lost? confused?
Don't be! After two years prattling on about smit and smite at this local and one year at iVillage.com, I'm focusing my writing at a new locale these days. So, archives here, new writing there. Hope to see you in the Kitchen!
Best,
Deb
sniffle
So, I'm not sure how long iVillage will keep this URL going after I've flown the coop, but seeing as this is my last day, do consider this my final, sniffly sign-off — from here. But, first I wanted to first thank Eileen and Josey and all the kind folks at iVillage again for being so hospitable this year.
I realized this morning that this is actually my fourth domain move since I launched this site in August 2003 at smitten.typepad.com. (Seriously? If you've been around from the beginning, you deserve a cookie. No, really. Email me.) From there it was thesmitten.com (November 2004), thesmitten.ivillage.com here (September 2005) and now into the smittenkitchen.com (September 2006) I go! Ironically, I've also moved apartments almost as many times in the same span, but I mean it this time, I'm not going anywhere again any time soon.
As I mentioned last week, I'll eventually reinstate these archives on TheSmitten.com, but my day-to-day writing will be at SmittenKitchen.com. I hope to see you all there.
September 15, 2006 | Comments (19)
the twobies, thus far
In our first year of married life, we've resided pretty exclusively on Cloud Nine; things are wonderful, and even bad days are mitigated by coming home each night to the most perfect person on earth. Gag me with a spoon, right Heather?
But, in the whole two-plus weeks since we've lost our "newbie" status, I have to admit that I've noticed a kind of shift. No, we're not unhappy, no, things are not taking a turn for the worse, no, we haven't started bickering or loathing or resenting or even tiring of each other, but I think real life is beginning to kick in a bit.
Alex started a new job where he wears a suit everyday - my husband is a Suit! - and while I secretly swoon because he is just so very handsome in his threads, my god, he looks like a grownup. Like a husband. Like a bread-winner. He looks more like a father than someone's kid, or also,whoa.
There are other imminent signs of adulthood creeping up on us, too, thirtieth and thirty-second birthdays, bruises that take weeks longer to heal, a completely lack of understanding of this MySpace thing, and there have been dozens of weekend nights where we just stay in and watch a movie. Most alarming is the absence of any desire to fight any of these trends with a stick.
It brings me back to the idea I mentioned a while ago of "biding our time." When you're done dating and you have a job and a roof over your head, spending your time in fancy restaurants and honing hobbies like bread-baking or tae kwon do, are you biding your time for the next big thing? Or is this representative of the way life really is? It all seems too saccharine-ly easy.
More than anything, this second year of marriage feels like the "gap year." Whether or not year three ends up being the one with the tiny baby feet sticking up from strollers and the draining of bank accounts to put shoes on said feet, I feel like much of what we do right now is in preparation or relation to this move. It's all so frighteningly grown-up.
And really, the only thing for us to do is to ignore it as much as possible. Two weeks ago I popped every one of the bubbles in the wrapping for my Cocotte with my bare toes in a frantic, flailing dance routine that sent my husband into fits of laughter. Last night, we almost died laughing watching this again and again, and determined that our children would be indeed very well-adjusted. And before that, we cracked up trying to figure out exactly what face one person would make to the other on a subway with his dog with three legs. I know you weren't there for any of these things, so it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but just trust me when I say I think it's going to be a very good year.
September 14, 2006 | Comments (9)
room for unexceptional stories, too
My 9/11 story is barely worth noting. I was checking my morning mail when a secretary from the next office ran in and said told us the first plane had hit. We had an hour or so of precarious innocence after that, a span of time when we could remind ourselves that, well, planes have run into tall buildings in New York before, and let's hope those people get down the stairs okay. (I can't write this without feeling nauseous, and I suspect it’s the same for you, reading it.) But when the second plane hit and those reports came in from DC, it was impossible to continue on this foggy path where our sense of security hadn't changed irreversibly in a span of two hours.
I didn't live or work near there and I knew nobody directly injured, so any claim to feeling victimized by the event was irrefutably shallow and self-absorbed. But, like everyone else who dreamed of one day making it to the Big Apple, who imagined a life filled with fabulous things in world-class places, it broke my heart because I hadn't enough time — in my one year, three months here — with the old New York, the one that got me starry-eyed. Like the sum of its inhabitants, New York was angry now, bewildered, bitter and overwhelmed. It was fires that scorched for a week and unmistakable smell of burnt that crept even into my corridor of the Upper East Side and it blew my mind that something this awful could happen on an unfathomably sunny day.
It's not unlike growing up, which I suppose at 25 it was also time to do. Eventually you realize that happiness less of an event and more of a contrast, something you can't really understand until you experienced the flipside. The first time something cracked me up in the weeks that followed, I mean, made me laugh so hard tears came out of my eyes and I could barely catch my breath and for that one moment, I completely forgot about the thing that broke my heart, I don't think it was funny so much as a departure, a wild, unhinged one that brought us guilty relief.
We don't talk about it, by the way. At first, we couldn't stop but if I remember correctly, at about the five to six month mark it just stopped cold. It's not that we wanted to forget it but we couldn't stand feeling so bad all the time anymore. Even a year and two later, nobody knew what to do on 9/11 — what can you do? Nothing fixes it. Nothing makes it better. So, you have drinks with your friends and awkwardly bumble around the gaping void at the city's base. Maybe you even pick up a husband. It could be worse, you would think fleetingly, if you could forget for even a day that it was.
September 08, 2006 | Comments (8)
adding to the ranks of servantless american cooks
Last month, this site marked its third anniversary of polluting the internet with unremitting smit and smite, but I didn't make a big fuss about it because I have to admit that for a while now, I feel like I've been phoning it in over here. I'm not proud of this; I think if you're going to do something, you should do it well as anything else just leaves everyone dissatisfied. So, with my iVillage contract up for renewal in couple weeks, I've chosen not to. It's not been an easy decision — they've been great hosts, and what kind of nutjob opts to give up a paid gig?
Julia Child once said that you should "find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it," and for me, it's been to launch the kind of site where I can fully invest myself in the food, cooking and life-that-surrounds-it stories I've somewhat cordoned off over the last year. Hey, I said somewhat.
In the last two months, I've been quietly posting some homages to wedding loot and my favorite sticky part of the tomato, defenses of Rachael Ray that surprised me, too, and garlic soup so good, you'll thank me (though maybe not the people clearing the room as you enter) in a gigabite I call Smitten Kitchen. But all recipes aside, the most exciting part for me is that I've been really interested in writing again, which means that even if it goes no further, it will have been worth it.
But it will. From now until September 15, I'll be writing in both places, and after that, in just the Kitchen. I hope to see you there.