Broiled grapefruit for breakfast. Eating a grapefruit is like inviting a tango into your mouth. The sweetness and the bitterness play with each other in a perfect, taut harmony. Broiling just tightens the rope, concentrating all the elements, making the sweet sweeter and the bitter more pronounced. It's quite an exciting, sexy way to start your day. Especially when it's a rainy Sunday morning and you don't have to hustle out the door. (Pun intended.)
Making birthday cakes. There is so much joy in birthday cake that it's hard not to get happy just creaming the butter with the sugar and adding an overflowing teaspoon of vanilla. The happiest cakes, in my experience, are the layer cakes of almost any flavor but Tunnel of Fudge and Marbled Sheet Cake will do, too. Included in the joy is writing Happy Birthday in an awkward scrawl and covering up mistakes with frosting and fresh flowers. Best of all is thinking of the recipients face as they bend close to the candle-spiked cake, their face still as they concentrate on their wish, the golden candle-glow flickering in their eyes until with a deep breath and puckered-lips ... whoosh!
Queueing for Eggs. Each week I get to the farmer's market early to stand on line for a carton or two of eggs that have an indescribable deliciousness and yolks that outshine the sun. These eggs taste better than eggs. They just do. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. There's a handful of regulars that apparently feel the same way I do and so we stand on line together, trading stories and recipes as we wait for the market to open. I don't know what they feed those chickens but it's probably illegal because clearly we are addicted.
Winter/Spring. Winter Spring Summer and Fall are too broad to capture what really happens seasonally. Each of these four seasons has a beginning, middle, and end so actually there are twelve seasons, not four. And then there's the place where they touch, where late winter becomes early spring and it's clearly not winter any more but spring is too young and fragile to stand up by herself. The time for this is now (or soon, depending on where you live), an especially magical and fleeting moment, so pay close attention to the clues: the sudden flood of asparagus and peas in the markets, certain flowers and shoots popping out of the ground. There is a shade of green particular to this time of year, too, a certain vividness that only can be found now. So sniff the wind and stay alert! Is it still Winter/almost Spring?
Figuring it Out. The other day I tried to make home-made ricotta for the first time and it didn't turn out. I checked a few recipes and tried again. It was better but not quite what I wanted. So yesterday afternoon when I went back to the kitchen to give it another shot, it occurred to me that I was really enjoying this process of figuring it out. It's so easy to focus on the end achievement that we forget to enjoy the process along the way, and all the tiny lessons and learnings that come from that. I've said it before but it bears repeating: Be cautious about mastering something immediately and learn to enjoy the mind of the beginner who is always curious and observing closely. A beginner delights in every new bit of information and therefore has a lot more to be happy about than the person whose eye is fixed rather firmly on the prize.
What are a few of your favorite things?
Related: Weekend Meditation: The Certainty of Cherry Pie
(Images: Dana Velden)
10 Easy Vacation Meals to Feed a Crowd
Recipe: Chopped Brown Rice Salad with Grapes and Pecans
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Martha Concrete Lam...
8 Secret Spots to Hide Valuables at Home
The Live/Work Studio of Robert Siegel Handmade Ceramics
Wonderful. I loved this article.
What a lovely article. Thanks. I love Sunday mornings to myself. My kids are grown now and my husband is a musician with a Sunday morning church gig, so I make breakfast just for me -- usually my oatmeal with whatever fruit I have (this morning it was last year's frozen blackberries and a banana), good hot tea (PG Tips this morning), and settle in my spot to catch up with my google reader, or read a cookbook and decide what I'm going to cook this week, or write a letter to a friend, and revel in the quiet. This simple, deliberate act takes me through the rest of the week.
The best part of reading about YOUR favorite things, is my mind considering MY favorite things, and the gratitude I feel because so many of them I get to experience often. Thanks for bringing to mind how great my life actually is.
I've been very grateful to have cooking to occupy my mind this week. So I'd have to say one of my favorite things is thinking about interesting ways to put food together. I found it fascinating (and sort of comforting) to discover and make pupusas.
And I've been thinking a lot about cooking methods and ingredients that are familiar and comforting to other people all over the world, that are new and exciting to me. The whole idea of that is one of my favorite things!
Today my favorite thing is reading YOUR Weekend Meditation!
A few of my favorite things for weekends:
Pancakes:
Pancakes are reserved for Sundays, unless I'm sick or blue in which case I might have them anytime I wish, the flavor is never the same but the very act of making them and especially the homemade syrup takes me back to childhood when my mother let me choose the syrup flavor. Today was vanilla & Vietnamese cinnamon, a vanilla and tangerine juice syrup, and a few early alpine strawberries from the garden for flavor & garnish. Could a stormy Sunday start any better than that?
Tea and a Chair:
One of my favorite things to do on a stormy day is to brew a cup of my favorite tea, slice and bake a few cookies from the logs of dough kept in the freezer, and take to my reading chair where there is a direct view into the garden. Whether I'm reading a book, and today it's Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, my time spent in the wing chair looking through that window feels like a vacation. I believe one can literally see the spring flowers grow as they're pelted by raindrops. What better meditation can there be for a gardener eager to get back to the dirt?
I'm inspired by your writing on Figuring It Out, and I couldn't agree more with that concept of beginner mind, perhaps today I might figure out a way to love doing laundry... after all I believe in miracles.
Having a Sunday morning to myself (even if only for 90 minutes or so) to read the paper, sip some coffee and perhaps even shower before the rest of the house gets up.
Dana's meditations; spring green; spring peepers; nice people; a fireplace on a cold, damp day; licorice mint tea; a good yoga class; chopping vegetables
thank you for your article and making my Sunday!