Instanton
On apocalypse fiction and flexible imaginations
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INSTANTON*
On a recent episode of the Big Picture podcast, hosts Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins, in that particular, chaotic neutral way that threads through most of the Ringer podcast network, rank their top five apocalypse movies. Their lists are not all Armageddon or Independence Day, though that last one is discussed, and instead a good chunk of the discussion falls towards movies that deal with what happens leading up to the apocalypse or what happens after it has hit already. As an example of how broad the definition of “apocalypse” is in this conversation, Fennessey names Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker as his number one. Stalker is a sprawling, slow, gorgeously lush and bleakly industrial meditation on faith that just happens to be packaged into something like an apocalypse story. In it, the apocalypse has happened already, and it is more or less a tool for bringing the more existential themes to the foreground. In a way, this use of the apocalypse in storytelling has an uncomfortable overlap with the current global situation where the COVID-19 crisis has made many inequities and structural failures very clear even to the most privileged among us. Certainly, this is not where the poignancy of discussing cinematic depictions of the end of the world as our real world struggles to keep itself together ends.
As they talk about movies and what works about their particular picks, the hosts also turn something of an analytic eye towards the apocalypse itself. Interspersed among comments on Terminator 2 or Melancholia are questions about what an apocalypse looks like that they are trying to answer for each other. Do you imagine the apocalypse as a single sudden moment or something with duration and an aftermath we are still conscious for? Will it be quiet, or will we still have chances to talk as much as we want after it happens? How long would you be able to make it without glasses, were it to hit tomorrow?
***
While Supercontext was still on a regular production schedule, the question of horror would often come up, regardless of whether its hosts were discussing a piece of horror fiction or not. Even now, in Patreon-exclusive monthly check-in episodes, Charlie Bennett and Christian Sager more often than not report to each other on some horror something they’ve consumed recently. Many of those conversation goes back to the old well: why consume horror at all? An emergent theme in the impressive run Supercontext had over the years has been the complicating of naïve interpretations of horror being either an inoculation for real life terrors and monsters or a wake-up call to those things themselves. In some sense, it can be both. It can also be neither and simply presents itself as a vehicle for a sort of emotional and cognitive expansion. The fact that things that scare us are out there is just an extreme way of reminding us that there is more out there, wherever that is, that we are not in control of. Horror fiction is also a challenge to our imagination: there are things we cannot imagine and things we cannot imagine controlling or avoiding. Works in this genre can then be a tool for confronting not just fear, but also feelings of smallness or finding a check on what may be, on the other side of the spectrum, feelings of unearned largesse.
I had never thought of myself as much of a horror fan but listening to Bennett (scared of horror) and Sager (a horror aficionado) I came to think that a lot of media I did like was at least at its edges. For instance, the years I spent reading Hellboy even after the character died and went to hell and the spinoff BPRD which was without any doubt an apocalypse story and a horror story. Those series are among some of the most formative comic book reading I have done in the past decade, and have for a long time held me as close to truly intense fandom as I’ve probably ever really gotten. Or the fact that I loved Dragged Into Sunlight’s 2015 record N. V. which is almost obscene in its use of audio clips from interviews with violent killers (this was before Netflix’s Mindhunter which seems to have normalized that sort of thing a bit). I hadn’t seen many horror movies, but I’ve always been conversant in them and many have been on my to-watch list for a long time. My husband, growing up with a much older brother who is a filmmaker, a musician and most definitely a lover of all things gory and unsavory, knew more than I did here, but we still bonded over our lack of squeamishness when confronted with both physical and existential horror in audio or visual form. For our third date, he took me to see a documentary about the Manson family in a small art theater and there was plenty of blood shown on that vintage screen. What I’m trying to say is that I am not an expert in horror, but certainly I am no stranger to it either. And the line between apocalypse movies and horror movies does not seem to be all that thick.
Photo: excerpt from the comic book series BPRD: Hell on Earth Vol 9, art by James Harren, colors by Dave Stewart, published by Dark Horse Comics
Though I listen to the Big Picture pretty regularly, I rarely have my own experiences with movies the hosts and their guests discuss to compare to theirs. It’s probably one of my bigger character flaws that I love to listen to people dissect and analyze media without personally engaging with it before or after. Since the pandemic hit, this podcast has gone heavy on top fives and halls of fame, and all such episodes mostly introduced me to new movies instead of giving me framework to rank my own faves. Except that I had heard or seen of every apocalypse movie that got a shout-out in this recent episode, including the Stalker which I immediately felt the need to re-watch with my new, pandemic eyes. Much as with discussions of horror, I started to wonder whether I had previously just been drawn to reminders of how susceptible to ending this world actually is.
