Very often, I think about all of us in the world, how we are all going about our lives in ways that are both the same and vastly different. Isn’t it incredible, in this big small world, that we are all bustling along, working away, caring for ourselves and our families and our pets, sneaking in bursts of joy in the day, and it’s all the same but also different?

I try not to be ethnocentric, or, more accurately, Nicolecentric, but sometimes I am surprised to discover that friends do boring, everyday things so very differently than I. It’s not like I think my methods are better or worse than anyone else’s, but they are different, I am discovering. I think sometimes there can be moral value judgement placed on how women do things – how often we do laundry, how often do we clean the bathroom, what are we making for dinner – but I’m not interested in any of that. One thing is as good as another, in my books. All the same, I wanted to talk about things I have noticed lately that we all do, but in different ways.

By The Book

My husband asked why I even have cookbooks because I never use them, or if I do use them, it is to wildly change the recipe. This is an exaggeration but only a little one; I don’t think there is any recipe I use regularly that I have not adapted or changed in some way. I’m like the irritating people who used to write in when I was working at YMC, who would say ridiculous things like: I made the chickpea dish you posted but I didn’t have chickpeas so I subbed ground beef, and I didn’t have lemon for the sauce so I used Worcestershire, and instead of parsley I used lettuce. It was terrible, I give zero stars to this recipe. Although, I’m not exactly like that, I like all the dishes I make, no notes. Even recipes for baked goods get the Nicole treatment – shave off some sugar, double the vanilla, let’s add chocolate chips! – and so all my cookbooks have my writing all over them, noting changes. I guess I think of cookbooks as aspirational jumping-off points, rather than, you know, something to use to make dinner.

Before we moved, I committed the cardinal sin of buying something new and extra to pack – two new cookbooks. I think I was having some kind of emotional crisis. My thinking was along the lines that we were going to be in a new house, in a new province, living a new life, with a half empty nest, and it was time to shake up the weekly meal plan. There seemed no need to have a pita pizza night when it would be just me and my husband, and there was no need to make extra pita pizzas for school lunches. So I bought two cookbooks and one of them sounded so promising, called Mandy’s Gourmet Salads. Mandy’s is, apparently, a famous salad and bowl place in Montreal, and I thought, what could be better? Well. This is the most ridiculous cookbook I have ever seen. Each recipe refers to at least one, but usually more, additional recipe on a different page, and then THAT recipe refers to another recipe. As an example, I wanted to make a peanut Thai noodle dish, and the recipe referred to another page for a spicy tofu recipe, and to another page for the chili lime dressing. When I got to the dressing page, the first item in the chili lime dressing recipe referred to ANOTHER recipe as the base for that dressing, and then THAT base recipe referred to another recipe for sesame syrup reduction, at which point I slammed the book shut and decided just to Free Bird it, deeply regretting wasting money on a cookbook when I was just going to make something up anyway. And this bird you cannot change.

Oh, I’m Dishwashing My Life Away

Someone recently asked me, when I mentioned washing dishes for the fifth time in a day, why I didn’t just get a dishwasher. I do indeed have a dishwasher and I do indeed use the dishwasher, but only for plates, silverware, and glassware, which is honestly only a small percentage of the items that need to be washed in the kitchen each day. I hand wash pots, pans, the food processor, the Vitamix, mixing bowls, and all the related cooking accoutrements. I suppose I could put some of those in the dishwasher, but they all take up a lot of room which would necessitate running the dishwasher several times a day, which seems wasteful.

When we were in planning stages of the house, the designer strongly recommended a large single sink to my husband, who relayed this information to me, was clearly not prepared for my outsized, passionate feelings about a double sink. He may have physically backed up slightly. I need a double sink to survive, is what I am saying, which is why Diane’s (HI DIANE) recent post about her dishwasher breaking, and her stopper-less single sink, gave me secondhand dishwashing anxiety. I have a very specific way of washing dishes: I fill the left sink with hot soapy water, and use the right sink to rinse out dishes BEFORE they go into the hot soapy water, because it harshes my kitchen mellow to have food particles or grease in the dishwater. I like clean dish water, what can I say. If I’m really in the zone I can rinse the washed-and-soapy dishes with hot running water, and allow that hot running water to also rinse the dirty dishes in the right sink, which feels like a virtuous water conservation project. If a pot is really gross, I will use a scrubber and the rinse water to clean it out BEFORE it goes into the hot soapy water. All the clean dishes get piled up on the dish rack and there they stay until they are dry, or dry enough, to put away. Growing up, my job was always to dry dishes, and there is not a household job I loathe more than that, no, not even scrubbing toilets; as god is my witness I shall never dry dishes again. Well, sometimes I do if I’m desperate, and when the kids clean the kitchen after dinner one of them will dry dishes, to prevent the inevitable tumbling down of the tower of dishes piled in the rack. They do not seem to have my dish-drying aversion.

This is controversial, but I never put a plate in the dishwasher without rinsing it first. I pile all the plates and cutlery into the dirty dishwater, after pots and pans are washed, and give each item a quick swipe with the scrub brush before loading the dishwasher. “So, you wash the dishes BEFORE they go into the dishwasher?” my mother asked me with her eyebrows in her hairline. No, I rinse them; if I washed them I would use the clean dishwater. My friend Dom (HI DOM) straight up told me that this methodology is a) insane and b) would, over time, result in a subpar performance by my dishwasher. Nevertheless, I am who I am and I shall not be deterred.

