Carrie Saum

You and I are creatures of habit. And our habit is to be busy. Occupied. Focused on creating and maintaining momentum and a functional life.

Every year, I recreate my favorite street vendor’s glüwine (pronounced glue-vine), and remember that crazy freedom. I’m instantly transported back to those snowy cobblestone streets, freezing hands and feet, warm belly, and everything tinged with magic even while being naively idiotic.

We had no turkey, no casserole dishes heaped sweet potatoes or creamy green beans, no pies made from scratch, no beautiful table settings or nice dishes to heap our non-existent feast upon.

Whoever Waldorf is, I love their style of salads the most. Fruit, celery, creamy goodness. It's hard to go wrong. I mean, you CAN go wrong, but you shouldn't because that would be silly.

We saw Hurricane Ike coming for days before it made landfall. It was just two short years post-hurricane Katrina, and all of south Texas and Louisiana were still reeling from her trauma. My husband and I began deliberating if we should stay or go. This is my story of surviving natural disasters.

SLEEP IS REALLY IMPORTANT. Here ar six ways to help make your sleep sacred.

I understood in no uncertain terms because of purity culture that having sex outside of marriage was the worst thing I could do as a young woman.

As a woman, it feels damn near impossible to be heard sometimes. But we are working hard at this life thing, and we deserve to be taken seriously. Here are five tips to get closer to that goal.

Next, juice your blood oranges. Or skip this and buy the juice from the spendy little corner market that sells $8 fair trade chocolate made from cocoa beans harvested purely through meditative thoughts generated by unionized zen monkeys in Thailand. They also sell blood orange juice. You’ll find it next to the $15 cashew milk.

Rosa made a chocolate cake with cinnamon and pecans that still haunts my dreams and my tastebuds, 20 years later. Here, I've tried to recreate it.