Weekly Good Things: Week 43

California Vibes

👋 Greetings! I’ve just returned back from a few energy-infusing days in San Diego. Ironically the weather was significantly warmer in Boston the entire weekend, but I always love a good excuse to go West!

I was going to push this off to tomorrow morning, and then I remembered that I value both consistency and connection with humans. And I reminded myself that we don’t need to wait to say the perfect thing to reach out and say hello. So, hi!

This Week in Good Things

This felt like somehow both the longest and shortest week. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Revolutions start at the dinner table. 🍽 A dinner party! My friend Daria brought together 8 women from different parts of her life. None of us knew each other particularly well. Her invite, which I loved, promised: “This is an intimate dinner for remarkable women who are my friends and colleagues in the tech world. Come as strangers, eat delicious food, and leave as friends.” It delivered!

Note to self: find more opportunities to get together with amazing people at the the dinner table. I’d love to host something like this once a quarter!

  • Going home feeds the soul. I have many homes, but one of them will always be Wellesley. I was so thrilled to have an Ompractice booth at the employee benefits fair at the college. (Employees have free access, so this was extra fun because all I had to do was have wonderful conversations with some amazing people (including so many people who have been working there since I was a student almost 20 years ago!)

On Thursday at 5am, I hopped a flight over to San Diego, to experience (and speak!) at Weekend at the Pitch Club, surrounded by incredible women leading mission driven businesses. I’ll be sorting through my 27 pages of notes this week, but here were a few things I noticed.

  • Rituals make life feel more meaningful. I experienced my first cacao ceremony. As someone who both loves the taste of good chocolate, and finds myself particularly moved by taste memories, this was a wonderful experience. Looking forward to bringing more small rituals like this back into my day-to-day life.
  • Good spaces drive good ideas. I had a half day workshop in an inspiring work space in San Diego, in the San Diego Made Factory. I always find that ideas come when I’m surrounded by plants, incredible people, and good architectural bones.

The water is my happy place. In San Diego, before each full conference day, I spent each day running on the water. My two favorite things: coming across the Saturday morning fish market where the fish were *massive* compared to any East coast catches, and people were walking off the dock with trash bags filled with a 40? pound fish they were carrying by the tail. And then seeing the Star of India this morning with people all over the rigging, ready to drop the sails for a special week!

Good Things in the World:

A week where I had curiously little consumption, I still bookmarked a handful of things, finished some good books, and made note of things I appreciate.

  • V.E. Schwab’s new book The Fragile Threads of Power (this is the first in a series, but not the first in the world. If you haven’t read A Darker Shade of Magic, I’d start there!
  • Yo Yo Ma playing in the woods. On that note, are you familiar with Saxquatch?
  • I watched a single episode S1 E1 of Vanderpump Rules, and I’m debating whether or not to take the leap in order to experience the ultimate reality television cultural phenomenon. (Or so I’ve been told.)
  • Dazzle Dry in Rose Gold. Here’s a discount code.
  • Chicken Katsu Curry. I used to eat this quite a bit in California, and it’s hard to find on the East Coast (unless you make it yourself!)
  • I got to actually see and hold one of my friend Jennifer’s Meemzy Magic Sensory Toy boxes in California! (I got the dinosaur one! I also got to give her a hug for the first time in about a decade! On that note, I got to give my friend Traca a quick drive-by hug while we were serendipitously in the same country and location on the same day. (Hugs are great.)
  • Rewatching the Wednesday Adams dance to get into the spooky season mood. The whole series is worth a re-watch.
  • This incredible home studio. How do I fill my home with more like this?

The Weekly Meal Plan:

After a long weekend of travel meals (some of them quite delicious!) I’m looking forward to being back in my own kitchen. And vegetables.

That said, one of the excellent things I ended up doing before leaving was eating down much of the fridge (the other excellent thing was a very good deep clean before travel). So I’m looking to restocking tomorrow night – usually I go straight to my “anytime shopping list” and go from there.

