time about turning habits into rituals to add more joy or meaning or purpose to the actions one must do every day.
Anyway, I'm writing this on a Friday, and it is our ritual to make pizza on Fridays. Due to some dietary changes that happened as part of the end of 2023, a lot of comfort foods and easy take-out options became no-gos. Which is fine, my partner and I are people who like a challenge, food-wise. But, one thing we've learned from various changes in what we eat over the years is it's a fool's errand to try to replicate something out of things that it isn't. You'll get very close to "normal" bread using alternate flours, but it's still a simulacrum, isn't it? It's a better use of energy to celebrate and explore something for what it is, than what you wish it could be. I suppose that well extends beyond cooking ingredients, but whatever.
So: pizza. Very salty, key ingredients include a dairy product that behaves in a very specific way, all yeasted dough is kind of a pain, even if you have a bread machine. There really anything like pizza. And pizza has a very wide range of variability, like dogs and chairs do! There is a lot we'll accept as a "dog" or a "chair" and there is a lot we will call a "pizza" and be correct. It could be on a bagel, or have noodles on it, or be almost a casserole and it's pizza enough. Despite all that, a little oil and veg on some toasted laffa is great, but it's certainly not pizza. Raisins aren't candy, carob isn't chocolate and chicory isn't coffee.
We shop (or more properly, my partner shops) at the outlet grocery store. Where we live that's a wonderful thing, especially as all the fancy supermarkets dump their food there when they realise that nobody is going to buy that incredibly specific granola they bought too many flats of, etc. And so one day, we ended up with a bottle of pourable vegan cheese. There were already cans of diced tomatoes in the pantry that were salt-free (weirdly hard to find!). And that was enough to think "well what's a pizza crust recipe that is fast and non-stressful to make?" And my partner found the one I shared up top because I was going to put it here but that felt utterly like such a heinous recipe blog thing to do and this isn't about that.
Anyway, we had pizza. And, in a stressful time, getting to have a comfort food returned to us was joyous. Also: fun. At some point in what was still intermittent pizza-making I said I wished we could have pizza every Friday. So we did. Because why not? The power to make pizza we liked was literally at our fingertips. And with time this became a ritual. It's a marker of making it through the work week. It's a celebration of ingredients recently found and flavours we're trying to master. It's a comfort and a joy.
You can turn anything into a ritual. I certainly haven't yet managed to turn writing this newsletter into one, it's barely even a habit. But this is the twelfth! I've done it, I did what I set out to do, write this for a year. I think I'll continue.
Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.
- Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie, Leckie's worlds are always a rich delight, and this collection of her short stories spans familiar worlds like Imperial Radch and Raven Tower, while also giving us glimpses of other fabulous places. I've shared it here before, but one of the stories, The Nalendar, can be read over on Uncanny Magazine, if you want a taste.
- The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister, this was on a lot of reading lists in 2024, I'm sure. I read this one in one bite, tbh, the whole thing rich as loam as it tells of a broken family stuck in patterns they didn't choose and the struggle it is to break from that. Good fairy tale/folk horror energy, hits sore spots for those from similar families.
- The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell has all the Gothic Horror vitamins. It's such a satisfying checklist, from The House, to The Family, to the horror that forever ruins you.
It used to be our ritual to spend the turn of the year on the coast, which is a lovely way to do it. Here are some pictures from then and other times.
Image description: A photograph of a tall grassy slope leading to a beach. The air is filled with gulls near and far, the sky and water both thin grey-blue. End ID.
Image description: A photograph taken at ground level of sand, stretching out to the ocean in the far background. The end of a feather sticks up from the sand in the foreground. End ID.
Image description: A long-exposure photograph of a beach at night, the sand glowing golden, a patch of seagrass midground blurred with time, the deep dark blue sky glowing from the moon. End ID.
This is a real mish-mash of things that have delighted me recently.
- The history of "dillweed" as an insult, yeah it's about what you'd think, but also is a surprise.
- I can't listen to podcasts easily so I'm always grateful for ones like A Bird for a Heart that have accompanying sites where one can read the transcript instead. This one is only a couple episodes in, so a good time to hop on. Fantasy-fairy tale goodness here.
- Speaking of fairy tales, Mel Gillman's The Goblin Throne has a second part now (of three), so although it's not finished yet that means there are more delicious coloured pencil pages to eat up. Bluesky thread of part one here and Bluesky thread of part two here.
- I love doing things you don't expect and this room builder Picrew is a simple delight.
If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.