There are some days that just don’t blend. My memory is like a treasure trove of places and people and things, those that help me conjure up each post; each memory, while different in feel, has a similar undercurrent: individuality and food. The year was 1994. My parent’s best friends owned a a local pharmacy in…
Curtailing Cooking
I always had “major anxiety” (and lets be honest, was a bit jealous) from those particular people who could fly by the seat of their pants, never organize anything in advance, never pre-plan, and yet somehow end up with perfect results, or without any consequence to their malaise. But, as I got older in life,…
Self Control… Over Yourself
The anger was building up to an insurmountable peak; I couldn’t withstand the internal pain any longer. And so, with all of my might, I hurled my hairbrush against my powder pink walls. It left, let’s just say, a noticeable hole that my mother began screaming at me about, not knowing that the cause of…
The Anti ‘Social Media’ Diet
Magic Markers. That fresh paint smell. Perfectly ripe cherry tomatoes. The first warm day after a rough winter that signals summer is around the bend. We all have those “simple little things” that make us beam from ear-to-ear, often times centered on or around our childhoods or personalities. We tend to feel elated and even settled when…
Sports, The Eternal Balancing Act
She schlepped me everywhere, my mother, poor woman. And for those of you who don’t know what schlepped means, it means she chaperoned and transported me, against her will, to every single sport, practice, activity and competition on planet earth from the time I was a young girl. Fall time was competitive swimming, every morning…
Salad City
The options were intolerable. Few in number were the days of Sloppy Joes and overcooked, sticky, yet surprisingly delicious mac-and-cheese; frozen turkey sandwiches and brownish-greyish hamburgers were only some of the choices of “slop” that mimicked food we were given that summer. For most pre-teen girls, summer camp was a period of time that housed…
A Life Without Fashion… Recipes
Throwing ourselves into and devoting ourselves to one particular thing is as important as finding the thing by which to devote ourselves to in the first place. Fashion is so much more than loving the word and the hashtags; fashion is an art, a relationship and is something that needs just as much upkeep and…
I Too Am A Fit Bottomed Girl
And… hoist! “One leg in. The other leg in, yes! Will it get over my belly, I don’t know”, I uttered out loud as I attempted to grab any available fabric and heave my workout pants over my newly expanding spare tire. I was in a rush to dress before the deliveryman arrived and my favorite…
The Dieting Breakthrough
Roland Barthes said that the bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition. So, what does this mean? This means that while an item or specific piece of something may differ, or try and repeat itself haphazardly, the meaning or content of this same something remains a constant. I always think of this quote when…
No Soap Radio
Remember the “no soap radio” joke from the mid-90’s? The popular kids and the mean kids, and eventually, all the other kids, would walk around telling this joke, only to embarrass those who did not understand it, or to “call out” those who feigned understanding, saying “Ha! I got it!” By the by, there was…
Sports, Why Yes, Of Course!
A young girl, eager to break records on her bicycle, was more likely to break eardrums with the amount she honked her bell and flew past other bike riders, up the twisting hills, along Golden Pond, in scenic New Hampshire. The year was 1995, and yes, that girl was me. Since childhood, the culmination of…
A Litmus Test
“Pardon? I had some trouble hearing you, please repeat, sir”, I uttered to some drunken guy in a restaurant lobby. He simply yelled back at me to “move”; it appeared that this man left his ‘pleases’ and ‘thank you’s’ at home along with his respect for women, and also, a clean shirt. In the home…