  • Sunday: Shakshuka (handed to me in a warm bowl when I returned from the airport)
  • Monday: Feast and Fettle Japchae Noodles
  • TuesdayWhite chicken chili
  • Wednesday: Fish Chowder. (Sam Sifton’s no-recipe recipe.) I found a handful of good Red’s Best fish in a freezer drawer I had forgotten about this week.
  • Thursday: Dinner at a work-related thing!
  • Friday: Pesto pasta, before all my garden herbs are totally frozen.

Lunches: End of the chili, tofu, pumpkin samosas from Trader Joe’s (still in there!)

Snacks: overnight oats, Topaz apples from Volante.

That’s all for now! Hope you have a great week!

xo, Sam

PS: Tomorrow morning, I’m going to clean my computer keyboard. (On the off chance that you need to do that too, consider this a fortuitous reminder!)

Weekly Good Things – Week 42

Mindfulness, common ground, and the weekly meal plan.

Cross-Posted from my Substack. (Please subscribe if you’d like this in your weekly inbox!)

42 is my favorite number, so this week was a sure bet at being a good one for me.

I inherited a love of good numbers from my mother – I love a strong number, mathematical curiosity, palindrome, 11:11 special number, etc. Alas, I didn’t inherit my mom’s synesthesia – where numbers and letters have color!

Mindfulness Doesn’t Have to Be Hard?

I was at UMass this week speaking to a group of students, and one of them asked about starting a meditation practice.

I find that most of the time when people have tried meditation and it doesn’t work for them, it’s because they either ramped up too quickly, or found the wrong type of practice for them

My favorite way to start building your mindfulness? Start where you are.

I’ve been practicing mindfulness and meditation every day for a decade – mostly because it’s much easier for me to do something every day than intermittently.

Tiny Tangent: Okay, have to pause here to mention the Twitter post I snorted when I read this week – “The Andrew Huberman ideology is built on the belief that we are controlled by unseen biological forces to which we must pay daily tribute. Insanely neurotic, low-agency way of living”; – @TenreiroDaniel (I have a really mixed complicated love/hate relationship with Huberman (neuroscientist, podcaster, pop-health influencer) – namely *most people* will never get to this “optimizing stage of health.. nor should they.)

I’m not sitting to meditate for an hour. While I’ve done deeper work with MBSR training that had me sitting for much longer periods of time – and very much enjoyed it, and admire friends who have been able to go on 10 day silent retreats, I don’t think that will ever be my personal goal.

My commitment is spending at least a few moments a day, usually 5-10 minutes, sometimes less, sometimes more, making time to work with my mind.

What keeps me practicing?

  • Finding Focus: I want to approach the day with a little more focus – practicing flexing my attention on the things I want to get done, and moments that I want to truly enjoy.
  • Boosting Energy: I frequently have to “spin up” to get something done or scratch the surface of deeper self reflection. Mindfulness practice helps me “tap in” and get there more quickly.
  • Even Mood + Less Rage: Sometimes the world is a lot. Okay, daily the world is a lot – when I practice mindfulness I’m focused on how I perceive the world around me, how to notice, and how to create energy boundaries.

6 ways I practice mindfulness that aren’t regular meditation:

  • Go for a walk and keep my phone in my pocket.
  • Sit with a cup of coffee and watch my dog sleep in the morning.
  • Watching a movie or tv show without multi-tasking on a phone.
  • Soundbowl class with Reggie Hubbard.
  • “Noticing Walks” – pick either a color and snap photos of objects with that color, or “flower walk” – photos of flowers.
  • Standing barefoot in the backyard grass for a few minutes.

This Week in Good Things:

  • This week I had my quarterly gift to myself – a personal organizer who comes for three hours every quarter to help me move forward a larger scale project in my home. This time around I removed a wild amount of Tupperware from my kitchen, and removed enough so that when the dishwasher and sink are both empty, there’s space for everything put away. The real impacts? I cooked this week, I felt more focused to do my day to day work, and it spills out to everything else in my lifeLooking to get more organized in life? Start with your physical space.
  • Good Writing: I wrote an essay I’ve been thinking about for a while: A List of Wants and NeedsIn it, I get very specific: wants for work, my writing, the world, Ompractice, and some fun stuff (I’m looking at you, Disney Annual Pass).

What do I want? What do I need? What am I not letting myself ask? Sometimes the thinking piece is harder even than saying it out loud. Sometimes the asking part is hard.”

