thenectarinediaries

[thenectarinediaries]

18.09 The Waffle Party

It’s the end of the third week of class and everyone in the staff room is exhausted and wandering around like a bunch of drunk bumblebees. There have been a lot of changes in administration and organisationing has generally been pretty rough going these past couple so it’s been quite tiring, especially for poor little me, who is only on her first year of teaching full-time - I really am discovering everything I don’t know. Luckily we all know how to take care of each other. 

I have had to meet with quite a few colleagues today to talk about the class I am responsible for, and everyone has been so kind. It’s a blessing to be here. 

Speaking of blessings: another breakfast with Gaëlle this morning (every one is precious). It was peanut butter porridge, topped with toasted almonds, fresh banana and blueberries, and a sprinkle of muscovado sugar. 

Porridge is always a little chaotic. I make it with half water and half milk and then add something creamy to get the right consistency - it was coconut milk today, but you have to be careful no to overdo it because the coconut quickly gets overwhelming. The recipe is ever-changing, and today especially as I had to make it for two. My hands know how to make porridge for one on their own and can do it in the dark, but as soon as you ask them to double the quantities, it becomes something else entirely. I am not complaining though, it’s a happy new adjustment.  

Lunch was the opposite of chaotic. We had decided to have a staff-room waffle party, which involved four (4) waffle machines and industrial quantities of batter, which our incredible teamwork turned into several stacks of waffles. The entire building probably still smells of it now, four hours later. It was a proper language department wingding: Thierry cracked open a bottle of Cerdon to celebrate Gaëlle and I being together (lol) and everyone ate too much. It was a terrible idea, really, to stuff four waffle machines and eight people into a fifteen square meter room in thirty-degree heat, but now that it’s over we can remember it fondly (jk; it was hot but lovely.)

I made Cyril Lignac’s waffle batter which produced squashy but tasty sweet waffles. Sophie made this batter which was much less sweet (despite more sugar?) but gave crisper, lighter waffles. I liked the crunch. 

Tonight Gaëlle and I have solemnly sworn to eat light. Something cold and raw and containing vegetables. She is coming to pick me up in an hour, after my last class. How many times can I be blessed in one day? 

[thenectarinediaries]

17.09 The living’s easy

I am not dead nor disappeared, just happily chugging along with life. Nothing radically new is happening. We are out and about; a trip to the cinema; a beer on the balcony; yesterday we were back in Besançon for Gaëlle’s job at the INSPE (the teacher school - she teaches the teachers how to teach) so we ate at Laura’s and went to a charity shop to have a look at plates and mixing bowls and ugly ceramic animals. Somehow I am not late for anything concerning work, my house is passably clean, I am seeing most of the people I want to see. The heat is oppressive and we had a long, dull meeting this evening, but the future immediately after said meeting is bright so it’s ok.

I haven’t been photographing everything we eat (regrettably), but Tuesday night we made Gaëlle’s spaghetti faux-lognese together in her highly photographable kitchen.  

Gaëlle’s recipe is here: Tuesday night’s had some extra cherry tomatoes, and a whole onion instead of half. Re-reading her post, I am glad that we made it again together in such different circumstances. I love cooking with her.

Dinner is now always followed by sleepy teas which are finally actually making me sleepy again.

Tonight we had galettes (gallets; galets; galeets, if you will) with a little tomato salad and some crispy garlic kale. The bland cider I carried here from Besançon has been improved with some rose cordial.

Everything is so easy and I am so thankful for this good living.

[thenectarinediaries]

11.09 People in my house

It’s been one hell of a week. Without even talking about the incredible, restoring love story, it’s been one hell of a week. I am - quite simply - having the time of my life. 

This morning I made scrambled eggs for breakfast for Gaëlle and Laura. We ate the eggs with burnt toast and fig jam, a winning combination. 

The past week has seen quite a few people in my house and I love it. Feeling the ones I love pass through my living space keeps them close to my heart. To wash their lips off my mugs. To offer them towels and pillowcases and blankets. To sweep up when they have gone and make the place ready for them to come back. I especially enjoyed just kicking it last night. We went to bed early after a chill evening of nothing in particular and it was some real easy being. 

This morning Gaëlle and I woke up before the alarm went off and we opened the window to let the sunrise in. 

“To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.”

She grounds me in the beauty of the moment and shows me how to properly revel in these miracles of the world. This is the most precious gift.  