The somewhat odd thing is that I have absolutely no answers to any of the questions you may ask about my vision of the apocalypse. I’m not sure whether, a year ago, I would have imagined it as a laser beam coming down on a place where power is consolidated or a long, drawn out fight with an invading force or a deadly disease. Maybe the most clear thing to me has always been that regardless of how the world ends, there would certainly still be something afterwards and we would all have to endure that something. Even if the world ended in just a brief moment, the aftermath of that moment could still go on for something like an eternity and that sort of survival was the thing that was terrifying. Partly this is a projection of my own psychology and a few years of living riddled with anxiety about some ending that was in sight, but I still had to invest in being somebody after it. Partly, I think it is hard for most of us to truly imagine a singularity or a point after which our idea of time wouldn’t makes sense anymore.
***
Recently, I spent an afternoon reading bits and piece of music theory to pad my fragile understanding of what music and statistical physics may have in common. In Christopher F. Hasty’s On the Problem of Succession and Continuity in Twentieth-Century Music from 1986, the arguments about some Stravinsky piece quickly went over my head, but the introductory discussion of our perception of time and the flow of time as it relates to music intrigued me. Hasty writes
“Freed from its connection with past and future events, the present moment places us in the realm of eternity.”
Though he is writing about the discontinuous, and seemingly unpredictable, nature of modern music, the connection between a disconnected moment and eternity helped me put more words to my present-day feelings about the apocalypse. Namely, the way shutdowns and stay-at-home orders happened in the United States was so disconnected from reality and the rest of the world alike that now that we are living in it, it cannot feel anything other than without a beginning and without an end i.e. slightly eternal. This gets to one of those Big Picture questions about what the duration of the apocalypse or the apocalypse moment might be in your imagination. Thinking back to February or March, it is hard not to think that even if there was a specific moment when it all went wrong and the world as we know it effectively ended, it probably doesn’t matter at all because our collective consciousness, and our political leaders, were so severely disconnected from it. Our “before shutdown” and our “after shutdown” have so little connective emotional or any other tissue that it does very much at times feel that not only is the world ending but it has been promising to end every morning and still hasn’t quite finished ending every night. We were wrong about the past and we can’t even start to really imagine the future, so all we have is this eternal moment of things shifting and changing but also staying terrifyingly the same. Just think of how often we say to each other “I don’t ever know which day it is anymore.”
Having just moved out of an apartment I lived in for four years (my first graduate school apartment was too expensive, and my second year included a valiant effort to actually live with other people), I am in an untimely position of having to make plans. My partner and I need plans for saving up for a new place, finding a new place, safely seeing a new place and then moving there. I am also supposed to sit down and write up an extensive lesson plan for the fall semester for my new teaching position one of these days, thus imagining a future for both me and my students. In a moment that feels never-ending in its discomfort and anxiety, gearing up for the future feels like quite a task, not just for my body which could give in to disease, but also my imagination which has been stalled by my having spent the last five months living in my in-law’s basement. It’s not that I don’t want to think ahead, in fact in my good moments I hold some cautious excitement for those times, as much as it seems like what I need is one of those really intense Lord-of-the-Rings-esque eyes to break through the barrier of the current moment.
***
On the 8th a friend pointed out that astrologers were making a fuss over something called Lion’s gate. It is a confluence of Leo season, some other star alignment that eluded me, and the fact that the date had two eights in it. Presumably, each eight can be taken as a hint at the infinity of possibilities for our future due to its shape. As I have written before, I don’t believe in astrology, but I appreciate it as a frame for self-reflection. At the same time, I continue to be a pretty unsophisticated consumer of most astrology related content. On Lion’s gate, I learned, everything conspires to throw some extra luck our way so we should take this as incentive to set intentions. Leo is a bold sign and one that is not shy by any means. Leos can be boisterous, and they get noticed. Combined with the unlimited potential the eights represent, this means that whatever intentions you do set on Lion’s gate, they better be grand and glitzy and possibly even a tad bit unrealistic. None of these words seem to have any meaning when embedded in the quarantine context.
