L-O-V-E

Nora Ephron, the lovely and funny and occasionally irritating Nora. I wanted to sit and stew in gloom for a while after reading I Feel Bad about My Neck. I can quote passages from Heartburn from memory. I don’t get her obsession with perky Meg Ryan, frankly. But I just read her essay, “Potatoes and Love: Some Reflections” – and she’s done it again.

I do not long for potatoes like Nora, or like Jake, my husband, or like Shirley, my mother-in-law. But I do pursue this relationship between food and love.

I remember months when I lingered over half a fucking Lender’s bagel for a tiresome amount of time. A calorie was never just a calorie then, and I had committed many foods' nutritional information to memory. Those were bleak times, and not about love. Not even about like.

Today cooking is often about love: baking thick peanut butter cookies or blueberry tarts for no reason at all, cooking rice and beans or frying cheesy omelets to make sure we get enough protein or calcium, tasting things I’d once have squirmed in my seat over – and that includes both pastry dough and asparagus.

What do you eat or drink or bake or cook that feels like love or something like it, dear reader? Red wine? Paper thin chocolate crepes? A garlic marinara sauce?