She left for work before me so I prepared our staff room lunch. It went undocumented, but it was a sandwich (goat’s cheese, dried tomatoes, kale, roast fennel) and anyone who has been following this blog for a while knows what the sandwich as a form means to me. Tonight I am eating alone for the first time in a few days, but more shared meals are up ahead (including but not limited to a waffle party next week and a significant restaurant outing tomorrow). 

avocado - two tomatoes - big handful of parsley - a shallot - olive oil - pepper 

It’s a classic chop-and-mix salad, there isn’t much else to it. It was good and easy and perfectly aligned with my current vibe of simply delicious living. 

[The Marie Curie experiment]

Not exactly food, but foodstuff-related: this week some of my students who are majoring in lab tech took me to visit the chemistry lab, and it was an amazing experience that I will treasure forever. They were pleased to share their workspace and show me the different glassware and tools and what they were used for. I was even lucky enough that they showed me an experiment: oil will remain suspended between distilled water and ethanol due to the difference in density of the different liquids. 

I think it’s beautiful; it’s the micro-microcosm, the spheres and all their celestial music in a test tube. 

[thenectarinediaries]

10.09 Shared meals

Short update while I wait.

We had pancakes this morning before she went to work.

I went in later with staff room lunch for two (chickpea curry - hastily put together last night).

We had dinner with Laura and when we walked back up the hill from the kebab place, if she hadn’t been holding my arm so tightly, I would have run up the hill (I ran up it on Monday night).

Like some kind of joy-coiled spring, I am happy to be alive.

!

[thenectarinediaries]

07.09 Sweet

New Monday night routine involves lounging on the sofa with my girlfriend and drinking Monbazillac for three four hours and then rushing to eat and prepare a day’s worth of classes in half as much time. As if getting to bed at a reasonable time today is somehow going to make tomorrow’s teaching any more bearable. 

I jest! The living is absolutely delicious. I even love my classes at the moment because they keep me busy; honestly, any minute I spend out of class and NOT lounging on the sofa with her feels like a waste of time. 

This sweet evening led me to make an appropriately sweet and easy dinner. 

tin of chickpeas - two carrots - 1tbsp vegetable oil - 1 tsp paprika - 1/2 tsp cumin - an orange - a good tbsp of maple syrup - blé (pearl barley) 

Rinse the chickpeas and peel and chop up your carrots, mix them with the oil and spices, season and put in the oven at 200°. Open the school’s digital workspace, write out everything you did in class today. Put the pearl barley on to cook. Open your emails, delete all the irrelevant ones, write one (1) very professional message to inform your colleagues that so-and-so is in the hospital. Then it should all be ready. Take the chickpeas and carrots out of the oven just before they burn and pour over the maple syrup and the juice of half of the orange. Chop up the other half (supreme it if you are feeling extra) and mix it in. Add some orange zest. Go ahead, you deserve it. Drain your pearl barley and top with the vegetables and then get back to work because you want to be comfortably free for tomorrow’s date. 

[thenectarinediaries]

06.09 Eating beans with a fork

Yesterday morning we woke up with the sunrise on the balcony and had a second breakfast of unburnt granola. 

Now I am eating beans with a fork in my living room which has been completely reconfigured after my (second) housewarming party swept through last night. 

It couldn’t have stayed the same anyway; the space is full of a soft new love and apparently Gaëlle will be requiring more cushions and blankets than I currently own. 

[thenectarinediaries]

04.09

Sunrise was glorious. Hit me right in the face with a big yellow beam too early this morning, so I have been awake and unusually productive. 

This mug sparked incredible amounts of joy today. I am feeling a little flustered, a little pink in the cheeks. A little excited to have a party tomorrow. A little bit dumb as shit.

[thenectarinediaries]

03.09 Moon rosé

Lots of staff room lunches this week, and I am thrilled to be sitting in the same seat as last year (back when it was a one-year contract and I was supposed to be leaving) and eating out of tupperware and knowing that I can stay. I am so happy, I am terrified. I had forgotten what it was like to feel this good. 

The freedom and the simplicity of it all is dizzying: every morning, I wake up and make my own breakfast and I am happy to go to work. It’s a ten-minute walk. My colleagues make me laugh. My friends love me. My students may not love me, but I love them, for their enthusiasm, for their impatience, for their impertinence. I remember sitting in the classroom myself and looking out the window and thinking that I would give anything to be running in the opposite direction. It was a special kind of boredom in that I didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wanted to go, and it never seemed to end until one day it was over very suddenly.

