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 moreSTRAWBERRY CHIA PUDDING
On Sunday I find myself sitting outside at the patio table with a mug of English Breakfast tea, doctored with a liberal amount of oat milk and Savannah Bee Company honey. The air is humid and pregnant with the promise of a thunderstorm—the word that comes to mind is languid. Every so often, a few drops of rain sprinkle the surface of the table and I duck inside before realizing it’s a false alarm.
I used to love reading the “Sunday Routine” column in the New York Times, in which they’d profile a prominent city citizen about their Sunday habits. I do realize that I am neither prominent nor a city citizen any longer, and you didn’t actually request to hear the details of my Sunday, but here we are, so let’s hope you’re a curious and captive audience!
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