Cake.

C is working late tonight. Or traveling I should say. He went to DC for something or other, took the train and doesn’t expect to be home before 10. I made a very gingery stir-fry for dinner that will heat up well when he gets home, if he’s hungry. It’s become one of my regular weekday meals, this very gingery stir-fry, with chicken or beef and shitake mushrooms and some kind of green like bok choi or even arugula or spinach, anything that cooks quickly, whatever is around. A little onion, lots of garlic and ginger, fish sauce, tamari, and for heat either lots of freshly ground green Szechuan pepper or Sriracha, and that’s it.  C loves it. I used to make fried rice pretty often with similar ingredients. I still love it, and C says it's his favorite meal. I toast the ginger and garlic together first and then sprinkle it on top of an over-easy egg on top of the fried rice. It’s really delicious. But I like this stir-fry a little better for a weekday meal because I have more control over the quantity of rice. C likes a lot. I try to get by with as little as possible. I don’t know what it is with my weight lately but I struggle to stay below 190, and that’s crazy. I should be more like 180, but at least if I stay below 190 my clothes fit me. Seriously if I just ate what I want to eat I would keep gaining weight and who knows where it would stop?  I’m not sure how I feel about this. My mother always said that in order to maintain her desired weight she had to get used to always feeling a little hungry and now I know what she means. It’s not right. C and I have both gained weight since we met.

I wrote that last paragraph a few nights ago but didn’t get around to posting it. Now I’m waiting again for my husband to come home. Business at the prop shop has been really slow lately, so I was sent home an hour early today. I say “sent,” but that extra hour was like a gift that I felt so grateful for I wanted to hold it close to me and cry like a baby. On the way home, I stopped at the drug store to pick up yet another prescription to try on my increasingly annoying irritated skin and at the grocery store for Greek yogurt and lemons to make a dipping sauce for cold chicken that we’re having for dinner tonight with fresh corn that I’m going to sauté with saffron according to a Mark Bittman recipe from the New York Times Magazine. Believe me, I understand that in the scheme of all the horrible situations in the world that I might be in the middle of I have it pretty good with my 4-day-a-week job sitting in front of a computer in an office with very pleasant people and time off basically whenever I need it. I get it. But so so often I feel like “good lord I’m considerably past the halfway point in my time on this earth and I’m still spending 32 hours a week doing someone else’s bullshit” and I want to punch a hole in the wall or curl up in a ball under the desk or come home and gripe at the man who loves me.

Yesterday I made a nectarine upside-down cake and there's half left for tonight. Half a cake might seem like a lot for two people to eat for one night's dessert, but let me tell you it was a feat of will to leave that much on the plate. Seriously good cake. There was vanilla ice cream in the freezer and I wanted to make something to go with it. I was thinking about some kind of pie, but then it occurred to me that fresh peaches are SO good with vanilla ice cream and such a treat and have far fewer calories than pie, so I ventured out to find peaches. I always forget that there are no good peaches in New York. (I miss Texas peaches.) I went to three stores and all of them had peaches, but they were hard and didn't smell like anything, so I gave up. On the way home I saw some nectarines at a fruit stand. They looked ripe and they smelled good and I bought some. Nectarines are not as tasty as peaches but they're more reliable. At home I peeled and sliced them so they'd be ready to spoon over ice cream after dinner, but I tasted a couple slices and they were good but nothing like fresh peaches and I knew we'd be disappointed, so I made a cake. Shut up.