I am celebrating this happiness by having a glass of rosé and some fresh raspberries with the moon. It’s cold out but I am warm (everywhere except my fingers.) I don’t want to go anywhere else.

https://youtu.be/pJCZNTOx_ds

[i love this song because it’s everything; it’s the panic i feel when i am happy, and the violent desire to flee my feelings; the very literal urge to run up and over hills; it’s considering applying for jobs in Lille of all places, and booking a hairdresser appointment, and telling Laura to take me out dancing with the firm intention of wasting, fucking and forgetting my heart before it gets broken; it’s the hounds of love all over again, except it’s over, it’s over; it’s falling into the love like taking a bullet in the back. apparently my poker face is very good but inside it’s beating like all these drums.]

Bonus image:

[thenectarinediaries]

02.09 Run for cover

Yesterday was a 100% sandwich day (burgers being members of the sandwich family). I had a beer with the ladies, and we were all dressed in yellow, and I want to remember this. 

For the rest, I talk too much and I am cruising for a bruising. Time to head for the emotional hills for a bit.

[thenectarinediaries]

31.08 Snazzy little quiche

Back to school, kind of - it was the staff-only day, pretty rock’n’roll. Nobody knows much about what was going on but we were merry and there was a little glass of crémant with lunch. Laura, Gaëlle and I agreed, this meant it was a good day: a stars-aligning, planets-singing kind of day. 

I had prepared some surprise snacks last night just in case lunch at the canteen wasn’t veggie - Gaëlle is currently doing a vegetarian challenge and I may have forgotten to mention here that I am also a vegetarian - and I was pretty pleased with how they turned out, despite high levels of making-it-up-as-I-go-along and clowning around the kitchen to schmaltzy music. 

shortcrust pastry - egg - milk - goat’s cheese - herbs (whatever you have) - a handful of cherry tomatoes - pepper 

The initial plan was to make mini quiches because a big quiche is a bastard to carry to school, but I didn’t have the right tin. I had a go at making pastry cases that would hold their shape without a muffin tin, but none were conclusive - it doesn’t matter because it was so much fun though, and I merrily ate the rejects. So I started with about a half quantity of Gaëlle’s savoury shortcrust pastry, minus the failed attempts; this left the perfect amount for a Pyrex dish quiche. 

Heat the oven to 200° (fan), grease the dish and roll out your pastry to make a shallow rectangular pie case. Blind bake it for ten-fifteen minutes, until it browns a bit. I didn’t use my baking beans because I am a lazy shit, but I think this cut down the blind baking time, so if you are weighing it down, you might need to leave it in longer. I am not very good at pies so I don’t understand the exact science that is making a pastry case. 

The filling was also completely made up: beat an egg in a glass, and then add milk until the glass is half full (should be about 120g total). Mix in the herbs and pepper, and cut all of your little tomatoes in half. When you take your blind-baked crust out of the oven, pour the egg mix into the pastry case, then settle the tomatoes in it and crumble the goat’s cheese over the top - this is why I didn’t salt the egg mix, but you do you. Put it back in the oven until it browns - the idea being that because it’s shallow, it’s quick. I think it was about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. 

It cuts up very nicely into little rectangles. I will definitely make it again. 

[Look at this solid motherfucker. Look at how strong and transportable she is.] 

Anyway lunch at the canteen did turn out to be veggie - gas-inducing, but veggie - so the quiche squares were thankfully left for exhausted little me to pig out on as soon as I got home. I reheated them and looked out the window and felt mushy-happy. 

A knot was untied; I removed the old photos of Pascale from inside my locker, and it was fine. It was good, even. 

I am thinking about the music of the spheres: 

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 

I love it because as soon as Lorenzo has finished his little bit about being unable to hear the music, the band walks in and the music starts. 

[thenectarinediaries]

30.08 Borderlands

Big freak out last night, didn’t sleep much. Spent a long time in bed this morning drinking coffee before accepting that nobody in the history of the world has ever felt better after spending an entire day chugging black coffee on an empty stomach. I got up and made porridge.

Emily’s “I Am Baby” porridge features banana, peanut butter, chocolate shavings and some chopped walnuts for a crunch. I ate it and went back to bed.

Je suis lessivée. 

How do you eat your oats?

Tired of myself, I am leaning on other people and spending time with poetry and pastry as acts of love. After all, there should be some beauty somewhere at the start of the new school year.

[Gloria Anzaldúa, from Borderlands.]

[thenectarinediaries]

29.08 Home is where the pink is

When we got back to Morteau on Thursday evening and I stepped into the flat, it struck me that it didn’t smell like the previous occupant (Gégé, en l’occurrence) any more. It was my own smell, and I wasn’t a guest (an impostor, plutôt) any more. 

