Okay, it is Friday, so we might as well take a moment to be moved by something, don’t you think? Here, then. Read this poem by Barbara Ras. It’s long but…soldier on, I believe in you.
Read moreMISO BUTTER BISCUITS
This week has been pretty excellent in the “spontaneous cooking” realm. I’ve gotten into a good groove these past months of balancing planning and impulse—I plan ahead just enough to have rough outlines of what to cook and eat, and then I fill in the rest in the moment.
For example, I’ve been making lots of big lunch salads with cooked black lentils, but every day it’s a little different. Maybe I’ll have cold lentils over arugula with minty yogurt and warm sautéed zucchini, or I’ll have warm lentils stirred into carrot ginger soup. Yesterday I piled lots of greens into a bowl, then warmed cooked lentils in a skillet with cubes of roasted sweet potato, some olive oil, and a dollop of miso paste. I spooned that over the greens, then in the still-hot pan, I poured more olive oil and added a few handfuls of breadcrumbs, toasting them for a minute while shaking the pan. I poured that over the salad and voila. Lunch.
Read moreZUCCHINI LEMON MUFFINS
Here I am, sitting outside with a mug of tea, wrapped in a blanket and stubbornly refusing to accept the fact that it is straight up cold outside. I showed up at 7:15 this morning for the “Dirty 30” circuit workout class, held in the parking lot outside of the trainer I occasionally visit. (Yes, it is AS FIERCE as it sounds. My muscles currently feel like jelly.) Katie—the trainer—runs small group classes, which are wicked hard combination of kettlebells and TRX and core and crossfit and medicine ball slams and sprints and more varieties of squat jumps than I realized existed. She’s been running classes outside all summer—and soon it’ll be too cold to carry on like this. Like so much else in the world, we’ll just have to see what happens next.
Read moreMISO BANANA BREAD
When the pandemic really began to spread, I—like many of us—briefly lost my mind in the grocery department and rushed to buy an absolutely nonsensical collection of items. Now that shopping has resumed some semblance of normalcy (although I still have yet to go to a grocery store!), I’ve returned to buying groceries in my ordinary manner. I buy a mix of staples (things I use with regularity) along with fresh items like produce and meat and eggs and so on.
Read moreSOUR CREAM BANANA BREAD
Remember small talk with strangers? Cocktail parties and the attendant chit-chat you’d make as you sipped a glass of Chardonnay in someone’s living room, or nursed a too-strong gin and tonic amidst a group of friends at a bar? Dinner parties where you politely conversed with the people on either side, finding out that the man to your left is an accountant who builds wooden canoes in his spare time and that the woman to your right only likes to humble brag about her three children?
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