love wednesday
The first thing that happened this morning was that a dove perched on the window by the head of my bed and did some cooing. This sounds like a lovely way to wake up. Sounds can be deceiving, or more accurately in this case, sounds can be profoundly irritating and make you wonder if some doves are not as capable of higher cognitive processing as other doves. Scratch, thud, rustle: now scrabbling to get a comfortable foothold on the window above the bed, now thumping (headfirst, it sounds like, maybe?) inelegantly into the siding over by the door. Now back to the window! Coo, coo, coo! Now I am flying off...back again! Again with the coo, coo, coo! Are you up? It's your mid-week bonus day to sleep in--just came to tell ya! Coo!
So I was ready indeed to recalibrate the morning, and the little note from my boy did just that. I asked him what he wanted for breakfast, and without hesitation he told me "a milkshake and salad." Those sounds are not deceiving to me--those are the sounds of a small body knowing just what it is after to grow on. I had just read this post about a chopped and restorative salad when he said that. Given what was in the larder, it became finely chopped celery, fennel, tender young zucchini, cucumber, parsley, basil and romaine lettuce, tossed up with a spoonful of capers, the juice of half a lemon, some crumbled feta, good olive oil and a twist or three of pepper. This took about three minutes.
To play the part of the milkshake, I threw frozen strawberries, a handful of the blueberries we picked yesterday, some yogurt, some coconut water, some almonds and a splash of strawberry elixir (I made a second batch of that, by the way, using chopped up lemons in place of the now-vanished kumquats, and adding a pinch of crushed red chiles--oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah baby--but honey could have done the trick just as well) into the blender.
It all seemed to hit the desired spot.
Hope your day is full of peace and progress and satisfyingly salty salads.
Janet Elsbach