Here is my friend Brie busy being awesome and having great hair
P.S. Ten points if you can spot the random hanging octopus doubling as bathroom decor.
P.P.S. I love the title of this post, but I want to be clear right from the start that it does not refer to Brie herself. She is indeed attractive, but (as far as I know) does not herself possess anti-congestive properties.
{ Coogee Wave, by Gray Malin (from the A La Plage collection) | Lulu & Georgia Lamp }
For a little while in the summer of 2002, I lived in Coogee Beach, near Sydney. Well, technically it was
"squatting," and technically it was only for two months, but it sounds much more glamorous to say, "Oh, I spent the summer living in Austraaaaaalia." My college boyfriend had done his semester abroad there while I did mine in England, and my school year ended earlier than his, so when I finished up I hopped a quick 26-hour flight (via Japan, where I accidentally spent two hundred dollars on a sushi dinner because I couldn't read the menu and thought what I was getting was one roll, not a boat of rare fish the size of a piano bench) to spend some time reconnecting - because semesters abroad are many things, but "good for relationships" is not one of them.
My boyfriend had to go to classes every day, and it was wintertime in Australia so it wasn't quite warm enough to spend hours at the beach, and the house was...well, there's really just no other way to say it: it was fucking disgusting, in the way that only a house inhabited by nine 20-year-old boys and a rotating cast of female companions can be. Boxed wine, flies, dirty dishes, someone threw up in the bathtub, et cetera. It was fun for a party (and that happened basically every night), but not exactly a relaxing place to spend the day.
Oh god, cotija cheese is so good. It's a crumbly, hard, mild-tasting Mexican cheese that I first discovered a few years ago, when Francesca took me to a place on the Lower East Side called Cafe Habana that specializes in cotija-covered corn (a.k.a. Mexico City Street Corn), and - despite my insistence that I do not like things that have red things (in this case, chile powder) sprinkled on them because red sprinkly things are often spicy, and another thing I do not like is anything spicy - she force-fed it to me.
And it was a terrible, horrible idea. Because what happened next was that I started making this cotija cheese-covered corn (albeit with paprika subbed in as the obligatory Red Sprinkly Thing, because paprika is not spicy) every freaking time it was humanly possible, including every single night during the summertime. And that is a lot of cheese (and mayonnaise).
{ Pictured: Noritake Hertford and Rochelle Gold China }
How we celebrated the arrival of spring (YAYYYY): with a seafood-and-wildflower-inclusive dinner in our backyard. As annoying as daylight savings is - I mean really, trying to convince a four year old and a one and a half year old that "yes, I'm aware that it looks like it's noon outside but for real, go brush your teeth and go to bed" is the very definition of an exercise in futility - it's also so exciting, finally getting back those extra hours that we can spend taking an after-dinner walk in the park, or leaving the windows open so we can listen to neighborhood kids playing basketball, or sitting in the hammock with a book, or many of the other myriad uber-suburban activities that I never knew were particularly my jam but that I now, officially in my mid-thirties, have discovered are what make me the very happiest.
I want to ride bikes (well, no: more accurately I want to sit on the stoop with a beer and watch my kids ride bikes, but same difference). I want to have picnics in the park. I want to garden.
About a month ago, I put up this post, in which I talked about how Kendrick and I had decided to try being gluten-free for a month (him for health reasons, me to be supportive because it's hard to make a major dietary change, and even harder when you're doing it all on your own). It was an interesting experiment, but not exactly for the reasons I thought it would be.
The thing is, gluten isn't "bad" for you. I knew this going in; of course - while some people legitimately suffer from diseases (such as celiac, or certain autoimmune diseases) that are exacerbated by the presence of gluten in their diet - gluten itself isn't the enemy, as much as the companies who are profiting off of gluten-free everythings (which, as an aside, are HOLY expensive) would like you to believe that it is. That said, I'm pretty sure we as a population eat too much of the stuff. I'm definitely sure that I do. Because pasta is delicious.
Before we go on: to say I was 100% gluten-free over the past month would be oh, such a lie. I can't tell you how many times I slipped up, just because I'm so used to picking at my kids' food completely mindlessly, and nearly every day - at least in the beginning - I had a bite of my daughter's macaroni and cheese or a piece of tempura in my mouth before I even realized it. But this mindlessness that I have towards food extends beyond plucking from my kids' plates; over the past few years I've given so little thought to what I eat on a daily basis that all of a sudden having cause to give it even a second of my attention was a dramatic shift...and the effect that this ended up having was actually kind of...cool.
