what is on your to-do list?

A day in the life of.

I often find the cumulative list of ‘things to do today’ an odd and funny allotment. Whether officially on a list or not, these items filled my day:

Drop off car at the shop; walk home.
(Note to self: figure out how to get the kids home from school).
Gather laundry from soccer piles and bathroom floors, take mushroom debacle out to trash.
Reorganize online bookmarks. Edit blog posts. Spray lamp base black.
Buy cold medicine. Eat granola. Build fire.
Review websites for client, reschedule phone conference.
Reheat pizza for lunch.
Consolidate stray paper airplanes.
Phone husband to remind him I love him.
Play photographer: snap photos of lamp base, earthy beets on a wooden plank…
Buy hand-wipes for my family, to fend off germs.
Call friend to vent, share and schedule lunch.
Remove fish from freezer for dinner.

Reminds me of an egg scramble, or what my aunt calls her ‘kitchen sink scramble.’ When whatever you have on hand is what goes into the skillet (a bit of cooking from the hip); you add a bit of this and that, a generous pinch of salt and an air of confidence.

In the middle of online bookmarks, newly blackened lamps, running the washing machine and getting kids from A to B: I make the executive decision to apply the kitchen sink method to my cooking for the next few days. It might seem like chaos—my to do list, a kitchen scramble—but most of life is adding order and flavor profiles out of a mess of ingredients or ‘to-do’s’.

My last few dinners have been about me digging through my freezer, figuring out how to fill the meal void with a mountain of veggies, some new recipes, and aiming toward a family goal of trying new seafood (we are searching for fish we like: tonight we try a sampling of mahi mahi and tilapia). I sometimes enjoy using as many ingredients as I can from my fridge and freezer, throwing caution to the wind, not so perfectly matching the veggie with the entree or soup… sometimes kitchens remain inspired because you pull out the stops, take a new angle, or try to use up your ingredients.

I mean: I doubt smores were deliberate. Even a sandwich came to be because someone needed two slices of bread to hold together a selected pile of ingredients…

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