For the past few weeks, I’ve been rereading what I’ve written in the last year or so.  It’s a strange thing, to revisit something you created.  Some of it seems so unfamiliar, yet much of it reignites the emotions that came and went, both happy, and sad.  Some of it gives me pleasure, some of it makes me laugh, and some of it reminds me of the pain and frustration of not yet being satisfied.

But then again, let’s be honest. If you’re 24 and completely satisfied with where you are in your life, you’re probably lying to yourself, or were born into too much money.

When I was twelve and thirteen, I pictured the perfect age being 17.  I’d drive a red convertible, have a boyfriend, and would go to the beach everyday.  Reality?  I drove my dad’s 1995 F150 (with a camper shell), wasn’t completely out of my awkward years, and wasn’t even close to being ready for a boyfriend.

When I was 18 and 19, I pictured the perfect age being 25.  I saw myself still living in California, as some sort of successful business exec with a red convertible.  And probably, I would have a serious boyfriend.  Reality: I don’t want to live in California ever again and I’m too broke to own a car (let’s be honest – I can’t even afford a gym membership), which is one of the many reasons I’m looking for more than my current job can actually give me in terms of personal satisfaction.  But then again, if anyone in the world is perfectly satisfied being an assistant, then they were either born into money, or hired for the wrong reasons. And then there’s the boyfriend thing… let’s save that for another day.

The past two weeks have been the craziest weeks of my entire independent life.  I know I’ve been saying that a lot lately, but I passed out Sunday night (afternoon?) around 4 PM, which should say something about my week and weekend.

About a week and a half ago, I got into the graduate school program I applied for – for those of you who are wondering, it’s a joint program between the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).  I’m signed up to get an MBA from Carey and a Masters in Design from MICA – it’s going to be intense stuff.

A day or two later, I had a conversation with someone higher up in the organization I work for about what my post-grad plans were.  I mentioned wanting to work in design and/or art direction for magazines, ideally, [insert favorite food magazine here].

A day or two later, I got a call from the company that owns my favorite food magazine, who asked me to come to NYC for an interview.  I still can’t believe that happened.

Anyway, I went up to NYC for six hours on Friday to pursue a dream.  Came back to DC, spent two nights at the bars for birthday parties and concerts, and Sunday morning hosting brunch.

I passed out at 4PM and woke up Sunday morning around six.  I need a weekend from my weekend.

Anyway, when I woke up today, I was twenty-five.  It should be a promising year.

When I was a little girl, 99 percent of the vacations my family took were camping and backpacking trips, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Sometime in my awkward middle school years, I joined the men in my extended family for a fairly strenuous hike — one pass led to a lake, which led to another pass and another lake, at which point, we broke out the topographical maps. My dad and I continued to a higher lake. Our yellow labrador, Jake, followed us; it was a few miles of what I would essentially call hellish gravel stairs.

We arrived at the top to find a pristine, semi-alpine lake that was likely a result of continually melting snow. I was hot, deceptively sunburnt, and exhausted (as was Jake). So Jake and I went swimming. The water chilled me to the bone, but it was worth it — even while doused in a sub-degree alpine lake, I found myself just staring, soaking up the landscape, sun, water, and snow. My dad used to tell me to remember those views and to store them in my memory, for the days that I’d find myself stuck behind some desk with some mundane task, so I’ll always have these memories to fend off office frustration.

And he was right. The frustration, just like the peace of mind, is always temporary, and will fade out when  memories like this fade in. Sometimes, I forget this sanity tactic in situations where I need it most, like behind my desk, amidst passive-aggressive office e-mails and fluorescent lights that leech onto the melanin in my skin.

But the frustration passes. The winter, the summer, the anger, the bliss: they all pass. It’s like a good hot yoga class. Your hips burn, your calves feel like they are going to burst free from your legs, and you almost give up on the hope of ever being comfortable again. But then you breath out, relax your muscles (or your mind), and upon realizing that every single solitary aspect of life is temporary, you are no longer stuck in that god-forsaken rut.

