I’m sitting in the backyard of my house in San Francisco, trying unsuccessfully to find a patch of sunlight streaming through the branches of the fir tree overhead, in which to dry my lemon-juice soaked hair. I’m commencing my summer rituals — which yes, include naturally lightening my hair — a bit early this year, and they could not be more welcome. If you’ve noticed the blog becoming a bit of a recluse compared to what it once was, it’s not that I haven’t been doing things, it’s just that every time I sit down to write about them, my mind is predictably elsewhere in the pits of fragile worries. But right now, there’s a loaf of coconut bread, studded with unsweetened coconut curls, a healthy swig of vanilla, stirred with browned butter, in the oven, the sun is out, and I’m wrapping up a weekend spent at home with barbequed scallops, pumpkin tofu curry over brown rice, and a walk on the beach in the late afternoon. But the best part of the weekend has been sleeping in my own bed, sitting at my desk by the window eating leftovers and planning summer travels — Portugal! Morocco! — with my parents’ seventies music drifting up from the basement and my little brother studying for the SAT subject tests at the dining room table.

Not surprisingly, as the end comes to what my mother calls my R&R weekend, I’m finally being able to sit down and write about something that isn’t required. To say it’s been a difficult month would be an understatement; I initially thought the stress would begin to fade when I finally handed my thesis over to the printers, but it just kept coming. Some days, it felt as if I was drowning in my own head, then my body took over and with it came a week of sickness and infections. But somehow, it all seemed to melt away this weekend — it’s a pretty magical feeling when peace finally comes, when you can just sit down, look out the window, with a couple of slices of warm bread — er, cake — and finally feel a bit more complete again.

And write. Even though I don’t know what to talk about really. Only that it felt good to be back in the kitchen, felt good to open the oven and feel successful, and that I’ll be very sorry to leave tonight. But while just sitting in peace is pretty great, that peace can follow you anywhere, it just sometimes doesn’t come as easily.

Word is I’m in the market for a place in Boston with a window-full kitchen.

Today I took a “me” day. I slept in, didn’t set an alarm for once. I bought a pair of red jeans off the sale rack, which I spectacularly managed to squeeze into seeing as they were two sizes smaller than I generally buy. I also bought a lovable tribal print sweater — it pays to be “hipster” in Princeton because no one else is, so everything that would be flying off racks in San Francisco is $20 off here. I had a cranberry orange scone (my favorite) and latte at Small World Coffee and people-watched instead of hiding behind my laptop, writing my thesis. I walked down to the Whole Earth Center and stocked up on local Fuji apples, kale salad with almonds, tofu, and sesame seeds, and organic peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I wore sweatpants and no makeup, and realized people don’t really look at you any differently. Simply walking around a bit was uplifting — after the snowfall two nights ago, spring appears to have finally arrived; the sun was out, the snow melting, and I could have done without the jacket.

When I got home, I started looking up the top organic and biochemistry grad schools (not for me obviously!) and started mapping out a summer road trip down the West Coast. I tried to tack on the Grand Canyon to the end of the trip (figuring I should give it another shot after my adolescent disinterest consisting of about a five minute look into the canyon before I’d had enough) which added an extra eight hours of driving. For some reason, I find thinking about travel incredibly calming; it’s like a realization that walls were made for falling down. Even more, thinking about driving along the ocean brings me to my happy place, where things are hippie, spontaneous, wandering, and bohemian without effort, because you know, even being boho these days seems to require quite a bit of planning. The images here are ones I took in Big Sur, California on a family trip. I can’t wait to go back. These brown butter rhubarb bars are from The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook, and are chewy like a macaroon without the coconut, crackly on the top with a brownie without the chocolate, and stuffed with stringy, sweetened rhubarb, which is finally back in season. Never having been a huge rhubarb fan myself, I always did enjoy eating the raw stalks, dipped luxuriously in white sugar, from my grandparents’ backyard. I handwrote the recipe for these bars on little cards for a couple of people, but alas the actual book is in my room in San Francisco so no recipe today.

That all said, there are parts of the very concrete future to be very excited about. I’ll be calling Boston home next year, and am incredibly delighted to share my new adventures surrounding food justice in the coming months.

