Apple, Fennel, Sweetheart

green peppercorns would u believe

Important PSA before we begin: it has come to my attention that Substack is doing something a little fucky and that some— most? many? no idea?— people are not getting the emails if they have downloaded the Substack app. (Maybe even if they haven’t?)

This is driving me insane not only because I hate the Substack app so much— everyone on there seems to be talking only¹ about the art of Writing A Substack, which, like, lads: it’s the same as all writing, do you also talk about the art of Writing A Microsoft Word or Writing A Gmail?— but also it’s driving me insane because I put a ton of work into these letters and the idea that people who have asked (and paid!) to be here are being shut out in order to, I don’t know, drive traffic to the bad app? makes me absolutely livid.

So! If you think she’s been very quiet… check your settings. Check you are set to get my actual emails. When my dearest friends are saying things like “I thought you were taking a break, then I saw on the app there were four posts I hadn’t even seen!”…it feels like the time to do a little PSA.

And also to say: Substack— I beg you to please stop tampering with a thing that works. I do not want a Twitter replacement; I do not want to chat. I want to write my little emails to my little friends and for that to be all. I like it here, I don’t want to leave, but the path of all social media is that it starts out with a good useful function, we all use it and like it, and then some man decides that it can be all things to all men and the whole thing falls apart and everyone who liked it has to trot off and go somewhere else. Please, Substack: I just moved house. I cannot move house on the internet again at this time. Do your job so we can all do ours! OK. OK, I am feeling better now, now will I tell you about this perfect thing I made?

OK.

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So.

There are approximately eight billion bad things about moving house, but one extremely good thing about moving house is the Great Shuffle.

The Great Shuffle is the same process as spring cleaning, but a forced spring cleaning; the Great Shuffle is the process by which old things become new again. The Great Shuffle is the process in which things you had forgotten you had somehow rise to the top of the packing boxes— probably by being the last to be found and packed— and therefore regain (or gain for the first time) prominence in your life. This lipliner I forgot I had! These green peppercorns!

The lipliner has been very helpful to me in my quest to feel like a powerful person, but the green peppercorns have truly been the hero of the hour. I never use green peppercorns! I don’t even know when or why we bought them!

And yet.

And yet!

In the Great Shuffle the green peppercorns have risen to the top not just of the spice drawer but of my estimation. Their green heat, raw and unfinished, has been the thing I sought for the first days of spring. Green peppercorns, if they have never surfaced unexpectedly out of your own spice drawer, are the unripe berry of the black peppercorn— brighter and lighter and sharper, paler, more aromatic. I reached for them not for any of these reasons but because a) they were there and b) I wanted not to mar the beautiful fennel shavings with the speckiness of black pepper. I wanted it all to look like a kind of spring symphony, if you will forgive me a small bit of Spring Equinox excessiveness. I wanted it to be green and white and elegant. And they worked unbelievably well. I love them. New best friend peppercorn.

This was not the first thing we cooked in the new kitchen— that was a sausage and fennel orecchiette, which I will also write up if there is appetite for it despite being fairly unoriginal (as it was extremely delicious)— but it was what we did with all the remaining fennel.