Category Archives: Food

Alone Again, Naturally

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Time, Unspooling

Something I did not calculate in my recent time-tracking project was the amount of time that I spend in conversation with the people I live with, mainly my husband. I realized, as he has been on his Tour de Scotland, that a lot of time is spent talking, which makes many of my tasks longer than when the only thing I hear is the Sound of Silence or, technically, the Sound of Podcasts. The point is that my tasks this past week have all been completely uninterrupted, which, coupled with the fact that my novel is in for final edits, led to a lot of free time. I have filled some of this time with various long-neglected photo projects and with British period dramas. Mostly, though, I am reading and talking a lot to the dog, which are all obviously one-sided conversations, answered only with a wag. Who’s a good boy, who is, you are, you’re so good, you’re so good, ooooh I love you so much, are you a doughnut, yes you are, you’re my doughnut. Etcetera.

I Am Like A Dog

Rex and I have a lot of similarities: we both have big feet, we love walking, we look great in black, and we thrive on a fairly-rigid schedule. Another similarity occurred to me this week: we both can eat the same meals over and over without getting bored.

Sometimes I will come across a quiz that will have the question if you could eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? I never have trouble answering. For me, I could eat Greek salad with hummus and pita for the rest of my life, and I would never get tired of it. Case in point: I have, at the time of writing, eaten five Greek salads in the past seven days, and I will make more tonight.

Dinner for one.
I have to use up these tomatoes somehow.

I know plenty of people who need a lot of variety in their menus, and who don’t repeat the same meal within a thirty-day stretch. And then there’s me, who has had a green smoothie for breakfast every day for the past decade. Don’t get me wrong, I like many other things! But when it comes to making dinner for just myself, I revert to my favourite dinner, which is quick and simple and has freed up even more time in the day over this past week of Single Girl Living.

My son texted me last week to let me know he’d be popping by to make sure I wasn’t spiralling into insanity, and also to eat dinner. Rarely do I allow input as to what I’m making for dinner, but since I’d been alone for a while, I asked what he’d like to have.

The Colour of Gratitude

Several months ago I wrote a guest post on my friend Elisabeth’s blog (HI ELISABETH) about gratitude. One of the questions was if gratitude was a colour, what colour would it be? I skipped that question. I couldn’t answer it, I couldn’t think in those terms at all – until this past week.

I realized, as I chugged down my coffee just before my yoga practice, that I DID know the answer. For me, it’s the colour of the sky as the sun rises: pink and purple and pale blue. Our house faces west, and at this time of year the sun starts to rise during my yoga practice; as it rises behind me I can see the western sky change and reflect those colours. At a certain point, the mountains on the other side of the lake glow pink, and it never fails to flood me with gratitude.

STOP! BIRCHIE TIME!

Speaking of gratitude and blog friends, Birchie was here visiting me this weekend! I cannot believe she made such a long trip for little old me. (HI BIRCHIE!) We had a great time and got along like nobody’s business, just as I thought we would. We explored the downtown area and shops, we drank margaritas on my deck, we went for a wine tasting, we watched Dirty Dancing and When Harry Met Sally, we talked and talked and talked. Of course, she accompanied Rex and I for our long daily walks.

Weekly Reading

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. Canadian debut author alert! I love that this author has had this level of success – a Jenna Book Club pick! And I also really enjoyed that much of this story took place in Edinburgh and a country house in Scotland, because my husband and son are there right this second. So that was delightful. I enjoyed the octopus symbolism. I loved all the friendships and the details of university life in Edinburgh. But the truth is I wanted to like it more than I did. There were so many characters to keep track of, and it was written in third omniscient, which made it hard to connect to or care about any of them. I kept losing the plot, like literally, I kept forgetting the main driver of the plot. When the big reveal happened, I literally had forgotten the point.

Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault. When I was young I loved reading the comics, or, as my dad called them, the funny pages. My three favourites were For Better or Worse, Garfield, and Cathy. Cathy! Ack! I used to identify with that heart-sweatered heroine a lot, and yes, I realize that sounds like the punchline to a bad joke. In any case, I was excited to read this book of essays by her creator. Now I think “did I hate myself?” Because so many of these essays are written with self-deprecating humour that slides into self-loathing, so many of these essays are about demonizing food and hating our appearance and nagging her daughter. I mean, I guess they could be amusing if you were in the mood for “ha ha, none of my clothes fit, and I just ate a container of ice cream so I hate myself” kind of humour, which I was not, honestly. There are some poignant thoughts about feminism, aging parents, empty nests, and the weird phenomenon of having bigger feet as we age, but most of it was cringe. I actually checked the publication date to see if this was written in the early 2000s, which would explain a lot, but no. It’s from 2019. Did we all hate ourselves in 2019? I don’t think I did.

Standard Deviation. After two mediocre books in a row, I needed a win, and so I went with this gem. I first read it in 2022, and it was one of those “books I read from the library but loved so needed in my collection.” Katherine Heiny is writing goals for me. Her books are kind of plotless, with all sorts of fun characters, and I love them. This is such a delightful and funny read about a couple raising a special-needs child who becomes really, really into origami. There is really nothing else to say about it except that it is a pure joy to read.

