I like to keep a list in my journal to help me notice the (mostly) little things bringing me a disproportionate amount of happiness on a regular basis. I love assembling these interesting and often strange assortments in these recurring posts of stuff I love.
1. Early morning candles
I light evening candles all year long but tend to only light morning candles in the dark months. The kitchen island is home base for morning candles: I strike a match when I’m brewing my coffee and blow the candle out after the sun is all the way up.
I’m particular about daytime versus evening scents; for daytime I lean toward the lighter and more floral. My latest morning find is this Hearth & Hand candle in the scent “Salt” I impulse-bought at Target; it’s nice and bright and smells wonderful when lit, with a brass holder that looks good against my wooden counters.
2. Easy dinners in bowls
My love for “food in bowls” isn’t new. (See: this 2024 edition of (mostly) little things I’m loving for summer.) But the specifics of what this looks like have varied as seasons change and kids move out of the house—for the night or for the semester—and then home again.
This fall at home we’ve had an unusual number of nights where dinner is just for two or three—quite a change from prepping for six like we routinely did for years! When it’s just two or three of us, lately I’ve been loving using a Trader Joe’s frozen entree for the protein base. (Current favorites are the chicken mole and bulgogi beef, but please, share your faves in comments.) Then we ransack the fridge and pantry for accompanying goodies: salsas, sauces, chopped veggies, beans, cheese, chips, kimchi, sesame seeds, maybe even fruit depending on what we’re putting together.
Often we already have a protein base in the fridge, likely some kind of slow-cooked shredded chicken or pork. (I included a few of our old reliables in this post featuring our favorite weeknight dinner recipes.)
These are still our favorite bowls; as you’ll see, ours are colorful but they’re also available in an all-white set if that’s your thing.
2b. Smoky black beans.
This is worth its own entry: a favorite addition to dinner in bowls (of the Tex-Mex variety) is Caroline Chambers’s smoky black beans from her latest cookbook What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make it Fast, but I found you a non-paywalled recipe link.
Previously I would open and drain a can of beans, add seasonings, and heat in the microwave; in my opinion, the upgrade in flavor this quick stove-top method provides is worth dirtying another pot. When I’m not in a blazing hurry I double the recipe so we can have more food in bowls for lunch the next day.
2c. Soup!
We were so ready for soup season to start this year. We’ve been making a big batch once or twice a week but I’ve had a kid home sick all week so it’s been soup every day: potato soup, black lentil with sausage (linking this one as it’s the most unusual of the bunch), chicken noodle, white chicken chili, turkey and white bean…. We have our favorites (I shared more of those here) but I’m always happy to hear yours, if you have recommendations.
3. Nellie’s Lime Juice.
I love this stuff and I use it constantly, so much so that I can’t believe I haven’t talked about it here before. I’ve used it as a beverage add-in for ages, adding it to seltzer or mixing with light tonic. But in recent years I find myself using it more and more in places where (gasp!) I used to use fresh citrus, because in many applications I just can’t tell the difference. When a dish—soup, salad, curry—needs a little bit of brightness, Nellie’s is my first thought. I think there might be a raving fans post here…
4. Cookie dough in the freezer.
This practice started as an accident and turned into something we do on purpose. I like to bake sweet things occasionally, but these days I hardly ever bake off a whole batch of cookie dough at once. I’m pretty sure this habit began when I was shipping a college kid her meds and decided to bake up a dozen cookies to go with them.
My favorite recipe for shipping is Melissa Clark’s Classic Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, because they stay fresh for a relatively long time. (Hot tip, if you’re into it: I often swap out the raisins for a cherries/cranberries, chocolate, and pecans and combo.)
We didn’t need that many cookies at home right then, so I portioned the rest of the dough into balls and popped them into the freezer. It turns out, we really liked having fresh cookies available basically on demand.
The real key to later happiness is to portion the dough before freezing. (We scoop them, freeze them, and them store in a ziploc.) Pre-portioning is obviously a pain versus shoving the whole dough blob into the freezer, but later me is always glad past me took the trouble, because you can then put the frozen dough balls directly into the oven. (When baking from frozen, the additional baking time is usually a couple of minutes. I set the timer for the recipe’s original baking time and rely on my senses to gauge when to pull them.)
When we start making Christmas cookies in another week or two we’ll be freezing some of that dough as well; making dough in advance worked great last year for all kinds of holiday cookies. We could bake as many or as few of each variety as we wanted, when we wanted.
4. Espresso powder.
Speaking of baking: I saw espresso powder appear in my recipes for years (beginning with Barefoot Contessa’s Outrageous Brownies that I’ve been using since 1999) and didn’t bother to hunt it down because it wasn’t an essential ingredient. Last year something possessed me to actually buy some, and I’ve been surprised at how often I’ve used it. Most recently I added the optional tablespoon of espresso powder to Caroline Chambers’s Salted Brown Butter Toffee Skillet Cookie “for even richer flavor.” It was divine. It’s in the final pages of the What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking cookbook, but I tracked down the recipe for you online (though the web version doesn’t include as many recommended riffs as the cookbook does).
5. Apples
This is so darn simple, but this fall everybody is snacking on apples at the Bogel house. Cripps Pink are my favorite when I can find them, Pink Lady when I can’t. There seem to be so many new varietals lately: what else should I try?
6. Right-size serving bowls.
More food in bowls, but different this time. As we’ve started making Thanksgiving plans, I’ve been thinking about the serving pieces we’ve added to our cabinets the past few years to fill the gaps, and what good purchases they’ve been. We’ve been given a fair amount of Louisville Stoneware over the years (it is, as you can imagine, a Louisville thing), and I love it, but often longed for something more neutral to serve colorful dishes in.
We added two pieces from East Fork pottery that are in constant use, day in and day out but also for more festive gatherings: the coupe (my most-used, which surprised me because it’s so small—but I love how it looks pleasantly full when piled with vegetables or a similar side for 6-8 people) and the weeknight serving bowl (which I expected to be my most-used).
I also added inexpensive white bowls that are no longer available online, but they are no-frills white porcelain, similar to this line. As the holidays approach, it’s nice to feel set in this department.
7. Seasonal soaps.
I’m a scents person, and decided again this year to lean in to the inexpensive pleasure of seasonal hand soaps in the kitchen and throughout the house. Last week my 16yo and I pulled out the partially full hand soaps from this holiday pack of Mrs Meyers and swapped them in throughout the house. (I can’t find this gift set available anywhere this year but the Mrs. Meyers website, but you can buy all the scents individually online or maybe even at your grocery.) I’m especially enjoying my hits of Iowa Pine and Peppermint from the two sinks I use most often at home. It feels a week or two early, but I was afraid if I didn’t make the switch now I’d forget until the new year, so better early than never.
Do you have any new kitchen and cooking-related favorites? Small things that bring you outsized joy, of course, but we’d love to hear about anything you’re loving lately. Please tell us in comments!
P.S. The pantry staples my family relies on, 10 delightful cookbooks for reading, cooking, and gifting, The Modern Mrs Darcy Holiday Cookie Exchange, and My kitchen must-haves.
One comment
I love East Fork and have been building my collection. I like the small breakfast bowl for yogurt or cottage cheese.