I was planning to write about icebox cakes today, but as I sat down outside with my tea to start writing, I couldn’t summon the words. The temperature dropped overnight and there’s a gentle but firm breeze; the sky is overcast and the humidity has abated for now—it feels strangely like fall, or rather, like that brief string of days that teeter between summer and fall, when it’s warm enough for shorts but there’s a definite crispness to the air, as if the promise of sharpened pencils and new notebooks and apple cider and woodsmoke and flannel shirts and Halloween candy is hiding just around the bend.
Read moreBITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE ESPRESSO SABLES
I start to drink coffee in earnest when I graduate from college. At my first job—as an intro-level advertising associate—I caffeinate like a real New Yorker: like a ritual, like sustenance as useful as dinner. I take the elevator up to the 20th floor of a sprawling, faded building smack in the middle of Times Square and drop my bag, stuffed with running shoes and a dog-eared novel and tangled headphones, onto my desk. I quickly make my way past rows of open cubicles to my friend Caroline’s desk: identical to mine with its jumble of candy-colored pens and tubes of chapsticks and piles of paper all askew, printed with months’ worth of status reports, their rows of Excel data marching endlessly across the white pages.
Read morePISTACHIO CARDAMOM CUPCAKES
It’s awfully nice to have things to look forward to. Anticipation is so much of what drives a pleasurable life—it’s the forward-thinking cousin of nostalgia. Because we aren’t able to eagerly await many of the normal events lately (travel, vacations, weddings, parties, meeting a random stranger, ANYTHING BASICALLY), we have to craft our own excitements.
Read moreBUTTERY HERB CRACKERS
Traveling has been a given for so much of my life—and I’ve been thinking about it lately, in the way we’re all wont to fixate on things we can’t have (at least, in this case, for the foreseeable future). I’ve been so lucky to visit far-flung places starting at a young age. And there have been plenty of adventures closer to home too, thanks to an ever-rotating roster of family vacations. We’ve flown in big commercial jets and wobbly prop planes or driven hours in our old blue Volvo to get to places like the tiny island of Pine Cay or the waterfalls in Hilton Head or the turquoise shoals of the British Virgin Islands or the cool, piney forests of the Poconos. We’ve hiked and biked and kayaked and sunbathed.
Read moreDARK CHOCOLATE RYE COOKIES
As I wrote about books here the other day, I remembered a passage from this novel, wherein a mother is reassuring her daughter about her worries over her upcoming wedding, pointing out that her preoccupations with seating charts and china patterns aren’t important. But not because those things aren’t as big as family and love and health. Small things do matter—the right kind of small things.
Read more