Pink of Perfection

On Sunday afternoon, Sebastian and I took a walk through Prospect Park and saw a father playing badminton with his daughter. Her serves kept going straight into the ground, and as we passed, he marched up to her. “If what you keep doing isn’t working, trying something different.” He was kind of a jerk about it, but his message was sound. I mean, he was paraphrasing Einstein, after all.

So I tried something different this week. Instead of looking for increasingly shortened recipes––dinner in 20, 15, 5 minutes!––I tried a chef’s approach of mise en place, thanks to a an article in Whole Living. After our walk, I came back to the kitchen (where the lightbulb burned out as I flipped it on––isn’t that always the way?) and turned on the oven for the first time in I-can’t-remember-how-long. It felt good to settle into an unhurried kitchen rhythm: stirring a pot, reducing a sauce, seasoning a chicken. I had forgotten about the quiet hum of productivity that can happen in while you’re cooking, how the busy work with your hands can help your mind be quiet for a bit.

This summer, I traded in my chef’s knife for a swimming cap. Fluttering kicks and land breathing hard at the end of the lane became another way to escape all the chattery thoughts of the day. But with the light changing, the kitchen feels like a welcome place to be again.

It felt good to chop, wipe down the kitchen counter, and set water to boiling. And the results? A roasted chicken, cut into pieces; a huge tray of chopped eggplant, tomatoes, and thyme roasted alongside the bird; a crazy good raisin vinaigrette, cauliflower purée, and figs in balsamic glaze (fancy!).

These pieces all came together in different ways: a lunch of quinoa, roasted vegetables, and a bit of feta tossed in the golden raisin vinaigrette; a dinner of roast chicken, polenta and balsamic-glazed figs; an autumn salad of chopped kale, shredded chicken, and more of that crazy good vinaigrette. All week, there was something so satisfying about knowing those bits and bobs were in there, like the assurance of having a wardrobe of really solid, stylish basics, and realizing they can be combined in near-infinite ways. (At least that’s what the magazines tell me.)

Continue reading “Building Blocks and Baby Steps” »

Tomorrow is the official beginning of fall, but the new season changed for me with my book club’s “last hurrah of summer” weekend trip to Cape Cod. It was like a last gasp. We walked down to the beach on Saturday, and the early September air made sitting in the sand in your bathing suit just a little too cold. We braved the water anyway, and swam far out past the kelp to discuss our book in a water-treading circle. Some of us turned back after that, to get a closer look at the seersucker-and-boat-shoe wedding happening back on shore, but a few of us swam out to a sandbar. The swim warmed us up, and the shallow felt warmer. I could have sat in the sun on there all afternoon: fingers and toes in the sand, hair whipping dry in the wind, talking with my dear friend. And had she not spotted the tiny, translucent jellyfish surrounding us, we might have. We had tingly fingers later, but we survived, and it’s still one of my favorite memories of the summer.

The whole weekend felt a little like that: wonderfully fun, but a little bittersweet. And isn’t that always the way when summer ends? The air was just a little too crisp, the sunlight just a little too soft. We all knew the seasons were changing, and that work waited for us at the end of our six-hour drive back home. And until Sunday, I was almost convinced of charade, dancing into the wee hours, and having a beach picnic (champagne + pepper jelly and cream cheese = heaven), breaking into big, gorgeous lobsters at dinner and drinking rosé like it was still humid July. But morning Sunday broke and the jig was up.

Once I got over my initial resistance––and that is always my way––fall felt good. Women broke out their tall boots, my coffee went from iced to hot, apples had new appeal, and I saw a little boy on a street corner wearing plaid and holding a football. Suddenly, that soft light seemed downright enchanting.

A year ago this fall, my life felt very different. I had so much free time, and I used it to write, to cook, to make playlists, to go to the library and buy dahlias. It was a very, very nice way to live, and it gave me lots of lovely things to share here. But as the year drew to a close and we started talking about what we wanted in the new one, I knew what I needed next: fullness. I had spent the past two years living quietly, and it seemed high time to turn up the volume. I was used to the breathing room of free hours, but I wanted to fill my life right up to the edges.