A recent trip to Seattle brought a Lola brunch of squid kebab with crushed chili and chermoula served with pita triangles, Greek salad, and garlic smashed potatoes; and mini donuts served with spiced pumpkin butter and maple mascarpone. A dinner at Restaurant Zoe featuring fresh ricotta gnudi with truffle oil; mussels and clams with smoked Fresno pepper and Spanish chorizo, sopped up with focaccia; and seared diver scallops with lentils and shredded duck, a heavier winter take on the usually light scallop; among many many other dishes. Another dinner at Poppy featured eggplant fries, a delightedly bright and crisp crab and avocado salad, curried shrimps, and an assortment of vegetarian sides including butternut squash, lentils, and red beet soup.

A few weekends later found me in Boston, fulfilling a love affair with Flour, a bakery in Cambridge. We ate there twice in two days. A chunky cookie with coconut, nuts and chocolate chips, a milk chocolate hazenut cookie, and a ginger cookie for the bus back to New York City. A salad of greens, grilled focaccia, mozzarella, tomatoes, and white beans. A sophisticated BLT with dark crispy bacon strips, aioli, and ripe tomatoes. And finally a vanilla cupcake with chocolate buttercream to share, my favorite combination of cake and frosting.

I’ve been slacking a bit on the pictures recently, and on remembering meals, mostly because my head is tied up recalling food experiences from last summer for my thesis writing and dreaming about this coming summer and all of the lovely places I’d like to vist.

I woke up this morning, after a day of fighting off the stomach flu, to snow-covered ground. I dizzily made a slow trek to Small World Coffee for my first food in over 30 hours, and have been here ever since. A hot chocolate and a plain croissant and a couple of endless hours of listening to people’s pithy conversations while I distractedly write my thesis. A couple of the hockey team boys are sitting across from me at one of the teeny tiny tables — if you’ve ever been to Small World, you know they’re about big enough to fit a laptop and a plate — drinking cappuccinos, and for some reason that makes me giggle though, I suppose, everyone has the right to drink a cappuccino. Two older middle-aged women are next to me, complaining about how their last dinner party dragged on too late, how some other woman has the same job title though she doesn’t deserve it (though she has a lot of past work experience), and saying how the only things they can cook are chili and meatballs (ham is a Dean and Deluca thing). A couple little toddlers are teetering around the cramped spaces between the tables, and in the background you can hear the one barista banging out used grounds as he struggles to keep up with the line. I’m not sure why I’ve stayed so long, though it might simply be that I’m afraid I’ll pass out if I try standing up.

Since the semester ended, I’ve been doing a lot of sitting. And thinking about the future more than occasionally. Right now it mostly consists of future travels as I’m generally trying to avoid thinking about the real life. I have trip to England coming up to see my boyfriend — the same boyfriend who recently received these almond cacao nib biscotti in the mail, about two weeks later and probably stale (though he won’t admit it), and who has been insisting that I go see a doctor all day, yes apparently I have only one — and then plans are in the abstract works for the summer. For some reason, I’m struck with the belief that the world will end in August, or maybe just that a new life will start and I better have done everything, and gone everywhere, I wanted to in this old life before the new one starts.

On the subject of the cookies. I packed half of them up in a box, and put the rest of them out at the end of a little neighborhood cocktail party the night before winter break ended. They’re studded with a delightful little chocolately crunch, without the sweetness of chocolate chips; twice baked (obviously); delicately flavored with both almond extract and chopped almonds; and so, so easy, it makes me wonder why people are so impressed by homemade biscotti. If only they knew, there would be so much less hate for the cookie which generally grows stale in the glass jar at your neighborhood coffee shop.

I followed this Smitten Kitchen recipe structurally, but got a bit lost in the flavorings, as you can probably tell.

It seems like just yesterday that I was standing in the kitchen, drinking red wine, with my camera in the other hand, documenting my little brother making fresh linguine using the pasta machine. I was called into the kitchen initially to knead the dough, but I ended up just photographing. And then eating, a bowl of pillowy curls of pasta, glossy from a coating of homemade pesto. We used the mortar and pestle I gave him for his birthday for the first time, ending up with a somewhat rustic pesto and a smattering of overflow garlic and oil on the countertop. The final plating was impressive, even more so because my brother is only sixteen and is more at home making pasta than, I’d venture, almost any adult.

