And Envy's Eyes in the Kitchen

Spring has come and gone with little posting, but in just one week Z and I will be taking five entire nights at the cabin in the woods with two friends of ours, J&S, and cooking will commence again. Here we live in a big house with a tiny kitchen with an awful stove and too many people storing too much food. I do not cook much. We eat nearly daily at our favorite, tiny, inexpensive diner and our favorite local deli and our favorite thai place, and sometimes we eat nothing but ramen and rice. It's all good, but I can't wait for a kitchen and farm stands and the company that lets me spend half the day just figuring out dinner.
And then we romp to our respective family homes, and romp back, and by the beginning of August I shall have a kitchen of my own.
I have seen the kitchen, indeed, the whole apartment, with my own eyes. We saw it just a few days ago, and my thoughts are: the drop ceiling is ugly but we shall live with it. We do have miles and miles of paper that has been fire-proofed up to theater quality from a show Z designed, so maybe we'll just cover the whole thing. The floors are old hard wood, and they could use a bit (a lot) of love, but they'll get it.
The kitchen has the makings of a thing of beauty.
But it ain't there yet.
It has linoleum tiles on the floor, in the classic "elementary school cafeteria" style we all know so well. It has ceramic tiles on the wall... mostly. A few are in a neat stack on one of the counters. The counters themselves are large, move able pieces with cupboards underneath them, topped in Formica in the style referred to as "ugly, gray-scale woodgrain." The current renters have a small, yellow-painted-metal outdoor table and chair set in the room's large open space. The walls are bare but for an ugly spice rack and an uglier wreath made of plastic fruit. The cabinet doors are painted a bright shade of green somewhere between mint and lime, called "Envy's Eyes."
Oddly enough, I think the green cabinets are the thing I'm least likely to change. The paint probably accurately describes my own eyes when I looked in there for the first time. For all the Formica and linoleum and ironic-kistch styling, the room is sunny and comforting. There are two windows, one which leads out onto a little bit of roof that we have been assured is fair game to sit on, one which lets in lots of light right onto the biggish, open section of floor. It will shed its rays onto a large trough or set of pots full of herbs, and the room will smell constantly of rosemary and sage. The small, ugly yellow table will be replaced with a large, comforting wooden one, which will help make the lonely gas stove look less isolated. For, indeed, the stove and oven are both gas powered (one of the quirky charms of the place is that it also has gas heat, from one single, large gas heater in the main room, just on the other side of the wall from the side of the kitchen where stands the stove. It looks like a vast amplifier, but apparently heats the whole place). I will move the counters around, and if I'm luck put a big, thick, food-safe wooden board right on top of the Formica on one of 'em and turn it into a chopping block. I will put beautiful pictures of beautiful food right in the middle of the bright green cabinet doors, and put some cheap, hardwearing rug on the floors. The room is a little too empty, now. It is full of love, but between just two people. I hope to fill it with love for the world. I hope to make people cosy with a mug of tea or cocoa there while I cook them dinner, I hope to linger over my coffee at the table by the window and the herbs, before Z or I does the dishes in the big, old, lovely ceramic sink.
When I think about the place as it will be, instead of as it is, what envy filled me drains away, and I am alive with excitement for laughter and meals and love.

Spring

I have not posted since this summer.
I dunno that I'll ever post often.
I think I'm talking to myself, by this point, but...

It is April. Only just. A few days in.
Weather has been warm, but wet, or bright, but cold. Grass is starting to grow. Flowers are poking their tips out of the ground, and I am suppressing the urge to shout GO BACK! There's more snow coming yet!
I saw forsythia the other day. Little yellow bundles of buds on a bare twig. Forsythia are the first flowers of spring, and they sunny up a room like nothing else. Possibly because if you cut the tall twigs just as the buds are forming and put them in water in a tall vase in the sun, the buds will bloom inside, quickly and brightly.

And I have not written about food here because for almost a year I've been writing about it somewhere else, for work, and it's almost done and I am rejoicing.

I miss the woodscabin and the cooking there, and my mind has raced forward to being there again. In Spring.

What shall I cook? Spring food. Delicate baby vegetables and salads and perhaps young chicken. Light-but-filling pastas. If we wait till June I can do early fruit pies or summer pudding. Perhaps a gratin of little potatoes. I will do as every generation for ever has done, and gather the earth's first bounty to feed to my friends and my loved ones.

Spring is coming. Spring is here.