a gingerbread house in nola

glue gun optional

Hello from our catsit in the Lower Ninth Ward (my job being to feed one indoor/outdoor, and the dozen neighborhood cats). I've been buying pastries every morning and walked 64.5 miles this week. How I want to spend vacations!

I’ve never been away from my caregiving job this long, but they stopped paying during holidays—since an audit, the agency learned that they can't pay staff for our regular shifts when we are relieved by the family. This obviously puts the family in a bind of knowing staff is losing hours whenever the client spends holiday time with them, or goes with them to an appointment. But on the upside, it means I feel less obligation to stay in town for a possible paycheck. B has never been to New Orleans, and I’ve been enjoying sharing it all with him—the relief we both feel at the normal warm human interactions when back in the South; the less great feeling of trading our usual Bay Area for another sort of dystopia.

Foodwise—there's much good vegan food to try here, which I have been appreciating—in spite of my love of Southern variety meats, I'm always concerned with fiber when traveling! I'm an old lady ok! Mississippi Vegan has a great post of local options—I especially enjoyed the doubles box from Queen Trini Lisa.

In spite of all the options, we've been eating most lunch and dinner at the catsit. While I don't advocate rentals ever, I’ve also enjoyed cooking this way while staying in hostel private rooms—I had a great time at India House last time I was in town. Hostels are for middle-ageds now; the common space was used by ladies my age on writing retreats!

Some favorite meals from the housesit: Amethyst Ganaway’s lowcountry brown oyster stew, served with Bellegarde Bakery epis. (This was intended for the traditional Christmas Eve meal, but I decided to take advantage of our host loaning her car and go to the levee bonfires instead. Incredible, and will definitely try to check out the bonfire sculptures in daylight or in preceding days next time.) One note on the stew—personally-speaking, I reserve 60, not 5 minutes, for a stovetop deep chocolate roux. Also absolutely nothing wrong with the jarred stuff! My usual roux method though is to use the oven, and that's what I did this time.

Orchids + Sweet Tea’s andouille sausage and peppers, with local Life is Good seitan smoked andouille from New Orleans Food Co-op.

For Christmas, I made Ria Dolly Barbosa’s jam-stuffed brioche french toast with Bellegarde challah for breakfast. We had a ploughman-ish lunch with Life is Good vegan camembert and brie, and chopped hard-boiled eggs with

Alicia Kennedy

mint-cilantro sauce—my new favorite egg salad. Kardea Brown’s oyster rice for dinner.

Pastrywise, I’ve been most excited to try Lagniappe Bakehouse’s new brick-and-mortar. I enjoyed everything—especially their panettone, made over weeks with lievito madre starter; kardemummabullar-inspired grains of paradise bun; and “vaucroissant” breakfast croissant using custom Vaucresson sausage.

I was equally moved by Guerin’s kindness and welcome, even while being totally overrun with new customers thanks to the Christmas Eve NYT mentions. I obviously wasn't hoping for an interaction with all of that going on, and yet she stopped to make the most gracious small talk. And of course, it felt good that her demeanor seemed to convey that she knew that trying her pastry meant a lot to me. To mirror to someone that you recognize that the moment matters to them—what hospitality means in my fantasies on a good day!

Lagniappe is also a half-block from Cafe Reconcile, and two from Southern Food and Beverage Museum—neat neighborhood!

While in Oakland, I had preordered a shotgun-style gingerbread house kit from Ayu Bakehouse, along with a “bayoule log:” a chocolate roulade filled with satsuma curd and pecan praline, decorated with meringue turtles and gators. I'm not a big chocolate-on-chocolate fan, but we were impressed—lovely textures and just sweet enough.

After talking about making the house incessantly for days, I tried to give B outs, saying, “it's ok if you don't want to do the house…” We had made a gingerbread solstice stonehenge before (as a fallback after I got overwhelmed by my 50-page Stella Parks/Serious Eats haunted house blueprint) and it went great. But we are better at quiet parallel living (hello covid) than project management, and I worried that maybe it would get awkward, since I normally spend much of our domestic time immersed in my private baking world. He brought complete sincerity and his flight engineer background to the house, and with the help of plenty of glue gun refills, it was perfect. Letting another person show you that they know something matters—is hard sometimes!

One more local recommendation: Swamp Lily Florals. I ended up buying three bouquets while here (two for family in Greenwood and Cypress Grove cemeteries, and one for our lovely host). They were all beautiful.

How has everyone's holiday or non-holiday baking been going? I'll be back on the 6th with something vegan for epiphany.

reading/listening

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom: A Novel — this week's Libby audiobook

Tatia Jacobson Jordan’s Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination

Apoorva Sripathi

’s “What edible motif will you be today?”

Food as an accessory, as a marketing tool, as soft power, as aesthetic works time and again because it is aspirational: there is now a choice to wear it than consume it, like a kind of puritanism surrounding food, nutrition, and eventually leading to the pursuit of thinness as a cultural ideal, which completes the vicious circle of brands making clothes only for a small range of sizes.

Dionne Brand on

Jon Randell Smith

’s recommendation:

But it bears investigation each time I address the page: “How do I reproduce the world without reproducing capital?” Capitalistic economic structures and social structures have so infected our daily life that we no longer see ourselves outside of that regime. What of my days can I recover outside of that? And as a writer, what of those days may I write down? I am chained to that economy because I live in its orbit. But still, how do I write differently and break up what Fredric Jameson calls the “monopoly of interpretation” and, therefore, the monopoly of power? How do I recover that which is outside (which, granted, has become meager) of that form, that administrative structure of capitalist economy, that takes over what I call my life? And what is my life now?