We drive at a breakneck speed in an open-air taxi around winding roads that climb higher and higher away from the marina that sits at sea level. The air is hot and heavy, as if it carries more weight here than back at home, freighted with the scent of salt water and coconut and something spicy but citrusy. We pass Cinnamon Bay and I clutch at the edge of the taxi’s door frame, sure that we’re going to drop right off the sheer face of the cliff to our left every time a truck comes whooshing past us without slowing down.
Read moreHOISIN-GLAZED CHICKPEAS
A good day is a two-swim day. A good day has a run, preferably in the most crisp fall-turning-into-winter air, your cheeks flushed and your muscles burning. If the run brings you to the edge of the water where you can watch the ferry gliding over to Shelter Island, the water churning furiously in its wake, so much the better.
These days, a good day is filled with ordinary things. Three cups of tea steeped a shade too long, the liquid turning a dark sepia color before you add just the right amount (read: an irresponsible amount) of honey and milk. The feeling of a baby’s warm body, heavy with sleep, against your chest—his breathing steady and rhythmic, his soft and chubby fingers gently resting on your neck.
Read moreCREAMY PASTA WITH GREENS
Shocking as it may be, I don’t think I’ve ordered delivery pizza in my life—ever. I grew up far enough from any town (or grocery store or coffee shop or anything) that I doubt you could have gotten delivery even if you’d wanted to, although that’s an untested theory. In college, you only ate pizza late at night at at the campus center if you needed to soak up a substantial amount of beer and/or shots of tepid Southern Comfort and/or vodka mixed with cranberry juice, poured into sticky red Solo cups in the common room shared by four sophomore boys, the floor strewn in typical college-boy-fashion with all manner of lacrosse sticks and open bags of Doritos and a Martha’s Vineyard Black Dog sweatshirt and a stack of psychology textbooks and a scientific calculator and a pair of soccer cleats.
Read moreEXTRA-SPICY PUMPKIN BREAD
If you missed it, you should spend a few minutes reading this beautiful piece by Christopher Solomon (contributing editor at Outside magazine) that ran in the New York Times last month. It’s a meditation on the nagging worry of the impending winter and what it will bring this year.
He writes with a lilting, melodic style that brings you right into his moment, even if you’ve never been there yourself. Sentences like: “October’s yellow afternoons smell of winter at the edges. The soft ovation of the cottonwoods sends another round of leaves adrift on the water.” or “We put our hands on the still-warm granite of the climbing pitch rather than cook down the applesauce. We take ridgeline hikes among larch the color of struck matches when we should be at the work desk. We run for hours through the mountains without thought of tomorrow’s soreness, or the firewood left uncut. We tear at the days immoderately, like animals, and we wolf them down, hoping to fill a hole we see yawning ahead.”
Read moreGARLICKY BRAISED ESCAROLE + CHICKPEAS
One of the nicest smells in the world—in my humble opinion—is the scent of bread baking. It’s nice in all seasons, but especially in colder months. To walk into a bakery on a frigid snowy day, pushing open the door and stepping into the warm, yeasty-smelling air, is an extremely pleasurable moment. Other baking smells are enticing too, of course: cinnamon mingled with sugar or chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven or the steam rising when you slice into a loaf of freshly baked banana bread or the spicy kick of ginger and cloves in a square of moist gingerbread cake.
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