"Diane, if you ever get up this way, that cherry pie is worth a stop."
These past couple of weeks, Thomas and I have been watching old episodes of Twin Peaks. There is something so soothing about re-watching TV shows. It makes me feel safe. Warm, even. I may have trouble watching the same movie twice, but I certainly don't mind sitting through entire series of a variety of TV shows again and again.
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"I want to make these!"
It was November 1995 and my aunt Annette - an altogether wonderful human being with a wry sense of humor that I'm sure she, like most of her siblings, inherited from my grandmother - had just given me a copy of Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes as a birthday present. It was a perfect gift and I leafed through the book with great eagerness and attention, immediately feeling the strange appeal of Quentin Blake's illustrations as they pulled me into the fantastical worlds that I loved so dearly.
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Everything starts with breakfast. Eating breakfast is one of the first things we do - one of the first decisions we make - and every breakfast offers new chances and opportunities. A chance to do better than the day before, to eat healthier or to be more conscious about what our body needs and what we put in our mouth in response. We are told over and over again that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and while I do believe that a balanced and nutritious breakfast is crucial to a healthy lifestyle, breakfast to me is more about a moment than it is about a meal.
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They were like jewels. Wrapped up in a box of gold, shiny, mysterious. Some were adorned with a medallion-like disc, others had a little bulge on top - the promise of a sweet and crunchy nut inside. I knew not to touch the ones in shiny, colorful paper. Their insides, runny and spiked with liqueur, were sure to make me shiver and cringe. But there was one ...
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Our Saturday market is busier than ever. As we walk to the square where it is held, we come across people with bulging bags of produce, bouquets wrapped in kraft paper, delicate little zucchini and tomato plants ready to be put into the nourishing soil of their gardens. The weather isn't perfect, but spring is in the air [...]
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She drinks tea like I drink water.
For as long as I can remember, my mother's presence and activities in the house have been marked by the location of her tea pot. She used to carry it around on a worn-down wooden serving tray that bore traces of green and orange paint and was filled with tea lights and other trinkets. In between the candy wrappers and the used matches you'd find tiny notepads, pens, paper scraps, coins, toothpicks and, if you were lucky, a small piece of chocolate [...]
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