two months without you, dear readers. i come back with a recap of summer and a heap of ideas for the seasons ahead. i come back with flashy photographs of salads, convinced i shall finally prove the seduction of strewn-just-so-vegetables. and i come back to you with a metal mixing bowl full of tuna salad anointed with leftover goldfish crackers from thing 1's lunch, perched right beside my laptop. glamorous, no?
i'd like to think my creativity oozes from me like juice from an overripe peach. actually, it moves through cycles. i've been holding my breath. i've been green. in the meantime, i've cooked. like a mad woman, i've cooked. but i didn't write. i turned many shining sweet peppers into charred up things, and at the end of the day, i slept and waited for today to come.
today i have the courage to tell you how moved i can get by a kitchen tool. i think about its creator, and wonder if they knew the simple pleasure many would derive from its form and function. today i am grateful my heart is the type that gets equally gripped by a whisk as a cloudless night sky.
today there is nothing more pressing than writing this. the most crucial item on the agenda is remembering when my freshman year roommate and her fiance visited me this summer and i got up early to bake them grapefruit-honey-yogurt scones before we swam in the ocean.
today there are a couple (or more) bags of kettle corn from the leucadia farmers market to remember, if only to affirm my complete powerlessness with respect to them. is there any graceful way to eat kettle corn? excuse me for a moment only, but i can't get that shit into my mouth fast enough. today i've determined kettle corn should be a controlled substance.
today might also be the day to admit that groove food went quiet because i simply made spaghetti with cherry tomatoes over and over again all summer. it is a recipe so powerful i could probably milk a dozen or more posts out of it alone, but then i'd risk being branded the crazy spaghetti with cherry tomatoes lady. it's up there with the crazy cat lady, but with copious garlic involved.
while i was away i made sandwiches, and someone visited this site and used google to translate its content to portugese. i learned that in brazil, this blog is called "sulco de alimentos." glamourous enough to excuse the tuna salad/goldfish combo, right? the version of me that dones string bikinis on beaches in ipanema also wrote this sentence: "inebriante, mesmo." if you say it out loud it kind of sounds like warm caramel.
i also thought a lot about recipes i want to share with you. at the end of the day, when i've loaded and unloaded thing 1 & thing 2 and all their gear multiple times and cooked for families other than my own, i want nothing more than to curl up with a bowl of greek yogurt and convince myself that it can pass as dinner. but really, i want a stack of recipes that are easy and fast enough for moments like those, that also remind me of the pleasures of eating. i'm going to find and create those recipes for both of us.
i've also had this picture to share with you. a moment from my friend ryan's 30th birthday. jack meets grass-fed lamb chops. it might be my favorite food picture yet. thank you, always and forever, jack.
i've had so much to share with you, but i forgot how to start.
i wanted to urge you to find an orange tree and pick an armful that are still warm from the sun. juice them right away and drink up. wherever you are, that's your new memory. mine was at my grandmother's house on a sunday in july.
there's just a few more things: while i was away, my father turned 60 and this blog turned one! there was pecan-cornmeal-brown butter cake and a revisit to my most visited post. there was the alarming and satisfying realization that i'm finally doing what i set out to do: share with you about cooking and eating and life. happy birthday, groove food.
so, lastly, thank you. thank you for cooking shrimp with black rice and coconut milk and telling me how much you loved it. thank you for writing me that you missed the recipes. thank you for being an audience as i muse over just-picked raspberries and my six-year-old savoring homemade pizza. i remain convinced that one of the greatest pleasures of a meal is talking about it.