On sweetness!!!

More treats, all the time.

When I listened to the audiobook version of Samin Nosrat’s lovely new cookbook Good Things, one section in particular spoke to me. It was right at the end, and it was such a perfect distillation of many of the themes that have shaped my life:

I’ve spent most of my life denying myself pleasures great and small. For one thing, I’ve always struggled to believe I deserved to experience delight of any kind. And on the rare occasions when I’ve allowed myself a pleasure, it’s only because I felt I’d earned the privilege.But pleasure is a right. An essential part of the human experience. And as I’ve grown older and more familiar with loss, I’ve become keenly aware of my own mortality, too. As a result, pleasure has become central to my life.

On a daily basis, this means using my most special mugs and plates, knowing they could break or chip at any time. It means lighting a stick o my precious, fancy incense each morning so I can feel my body relax as I breathe in the sweet, grassy smoke. It means planting my garden full of heartbreakingly gorgeous flowers -- knowing they’ll quickly wither once they bloom -- just so I can be engulfed by their splendor every time I approach my front door.

It also means always saying yes to dessert. We have to ear vegetables and proteins to survive, but dessert’s entire raison d’etre is pleasure. … Our brains are hardwired to pursue not only pleasure but also sweetness. So to enjoy a desert is to be utterly, beautifully human.

It’s worth making, eating, and sharing dessert -- even the simplest one -- because, as Zadie Smith put it, “we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in our life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available.”

I love these words ever so much, and I hope you do, too. What a beautiful celebration of sweetness -- something I’m sure we could all use more of during these terrible times! I’m sharing it this week because Sam Sanders recently posted a picture of this page from the cookbook on his instagram, which was just the reminder I needed to sit with Samin’s words again. And, of course, a treatise on the importance of sweetness seemed especially apt given the fact that it’s Halloween today.

Here are some other things I’ve been enjoying this week, which you might like, too:

• My mom recently gifted me an absolutely gorgeous tea towel with sexy root vegetables (yes, you read that right), and you can also get them online!

• This week, I dove headfirst into Soup Season and made this borscht from The Moosewood Cookbook (which also has illustrated root vegetables! Though they are decidedly less sexy.) This is a soup that you should eat when it’s very hot, with a good heap of cottage cheese on top, and a slab of well-buttered bread alongside it.

• And because we could all use some good news wherever we can find it: Ann Patchett announced she’ll have a new book next year! It’s called Whistler and it has a horse on the cover and I honestly do not care what it’s about because I will read the hell out of it regardless.

• And speaking of books, congratulations to GRETAGRAM subscriber Theresa, who won a copy of Heart the Lover by Lily King! It’s our November book club pick and I’m so excited to read it along with y’all. We’ll discuss if the last Sunday of November at noon Central Time.

That’s it for this week! I hope y’all are hanging in and taking care and helping how you can.

**Note: All book titles in this email link to my affiliate page at bookshop.org, where I receive a percentage of the purchase price (and you support a website that supports local indie bookstores!). I don’t actually care where you get your books, as long as you support indies when you can! Libraries are really cool too!!!