  • Good Reading: After writing my own essay, I ended up reading this good essay: ‘What do you want?’ by Calvin Rosser. I’ve also worked my way half way through Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) because it felt like the season for a little philosophy.
  • Our Legacies: The poet Louise Glück died this week. I first got into her poems after taking a class at Wellesley on Lowell and Bishop with Frank Bidart. I like reading both Obituaries and Poetry, so I found myself reading a handful of them about her, then her Wikipedia page – her mother went to Wellesley! I went to high school with her editor’s child! –, and then diving back into some of her poems. My friend Lizzy also pointed out that she wrote poems that referenced Formaggio Kitchen, and she lived these days in Cambridge, which now makes me question is it possible I’ve struck up conversation with her and not even realized?
  • Tackling a nagging task. This weekend I found myself wading my way through half-finished errands: breaking down cardboard boxes, returning a box to Target via mail instead of wading into the weekend zoo. Returning a product I ordered from France that’s now taken me 3 weeks and 4 separate trips to try to return.
  • What does it mean to be “a regular”? I headed out to dinner with my mom and brother this week to the newly re-opened Eastern Standard, a Boston institution. (Eating with my sibling is like eating with a celebrity. Everyone comes up to us to say hi.)

Good Things to Think About

🤝 How do we find our mentors in life? Try “Invisible Mentors”. While I think structured mentorship programs can be useful, often it’s hard to find people who have the time and space to participate. One way to get around this? What I call “Invisible Mentors”. Every so often when I’m trying to learn something new, get up to speed in a space, or advance, I start with making a list of people: who are the most innovative people in the space who are doing what I want to do? I then do a deep study on their writing, reverse engineer their path to where they are, and learn everything I can from them. Do they know me? No. But I believe we can learn from anyone. (Caveat: in this internet connected world, one thing I’m mourning about Twitter was that it was always very easy to reach out and actually connect with your “invisible mentors” on the platform. These days it’s a little harder!)

📣 What did you read that made you question something this week? Think differently? One thing I try to do every day is read the ideas and opinions of people I disagree with. I don’t want to live in an echo chamber. The next level is having conversations with people I disagree with, with the hopes of finding common ground. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend Diane Hessan’s “Our Common Ground: Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters” the lessons of which go beyond politics.

🩴 How do you change your mind? This week, our friend conversation was about teaching a four year old about changing your mind, and how to convey age appropriate concepts on the topic. We talked about: “What kinds of things can we change our mind about” (agency) and “When can we change our mind” (predictability). It got me thinking about how we lose the ability to change our mind over time whether because society has beaten us out of it, or because we haven’t practiced. Have you changed your mind about something important lately? What would it take to change your mind?

🟢 Good Things in Action: if you have a few minutes today while scrolling social media – take a moment to pause and actually comment on someone’s post instead of just passively scrolling or “liking”. 

Other Good Things

  • 📺 Watch: I’ve been very much enjoying the documentary series onthe Beckham’s on Netflix. They come across as surprisingly thoughtful people, there’s very good conversation about mental health, bullying, perseverance, and grit. // Killers of the Flower Moon was a phenomenal book, and I’m looking forward to the Scorcese film that just came out. 
  • 🛒 Things to buy in quantity: over the years these have been great decisions – a package of several good scissors. I use for cooking – I have several and they go in the dishwasher and I don’t worry about it, one for my mail area, one in my office. G2 Gel Pens by the dozen. Sharpies in quantity. Anker fast charging cubes and several long charging cables. Packing tape in a 6 pack.
  • 👅 Good Tastes: I subscribe to the Noma Tastebuds membership, and this Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce was one of the best new things I tried. (This will sell out by the end of the week.) Trader Joes has Kimbap back in stock (sort of) after going viral a few months ago and selling out after I had very much enjoyed the one I tried. I went on a yearly McDonalds Pilgrimage to try out the Mambo sauce with a 10 piece Chicken McNuggs and Fries in Palmer, MA. They were out of the sauce. I should give a special shout out to my one thing I get more frequently than once a year – the Mango Pineapple Smoothie which I find to be very good.

