Lately I’ve been drinking an alarming amount of coffee.
I know — me, the person who used to say I “hate” coffee. Apparently I don’t anymore. I wanted to feel cool drinking coffee like everyone else, so now I am: cool, wired, and a little jittery.
If you don’t follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you might not know that since last fall I’ve been quietly working on a book. Not a novel — though I’m dabbling with one — but a proper cookbook. Developing recipes that felt worthy of sharing was harder than I expected. I’m picky about what I put in front of you; if I don’t think it’s excellent, it doesn’t make the cut.
The good news: the book is essentially finished (after scrapping roughly 300 recipes) and late next year I’ll be sharing a collection of new, quick, mostly healthy recipes. Yes, some will include bacon — my version of healthy definitely allows for bacon. If that doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay.
The bad news: my house has become a disaster. Not filthy, exactly, but overwhelmingly cluttered. It’s reached the point where I don’t even know where to start cleaning. I go to bed and wake up hoping a magical cleaning fairy handled it overnight. And no, I don’t even have kids — so this level of chaos is purely self-inflicted.
As a small aside: some days I put on a lot of fancy makeup just because I enjoy playing with it. No surprise there.
In addition to the ridiculous coffee intake, I mentioned earlier this week that I’d been “eating like a teenage boy,” which is a polite way to describe devouring whatever looked best in the moment. On a recent travel day we ate pulled pork tacos for breakfast, grabbed a donut at the airport, had a Five Guys burger after landing, and then at midnight tried a Primanti’s sandwich — if you haven’t had one, it’s worth the hype.
After expecting my heart to revolt, I tried to redeem myself by buying a green juice at Whole Foods and telling myself I’d start the week off right. It was awful — truly gag-inducing. I reacted like I’d never tasted anything so terrible. Maybe it’s unsurprising given my complicated relationship with vegetables, but I’ve actually made progress eating more of them lately. Still, that juice did not help my case.
I don’t understand how people drink that stuff regularly. Maybe I’ll warm up to green juice the way I eventually warmed up to coffee.
Also — a somewhat vain confession — I wore some bedazzled, very flashy shoes recently and wondered afterward if thirty might be too old for them. I decided I didn’t care and kept wearing them anyway.
Earlier this year I half-heartedly trained for a half marathon, thinking it might help me avoid packing on the cookbook pounds. Spoiler: I quit. I genuinely dislike running. I’d much rather walk or spend 45 minutes on an elliptical or a spin bike. Life’s too short to force yourself to do something you hate every day.
About the photo above: don’t mind the zigzag craft scissors — I’m not great at crafts and they’re leftover from a scrapbook kit I couldn’t part with. For the past eight months, that view and my kitchen have been my main companions, along with a lot of iTunes playlists and DVR’d TV shows. I love the work, but interacting with you has kept me sane. Thank you — I really appreciate you.