During our wine tasting, I discovered my new favourite wine from a very special, VERY local winery, Tantalus, that was just released on Saturday! We were one of the first to taste it. Birchie is leaving me today to continue on with her adventures, and so there will be many more British period dramas and Greek salads in my future! Have a beautiful week, everyone. xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Nourishing Edition

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How has June been treating you, friends? I hope you have all been enjoying my Nourishment series; I have certainly enjoyed putting it together. There will be a final post on Monday to wrap it up, and in the meantime, I want to tell you about my Favourite Things this month. They are all things that are nourishing for my physical and mental states, if we use the term fairly loosely. You know me, I like a theme.

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Nourishing Edition

Strawberry Fields Forever

This is the second year for our strawberry plants, and they have been prolific! Almost every day I have a harvest of these sweet sweet berries. We have to net the plants to keep the birds from feasting, and when I’m crouched down underneath the netting, picking them, I’m reminded of Mrs Elton at the berrying party in Emma.

And check out this very funky specimen:

It was delicious, although I do feel like I snacked on Patrick from Spongebob.

The raspberries have also been showing up and showing out; we have several different varieties, so hopefully we will have berries from June to September.

Did you hear that? It’s ominous music playing.

AND SO IT BEGINS. Zucchini season is now, alarmingly, in full swing. I have already harvested eight zucchini, including an absolute monster that quadrupled in size from last Wednesday, before our road trip, to the following Monday. My husband and son are giving me the side-eye, after last year’s zucapocalypse.

Postcard from the incomparable Michelle (HI MICHELLE) for scale.

Like A Good Neighbour, Amanda Is There

The emotional and psychological issues I have around my hair could keep a therapist busy for decades, and probably buy the aforementioned therapist a vacation home on Maui, but such issues are not available for public consumption. I will merely say that fifteen years ago or so, my hair stylist put down her comb and scissors in exasperation, and said to me Nicole, will you STOP saying that. There is nothing WRONG with your hair. It’s just REGULAR hair. Stop telling me how weird and terrible it is. IT IS JUST NORMAL HAIR.

So. I have issues around my hair. I dislike having my hair cut not because I’m Samson or Rapunzel or anything, but because I fear negative commentary about it, although with few exceptions that is not something that happens. It takes me a while to build trust with a new stylist, so you can imagine the tizzy I was in when I moved here. And listen: my hair is not complicated to cut. It does not require precise styling. I know this and yet, I still feel stressed and worried whenever I go to get my hair cut.

My neighbour Amanda cuts hair out of her home, and it took me nearly a year of living a three-minute walk from her house before I got the courage to ask her to cut mine. She’s a busy mom with a full-time job, but she told me cheerfully that she cuts hair for friends and family! and I took MONTHS to contact her. Are we friends? Is this overstepping? If I ask her will she think I’m weird and presumptuous? Finally, after my husband told me to just call her already, and if she didn’t want to do it she could say no, I contacted her.

Friends, she is the sweetest woman around and she immediately set me at ease as I talked a mile a minute about my hair worries. She has been cutting my hair for almost a year now, the latest time being just a couple of weeks ago, when I had delayed getting it cut for a few months. The ends were, to say the least, not great, Bob.

Amanda told me gravely we would have to take off some length. She asked if I was okay, and then she asked again. She explained very carefully what would happen, what her plans were for future cuts, and then she proceeded to give me the best haircut of my entire life.

I might be getting over my hair issues! I love you, Amanda! (HI AMANDA, if you’re reading this)

Power Pants

I am about to relate an anecdote, but before I do, I want to note that the following occurred years ago, in 2011 or 2012, when it was considered not only appropriate but complimentary to comment on other people’s bodies, particularly when the other person’s body appeared smaller. I know, I know, we would never ever think this was okay to say these days, but I am setting the scene for you.

Picture it: it’s 2011 or 2012. I’m standing with the Circle Moms, so named because we all stood in a circle and chatted in the schoolyard when our kids sledded or built snow forts or played on the playground after school. As we were talking, a woman came up to a friend of mine in the circle, and asked her in a congratulatory, complimentary tone if she had lost weight. Nope! my friend said happily. I just bought bigger pants.

Several months ago, when I did a big purge of my ill-fitting wardrobe – mostly pants, but also a not insignificant number of little black dresses – Michelle (HI MICHELLE) congratulated me. It’s so empowering to have clothes that fit! she said, and she was right. It IS empowering! It IS a big deal to go into my closet and know I can wear all the things in it.

Here we are, in a new season – not just of life, but an actual season – and it’s really time to bust out all the crops and capris. I needed new pants. I needed bigger pants. And so I went to Mark’s, because it seems like this is where I get all my pants lately, and I bought three pair of very lightweight capris, and two denim ones. Friends, they are comfortable, I feel cute, and I AM EMPOWERED! Behold a few of my powerful pants!