That saying about being careful with your wishing? Yeah, it’s cliché for a reason.

Continue reading “Telling Truths” »

My, does it feel good to be home. But it always feels a little awkward coming back: walking through your own front door to a strangely quiet house, reappearing at work, resurfacing on your own blog. (Hi! I missed you!) I was away longer than expected. Hurricane Irene wreaked airport havoc just as we should have been boarding our flight home, and we couldn’t get home for another week. That was certainly an exercise in letting go.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We went to Washington to attend a wedding, the kind that takes place in a 1930s summer, where you’re greeted with an ice cream social and the groom processes to the alter with his ecstatic trombone leading a ragtag marching band. We arrived a week early to drive up to the San Juan Islands and settle ourselves into a cottage on a bay. You know how whipped into a fever life can get right before a vacation? You’re aching for a break, but there are nine thousand details to attend to before you can even head to the airport.

As soon as we walked into this tiny little cottage and I sat down, looked out past the birds in the front yard and onto the water, those tight-fisted stress knots in my shoulders and brain loosened and dissolved. Salt air can do that. I read in the mornings and did yoga on the front deck. I hiked steep mountain paths through the woods, and bought dungeness crabs, clams, and oysters from the seafood operation down the road. They kept a very gorgeous red rooster strutting around the front yard and a bouquet of dahlias on the counter. In the evenings, the hot tub, a glass of wine, and my very juicy Ava Gardner biography awaited. We cooked on the grill and ate outside, and I fell asleep in the sunshine. Even a rainy day felt right. We sat by the fire and ate chocolate chip cookies with our books on our laps, a ukulele and a guitar at our feet.

All that relaxing set the stage to ride the ferry back to the mainland and point our car toward the wedding. We sat in an arc of chairs in front of the water on a day bright with sunshine and expectation. We listened as two dear friends and very kind, special people shared the most honest, thoughtful vows I’ve ever heard. Wedding ceremonies so often get caught up in promises hard to visualize. What does what you’re saying look like in real life, like, on a crappy Tuesday when it’s raining and you don’t have any clean socks? These vows were as much about love and support as living a life that meant something together––starting now. They spoke about the everyday and their promise to show up each morning––to make it fun, to work hard, to keep being curious, to be creative, to cook. I wanted to say, I do, too. Instead, I cried behind my sunglasses and squeezed Sebastian’s hands, and thought of all the ways I wanted to keep showing up in my own life. I realized with a bitter pang, one of those knots reappearing in my throat, just how absent I had been.

The wonderful thing about weddings is how often they encourage everyone present to make their own commitments. When a couple is brave enough to take a giant leap together into the unknown, and you are witness to their nervous smiles, their cracking voices––it always makes me want to love better. But this wedding made me want to live better. I came to vacation worn-down, exhausted, barely myself. My friends stood in front of their family and friends looking so excited. They reminded me of the adventure of life, especially in its most quiet, quotidian moments. There’s magic there, if we make it. On that incredible day, we all ate and laughed and danced to Michael Jackson into the night. But I knew part of them couldn’t wait to get back to their kitchen table, the desks, their garden out front. I couldn’t either.

Just dropping in for a quick note to say I’m taking the rest of August off for a much-needed adventure. See you back here in September! I hope the rest of your summer is lazy, sweet, and absolutely delicious.

xoxo
Sarah

I don’t know Jennie. But I know the reliable warmth of her writing and her creative recipes, and I’ve thought about her more this week that many of my real-life friends. Jennie’s husband died.

Just writing that makes me feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.

People like me, who love Jennie through the fibers of the internet, have felt achingly helpless. But I read her lastest post and felt grateful for some direction:

For those asking what they can do to help my healing process, make a peanut butter pie this Friday and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there’s no tomorrow because today is the only guarantee we can count on.

Pie I can do.

I went to the grocery store this morning for the ingredients, and came home to bake. I tried to be mindful as I was mixing. Before this unimaginable news, I had been thinking about what it means to be married, how to share your life with someone and uphold the promises you make. I had been wondering about timing, and when to take the next steps in life. When is it time to buy a house? To have a baby? To take that trip we’ve been putting off? As I botched the cookie crust and struggled to spread the melted chocolate I thought, This is love. Making mistakes and making a mess. And extending the whole sticky mess as an offering.

