Maybe it’s just me, but although veggies are increasingly hard to come by in this area, one vegetable lingers, reluctantly available: spinach. And I don’t know why. Spinach is goddamn amazing. It’s a nutritional powerhouse, for one. For two, it tastes amazing. No, it may not have the COLON LOCOMOTIVE powers of, say, kale, it’s still green and healthy and all that happy shit.

But, for some reason, people aren’t buying it. Again, around here. Maybe where you are, everybody’s Popeye looking for muscles, but here, they’re leaving that and Brussels sprouts on the shelf. Lockdown still won’t push them to the fringes of the produce aisle, I guess?

(Here’s my Brussels sprouts recipe, before you ask.)

Maybe it’s because The Kids Today are like The Kids Of Yesteryear and just won’t eat spinach. (And only now is it occurring to me that Popeye was some kind of vegetable propaganda. Same way an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and carrots “help” your “eyesight” and other such vegetable legends.) I sure didn’t eat spinach when I was a kid, are you nuts? No, no, I had a discerning palate. It was Spaghetti-Os or nothing, you vulgarian. Toss a couple hot dogs in there? C’est magnifique.

More seriously, I’ve come to believe that the parents of yesteryear — like, let’s say of the 80s — really didn’t get how to cook vegetables all the time. And a lot of veggies available were in cans? It wasn’t a good time for vegetables, no wonder we were all sick and weak. Mushy asparagus. Mushrooms that tastes less like graceful wood ear and more like human baby ears. Steam it, boil it, meh. So, entirely possible spinach just wasn’t winning any awards back then. But we’ve grown smarter when it comes to cooking vegetables and I have a super-hella-stupid-easy spinach dish that will —

Wait, what are you looking at?

Hello? Eyes down here.

Ah. Ah. Yeah, I get it, the photo at the top of the post contains no spinach. It’s tomatoes and okra and potatoes and tomatillo husks and I’m sorry, I don’t have any spinach photos. Settle down. It’s fine.

AS I WAS SAYING

This is a spinach dish my kid doesn’t just eat, but that he eats with delight.

Now, my kid is also a little weird. He likes veggies a whole lot. He likes sushi. For his birthday, he asks for me to make him Brussels sprouts. So, do recognize his tastes are skewed for a kid, but I also like to believe, perhaps mistakenly, it’s because I know how to make food tasty.

And this spinach? Is tasty.

Here’s what you do.

Skillet. Stainless steel for me.

Bit of olive oil or butter, depending on your predilections for particular FOOD LUBES.

Then, some chopped garlic. Again, your tastes matter here. Thinly sliced garlic is nice. Minced is fine. Maybe a shallot instead, who cares. Food is customizable, it’s a menu of possibility and delight. Honestly, if all you have is garlic powder in These Perilous Quarantimes, that’s fine, too, just don’t add it now, add it later. Just note that the bigger the chonks of garlic, the milder the garlic taste will be, because it’s got less cuts to the, I dunno, GARLICKIAN MICROSTRUCTURE and reduced GARLIC SQUARE FOOTAGE or something. Hashtag science. Hashtag shut up.

Get the garlic in the oil or butter.

Cook until fragrant, not until burned.

Then, fill the skillet with spinach.

Here the question is, fresh or frozen? Yes. Whatever. Either. Frozen is fine, and remember, frozen vegetables tend to be plunged into suspended animation at the peak of their freshness. I like the Woodstock brand, because it comes out looking like a batch of cryo-nuggs of sci-fi weed, and it has a delicate tea-leaf taste to it. Shit, maybe I’ve just been cooking tea leaves and weed? That might explain a lot about me. It’s fine. Point is, fresh or frozen.

And it can also be Swiss chard. Or other greens of your choosing.

This application is easy and applies to every cooking green I’ve tried it with.

So.

Heat on medium. Spinach in the pan.

Salt and pepper go onto it.

Cook it down until the leaves are reduced. If fresh, you’ll start with this massive APPLE CART of spinach, and end up with four thimbles, as all that water comes out and the leaves wilt. And in that case you can keep adding spinach to freshen it up. It’s pretty resilient long as you don’t burn it.

Add in couple splashes of chicken broth, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan.

A pinch of Italian seasoning or Herbs de Provence.

(That’s French for Herbert, of Provence.)

Cook, cook, cook.

Ten minutes, fifteen, I dunno. Like I said, spinach is resilient. A good food for these tough times. Spinach doesn’t give a fuck. It has green goodness and it doesn’t care if you don’t like it.

Then when it’s cooked down pretty good and has started to lose its emerald green in favor of a Bob Ross-painted pine-tree, you want to add first a splash of sherry vinegar. How much is a splash? I dunno. A splash. You can add more if you need to so like, think a tablespoon or two.

Then, cook a bit, just a minute or two to incorporate.