It’s been grey and rainy still out here, but I like it - it goes with making a house a home. I realised that when left entirely to my own devices, the bits of my mother in me come out, in the way I conceive of home. It has smelled pleasantly of roasting vegetables today - granted, not the pork and lamb and duck of my teenage years at home with my mum, but the vibe is the same. The room smells delicious, the oven is making its noises (this one bumps occasionally), and I am grateful that my parents gave me this love of easy slow cooking that invades the house. 

Another thing decidedly pervasive in my life right now is the colour pink, which also comes from my ma. Everything is happily bathed in it. I have a newfound love for blush, I am snuggled in the dusky corduroy overshirt I stole from Pascale, there is the rose cordial and the pink cocktails I have planned for my own housewarming party next weekend... even these flowers I took pictures of today before the thought of pink even occurred to me:

Lise also brought back a pink fruit memory of lychees which we ate by the kilo:

[lol it’s true]

But this is supposed to be a food blog.

I always forget I have a load of rocket in my fridge and by the time I want to make a salad it’s too late and the leaves are a bit limp and unappetizing. SO I make walnut and rocket pesto. This one. 

Tonight I ate the pesto with a warm salad of roasted fennel and cannelini beans, which is ultimate lazy. You roast the fennel in slices at 160° fan for thirty minutes, then add a drained tin of beans to the pan and mix. Give it another ten minutes in the oven and serve with the pesto and some tasty bread. 

Yesterday’s optimism about school is fast fading and my teeth feel wobbly with anxiety. The dentist has confirmed that they are deeply rooted, in good health and that they aren’t going anywhere, I just can’t help freaking out. Poor Pascale used to spend a lot of time reassuring me that my teeth weren’t moving, but now it’s just me and them.

[thenectarinediaries]

28.09 Mid-week weekend recovery

After the Basel trip and eating almost nothing but wine and coffee for two days, my body is currently like “hhhnngggggg please give me vegetable” so a completely insentient Emily rolled down the hill to the supermarket. But she really shouldn’t be allowed to go food shopping in that state because of her catastrophic birth chart - she respects neither budget nor logic. 

Anyway, the food gathering we planned while feeling “fresh” yesterday thankfully fell apart so I made food-for-guests for myself and ate it on the floor in sweatpants. Living deliciously. 

red lentils - butter - red onion - massive clove of garlic (you can double that) - stock - harissa - ground coriander (1), cumin (1), turmeric (1/2) - coconut milk - orange zest - toasted cashews - decorative leafage (I think it’s parsley)

This is what we now refer to as Laura’s dhal and Gaëlle has already made her own version over here. Mine is a little more tumultuous. I start by frying the onions and garlic in butter until they brown a bit. When that’s going on, add two handfuls of lentils and the spices, stir it around for two minutes. Then cover with water and let it bubble while you prepare everything else, add water as it needs it until the lentils are just cooked. Then stir through a good slosh of coconut milk, however much harissa and like half a teaspoon of orange zest and let it finish cooking. Top with The Nuts and Leaf. This is an excellent approximative recipe for people who need a break. 

Serve it with flatbread (because you don’t have the yeast or the patience to make proper naan okayyyy), minty yoghurt and some of the nectarine chutney you cleverly prepared before going away because you knew you would crave it. 

Fruit salad is a whole kind of love and nothing is more loving than supreme-ing citrus. This evening the orange was topped with more fruit, yoghurt and some lime zest (can’t go wrong with some zest!! zest! it! up!)  

I am feeling optimistic about going back to school next week, despite having approximately nothing ready. The sky is glorious, the living is good and I haven’t let myself down yet! 

[Combined effort: Gaëlle is singing at one end of Morteau and so am I at the other.] 

Tomorrow I am going on a melon run and I am going to exfoliate the remains of my face. Honestly, really looking forward to it. 

[thenectarinediaries]

27.09 48 hours in drinks

The gang went off on a mid-week weekend to warm Gégé’s new house and to see the Hopper exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel and there were plenty of memorable drinks. In order: 

1. Gaëlle’s watermelon smoothie, pointe de citron  📍the Blessèd Balcony Fresh and delicate. Beautiful drink, even more admirable considering it was her third variation on the watermelon smoothie that day. We stan a creative taurus.

2. Hermitage de l’Arquebuse [Arquebuse de l’Hermitage]  📍Audincourt Try saying that after three shots. A liqueur that is the exact opposite of calvados, in that it restored both my organs and my soul.

