Happy New Year, gentle Spy readers! I’m feeling optimistic about the upcoming year. I should probably check back in about three months to see how these new 2025 rules of austerity are still ringing true. It’s easy today, three days into the new year to be proud of my new approach to life. But as my daughter, has observed, sagely, that all this adulting is hard work.
Luke, the wonder dog, and I have started taking two walks every weekday. It’s been easy, so far. Sure, it’s been chilly in the mornings, but bright and sunny in the afternoons. I’d like to maintain the idealistic goal of 10,000 steps a day, and so far, every day this week we have been successful. I don’t know what we will do on a rainy day, though. Luke hates to get his feet wet in the rain. Never mind that he loves pools, oceans, and rivers. No; he does not like to go out in the rain. I’ll have to leave him here while I go off trekking, virtuously.
Dry January is a little trickier. This is the fifth year that Mr. Sanders and I have participated in Dry January – no alcohol for the month. We didn’t realize how much we like that glass of cheap white wine when he comes home at night, or choosing the right wine to pair with Friday Night Pizza. This abstinence is good for the liver, pocketbook and waistband. Christmas foods included inhaling city blocks of crème pâtissière in the Christmas cream puffs, I gobbled acres of homemade peppermint bark. Plus a whole flock of Champagne; some really nice Veuve Clicquot Rosé, too. Diet-wise, it has been an excellent New Year, so far. Yes, these are the early days. I know.
My dentist is sangfroid and easy-going. She is just pleased that I wander through every year. Her martinet of a dental hygienist is another story. Every 6 months I get Miss Trunchbull’s soul-crushing assessment. She knows that I don’t floss each bloody night. Not so in 2025! 2 for 2! So far! And I replaced the head of my electric toothbrush on January 1. Who says I am not serious about oral hygiene?
Santa brought me a nice pile of books that I haven’t been able to find at the library, so I will not be indulging in any impulse buys on Abebooks for a few months. I have even tidied up the stack of waiting books on my bedside table. New among the dusty pile are: Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru, Good Material by Dolly Alderton, Lethal White by Robert Galbraith, and Secret Ingredients | The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink Books, murder, food, literary gossip, food stories and more.
Which brings us to the kitchen. For the most part our kitchen is fairly well organized. There are drawers dedicated to potholders and trivets, rolls of aluminum foil, parchment paper, and waxed paper. A drawer for baking tools: cookie cutters, measuring spoons and cups, offset spatulas and icing bags. A drawer for tea towels, another for silverware, one for matches, straws, razor blades, twist ties, and other rarefied junk. There is just one for all the key cooking utensils. Mr. Sanders and I have a lot of repeat items. There are two turners I like, thin and sleek and metal. He prefers a of clunky, unattractive black OXO silicone pancake turner. I like an old fashioned, easy-peasy cork screw – he likes a fancy battery powered one. (Luckily that isn’t an issue this month!)
We have two sets of indoor cooking tongs, and an outsized pair for outdoors. We have cheese graters, micro-planers and a nutmeg grater. We are down to one garlic press, and one can opener. Several slotted spoons. Lots of mismatched heirloom sterling serving pieces. A basting brush. Two cooking forks we got from our mothers when we each set off for college, that are exact matches, which makes us suspect they were acquired through the assiduous application of child labor pasting S&H Green Stamps into books, as we both have vague recollections of being waylaid as tots…
My New Year character improvement will include organizing this shambles of a kitchen drawer. Wish me luck. Luke says it is going to rain this weekend. Happy 2025!
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”
-A.A. Milne
Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.
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