The Weekly Meal Plan:

This weekend, I had some energy to cook my favorite thing in fall: a pot of chili. I start mid-fall, and usually make a pot once a week or two through the entire winter. My method is typically a pound (or two) of ground meat which I heavily season, chopped onion, chopped pepper, a can of beans, a can of diced tomatoes, and then a jar of salsa of choice. (Today’s was pepita salsa from Trader Joe’s.)

  • Sunday: Mushroom pizza and salad with red peppers, blue cheese, and fried onion
  • Monday: Chili, shredded unexpected cheddar, crispy jalapeño crunchies
  • Tuesday: Tech women dinner at a friends’ house!
  • Wednesday: Fish night, rice bowl, nori, cucumbers, pickled ginger
  • Thursday: San Diego!
  • Friday: San Diego!

Lunches: TJ’s lamb vindaloo with yogurt, cubed cold tofu with peanut dressing over assorted fridge veg, pumpkin samosas from Trader Joe’s.

Snacks: hard boiled eggs, overnight oats, Topaz apples from Volante.

Treat: Cinnamon Sugar Toffee Trio.

🥔 You know how you could do that? A friend posted about what to do with a baked potato this week, and I got a little excited in the thread:

  • Take a peek at Turkish “Kumpir” – it’s baked potato as STREET FOOD. You basically load up with an outrageous amount of stuff.I’m always a fan of chili topping, but you can get VERY creative. I like to theme globally – ie “Greek Potato: feta, chopped olives, chopped parsley and dill, souvlaki or lamb”; Spanish Potato: chorizo, deconstructed patatas bravas – ie – tomato-ey sauce, garlic mayo. Etc.
  • Breakfast Baked Potato: loaded with eggs, cheese, bacon.Taco Potato: all the fixins of taco night.. on a potatoAlso – some of the great global potato dishes – corned beef hash.. potato.Canadian Potato: poutine baked potato, or Montreal Style potato with Schwartz’s smoked meat, sauerkraut, pickles, side of Cel-Ray or Black Cherry soda.
  • Also! Potatoes are great to stick little flags in to make your potato more “festive”.

That’s all for now! Hope you have a great week!

xo, Sam

The Second Lunch July Eats

Bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers and feta and salami and beans

After making myself an unusually good salad lunch (this bean salad above: ripe tomato, cucumber, feta, oregano, salami, and red wine vinegar), I sat down this weekend to dream up some summer meals for the month of July. .

I usually start with Mark Bittman’s classic 2007 article Summer Meals for inspiration. Most of the “recipes” are really just ideas – fresh, in season, simple meals. Lots of seafood. In the summer I need things to be easy, not get the kitchen too hot, and make me feel vaguely like I’m in middle school summer again.

Shopping is a little bit more relaxed – Trader Joes and Whole Foods for some basics, my farm share, and I like to pick things up at Farmers Market – I’m lucky to have a weekend market right down the street.

In Season (in Massachusetts)

  • Fruit: end of the strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches mid-month. I’m still gorging myself on cherries (mostly Ranier), and typically buy whatever is on sale at the store. The melons starting – watermelon, cantelope.
  • Vegetables: Lettuces, Green Beans, Beets, Bok Choy, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrots, Cauliflower, Kale, Chard, Corn, Cucumbers, Eggplant, Leeks, Peppers, Spinach, Zucchini/Squash, Tomatoes (at least hot house). My fresh herbs are all doing well in the planter: parsley, basil, dill, cilantro, oregano.

Cooking Projects:

  • Nan’s Gazpacho: my grandmother used to make large containers of gazpacho all summer long to take to Maine.
  • Jordan Marsh’s Blueberry Muffins. This classic recipe from Marian Burros in the NYTimes. I think of my grandparents whenever I eat blueberry muffins (although admittedly those were more likely to be from Market Basket or Costco.)

