Recently, several friends suggested I return to blogging after a two-year lull. I quit because after staying home for months, as Covid fears began to fade, I ran out of anything to say beyond, “Yea! I can go to the grocery store without wearing a mask.” As time passed, my world seemed to be mostly limited to grocery stores. And I ran out of anything to say.

But my friends persisted. “When you’re with us, you talk all the time. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Also, we liked reading your blogs, because they were informative,”

‘Informative’ was never my intent,” I thought. But why not. Just because I’m working on co-authoring a whodunnit with a friend, and sitting in front of the computer cursing at Duolingo to improve my Spanish, why not spend a few more hours hunched over a computer and further rounding my shoulders. Anyway, I’m giving blogging a try again. I chose August 1 to start because it marks a new month and a new year — another one– for me. And I see August as a lazy time, a period when no one is working too hard. At least no one around me. Maybe that’s because we’re all old.

I just hope my followers from before are still alive to greet me.

“Summertime and the livin is easy.” No fish are jumpin’ and there’s no cotton growing here, though a lovely crop of tiny and mid-sized tomatoes in pots in the back yard are starting to turn the appropriate color for their particular variety. Maybe my living is too easy. Except in the area of cooking. After meal planning and cooking for many, many, many years, even with my husband’s able assistance, I find our meals often uninspiring. Restaurants aren’t a lot better. Maybe some chefs are bored with their cooking too. This makes my biggest daily challenges to be deciding what to eat and then preparing the meal.

So, August will be the month of salads. Not your everyday bowl of torn up lettuce leaves, topped with a few tomato bits, the equivalent of a loaf of bread in the form of croutons, brought to a climax with a bottle of dressing slobbering all over it. No, I’m choosing recipes from the New York Times and other illustrious sources, ones that call for hard-to-find ingredients you’ve never heard of, ones that you use only once after you’ve tried the recipe and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to do it again. And now your kitchen cupboards are filled with the useless ingredients you’d feel guilty throwing out, so you hold onto them until you begin to see grayish-green spots within.

What kinds of salads am I talking about? Salads with a Persian cucumber (what’s that?), toasted pine nuts, grilled eggplant, sliced jicama (where the salad calls for one tiny slice and you’re left figuring out what to do with the rest of it), one small daikon, and one-half, small napa cabbage. At the Asian grocery store where I sometimes buy my vegetables, I can assure you, they’ve never heard of a small napa cabbage.

Tonight’s menu will involve roasted eggplant, torn-up toasted pita and a few other ingredients not usually associated with salads. All to accompany a Costco chicken.

My hope — and I’m certain yours too —is that returning to the blog will open a few more doors to other topics to consider for the future.