Rich people gonna rich people 💰 & four soups

Hi friends!

How are you?? Oh my goodness, it’s been forever (okay, three weeks). If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know I am usually pretty goshdarn regular with my biweekly publishing schedule, so this has definitely been a fluke. The Monday after I sent out my last newsletter, I came down with some nasty flu-type thing that took me out for almost two weeks. I’m talking an actual fever and aches and a sore throat, on top of fatigue and congestion. I can’t remember the last time I ran an actual fever. Do not recommend!!

The thing that sucks about falling sick is that I had been pushing myself to go out and be social in a way that I haven’t been lately, and I’m almost certain that was the reason I got sick. I went to a dope showcase for female-directed short films that included one my buddy had worked on, Chispa, as well as several shorts from Black Girls Film Camp, a really great organization we should all support! They provide a 16-week program for high school girls and provide them with everything they need to make short films, aiming to increase the currently tiny percentage of feature film directors who are Black women. So that was really cool to see, and then we went out with my buddy and his crew to a dive bar downtown called the Golden Gopher, which is “known for its mashed potatoes,” a frankly unhinged thing to say about a bar. But it was true. So that was Saturday, and then I woke up running a fever on Monday morning. D’oh.

Being sick is never fun, but the biggest bummer of falling sick at that particular time was that I had made plans to go out to Joshua Tree that weekend to do some writing. I was going to stay by myself in this gorgeous little Airbnb with huge windows all around the house, so I could look out at the beautiful desert scenery while I daydreamed up my stories.

Well, unfortunately, I was still sick by the time that weekend rolled around, so I ended up canceling my trip (and losing a couple hundred dollars in the process). It’s about a three-hour drive out to Joshua Tree from L.A., and I couldn’t imagine doing all that just to sit by myself and be sick in not-my-home, with not-my-kitchen and not-my-pantry of soup-making materials, trying to sleep in not-my-bed. I know I made the right call by staying home, but it was definitely disappointing. Maybe I’ll reschedule my trip, I don’t know. I’m not jumping at the chance to spend more money, let’s put it that way.

At any rate, I have fully recovered, enough to spend a day last weekend visiting my friend and her baby out in Redondo Beach. The last time I saw them was during the fires in January, when they very generously let my cat and I crash with them, and man, babies really change a lot in just a couple of months! This one is always developing new skills. Last time I saw him, if you put him down, he would pretty much stay put in that place, but now the kiddo is on the move, big-time, crawling and standing and before you know it, he will be solving the climate crisis, hopefully. Don’t let us down, kid!

During the week, work has been ramping up again after a somewhat slower period for me. I’m really excited about the projects I’ve been working on, I think they’re really cool, but sometimes, being on a cool project comes with more pressure to make it AWESOME than being on, let’s say, a lower priority project. I find myself having to really bring it every day, creatively and strategically speaking, and sometimes that leaves my creativity well a bit dry by the end of the day, so that it’s all I can do to lay in bed, playing Two Dots and listening to a murder podcast.*

*I should note here that I’ve started listening to My Favorite Murder again, after dropping the podcast back in 2020 when they sold out to Wondery and had some kind of exclusive deal with Amazon Music. I just thought that was a pretty gross move that they didn’t have to do, although, who among us would have the balls of steel to turn down $100 million, even if it meant (ugh) being nice to Jeff Bezos? Anyway, I learned recently that they actually left that deal and haven’t been affiliated with Amazon for a couple years now, so I am enjoying listening to Georgia and Karen again. The show is more formulaic now than it was back in the day when they would do their own research (not like anti-vaxxers, lol, I mean research for their true crime stories) and record it on Georgia’s couch with her cats running amok, but that’s okay. It’s a business now, and I understand that.

One project I’ve been doing some creative strategy work on that I’m super proud about is called Confession Hole, hosted by the hilarious comedian Eric Williams, who says his goal with the show is to take shame away from queer sex and relationships. I fell in love with the concept when I learned that Eric was interviewing guests from a bathroom stall and sticking his microphone through a glory hole, and thank GOD (or whoever), they let me work on it. See, it’s like a Catholic confessional, but also, gay sex. You can check out the content @confession.hole on all platforms! The first guest is the drag queen Meatball. She’s amazing, and trust me, it just gets better and better from there.

But enough of me blabbering!! Let’s get into some things:

- Cooking. Over the week and a half that I was really feeling quite sick, I made four (4!) different soups. I hope you’re in the market for a new soup recipe, because I have plenty (again, four):

• Thai red curry noodle soup. I was in the moodle for an Asian chicken noodle soup I could top with sliced jalapenos, and I’ve also been looking for creative ways to use up the jar of Thai red curry paste in my fridge. This soup was perfect for both. It was really tasty! The only mistake I made was dumping in twice as many rice noodles as the recipe called for, a misstep I only realized afterwards when I went to put the soup away and instead of a brothy soup with some noodles in it, it had become a pasta with red curry sauce. Look, I was still pretty sick at the time, so I wasn’t at my cheffy best. It was still delicious!
  
  

• Chickpea tomato soup. This soup is vegetarian and could easily become vegan if you omit or sub out the butter and parmesan cheese for vegan varieties. It’s your basic tomato soup with some chickpeas added for protein and bulk. I made Texas Toast to go with it, but it would also be fantastic with grilled cheese, of course.
  