It’s so simple. Putting on pants without shimmying or struggling, and just…doing them up? It’s the best. Our bodies change throughout our lives, shouldn’t our pants? Why try to squeeze into pants that are uncomfortable and most likely unflattering in their discomfort? JUST BUY BIGGER PANTS. Fitting my body should be the very least we ask for from pants, right after making me not be naked, and yet. And yet it’s revolutionary.

Stop Bugging Me

We had quite a bit of rain, which was desperately needed – I do not want to go through another August like the one in 2023! – and the rain was followed by sunshine and lovely warm temperatures. Glorious! And also? Perfect mosquito weather.

Something you may or may not know about me is that I am a person you want to invite to your parties, not just because I would talk to a chair if it looked marginally friendly, but also because I am a Mosquito Magnet. I am ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTABLE to the female mosquito population. They cannot get enough of my sexy, juicy flesh. And another neat thing to know about me is that I have the kind of allergic reaction to mosquito bites that makes people say Oh GOD, what HAPPENED to you? What on another person might be a slight annoyance is, to me, torture. Mosquito bites swell to enormous, hard, red lumps, and then turn into bruises, and that is not a look I like to embrace. Some topical ointments soothe somewhat, others give me a secondary reaction, it’s a wheel of fortune.

I want to be the type of person who just smooths on a little Skin So Soft, or spritzes on a homemade essential oil mixture, and then calls it a day, but I am not. I am just so sexy and irresistible to those rental houses for souls of the cruel, that I need The Big Guns.

Do I want to be spraying chemicals all over my body? No, I do not. But faced with the choice between that and having gigantic swollen itchy lumps all over my body, between that and praying for the sweet release of the bruising that follows, even though I look like I’ve fallen off a cruise ship, pinballing down, hitting a lot of railings on the way, well, I’ll take the Fresh Scent Deet every time. I leave it on the outside steps to spray on just before my walk, then I strut through the greenway like John Travolta with a paint can, while everyone around me is losing their minds and slapping the air and their own bodies.

Come Back With A Warrant(y)

The most-used small appliance in my kitchen is the Vitamix; it gets used by various people three to four times a day at minimum. So it really was no surprise when, several months ago, it finally gave up. It’s too much! the Vitamix would have said, were it sentient. Stop with the continuous smoothies already! The container blades seized up, started to smoke, and died.

This was an absolute crisis. The motor still worked perfectly, so we ordered a new container for it, making the huge and predictable mistake of purchasing a quick-to-arrive, much-less-expensive knock-off that was compatible with our motor. In what can only be described as You Get What You Pay For, the container worked perfectly for two weeks, and then developed a tiny leak. It still worked, but it would leave a teaspoon or so of smoothie on the motor. Over the course of a few months, that teaspoon increased to a few tablespoons, and every time I wiped up the resulting mess I could only think that this was not great, Bob.

The problem was that our model is no longer available, and so my husband called Vitamix to ask what he could purchase as a replacement, which is when we discovered that we have a seven-year warranty on all parts, expiring in August. Vitamix sent us a brand-new container, free of charge, and we are all happily consuming smoothies without having to clean up a little puddle afterwards.

Outfit of the Month

As I mentioned above, I was running low on little black dresses after The Great Closet Purge of 2024. The purge happened in November which, as my husband pointed out, was perfect timing for Black Friday. How or why Black Friday became a thing in Canada, I do not know, but I was grateful that Ricki’s – a proudly Canadian company – had such a sale. I picked up three dresses for $120, and I love them all.

I wore one a few weeks ago for a friend’s 60th birthday party, paired them with Skecher sandals, and posed with the best black-and-white accessory I have.

I hope you are all enjoying our first official week of summer! I’d love to hear about all your Favourites this month. Tell me everything. xo

Glorious Food and Joyful Movement: Nourishing the Body

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I have never run a marathon, and it is unlikely in the extreme that I ever will, but in spite of – or maybe because of – this, I was absolutely fascinated by a podcast interview of a Belgian woman who, at age 55, ran a marathon every day in 2024. Every day. And 2024, you may recall, was a leap year, meaning she ran 366 consecutive marathons.

I laughed as the host kept asking multiple questions that can be summed up in a single word: how? And this woman, in her stoic Belgian accent, said that yes, it was difficult. Yes, she had pains and aches and exhaustion, which she would take treatment and painkillers and naps. Yes, she ate a lot of pasta and protein pancakes. Yes, she ran in the rain for the majority of the winter and spring seasons. Then, she casually mentioned that her immune system was compromised from all the running, which led to contracting Covid in August. It took a long time to get over it, she said matter-of-factly, Because of all the running.

I mean, yes? I was completely stunned by this revelation and listened to the host ask multiple questions about that. Oh, I ran more slowly, she said. More like four hours and twenty, or twenty-five minutes. This bout with Covid brought her daily average run time from sub-four hours to 4:05, which made me wonder if she and I were even the same species.

