Unfluencer Weekly: Borscht, Japanese Ghosts, and More

Because I'm too tired to be cool anymore!

20th Century Studios/Significant Productions

Here’s this week’s roundup of things that I have enjoyed. Some are new. Most are not, because I just can’t keep up with all the new things. 

A Thing I Recently Cooked

Veselka’s Borscht

Raising a child under two is a little like making borscht: it requires alternating spurts of action and patience. You need to leave it alone sometimes. Your clothes will get stained. If you don’t keep at least one eye on it, it could burn your house down. 

One of the crazy things about parenthood is that things that I used to do on the regular to blow off steam would now probably land me in jail for child neglect or on the front page of the New York Post for being a shitty mom. 

I can no longer wash a bad day down with, say, getting super stoned and watching cartoons for six hours as I drift in and out of sleep, my notifications silenced. 

I can no longer unwind in a bubble bath for several hours listening to podcasts about historical disasters. The bathtub has been colonized by an army of well-loved ocean-themed baby toys and Juniper is getting to the age where she’s repeating words, and too many macabre podcasts are going to turn her into the Wednesday Addams of her daycare. 

I can’t randomly disappear for several hours on a solo hike in mountain lion country or spontaneously book a solo trip to Baja California. People would come looking for me. 

But what I can do is cook foods that I enjoy eating but never learned how to cook, especially the kind of dishes that require concentrated active steps followed by long periods of checking the pot occasionally and giving it a stir. The other week, I made pho from scratch, including the broth. It took a long time! The following week, I made butter chicken. This week, I made Ukrainian borscht, from the Veselka recipe. (Veselka is a wonderful Ukranian restaurant in New York City. They ship their pierogis nationwide. I’m sorry/ you’re welcome.)

The recipe isn’t technically difficult. The most difficult part of it, for me, was going to a busy butcher counter and yelling that I was looking for “PORK BUTT,” which is an embarrassing thing to yell. “GIVE ME SOME OF THAT PIG ASS, BUTCHER!” is what I should have said to ease the tension, even though I know that pork butt is from the shoulder and not the actual butt.

But after I obtained my PORK BUTT, this borscht recipe the kind of recipe designed for people who were really good at following directions in grade school— you know, the people who absolutely killed it when their teacher pulled the trick where question one on the exam was “READ ALL DIRECTIONS BEFORE STARTING THE TEST” and then the last direction was something tricky like “ONLY ANSWER QUESTION FIVE.” I was one of those people. I love this stuff.

I made this borscht exactly as-written, which means that I dirtied just about every large pot I owned, and not just dirtied like how dishes involved in the making of risotto get dirty– I’m talking beet-dirty. My kitchen sink was magenta with beet juice. My pans required a thorough, attentive wash before being put in the dishwasher, not one of those half-assed swipes with a sponge you can do for a pot that only contained boiled pasta. I forgot that I’d been working with beets and went to run an errand between steps in the recipe and when I was checking out, I noticed that my hands looked as though I’d brutally murdered Telly Monster.

The Muppet I did not kill. (Children’s Television Workshop)

Years of working with the tiniest and most inconveniently laid out of kitchens has brought me to a place where I’m attentive to cleaning as I go, but even I was no match for this recipe. This recipe is a gigantic mess. 

The end result, however, was worth it. 

I recommend tackling this one if you are able to be in and around your kitchen for like six hours, you don’t mind a monstrous clean up, and you understand that this recipe creates enough borscht to feed a youth hockey team. (If I make it again, I’ll halve it.) 

What I’m Reading

Soft Skull Press

Where The Wild Ladies Are by Aoka Matsuda (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) 

This short story collection was published in Japanese in 2016 and translated into English in 2020 and, I’m delighted to inform you, it’s incredibly, deliciously weird. 

Each of Matsuda’s stories features a female ghost or monster from Japanese folklore popping up in modern life. It’s alternately funny and lightly spooky, a similar vibe to the less messed up Monster of the Week episodes from The X Files. The writing is effervescent and fun. 

