Where have you been?

          Some of you might have noticed that we’ve been writing a lot less frequently lately. It’s true, and we are actually quite disappointed about it. The truth is we all entered fall excited for the “slower” season and have found that our lives have accelerated instead. Where have we been? Well, there’s been work, and family obligations, and preparations for moving and thinking about big picture stuff, and what comes next, and all those things seem to eat up our precious blogging time. Now that I’ve decided to go to grad school, I personally have spent the beginning of fall searching for a new home. I have been in and out of Boston, and in and out of many questionable apartments. I’ve stood on dubious carpeting, I’ve stood in bathrooms where you couldn’t actually open the door past the toilet, and I’ve found myself in kitchens that were clearly once walk-in closets into which someone had stuffed a stove. And while I want to believe I can adapt, somewhere between needing to balance a cutting board on the radiator because there is no actual counter space, and needing to plug all cooking appliances into the bathroom due to the shortage of grounded outlets in the “kitchen,” I realized that my budgeted cooking life in Boston is shaping up bleakly.

          Feeling bad about my quest for a new home that could be going better, my friends and family have reached out beautifully, and they’ve done it with herbs. From Saratoga I was gifted a mammoth parsley plant, and my mother walked into the house the other evening with what can only be described as a rosemary bush, and which has even actually managed to overpower the basil’s aforementioned perfume. The herb situation is now, admittedly, a bit out of control, and since the apartments I’m looking at don’t have a living room so much as just a hallway (a very narrow hallway), I’m not sure where I will fit in my 12 potted plants. It’s looking dangerously like the time may come when I might have to choose between having a bed and having fresh herbs, and I hope that when that final hour arrives I will have the will power to make the right decision.

What is most disappointing, however, is not actually the state of affordable housing in Boston, but rather my culinary habits throughout this little rental adventure. In the past week I’ve stress eaten enough questionable Chinese take-out for 4-6 people, boatloads of fresh-popped popcorn because I felt the need to exercise my ability to plug in the air popper confidently without blowing a fuse (a luxury it looks like I will soon be forfeiting), one jicama, peeled on the go and eaten as if it were an apple, and nearly an entire jar of peanut butter, and another one of honey, consumed almost exclusively in the spoon-to-mouth fashion. I’m not proud of any of it, but it’s kept me going, and at least the honey was local. But, sadly, unless you consider open jar, get spoon, dig in, your sort of meal, there are limited recipes to be posted from my current quest for semi-normal roommates and a decent kitchen (I’d take mediocre even) that seems so elusive at this point it may as well be the holy grail.

So, I am pleased to say that we are all still here, and persevering, and maybe even thriving in some small ways, and sometimes we even get to see one another too, to cook delicious things, and to blog about them. For now, we’ll ask that you be patient with us, know that we miss you, and hope you can subsist along with us by taking comfort in the fact that all the herb plants are still alive, and that delicious recipes are on their way.