Recipes: (I mostly use NYTimes Cooking app for specific recipes outside of my own cookbook collection.) Here are a few I’ve bookmarked:

The List Summer Items:

  • Summer Corn + Tomato Salad
  • Cold Peanut Noodles with Chicken and Cucumber
  • Grilled Hot Dogs and Baked Beans
  • Kraft Dinner Mac + Cheese from Canada
  • Can of B+M Brown Bread with Nutella
  • Watermelon and Feta Salad
  • S’mores
  • Strawberry Shortcake
  • Köfte and Shepherd’s Salad, and cold Ayran
  • Fried Hamsi (little fish) with lemony salad
  • Fried fish tucked in bread

What to Eat When I’m Tired and Don’t Want To Cook:

  • Trader Joe’s Chicken Drumellas and a bag of broccoli never disappoints.
  • Tinned Fish Rice Bowl. If I’m a little more ambitious I can bake fish from this. Usually I add some cucumber, avocado, rice vinegar, seaweed, ginger. 
  • Taco salad. Ground meat from the freezer with taco seasoning. Cheese. Chopped tomato. Sour Cream.
  • Lobster Cobb: lobster, blue cheese, tomatoes, avocado.
  • TJ’s Lamb Vindaloo + TJ’s Cumin Marinated Chickpeas + Yogurt

Eating Out:

  • Lobster Roll Quest (I’ll aim for one every week or two.)
  • Pammy’s
  • Mochiko Chicken Sandwich
  • Rancatore’s Chocolate Shake
  • An Italian Sandwich (from Monica’s, DePasquale, or Linden St. Deli)
  • A cider donut (even though it’s early in the season)
  • A Flo’s Hot Dog
  • Barnacle Billy’s (Steamers and a Crab Roll)

What’s on your summer table?

Good Things 2023: Week 2

cubed pumpkin poached in syrup with walnuts on a stove
Turkish Kabak Tatlısı Pumpkin in Syrup with Walnuts

We’re mid-way into January, and so far New England has seen a smattering of flurries. I’m not sure if we should all be concerned, but I’m enjoying the temperate enough weather and trying to get out as much as possible. I have an amaryllis that’s blooming which is a joy to watch, and a fresh bouquet of Irises.

a bouquet of irises on a coffee table in a tall vase

{Still Fresh:}

skiing at the weston ski track
Night Skiing at the Weston Track

{Good Things, in No Particular Order:}

  • I’ve been doing morning yoga every morning to start my day, and pairing with a liquid vitamin (MaryRuth’s Organic Liquid Morning vitamin.) I’m historically intermittent with vitamins, and not really sure they do much, but even the placebo in the winter is a nice ritual.
  • My stairwell and living room bathroom painting is done! The stairwell looks SO FRESH! (This unintentionally set off a saga with fire alarms, and another with a pup with an itchy eye; but we’re rolling with it!)
  • I went to the gym to participate in an off-session Barbell Betties, and lifted a back squat PR for myself unintentionally. It’s so nice to lift with barbells.
  • Acquisitions of note:
    • I “stocked up” on fresh undergarments. Friends with tatas, I’ve switched over almost exclusively to the True + Co Body Boost V Neck. (One of my yearly intentions was to continue with the undergarment refresh.)
    • I got myself a season pass to the Weston Ski Track, which is conveniently less than 11 minutes from my house, and offers night skiing! My first go was a little bit harrowing, as it’s been about 20 years since I last skied, and somehow I found myself in the MIDDLE OF A SKI RACE! I’m going to be taking a few lessons and looking forward to it.
  • I went to my friend Nat’s small business and friends mixer down the street. It included ice breakers (the best being – what piece of media have  your recently enjoyed!) and a harmonica!
  • I went to a Female Founders and Funders event downtown at SVB. (Thank you Kristen and Meeta!) I also made it a point to connect with another founder in the same general space, and was kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
  • Good Reads: finished Ann Patchett’s lovely book The Dutch House. Took me about three years of audiobook to finish it, and still thinking about it. Picked up Danny Licht’s Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again, on Bettina’s recommendation list, which is a small and mighty little book to inspire you to cook and eat. Finally, a RomCom a month late – The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer – was delightful (and being turned into a film!)
  • Watched: Fire of Love– a National Geographic documentary on Disney+ about a pair of famous vulcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft. While I loved my geoscience and volcano research in college, I’m… also glad that I didn’t opt for a life of chasing live volcanos. (Their death is not a spoiler – you learn about it in the first 20 seconds of the film.) The footage is really quite remarkable.
watching a film about volcanos on a tv and a dog in a blow up cone snoozing
Watching Fire of Love (and little Cone Boy)

{Good Eats}

Another great week in food! I’m still reading the 60-minute Gourmet Cookbook (Pierre Franey), Smitten Kitchen Keepers, and The Woks of Life. One of the fun things I did was crowdsource some favorite recipes from my Wellesley food people, so I’m compiling that into a list now. My Turkish recipe of the week was Kabak Tatlısı – a kind of candied pumpkin dessert. I also made myself a quality avocado toast.

