The Week In Recommendations 1.10.24

A new cult doc, catching up on RHOSLC, winter comfort food, and winter moisturizer. (Plus: We try to cut back on spending.)

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Our latest podcast was about “May December,” starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman! Rich Text is a completely reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Claire has been reading… 📖

“I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” by Claire Vaye Watkins… for the last week! Yes, I finished a book, and I feel powerful. I recommend this book, which is raw and aching and entrancing, but it was coincidental that the next book I picked from my TBR pile shares many commonalities.

Melissa Broder’s “Death Valley” is … also about a female narrator who has fled her marriage and various other miserable responsibilities to seek herself in the desert wilds of the West. Broder (“Milk Fed,” “The Pisces”) locates her protagonist not in Nevada but a Best Western in the California desert, where she is trying to come to grips with her father’s medical crisis and get her head together. Reading it so soon after Watkins’ novel, which is, so far, very similar in setting and circumstance but very different in sensibility and subject, makes me feel a bit like I’m taking a themed seminar, like “The Female Novelist in the American Desert.” And I used to love themed seminars!

Emma has been reading… 📖

“Iron Flame,” Rebecca Yarros’s follow-up to “Fourth Wing,” because I simply need to get to the end of this chapter of the series before I can move on to more challenging literature. I read 400+ pages over the course of a few days and somehow am still only just over halfway through this book, but it’s as fast-paced and intoxicating as the first one. I am now so much more invested in the folklore of dragons than I ever thought possible. Will sweet, formerly golden Andarna be okay??? Also… the steamy factor is off the charts. The sex scenes between protagonist Violet Sorrengail and her love interest Xaden Riorson are just full-on erotica, and frankly it’s great.

Claire has been watching… 📺

“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” season 4 has finally gotten my attention. The only previous season I watched was season 2 — I truly can’t find time to keep up with Bravo shows at this point in my life, so I dropped off for season 3 — but I heard season 4 ended in dramatic fashion, so I’m back in. I have never seen a group of women who clearly hate each other so much insist so vociferously that they love each other; every girls’ trip is, explicitly, a desperate attempt to overcome their hatred and distrust of each other so that they can continue being professional friends. Can’t wait for the bombshell that is apparently coming!

Credit: Gibson Johns

Emma has been watching… 📺

You know we love a cult doc over here on Rich Text, so I was very excited when “Daughters of the Cult” popped up on my Hulu. The series dives into the legacy of Mormon fundamentalist polygamist cult leader Ervil LeBaron, who raised his many children in a culture of abuse, neglect, religious extremism, misogyny, violence, and eventually, murder. “Daughters of the Cult” focuses most heavily on the stories of two of his daughters, Celia and Anna LeBaron, alongside a handful of other family members. I watched all five episodes in one day.

Claire has been listening to… 🎧

“Classy with Jonathan Menjivar,” a much-lauded 2023 podcast about class. Menjivar, a former producer on “This American Life” and “Fresh Air,” was inspired by his own class-straddling identity; born working class, he started a media career and entered a new economic and social stratum — one in which people read the New Yorker weekly and own cashmere sweaters. (Menjivar now owns cashmere socks, a concept even someone as bougie as myself is still wrapping my mind around.) I’m a couple episodes in, and while nothing so far has been conceptually revolutionary, I find his honest reflections on his own experience and his thoughtful interviews with experts and other relevant subjects to be really absorbing.

Emma has been listening to… 🎧

Gypsy Rose Blanchard on “The Viall Files.” Highly recommend Andrea Dunlop’s “Nobody Should Believe Me” as a companion piece that really explores the complex, often misunderstood topics of Munchausen by proxy and medical child abuse.

Claire has been buying… 🛍️

I have been trying and trying to be better about spending, as it has become my worst bad habit — and a particularly unfortunate bad habit to have when you have two kids and live in the New York metro area. This week I’m most pleased about all the things I resisted buying, as I had some very close calls with a Hatch nursing dress, Hill House pjs (on winter sale), and a Doen button-down (also on sale). 2024 resolution: remember that things on sale still cost money.

One purchase I have been nothing but pleased with, however, was the Leuchtturm1917 five-year memory notebook. It has one page for each day of the year, with five sections for five years. The idea is to write a few lines a day for five years. It’s the perfect concept for someone like me: I am so overwhelmed by the responsibility of writing a whole diary entry that I simply never try, and each attempt I make to keep a journal ends quickly and ingloriously as my entries peter out within weeks. Writing one to five sentences is an invitingly low lift – so far, I’ve written an entry for every day of 2024 without committing much time to it. And I need a diary. My memory is abysmal. I barely remember my college years, let alone childhood, and Max’s infancy is basically a misty recollection of sleepless nights and roly-poly baby arms at this point. I want to remember my life! So it feels like an investment in future me’s happiness to document each day. I’ve been taking special note of adorable things the kids do, which are plentiful. 

Emma has been buying… 🛍️

Like Claire, I’ve been trying to reign in my impulse purchasing, something that I have realized got much worse during pandemic times and then never quite left me. So I’ve resolved to only spending money on things that are really special (and within my budget) and things that I actually need.

This week a refill of my most-used winter skin care product fell under the latter category: Dieux Instant Angel moisturizer. Now that I’ve gone through a full tube of the stuff I can confidently say it is the best moisturizer I’ve ever used. It doesn’t make me break out, it’s fragrance-free, and it makes my skin feel smooth and hydrated when I wake up each morning. I’ve been trying to pare down my skincare routine and just focus on the basics: one cleanser, one serum, one moisturizer, one sunscreen. Instant Angel is definitely helping.

Claire has been making… 🧶

More pasta — and this time, I actually made it myself! It’s been a busy season, even with the baby starting daycare. He doesn’t take a bottle, despite several weeks of attempts, so I have been visiting daycare every three hours to feed him. Also, I keep needing root canals? I’m on my second in two months over here. FLOSS YOUR TEETH. All this is to say that I needed to make something quick and filling without doing a big grocery shop. So I made…

Alison Roman’s pantry pasta, with roasted chickpeas and spinach. I followed her recipe pretty closely (except no dairy, no capers and only juice/zest from the lemon). As I finished the spaghetti in the skillet, I added some big handfuls of baby spinach so they wilted into the pasta. Meanwhile, I drained and rinsed a can of chickpeas, tossed it in a little olive oil with kosher salt and pepper, and roasted them at 400 for 20 minutes. Those went into the pasta right before serving. I actually would go a little harder on the lemon next time (I only juiced half of it, and in retrospect it could have used more zing), but it was surprisingly quick, easy, comforting, and delicious.

Emma has been making… 🧶

Comfort soup for a dreary time of year. I think I’m not alone in finding the first weeks of January to be kind of depressing. We are all coming off of the high of the holidays and vacations, and staring ahead into all of the uncertainty (and promise!) of a new year. (And an election year at that.) Plus, I have a few very close friends grappling with acute hardships and losses right now. All of that is to say that I was craving some soup — and wanted to make soup for my loved ones — this week. I had some cauliflower florets in the fridge already, so when I found Lidy Heuck’s NYT Cooking recipe for Creamy Cauliflower Soup with Rosemary Olive Oil, I immediately started cooking. (This one is dairy-free, Claire!) The soup is delicious, creamy without actual cream, and is perfect for toasting a baguette and dipping the crispy bread right into the soup bowl. I’ll be making this all winter.

Yum! This sounds so good. -Claire

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