Lemon-ey Fresh

It's the weekend, at last. I needed that.

The briskness of fall has arrived in Pennsylvania as of today; I needed a cardigan to wear to class this morning, and the light breeze was just enough to jolt me awake upon exiting quite possibly the most excruciatingly boring class I've ever sat through. An hour can seem incredibly long when a middle aged, nondescript, soft voiced woman who dresses similarly to my mother is explaining how to convert degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius. Are you kidding me? Did we not cover that in like, oh, Middle School?.

Luckily the Ardmore farmers' market was open today, so I was able to get a head start on tomorrow night's dinner. I absolutely love the weekday afternoon bustle of that place, the fact that it's filled with members of the community (yes, too wealthy Philadelphia suburbanites talking on headsets, soccer moms, and trophy wives. But hey--that's our community), fully functional and reasonably priced to boot! I can, after a miraculously short 20 minute walk, find smoked mozzarella, ricotta salata, amish organic cornish game hens, and fresh flowers. The plum and lavender carnations, while beautiful (and I don't even like carnations), were a bit too much of an extravagance for my budget, after I splurged on good coffee. That's a shame, because we could use a little color in our lives around 2C. Our sad looking refrigerator was almost empty by the end of this week, as we've both been far too busy to run off to the store for silly things like milk or fresh fruit, luxuries for the weekday overinvolved college senior. It's funny that on a day like today I can get excited about both imported cheese and condensed water vapor dripping down a glass of cold, plain, skim milk.

I had a nice sushi dinner with a friend from up campus (in other words, who I never see on a normal shedule), bitched about the spectre of evil in literary criticism aka Harold Bloom, talked about feminist Romantic poetry, and then went grocery shopping again at the supermarket to pick up the stuff that I couldn't find at the farmers' market earlier. By 9:30 pm, I was in my pajamas (red sweats, of course: athletic issued 00-107) and up to my wrists in soap suds, doing the last three days' accumulated dishes. A short while later, a gleaming kitchen in front of me, the lemon juice scrubbed copper bowl that I'd just untarnished rocking lazily on the drying rack, Kaitlyn said "it smells kind of good in here."

It did. The new basil plant on the windowsill lent a savory hint to the normally stale kitchen air, and the lemon juice (along with the citrus zest for tonight's biscotti that spattered my shirt) sent a zing throught the apartment that reminded me of sunny days. Either that or dish detergent, I can't decide which. Clean smells all around makes for a good environment to cook in, hell, to exist in. Throw in some loudly sung pop music from Klu's CD player, and I'd say that makes for a Friday night to rival some of the best. Now, if only that damn biscotti would finish baking, and I could get to bed. And it's only Friday =).