What does it mean to dream big if an unreachable dream is seeing a friend up close, something that we used to do all the time and it was not a big deal at all? As I often do, I felt like the stars were mocking me. Imagining some aspiration of mine worthy of a cosmically determined lucky day felt like a joke. There is nothing you can plan on showing off if it is never safe to leave your home. I thought of my mom, the most Leo Leo in my family, and her fiery red hair jumping out of incredible pictures a photographer friend of hers took recently then looked down on the Adidas three-stripe pants I have been living in for months (unless I am wearing leggings during a run) and gave the stars a small shrug.
***
A few days earlier, I attended a workshop on equitable and inclusive syllabus design, with an eye specifically on the context of remote learning and COVID-19. It was rather consistently stressed that being equitable in the coming months of instruction will mean being flexible. Flexible about deadlines, about alternative assessments, about acceptable technologies, about attendance, about what we consider to be a success. I believe this is right and have certainly found inflexibility in teaching practices to be detrimental this past spring when we all migrated online with little to no time to think it through. Talking to workshop colleagues as well as colleagues from the Access Network, I further realized that not only should I aim to be flexible as a teacher, but that I should also consider teaching students themselves to be flexible in the interest of their own learning. If an assignment doesn’t quite work out in one format, maybe there is an alternative way to deliver it. If a new technology utterly fails, maybe there still a way to translate the goals behind using it into some other modality. A colleague also pointed out that I should stress that negative feedback is not a punishment but rather a call to learn more. They suggested always offering credit for revised assignments to encourage self-evaluation and a growth mindset. In other words, being able to bend around a small failure and imagine a future success. That’s the kind of flexibility we all need more of anyway.
***
In recent years much has been made of concept such as grit and resilience, but I keep going back to flexibility. The rigidity of the structures within which we work and live these days seems to be in part, just like in physics, what contributes to their propensity for crumbling under pressure. As people, we replicate those properties because we are, again, unable to disconnect from the present moment and wholeheartedly imagine a different future. It has been a year of both dealing with broken norms and broken systems, and of reckoning with the past and an ever-growing desire to set everything on fire in the hope that the ashes nurture something better. The pushback and the hostility towards reforms, restructuring and restarting all seem to stem in either a fear of those who were never allowed imagination before suddenly dreaming up fearless futures for themselves or in so much complacency that imagining a future different from now becomes an impossible mental exercise. Is it possible that some minds have been made so un-plastic, so in-flexible by the grind of the status quo that they can’t stretch into the future at all?
Living with two people on the edge of seventy who I know are interpersonally wonderful I am often struck and saddened by how little room they leave for things like empathy, curiosity or just straight up imagination when it comes to discussing what could happen next and what we should all be doing next. As someone who does not have the right to vote despite having lived in the United States for twelve years – and I will probably not have it for another five to seven years – it scares me to think that people in power and people in my life cannot think up anything more new, more fresh, more disruptive than same old choices and same old fears.
***
The pandemic is another thing that no one could have imagined and now I wonder whether we can imagine its aftermath. It feels like at least once a week I tell someone, on the phone or over Zoom, that this situation is just like a movie except that even movies maybe weren’t imaginative enough for this particular kind of slow, almost invisible yet ever-present horror. Would a movie about the day to day existence of any of us during the coronavirus crisis even be interesting? The horror of not being able to escape the now has recently seen something of a renaissance in the guise of a Groundhog Day-like comedy with Palm Springs, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch it because maybe my imagination stops at imagining anything about this moment as funny. The Big Picture episode on apocalypse movies, though, mentioned one movie that I have loved a lot and that has some hope to it.
In Mad Max: Fury Road the character of Furiosa is trying to escape a literal hellscape to a “Green Place” she remembers from her childhood. Of course, the Green Place is nowhere near green anymore and she has to fight to reimagine and rebuild it through a painful and violent revolution. I’m not necessarily advocating for a painful and violent revolution (though an argument can be made that some of us have been forced into already participating in one), but what Furiosa seems to have is a flexible imagination and a way to conceive of the future she wants, the big impossible future, even when there is little to ground that vision in. Fury Road is not a horror film and it does not serve as inoculation against the terror of living in a desert terrorized by War Boys, but it could be something of a wakeup call for remembering that there are bigger things than the moment we are currently stuck in and the fears and boundaries that populate our reptile brains.