I just spent a whirlwind of a weekend in Cupertino, for the first wedding of my twenties. On the ride back to the San Francisco airport, amidst rolling hills dotted with age-old oak trees, I soaked in the landscape, and my heart ached. While the attendees dear to my heart are scattered across the country, many of them not far from me in Washington, there is something to be said about everyone traveling across the country to celebrate the love two of our friends share with each other.  Amidst the wine and the whiskey, there’s solace in simply being with the people you love, and the ones who make you feel loved.

Tomorrow, I will struggle to face a newly launched website, and a likely deluge of emails with reports of glitches, typos, and miscellaneous fires to put out.  I’ll be thinking about the rolling hills of a state that I love visiting but will probably not settle in, and I’ll be taking pride in learning to enjoy whiskey on the rocks with the boys.

Lentil Meatballs with Lemon Pesto (adapted from Sprouted Kitchen)

Ingredients:

Lentil “Meatballs”:
2 cups cooked French lentils
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup grated mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
Pinch of fresh or dried thyme
2/3 cup breadcrumbs
Salt and pepper to taste

Lemon Pesto:
1 cup packed basil leaves
2-3 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons pine nuts, lightly toasted
zest and juice of one lemon
2 tablespoons parmesan cheese
1/3 cup olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

If your lentils are not cooked, boil them in water for about 20 minutes, until they are soft.  Strain them, and let cool.

Once cooled, pulse grind the lentils in a food processor until they turn to mush.  I love that word.  Mush.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the eggs, cheeses, garlic, parsley, thyme, and breadcrumbs.  Once evenly mixed, add the lentil mush, and stir to mix well.  Let the mixture sit and continue cooling for another 15 or 20 minutes.

In the meantime, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and make your pesto.  Pulse-grind the garlic and pine nuts in a food processor, and then add the basil leaves, grinding until the mixture starts looking like, well, pesto.  Add the cheese and lemon zest/juice.  Use the dripper on the top to slowly add the olive oil, while the food processor is running.  Slip in a pinch of salt and pepper each, and set the pesto aside.

Now, using your hands, start rolling the lentil mixture into 1 inch balls.  If the mixture is too wet, just stir in more breadcrumbs.

Once the baking sheet is covered, brush the tops of the meatballs with some olive oil, and bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

Serve over pasta with the pesto sauce, or just eat them by themselves (that’s what I did).  I do have a hunch, though, that they would make fabulous vegetarian meatball sandwiches on a good French baguette.

It’s too easy. It’s too easy to get stuck in a rut, sometimes even more so than it is to spend time actually living your life.

You’re probably thinking, what in the world is this girl talking about?  Well, here’s the deal.  

In the last few weeks, I was robbed in the street (good-bye, my cherished iPhone 4s), I decided to apply to graduate school, I took the GREs, I wrote my graduate schools essays, and I’ve been working on my path to freedom: freelance.  To some of you, that might sound like a self-inflicted personal hell.  In some ways, it is.  I feel like I haven’t gotten to spend time with any of my friends (until this weekend, I haven’t).

On top of that, I ran my third half marathon yesterday morning.  In just a few days, I’m flying back to California for a wedding, and the weekend after that, I’m running the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler.  For Pete’s sake, throw in a few freelance deadlines and a new website launch for my day job.  No big deal.

Go ahead.  Call me crazy.  I already know that I am.

So, back to the robbery.  I went home during my lunch break one day to pick up some forgotten items.  As I was walking down the street, I was holding my iPhone, and… some jerk snatched it out of my hands on street corner – at 12:30 in the afternoon, just one block from my house.

Let’s all just admit that we do crazy things when we’re in love, and we’ve invested too much in an unhealthy relationship – too much for us to let go.  Anyone who has or has owned an iPhone knows what I’m talking about.  That being said, I chased the seedy character that had just robbed me.  I know.  I’m crazy.

Not only did I run after him, but I was also shouting expletives at the top of my lungs, and I chased him around a free-standing liquor store… twice.  Looking back, I’m so lucky to still be alive.  After reviewing the liquor store’s surveillance tapes, I was able to confirm that the half marathon training was paying off – I made running in three-inch heeled boots look like a piece of cake.  That might be the only good thing that I took away from this situation (and it’s satisfying to find humor where all hope is lost).

After I realized that I’d never catch him, I heaved a sigh of frustration, and a very large woman in a luxury SUV stopped at the corner, rolled her car window down, and said “get in.”