Final bit, add in a couple splashes of heavy cream. Twice the amount of the vinegar, let’s say.

Mix-a-mix-a-mix.

There. That’s it. Season again after tasting if need be.

It’s good. Your kids will like it. You will like it, too. Unless you’re one of those weird adults who won’t eat vegetables. Christ in a crab trap, eat your vegetables, you scurvy-sickened ricket-monsters.

All right, that’s it. Go eat some spinach. And buy my books or I die.

Two young witches, once inseparable, are set at odds by secrets and wildly dangerous magic.

In the waning days of World War II, with Allied victory all but certain, desperate Nazi diabolists search for a demonic superweapon to turn the tide. A secluded castle somewhere in the south of Germany serves as a laboratory for experiments conducted upon human prisoners, experiments as vile as they are deadly.

Across the English Channel, tucked into the sleepy Cumbrian countryside, lies the Library, the repository of occult knowledge for the Société des Éclairées, an international organization of diabolists. There, best friends Jane Blackwood and Miriam Cantor, tutored by the Société’s Librarian—and Jane’s mother—Nancy, prepare to undergo the Test that will determine their future as diabolists.

When Miriam learns her missing parents are suspected of betraying the Société to the Nazis, she embarks on a quest to clear their names, a quest involving dangerous diabolic practices that will demand more of her than she can imagine. Meanwhile Jane, struggling with dark obsessions of her own, embraces a forbidden use of the Art that could put everyone she loves in danger.

As their friendship buckles under the stress of too many secrets, Jane and Miriam will come face to face with unexpected truths that change everything they know about the war, the world, and most of all themselves. After all, some choices cannot be unmade–and a sacrifice made with the most noble intention might end up creating a monster.

* * *

Writing from experience can add verisimilitude to a fantastical narrative…

Creatures of Charm and Hunger is set at the tail end of WWII, in the Cumbria region of England (very near the place where Beatrix Potter lived, wrote, and drew). Miriam, one of the co-tagonists, is a 15-year-old German Jew who has been living with English family friends for years, after her parents sent her away. Miriam, her friend Jane, and Jane’s mother Nancy are all diabolists—they summon demons and traffic with them.

A lot of that is well beyond my experience, it’s true! So, to anchor the narrative I made a few choices. I decided to tell a story about being frustrated about feeling ineffective in a world gone mad, which is something highly relatable to most of us I’d guess. Of wanting to spread one’s wings and getting angry when they feel clipped. And I decided to inject a little of my own experience of having a complicated identity. Miriam is actually half-Jewish—or not Jewish at all, depending on how Talmudic one wishes to get about it. That’s my life, too. My father was Jewish, my mother is not, and I grew up not knowing how to feel about it. We didn’t do a lot of Jewish things, and I knew I wasn’t technically Jewish, but growing up in rural Georgia in the 1980s meant I felt pretty Jewish when I’d experience bouts of antisemitism from my neighbors. So I decided to mine that strange sensation to give Miriam some (hopefully) realistic characterization as a counterpoint to her using diabolic astral projection to kill Nazis.

…but writing truthfully, from outside of one’s experience, is crucial in other ways

While I consider myself a fantasist, I also consider myself a realist. I write about people, and I spend a lot of time trying to craft realistic interactions between those people, even when they’re in speculative situations. And one of my missions in my Diabolist’s Library series was to write about people from all walks of life interacting with demons and diablerie. So, Creatures of Will and Temper had lesbian romance and a bit of straight romance too in with the fencing and the art and the secret societies; Creatures of Want and Ruin featured a healthy polyamorous relationship as a counterpoint to the rigid moralism of the villains, and in Creatures of Charm and Hunger I’ve got an ace character, Jane, and a coalition of diabolists of all sorts teaming up to fight Nazis. Researching asexuality, as well as everything else, helped me understand my world a bit better, and also served to increase the realism of a fantastical narrative.

Joy moments are crucial, especially for dark stories

Years ago now I read a review of Prometheus, the now-notorious Alien sequel that featured some real head-scratchers like male-only surgery pods, gay impregnation panic, and scientists who don’t seem to know a whole lot of, well, science, that remarked upon how there is only one real moment of genuine joy in the film. They pointed to that scene where the cyborg (or whatever; I’m not googling it) played by Michael Fassbender stumbles upon a bunch of glowing technology balls (I really do refuse to google) and looks upon them in awe and astonishment. Fassbender seems to have an experience of the sublime in that moment, one that stands in stark, regrettable contrast to the scientists and explorers, who come across as both tense and inattentive most of the time. That sort of filmmaking doesn’t exactly inspire the audience to feel much (for another example of this, see the dour “space sure is boring” turkey Ad Astra). There’s no wonder, no sense of anticipation or excitement felt by anyone on board the ship when they land on Alien Planet. One wonders why they became scientists at all!

