Every one knows that moving is no fun, so those details will be spared. Let's just fast forward to a post-move scenario, one where you're still living in your original place but all your stuff was taken away the day before and while you thought you had organized things down to the last salt shaker, it turns out that you forgot the fact that there are still a few last meals to be eaten here. Like breakfast. More

A pile of fava beans pods sits before me like a jangle of alien's toes: thick, elongated, waxy pods with bulges and bumps and scruffy black marks. Inside, they're crammed full of plump oval beans, pale green and smooth and surrounded by cottony pulp. I love favas for their sweet, green flavor and creamy texture. I love them like I love asparagus, sharing as they do this brief season that makes them even more precious. I love them for their alien-toe looks and dozens of culinary uses from all over the world. But I especially love them for their inconvenience. More

This post is about the pleasures of being unambitious. Not lazy (although I approve of that as well) but not all determined and zealous either. Unambitious, as in making just one jar of strawberry jam, instead of mounting a jam-making superproduction, complete with vats of boiling water and industrial sized bags of sugar and cases of fruit. Not that there's anything wrong with a good, old-fashioned canning-palooza, but sometimes the circumstances are such that you have to aim small. More

Sometimes when life is playing rough and pushing you too hard into a corner, you have to find your balance in the most peculiar places. For me, it was this scoop of strawberry ice cream. My gritty, hot, tangy-bitter day met the cool silk of frozen cream, sugar and strawberries and for a moment - exactly the duration it takes to eat a scoop of ice cream with a tiny shovel-like spoon, plus about 10 minutes of afterglow - for a moment, all was well. More

In a few weeks I'm going to move from my tiny studio apartment, with its overcrowded kitchen and teeny stove and refrigerator door that doesn't quite close unless you push on it really hard. I'm excited to make this change and at the same time scared, two-sides-of-the-same-coin feelings that leave me a little unbalanced as I flip-flop between them. More

This morning when I glanced out my window and into the alleyway that comprises my "view," I noticed that the springtime sun is coming in at a different angle now and at a greater intensity, and that it is briefly (oh so briefly) piercing the alley's shadows and filling it with sparkle and brightness and reflected light. It's spring, a time of tendrils and tenderness. And fierce determination, too, as shoots and buds burst forth, so vital and insistent and extraordinarily beautiful in their desire to capture this new sunlight and turn it into nourishment. More

A friend of a friend's mother has a farm outside of San Francisco where she raises ducks. (She probably raises some other things, too, but I only know about the ducks for sure.) My friend's friend gave him some duck eggs and so my friend in turn stopped by the other night with a half dozen as a gift for me. Beautiful duck's eggs, passed from warm hand to warm hand. When we're given something useful and beautiful and it is given freely, with open hands and no strings attached, or the strings are little and not so bothersome, then life is sweet and we can relax and enjoy the mutual pleasure of a gift given and received. More

What I am avoiding: Washing the kitchen floor, organizing cupboards, sorting through the large collection of empty glass jars that have gathered in the cupboard below my sink. Also, starting a good-for-you for dinner, which involves peeling a lot of vegetables and other time consuming tasks, meaning that it should have been started an hour ago if I'm really serious about eating dinner at a reasonable hour. Oh, and writing this post. More

Today my pear at breakfast was perfect, so very ripe and juicy and scented sweet. And although a pear is just an ordinary thing, still I felt a little spike of pleasure when I spooned it into my mouth along with some yogurt and honey. There was pleasure, too, that I had this quiet time to notice the pear and the way the morning light was washing into the room where I sat on the floor with my back up against the wall. Without their wooly slippers, my bare feet were getting cold but I stayed there in that moment of pear delight until the whole bowl was licked clean. An ordinary pleasure, a simple moment. More