Naturally, being crazy in love, I sprinted to her car and hopped in.  Long story short, she drove me around, we followed him, lost him, and then found a police officer to report the crime.  Good-bye, my beloved Siri.  Hello, POS iPhone 3GS, which-I-can-only-make-phone-calls -while-on-speakerphone-with.

Fast forward three weeks, to this morning. I woke up early feeling the need to brush my teeth at 7 AM on a Sunday.  Considering the fact that I left my house at 7 AM to run a 13 mile race, didn’t nap, and then spent my Saturday hosting a barbeque and my Saturday night at the bars, all the laws of physics and sanity pointed to being knocked out until noon.

Nope.  Woke up to brush my teeth.  As I got out of bed, I knocked my slowly-dying iPhone 3GS into a glass of water next to my bed (it was half-full).

Shit.

So… there goes my phone.  Again.  Really?  Is this some sort of punishment for chasing the guy that robbed me around a liquor store?  The surveillance tape wasn’t enough?

It’s 9:30 on a Sunday morning, and I’m typing away because I had too much caffeine yesterday, and the birds are chirping.  Clearly, they were not violently stripped of their most serious long-term relationship, as I just was (twice).

I must say, I take more than enough satisfaction in the simple act of drawing a line through each completed item on my painstakingly long to-do list.  I can cross off the half marathon, another freelance project, and ordering a new phone.  In a couple of hours, I’m going to pray to God that AT&T lets me downgrade to a dumb phone.

This trip to California is a necessary escape.  I’m hoping 2012 will start being nicer to me.

Sweet tart crust, by Smitten Kitchen

1.5 cups AP flour, plus whatever you need to make the dough workable
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick plus 1 tablespoon (9 tablespoons; 4 1/2 ounces) very cold (or frozen) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 large egg

Whipped Cream Filling

1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 Tablespoon confectioner’s sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.5 cups fresh strawberries, sliced as shown in photos

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  In a food processor, combine 1.5 cups flour, 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar, and 1/4 teaspoon salt.  Pulse grind until evenly mixed.  Then, add the cubes of butter and pulse grind, slowly adding in the egg.  Pulse grind (about ten seconds each) until it won’t mix any more.  At this point, the dough was too sticky for me to work with, so I gradually added flour – about another half cup – until it was more of a pie-dough consistency.

Deb recommends chilling the dough, but I’m horribly impatient these days, and frankly, since it wasn’t required, I didn’t do it.  I rolled the dough out to about 1/4 of an inch in width, and transferred to a buttered tart pan.  I like giving tarts a nice, thick crust – the dainty crusts always fall apart on me.  I’ve given up on them.

I tried two methods with this crust.  First, by poking the living daylights out of the crust’s bottom with a fork (to prevent bubbles) and baking by itself.  At the same time, I had an identical crust that I lined with aluminum foil and filled with pie weights, disguised as legumes.  The first method came out looking much nicer, and finished baking much more quickly, so I recommend going au natural.

Anyway, bake for 20-30 minutes, until the crust is golden to your liking.  Then, remove it from the oven, and let cool.

While that’s resting, beat your whipping cream in a stand mixer for a couple of minutes, until it looks like, well, whipped cream.  Look for stiff peaks.  As it begins to form, gradually add the sugar and vanilla extract.  Set aside in the refrigerator until your tart is ready to serve.

To prepare, use a spatula to fill the tart with whipped cream.  If you want it to be extra decadent, line the tart with a layer of fresh strawberry jam before filling with the whipped cream (that was my original intent, but I got distracted when I made this, and then forgot to do so).  Arrange your sliced strawberries on top of the whipped  cream to your liking, and consume on a pretty spring day.

This winter may have been weak, but spring has sprung.  And along with the hour of sleep I lost this morning, my social life has flown out the window.  I’m pretty sure I’ll see it sometime next week.

But, amidst design work, grad school applications, and writing (for both work and pleasure), I found time to eat, and Spring light found its way into my kitchen and living room, which made photographing my delectables all the merrier.

For the sake of time, this is all I have to write.  Oh, that, and… I’m going to scold you if you don’t make this corn ceviche as soon as possible.