Coming back to school, I miss the food and the kitchen more than anything. I know I complain about this a lot, and my pickiness likely doesn’t gain a lot of sympathy — especially when I run off on a rant that the reason I don’t eat vegetables at school is because they’re just not California vegetables — but there it is. We’re in the midst of reading week and finals, the cafés and libraries are packed, and I’m craving some good downtime standing by the kitchen counter.

I’m going to go ahead and say, I don’t have much knowledge about making pasta (perhaps I should solicit a guest post from my brother) but it seems to me that a lot of it is about touch and feel. So start with a basic pasta dough, and there are a variety of pasta cutters and pasta machines out there to urge on your creativity. Our household now has quite a few interesting contraptions (a ravioli-cutting rolling pin, a hand-held spaghetti cutter) for shaping pasta.

I was going to talk about whole-wheat everything bagels, and croissants the size of my head from the local bakery, and glasses of red wine every night, but somewhere along the way I got lost in all of the snow and didn’t want to come back out. There’s just so much of it, and it’s everywhere, clouding all my pictures in a foggy white haze, and I sort of want to jump in a huge pile of it, like the kid we passed one night on the street who dove into a snow bank, first time he had ever seen snow.

On Christmas Day, my family took off for a week in the Rockies, to the sleepy little town of Fernie, British Columbia. The food wasn’t much to write home about —though I quite enjoyed those everything bagels — but the snow, oh the snow. The tops of the peaks were so white you could barely see the bumps and riffs underneath you, leaving you to put all your trust in the skis and your legs. Perfect six-point flakes came down almost daily, catching on my scarf and gloves while I rode the chairlift up, minuscule icy beauties. But the real treat was the last day, when we put away our skis in favor of snowshoeing and took off alongside the cross-country trails. We stumbled upon icy ponds; fallen, burnt out trees; layers on layers of snow mounds, which seemed to mimic ocean waves; narrow, winding creeks, which skiers had attempted to cross. We had to stop every five feet or so to take a picture, for my brother to carve another happy face in the snow, or hit a snow-covered branch with his makeshift walking stick, only to have fluffy snow descend on the person unfortunate enough to be walking directly behind him.

On the cross-country trails, locals were out getting an afternoon exercise, most being chased by a dog or two. Some people stopped to chat, but the real beauty was in the silence of the woods. No thrills, no adrenaline rush, just cold fingers and untouched snow.

There’s something about San Francisco and name recognition that when you put the name of a certain café or restaurant before an item of food, you instantaneously know it’s good. Tartine is one of those places, always with a line tailing out the door, always full of the smells of fresh baked croissants and scones, and bread, if you’re very, very lucky. So when an old friend suggested we make Tartine’s lemon bars together, I was definitely on board. We used the pine nuts suggested for the crust. We surprised the man down the street from whom we bought the pine nuts with a plate of still-warm bars. We mixed it up with his family’ breakfast of apple pancakes, a whole hidden apple slice enrobed in soft, fluffy batter; a run out for a pour-over Blue Bottle coffee; a break for Vietnamese sandwiches. It was good to catch up and remember times past. He even reminded me of a pear and almond cake which I made for our prom dinner — I had completely forgotten, but he still had the recipe, and remembered being impressed by the spring-form pan. I only remember the pan of black-and-white cheesecake brownies we devoured in the limo on the way to the after-party.

As I was sitting on the bed the other night, having another freak-out about my post-graduation future, my mother reminded me that sometimes I need to try harder to live in the present. So I’ve compiled another list of little things that make me happy, something I’ve found helpful when the big picture starts to seem overwhelming.

Watching the World Junior Hockey Championships, filling the void created by the NHL lockout.

Lemon sugar cookies, the same ones we’ve made every holiday season since I can remember, devoured this year before I could even photograph them. The stained pages of the Christmas Cookie Cookbook, one of the first cookbooks properly my own, now lacking a binding.

