Heart Eyes, Vol. 192: Severance and Herby Sheet-Pan Meatballs with Green Beans

Well, hello! It’s so nice to be back after some time away—busy work time and a handful of summer getaways, and also at least once when I straight-up forgot what day it was. I’ve missed you all, and whether you’ve got kids already back in school or consider it still fully the dog days—it is, after all, the middle of August—I hope you’ve all had fabulous summers, with just the perfect ratio of ease to adventure. And I hope you’re able to squeeze a little more out of it before the season changes! In any case, I think you’re doing great.

What To Watch: Severance

Just last night I finished a TV show so captivating and compelling that I watched the last two episodes straight through, without even picking up my knitting. (I KNOW.) Let’s talk about Severance.

Without saying too much, Severance is an hour-long drama-thriller on AppleTV+ about a group of people who have undergone a procedure to divide their at-work consciousness from the rest of their brains. When they’re at work, they don’t remember anything about themselves or their outside lives at all; when they leave for the day, they don’t remember what they did there. Incidentally, this means their at-work selves are functionally trapped at work forever and don’t otherwise exist.

It’s a hard to show to describe—would it help if I told you it stars Adam Scott (Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec) but also John Turturro and Christopher Walken?—and I think that’s because it’s a super-high-concept show whose pleasures nonetheless come mainly from execution and not from its premise. I honestly tend to skip these kinds of dark, prestige-y dramas…but this, I loved. Immediately. I got sucked into the vibrancy and specificity of the writing, the subtlety of the characters, the outright weirdness of the visual production, and the warmth of the performances. It is dark, but it’s also nimble and odd and funny and exciting, and I couldn’t wait to sit down with it every night. Maybe you’d like it, too?

(Also, for those of you who’ve seen it, can we PLEASE talk about whatever it is they did to Adam Scott’s face to make it so unsettling? Is it makeup? Fillers? Lighting? Is this just what he looks like now? [I don’t think it is; I’m pretty sure they did…something to him, I just cannot figure out what. Please advise.])

You can find Severance on AppleTV+, and I think you should.

What To Cook: Herby Sheet-Pan Meatballs with Green Beans

My summer cooking has been in a strange, strange place lately: I’m either plowing through recipes from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook—current count: 48!—or I’m refusing to think about it and making happy little game-time decisions about tomato sandwiches and various permutations of corn tortillas, black beans, eggs, and salsa. I may turn into a sliced peach soon. It’s par for my particular course in August, and I’m not mad about any of it.

I did manage a break in the routine last weekend, though, and I made something a) completely lovely and b) just perfect for all of you with gardens that are currently burying you in produce. These Herby Sheet-Pan Meatballs with Green Beans from Asha Loupy at Bon Appetit are delicious and use up at least one whole zucchini in addition to the pound-plus of green beans you’ll be roasting. They were so good and so summery that I couldn’t help inviting a friend over to help me eat them, outside, with a glass of rosé and rhubarb cake to follow.

(Feel free to ignore the part at the beginning about grinding fresh spices; I absolutely did not do this.)

Another thing about this recipe: Don’t sleep on the bright yellow turmeric-yogurt-tahini sauce that comes with it. The recipe makes a lot and I was convinced I wouldn’t get through it all; instead I ended up making another batch because I put it on everything for four days and ran out, and I missed it. (Ahem, it makes a spectacular dip for pretzels, but also literally anything else.)