If we walked around all the time, aware that at any moment our time with the people we love most could almost be up, it would drive us insane. So there must be some line we can walk, one where we are filled up with gratitude and so much joy for how lucky we are, but without making ourselves crazy over how fragile life is.

The pie smells delicious, and it’s sitting in the refrigerator right now. Tonight I’ll carry it upstate on a long train ride, resting securely on my lap. I’ll cut into the whole mess and watch it fall apart when the crust doesn’t hold, then pass out slices to old friends and my guy. And then we’ll dig in.

Time’s a wastin’.

Continue reading “Jennie’s Peanut Butter Pie” »

I woke up this morning feeling totally over food. These days, if there were a pill I could take to keep hunger at bay, I would. (The closest fix: hard-boiled eggs.) And it occurred to me later, as my hunger pangs got louder, that in all the hours spent assembling a weekly meal plan puzzle with economy and creativity, I could have become a virtuoso at guitar, or planned a trip to Scandinavia, or finished Remembrance of Things Past. Anything grand and time-consuming: I could have done it.

As long as this feeling persists (which is likely in direct proportion to my need for a vacation), I am stripping dinner of its expectations. Dinner will not be the highlight of my day. It will not reaffirm my faith in humanity or convince me of the transformative power of a leaf of basil. It will just be a way to get un-hungry and to hang out with my husband for twenty minutes at the end of the hot day.

Am I the only one who gets swept up in what dinner can be, what it “ought” to be?

It must be from reading too much M. F. K. Fisher and thinking that a just-so picnic of cold chicken and warm berry pie is an integral element to falling in love or finding your way. Or seeing Alice Waters make things look sumptuously simple. I can do that, I think; I need to do that. It’s like that smartly-titled Meghan Daum book, Life Would be Better if I Lived in That House. Only, life would be better if I ate that for dinner.

And when you have looked at spreadsheets all day or been on conference calls, it’s easy to see why the romance of food––of the just-so dinner––can be so appealing. It’s so often our one time each day to get creative, to get out of our minds and into the tactile world of knives and peach fuzz and hot, spitting grills.

But it’s also just dinner.

This might sound painfully obvious, but cooking, sitting down to a meal, feeding people we love––it can’t get out of proportion to the other ways life gets its meaning, like laughing really hard right before bed or surprising someone with something really loving or singing in tight three-part harmony. I forgot my own feelings about what matters: that connecting and creativity are just as important as cooking. Duh.

So this feels like a weight has been lifted! And now we are looking at nights of tuna macaroni salads and tomato sandwiches, both made with mayonnaise from the jar. The next day I will likely pick up a rotisserie chicken. And I feel really, really good about that.

Do you ever get that over-food feeling? And then what do you end up making for dinner? What gets more of your attention when you take the focus off food?

Last week, there was a morning breeze so cool through the window I made hot coffee instead of iced. That alone would have been enough to make me feel quiet and a little wistful, but then I heard the cicadas. They send me right back to the summer I fell in love, kissing on lonely country road, the skirt of my sundress fluttering around my knees in the breeze. The cicadas were the soundtrack.

And, though less romantic, that morning air reminded me of the last time I dared to turn on the oven, when the steam outside wasn’t itself like an oven . I made this recipe from the Barefoot Contessa, who I’ve rhapsodized about before. This recipe, like the last, was no disappointment. Simple, special, a little subtle, and tasting sweetly of sunny days by a Grecian sea (go with it): fresh shrimp, feta, fennel, lemon and oregano. We slid a tray of asparagus spears in alongside the main dish in the oven, and placed a hunk of sunflower bread on the table, and really, now that I think about it: that was pretty romantic, too.

What are you making this weekend?

Continue reading “Roasted Shrimp with Feta and Oregano” »

I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. ––Audrey Hepburn

Don’t you love when someone sends you something––a card in the mail, a text, a link––at exactly the right time? That is what happened to me on Friday, when I felt July weighing heavy on me and wanted to get out from under its thumb. My coworker sent me a link to Tonya Leigh’s blog post, The Life Seduction Challenge. Tonya’s list made me feel instantly better about everything, and it made me want to share a similar challenge here, but with a Pink of Perfection twist. That is, finding the delight and beauty in the everyday.