Well, in a way I get it. I do. I am obsessed with keeping my own various streaks on DuoLingo and Peloton, and I am not trying to set a world record, here. I get the idea of pushing through just to accomplish something important. I do. Running a daily marathon while sick with and recovering from a respiratory illness isn’t something I personally would choose to do, but I’m not in her shoes, the shoes that she had to replace twice a month from wear. And yet I can’t help but think her poor body. I can’t help but think that her body was giving her signs that said maybe we should take a break?, signs which would be mostly obscured by her ultimate goal.

I wanted to talk about nourishing our bodies this week, through movement and through what we all think of when we think of the word nourishment, food. Food, glorious food! Interestingly enough, that same podcast several weeks prior discussed the role of nutrition in perimenopausal fatigue, the interviewee was adamant in her belief that women just do not eat enough to support their energy needs.

I found that fascinating. I also find it fascinating, and not in a happy way, that women are all universally scarred from the societal pressures and images of beauty that we are constantly exposed to, from the cradle to the grave. Who among us has not felt, if not downright self-loathing, then at least dissatisfaction with our bodies and appearances? I am sure there are some women out there who have always simply eaten whenever hungry, whatever food they felt like eating, and don’t think for another moment about it, but I have yet to meet one. I have yet to meet a woman who has not at some point assigned moral value to food items, and thought I’m being bad while eating one, or has referred to a treat as a guilty pleasure, as if eating a cupcake was a moral failing and a plate of nachos was on par with an actual sin.

I have yet to meet a woman who has not felt some kind of guilt or shame about her body, and if you are reading this and you think wait, I haven’t, I have always felt great about myself, then I am happy you’re here and happy to know you exist.

It just makes me sad. It makes me sad so many women view movement as some kind of punishment, and food as some kind of virtue signaling. Because we need nourishment! It reminds me of the scene in the book Bridget Jones’ Diary where she talks about calories to her gay best friend, who asks but how many calories do you need to survive? Bridget is completely taken aback, having dissociated actual physical needs from calorie counts.

We need to treat ourselves tenderly and with love, and withholding food and feeling shame or guilt while feeding ourselves is not that.

After many decades of doing complicated food math in my head, of feeling guilt and shame and embarrassment, of refusing and restricting and saying no thank you when I wanted to say yes please, and could you give me a piece with extra frosting, I am done. I’m done with all that, which is a simple statement to make and much more complicated to get there.

I love this rental house for my soul, this body of mine, and I want to give it all the tenderness and nourishment it needs. I want my food to check off at least two, and preferably three, out of the following three boxes: filling, energizing, and joyful. There are a lot of vegetables and fruit in my world, lots of green smoothies and lots of chickpeas and lentils, and there is also cake. There are sometimes chips and guacamole, and homemade crusty bread, still warm, dripping with butter or Boursin. Weekly, there is popcorn, and also wine or cocktails. And always, always there is coffee, because where would I be without that nectar of the gods?

I wouldn’t be in motion, that’s where I would be. How do we feel about movement practices these days? My personal practices have changed a lot over the years, to become more tender and nourishing. I no longer run, but instead walk a marathon distance over the course of a week, with my fuzzy companion. It’s slow, but I get to take in all the views. I haven’t practiced the Ashtanga second series for six years; instead I have focused on the primary series with some modifications.

2014: I don’t do this pose anymore, but this is my yard now!
2025: How do people take action shots while exercising? This is as good as it gets around here.

I get excited every morning to choose a Peloton ride, which I do based almost entirely on the playlist – disco and 80s music are immediately bookmarked – and how much I like the teacher. I will say I am much less excited to do my strength training, and treat it less like a joyful movement and more like a dreary, tedious prescription. I guess the results – non-crumbling bones, more muscle mass, fewer menopause symptoms – are the joyful part of that movement practice.

Food and exercise are two of the most fraught topics around, and they certainly have been for me in the past, but these days I’m very peaceful about them. I want eating and moving to be joyful things, and they are for me; I think that joy is nourishing, and a nourished body helps with the mind and with the soul – the latter of which will be next week’s topic!

Weekly Reading

After last week’s amazing reads, this week was Just Fine.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein. You may remember I recently read Coco Mellors’ book Blue Sisters and disliked it, so you may wonder why I would pick up her debut. The reason is that I think she is a talented writer, and it was the subject – addiction – that put me off of that book, so I wanted to give her debut a try. And as a warning, there is a lot of drug and alcohol use in this book as well (Coco, are you okay?) but it is not as graphic, so it didn’t bother me in the same way. But. You know that feeling when you finish a book and think “wait, what did I just read?” That was this – in a good way, yes, but what did I just read? I will try to describe it: the story follows a very mismatched pair, Cleo and Frank, through their meeting on New Year’s Eve and subsequent marriage. They are not compatible, they have a twenty-year age gap, and they are surrounded by a cast of characters that can best, and most optimistically, described as offbeat. I found myself quite invested in the fate of all of these weird characters, and the book itself is a bit weird, but I liked it. There’s a lot about mental health and trauma, and about healing from both of those things.