3. The Overpriced Ovomaltine 📍Riehen, Basel City The Ovomaltine makes me sleepy, constipated and poor. 10/10 can’t wait to do it again.

4. Pimp that rosé 📍the AirBnB, Gellert The watermelon keg got filled with rosé but there are still 2L left (curse of the cubis). Luckily we are resourceful gals and make two excellent mixes that help that rosé get gone. Firstly with Rième Grapefruit Lemonade and mint, secondly with ginger ale. There is still 1L of it in my fridge right now, so when I have finished typing this post I am going to procrastinate my work by looking up intricate cocktails I can sneak it into.

5. More Wines 📍the AirBnB, Gellert Gégé goes down to the Co-Op and makes the finest food-related decision of all of us in Switzerland, bringing back a sweet bounty of butter, bananas, and two bottles of wine.

6. Market coffee 📍Stadtmarkt, Basel City Made by a man with a bun in a truck. It feels like drinking a stomach ulcer. It’s worse cold.

7. La tasse-caille 📍Audincourt The return to Audincourt is marked by a hot pasta meal (praise) and a cup of coffee from Gégé’s machine, bathed in holy light. It is delicious. I could shed a tear.

[“It’s the only place but home I feel relaxed enough to crap, I know it sounds crude but there’s something in that.”]

[thenectarinediaries]

24.08 Le Plastèque

Nothing but good news today, fellas.

A breakfast outside, wrapped in a massive cardigan (me, not the breakfast.) 

A question about lyricism, finally turned into an answer. 

And a glorious project: 

3 seconds to come up with the stupid idea - 30 minutes to make it - 3 hours and a beer to recover

It’s hard to write about something that makes you so happy. I don’t know that I can do it justice. Gonna have to roll out the big “L” word  and a big ol’ list again, I think - it’s overflowing, à la Whitman. 

I love this gorgeous generous fruit. I loved emptying it in - and all over - Gaëlle’s perfect cottagecore kitchen with her, and then clumsily fitting a plastic bag inside. I love knowing that tomorrow it will be filled with some godawful concoction made of cheap rosé with sentimental value. I loved the mug of watermelon juice it took most of the afternoon to drink on the balcony, and the tupperware of fruit that I forgot about and then remembered with delight and ate standing up in the kitchen, swaying to some dreamy tune. I even love googling “does watermelon stain” between the Whatsapp messages. 

My heart doesn’t feel like a bruised nectarine anymore, it feels like a watermelon lovingly turned into a keg. 

[thenectarinediaries]

23.08 ...more?

[The nectarines are gone, but I am still sitting here with my journal open, writing something out as if I were going to publish it, looking back over the day through the prism of food. And I am hesitating about publishing this one because it turned out to be quite heavy - I will see how I feel about it in the morning. On the one hand, it’s an important admission and maybe will start discussions with other people - it already has. On the other, it’s painfully private. On the third hand, you have to feel exposed to be known. On the fourth hand, I still don’t want anyone to know, ever. Genuine quandary. In any case, a bitch will be seeking help.]

The day has been cold, so my cotton socks and I baked a sweet potato for dinner: 

sweet potato - bit of vegetable oil (I like to use the oil from my jar of dried tomatoes) - the end of the pot of ricotta - red onion - lemon zest - salt, pepper, chives 

Stab the poor sweet potato repeatedly with a fork, all over. Rub it with vegetable oil and put it in the oven at 180° fan for an hour or so, until it’s all squishy and soft inside, then cut it open and mash it up a bit and add the toppings. It is beautiful and delicious. I enjoyed this dinner very much. 

What got me going was the fact that I hesitated about eating a yoghurt afterwards. I felt like eating something else, something sweet, but I also found myself thinking “ok, do you really deserve that though?” 

What a shitty question! 

And I realised that this is a very common thought for me, and that it’s a problem. In fact, it’s a disorder.  That despite loving food (really, loving in a big way) I have a very unhealthy relationship with it. 

I didn’t drink with Pascale. Progressively, I gave up pretty much all alcohol while we were together, even when she was having alcohol I would refuse to join in. Today I was wondering why, because I love it! I love mixing a drink as much as I love cooking. I love tasting different things and I really love beer. At first it was a question of drinking beer out of the bottle, which Pascale hated me doing but which is part of what I enjoy about having a beer - so rather than drink it out of a glass, I preferred to go without. Then it spread to other alcohols, which I enjoyed not-having more than I enjoyed having most of the time, and it spread to food as an unhealthy coping mechanism for an unhealthy part of the relationship. 

