Pink of Perfection

• One of my projects for the new year is to give my cubicle a makeover. If I can’t manage to get together all the ingredients myself, I’m loving these terrarium kits on Etsy.

• Have you tried whole parsley leaves in your salads (as in this kale salad)? In winter salads, its fresh grassiness is a revelation. Pictured above (from left to right): fennel, red onion, and parsley salad; winter salad with lemon-yogurt dressing

• Have you ever taken an e-course? Have you wanted to? I’m taking Susannah Conway’s Unravelling course and loving it, and my mind’s been percolating away at what a Pink of Perfection e-course would look like. Would you be interested? What would you want to see covered? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

• I’ve been searching for a Cathrineholm teapot, and this might be a perfect stand-in until I find the perfect one. (How much do you love that the name of this Etsy store is During Quiet Time?)

• Do you know of a charity that helps provide low-income girls and young women with access to tutors, mentors, college scholarship money, and other resources that help level the educational playing field? Please tell me–Pink of Perfection wants to give them money!

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” »

My mom always had a knack for parties. There was my dress-as-your-favorite Barbie birthday party (peaches and cream, naturally) and, before my time, the teddy bear picnic my sister still talks about. But one of my happiest childhood memories was the cookie swap we had one Christmas. I remember the rustling plaid taffeta of little girl party dresses and our dining room table covered with cookies and three-tiered silver trays. That was when I tried my first rosette, brought by a classmate and her grandmother: light as air, whisper thin, and dusted with powdered sugar. I was in heaven.

Without the grand silver and taffeta party atmosphere, a soup swap is founded on the same idea: every attendee brings something and gets to go home with something else. In this case, I piggybacked on my book club meeting (Angle of Repose, if you’re curious), and asked everyone to bring two 4-cup containers of soup.  We then went around in a circle, each person nabbing their first soup choice. Then we reversed the order of picking for the second choice.

I love the feeling of a wholesome meal just waiting and ready to go in the freezer. In fact, my second favorite part of making soup is freezing half of it (who says you can’t have your soup and eat it, too?). But there is something especially nice when someone else has made that meal that waiting for you, nearly as comforting as when your mother tricks out your freezer herself. Because of our soup swap, I had a wonderfully spicy chicken sausage, chard, and black-eyed pea soup one day when the cupboards were bare. And still, a a vegetable soup awaits for some night when exhaustion and hunger rule with an iron fist. In other words, some night very soon.

If it seems like a stretch to call a meatloaf French, I hope you’ll permit the reach. Fennel and apple seem like a dignified way to class up this ’50s housewife favorite, and did I mention the gruyère? That practically makes it bona fide.

I’ve had two meatloaf recipes in life that were worth repeating. This one, and one that seemed a little Continental with its inclusion of prunes. (Am I saying that a recipe is “French” if it’s got that savory-with-fruit thing going on? Who knows.) I was introduced to that recipe where I get a lot of my good food ideas: book club.

Which brings me, tangentially, to the pleasures of belonging to a social club. Are you guys in book clubs? Are there women you meet for tea and knitting, to talk about wine, to practice yoga together, or to swap mixtapes? It doesn’t really matter what the impetus is that brings you together (though a shared interest certainly leads to sustained enthusiasm when the meeting falls on a cold, rainy night in February). What matters is the idea incubator and mutual support that happens when you’re together. We talk about the book or cast on our stitches and then the real meeting comes to order: someone needs to talk about job hunting, getting over a broken heart, how to redo the kitchen, or just inexplicably having a bad case of the blues. Not to get all red tent, ’70s consciousness-raising on you, but something powerful happens when women come together like this.

My college experience had an idea-incubator quality to it among my female friends that made me hunger for the same experience in the real world. It turns out, though, that grown-up life isn’t naturally set up to foster this kind of togetherness. We all live separately, cordoned off in our own snug little homes, working away in our individual cubicle corrals, sweating silently side-by-side on the treadmills at the gym. Yet that sense of connecting, of being understood, of belonging to a group that likes each other and spends time together because they elect to––not because they’re receiving a paycheck at week’s end or share the same DNA––that experience can bring so much meaning to the day-in, day-out experience of waking up, punching in, and slogging through. A sense of community can sustain us through so much.

