I don’t like honey mustard, but I love honey mixed with mustard. (Ask my husband.) Combine cubed sweet potatoes, quartered Brussel sprouts, and chunked onions onto a sheet pan with olive oil and S&P. Throw some bacon and Italian sausages in the mix. Roast at 425 degrees for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, mix 2 tablespoons of [...]
A seemingly innocent email from the United States Postal Service when we moved: Do you want to sign up for Informed Delivery? Sure, I thought, it will be nice to know what’s coming. Every day, I open an email with photos of what’s arriving (or not arriving) in my mailbox that day, a scanned digital [...]
The two best friends know this already, in fact, they’ve had more than 60 years of learning that there are things you just can’t plan for, like how many days you’ll spend playing nurse after the other recovers from surgery, for instance, but this one, well, this one is a new one: spending the day [...]
Today she gets to decide: push the vacuum up and down, or side to side? How does she want it to turn out? It's entirely up to her. She could even do a mix of both patterns, longways and sideways (if she wants) because she has complete power over the outcome. With every push and [...]
“Why are you using a good Sharpie pen to write a grocery list?” my husband asks. “Because I like how it writes,” I say. “Why waste a good pen?” “I care about how the grocery list looks.” (Why would I not select a smooth pink pen?) “Here, this is the pen,” he suggests, grabbing a [...]
A man in a red shirt drives a blue tractor through our neighboring green field. Our black-and-white cat sleeps under my chair, while the gray-spotted cat’s busy hunting a cardinal. An orange popsicle to cut through the thick July heat. If I look hard enough, I see more than the black that paints all of [...]
I lost my grocery list. Crumpled, half-folded, itemized secrets to eating and living. Blueberries Kale Flowers I forget. Omega-3s for joints, anti-inflammatory, immune-system-building ingredients. Back then, my elbows leaned on the cart as I crossed off essentials. But seasons change, it's gone, or it will resurface when the ice melts. Tonight: frozen pizza.
He chopped vegetables and slid thyme off stems, while I rubbed oil and shoved lemon into darkness. Six hours slow cooking and seven minutes kissing the broiler later, he dug the dull knife into the loose joints of our browned bird. Nauseated, I walked my ears away. (Sorry, Julia Child.)
ashley fenker 