I turn 35 tomorrow. (And the day after that, my son graduates from preschool, which is even more perplexing. ...How did this happen? Am I happy about it? Am I going to cry massive crocodile tears? The answers: I have no freaking idea, yes with qualifications, and ohhhmygoodness yes.)

The fact that it's my birthday has nothing to do with the photos of salmon in this post (other than the fact that I suppose I should be ingesting more omega-3s...?). It's just on my mind.

The thing is, I've never been into New Year's resolutions; New Year's is a holiday that I'm not especially fond of because it stresses me out (HAVE FUN! NOW!), but beyond that, I've never gotten that grand "Hooray! This is my chance to start afresh!" burst that apparently motivates dedicated resolution-makers. This birthday, though, I'm sort of getting that feeling: the desire to hit the refresh button in certain ways. I don't think it's any mystery that I've been going through some searching with regards to how I can live better, feel better, and mostly be better, as a partner and mother and daughter and person. These are obviously things that I've always thought about to some extent, like everyone, but something about this particular moment in my life seems different.

{ Noritake Sandefjord Plate }

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).