***
Fairly often it seems that we are cautioned against worrying about the future too much and encouraged to stay in the moment. With this, I am always reminded of practicing yoga and being uncomfortable in a particular pose. Thinking about how you are going to get out of it in just a few breaths usually does not minimize the discomfort: you just tense up even more because now you’re caught in anticipation. It is untrue, I think, however, to focus on nothing other than the exact present moment. Even in a pose meant to be very static, there is rarely truly such a thing. All yoga is to an extent dynamic because the of the motion of breath. And all static poses are not only made less static by that breath, often directed to a pain point even if just mentally, but also by micro-adjustments that the body finds as it works to move away from discomfort and towards a more natural point of, somewhat constrained, equilibrium.
My vision of the end of the world these days seems to be that constrained, meta-stable, equilibrium. We are making micro-adjustments but not exactly managing to fully fall out of it. There is a sense that time should continue flowing, that there is a natural sequence of events, but getting to some discrete, distinct, easily perceived and agreed upon point of “after” is elusive. And maybe this slow-trotting apocalypse would be easier to take in if it really were quiet or if you could not actually see what is happening all around. For me personally, there is so much that would usually spell enthusiastic anticipation but this cloud of everything being the pandemic, muted version of big life events hangs heavily over how I am processing it. However, unlike in the movies the world did not actually end with COVID-19 nor will it end with the 2020 election. It is a challenge to me, and maybe everyone else, then to practice imagination and flexibility of the kind that can take us past the seemingly eternal now and towards something we didn’t dare imagine before the post-apocalypse presented itself as an unexpected blank slate.
Best,
Karmela
*Instantons are a “pseudo-particle” that reflects a special type of solution of field equations for a widely used set of quantum field theories. In quantum field theory, behavior of fields is governed by the main equations of some given theory and solutions of those equations corresponds to excitations of the fields that are then called particles. (In this way, field theories are sort of opposite to more familiar types of physics where one starts with particles instead of trying to “find them” in solutions of equations). Instantons get their instant-related name from the fact that they happen at a particular point in time (once time is defined a useful variable in the theory). In some very simple quantum field theories instantons can be interpreted to capture tunneling through classically forbidden barriers.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING I wrote a short profile of the experimental physicist Prof. Deborah S. Jin, widely known as Debbie, for the Science Heroes series that runs on Massive Science. Though I am a theorist, Jin was certainly always one of my heroes as a true luminary in ultracold studies and a woman in a heavily male-dominated field. I saw her speak while I was in college and was certainly taken by her positive presence and superb communication skills. I feel fortunate to have had a chance to write about her and could have certainly written so much more – she was truly that extraordinary.
Additionally, my article on an American Physical Society webinar on making physics more inclusive and equitable from back in June got re-published on the Science Talk blog. Science Talk is an organization that does some great science communication work so I was happy to have a chance to share some of my work with them.
As I am writing this, I have also filed two stories with a popular science magazine that I successfully pitched last week. Hopefully I will be able to share links to those in this space soon as well.
LEARNING This past week, I read a lot of papers and conducted a few interviews for my two science writing commissions and had a lot of fun doing so. I also secured a very small, very part-time position as a science writer at my alma matter, so I am hoping the rest of this month will see me work even more on my writing. I am realizing that there is a lot left in the “just learning the ropes” category for me as a science writer (for instance, I finally gave in and paid for a decent-ish transcription app for interviews) and I have been pretty nervous about sending drafts in to my editors (much like with science research, if I stare for something I’ve done for long enough I convince myself that it is stupid), but overall I’ve been pretty energized by the whole thing. I am really grateful to have a few chances to grow as a writer instead of having it be a pie-in-the-sky, potential side-hustle only.
It seems that the wheels of education bureaucracy have also been turning somewhat in this past week, so I have been given a very unofficial, very tentative date for the start of my in-person teaching at BHSEC Manhattan. I’m looking forward to spending the next few weeks sinking time into planning classes and assignments and trying my hardest to view our current situation as a call for creativity rather than a damper on my first semester as a faculty member. Though it made me feel incredibly old, I watched an American Geophysical Union webinar on using TikTok and Twitch for science communication and am now ready to run a little wild with working out the online components of my conceptual physics course.
Finally, another one of my projects from the end of graduate school has now been both submitted and peer reviewed as a paper, so I am up for another round of edits and referee response writing. Overall, the report me and collaborators received was positive and the amount of work that is now on our slate is not trivial, but also won’t, because of that positivity, feel like an uphill battle. Hopefully this will be a good sign for the other paper I’ve had under resubmission for a few weeks now as well.