Taking pictures of snow on Boxing Day, with absolutely no one on the road and only a scattering of people on the sidewalks.

Everything bagels from the local bagel and coffee shop, actually covered in seeds instead of just lightly dusted.

The burn in my legs, the powder, the trees turned to icicles, and the pure whiteness that is the peaks of the Fernie Ski Resort in the fog.

Sending out my mother’s hand-printed holiday cards to friends far, far away.

Opening wrapped presents, that I um picked out and tried on a month ago. Gray cashmere sweaters and striped silk wraps from Thailand.

Being in the middle of nowhere, until I’m sick of being in the middle of nowhere. By the way, Hi! I’m in Fernie, British Columbia!

So I should probably start by saying that the last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of festivities and new things that should have happened a long time ago. Recovering, I’m sitting on a sheet-less bed eating leftover candy from our holiday party and drinking hot chocolate, trying to get my life and laundry in order, so that I can fly home tomorrow in peace. As I’m packing to leave for winter break, it’s funny to think that this is the last time I’ll be doing that. That this year is in fact a year of last times. And also, funnily enough, a year of so many firsts, so many things that seemed to come out of nowhere and now feel so right, so many moments of absolute uncertainty, that it seems strange to be closing out the year because it’s like it finally just begun.

So maybe a couple of days passed since I wrote that paragraph, not really knowing where to go from there. I’m now sitting in the dining room in the house I grew up in, with light pouring in from the skylights overhead. It’s a gray, misty day, but walking around the neighborhood this morning never felt so comforting. A man in red plaid walked past, blasting “All I Want for Christmas” from a pair of speakers tied around his neck. A girl sat on the street corner, peddling “vintage findings,” which, as far as I could tell, looked like a pile of stones. A man in running gear did a handstand leaning up against the wall of a home on Church Street. Inside the neighborhood cookbook store, a young woman asked the shopkeeper for a book on Swedish cooking to give her grandfather to remind the meals of his youth. On Market, the Delancey Street Christmas tree parking-lot shop is framed by a row of palm trees.

I feel a little silly posting about frozen yogurt in the middle of winter, though my original defense is that I’m in California where it is always sunny hot beach weather all the time rainy. I also have to confess that although I love the Sprouted Kitchen (from whose book this recipe is from, though you can also find it here), I much prefer my mint chocolate chip separate from my Greek yogurt. But maybe that’s just me, because this frozen yogurt has lots of fans. And if nothing else, take away from it a refreshing take on mint in this winter season.

I was running along Ocean Beach in the late afternoon on Sunday. The sun was starting to set, disappearing under the water line, casting a foggy pink haze over the waves. The air smelled like weed, salt, and kelp, and along the shoreline, trails of smoke drifted up from the bonfires. Couples held hands walking up to the cliff house, volleyball nets were set up in the sand, and every ten feet, a child ran across the path or a group of early-twenties started lighting up. It struck me then how quintessentially home I was.

We managed to pack a lot into a short week: a visit to one of the first bakeries I ever truly loved, and one epic meal after another — an evening at Cotogna with warm ricotta on toasts, pizza of fior di latte, brussel sprouts, and prosciutto; Thanksgiving of course, which for me consisted of a plate of scalloped potatoes, a yam, half a tray of lemon bars, and a slice of gingerbread cake (with browned butter frosting!); a take-out menu of spice, pumpkin curry, crab pad thai, and red curry with bamboo shoots and prawns; a carb fest at Dosa of South Indian crepe-like pancakes stuffed with lentils, potatoes and broccoli rabe, served with dipping sauces. My brother’s 16th birthday, a visit to Japantown with my grandparents.

And finally, a day of wine tasting in Napa Valley with my oldest best-friend. A couple of wrong turns, turning into random vineyard driveways, a couple of tasting sessions, and about 10 wines later, we successfully pulled off probably our most spontaneous day to date. We may have managed to pay bridge tolls going both into and out of the city (that’s what happens when you leave by the Bay Bridge and return by the Golden Gate), but we made it back in one piece, though exhausted. Not to mention, it never occurred to me that in California, where few trees have leaves that change color, grape leaves become brilliant shades of red and orange.