in the cosmos (flowers)

what we're cooking, reading, links + recs, ideas that are helping me keep going

Sep 25, 2025

This newsletter is mostly links and recs and notes on what I’ve been reading and eating lately. Lots of interesting things to think about.

FIRST: Please consider Everything for Everyone for the top of your to-read list! Put it on your library holds! It’s speculative fiction set in the 2050s-2060s framed as an oral history of the New York Commune — so many ideas for an imaginative future, just what I needed right now. Dark but liberating! (I thought the first chapter started slow — press on.)

Eating: We made two batches of muhammara this summer, lots of peppers! Peach cobbler, plum cobbler; here’s the recipe we’ve been making for years. We had a few pizza nights at friends houses, and I’m still thinking about the combo of gleaned Italian plums and pears, gorgonzola, parmesan, olive oil and some basil. (Our How to Pizza Night zine is all about how to have your own pizza nights with friends.) Adam turned 20lbs of farmers market tomatoes into sauce for the freezer, and made a lot of applesauce. We have ambitions to can some whole tomatoes, and hopefully some make some jam too. Lots of projects before the fall turns cold.

There’s a batch of labneh in the fridge, from the new Good Things cookbook. I want to make a batch of Momofuku Soy Sauce or Tamari Eggs, and a fresh jar of red onion pickles. In August we went to a fancy restaurant for our anniversary dinner and had rye crackers that were so incredible that I got inspired to make sourdough crackers for the first time; I got the recipe and will report back.

Some instagram selects: rolling curtain | a pond made of plastic totes buried in the garden | a plunge pool pond for swimming with frogs by habitat-tuinen.nl | how is your detox from the moving image going?

Re: detox from the moving images; the phrase made me realize that haven’t really watched many shows or movies in 2025? I went to a matinee alone on a 100°F weekday to watch Mission Impossible 8 Part 2. (Unfortunately I must indulge my passion for the spy/heist genre.) But maybe only one or two others this year? I love reading so much that I typically don’t want to watch anything unless I’m too sick to read. Or sometimes if I’m doing a repetitive physical task (collating zine pages, feeding them the booklet maker, or ironing fabric for sewing are the main qualifiers) I can watch something. But it’s been an unusually long time since any of those were the case, and it feels weird to have not noticed it until now. I wonder what’s happening to my brain to have relatively few moving images this year? Like in the comic linked above, I have been really into lichens……….

Re: instagram, did you know that if you use an ad-blocking browser (like Brave, for example; there are others too) you don’t have to see ads on IG on the web, or elsewhere online? Potentially relevant links: Awesome adblockers + Digital hygiene: Passwords

Reading books and articles: A string of beads. I can’t tell you what’s coming. This Auntie Bulletin newsletter. So many moving pieces. We Give Us Our Roses. “I do believe a great library is both a practical asset and a personal achievement.” How much do electric car batteries degrade?

I’ve been helping my friend Rachel Hays edit the writing for Tomato Diary — so wonderful!

Department of independent publishing-related interviews: these are just for my fellow print-publishing nerds. You know who you are.

Sending care,
Amelia

P.S — I accidentally took August off from newsletter writing, and I’ve missed corresponding with everyone. Have any projects you’ve been working on? What are you cooking? Any reading recs? Any spy/heist genre recs? Should I send a roundup of my favorite spy/heist content? Have any questions for me? Etc. Write back if you want!

P.P.S — 25 in 2025 subscribers — a newsletter’s coming for you next week. I’ve also obtained the supplies for mailing y’all a physical riso-printed newsletter, stay tuned… :)