Some highlights:

Kabak Tatlısı: the recipe is very simple, you cut approximately 2 lbs. of pumpkin (or squash! I used a Japanese squash this time) into squares in a wide shallow pan. You cover with 8 ounces of sugar, about 1/4 pint of water, and the juice of half a lemon (I use a whole lemon because I like it lemony). Cover and poach gently for an hour, basting every ten minutes or so. I usually turn the pumpkin over mid way to make sure it’s all cooked. You then leave it to cool in the pan, and sprinkle with walnuts.

a bowl of rice and sardines and tomatoes and cucumbers and ginger

Sardines Rice Bowl with Tomatoes, Cucumber, Pickled Ginger, and Furikake I each a version of this regularly – it’s one of my most satisfying meals. Sometimes I use tuna, or salmon, but I truly adore sardines.

Broccoli with Blue Cheese and Balsamic, tossed in some leftover Chicken + Kebabs: I get addicted to a combination, and then can’t stop eating it. Broccoli, blue cheese, balsamic, and toasted walnuts (if you remember) is really a perfect combination. I find myself eating the entire bag of broccoli this way.

a bowl of christmas lima beans and tomato celery with a lemon wedge

101 Cookbooks: Christmas Lima Stew – this is a truly stellar recipe, and I cook up Rancho Gordo Christmas limas. This time around, I was planning on cooking the soup the day of, but I ended up taking myself skiing at the last minute, so when I came home, I simply made all the ingredients into a bean salad! Celery, Caraway, Olives, Lemon, Parsley. All delish.

Two bolo cheese sandwiches with açili I picked up these Portuguese sweet breads, and ended up making myself a late night cheese sandwich. My neighbor had given me a jar of her tomato and pepper condiment from her garden in Turkey, and I’ve been hoovering it this week.

a bowl of salad with goat cheese and a baking tray with baked skate fish with some crunchy panko topping

Baked Fish with Crunchy Miso Mayo + Green Salad with Honey Goat Cheese. I usually eat fish on Wednesdays when I get it fresh from my farm share. This time though was Red’s Best Skate wings from my freezer. (The goat cheese was from the event I went to.)

a bowl full of chicken and bulgur with yogurt and parsley

Chicken thighs with tomato and bulgur (riff on the chicken and rice dish in Smitten Kitchen Keepers) – I always love homey dishes like this that are sort of stove top casserole and low effort. I ended up cooking some leeks and garlic with smokey Rancho Gordo paprika, cumin, chicken thighs, and then tomato, little honey vinegar, and Turkish bulgur with vermicelli.

a bowl of the epicurious kale and date and parmesan salad with almonds

Epicurious Kale Salad with Dates, Parmesan, and Almonds + Pork Chop. This is a PHENOMENAL salad. Honestly, might be up there in my top 3 salads of all time. MAKE THIS SALAD. It’s easy to make, and truly exceptional. I add a whole lemon instead of half.

a dog rolling in the grass with his belly up

May we all barrel roll with the JOY that Bertram brings to flinging himself and rolling in the grass.

Here’s to a great week! –– xo Sam

Good Things 2023: Week 1

Lemony Shrimp and Bean Stew

Another year, another excuse to go back to “Week One” – which is a satisfying way to start again and renew for the year. One things I try to do at the end of every week is a pause for gratitude – taking a moment to do a little review of the week, how I felt, and what I experienced. Every time I do this activity (*every* *single* *time*) I’m reminded just how many really lovely moments I’ve had.

This week, I wrote!