Girl, Wash Your Face

Speaking of washing things, if we were playing Never Have I Ever, I would say used a washcloth to wash my face. I use my hands, and so does my entire family; not to be insular, but I never really thought about it any other way until I read this by Suzanne (HI SUZANNE) and this by Engie (HI ENGIE) and realized that a large percentage of people are Team Washcloth. I have just never considered a washcloth as an option, and I probably never will, because the way I wash my face works just fine for me. A washcloth seems too rough for my skin and always has, although that doesn’t explain my early-teen usage of St Ives Apricot Scrub. I think that product could remove rust from a wheel well.

When I admitted that, while I own a couple of washcloths, they are never used for their intended purpose, I felt kind of exotic, fielding questions about washing my face with my hands, like I just landed here from Mars and humans were wondering how Martians perform their daily ablutions. Are you wondering how, exactly I wash my face? No? Are you thinking Nicole, this is the weirdest and most boring topic you have ever written about, and I just read a thousand words about how you wash dishes and hate cookbooks, so that is saying something? Well, we didn’t come this far just to get this far, people. Strap in, friends, we are going for a wild ride.

Here are the necessary items that guarantee success: a fresh hand towel for patting the old visage dry post-washing, Dove bar soap, Neutrogena cleanser.

Also necessary: tying back my hair and, when applicable, pushing up sleeves. No one wants to go to bed with wet jammie wrists, not that this is a concern with summer jammies.

First step: wet hands, work up a small lather with the Dove bar, and then splash the soapy water on the face, massaging gently to loosen the layers of makeup and sunscreen from the day, paying special attention to the eyes. I gently rub my eyelashes until I no longer feel mascara, but instead look like a crazed raccoon.

Next step: rinse hands and then work a dollop of Neutrogena cleanser into a lather, apply to face, massaging gently for a minute or so.

Last step: rinse, and then pat dry with the clean towel. I don’t like to put my face into a used towel, so I have many hand towels that I have under the sink for single use, like the princess that I am. This can also be used to wipe up any errant water sprays if need be.

Now I’m ready for my many serums and night creams!

Weekly Reading

Before I get into what I did read this week, I am going to tell you about a DNF. It is very rare for me not to finish a book, but the Menopause Reset made it onto the short list. How or why this ended up on my Kobo, I know not; maybe someone recommended it, maybe the Kobo algorithm recommended it, maybe I heard the author on a podcast and liked her, who can say. Well. The very first sentence is something like “Are you tired of not being able to lose weight?” and I thought, NO. Not only am I not interested, I am not even interested in reading even tangentially about weight loss. But I pushed through the first two chapters before abandoning ship. It was not well written, for one thing, although I have read worse-written books. The first two chapters talked about how great the author’s life was until menopause hit, and then there were SO MANY HOT FLASHES, YOU GUYS. Then she outlined how she took charge of her menopause, and mainly, it seems, that was accomplished through the keto diet, intermittent fasting, and detoxing. Again, none of these things are of interest to me but I may have still read it, had she not revealed that she did not believe in medication utilization for depression and anxiety. I myself do not suffer depression nor anxiety, but I have friends who do and medication literally saved their lives. Listen, I will grudgingly tolerate this attitude from Tom Cruise, because Maverick, but I will not read this kind of bullshit from another woman. DEE EN EFF.

A Living Remedy. This is a memoir about a woman losing both of her parents; I had also read her memoir about being adopted and the search for her birth parents, and I will say that this book was a much more compelling read. She discusses her father’s death from complications from untreated diabetes, and what stood out to me is the absolute disaster that it is for people without health insurance to become sick in the United States. I am no Smug Canadian here, because our health care system is far from perfect (ask me about finding a new doctor! Or wait lists!) but I think the absolute last thing a sick person should be doing is worrying about costs of treatment and if those costs are going to push a person into bankruptcy, which is exactly what happened in this book. Her working poor parents had no health insurance, and her dad became sicker and sicker, until he went to a doctor and discovered he lost 90% of his kidney function. His treatment, plus her mother’s bills from cancer treatment, meant that they had to declare bankruptcy. For some reason, they didn’t qualify for Medicare or disability insurance either. I think it is an absolute travesty. Recently I listened to the Hooked on Life podcast where one of their guests discussed his own journey with cancer and said that what is never talked about is the crippling depression that happens AFTER treatment; this man had lost his home, his job, everything. Anyway, this book is about more than just that, it also shows a beautiful and loving relationship between the author and her mother. Her mother died of cancer during the early part of the pandemic; the author could not be with her mother when she passed, and it made me so sad to remember that very terrible time. So many deaths that would have been so lonely. This book is definitely worth a read but, clearly, heavy reading material. 

If you, like me, are also fascinated by the myriad ways we experience the boring and mundane minutia of life, feel free to share! Are you Team Washcloth or Team Hands? Do you also have weird and absolutely rigid ways of doing the dishes? Do you hate drying them? How do you feel about recipes? Tell me everything. xo