Today, a quick and festive post to help you with your last-minute holiday baking.
I’m a sucker for linzer cookies. They look like Christmas, snow-covered and gem-like, and you essentially get to eat two cookies in one. Yes please! So when the lovely people at Doisy & Dam Chocolate asked me to develop a recipe for them, I knew what had to be done.
How’ve you been these past few months? Has your life drastically transformed? Did you move across the country, win an award, fall in love? Did you get a puppy? Hire a life coach? Go back to school? Start a new job?
Maybe your time has been occupied with less dramatic pursuits: have you listened to an absurd number of podcasts on an obscure topic? Perfected your method for cooking rice without a rice cooker? Discovered that leggings can and should be worn as pants with no shame or regret?
For me, the transition from summer to autumn has been a heavy mix of significant life events, murder podcasts, and some stuff in between.
Leo and I got a very grown-up, horrible thing called a mortgage, which is slightly terrifying, but we also used that mortgage to buy a sweet little flat in south London. We move in December and I get all tingly and excited when I think about it. (Major shoutout to my extremely handsome husband Leo for being a Responsible Adult and doing mortgage things.)
I’ve been working, cooking, running, spending a little too much time on Instagram, going to the market on Sundays, cooking some more, basking in the chill of autumn, and cursing the 5pm sunsets that have suddenly ambushed us. I’ve been planning a much-anticipated trip to New York and Ohio in November. I’ve been reading (Ready Player One, of course).
I didn’t grow up in a particularly crunchy household. Legend has it that my dad tried feeding me Oreos when I was three months old (guess that’s what happens when you give a 23-year-old dude a baby. Love you, Jay). The first thing I remember cooking for myself as a kid was one of those ramen blocks resembling Justin Timberlake’s hair from the ‘90s (sometimes I would get REAL gourmet and ditch the seasoning packets for butter and grated parmesan from the green plastic tub).
Now I’m not saying that my parents weren’t good cooks, or that they didn’t feed me veggies on the daily. But as two recent college grads trying to make a living in Atlanta, they had priorities other than making their own nut butters or raiding the bulk bins at the local co-op. My dad was working nonstop. My mom was in grad school studying her days away. Plus, they had a kid who would smear Vicks Vapo-Rub all over her body when left unsupervised (yep, I can confirm that it burns just as much as you would expect).
Hello, friend. It’s been awhile.
Over the past few months, I’ve been getting used to a different routine: waking early to move my body, heading to my new-ish job, writing and writing and writing, and then commuting home. Weeks pass quickly and it’s both exhausting and empowering. It makes me wonder where the time goes, and if things will ever slow down—but at least I’m making a life in that passing time. That’s a good thing.
Favorite things, April 2017:
