Friendship & pickle 🥒 lemonade

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So. How are you? I’m doing okayyyyy. This week was my company’s biannual Volunteer Day, so we all went to volunteer at the L.A. Regional Food Bank, which was so much bigger and cooler than I realized. They serve almost a million people every month! What an enormous impact! We were at their City of Industry location, helping to pack up boxes of canned and dry goods as they went down an assembly line. I was in charge of unpacking boxes of oatmeal so they could be distributed. Each box was about 15 pounds, and man, after unloading about a pallet and a half of those, I definitely got a workout! I should have worn workout clothes to be honest. No idea why I was trying to be cute in my overalls. There’s something deeply upsetting to me about being that sweaty around my coworkers, but oh well.

My husband Ross went out of town this week on a business trip so I got to eat my green olive pasta and watch Summer House whenever I wanted and that’s about it to be honest, I like having him around. Usually when he’s away, Zadie (my cat) will get super bonded to me and sleep in bed with me at least once, but this time she was over it. I guess I can’t complain much about her lack of cuddliness, since she’s currently in my lap.

One thing I did while Ross was away that I shouldn’t have, is watch the three-part Netflix documentary Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer. I don’t know why I thought that would be good viewing for a night when I’d be sleeping alone. Gosh, what a monster. I remember well in the early 2010s when the news broke that there was a serial killer on Long Island, and how it was framed to the public as “don’t worry, he’s only killing sex workers.” Terrible. All of those women had friends and family who loved them very much, and some of them even had kids. Yet there was this victim-blaming mentality that oh, they lived a “high-risk lifestyle.” When I hear that, I think of someone who gambles a lot, or maybe someone who rides a motorcycle, maybe that Free Solo guy. People who make these conscious choices knowing all the risks. If you think about it, there really shouldn’t be anything dangerous about two people having a consensual sexual encounter. But, unfortunately, there are predators like this guy out there, so you never really know. Thank goodness he was arrested in 2023 so he can’t do this to any more women.

WOW, that got dark! It was meant to be a throwaway joke about how I obviously shouldn’t watch serial killer documentaries when I’m home alone, because then when I try to go to sleep, I lie awake like Bart Simpson in his scary clown bed.

Let’s get into some things:

- “Born in the U.S.A.” The other day, I was thinking about how fucking dumb it was that Trump used “Born in the U.S.A.” at his rallies (unauthorized, of course), because it was literally a storyline in an Achewood comic from 2004. Philippe is running for president, and he says that “Born in the U.S.A” is “such a good song” and “what America is all about!” Roast Beef tells him, “This song is about how America chews the working man up and spits him in the dirt to die,” so Philippe suggests they rewrite the lyrics to: “Born in the U.S.A./I ate a hamburger and said Hooray!”

I feel like this is exactly what Trump thinks the lyrics to that song are, too. The thing is, in that Achewood comic, Philippe is supposed to be five years old. It makes a lot more sense for a five year-old to make that mistake than a 78 year-old. But then, I don’t think he and his cultists are lyric people. I mean, they clearly hate reading, the way they love to go after books and libraries and storytime.

- Friendship (in theaters). There was a mild heat wave in L.A. last weekend (it’s not a real heat wave to me unless we’re in the 100s, and we were in the high 80s), so on Saturday, Ross and I decided to go to the movies and see Friendship, the new A24 movie starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. When I first watched the trailer, I truly had no idea whether or not this movie was a comedy or a horror film. A24 likes to do that, don’t they? Well, after seeing the movie, I can say it firmly falls into the “cringe comedy” arena, and Tim Robinson plays a very Tim Robinson character. If you were hoping this movie would show his range, I’m sorry to tell you that it doesn’t. Paul Rudd kind of makes up for it by being the most charming, charismatic character ever, and Conner O’Malley has a small but hilarious cameo where he steals the show.

I feel pretty ambivalent about cringe comedy. When cringe comedy is good, it’s great, but when it’s bad, it’s incredibly painful. While there are many sketches from I Think You Should Leave that made me laugh so hard the first time I saw them that I almost threw up, a lot of the third season didn’t hit for me. I would say that Friendship, though not written by Tim Robinson, felt like it could have been, and also felt a little uneven. On the other hand, it also kind of reminded me of great early aughts indie movies like Punch Drunk Love, Broken Flowers, and Napoleon Dynamite. Those movies were flawed but iconic. Friendship is worth a watch, and maybe you’ll feel differently than I did.

- Cooking. I really hate food waste, it bums me out, but as someone living in a household with only two humans (and one cat), it feels inevitable a lot of the time that we end up throwing things out without using them up. So when an Instacart order mishap meant I ended up with twice as much blue cheese as I needed, I started looking into creative ways to use it up, and I found these blue cheese scones with walnuts and pancetta. I decided that if I used bacon instead of pancetta for the scones, I could use the bacon fat to make refried beans and make bean and cheese burritos later on. So, last Sunday, that’s exactly what I did.