Sweet Corn Ceviche (derived from Sprouted Kitchen)

Ingredients:

2 ears of fresh sweet corn
1 serrano chile
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
Zest and juice of one lime
1/2 sweet pepper
1 avocado
1/8 teaspoon salt
dash of pepper

Directions:

Use a serrated knife to shuck the kernels off the corn, and transfer to a medium-sized mixing bowl.  Mince the chile pepper, and dice the sweet pepper and avocado to the size of your preference. Zest the lime (yes, the entire lime) and then squeeze every drop of juice that you can into the bowl.  Toss in the salt, pepper, and olive oil, mix well, cover, and refrigerate for at least thirty minutes, letting the flavors of the serrano chile and the lime cultivate.

Serve as a salsa, or on top of some seared salmon.  Or, drop a dollop of the ceviche on an egg that your roommate made you for breakfast, inside an onion ring, with spinach and feta cheese.  Okay, I might have helped her.  A little.

We’re all still learning.

There comes a time when you come to understand the red flags that your body uses to get your brain back on track.  In college, pulling all nighters was no big deal.  Coffee sweetened with Coke for extra caffeine?  No problem.  High sugar content late night drinks?  Bring it on.  Hung over?  A Sunday morning run and a Jamba Juice will cure that.

Nevermind the fact that my immune system launched a full-on missile attack of red flag warnings back then, because if I so much as noticed them, it was second nature to ignore every single one.  But I find myself wanting to savor some of the things that were probably not so important to me when I was sharing a dorm room (I can’t believe I did that for so long) and when I was more concerned with having enough time to study and drink/party/other things.

There is no doubt in my mind that I value time with my friends now just as much as I did in college.  But the gradual changes I’ve made with how I cherish and make time for myself makes me wonder – am I the same, super-extroverted girl that I always thought I was?  Back then, it was more than easy to switch on and off between the Lebanese step-dancing party goer with perfect Modern Standard Arabic to the hyper-focused student pulling all-nighters in the library before working doubles at the restaurant.  These days, I find myself much more introverted than I’ve ever been – after a day of work, I need to take an hour in my room to cure my social exhaustion. And I generally keep headphones in my ears while in public to minimize unwarranted interactions.  Not that this behavior is extreme in any way – it’s just not what I’ve ever imagined myself doing.

I guess, some things are just more important to you as you get older. For instance, how often do twenty-four year olds with full-time jobs get to wake up after 10 AM, without a hangover?  (Don’t answer this if your name is Rachel.)  Sometimes, it feels rare to sleep in, wake up fresh, and not have an obligation to running seven to ten miles before noon.  Perhaps the latter characteristic of my weekend mornings is an example of my commitment to myself, but perhaps it’s an example of the lingering self-destruction that occupied my university years.

Moral of the story – last weekend, I didn’t get enough Sarah-time.  The result?  I spent this entire week fighting off illness.  Let’s consider this a lesson learned.

On another note, just a couple of weeks ago, it snowed.  Not much, just a little to leave a little bit of a dusting before the temperature rose and the (pathetic) winter rain washed it all away.  If only it would snow on a weekday, I could probably get some time off work that I’d actually be able to enjoy! These days, I’ve gotten really into taking the time to pamper myself. That snow day helped me realize it.

Pampering.  That’s what I need.

And a manicure.  Yes, a manicure.

Orange, Almond, and Olive Oil Cake (from The New  California Cook)

Ingredients:

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sliced almonds
6 ounces whole blanched almonds
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1.5 cups sugar
Zest of 1 medium orange, grated
Juice of that orange (about 1/2 cup)
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Garnish:
Powdered sugar
Orange slices
Homemade whipped cream

Instructions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  Oil an 8-inch cake pan (or line with parchment paper).  Sprinkle the sliced almonds on the bottom of the pan, and up the sides of the pan as you can.

In a food processor, grind the remaining almonds as finely as you can without turning to a paste.  In a medium mixing bowl, whisk the ground almonds, flour, baking powder, and set aside.

