Notes on domestic life

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had chapped lips. It was probably a combination of my stupid habit of rubbing my lips together when I’m nervous, which happened all the time at gymnastics practice (not to mention continuously drinking from my water bottle), and playing wind instruments growing up. It seemed that I could never get enough Chapstick on my lips, so I started carrying a tube around in my jeans pocket all the time. The days that I forgot it or lost it to the dryer meant dry, peeling, cracked ugliness, and those were the times that I would say to myself that when I finally grew up and had my own place, I would stock every room with Chapstick so that I was never more than an arm’s reach away from one. I had forgotten that until recently, and the day after I recounted my dream to Josh, he showed up at my place with a three-pack of Chapstick whose contents we have since divided and stashed around my apartment. It’s glorious.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about food. I’ve been thinking to myself that I should really make more of an effort to eat more healthfully and eat a wider variety of foods. Enter my bread machine. It was a gift from my dad several birthdays ago, and I used it a couple times in Houston and once in Boston, but mostly it sat in its cardboard/styrofoam home on top of the cupboards. But several weeks ago, I was inspired to make stuff from scratch, so I pulled it out again and baked a loaf of whole wheat bread. I did this several times, and the loaves always came out fine, but the recipe constantly wavered somewhere between slightly off (fresh) and downright gross (week-old). Over the weekend I finally discovered that it’s because the whole wheat recipe uses molasses instead of sugar. Blech. Molasses doesn’t belong in bread. So I tried the basic white loaf (which uses sugar) and substituted one cup of whole wheat flour for one cup of the white flour. Yum! The only thing I’m going to do differently next time is reduce the salt. The bread machine is officially in business.

Still on my kick, I went to the library today and checked out a Cooking Light cookbook titled 5-Ingredient 15-Minute Cookbook. Perfect for people like me for whom anything more than boiling pasta water is “a lot of work” for dinner. It’s quick (duh), healthy (duh), there’s a picture of every recipe, they suggest side dishes to go with each meal, and they even write out a grocery list for you. Yeah, I know… how lazy can you get… but trust me, I need all the help I can get.

I’ve also discovered a hidden benefit to quasi-living with someone else – there’s more inspiration to cook because you won’t have mountains of leftovers, and – AND – there’s someone else to split the work! I usually “cook” dinner for the two of us, and Josh is awesome on dish duty.