Julie Chan Is Dead. This is a very buzzy book, but I’m mixed on it. On one hand, hooray for a Canadian woman author making such a splashy debut! On the other, I think I’m too old to read a satire about influencer culture. I have to admit that it took some doing for me to get past the premise of this book, which is that twin girls are separated at age four when their parents are killed in a car accident; one is left with her mean and stingy aunt, the other is raised by a very wealthy and possibly racist couple. It took me a while to get past that detail. Why wouldn’t the girls be adopted together? If there were family members to care for one, why did they separate them? Why did they have to go no-contact between the girls? This makes no sense. I had to really move past that detail just to get into the book, which is a propulsive read to be sure. It is satire, and as such it’s pretty over-the-top, but it is cleverly done and contains some very sharp observations about influencer culture. It was entertaining, even if I was not the correct demographic to really enjoy this.

Big Girl. I don’t know how this ended up on my holds; I must have seen it recommended somewhere. However, it was a slog for me. A very, very depressing slog of a book about an eight-year-old girl, growing into womanhood, navigating the world in a very large body. It was inadvertently on topic for this week, what with the themes of body issues, weight, self-loathing, and intergenerational body trauma.

I hope you all have a delicious week, filled with lots of joy and yummy things. xo

Homegrown Salad Season Begins!

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For absolutely no discernable reason, for five days last week I had Slide by the Goo Goo Dolls intermittently stuck in my head. How this happened, I have no idea. I hadn’t heard it recently. I wasn’t thinking about anything that could trigger such a thing. I had not been on any slides and I hadn’t watched any slideshows and I hadn’t thought I’ll just let that slide. The source remains a mystery. Then on Friday, after five days of singing I wanna wake up where you are, I took a Peloton ride and near the end was the song Slide, the familiar tune coordinating with my already-there earworm.

The universe works in strange ways.

My own little universe has been very green lately as I have been sliding into homegrown salad season. We’ve had quite a bit of rain over the past month or so, and temperatures have been in the mid-to-high teens, which is ideal growing weather for green leafy vegetables. I had my first harvest of kale and arugula last week, which was celebrated by making a giant salad for dinner.

I harvested on Wednesday, and by late in the day Thursday I could barely see where I cut from. The greens are growing before my very eyes! A key lesson I took from last year is to stagger the plantings so that I’m not completely overwhelmed, and even so, even so I currently have an astonishing amount of spinach, kale, and arugula. Well, I like smoothies and I like salads, and I really don’t mind this problem at all.

Another key lesson from last year was to only plant one zucchini. I confess that I did plant more than one zucchini seed, and until last week I had two pretty healthy looking, sizable plants. My husband, upon learning this, grabbed a spade and dug one up. My baby! Murderer! After a short period of mourning for the zucchini that never was, I had to concede that it was for the best. I still, despite best efforts, have nine cups of grated zucchini in the freezer from last year’s bumper crop. I also still have friends, although those relationships may become strained if I tried to force zucchini on them like I did last year. I’m leaving these here, no take backs! I actually said at a girl’s movie afternoon last September. I was only steps away from leaving zucchini on people’s doorsteps before Nicki Nicki Nine Dooring myself out of there.

Maybe that could be a thing, but call it Nicole Nicole Nine Door, where a person answers a door only to find a pile of zucchini.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however, as it will be a few months before The Great Zucchini Season begins. In the meantime, my cilantro is coming up strong, which I am also stagger-planting, as I am the only person who eats it. I harvested a little last week to have on my stir-fry, and it was absolutely delicious.

In other garden news, the perennial garden is popping, the irises are irising, and in general everything is very fresh and green right now.

On one of our walk routes is a tree that is hung with dozens of handmade birdhouses, which is truly delightful. I have yet to see a bird in any of those birdhouses, or even in the vicinity of the tree, but no matter. It’s lovely to look at, even birdless. I don’t know the who, why, or how of it, but I enjoy it.

Weekly Reading

This Motherless Land. As mentioned last week, I reread Mansfield Park in preparation for This Motherless Land, as the plot of the latter is taken from the former, and I highly recommend doing that for a really interesting reading experience. This Motherless Land deals with two cousins, one in Nigeria and one in England, who due to tragic circumstances start living together, before another set of tragic circumstances separate them. It’s a story of finding home and belonging, and it contains a few of the most abhorrent, atrocious characters you ever did read. Fortunately for us readers, it all wraps up in a very neat bow, with a series of satisfying coincidences. Where Mansfield Park explores the British class system of the early 1800s, this book explores straight-up racism, which is pretty breathtaking, and not in a good way. It was a solidly satisfying read; I did not love it, but I liked it well enough, which is a lot coming from a person who has a strong tendency to dislike modern retellings of classic books.