In a stand mixer (or a bowl that you can mix by hand), beat the eggs until frothy.  Slowly, add the sugar while beating, and mix until it is light, thick, and lemon-colored.  Slowly add the flour mixture, then the zest, juice, and oil, until the batter is smooth.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake at 350 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes, until you can poke the center of the cake with a toothpick and it comes out clean.  Let the cake cool for another hour or two (it continues to bake while it cools), then invert, and serve with homemade whipped  cream and an orange slice.

I like to whip cream at home, and sweeten with preserves instead of sugar – this cake paired perfectly with a nectarine jam given to me by a friend from Los Angeles.

I can’t lie to you guys.  2011 was quite the blogging fail, on my part.

For the past week or so, I’ve been walking around, lounging in my house, and chatting at bars about how I needed to write something for this post.  Walking.  Lounging.  Chatting.  Designing offensive Valentine’s Day cards.  And not writing.

I hesitate to count the posts that I wrote in 2011, in fear that I could count them on the fingers on just one of my hands.  Fail, fail, fail!  It really doesn’t feel like so much time has passed since I wrote my last 2011 new year post, vowing to blog more, and essentially turning down the idea of new years resolutions.

2011 involved a lot of not taking action.  Also, a lot of mistakes.  But another year goes by, and I catch myself doing things that I’d rather not be doing.  2011 was a strange year – I baked less, cooked more, and photographed less.  I worked too much.

I’m currently sitting in a close friend’s studio apartment, multi-tasking between petting her eighteen-pound cat and typing.  It’s the same apartment that we celebrated the New Year in – a tiny, four-hundred square foot, dark-wood-floored and window-ridden feline abode, decorated in her own botanical drawings and her scattered book collection.

The dinner we planned was beyond phenomenal: cheese and sausage stuffed mushrooms, a pear and toasted almond salad, parmesan-crusted salmon smeared with a collection of pestos, and these chocolate covered cherries for dessert.

I enjoy throwing dinner parties – it’s a simple way to show off, hang out with friends, and enjoy something decadent.  In my head, the menu-planning takes more creativity than anything, but it seems as if the timing of the cooking appears to be the greatest challenge, in the eyes of my guests.  Honestly, timing itself is an art form, but it’s included in the menu-planning stage.  Especially at our age, when you probably only have one oven and a frighteningly small kitchen.  I’ve willingly volunteered my services to help my friends learn how to plan and cook a full meal.  Perhaps, it will someday turn into a business venture.  Like most things, it takes hard work  and preparation.  I memorize all of my recipes long before execution, and usually have a friend play sous chef or dishwasher to keep things moving along.

Then again, if I ever open a supper club, I already have a list of friends/besties who’d make excellent hired sous chefs.

With the new year comes a renewed need to do what I love – enjoying my life, and making sure that every day is fulfilling and worth every second.  Savor every bite, be creative in every measure, and know my body.  After all, I started 2012 with a fairly intense training schedule, and a much appreciated winter trip to a beach on the Chesapeake Bay.

Bourbon Chocolate Cherries

Ingredients:

1 bag of dark cherries (I adopted these ones because a roommate swore she wouldn’t eat them before they went bad)
1 lb milk chocolate
Enough bourbon or whiskey to just cover the cherries in a bowl

Directions:

First, pit the cherries using a cherry pitter – I used the blunt end of the chopstick to push out the pits.  Warning: do not wear white when you do this.  My UCLA sweatshirt will never forget the night I pitted cherries.

Place all the pitted cherries in a large bowl, and pour enough bourbon into the bowl so the cherries are just covered.  Drown them.  Let them soak in the liquor for one to two hours – but no longer.  After they’re done, strain them, and save the liquor for something else (if anything, you have cherry-flavored bourbon).

For this recipe, I learned how to temper chocolate.  Tempering chocolate ensures that, when cooled, the chocolate hardens correctly, and has the right color and sheen to it.

Chop the chocolate with a serrated knife, and simmer an inch or two of water in a medium saucepan – simmer, do not boil.  Place a metal bowl over the saucepan, and melt two-thirds of the chocolate in that bowl.  Have a candy thermometer handy – bring the chocolate to 115 degrees while on the stove.

When the chocolate in the bowl is completely melted, remove from heat, and pour in the remaining chocolate.  Stir with a rubber spatula until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth.  Then, measure the temperature.  Continue stirring until the chocolate reaches 87 degrees Fahrenheit – at this temperature, the chocolate is ready to use.  You can only temper milk chocolate a few times at most, so you want to keep the chocolate at this temperature (or else what cools too much will not be usable).

