It feels good to have my own space again. My belongings are finally unpacked (well, most of them, anyway) and put away in closets, cabinets and atop shelves—a sure sign of permanence in a housing situation.

There’s a supreme comfort in having your possessions accessible to you, isn’t there? As soon as I unpacked my cookbooks, which had remained sealed in storage since Virginia, I couldn’t stop tearing them from the bookshelves and rifling through their photos and recipes. I was ravenous not for the food, but for the return of a sense of ownership. Even if I wasn’t planning on making anything—and for awhile, the fridge and pantry were too barren to raid—it was still nice to know that Ina Garten’s Tuscan Lemon Chicken was there, just in case my eyes (or my soul) got hungry.

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I have two competing sides of my personality: the antsy one that craves new adventures, and the homey one that wants nothing more than to live life as a series of comforting routines. It’s a yin-and-yang dynamic that shoots me off on a road trip one weekend, then renders me homebound the next. I imagine it’s not uncommon to find this sort of split personality, the kind that makes you use all your energy on something exciting but requires a battery recharge before your next attempt.

After a solid five weeks as a CSA subscriber, I’ve realized that getting my weekly produce share complements both sides of my personality. There’s a fair bit of comforting sameness as the weeks fold in and out of each other; every Tuesday, I read through the weekly e-mail from Farmer John, telling us what to expect in that week’s bag. On Thursday, I swing by my local dropoff point after work, thumb through the offerings, and enjoy a quiet night of veggie-washing, wine-sipping and recipe-procuring with Ted. And with so many raw ingredients to work with, I’m able to content myself with lots of calm puttering around the kitchen. At the same time: having your weekly vegetable allotment dictated to you? It’s a challenge, and we’re constantly hunting down ideas and recipes that will use up our entire share without requiring us to give up our social lives. Never before have I made this many new dishes in a week, or eschewed “dinners” of peanut butter and toast for so long, or learned so many new cooking techniques. Belonging to a CSA program has asked a lot of me, and it’s given a lot back. It calls me to expend mental and physical energy, and then it recharges me with the best food I’ve ever had.

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The countertops have been 409-ed, the floors vacuumed of Styrofoam peanut residue, and the dishes lifted from cardboard boxes into my refurbished cabinets. Ostensibly, the construction workers (or as I like to call them, “my sometimes roommates”) have left my apartment for good after two weeks of disruptive work and ridiculous shenanigans (one day, they made no repairs but did take the time to unplug my fridge). It’s at times like these—or, more realistically, after times like these, when you’ve had a chance to reclaim your 610 square feet—when it seems appropriate to substitute the occasional agonies of adulthood for the simple pleasures of childhood. In the middle of a June heatwave, that most certainly means ice cream, and lots of it.

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I’m not usually one to miss important milestones. But it seems that I graduated from college one year ago last May, and the entire month swept by without my recognizing the anniversary.

In the grand scheme of things, how meaningful is this milestone, really? It’s not a day that we’re socially conditioned to remember, like we recognize a close friend’s birthday with a restaurant dinner, or our wedding anniversaries with gifts that riff on paper, silver, or lace. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since my college graduation ceremony, it’s that life no longer hands you obvious deadlines, and the rest of your life’s “universal” rites of passage can be counted on two measly fingers (marriage, and babies—if you even choose to dabble in either). For twenty-two years, my classmates and I were shuttled in lockstep through various life stages with astounding predictability, mostly thanks to our highly-structured educational system. And then? We reached the last page of our guidebook the day we donned one-size-fits-all gowns and threw our tasseled caps in the air. In the wide-open plains of post-graduate life, we’ve had to find our own meaning and order. You know, construct our own roads and fences, if you’ll beat that metaphor to death with me.

So I chose to celebrate this belated anniversary, arbitrary though it may be, and I celebrated with cake. That’s how all milestones should be marked, right? It was banana chocolate walnut cake, extraordinarily light but equally flavorful, and yet simple enough for the made-up occasion. There was ice cream too, of course.

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My friends, it’s Friday, and I’m headed up to New York City. Three of my friends (Monica, Kim, and Anna, blogstresses all of them!) are conveniently running the same half-marathon in Brooklyn, which makes it pretty easy to see them all in one weekend. And with round-trip bus fare priced at $24, I had no reason to stay in Washington. In just a few hours, I’ll be snuggled up in my bus seat, concerned mostly with staring out the window and flipping through a stack of glossy magazines.