I spent the days leading up to New Year’s Eve in a white farmhouse in Wisconsin. There were eight of us, and three people cooked side by side in the kitchen, passing behind each other, crossing arms to reach pots on the stove, compromising on oven temperatures. Then we would sit down at the long table, folded paper towels under our knives, wine in Anchor Hocking teacups, and eat. I realized then, just clear as day, that one of my greatest pleasures in life is sitting down to a meal at a table filled with people.

“This is just what it would feel like to be in a really big family,” someone––maybe me––said. “Yeah,” came the expected quip, “except we would all hate each other.”

This is all to say: I hope you find a spot of community this weekend, whether elected or familial, and share a meal together. Maybe even this meatloaf.

Continue reading “French Friday: Fennel and Apple Meatloaf” »

In our house, we keep time capsules. It’s our way of dealing with life’s most excruciating moments. So, whenever things get really bad and unbearable, we sit down and right about three things: 1) what we’re unhappy about now, 2) what we’re grateful for in spite of the bad stuff and 3) what we hope for in the next twelve months. Then we seal the envelope and write on the outside in big cautionary letters, “Not to be opened before [the date 12 months hence].”

We’ve been writing time capsules since December of 2004, a cold winter when we felt desperate: I had just moved to New York. I was achingly lonely, afraid of my boss, so terrified of screwing up at work that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I missed my friends from college, I had $40 a week to spend on things other than groceries, and my boyfriend lived far away in New Jersey, his car having just sputtered to its final death, steam pouring out of its hood on a dark country road.

That first time capsule always makes us laugh when we read it now. The center of our disappointed world was that broken-down Bronco. But Sebastian would soon move 10 blocks south of me in Brooklyn, and I would grow to deeply admire my boss and even make a friend or two. I sound so very young and unsure of myself, and reading it makes me grateful for the aging process, despite these new fine lines I’ve noticed at the corner of my eyes. The time capsule is like a snapshot of exactly where you are in a moment in time, like those treasured old photographs of your parents, picnicking by a river and still so in love.

We recently split the seal on a time capsule from this time last year, and the picture was grim: I didn’t know where my next paycheck was coming from, I sounded untethered and uninspired. What struck me most of all was the sad, mournful timbre to the time capsule: I sounded lonely.

I got an email from a new-ish friend a few weeks ago. For the past year we’ve been getting to know each other over oysters and Monday morning emails. She was counting her blessings, she said, and thanking me for my part in hers. I’m embarrassed to say that her thank you reminded me of just how many people have played a part in my being in a much happier, hopeful place this year. I’ve got a lot of thanking to do.

What I needed in 2004 and this time last year was a community. I needed a circle of women to talk my head off with, who would help me see things from a different perspective, introduce me to new writers and new ideas, friends who would listen to my tales of woe and then make me laugh about them. But these things take time to develop, especially if you’ve got sky-high expectations for what community and friendship should feel like. Six years after moving to New York and starting my grown-up life, that community is clicking into place in a way that makes me feel so different about my life.

We forget to tell our friends how much they mean to us. It feels cheesy and florid and overwrought. So we wait until we’ve had too much to drink or someone’s getting married to let it all pour out in an urgent outpouring. The people in my life don’t need scented soaps and gift certificates: they need to be thanked. You’re first.

I love this space, not because I hold forth and blab about cookies and cocktails, but because of the community here. It’s like––to speak in television terms––the Peach Pit or the Double R Diner. I always know someone’s going to be sitting at the counter, ready to bust out with something pithy, wise, or funny. It’s really the best, and something I thank my lucky stars for.

Here’s wishing you all a relaxed, love-and-eggnog-filled holiday, with lots of pajamas, good food, winter walks, and so much laughing your belly aches.

And thank you.

Who knows what you win, exactly, but I love the sentiment of this cross stitch print like mad and could see it inspiring a craft of my own, very likely complete with a pronoun change.

Available at the Keep Calm Gallery