READING Rebecca Traister in the Cut on the democratic vice-presidential pick and how it was from the get-go framed in a way that cannot possibly truly empower women. Traister’s sharp tone is, as it often happens, quite justified here. Though there is joy to be found in the prospect of a woman in such high office, it seems important to not give Joe Biden and the DNC any more passes than absolutely necessary. Concerning the aftermath of Biden’s original promise to choose a woman as a running mate and the long time it took his team to tear itself away from the inevitable catfight narrative that emerged, Traister writes:
“Biden may have intended this to be about an imagined expansion of possibility for women but wound up creating a pre-narrowed field, from which he, the benevolent corrector of representational deficiency (who had just aggressively run against six women), would eventually pluck some lucky contestant. He also ensured that no man could feel that he had been passed over for a woman and no woman could feel that she’d been selected as the right person for the job, merely as the right woman.”
She is similarly pointed on what the process unfolding now might mean for women candidates seeking high office in the future:
"Instead of showcasing affirmative cases for a robust list of exciting possibilities — making the assured move of picking a woman who’s dunked on you in a debate or touting the resilience of woman who lost a gubernatorial bid and promptly created a massive apparatus to battle voter suppression; instead of having his surrogates cite the enthusiasm and proficiency of a senator determined to battle corruption and protect consumers or speak admiringly about the political commitments, rather than the appealing humility of, a former community organizer who has been fighting for progressive reforms for decades — instead of any of that, Biden has permitted his League of Mediocre White Men to run around dinging up a group of trailblazing female politicians, most of them Black, all of whom have plied paths unimaginably more challenging than any taken by these men. This has been the vice-presidential selection process of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and it should leave us all hot with anger.”
Even though what is happening here is certainly progress, this piece is still very much worth reading as a check on any over-hyped enthusiasm and faux-feminism we may see in the coming months.
Irina Aleksander in the New York Times Magazine on the fall of fast fashion and the larger fashion industry for reasons mostly pre-set way before COVID-19 left us all shopping almost strictly for sweats.
This absolutely unreal profile of Robert Pattinson which is either the most incredible piece of stealth performance art or a new extreme for how we glorify the utter weirdness and dysfunctionality of famous, thin, white men. Of course, I am part of the problem here because I could not peel my eyes away from this story.
These poems by Matt McKinzie and this one by Grace Paley.
This infographic on supporting queer students while teaching online and this one on practicing calling yourself out.
LISTENING Zaddie Smith on Call Your Girlfriend being very honest and compelling. (Hearing her speak made me order her book of pandemic essays.) The New York Times Popcast on the history of the label ‘urban’ as a euphemism for Black music and the legacy and work of Enio Morricone (his lounge music, which I learned about from the Popcast, is incredible).
WATCHING About four hours into Nicolas Winding Refn’s Amazon Prime backed behemoth of a show Too Old to Die Young I finally reached for my phone to check out who any of these people moving across our screen extremely slowly actually were and learned that the whole thing was supposed to be a satire. In retrospect, I can see how it could be read that way, but the fact that I made it through two movie-length episodes without even questioning Refn’s earnest intentions means that, for me, Too Old to Die Young certainly failed as satire. This show has a lot to it that I would usually fall for and I am struggling to fully dismiss it exactly because it’s aesthetics-oh-so-much-aesthetics approach is on some level satisfying. There’s a more glossy third season of Twin Peaks hiding in here as well as a whole lot of music videos. None of the characters really seem to have an inner life and they move accordingly, almost as through molasses, even in very violent scenes. They are all archetypes and straw-people and cyphers and Refn seems to revel in piling on as many of them as he can. But this maximalism mixed with the lack of an actually well-developed story and the absolute slowness of everything is where Too Old to Die Young really fails hard. There’s just too much of everything, but especially overt and covert misogyny and the absolute disregard for the female body as anything other than an aesthetic object. Does a single show really need a dirty cop sleeping with a seventeen-year-old, and a Mexican drug cartel run by a dying man and his leather-pants-ed young magical lover, and an evil female healer, and an ex-FBI agent with one eye, a deadly disease and a penchant for vengeance, and a coked up hedge-fund managing William Baldwin, and mild mysticism and overt fascism in the ranks of a police department where the chief also plays the ukulele? And that’s only what we’ve seen in the first few episodes. As in fashion, things get unappealing if you don’t stop to remove at least a few elements. Maybe this is what is supposed to tip off the viewer that this is a satire and not to be taken as anything but sharp mockery. That intention, however, is in no way obvious in the setup of the story. We will probably finish watching Too Old to Die Young because it is the kind of gorgeous train wreck that is hard to look away from, but if I wanted to see soulless people hating women in a well-produced visual medium, I’m sure I could do better.