  • I published My 2023 Kitchen Resolutions! and my 2023 Reading list (and beyond!)
  • I spent a little bit of time on “systems upgrades” – reviewing my “Let’s Eat” spreadsheet, adding new recipes to my list to try, reviewing my “list of lists“, my January Intentions
  • I’ve kept a movie watching spreadsheet since 2019 (and an unorganized Letterboxd of most everything I’ve watched) – but this week as a gift to myself, I made a to-watch movie list with options for my favorite genres – primarily classics that I’ve missed.

Also, if you haven’t yet downloaded it, my 20 page Winter Good Things Guide is here!

{Good Things, in No Particular Order:}

  • I ran my first 5k of the year – I’ve run the Needham New Year’s 5k maybe for the past decade? (This year I had to tie both shoelaces..)
  • My stairwell and living room bathroom are being freshly painted
  • I’ve gone to bed by 11:30, and woken each morning to do some yoga or lift (I’m not usually a morning movement person, but I realized that I could get in 20 minutes without disrupting my morning coffee and reading.
  • My ProHort gardening and horticulture class kicked off! Looking forward to getting my gardening to the next level. (I also “accidentally” acquired some dahlia tubers from Five Forks)
  • Acquisitions of note: I sprung for a month of Youtube premium to see if it makes a massive experience difference.
  • Good Reads: we kicked off the year with The Bodyguard – Katherine Center (very fun romcom), 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (2021, 129 pages) – strongly recommend!
  • Watched: The Menu (HBO) if you like watching Chef’s Table and dark comedic violence, you’ll likely be mostly satisfied. Wasn’t perfect, but enjoyed.
  • Chopped off about 5 inches of hair! And now it’s swishy!

{Good Eats}

It was a great week in food! I’ve been reading the 60-minute Gourmet Cookbook (Pierre Franey), Smitten Kitchen Keepers, and The Woks of Life – and been inspired to cook each evening (a working dishwasher, turns out, is the secret to my happiness cooking. Some highlights:

Ottolenghi Chicken Thighs with Fennel and Arak I’ve made this recipe maybe a dozen times over the past few years, and it’s always good. It’s also forgiving – you can swap different citrus out easily, and it’s a very simple recipe to make – you can marinate all the ingredients in a ziplock or even in the baking dish and just pop in the oven.

Cauliflower Gnocchi Deconstructed “Manti” (Turkish seasoned ground beef, yogurt sauce) I’m a fan of Trader Joe’s cauliflower gnocchi, and this makes me feel virtuous. You really simply season the ground beef (usually cumin, oregano, chile, or köfte seasoning). I air fried the gnocchi, and then tossed it in when the beef was done. You make a little yogurt sauce with some garlic to top it, and some more pepper on top.

Pierre Franey Mustard Mayo Flounder; leeks with red wine vinaigrette + tomato. Super simple mix of mustard, mayo, and parsley. You coat the fish and broil or bake. I had flounder from Red’s Best in my farm share. (The leeks were leftover from boiling a chicken over the weekend, and I made a red wine mustard vinaigrette to douse over everything.)

Pork Chops + Salad with Burrata, Tomato, Avocado, Dill Dressing. The air fryer makes perfect pork chops every time. (8 minutes or so at 390 and I let rest.) Big salad of everything in the fridge. Trader Joe’s vegan dill dressing.

Vietnamese Style Garlic Noodles + Whole Foods Lobster, Bok Choy: made a version of these. Sprung for lobster.

Lemony Shrimp + Bean stew with Christmas limas and Argentinian red shrimp from TJs, lemon parsley + sour cream. This is a great stew base recipe! You really want to add extra lemon and parsley at the end.

Also this week? I remembered how easy it is to make good popcorn in the microwave?

Here’s to a great week! –– xo Sam

Good Things 2021: February

I haven’t been able to wrangle myself to write weekly, so here’s catch-up on this short month!

My amaryllis bloomed! I’ve been admiring it in the diffused morning light from the overcast sky which been giving us snow intermittently. I’ve been being diligent at picking up a weekly bouquet for myself at Trader Joe’s. It’s been a few weeks in a row of tulips, because they are fabulous.