Blue Sisters. What I am about to say is absolutely a Me Problem, not a Book Problem. The thing is, I have a very hard time reading about addiction, particularly hard-core drug addiction and alcoholism. I have a very hard time with the details about benders, physical effects, and the psychological behaviours and impacts. I blame Trainspotting for scarring me, back in the Nineties. Anyway, I know this about myself and yet I picked up this book that is about addiction, and wow, it was not for me. I almost DNFed it several times, but pushed on because I have so many friends who have read and loved it. But it was just too much for me. That said, it is well-written and contains a lot of other interesting themes, particularly about pain and how people cope with it, along with trauma, inter-generational and otherwise. So this book might be perfect for you! But it was just awful for me.

On that kind of downer of a note, I hope you all have a beautiful week ahead of you. Maybe with some homegrown salads? Or flowers? Take care of yourselves, friends. xo

A Day In The Life: Saturday, What A Day, Grooving All Week With You

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Everybody’s doing it, so I will too! Day in the Life posts are abounding in my lovely blog community, and I realized that a) it’s been a while for me, and b) I’ve never done a WEEKEND Day in the Life, and so here we are. Even though I have no job, no kids who are in the school system, and a retired husband, I do like to make a distinction about weekend activities. I could probably make every day the same, but I thrive on a schedule and routine, and I like to have a different one for weekends.

Saturday May 3

3:55 am. I wake up at my normal time, but then I remember it’s Saturday! So I doze off and on for a couple of hours before getting up just after 6:00 am. Every single day, I do the same thing when I get up: I go downstairs, start the coffee, and drink two big glasses of water. After that I let Rex out of his crate and after he’s joyfully greeted me like it’s been years instead of hours since we’ve seen each other, I let him outside. While he’s there I fill his bowls and do my morning ablutions – wash face, brush hair and teeth, apply SPF moisturizer – and then go check on him. He’s still out and about, probably sniffing the resident coyote or deer scents. When we moved here I fretted so much about having no fences, but it turns out dogs really can be trained to stay within their range, and he does. He’s out there for a while this morning, so I pull out my laptop, pour a big cup of coffee, and start answering blog comments.

I’ve been taking branched-chain amino acids in the morning lately; it’s supposed to help with perimenopause-related fatigue, and I think it does. I mean, I’m very much a Placebo Effect person, so who really knows. I let Rex in after about twenty minutes, and he flops at my feet while I edit my Monday post and read a few blogs, as well as my daily Simple Abundance reading and a Mary Oliver poem.

7:25 am. Time for walkies, but before that I give the downstairs bathroom a quick cleaning. I get dressed, brush my coffee teeth, put on a little mascara and tinted lip balm, and head out with my favourite fuzzy companion. We walk by the creek, which is super high, so we take the high path instead of the more-fun, but now flooded, low one. We meet and greet a lot of the regulars, including but not limited to the man with the chocolate lab who always has a ball in his mouth, an older fellow wearing a “Canada Is Not For Sale” hat – elbows up, sir! – a couple with a fifteen-pound version of Rex, and a gentleman who refers to himself as “Grandpa” and who, every single time I see him, tells me the same joke regarding a quote from Winston Churchill and the inscrutability of women. He always says Stop me if I’ve told you this before but at this point, I’m never stopping him.

9:05 am. I arrive home to a bustling kitchen, where my husband and son are making breakfast. I make my own breakfast – a green smoothie – chug some more water and coffee, and notice how gross the floors are, even though they’ve been vacuumed and washed twice this week already. I do it a third time, wash the blender and accoutrements, call the vet to order Rex’s preventative lice/ flea/ tick/ heartworm medication, brush my now-green teeth, and head downstairs.

9:45 am. After a week of more-strenuous workouts, on Saturday mornings I like a Peloton recovery ride, so I choose a 20 minute one. Following that I give myself the gift of a restorative yoga practice with a silent meditation, and Rex tries to hold my hand while I have my legs up the wall.

10:30 am. I feel great! I drink some more water, and then Rex and I head to the garden. It’s supposed to rain this afternoon so I’m taking advantage of the sunshine to check things out. I get super excited to see that my spinach is close to harvesting already, weed a little, and then head back to the house as the clouds gather.

10:55 am. I make our bed, clean the ensuite, and change out the towels, after which I take a shower. Makeup on, hair done, and dressed, I put an absolutely enormous load of laundry in the washer, write out a few birthday cards, and read a document my husband asked me to review.

12:15 pm. I drive to the library to exchange some books and then to the vet to pick up the medication plus Rex’s expensive dental chews. I mail the cards, go to the bank, and then grudgingly to the grocery store to get eggs. I have long considered the egg industry to be terribly cruel, and to assuage those feelings and compromise with my egg-loving guys, we get a biweekly egg delivery from a local urban farm; I can see the hens on one of our walk routes, and they look happy and healthy. We get two dozen every two weeks, but I did not account for our older son being here for a transitional week between his dorm closing and moving into his new apartment. I spend some time talking to the employee about which eggs are most humane, buy ANOTHER two dozen, and hope fervently that the humane eggs really are.