Because Too Old to Die Young episodes clock in at about an hour and a half each, on days when we have been working late, we’ve been ending our nights by watching What We Do in the Shadows on Hulu instead. Having not seen the movie of the same title, it took me a few episodes to catch on to its mockumentary format and subdued yet clever and fairly dark humor. By the halfway mark of the first season, though, I realized that this show is near-fantastic and pretty delightful. I would recommend it as an unexpected quarantine pick-me-up, even if you think vampires are silly (and I think the creators of the show would agree with you).
On the movie front, we randomly watched The Usual Suspects which I expected to be more clever and surprising, and ultimately just found kind of busy and incoherent. Maybe it’s the unsavoriness of present day Kevin Spacey or the fact that the twists and some of the format of this film have been replicated in other movies since, but though it was at times amusing to look at, and I’m not beyond liking a story of a heist, it fell pretty flat for me.
EATING Through some very seasonal set of circumstances, our fridge this past week was overflowing with sweetcorn so I reached for many of the cookbooks I brough from Illinois as well as some of my favorite online sources and pulled together a few days of corn-heavy meals. We tried to come up with a corny pun on the world quarantine, but failed and just ate yellow food for days instead.
First, I boiled a few ears together with some baby tomatoes and gave it all what Priya Krishna, writing for Bon Appetit, called “the chaat treatment”. I topped the corn and the potatoes with chopped cherry tomatoes, red chilies, cucumbers, basil and drizzles of lime juice, chili oil, coconut cream and a heavy sprinkle of chaat masala. This did miss a crunchy element like the traditional sev or maybe puffed rice, but still made for a very bright and complex tasty dish that paired well with a creamy urad dal (I roughly followed this recipe for kaali dal from Hebbar’s Kitchen but omitted cilantro which we didn’t have and finished it off with a few tablespoons of coconut cream, I also like this recipe from Holy Cow Vegan which is quite similar).
Next, I reached for Amy Chaplin’s in Whole Food Cooking Everyday which continues to be the most intriguing and challenging cookbook I own and made a pasta salad with her raw sweetcorn, lime and basil dressing in place of mayonnaise. Blending sweet corn with olive oil, lime juice, salt and garlic until creamy and smooth produced a really great sauce which we probably could have used for sandwiches or dipping as well so I will be making this again for sure. To complete the pasta salad, I tossed most of the sauce with cooked penne, white beans, chopped tomatoes, just a bit of fresh sweetcorn and roasted green beans.
The following day I used what was left of the sauce to make a fresh sweetcorn polenta-style porridge. I mixed it with some water and a lot more kernels, simmered the mixture for a while then blended it until mostly smooth and boiled again, adding a good amount of spices at this step, until it got thick. While I mostly improvised this, this recipe from Alexandra’s Kitchen and this one from With Food and Love both make for a good base, with the former not even requiring a blender. I topped our porridge with salty, charred green beans, vegan meatballs from Aldi (roasted until crispy) and a basil, miso and sunflower seed green sauce I also just sort of winged. A good handful of basil for taste, some sunflower seeds for body and creaminess, miso for saltiness and funk, lemon juice and apple cider vinegar for bite, a splash of water for thinning, and some red pepper flakes for kick all came together very nicely and helped cut through the sweet and creamy porridge and the salty meatballs.
For our final few ears, my husband made a red lentil, black bean and sweetcorn vegan chili and served it alongside most addictive crispy, golden, garlicky potatoes from the Mississippi Vegan cookbook. The sauce in which the potatoes were baked was another major winner, even though it calls for an overwhelming 1/3 of a cup of fresh garlic, so I imagine those will make another appearance in our kitchen as well.
Do you have favorite sweetcorn preparations? Even though I spent a full six years in a town that had a whole festival devoted to sweetcorn, I think this particular succession of cooking it may have exhausted all of my ideas.
Also of note: high hydration bread leavened by commercial yeast but given the sourdough treatment that turned out great and a set of tightly packed, jam filled buns equally inspired by my grandma’s summertime classic and my Instagram friend Lin’s incredible stuffed bun baking I’ve been eyeing an awful lot recently.
