Coconut Cream Brownies
Nearly everyone finds writing hard. Writers find writing hard. What makes writing hard for you?
Perfectionism makes writing hard for me. I have high standards for the impact I want my writing to have. I’ve read such breathtaking work — and I almost won’t read it anymore because I know it feeds this despair in me — so I know how beautiful, perfect a sentence or image can be. I know you can make someone stop and exclaim, “HOW DID THEY THINK OF THAT.”
This post is sponsored by Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
Caramelized Pineapple Cheesecake Cups
I may have mentioned this a thousand times before, but moving across the country is pretty stressful, as it turns out. And stress makes being nice to others, particularly certain husbands, pretty difficult, as it turns out. One day you’re in love and the next you’re duct taping all of his clothes into a giant ball because if he’s not going to help you pack you’re not going to waste a perfectly good box on him, so there.
Not that I speak from experience or anything.
This post is sponsored by Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
Fish Taco Bites
When this recipe pops up in your inbox, Mike and I will (hopefully) be knee-deep in our cross-country trek to our new home in San Diego! I would love to paint a Norman Rockwellian portrait for you of us clambering down Route 66 sipping sodas with crushed ice and blasting Prince tunes, but honestly we’ve probably spent the last 48 hours hot, bored, paranoid about the dog and turtle, and slowly beginning to hate each other. ROAD TRIPS ARE FUN. Someone just needs to convince my husband of that.
Buckeye Brownies
My family is a driving family. Mike wants to gouge out his eyes with his car keys when he has to drive for over a couple of hours, but when I was little, my family would trek 10 hours to Orlando, 14 hours to Missouri, 10 hours to the Gulf Coast. We just piled in the car and dealt with it.
I never minded too much, but it did make the trip go faster if I had something good to read. Before one epic trip to Missouri to visit extended family, my parents bought me an activity book based on The Simpsons. It was giant, glossy, bright. It beckoned to me from my mom’s bottom nightstand drawer. But I was NOT allowed to read it before the trip.
Piña Colada Dump Cake
There’s nothing like moving to force you to LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS. You thought you were holding it together, keeping things organized, but in reality you were STUFFING ALL THE THINGS INTO A BLOATED “IMPORTANT ITEMS” FOLDER in the nether regions of your filing cabinet. Unopened letters from the insurance company because you Could Not Even at the time, manuals for appliances you haven’t owned in a decade, ticket stubs you thought you’d care about later (nope).
You want to just chuck the whole thing in the recycling bin, but of course that would be TOO EASY. Mixed into the detritus is the ORIGINAL COPY of your social security card, your fave recipe for stuffed squash, and faded receipts that the IRS might still inexplicably demand from you.
