Cabbage Steak:

I’ve lost it, readers. Never did I ever expect to find something so common as cabbage so delicious. But, oh my sweet Beysus. The other day, I saw a cabbage in my refrigerator. Food shows up all the time with origins that I’m unsure of. The other people in my house don’t cook, so a raw ingredient is odd. It sat there for awhile, calling to me, and I wasn’t rightly sure why. Then, it dawned on me and I went through my collection of Everyday Food magazines in my cookbook cupboard. I wished they still published that magazine but that’s a rant for another day. (Please, Martha!) I flipped through quite a few issues until I found it: roast cabbage. I avoided it for awhile, still, as you do because cabbage is scary after all. Finally, with a horrified face, I chopped it up and tossed it in the oven with a baked potato. When it came out…readers…it was a heavenly transformation. The cabbage blossomed into a savory, toothsome, gourmet treat. There is no way to properly explain how good it was. You simply have to make it! Here’s the recipe: cut cabbage into one-inch wedges, brush each side with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and fresh black pepper, spices of choice, and smear with smashed garlic. Put into a 400-degree oven for twenty-five minutes per side. Pull out when brown and crispy and gorgeous. Then, stuff your face! It’s amazing. I’m making it again tonight. I’m so excited!

Met Gala:

The Met Gala is one of my favorite things. A lifelong goal of mine is to attend. I know that it costs tremendous amounts of money, but nothing is too expensive to attend a function as an equal with Beyoncé. I want to be friends with Anna Wintour and have her thank me for coming. I want to bump into Madonna while grabbing champagne. I want to photobomb all the paparazzi shots. Beyond the obvious, I want to go there to see the Metropolitan Museum bedecked in splendor. When I visited last year, I paraded around the Temple of Dendur as if the Gala were about to begin. The other museum patrons looked at me oddly as I feigned sipping champagne and giggling with the Olsen twins. I don’t care. I haven’t cared what people thought of me for years. It’s more fun to be my ridiculous self. And so, each year, I love to watch the pictures roll in and see what the celebrities wore. I died when Mary-Kate and Ashley arrived looking like skeletal waifs in Victorian mourning garb. It was fantastic. Grace Coddington’s pantsuit left me screaming with delight. “Get that promo,” I shouted at Madonna, who wore an album with the name of her latest album plastered on the fabric. Of course, the queen of the gala was the queen herself, Queen Beyoncé. Did you see her in her illusion gown? All those carefully placed sequins and jewels were flawless. She is flawless. She is everything. Hail, Beyoncé. I stayed up far too late scrolling through all the paparazzi images, but I would not have had it any other way. The Met Gala is everything. Someday you will see me there.

TuneIn Radio:

This app has long languished in a folder on my iPad, which is a real shame, but I never have time to try out everything I download. I’m too busy listening to the Middle School Turn Up playlist that I’m obsessed with. (And new Snoop Dogg music. It’s a thing, readers. I have a great fondness for Snoop. Don’t ask me to explain it; I can’t.) I was deleting a bunch of apps that I never use, like all those games I got thinking that I would play them. I hate video games. I don’t play anything but solitaire or Mahjong, and only then if I’m desperate on an airplane or some other mode of transportation. When I was in my music folder, I came across TuneIn Radio, and I remember having a brief love affair with it years ago. I opened it up and remembered why (and wondered why I had abandoned it). It’s a radio app that plays streams from all across the world. I immediately put on a station from Paris and it felt like I was wandering around the Monoprix again, looking at boxed soups and generic Nespresso pods. That is a dear feeling for me readers. Then I put it on the top Cairo station and I swear I was in a taxi again with Mr. Gab, swerving past camels and ogling a corpse on the side of the road. Egypt is a weird place. Anyway, I love this app. It’s free and I highly recommend you download it, especially if you’re like me, and have far too many memories of wonderful travels always popping up in your mind.

The House of Mirth:

When I was in Washington DC, I stopped at the National Portrait Gallery and had a marvelous time looking at the old oil paintings and the American Impressionist pieces. I was particularly intrigued by a room on the Gilded Age, but I still don’t know exactly what that means. Under one of the paintings was a quotation from a book called The House of Mirth, “She was not made for mean and shabby surroundings…an atmosphere of luxury…was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” I stopped and I stared for a good long time at that little quotation because rarely have I ever read anything that relates more to myself. I immediately whipped out my phone and downloaded the Kindle version, and I’m just now getting around to reading it. I’m only about one-third of the way through, but I have been highlighting delicious quotes on nearly every page. It’s like somebody wrote a book about the person that lives inside my head! The story is about Lily Bart, a young woman who is on the verge of spinsterhood. Her rich family fell on hard times and now she is doing everything in her power to scrape by and get along in the same manner as before. She could easily survive the middle class world, but she doesn’t want to be common. Lily is fabulous and I relate 400% to her. I’m sure the book will take a depressing turn for the worse, but I’m loving it right now. Give it a try if you’re vain and love money like me.