1:15 pm. I’m home, and I’m hungry. My general view of leftovers is simply NO. I will not. The exception to this is Greek salad; I have lately been making a ridiculously large salad on Friday so I can have the leftovers on Saturday; I round it out with a protein smoothie, supplements, and lots of water. After that I brush my teeth and start food prep: two dressings for the next day’s dinner, and pasta sauce for tonight. Fun fact: I wrote about using my grandma’s trick of adding baking soda in order to cut the acidity of tomato sauce when I worked for YMC; this was in 2015 and so, predictably, my editor titled it Tomato Sauce: You’re Doing It Wrong. Wow, did I get blowback from that. Good times on the internet. As I reminisce about the days when you could expect an attack on your character for adding baking soda to tomato sauce, I wash all the dishes and wipe down the countertops.

2:30 pm. I practice my DuoLingo – I’m learning French and Arabic along with my Spanish – and then fold the giant load of laundry while talking to my mother on the phone. I brush Rex’s teeth and let him outside with a chew, I bake a pumpkin loaf and chop up cauliflower while drinking wine. I wash the associated dishes again, because I am spending my wild and precious life doing so, and also because I cannot abide a messy kitchen.

4:00 pm. I pour another glass of wine and settle in to read for a while, occasionally ambling to the kitchen to cycle pans of cauliflower into the oven and heat up water for pasta.

6:00 pm. Dinner time! We eat the roasted cauliflower with the internet-maligned pasta and sauce (it’s delicious), and the guys clean up the kitchen while I take Rex outside. I go upstairs to change into my pajamas, I brush and floss, wash my face, and apply my night creams along with my hand and feet moisturizers.

7:15 pm. Thus sexily attired and lubed up, I come downstairs to snuggle with my husband on the couch. We watch a movie – The Hit Man – but it’s so boring that I fall asleep for half an hour, and then when I wake up I’m incredibly confused. I watch the end, not knowing what’s going on, and then I go to bed.

9:10 pm. Good night!

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my Saturday! I’d love to hear about yours. xo

Five For Friday: The Month of Cakes Edition

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About eighteen months ago, I read a book about Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, and it remains to this day one of the most depressing literary experiences in my life. I was still processing the book weeks later, particularly the part where Jean advises that on one’s birthday, every single birthday for the rest of one’s life, one should bake a cake, cut the cake, serve the cake, but for god’s sake, do not eat the cake.

I’m depressed all over again just thinking about it.

Listen, you all know me. I’m all about healthy choices and nourishing one’s body, I’m all about taking care of these rental houses for our souls, and yet. The thought of not eating cake, which is to me one of life’s greatest pleasures, is so incredibly sad that I can’t bear it. I can’t bear the thought of someone hating themselves so much that they would deprive themselves of a treat even once a year, on an occasion as momentous as one’s birthday.

And you might immediately say, No, Nicole, it’s not because she hates herself! It’s because she loves herself! She wants to be the best version of herself! and maybe that’s true. Maybe. But the pursuit of thinness at all costs – particularly the cost of an annual slice of birthday cake – is genuinely soul-destroying. It feels very much like self-loathing.

I think the thing I love about cake, other than its deliciousness, is that it is very much a Sharing Dessert. I suppose one could make a single-serving mug cake, but for me part of the joy of having cake is the passing around of slices, the communal enjoyment, the sharing of the moment.

A tradition in my little family is to have a big Sunday dinner, the kind that takes several hours to make and that always includes dessert. I decided in honour of my big birthday, and also because I love cake, that I would bake and/ or consume cake every weekend in April. Not only did I meet this low-stakes goal, I exceeded it! Here’s how it went.

The first week’s cake was a golden one, layered with salted milk chocolate frosting.

For the second week, I took a page out of my friend Sammi’s book (HI SAMMI) and baked a lemon angel food cake, topped with lemon drizzle. Sammi’s trick was to use an angel food mix and sub out some of the water for lemon juice and zest, and it worked like a charm.

The third cake was a mid-week one, and it was courtesy of Sammi herself! She hosted a birthday lunch for me, and she made a glorious flourless fudge cake with chocolate-covered strawberries, which are second only to cake as my favourite dessert.

I just love strawberries, and so the fourth cake was a favourite made by my mom when she was visiting (HI MOM); it’s an angel food cake with strawberry filling, topped with non-dairy whipped cream. Divine!

Last, but certainly not least, was my Nifty Fifty grocery store sheet cake, courtesy of my husband. Chocolate on the inside, vanilla icing and lots of it on the outside; I could not have been happier! There was plenty left over from the party on Saturday to have for Sunday dinner.

I think this Sunday we will take a little break from cake – I have another dessert in mind – but soon it will be Mother’s Day and I think that is a Cake Occasion as well. Have a sweet weekend, my friends. xo

Nifty, Fifty

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Today is my fiftieth birthday! I can finally say I’m Nifty and Fifty!

When I was very small, I had the thought process shared by many small children with regards to what “growing up” entailed. What do you want to be when you grow up is a ridiculous question to ask a three-or-four-year-old, and yet it’s incredibly common. I mean, preschoolers really do not have all the information with regards to career paths.

But when I was that age, I had a really firm idea about what I wanted to be when I grew up, and that was a flower.