Good Things and Creative Input:

  • Watched: The Big Chill – which has a surprisingly good soundtrack! To All the Boys:2, and Lucky Logan (neither of which were must-watch.) And MINARI! (HIGHLY recommend.) Signed up for Letterboxd, a film version of Goodreads. I’ve been *loving* WandaVision, and been watching Agent Carter, with deep angst that they cancelled it after two short seasons.
  • Reading: been loving the Brooklyn Bruja series. We’re reading Caste for Wellesley Book Club. A little behind on my reading these days!
  • Errands of note: Went to the dentist! Started my taxes!
  • Movement: The last week of my lifting class was bittersweet – I’ve enjoyed the structure of a Monday, Wednesday, Friday program at 6pm to look forward to. After finishing it, I made the attempt to switch programs and do the work on my own – it’s been… semi-successful! I’ve also kicked off our Ompractice My Core Floor Pelvic Health program (the exercises are very fun!) and I’m doing more time on the bike to contribute to our Circumpolar Race around the World Team.)
  • Together-ness: Weekly Zoom Trivia! A chocolate truffle making class on Zoom. A Zoom Pizza birthday party with charades and a seven year old DJ.
  • Organization: weekly personal sprint planning tag team!
  • Flowers: Red Tulips! Daffodils! Orange Tulips!
  • Joy: Getting a POST CARD from my DOG. Reading the Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer. Getting a second BLANKET with my dog’s face on it.

After a few weeks of being house bound with a sore back, Bertram has been up and at em for the past week or so going on walks again, and I’m deeply relieved!

Last week, I went to Formaggio to wait in line and bid farewell to the location that has been one of my comfort places for the past twenty years. It’s moving three blocks down the street, but I have a LOT of feelings.

{Good Food}:

One thing I’ve really enjoyed over the past few months is shared meal planning with friends. Not that we’re actually eating the same things, just more as an accountability tool. More than the fancy planning, I’m really interested in those quick default meals my friends are eating – I find that I’m more likely to make a healthy choice when I can swap out a simple meal that I know a friend is also enjoying this week.

The most glorious bowl of cottage cheese topped with Formaggio Kitchen passionfruit curd. A generous dollop. (And then having this same thing about four times for desserts. Sometimes I added a little oat.)

Some highlights:

  • Post-Superbowl Feast: leftover’s from my family’s Zahav montreal shortrib extravaganza from Goldbelly.
  • My favorite Epicurious Kale and Date salad.
  • Lobster Cacio Pepe
  • Calabrian Tomato Dumpling Soup from Trader Joe’s with added chicken
  • Kheer from my Indian take-out from Shan-a-Punjab.
  • Lentil soup with ham, bok choy, eggs
  • Chicken tenders in the air fryer with a big ole salad and two dipping sauces. I tried the new magnificause from Trader Joe’s (the second was actually Chik-fil-a spicy sauce.)
  • Molten Chocolate saucy cake.
  • Big pot of Kimchi Stew.
  • Pot of Rancho Gordo pinto beans. Ate a bowl with honey, and plantain garlic croutons which was sensational. Another bowl another day with chopped tomato, egg, and star dust (Rancho gordo tajin)
  • Cafe Spice Chicken Tikka Masala (one of my favorites pre-made meals).
  • A bowl of ham, chicken, broccoli, and basil caesar.
  • Fennel salad with hardwood smoked tuna.
  • Annies Mac n Cheese with Birdseye Broccoli with Cheddar sauce… because.
  • Incredible Beet Tzaziki from Formaggio.
  • Broccoli with blue cheese, toasted walnuts, and balsamic vinegar.
  • Mocktail with seltzer, cherry jam, and rosewater.

Lunar New Year food from my neighborhood Chinese restaurant: noodles, and sesame balls, 8 Treasure rice, and date rice cake.

OYSTER delivery from Island Creek thanks to Somchay and Janet. I’m so thankful for friends who will do an emergency drive to Duxbury to pick up $10/dozen Island Creek oysters…

Zoom Truffle Making Class! This was so much fun. Plotting my next online cooking extravaganzas.

Of course, there’s been a lot of snuggles as well.

With this, I bid you adieu!

Here’s to a very good week!

xo, Sam