In the middle of the night last night, I found Juniper sitting up and babbling as if somebody else were with her, but there was nobody there. My first thought was that the Japanese ghosts had found me and were having discussions with my child. That’s how good this book is. 

I rarely read short story collections because that many starts and stops in the narrative give me whiplash (and I once forced myself to read all the way through a collection of John Cheever stories in one go because it was the only book I brought with on vacation, and by the end I cared so little about every protagonist that I could only think, what dumb shit are these wealthy Sookies or Griffs or Chickadees crying about now?), but Where The Wild Ladies Are works with the format’s inherent starts and stops to give the impression that behind every door and around every corner a Japanese ghost might be hanging around waiting to fuck with you. 

What I’m Finally Getting Rid Of 

Shutterstock

Coffee mugs and free tote bags

My coffee mug and free tote bag collection is a real retrospective of my twenties and thirties. I have amassed so many goddamn coffee mugs and tote bags. I am at capacity. From here on out, it’s one in, one out. 

This is not to shit on coffee mugs and tote bags. Lord knows I use both of them. But the coffee mugs have their own shelf in our dish cabinets. The tote bags, when gathered together, can fill a small laundry basket. My house contains only two adults. We do not need so many coffee mugs that they have their own entire cabinet shelf. The tote bags do not deserve a basket-amount of space. I am sorry, Chicago affiliate of NPR. Sorry, The New Yorker. We never need to carry home that many groceries. 

It’s too much. 

So I’ve gone through our cabinets– a real journey back in time through all of the free gifts and bookish swag of my twenties and thirties– with a mission to halve both collections. Any coffee mug that does not have sentimental, practical, or ironic value goes to Goodwill. Any tote bag that I would not trust to hold a gallon jug of liquid goes in the trash. 

I parted with a Merrill Lynch coffee mug, even though its presence in our cupboard served as a hilarious reminder that I worked there during the financial crisis of 2008 because I was young needed health insurance. What a scream of a time that was! But I had to throw it out; it contained too much bad juju. Looking at it reminded me of how when I worked there, the Occupy protests were happening and at one point one of the high-earning brokers yelled “GET A JOB” at them out of his office window, even though our offices were very high up in our building and there’s no way they could have heard him. A lot of rich people are complete dumbasses. I wonder if that guy thinks that the Fox News hosts live inside his television. 

The mugs I got at old jobs, mugs old boyfriends gave me, chipped or cracked mugs my husband who refuses to throw anything away until it’s not only worn out but dangerous to continue using has had in his possession for years all went into the donation box. When it was all over, we had half a shelf left to use however we saw fit and a thrift store goer in eastern Los Angeles will have to ask themselves if it’s possible for them to drink from an old Merrill Lynch mug ironically. 

A Movie I Saw

My condolences to whatever poor copywriter had to come up with a tag line for this movie. / (20th Century Studios/ Significant Productions)

Sorry to Bother You (20th Century Studios) available to stream on Netflix

I first saw Sorry to Bother You when it came out in 2018. I don’t know how closely I was paying attention; I may have been tipsy and I may have been on a date. Doesn’t matter.

Thought it was funny and subversive at the time, what I noticed of it, at least. I watched it again the other night, and it has held up almost terrifyingly well. It is to getting better with age as Forrest Gump is to getting worse with age. (Forrest Gump sucks.)

LaKeith Stanfield is incredible, as he is in everything. Tessa Thompson is super hot in it. David Cross and Patton Oswalt (as disembodied voices) are great. A pre-that-whole-cannibal-thing Armie Hammer is perfectly cast as a moneyed creep. It’s so fucking weird, it’s so fucking funny, it’s so fucking good. The fact that Boots Riley completed this screenplay in 2012 makes the film feel like it was written from a clairvoyant fugue state.

If you’ve already seen it, watch it again. If you’ve never seen it, give it a watch.

Next week:

What’s on television?

Another weird book

Plants! And more.