Weekly Digest #83

Hello there!

Did you miss me?
I failed to write you a letter last week as my head was completely focused on the fact that Friday, July 29th, was the day my daughter completed eight years living in this world. I have an eight year old daughter, people!

So I apologize for being absent and I’m compensating you today with a longer issue which was honestly very pleasing to write and helped me get in a better mood.  

Although I was feeling uninspired at first, I’m having positive days this week and life just feels a little less overwhelming, which is awesome. 

I hope you’re also having a good time.
In case you aren’t, do not worry. August lasts forever and you have plenty of time to turn some tables around. Go get'em!

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As you now know, last week was my daughter’s birthday and we tried baking orange butter biscuits, which turned out delicious.
As some people who tried them asked me for the recipe, I’m sharing it with you: 

Ingredients:

1 ½ cup flour

½ cup sugar

¼ cup corn starch

150g room temperature butter

1 orange zest

1 pinch salt

Marigold, fennel and camomile (optional)

How to:

In a bowl, mix the flour with the sugar, corn starch, orange zest and salt. Add the butter and mix it well with your hands until you have a smooth dough.

Sprinkle the counter with a bit of flour, divide the dough in two portions and shape each of them into a 3cm diameter roll. Wrap the dough in parchment and twist the ends of the paper before refrigerating it for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Butter two baking trays and sprinkle them with flour.

Take the dough from the fridge and cut it into 0,5cm thickness slices. 

Sprinkle the slices with the marigold, fennel and camomile before placing them in the trays, in a spaced way. Bake for around ten minutes, or until the edges start to golden.
The biscuits get firm after cooling down.

These biscuits last for up to 15 days if stored in an airtight container.

*recipe via Panelinha

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I wasn’t feeling very inspired when I started writing you this letter today and, in order to get things going, I turned to an official soundtrack to provide me with some poetic inspiration. It is from a movie by Kleber Mendonça Filho, called Aquarius. 

As written in a review published by The Guardian, the movie is a portrait of a 65-year-old woman refusing to be bullied out of her seafront apartment by developers. Aquarius is both a powerful celebration of its independent heroine and a scathing satire on institutional corruption. It brings an amazing diversity of music choices, which range from Aviões do Forró to Queen. 

An opening sequence, set in 1980, finds a young Clara (played by Barbara Colen), sporting an Elis Regina crop after treatment for breast cancer, slamming Queen’s bass-popping Another One Bites the Dust into the car stereo. Decades later, Braga’s Clara will twirl around her apartment to the guitar grunts of Fat Bottomed Girls. 

The songs are as inspiring as the story is, and they’ve been quite successful in helping me find the inspiration I was looking for.

Click here to dive into this Brazilian dream through a Spotify playlist by enriquevivar.
 

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Brazilian humorist, talk show host Jô Soares dies at 84

“José Eugênio Soares was born in Rio de Janeiro and as a child had wanted to be a diplomat, following the footsteps of his great-grandfather who also had been governor of Espirito Santo state. Soares spoke five languages (Portuguese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish) at different levels of fluency.

He studied in Switzerland as a teenager, where he became interested in theater. Upon returning to Brazil after his parents’ business failed, he began taking acting classes.

His first participation in musical films was in 1954, and his television debut came in 1958. He began to write, direct and create characters with his trademark humor. He also wrote books and columns in newspapers, often deploying his tonic of comedy and irony.” - from The Washington Post. Read more here.

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Die Happy: The Oral History of Dashboard Confessional ‘Unplugged’
“It was, hands down, the best day in the history of the emo stalwarts. 

(...) Carrabba opened the show solo with “The Swiss Army Romance.” Then, during “The Best Deceptions,” he unleashed such emphatic screams that viewers at home could see the fillings in his molars. (“I had to have work done on that two years later,” he says. “And they replaced it with the current one that’s just the same color tone as your tooth. I’ve been asked about that so many times.”) After finishing the second song, he told the audience, “You guys sound good. Don’t be shy.” Not that they needed any prodding.

(...) Twenty years and several lineup changes later, Unplugged remains a signature moment for both Dashboard and their fans.” - from The Ringer. Read more here.

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Shaun the Sheep is now Shaun the astronaut for all “lambkind”
“World beloved Aardman character Shaun the Sheep is set of an all new adventure, having been named as the European Space Agency’s first astronaut to participate in Nasa’s Artemis Moon program." 

(...) Artemis I consists of Nasa’s 322-foot-tall heavy-lift Moon rocket and the Orion Spacecraft. (...) The mission will send Orion — and Shaun — on a course looping around and beyond the Moon before returning to Earth. 

(...) 2022 marks the 15th anniversary of Shaun’s first TV series, so what better way to celebrate than by travelling farther than any sheep has gone before.” - from The Independent. Read more here.

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Take care!