And the whole fun experiment feels right: here we are with a fresh new month, ready to be made into something a little more fabulous. Need a little spring in your step? Every day for one month choose one item off the list. And for thirty-one days in August (or whenever you decide to get going), feel life get a little more luscious. I’m in!

1. Give something broken a new life (a skirt, a squeaky wheel, scuffed shoes).
2. Put something beautiful on a bit of blank wall you see every day.
3. Wear something you love that you think “just isn’t you.”
4. Send a thank you note, for anything.
5. Spend an afternoon reading.
6. Cook in a vintage apron.
7. Have luncheon: a slow midday meal with cloth napkins and wine.
8. Go out of your way to do something kind for a stranger (offer a seat, hold the door, leave your copy of Us Weekly on the elliptical).
9. Donate five items from your closet that don’t make you feel unstoppably gorgeous.
10. Take care of a nagging life admin item (a trip to the post office, filing an insurance claim, making a doctor’s appointment).
11. Buy an utterly frivolous piece of lingerie.
12. Invite friends over for cocktails, dinner, or brunch.
13. Wake up an hour early to have a leisurely morning.
14. Try something that looks like pure fun (accordion, crochet, burlesque).
15. Dance. In public, in the living room, with a partner, with yourself.
16. Flirt with a stranger. (Smiling counts.)
17. Get rid of five things in your home that don’t bring you pleasure.
18. Go to a parfumerie or department store in search of a signature scent.
19. Buy flowers for your home or office.
20. Make a recipe from a fruit, vegetable, meat or fish you’ve never cooked before.
21. Walk barefoot in the grass or on the sand.
22. Have a media-free day.
23. Write down everything you feel grateful for.
24. Hold a baby.
25. Pet a puppy.
26. Ask someone to tell you their life story.
27. Read a biography of your favorite glamorous screen star, or the bravest, most badass real life heroine.
28. Eat fresh berries, straight from the green paper pint.
29. Create an occasion to wear your most impractical pair of shoes.
30. Write down your wildest dreams.
31. Take one itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy step to make one real.
32. Have a proper weekday coffee break: ceramic cup, idle gossip, and staring out a window.
33. Visit a playground and swing.
34. Make lemonade. (Literally or figuratively.)
35. Go to a junk or antique story; consider what your favorite object has seen in its life.
36. Jump in a body of water. Float.
37. Give someone a hug; let them let go first.
38. Look at the stars.
39. Replace one utilitarian item you use every day––a measuring spoon, a file folder, a key chain––with something really, really beautiful.
40. Pamper your body with a massage, an overdue haircut, a trip to the sauna, or a soak in the tub.
41. Research something that sparks your curiosity (Arthurian legend, photosynthesis, investing). If you’re still curious after a 15-minute google session, dive deeper.
42. Make a collage of beautiful images that resonate with you.
43. Read aloud to someone you love.
44. Forgive yourself.
45. Forgive someone else.
46. Spend an hour in silent reflection.
47. Dine by candlelight on a weeknight.
48. Take a walk after dinner.
49. Wear your no-fail, cheer-me-up lipstick.
50. Give a genuine compliment to an acquaintance.
51. Have a glass of champagne, just because.
52. Spend one day taking pictures of everything you find beautiful.
53. Describe your perfect day in writing.
54. Block out an afternoon (or day) on the calendar to make some (or all) of it real.
55. Select one drawer or surface and organize it.
56. Write a love letter.
57. Do something you loved as a child.
58. Upgrade your sleep wear, or go Marilyn-style.
59. Do the one thing you were relieved/sad wasn’t on this list.
60. Pretend for one day that you are as confident and amazing as you want to be.

Special thanks to Tonya Leigh for the inspiration (and several of the ideas on this list)!

Update: Wonderful Pink of Perfection reader Sarah and my blogosphere kindred spirit put together a wonderful printable of this list overlaid on that irresistible Audrey Hepburn image. Print and enjoy!