I’ll be sleeping on the futon of my dear friend Anna, who visited Washington last fall and stayed with me then. I’d just moved into my current apartment, which was, er, sparsely furnished, and cardboard boxes still adorned the living room. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to mind, and we had a great time sitting cross-legged on the floor with plates of lasagna after a full day of vineyard-hopping. And she brought dessert that lasted the whole weekend: monstrous slices of red velvet cake from her favorite Brooklyn bakery, Cake Man Raven (that’s the nickname of charismatic owner Raven Dennis). Word on the street is that Cake Man Raven counts Oprah, Robert De Niro, Patti LaBelle and P. Diddy as fans, and it was easy to understand why after taking my first bite of cake.

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It’s been awhile since I attended a bake sale, but I do have fond memories of the events held in our school cafeteria. Plastic tables—heavy with Duncan Hines confetti cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies—were staffed by students with little experience as cashiers, and mobbed by their sugar-toothed classmates. The spectacle was fun enough, but at the end of it all lay the promise of dessert (something not procured from sketchy vending machines!), and the knowledge that you’d helped Mrs. Garcia’s homeroom support a good cause.

If you’re nostalgic too, I can point you to a thoroughly grown-up alternative to the cafeteria bake sales of old. The lovely Phoebe and Cara of Big Girls, Small Kitchen are raising money for The Valerie Fund by baking some amazing-looking peanut M&M blondies through Mother’s Day. Personally, I can think of no more appropriate way to say “I love you” to my wonderful mother (a food-blog reader herself, she introduced me to Phoebe and Cara’s writing). And on this holiday, I feel especially compelled to support families that haven’t been as lucky as ours; the Valerie Fund provides comprehensive care to kids with cancer and blood disease. It breaks my heart that little ones have to go through that kind of pain—and it’s eerily similar to the cause I supported (with particular energy) back in high school.

My senior year, I found small-town life in Wilmette, Illinois to be suffocating, and high school classes seemed to be nothing more than obstacles standing between me and college. Bored and purposeless, I signed up to run a marathon with Team in Training, which meant I’d also be raising money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. It was a bold and probably dumb move: I’d been running recreationally for two years, but I was young and green and in no shape to run 26.2 miles. But the training and the fundraising would challenge me, ask something of me. It became the thing that gave me purpose in what otherwise would’ve been a self-centered year, spent resting on my laurels and waiting for my next life chapter to begin.

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As a hopeless perfectionist, I find delight in telling you that the below-described cake has absolutely no flaws. Having said that, it’s probably healthier if I also admit that it took me two attempts to attain said perfection. (And, okay, that it took me about ten minutes to write those two sentences.)

I first read about this cake on Molly Wizenberg’s blog, and then later in her wonderful book. In between, I saw countless reproductions of her Winning Hearts and Minds cake in the blogosphere, convinced finally by Shannalee’s post to try the damn thing already. It seemed that everyone who had ever eaten a slice was star-struck, and every baker assured readers of its absurd simplicity: butter, sugar, chocolate, eggs, and a tablespoon of flour. Heaven emerging from a cake pan in twenty-five minutes, essentially. For someone used to chasing perfection, it seemed that this one had been dropped in my lap, and it actually sounded easy. My sanity might remain intact to see another day!

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As I had hoped, three city-dwelling friends visited my suburban apartment this Saturday, plied by promises of (what else?) food, and lots of it. Formally, this gathering would be called a dinner party—but that sounds so staid, doesn’t it? I think of dinner parties as those events of my youth when children were banished by means of early bedtimes. As a child then, my biased opinion was that dinner parties must be no-fun zones washed of spontaneity and liveliness.

Of course, as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned better. Now that college is over, dinner parties are a great way for groups of far-flung friends to get together at once. They’re cheap, with only the cost of an extra bag of groceries to fuel an evening. And they don’t require screaming over music and strangers, as with nights spent at restaurants or bars. Really, I’m glad that I’ve gotten over that childhood bias, just as I’m relieved to have recovered from another one: vegetable phobia. Because when dressed up with cake batter, golden raisins, and white chocolate, carrots ain’t half bad.

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Way back in October, I invited a few friends over for dinner. I contributed a pan of lasagna and a green salad, and my friend Emily brought a shiny blue plate piled high with Bailey’s-spiked brownies. We were busy laughing and chatting, and the blue plate never made its way back to Emily’s apartment.

Somehow, October turned into February, and I figured that I owed her the plate plus interest. I paid that interest in the form of lemon bars. And after taste-testing them, I can assure you that they made up for the delay.

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