Fassbender’s joy moment is indeed so remarkable that it was used widely as the image associated with the film. And there’s something instructive in this—something I thought about when writing Creatures of Charm and Hunger. Creatures of Charm and Hunger is a dark story, about war, about the perils of growing up and the perils of refusing to, about what drives us to want to be seen and what drives us to wish not to see. And when I read my draft through the first time, I saw a lack in it—the same lack Prometheus has. No joy moments. And these girls—they’re teen diabolists doing fantastical things with bizarre reagents. There needed to be moments of “oh fuck this is so COOL” in there with all the big feelings of anxiety and pain and rage and uncertainty.

Figuring out “how magic works” is not for me…

The biggest thing I learned working on Creatures of Charm and Hunger is that I freaking hate writing about “how magic works.” And I’m pants at it it, too—my agent told me to cut most, if not all of the specifics of diabolism from the novel. I was only too happy to; it was not good writing. Lampshading it was the right choice, narratively and aesthetically, but even dialed-back it felt overwhelming to make choices of that sort. I hated it so much I texted a writer friend of mine the following:

Just in case…

Every writer has things they do well and things that challenge them. I learned from Creatures and Charm and Hunger that figuring out how magic works isn’t for me—and that’s okay! It’s something I’ll think about moving forward, since I don’t plan on stopping writing magical and fantastical stories.

…but writing about cats sure is

Creatures of Charm and Hunger is a cat book. “What’s a cat book?” you might ask, if you’re not a cat person. But cat people… we know that all books with a prominent cat in them are “cat books.” Sabriel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Bunnicula, The Castle of Llyr, The Master and Margarita—the list goes on and on. Cats end up in books because cats add a certain zest or whimsy to a narrative, and a prominent cat sticks in the mind, especially a well-written one.

Smudge, the cat in Creatures of Charm and Hunger is largely based on my own cat, the Toad. Toad… oh man, the Toad. He has always been a challenging kitty. Yes, I know the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about how everyone (except replicants) thinks their cat is special, but as a life-long cat owner, I’ll tell you what: the Toad is a mess. (I hand raised him, and he has a lot of the problems that come from that, as well as other, weirder ones.) But, he’s my best boy, and I used a lot of his quirkiness to give life to Smudge, who ends up being even more unusual than most cats. Which is saying something…

I said above that I love writing people. It turns out, I love writing from life. Studying the Toad to add realism to my depictions of Smudge was no hardship. Most cat people will happily drop what they are doing to watch their cat clean their ears for minutes at a time! But this, for me, was different. I wasn’t just staring at him through my usual haze of toxoplasmosis; I was watching him to capture him, as I do with people. I’d never written a book with a prominent animal companion in it before, and I liked it so much, my next book is going to have one, too.

* * *

Molly Tanzer is the author of The Diabolist’s Library trilogy: Creatures of Will and Temper, the Locus Award-nominated Creatures of Want and Ruin, and Creatures of Charm and Hunger. She is also the author of the indie weird western Vermilion, an io9 and NPR “Best Book” of 2015, and the British Fantasy Award-nominated collection, A Pretty Mouth. For more information about her novels, her appearances, and her critically acclaimed short fiction, visit mollytanzer.com, or (better) follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram. She lives outside of Boulder, CO with her cat, the Toad.

Molly Tanzer: Website | Twitter

Creatures of Charm and Hunger: Indiebound | Amazon

Once again, the big delicious cookie of a blog post I might have once planned has been stepped on and broken into fragments. A crime, to be sure, for now it is all crumbs, but just the same, crumbs is what I got. Please enjoy the broken bits.

Fiona Apple has a new album out wait what? I knew there was an album coming, as I’d read it in Emily Nussbaum’s phenomenal piece on Apple earlier this year. But I didn’t know the album would just one day be a thing I could have. And now I have it? And it’s amazing?! Okay, listen, Idler Wheel is probably one of my favorite albums of all time. A top tenner. It is raw-boned and throaty and barely constrained in its willing derangement, and it speaks to me in a thousand different ways. So I’m digging into this new one and finding it has its own lunacy — it’s a bit quirkier, but still feels like someone took their heart and their brain and blended them up in a Vitamix and dumped it on a countertop. It’s wonderful. More fun and less flensing than Idler Wheel, but still toothy as shit. Got bite. Got little shrieks. Got dog barks. Pitchfork gave it a rare 10, if you care about that sort of thing.

