Unrestrained Indulgences

Sichuan Pepper Smashed Potatoes, a competitive wine-tasting TV drama, scorching hot Tang Dynasty love poetry. I have some recommendations.

He used ridiculous and far-flung descriptions, absurd and preposterous sayings, senseless and shapeless phrases, indulging himself unrestrainedly as the moment demanded, uncommitted to any one position, never looking at things exclusively from any one corner.

Zhuangzi, translated by Brooks Ziporyn

As soon as I woke up this morning I knew I had a responsibility to alert my readers to the existence of Chili Crisp, a Substack newsletter dedicated to Sichuan cuisine, featuring fabulous recipes concocted by Xueci Cheng.

I discovered Chili Crisp last Friday by way of a recipe from The Mala Market, Sichuan Stir-Fried Chicken with Yacai. Sometimes you can tell just from reading the recipe that a dish is going to be an out-and-out banger, so I knew I had to dig into Cheng’s newsletter.  On my first visit I was immediately drawn to a recipe titled Salt and Sichuan Pepper Smashed Potatoes.

I was particularly intrigued by Cheng’s recipe for Jiaoyan (椒盐), or Sichuan pepper salt. I have long been a huge believer in the deliciousness of mixed together toasted and ground Sichuan pepper, but Cheng’s formulation adds fennel and sesame seeds and chili flakes, and, yes, that is a recipe that speaks to me in the language of Sichuan love.

So last night I cooked both dishes for the first time. My verdict: EXCEPTIONALLY FANTASTIC. The potato recipe actually achieved the unthinkable: it is challenging the years-long stranglehold J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Best Crispy Roasted Potatoes Ever Recipe has owned over my kitchen.  WE HAVE A NEW CONTENDER IN THE GAME OF ROASTED POTATO THRONES.

So. Try it out. You will thank me. As for me, I’m going to work my way through the rest of Chili Crisp, dish by dish.

+++

But enough about food. I also want to take this opportunity to launch a new recommendation feature in The Cleaver and the Butterfly. Not too long ago, I was listening to a three-hour long podcast about Costco, for reasons that should be obvious. The hosts of the podcast ended their show with personal “carve-outs”: recommendations of things they liked. These recommendations didn’t have anything to do with Costco, they were just gadgets, or books, or TV shows that the hosts had recently become infatuated with.

I am always becoming infatuated with something, so I’ve decided to copy this gimmick and share my Unrestrained Indulgences. This first installment is free! Future offerings will go behind the paywall.

TV:

--- Drops of God, (Apple TV). To call this a series about competitive wine-tasting is both accurate and totally misleading. Funny, sexy, melodramatic; a French-Japanese mash-up with a side-quest to Italy; terrific performances by everyone in the cast.

--- The Brothers Sun, (Netflix). One brother is Taiwanese gangster who would rather be a baker. His younger brother has stand-up comedy aspirations. Their mother is Michelle Yeoh. That should be sufficient. Alas, sadly cancelled after one season, but it stands up all by itself.

--- Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.  (Crunchyroll). My youngest child turned me on to this anime adventure. Frieren is an immortal elf mage who has outlived all the members of a questing party that brought down the Demon King decades before the narrative begins. She has a lot of feelings.

BOOKS:

--- The Chinese Computer, by Thomas Mullaney. I am only a third of the way through this, but it is engrossing and I will be writing at length about it in a future newsletter installment. If you liked my post, The Impossible Dictionary of Truth, you will love this book.

--- The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia, by Nick Cullather. Fact-based enlightenment on every page. How the world works, and how the Green Revolution was (and is) a lot more complicated than its propagandists make it out to be.

--- Li Shangyin, edited and translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts.

Here’s how the publisher describes the work of this 9^th century Tang dynasty poet: “Combining hedonistic aestheticism with stark fatalism, Li’s poetry is an intoxicating mixture of pleasure and grief, desire and loss, everywhere imbued with a singular nostalgia for the present moment.”

Here's what Chloe Roberts says about him in her introduction:

His frequent use of carnal imagery (beds, undone hair, inebriation), his inversions of gender (writing sometimes from the male perspective and sometimes from the female), and his frequent subjects of courtiers and sexual affairs have resulted in him being generally labeled as a love poet. And yet he is not a one-dimensional romantic, as the cyclicality and inseparability of longing and bitterness, meetings and partings, love and grief are in continual tension through his work. Moreover, the span of this emotional narrative, form the first glimmerings of desire to the last agonies of separation, is often twisted, subverting the laws of action and reaction to create a space where resignation can precede desire, or where pleasure and anguish are simultaneous.

Whew.

At dawn, use clouds

To conceive the lines.

In winter, hold snow

To divine the poem

On good days

The self is often moved.

Though it’s impossible

The writer could always be so.