  

• Creamy tortellini soup. Sausage, kale, and tortellini in a tomato-laced veggie broth; what more could you want? I highly recommend throwing in a parmesan rind as the recipe suggests, it added such a lovely richness to the broth. This was almost like a sister soup to Italian wedding soup. It was pretty heavy, but so good.
  
  

• Broccoli cheddar soup. I’ve made this soup more than half a dozen times and recommended it in this newsletter more than once. I will just say that for a soup with half a pound of cheese in it, it has surprising healing qualities. The broccoli and carrots have so much vitamin C in them, anytime I’m sick and eat this, I wake up the next day feeling significantly better. It doesn’t really make sense to me, but I’m here for it.

I also made ricotta gnocchi with a chunky tomato sauce from scratch the day before I got sick. Ricotta gnocchi is work, but it’s not as much work as potato gnocchi, which will break you. I remember when I was in college and first started cooking, I watched an episode of a show on the Food Network that promised that making potato gnocchi was “so easy!” So I destroyed my parents’ kitchen attempting to make it, and in the end? My potato dumplings were lumpy and even, upsettingly, crunchy in places. I got so worked up about that fail that I went and sat in my room for the rest of the night, not emerging even when my mom kindly lied that my dad said he’d liked the gnocchi. No one is more dramatic than a perfectionist in her early 20s who’s finally failed at something.

An-y-wayyy, I actually think I like ricotta gnocchi better than their potato cousins! They’re cheesy and have a lightness to them, and it’s much easier to ensure a uniform, fluffy texture throughout. In that recipe, Kenji López-Alt insists you need to use fancy ricotta, but I just used the basic Galbani whole milk ricotta that they have at the grocery store, and it worked great. I froze extras of both the gnocchi and the tomato sauce and actually, I kind of want both right now…

- Top Chef, season 22 (Bravo, Peacock). This season of Top Chef takes place in Canada, and the idea of distilling all the different cuisines of such a massive country into one season, when every other season has focused solely on a single state or even a city, is quite hilarious to me! Like, yo, Canada is HUGE! But I’m excited for the show to be traveling outside of the U.S. I’m also intrigued because the owner of a restaurant in my neighborhood is competing on the show—Kat Turner of Highly Likely, which is kind of like a coffee shop that’s also open for dinner and has booze. It’s a pretty low-key place, i.e., not exactly the kind of restaurant you would expect a Top Chef competitor to hail from. As my husband Ross noted, it’s not even the best restaurant in our neighborhood (that would probably be either Hippo or Checker Hall, or maybe Villa’s Tacos). So I’m sort of rooting for Kat, but also, I’m rooting for everyone.

- RuPaul’s Drag Race, season 17 (MTV, Prime Video). SPOILERS ahead, if you are not caught up on this season of Drag Race, which has its finale tonight! … I am rooting for Lexi Love, but expecting Onya Nurve to win, and deservedly so. In a cast in which 11 out of 14 contestants are in their twenties, Lexi is the oldest contestant at the ripe old age of 33, which earned her the nickname “Grandma” (meaning that I must be a dead and rotted corpse at 38, jesus). I just love Lexi’s underdog story of overcoming homelessness and drug addiction, and you know I will always support the trans community on this show, especially considering RuPaul’s past reluctance to include them. I am a cishet white woman unfortunately, but I think, coming from the trashy state of New Jersey and then going to a fancy private college and living in New York and L.A., I have always related to the underdogs and those who feel like they don’t fit in because they aren’t classy or wealthy enough. I have such a soft spot for Lexi, but I think Onya has definitely proven herself to be the front-runner this season, and I will be quite surprised if she doesn’t win. I’ll be happy either way, though, honestly.

- The White Lotus, season 3 (HBO, Max). What did you all think of the season finale of The White Lotus? SPOILERS ahead for anyone who is not caught up! … I would say this was my least favorite season of the show so far (my most favorite was Italy/S2), but I thought the finale was really good. I did not guess correctly who would die—my wild card guess was the curly-haired hotel manager, but I’m glad he lived to sing, and have all the feelings, another day. A few stray thoughts:

- Chelsea wanted her and Rick to be together forever, and now they truly will. 😭

- Patrick Schwarzenegger is like, a really good actor.

- Belinda definitely made the smart move, but it would’ve been nice to see someone stick it to Greg, too.

- Poor Pornchai! Rich people gonna rich people, no matter how New Money.

- Poor Gaitok! Now he’s stuck in a job he’s not spiritually aligned with.

- Poor Amrita! Ross thinks she’s at fault for Rick popping off (“if she had only done a session with him!”); I think that women aren’t responsible for managing men’s feelings!!

- I was kind of sad that the toxic trio stayed friends in the end. I feel like they are just going to repeat the same patterns of behavior again and again. But I guess this show isn’t (always) about personal growth?

- Speaking of personal growth, I feel like I understood everyone’s arc except for Lochlan’s. I’m not sure what Lochlan learned as a result of this experience. I wish we could have seen him self-determining in some way.

- I would 100% watch an Arrested Development-esque show about the Ratliffs’ lives after Tim goes to prison. Spin-off time?? I can only dream of hearing Parker Posey say “lorazepam” again in her Southern drawl.

Alright, that’s it for now!

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page. This post is public, so feel free to share it on social media, or forward it to a friend.

Until next time—stay healthy!

Love,

Liz

XOXO

P.S. Beehiiv decided to pop off this week and added a whole bunch of new design levers that mucked up the old formatting for this newsletter. Please bear with me as I figure out what it should look like!