Mornings are my favorite part of the day. I get up first and take the dogs outside, sometimes scooping them out of their crates and carrying 30 pounds of wiggling dogs out of the bedroom and downstairs. Sometimes the bigger dog sleeps in, and I only take the puppy down with me; I put her next to me on the couch and she’ll sleep another hour or so while I make coffee and do whatever I want. This is one of the things I like the very best about her.
This morning I finished reading Perfect Tunes and then I organized one of my recipe books. I have two, one from when I was single and one from after I got married. These books are designed for you to write recipes in them, but who is out here hand-copying recipes when you can just print them off of Al Gore’s internet? A lot of them are printed and many others are on Blue Apron cards. One is a scone recipe on the cardboard sleeve that came wrapped around my scone pan. An Asian-style barbecue pork recipe that I like and have made for years is part of a small booklet, bound with ribbon, that I got as part of a Michael Symon cooking class back when there were such things, held in the space above the original Lola in Tremont.
I stuff a lot of things into these books, things like instruction manuals for KitchenAid attachments. So they’re a mess. I didn’t throw away too much, but I put all the instruction books somewhere else (a drawer that I will also have to clean out at some point) and got rid of the Blue Apron recipes that I don’t remember making or eating, let alone liking enough to make again.
It’s interesting to see things I used to make all the time (vegan oatmeal cookies for a Bad News guy who I wanted very much to date, but never did) and the things I made and crossed out because they were terrible (clementine clafoutis I’m looking at you). I was definitely, definitely not a good cook in my 20s and there were many things I had no business doing, including cooking elaborate feasts for any kind of audience, let along a discerning one.
When I was in my 20s I invited a friend over for dinner to test out a recipe I wanted to make for a date. The recipe was something involving beef and a marinade that called for one clove of garlic. I got the marinade going several hours before my friend came over and when he arrived, he pulled the cover off of the dish and recoiled. “How much garlic is in this?” I told him a clove and by way of demonstration pulled another clove from the basket on my counter. You may have guessed already that I was mixing up clove and bulb of garlic. We ate the beef, but I don’t remember whether or not it was good, or if I ever made that recipe for the guy I had hoped to impress. (That guy barely had furniture in his apartment but he roasted an entire turkey every single Sunday so he could eat turkey sandwiches all week long. I should have shopped for dinner at the deli counter.)
Tonight we’re having Impossible Burgers, provided our grocery delivery arrives and that it includes the not-meat. We’re having a spell of warm weather at the moment that in reality is probably the very early stages of summer. (I consider 50 degrees and raining to be spring, because this is Ohio, but a lot of people whine about it.) I started wearing my flip flops around the house yesterday instead of a pair of socks or slippers and it felt, as it always does, clumsy and wrong. One day soon they will just be extensions of my feet. It’s a yearly tradition!
I think the puppy can probably go for a short walk today. I mean she’s clearly capable of this but I have no desire to prolong this recovery period by overdoing it. I think the first day she can go back to daycare I am going to try and find someplace to just go and be by myself for a while. I have heard parents, mothers in particular, talk about being “touched out” by the end of the day and I feel something akin to that. I am ready for there to be spaces in our togetherness again. It’s either that or just give up and put her in a Baby Bjorn.