It’s still Friday! It counts! Today was a long one. Not a bad one. Just…long. Thus, my very first Friday Favorite is the very fact that it is Friday. Friday!

Ok, for reals.

Right now I am loving our CSA. Look at that bounty! We get a box every week from Full Belly Farm, and it’s a real treat. Sad fact is, Sean and I rarely manage to make it to the Farmers’ market. I wish we did, but we don’t usually get out of the house early enough. With a CSA, I can still get my local organic goodies, and it’s like a present every week. If you’ve never joined a CSA, a definitely encourage you to try it. You can find one near you at Local Harvest.

And while I’m on a produce kick:

I am so excited whenever I see the first bags of cherries at the market. I remember coming up to San Francisco when I was in college, and when cherry season came around my friend would buy a huge plastic cup of them at the corner market and we would walk around the city eating and talking about all the ridiculous things college kids talk about. Cherries are the best.

To counteract all that healthy food, I had a need-comfort-food kind of day this week, so I made tamale pie.

I know it doesn’t look appealing, but trust me on this one. Tamale pie is a creamy, casserole combination of cornmeal, spiced meat, tomatoes, and some other things we don’t need to mention, and it is so good. It always reminds me of my friend Crystal, from whose grandma I learned the recipe. It makes me feel warm and cozy, and thankfully, it makes a ton, so I have comfort food leftovers if I need them again.

I am also loving these new shoes. I’ve been coveting them for a long time, and I finally just went ahead and bought them. They are so cute! But also kind of elegant and lovely. And holy moly, my feet are white.

And my final favorite: Nostalgia. This week I rediscovered a blog that I wrote when I was in my twenties. This thing is still around, and I even still update it, very sporadically. But I spent an evening (or two) this week going back through the posts from 2003 and thereabouts, and remembering my move to Boston and my impassioned political years and my underemployed years and, well, it was a good bit of reminiscing. I’ve been blogging for a long time (I actually started my first blog-like website, before blogging software existed, back in 1998). And I like having that record. I like sharing parts of myself with the world this way, even if sometimes it stresses me out or makes me feel uncertain.

I also realized, in perusing these pages from long ago, that I have always had a penchant for making lists of things that make me happy. It’s nice to know that some things never change.

Happy weekend! I hope you enjoy some of your favorite things today.