Take one of the cherries with a spoon, roll it in the melted chocolate, and lift it out.  Place it on a cool cookie sheet, and repeat until all the cherries are completed.  I sprinkled a little bit of salt on some of the chocolate covered cherries.

Once finished, it’s not necessary to cool the cherries in the fridge, but it will definitely speed up the process.

Washington, DC, is a bit of a late bloomer: Fall is only really hitting the district as we speak. Yes, the fall I’ve been longing for since the heat wave in June.  The fall that carries a breeze, the fall that tints foliage into my favorite color (orange), and the fall that finally satisfies you with the comfort of staying in on a Friday night to make French onion soup.

That fall.  It finally showed up.  Fashionably late.

Oh, who am I kidding?  The weather has been beautiful for the past month or so, but the foliage is only really settling in to its natural golden state.  Friends have been talking about visiting apple orchards for months now, but I brushed off any attempts for recruitment.  Apples, no offense to them, have never floated to the top of my favorite food pyramid, and physically working to gather such a thing never really appealed to me.  But now that it really feels like fall, the apples caught my radar.

In high school, someone introduced me to snacking on apples with cheddar cheese.  It was weird at first, but the flavors actually pair very well together… and it’s been an elusive flavor that has somehow disappeared from sight, until I recently saw a similar tart on Foodgawker.

And only then did I find the urge to make something with apples.

Apple, Cheddar, and Caramelized Onion Tart

Ingredients:

1 perfect tart crust, recipe by David Lebovitz
1 baking apple, sliced
1 large yellow onion
About 2 cups sharp cheddar cheese
Salt, to taste 

First, roll out the tart dough, and transfer it to your tart pan.  I’ve found that the metal tart dishes with the removable bases are the best; also, be sure to aerate the base of your raw crust with a fork.

I like to take the tart scraps to form a better crust lip – roll the scraps into a long, skinny piece of dough, and just attach it to the edge of your crust.  Press it firmly to the edge, to prevent it from detaching or falling while baking, and press the teeth of a fork flat against the wall of the crust to fasten the lip firmly.

Line your crust with a piece of foil, fill the foil with legumes to prevent bubbles from forming, and then bake in the oven at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, until the lip of the crust just begins to turn gold.  At that point, remove the crust from the oven and let cool on a drying rack while you prepare the remaining ingredients.

Next, slice your onion in half, remove the skins, and then slice the onion into skinny half-circles.  Drizzle olive oil in a shallow pan, and saute the onions on high heat, until they become translucent.  Stir frequently to prevent burning.  Once the onions are translucent, reduce to low heat, and continue stirring until the onions begin to brown.  The bottom of your pan should be building up brown substance from the onion – this is good.  After about fifteen minutes, deglaze the pan with a few tablespoons of red or white wine (I prefer red), scrape the brown bits from the bottom with a wooden spoon or spatula, and continue stirring until the onions are a deeper brown – about another 15 minutes.

Transfer the caramelized onions to the cooked tart crust, and line the bottom of the pan evenly.  Then, generously layer your sharp cheddar cheese, and top with sliced apples.

Drizzle with coarse sea salt, and bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes.  When finished, let cool for about 15 minutes before consuming.

Being a New Yorker runs deep in my veins.  Perhaps, that’s why I feel so at home there.  But perhaps, it’s because of the wonderful friends I have there.

Another phenomenal weekend in New York – and some photos to prove that I’m alive.

I have a confession to make.

I am not a morning person.  Definitely.  Not.  Me.

Weird, right?  I know.  I used to think all bakers were morning people, too.  Sorry.  I was wrong.  I’m one of those girls that has to set an alarm at 6 AM to wake up sometime between 7:30 and 8.  I really do hit the snooze button that much.  It’s a problem.  How am I ever going to own a bakery?

I’m trying to get it together, I swear (the waking up early part, not the bakery part… yet).

It’s something that’s been on my mind since I stepped out of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco.  This is the bakery I’ve had on my radar for a couple of years now – the Robertsons’ cookbooks are my Bibles, and, as my regular readers have probably figured out, I’ve been experimenting with bread.  Mostly because of my obsession with Tartine Bread.