I remember how I found Fiona Apple. I mean, I didn’t “discover” her and give her to the world or anything. I was working in college for a coffee house — Dillworth, in Charlotte, NC — and we of course played a lot of “coffee house” music. (Think, y’know, Lilith Fair and weird jazz.) We would get random CD deliveries from… honestly, I’ve no idea who. Music companies? Demons? Whatever. They’d deliver weekly stacks of CDs and nine times out of ten they were half-shit. But one time, in the stack came Tidal. And I was working a shift with my good friend and roommate Jim at the time, and we put it in and… I dunno how many times during our shift we listened to it, but I knew it made me feel the same way I felt when I listened to, say, Portishead’s Dummy. And we were like, fuck this, this is too good for the coffee house. So, we took it. And listened to it constantly. Her work since then has been a journey, each album still irrevocably her, but each album also very much its own creature.

I aspire to have my books be that, by the way. I never found genre to be a thing I wanted to be trapped in, or by, but I also want you to read one of my novels and know it’s one of mine, and have it feel like I’m my own damn genre, even if the genre is sci-fi, or horror, or fantasy, or whatfuckingever. Which also is why I can see how some people bristled at the Aftermath series — I mean, besides the usual shitbirds who had problems with the ahh, “content” in terms of who is allowed on the page. But I remember reading a forum post at one point where someone lamented, “Doesn’t he [i.e. me] understand, all we read are Star Wars novels?” and that clarified a lot of things for me. I wasn’t just writing a Star Wars novel. I couldn’t. I had to still write a “me” novel, otherwise, what’s the fucking point? It’s my name on it, too. I have to own it. And that’s my feeling on all my books — that’s me on there, that’s my name, it has to be all of what I bring to the table. Which then makes me think, what are all the authorial things I’m bringing to the table without realizing it? Common themes, but also lazy bits? Hmm. Worth more study. When I’m not trapped in lockdown. This fragile era is not the best time for putting the self under the lens, maybe. Or maybe it is. Who knows.

Oh, to explain the aforementioned dog barks. Yeah, no, it literally has dog barks in it, the new album. It’s the perfect lockdown quarantine album. Because it feels like she just recorded it all last night, in a binge, in her house. (I think she actually did record a lot of it in her house.) Her dogs sometimes bark. It’s amazing. (And for the record, I know she didn’t just record it last night. Its chaos is far too artful — the power of it being in how it feels improvised and mad, but is no such thing. It is her design.)

Pennsylvania is champing at the bit to “reopen.” Which is, at this point, delusional, but never underestimate people’s ability to misread a moment. See, here in PA things aren’t as “bad” as people thought, so like the Y2k bug, you have people claiming it’s either a hoax or that people got it “wrong,” despite the fact that PA arguably did a lot more a lot earlier, and has since clamped down on some of the worst of things. (Also don’t forget, we’re still not testing like we should be. So the true numbers are wildly unclear.) To reopen everything, you gotta go slow, methodical, and increase testing or get antibody testing in play. But you have the local Republicans just wanting to hee-haw their way into kicking the doors open for everyone to come rushing in, back to business. Which will cause a certain spike and surge, because, a-duhhh, the virus didn’t magically go away. Listen, I want shit to get back to normal, too. But we cannot just ignore experts and embrace magical thinking just because we want businesses open. We need better leadership from the top that helps people weather this storm in a way that doesn’t just toss vulnerable folks into the pyre in the name of Mammon, for Chrissakes.

Just the same, I guess we’re doing okay here. I got yeast, thanks to a friend who did a driveby driveway drop-off. We stood 20 feet apart and yelled conversations to one another. It was both nice and super weird. With yeast, I guess I’ll now try my hand at bread like every other carboloading individual out there. If you have good bread recipes, hook me up, because I’ve zero idea what I’m doing.

We have VR, an Oculus Quest, and it’s great. This should be the Quest’s shining moment, because VR actually feels a little bit like an escape (and you can see how Ready Player One actually comes to be). But the supply chain is disrupted and the Quest is hard to get at a meaningful price so, oops. But there are some truly spectacular experiences for it. I need the new Half-Life, but it isn’t on Quest natively, and I don’t have a PC that will load or run it. Is now a good time to get back into PC gaming? Probably not, and yet, I wanna? Because I’m an idiot?

Speaking of apples, since apparently I like anything with the word “apple” in it: did you see about the lost apples, rediscovered? Or there’s this video of an apple detective. Which is what I wanna be when I grow up. I’ll be DETECTIVE COXWORTH “GOLDEN DELICIOUS” PIPPIN, aka “Doc Pippin” for short. I will solve all the apple mysteries. This is my design.

Got me a birthday next week. In the middle of all this, a fuckin’ birthday. That should be illegal. Also illegal: our current autocratic government ineptly and cruelly stomping on all our norms and freedoms. But also, the birthday thing.

Maybe next week I can announce a cool thing? Maybe I can tell you about one of my secret books. Maybe. We’ll see. No promises. Time is goopy. Everything is wet paint.

And now, a bird photo. It’s an oafish cardinal yelling HEY at you. And not a friendly hey but like a HEY QUIT LEANIN ON MY CAR, YOU JABRONI.