Heart Eyes, Vol. 20: Coco, 46 Books, and Cabbage Casserole
Happy New Year! I hope 2018 is treating you well so far! I personally celebrated the warmest, sparkliest, friendliest, most fun and relaxing New Year's Eve I've had in years, though I also learned some lessons today about turning off the water if you're going to work on the kitchen faucet, even if you don't think you need to, and about the importance of keeping some beater towels around for when water gets...places. (Everything's fine now, and my floor and ceiling and counters and windows and curtains and tools and phone and shirt and hair and face appreciated the rinse, I think.) Here's to continuing this year with celebration and friendship and humor and, um, learning—I feel like I've begun more or less as I mean to go on, and I hope this week has made that easy for you, too. Here are some things that are bringing me joy this week:
What To See in Theaters: Coco
On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, a friend and I squeezed one last movie viewing into 2017: a matinee of Coco, the most recent Pixar movie. Two hours and some giggles and many, many (MANY) tears later, it had leaped into my Pixar top five and into my top five movies of 2017. The story of a twelve-year-old boy in Mexico who accidentally crosses into the afterlife on the night of Día de los Muertos, I found it totally enthralling from start to finish—it's fun and funny and thoughtful and poignant and very, very beautiful—the most visually stunning move Pixar has ever made, I think. It's also, despite the Inside Out-level tears I shed throughout, truly not a sad movie; it's just about music and family and memory and redemption, and I'm a sucker. I can't think of anybody (except maybe very young kids?) who wouldn't love this movie. If you're scanning the movie listings for this weekend, you might also like Coco.
What To Add to Your Library Holds: "46 Books By Women of Color" at Electric Literature
One of the things I love about reading is how much there is of it to be done—how many voices there are to hear and perspectives there are to embody. Which is not to say I've done an amazing job of reading everything by everyone; statistically, I read a lot of books by white women. I'm trying to read more broadly, to see and understand as much of the world as I can, and to that end, I really enjoyed this list at Electric Literature of books by women of color coming out in 2018: it's an exciting mix of styles and genres, fiction and nonfiction, by writers I'm familiar with and those I've never heard of. It makes me excited for all the books I'm going to read and discoveries I'm going to make this year; maybe you'll find it inspiring, too.
What To Cook: Cabbage and Sausage Casserole
Every year around this time, I go cabbage-crazy. We're not talking punchy, crunchy raw cabbage, or even the vinegary German red cabbage my mom makes from her family recipe; in January, it had better be plain old green cabbage, and it had better be cooked basically forever. It's not a New Year's resolution thing; I just really like cabbage that's been cooked to death. In fact, I pretty much only like cabbage that's been taken its time with, and has turned soft and nutty and sweet. I have so many favorite winter cabbage recipes that I could truthfully do many weeks of cabbage coverage here. (I'm sure you're all thrilled.) But since everybody but California seems to be looking at a weekend indoors, this seems like a good time to talk about the Smitten Kitchen Cabbage and Sausage Casserole.
I went into this cabbage and sausage casserole for the first time with low, low expectations. Deb said it was good, like the cabbage rolls I love but am too lazy to make, but I just...wasn't...sure. Forgive me, Deb. This dish has basically three ingredients, feeds me for a full week of lunches, and is almost indescribably delicious to me. I make it with fresh chicken or turkey Italian sausage and I usually eat it with good bread and Dijon mustard, as Deb recommends, but it absolutely holds up on its own—it's juicy and buttery and savory, but not particularly heavy. It does take a long time to cook, but it won't require your attention during that time; you can throw it together and let it bake while you do other things, if you're going to be home anyway. If you're having a bomb cyclone or a polar vortex or just a rainy day where you are, cabbage and sausage casserole is where it's at.