Anyway, I’ve been attempting recipes from this book for about six months now.  Yes, I even tried to make my own starter.  That was a disaster.  I’m pretty sure that all the details of breadmaking were not intended for people with full time non-baking jobs, because nurturing a starter really just did not fit into my work-play-drink schedule.  I mean… come on.  I’m not the best person with routines, so having to feed a starter every day at the same time just reiterated my inability to do one thing at the same time on a daily basis.

Weeks after my failure, I went hunting for sourdough bread in a local grocery store.  Lo and behold, it was nowhere to be found.  So naturally, I went grumbling through the bakery and the bread aisle, until a little old lady started talking to me.  Apparently, she, also from the West Coast, shared my frustration with the lack of decent bread out here.  So she made her own, with a mature starter purchased online (one that didn’t require regular feedings).

Needless to say, I bought a mature starter online shortly after hearing about it.  And then I started making bread.  Lots of it.  To be honest, I’m just going through the Tartine Bread cookbook, which is where I got this recipe for homemade English muffins (oh whaaat?).  I won’t publish it, because you probably should buy Chad’s book.  Plus, the muffins in these photos don’t have salt.  Shhh… I messed that one up.  I know I’m human, but let’s keep that between you and me.

If I saw him working in the bakery while I was “looking for the bathroom” (sneaking around), we can be on a first-name basis, right?

Anyway, all you need to know is – goat cheese, tomatoes, bread, and salt.  They make the perfect meal for a girl who missed her lunch today.

Here’s an amazing video about Tartine, and Chad Robertson’s bread.  Be obsessed.

My spring trip to California worried me.

I flew out there for my little brother’s graduation in late May.  Desperately in need of a vacation, I was sleep deprived, hungry for personal relaxation, and looking forward to seeing familiar faces.  I sleep in the room I lived in during high school – before I went away to college, and before my familial and physical expansion shuffled my siblings around the blueprints of the beautiful Gerrity ranch-style floor plans.

Like most other trips to California, I stepped off of my usual Thursday night flight, into the airport I know so well, and then into the comfortable and amazingly not-humid Los Angeles ocean breeze.  I came home, had a glass of red wine with my parents, and went to bed in the bed that’s no longer mine.  When I woke up the next morning, I had an email from a creative job recruiter in Los Angeles, looking for a designer.

I’m not going to lie – for the next three days, I messaged back and forth with the recruiter, and I toyed with the idea of moving back to Los Angeles. It was the first time in over a year that the thought ever crossed my mind. I missed the freedom of driving a car and wearing jean shorts whenever I wanted, and more than ever, I wanted to be there to see my six year old brother grow up.  At the end of my four-day trip, though, the e-mails revealed that the position was not for me, and I boarded my plane back to Washington National Airport.

I had always told people on the East Coast that it would take me a lot to move me back to California.  Like meeting the man of my dreams, falling in love, and compromising his desire to move back to the West Coast with my desire to never experience the act of childbirth.  And even then, I used to say that I’d only move to the Bay Area.  So, I spent the months between that initial email and last week amidst conflicting possibilities – could I see myself back at home?  In San Francisco or the Yay area?

Rest assured, East Coasters, I’m probably here to stay.  Last week, my time in Los Angeles was well-spent: hiking, beaching, eating, and salsa dancing.  I couldn’t ask for more.  And San Francisco was similar: walking, exploring, eating, and salsa dancing.

But it’s not for me.  I will forever thrive in a city, surrounded by noise, survived by seasons, and oozing with creativity.  Where that is, I don’t know.  But I know that I felt more than relieved to see Washington’s beautiful (perhaps cracked) monuments as I landed.  And that ended those confusing moments, when I questioned the permanence of my decision to go east.

In a perfect world, I’d live in DC (which would only be a 40 minute drive from New York City), have 6 months of Los Angeles summer, 2 months of autumn, 2 months of winter, and 2 months of spring.  And California would be a cheap, three-hour flight to see the people I love.  I’d also work for myself, and I’d actually make enough money to have a gym membership.  Sigh.  In a perfect world…