When I was growing up, New York City bagels were a "thing." You just couldn't get anything even approximating one once you left the boundaries of the city. People continue to act like they're still a thing, but by now Noah's and Einstein's and similar chains have made their way across the country, and while they're not anywhere near as good as an H&H Bagel straight out of the oven (I used to live a couple of blocks from the factory and walk over for a fresh bagel with cream cheese and lox on cold mornings, and oh my godddd), they're certainly acceptable. Even delicious.

But still: not the same. And since I don't have a solid bagel place anywhere within a twenty-minute driving range, I just don't really eat them very much anymore. This is obviously a shame.

Then my friend Alisa told me that she makes her own bagels. I mean...who does that? That is an insane thing to do. (I actually consider any bread-making an insane thing to do, since - as you may recall - I am oh, so very bad at it.) So she said she'd show me how she does it, using a recipe from Sophisticated Gourmet, and now...well, ok, I'm not going to make these myself, because I am wayyyyy too lazy and impatient for a recipe that involves yeast and waiting. But anytime someone wants to make them for me, I'll be right there, cream cheese in hand.

Jello Pudding makes everything better.

I spent last night and the bulk of this morning writing a massive post exploring my getting-fired-from-It's-Always-Sunny-In-Philadelphia story through the lens of gender and sex in the workplace. It's essentially a retelling of the post I wrote on the subject many years ago, but it's only over the past couple of years that I've started to understand that what I went through, while devastating, wasn't especially unique - and I think that's an important part of the story to explore. (I also wanted to tell the story again because my first try was terribly written and I'm annoyed about that.) I didn't publish it here because you've already read parts of it if you've been reading RG for awhile, but if you'd like to check it out it's over on Medium.

Anyway. I'm exhausted and headache-y from the exercise of dredging up decade-old feelings, and so today? I am going to write about refrigerators.

Look! She's wearing an apron; she must know what she's doing! (Spoiler: she did not.)

The other night, I made grilled pizzas for dinner - one with tomato sauce, mozzarella and fresh basil (FROM MY GARDEN, #bam), and the other with arugula, peaches, prosciutto and goat cheese (and both with store-bought dough, obviously, because dough-making is not my thing). We were sitting outside eating dinner and Kendrick said something about the peach pizza being good, and then he said, "Remember when you didn't know how to cook?"

To be clear: I still don't consider myself an especially proficient cook. I make things that are easy and that I think taste good, I cut corners virtually everywhere, and I never met a package of pre-marinated Trader Joe's anything that I didn't like. But what Kendrick was referring to was the fact that when I started this website six years ago, my idea of "making dinner" was boiling some ravioli and throwing a bit of Prego over it that I'd tarted up with diced onions and mushrooms (I still make this sometimes when I'm alone, because it may not be elevated cuisine, but it is GOOD).

The original idea behind Ramshackle Glam was that it would be a food and entertaining blog written by a person who didn't know a whole lot about either. I figured hey, I just got married and moved into a (massive-for-us, at 800 square feet) new apartment, I'm interested in spending time at home and cultivating a cozy home life (as opposed to spending as many nights as possible out at some bar or another) for the first time ever...I might as well try to figure out this whole "cooking and entertaining and decorating" thing. And I might as well write about it on the internet while I do it, because there are a hell of a lot of sites that explore cooking from an expert perspective...but I always think it's fun to watch someone figure things out as they go.