It hasn’t been too hard to drink alcohol again because I have always done it with people other than Pascale, but it is much harder to let go of all the other deprivational habits when I am on my own. They have been developed over the course of a few years and are deeply rooted. I can’t stop eating less than I need, then inevitably compensating by eating too much. I would rather be light-headed than have a snack. I need to feel like I “deserve” everything I eat. I count the calories, do the workouts, enjoy hunger as if it were some kind of success to function despite running on empty. I would guess that a lot of people do this.

After trying on some clothes today and seeing how they fell on me, I was a bit bummed because I don’t like my body much. It’s not so much a question of being fat or skinny - it’s the shapes it is made of, the look of my skin. I feel like I can deal with this dissatisfaction most days because I am dedicated to telling myself “it doesn’t matter if you aren’t pretty, you are much more than that, your body is strong and that’s what matters” - except that I don’t follow through on that and still spend awful amounts of time and energy trying to make myself a more “desirable” shape, or, failing that (it’s clearly failing), to exert some kind of small control. If I can’t be a “desirable” shape, then I will own my undesirability. I feel like navigating between “self respect” and “self restraint” is like walking on a tightrope for me, and I am not always very good at it. 

I was telling Gaëlle the other day that I don’t like wearing makeup because it’s too hard to take it off and feel ugly again. I just don’t put it on, as a favour to myself and I try to also make it a question of principle for my students - that they should see women without makeup and looking professional nonetheless. But I still hate seeing my face without it, especially now that Adina is taking photos of us all the time. 

The anxiety always stems from the same fight between wanting to respect my authentic, talkative, yoghurt-eating, buttless, braless, bare-faced self and wanting to bottle it up, cover it up, make myself disappear and be discreet and palatable because I am worried - sometimes - that I am unlovable. Obviously I am not unlovable. However, I am suddenly alone and sometimes the two adjectives get mixed up, especially when I am thinking so much about love and writing something serious (academic writing in particular is a hard place for me to be.)

One of my healthier coping mechanisms is to channel French influencer Jeanne Damas when I feel bad about myself. I play act the Parisian It Girl. I am not ugly; I am low-maintenance Parisian chic. I lift my chin up and act a little arrogant. I am not ugly, I am a different kind of striking beauty and if you can’t see it, you should get your eyes tested and social security will pay for it. Most of the time this works quite well, because even if I am not Jeanne Damas, the rest is, in fact, true. The food blog has also helped in keeping my interest in food on the healthy side of things. Pragmatically, I put more on the plate when I am going to photograph it, and once it’s on the plate, I generally finish it. The excitement of using the nectarines made me eat desserts, which I usually avoid. And I was more interested in learning and trying things out than depriving myself. It encouraged abundance.

It’s Virgo season, it’s time for clarity. These are some of the contradictions that sit within me. I know this post isn’t the half of it and that there are so many factors outside of myself that play into it - but it’s a start, it’s a relief to start.

Robyn says to herself, “come on, let’s have it out”, well, geez, I really am having it out with myself at the moment huh.

[I said to Apolline, it’s a good job this video didn’t exist when I was a teenager otherwise I would have died on the spot - my heart would have straight-up stopped out of sheer thirst.]

[thenectarinediaries]

22.08 The last nectarine

Saved the best for last.

[Emily’s August sandwich.] 

one nectarine minus one wedge - tbsp of honey - tsp of mustard - rocket - goat’s cheese - bread 

Put the honey and the mustard in a frying pan over a low heat until the honey is runny. Add your nectarine, sliced, and turn the heat up so it goes a bit golden but stays firm. Flip them over and do both sides. 

You know what to do after that, it’s a sandwich. 

Drop your last slice of nectarine into your fresh-as-fuck pink g&t, and go eat outside. It’s a celebration. 

I have just finished eating (but not drinking) and am still sitting outside, watching the cows on a hill over there make their way home. I am trying to memorize where Gaëlle’s house is, because on Monday they are going to take away the crane that had been serving as a marker and I do like to look out and think “that’s where Gaëlle’s house is.” The sky is very big and very blue. 

I finally committed the outline for my Ashbery lectures to paper today. It might not stick, but it doesn’t matter. It reminded me of the first lines of poetry that Pascale ever gave to me, copied out on the bottom of my final paper five years ago: 

"The earth is all before me: with a heart Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, I look about, and should the guide I chuse Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way.” 

[Wordsworth, from Book I of The Prelude, 1805 edition]