46. The Moon and cake.
Dear readers, please enjoy an essay-free newsletter today: onward to the recipe, the links and a tarot card. xoxo
Home.
Quarantine Cornmeal Pound Cake
Yesterday for the first time in a while, I baked our household favorite “quarantine cake,” so called because I started baking a version of this NYT one-bowl pound cake regularly during the first weeks of COVID lockdown (here’s my first blog about it), and now it’s a staple. Highly adaptable and substitutable, highly delicious.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Butter and flour a loaf pan.
In a large bowl, whisk these ingredients together, one at a time, in this order: 1 cup of sugar, zest of one lemon, 2 eggs, (room temp), 1/2 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup plain yogurt (substitute plant-based milk + 1 teaspoon AC vinegar if you want to make it dairy free), dash vanilla extract, dash almond extract, dash nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 cup cornmeal, 1 1/4 cup flour (if you’re GF, I recommend substituting with Bob’s Red Mill all-purpose gluten-free flour).
Pour into loaf pan and bake for about an hour, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.
This is a great cake to just have on the counter for snacking, or toasted on the skillet with butter for breakfast, perfect with a cup of tea or coffee.
The World.
Recommended:
Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein. This book is so good. Naomi Klein is so smart. Reading her writing is a pleasure, first and foremost due to her skill, her craft, the way she artfully weaves together everything (EVERYTHING!) into a coherent and legible whole, the way she illuminates the most confounding issues of our time with grace and sophistication. In Doppelgänger, Klein uses her experience of being increasingly publicly confused with (and then conflated with) a different Naomi (Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and now a prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theory/wellness influencer) as the entree into patiently and methodically analyzing the interlocking past, present, and future of: COVID denialism, the doppelgänger trope in western literature, autism, antisemitic conspiracy theories, Celtic “changeling” mythology, ecofascism, helicopter parenting, yoga, the Holocaust, the occupation of Palestine, late-stage capitalism, colonial feminism, influencer culture, artificial intelligence, and social media algorithms. And she does it with empathy, humility, and calm. This book is so good!
Don’t stop talking about Palestine. Check out the second half of last week’s newsletter for 10 ways you can plug in to the movement to support Palestinians in their movement for freedom, dignity, and life:
- ’s latest newsletter:
The Moon.
The Moon is auspicious, apropos of yesterday’s full moon in Virgo opposite the sun in Pisces, a sweet lunation that, nevertheless, can reveal our lunacy. This Moon is the patron saint of everyone who’s ever been gaslit or crazy-bitched; everyone who had to find their way home in the dark. The Moon represents the generative inner darkness, the dream world—that fine, ever-shifting line between waking life and the liminal realms, “civilization” and our feral natures, consciousness and the subconscious mind. The moon affirms our yearning to dive deep, to get lost, to face our fears; to embody our inner sea witch, bog witch, dog witch, lunatic. The Moon speaks to the ways we must rely on our own lights to guide us, regardless of what the world may say.
The Moon is also one of three tarot cards depicting dogs (the other two being the Fool and the Ten of Pentacles). The dogs in the Moon card speak to our twin animal natures, both domesticated and feral, to our innocence and our fierceness, which are also two sides of the same coin. It brought to mind my own very good girl, Sugar, who braved the cold with me yesterday at the Runners for Justice in Palestine 5K, my steadfast comrade:
May you know yourself even in your most diffuse, dissolute, and dream-like states, and may your inner crazy bitch protect you and everything you hold dear—all your most essential qualities of integrity, freedom, creativity, innocence, peace and rest—in exactly the ways you need. xo
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. If you wish to support my writing with a one-time donation, you may do so on Venmo @Jodi-Rhoden. Sharing
with someone you think would enjoy it is also a great way to support the project! Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.⚔️❤️ Jodi