I don’t think it’s that unusual for a small child to equate “growing up” with a species-shifting free-for-all. I loved flowers, therefore I wanted to be one. I wanted to be a pink daisy-like flower, my face would be in the centre, and my arms would be the leaves. I can still picture it, myself as a flower, bobbing along in the breeze.

I also remember exactly when this future flower plan came to a screeching halt. It was when I realized that flowers die in the winter. I remember crying hysterically about it; I was a very emotional and dramatic child, and so my complete devastation probably didn’t register much to my parents. I recall my dad saying but flowers come back in the spring, which made me cry harder. I would miss Christmas! I would be dead! When I was a flower! I’m sure my parents did not understand the depth of my sadness, because what adult would be like right, right, well I know you think you’re going to be a flower, but that’s not actually going to happen, so you won’t die every year and miss Christmas. They were probably more like oh my god why is this child crying again?

My dreams of becoming a flower evaporated into the ether, along with my tears.

When we moved here, my husband and I redid our wills to reflect the new province and property, and, because the children were now grown, to eliminate the guardianship clause in the case of our sudden demise that would leave them orphaned. As we spoke with the lawyer, she asked if we had any burial preferences, for when we shuffle off this mortal coil, and my husband was quite surprised that I did have a very strong opinion on this subject. I exuberantly informed the lawyer that I wanted to be composted and planted with a tree, which she dutifully wrote down.

I think it’s very important to have these strange and difficult conversations – open and honest communication is always the best – and so I informed the children of my plan, should I suddenly expire. Oh Mom, my older son said, That’s so great! You’ll be one step closer to achieving your childhood dream of becoming a flower!

It seems a little macabre to talk about my future demise, may it be many decades in the future, and also becoming human compost on my birthday of all days, and well, it is. But it also strangely brings me happiness to think that perhaps one day I’ll be one with the earth while my soul flutters around, hopefully inhabiting a bird or a butterfly, and not something that will immediately get squished, like a fly or mosquito.

In the Ask Me Anything that I had posted months ago, Kyria (HI KYRIA) asked how do you want to be remembered, and that to me is an incredibly difficult and complicated question. I think the way we remember people is specific to the time periods in which we were the closest, to how well we know them, to things we did together. Someone from my youth will remember me very differently from someone who knows me now; certain songs might spark memories, certain movies, certain places.

That said, I think I would like a park bench, just like my pretend friend Lloyd Forest, but instead of reminding people when the park closes, I would like to tell them to return their shopping carts.

Of course, when I told my kids that, they demurred. Turning their mother into compost, that’s fine, but putting a shopping cart reminder on a park bench was not. That makes you sound like you’re a grumpy old person! my son said, I think it would be better if you had Putting the OM in OMG.

Well. I guess he’s right. My tagline really does describe my life so far, and I hope it describes the next fifty years.

Weekly Reading

What’s Mine and Yours. This is what I would classify as a Big Book, and I’m not talking length – it’s just over 300 pages, which seems average these days. But it’s big in concept and it deals with big issues: race-related tensions, redlining, integrating school districts, and intergenerational trauma. There is also a big cast of characters and they all have big problems. There are several time periods as well. I will say it’s very well-executed, thoughtful, and smart. However, it was not what I would consider a pleasurable reading experience because nearly all of the characters were deeply, deeply dislikeable. Even the one main character who I thought was pretty decent turned out to be not so much in the end. It really says something about the nature of pain and trauma, and how hurt people often lash out. Still, I was looking for a redemption arc, which never really happened – but maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point is that people with pain and trauma often never get that redemption.

The Book of (More) Delights. I picked this up while Christmas shopping last year, entirely because of the cover and the name. I had no idea until my friend Laura (HI LAURA) mentioned a “Ross Gay moment” that this was a book by an acclaimed author. To further the Laura confluence, in the recently read Bite By Bite, the author, Aimee, mentions going to a watermelon festival with her friend Ross, who was working on another book about delight, and it was this Ross. THEN, near the end of this book, Ross mentions going to a watermelon festival with Aimee, and I just exploded with all the life/ reading intersections. Anyway. This is a book of 81 essays on everyday delights over a span of a year, and it starts and ends on Ross’ birthday, which felt serendipitous for me, finishing it just before my own. I have been reading an essay before yoga most mornings since January, and his style of writing is – as one might expect – delightful. He has more digressions than anyone I’ve ever read, sometimes six or seven in a SINGLE SENTENCE. I loved it.

It’s certainly been a week of delights for me: my darling friend Sammi (HI SAMMI) hosted the most gorgeous girls’ lunch you can even imagine, complete with tiara and sash, which I’m wondering if I can get away with wearing everywhere for the next year. It was truly the most wonderful afternoon with such an incredible group of women, I am SO lucky, so so so lucky.

My parents were here for the weekend to celebrate, and we had a great time with lots of wine and more cake. I hosted Easter dinner for both sides of the family, and it turned out great! I hope you all had a lovely weekend with all sorts of treats. xo