The dough for the scones was extremely sticky, so much so that cutting them into triangles was nearly impossible and they all came out in different shapes. The scones were fine, but I’ll be honest, blue cheese is kind of a weird cheese to put in a scone. It didn’t bake down in a pleasing way, it’s got that minerally flavor, and it’s odd to eat a scone with spots of blue in it. They were not my favorite, though Ross seemed to like them. They were best eaten with a little honey.

The bean and cheese burritos made for some very tasty lunches, though. I looked up a recipe, and drooled over the photos, but they’re so simple, you don’t really need one. They’re just refried beans + shredded monterey jack cheese rolled in a tortilla and warmed in a pan briefly to melt the cheese and toast the outside. You totally don’t have to use bacon fat for refried beans, either, you can make vegan ones by using olive oil, I just like to be extra. It was an easy thing to meal prep, too.

- Pickles. One thing about me is that I love salty and briny things. Oysters, olives, pickles – bring ‘em on! When Ross and I go out to eat at small plates places and they have a “pickle plate” on the menu, we’re ordering that bad boy nine times out of 10. (That said – when it comes to pickled cucumbers, I really prefer a classic dill pickle. I don’t fuck with bread and butter – too sweet.)

Recently, I had food from two different establishments that both placed pickles as central components of their food and beverage menus, one local (Belle’s Delicatessen and Bar) and one global (Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen). Let’s start with the local one and then zoom out. I’ve been a loyal customer of Belle’s Bagels since I moved to Highland Park in 2021, and I stand by my assertion as a former New Yorker that they have the second best bagels in L.A. (The best bagels are the ones my friends and family from New York bring in their luggage when they come to visit us.) Their bagels are big and doughy and damn near close to New York bagels. My two tiny quibbles with their everything bagels are: 1) they don’t include salt in the toppings and 2) they do include caraway seeds in the toppings. But their bagel sandwiches are delicious and their schmear is appropriately ridiculous in size, and they just use really good quality ingredients.

So, when Belle’s announced that they had renovated their interior space on York and were opening it at night as a deli and bar, I was pumped! I finally got over there last Saturday night. Ross and I split their fried pickles as an appetizer, and I had their pickle martini, which I’ve been dying to try ever since I heard that they had something called a “pickle martini” on the menu. The fried pickles were cornmeal-battered, crunchy on the outside and deliciously salty and briny on the inside. They actually reminded me a lot of the fried pickles at The Hermosillo, a bar down the street. The ranch the pickles were served with was really fucking good. They called it “San Fernando Valley ranch” on the menu, and I wasn’t sure if that was a joke or actually a thing, but after some Googling, I think it’s just their house ranch. It was thick and had fresh green onions and dill in it and was delicious. The pickle martini was just okay. I kind of wished it had more pickle juice in it, because I think I like pickle juice better than martinis. But I also had a patty melt and thin cut fries, and both were delish.

The last time I’d had a patty melt was the Sunday we drove back from my last Vegas trip, when we stopped at Peggy Sue’s ‘50s Diner between Vegas and Los Angeles. I will say this, I didn’t feel sick, but I was just hungover enough that ordering a patty melt at 11 in the morning sounded like a good idea. And honestly? It was. Fuck, I love diners!!!! It’s the Jersey part of me that will never die.

But I digress. Popeyes also recently had a special pickle menu that started as an April Fool’s Day promotion but was never actually a joke? Idk. My local Popeyes did not have the fried pickles that some locations did, but I was able to try their pickle glaze chicken sandwich and, yes, their chilled pickle lemonade. The pickle glaze chicken sandwich tasted exactly like their regular chicken sandwich, which would have been disappointing, but their regular chicken sandwich is delicious, so I didn’t mind much.

The pickle lemonade? Was disgusting. I feel like I’m pretty open-minded toward pickles being used in weird ways. When I turned 25, I chose to host my birthday at a specific bar (Soda Bar in Brooklyn–RIP I guess) because they had “pickleback” shots, which is a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser. It’s actually the only way I can get whiskey down. Fun fact about that party is that two of my dearest friends got so fucked up pregaming it that one of them threw up on the way there and decided to just go home instead. Oh, to be in your twenties in Brooklyn in the 2010s!

Another pickle story from my 20s in New York: Peanut Butter & Co used to have a brick and mortar location in the West Village where they sold sandwiches, and sometimes, in the early 2010s when I worked at my horrible gray cubicle job, I would go there for lunch and buy their “Pregnant Lady” sandwich, which had crunchy peanut butter and pickles on it (and then chase that with hormonal birth control, because I did not want to be an actual pregnant lady, just eat like one). That sandwich was actually super tasty, salty and nutty and awesome. So I could conceive in my head of how salty lemonade might actually taste good. Popeyes’ pickle lemonade, though? Was disgusting. Imagine sugary sweet pickle juice. Could not get down more than a sip or two, and then I poured it out in the sink, sadly. So, I would not recommend getting that. Or, if you can’t stand the curiosity, just get a small one.

Oh my god, I just wrote almost 900 words about pickles. Well. I think that’s enough, yes?

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Until next time—order the pickle plate.

Love,

Liz

XOXO