Last night, I ate the best dessert I've ever had in my life: the corn husk meringue from Cosme: a meringue made from corn husks, as the name suggests, served with a sweet corn mousse. I love a dessert that isn't overly sweet — indeed, up until last night, my favorite desert had been at Pla in Barcelona: a bitter chocolate brownie with a scoop of wasabi ice cream. Cosme was listed, for a time, as one of The World's 50 Best Restaurants, but the reviews I read were rather mixed. The restaurant, according to the Michelin Guide, could be inconsistent. If so, we were lucky last night, as everything was exquisite. The octopus. The blue crab relleno. The duck carnitas. That damn dessert. (Kin also ordered a basque cheesecake but agreed that my choice was superior.) I think a lot of people in the US have a very fixed idea of what Mexican cuisine is like: beans, cheese, cheap. Cosme was none of that. (None of our dishes, save the marscapone in the corn mousse.)

One of the things we are enjoying about New York, this time around in particular, is visiting different parts of the city on weekends — taking in the food and/or the shopping and/or a museum. We arrived in the Flatiron District a bit early for our dinner reservation, and so we popped into the Lego store — just to look. (Ha. We spent $100, and god we could have blown so much more money.) There is so much to see here that we will, as I told Kin last night, have to live here for the rest of our lives if we hope to see "everything" or to eat at restaurants like Cosme twice.

Phew, this blog post today is already way too long, way too verbose as I should be putting my writing energy into the last of my big essays on Second Breakfast: the year in fitness technology. The first in the year-end series went up last week. I also recorded another episode of the podcast. I'll be making some adjustments in the New Year, but one thing I am definitely doing different now is taking some time off over the holidays. I also attended a Zoom meet-up with some other writers/runners on Substack, and that gave me a lot to think about how I "work" there.

Time off from writing. We'll see what sort of time off I take from training. This past week, I had my longest bike ride to date: over 18 miles. Lifting didn't go as well as the week before; but I was just a tad faster than usual with swimming. Running was tough, considering the 15K race I ran on the 2nd. I had my NYRR Group Training on Wednesday and Friday. On the former, we did hill repeats, and from there I ran to the reservoir to do a run with Coach KB. Friday was a tempo run, scheduled for 36 minutes that went a bit longer than that. By the weekend, I was pretty beat, but managed to hit 30 miles for the week. I'm trying to figure out what my body can handle as far as running volume goes when I'm not training for a race so that when I do — I'll start the next training block for my spring half marathon soon enough — I can do more miles (and, ideally, get faster).

Speaking of speed, I finished reading Fast after 50. Kin and I finished reading Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing — we listened to the audiobook, and so it was sort of haunting to hear Matthew Perry's voice talk about his addiction. I think I gained a lot of insights into Isaiah's struggles — whether or not he shared Perry's exactly, there's enough overlap to find some strange comfort there. I started reading How Infrastructure Works, and we started listening to Black Thought's memoir, The Upcycled Self. We watched Killers of the Flower Moon. I am a huge Scorsese fan, but I didn't expect this to be my favorite movie of his — I think it is. It was such a powerful story, but there were lots of very interesting filmic elements in it, reminding viewers about the ways in which media (film, radio) and culture (indigenous, colonist) construct the stories we receive about the past and the future.

What I cooked: butternut squash soup; baked beans with chorizo and lime; orange tofu; minty malted chocolate cake; chicken piccata and polenta; sweet potato biscuits with sage — I tell you what, the CSA continues to give. I think all that's left are a few potatoes that I'll make into latkes this evening.