Salmon cakes, Schitt’s Creek, and Rent the Runway Kids
Annemarie here, talking about cooking, magazine industry despair and strep throat (charmingly, of course)
Hello! As I talked about in the last newsletter, Annemarie Conte and I are going to switch off writing this here beloved (?) newsletter. Annemarie is an Executive Director at Woman’s Day, and was a staffer on Seventeen and Jane. She’s also the mom to two really cute girls, 7 and 4 (in a weird plot twist, our children have never met and Annemarie and I have only hung out a few times IRL. And yet, here we are, building the next GOOP for shut-ins who don’t look a day over 35). Additionally, Annemarie got me to join the Elks Lodge in our town, meaning her powers of persuasion are so good, she’ll definitely convince you to whip out your Cuisinart to cook for your children this week. - Dorothy
Guys, I’ve been in bed with strep throat all week and so I have nothing to say to you! I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck (but how is that different from me on a normal day, you ask? It’s not). The searing sore throat has subsided and so I’ve just been waiting for the antibiotics to work their magic. I actually got sick on Mother’s Day and then stayed home from work on Monday. After attempting to go back to work on Tuesday (I didn’t know it was strep, I swear, and I thought I was feeling better!), my coworkers shamed me into getting a strep test at our company’s wellness center. And to be honest, the only reason I went is because it’s free. With our high-deductible plan, I pay like $200-$300 every time I go near a doctor’s office, and so I usually just skip it. (If you want to be extra depressed, read Sarah Kiff’s article in Vox about parents who wait outside the hospital in case their kid’s issue becomes a true emergency because they can’t afford to pay the unknown tens of thousands of dollars in ER bills.) Am I a downer? Sorry. But listen, if you have a sore throat, aches, exhaustion, get yourself down to the Minute Clinic for a strep test. It’s going around. And then you too can spend two days napping and watching clips from The Graham Norton Show on Facebook. Which really isn’t so bad at all.
What I Made This Week:
I don’t get home from work until after 6, so my husband does all of the cooking in our house. It is absolutely wearing on him, especially when the children cry over anything that isn’t pasta, so he’s been encouraging me to cook at least once on the weekend to give him a break. Which is fair, but I really love to eat and really hate to cook, so it would just be so much better for me if he did all the cooking and just stopped complaining about it. (And to those of you who read Dorothy’s kind words about me last week, yes, I know about cooking, I just don’t like to do it.) To give my girls some agency in what we eat, I’ve been going through cookbooks and back issues of Cook’s Illustrated with them and creating a menu for the week. And last weekend, I actually cooked. (That should hold me for another few weeks, right?) I made salmon cakes, which involved chopping up salmon in a Cuisinart (gahhhhhh), but wasn’t actually difficult. The 7-year-old ate half of one, declaring it “medium-good”—THIS IS HIGH PRAISE FROM HER—and the 4-year-old ate strawberries for dinner. (Note, the above photo was stolen from the Internet and not a real depiction of what the salmon cakes look like IRL.)
What I Read This Week:
I subscribe to Audible but only listen to memoirs written by women in media that they have narrated themselves. It’s a niche and I’m sticking to it because having Ruth Reichl read me Save Me the Plums is like crawling into my mother’s lap for a bedtime story. Too bad that bedtime story is about the beginning of the end of the magazine industry. (Will I wake up from this nightmare? Not likely.) But she tells it beautifully in her kind voice and makes me yearn for the days when there was a place for gorgeously produced, well-researched magazines in people’s lives, instead of, say, endless rotating clips from the The Graham Norton Show on Facebook.
What I Watched This Week:
I am late to the party and I know it but I don’t care. If you love the absolute absurd humor of Eugene Levy and want to hear Catherine O’Hara’s jacked-up posh-lady accent (and you do, trust me), you must consume Schitt’s Creek on Netflix in one giant gulp, as I did. The showrunner is Eugene’s son, Dan Levy—and I love this little riches-to-rags story he has created. In short: An uber-rich family loses their fortune and is forced to live in a backwater town they once bought as a joke. These characters are so lovingly formed, and every detail is perfect, from the twentysomething daughter, Alexis’s, Instagram-perfect, Coachella-ready wardrobe, to most tender, heart-fluttering same-sex kiss I’ve ever seen on television.
What I Wrote This Week:
This is from a little while ago, but my girls reviewed the new Rent the Runway Kids collection.
Parenting Gif of the Week:
Drinking the tears of my children when they won’t eat the salmon cakes I lovingly made.
In Closing ….
You can follow Annemarie on Instagram here, where she posts a lot of great cookie recipes and Dorothy here, where she posts videos of her son telling jokes for free (hilarious!) content and super flattering photos of herself. You can get friends to subscribe to this amazing newsletter here 👇.
Next Friday, Dorothy is on deck with funny things she has made up in her head. And we’re not making any promises, but she may, finally, get to writing her magnum opus about her toe arthritis.
