Given the milieu and such, caution seems fitting. Maybe I’m wrong but will just test the water with my toes for now.

Yesterday Chef David stopped on his way home from errands and picked up a nice piece of tuna and then made seared fingerling potatoes and an uncomplicated cucumber salad to go with. We flipped on the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and sipped some cheap (but quite good) Prosecco and nibbled on a perfectly sufficient store-bought Panettone, about which much chatter and opining. Funny I should open the pages of my latest New Yorker this morning to find a quick rundown of the best three Panettones in the city, said the writer. (Can you find them online? Sure can, but expect to pay upwards of $100 apiece. Maybe next year.)

I messaged my SIL down in Charleston this morning to see what was what, and found, like me, she had plans for black-eyed peas and cornbread later on today. This is a distinctly Southern thing, I believe, the good-luck black-eyed peas (actually beans, they are) on New Year’s Day. The cornbread, eh, I am not sure it brings luck, but what else do you have with black-eyed peas except cornbread. Let’s go heavy on the black-eyed peas though, shall we? Just in case.

Anyway, David said before he met me he’d never heard of having black-eyed peas for good luck in the new year. I have to explain everything to you, I told him for the gamillionth time.

Scout and I started our new year with a longish morning run, of consequence given his recent twelfth birthday. That’s twelve canine years, nothing to sniff at. He made it for most of roughly 3.25 miles before he said he’d had enough and needed to walk it on home, thanks. It’s important to keep on moving, while you still can, is my way of thinking. Today is gloriously sunny and cool, reason enough to go. Next week, maybe not so much.

I’ve reached a place in my life where starting a new year with ambitious resolutions feels off. I don’t begrudge anybody who wants to do this and finds it useful. I’ve learned it’s tough to sustain new rules and regs, and anyway don’t have an especial, immediate need for drastic measures of any sort. I do hope to improve small bits and pieces of my life, mainly to do with achieving a better work/life balance, kind of thing, not letting my work day or week bleed over into time that belongs to me. I’d like to pick up my guitar, maybe plug in my sewing machine. Walk on the beach more often, and such. But diet and exercise, those are always top of mind. No need to reinvent the wheel this year.

I have thought about a new project to document food in my life, our lives, mine and David’s. It’s ill defined as yet, but I have pulled out the camera and started making photos and filing them, not just of exceptional food but of the ordinary fare that sustains us every day. I’ve drawn inspiration from celebrity travel documentaries abroad, pages in highfalutin magazines, glossy reality television, and I understand why those modalities get so much attention. But why should our humble approach to delicious—and ordinary—food be any less interesting, I am thinking. I know my way around a kitchen, can wield a mighty pen when I put my mind to it, and I’m not afraid of failure. Seems a plausible enough undertaking.

I suppose time will tell whether that will be tough to sustain, but it does play into my philosophy that the best approach to food is a thoughtful and intentional approach. Food without tweezers and fog, is our mantra in this house. And one of us has even attended culinary school.

I’ve been losing myself in music, art, books, ballet, and especially the nostalgia that seems always to emerge this time of year before it goes back into boxes, the figurative and literal ones. Nostalgia crept into my thinking this morning in fact, after my run and before I baked corn bread. Instead of my usual egg whites breakfast I decided to throw caution to the wind and make something more sinister my great-grandmother Gracie might’ve eaten, slightly modified. Fried egg and bacon on buttered toast. She’d have used real bacon instead of the reduced-sodium turkey bacon in my fridge and would’ve lit up a Viceroy to go with her breakfast and black coffee. I sliced the tomato extra thick in homage to her, the woman who could happily make lunch of an entire tomato, sliced and liberally salted.

I thought of her again when I made the cornbread. Last time I pulled out her recipe and read the instructions, I felt the irritation stewing inside me: Mix until right consistency. What the hell, Granny Grace, is the right consistency? Funny she can still speak to me from the afterlife. David just face-palms when this happens, but I can see Granny’s little round belly shaking with laughter in my mind’s eye, because her great-granddaughter does not understand the right consistency. Today I saved myself the frustration and found something with the instructions spelled out, on the interwebs.

And so the holidays end and off we march into uncertainty. Best to keep busy and keep on moving, and who knows, maybe something exquisite will come of that after all.