Hello, friends and readers. It's been a long few months since I published here, but with the weather finally acceptable again (read: under 70 degrees), I'm feeling invigorated — and ready for a new, more dedicated chapter. I've been on a hot streak of networking and trying to build up my writing roster these past couple months, and the more I meet writers and do things that feel worth writing about, the more interested I've become in just publishing things on my own.
Don't get me wrong: I am still very much a full-time freelance writer Available For Hire™️. But I also fancy a return to my roots. Life was better in 2011, was it not? We cannot recapture the recession-in-the-rearview, stomp-hey-music-listening millennial optimism of the era, but we can blog like we did back then — and that's what I'm thinking of doing.
My loose plan is to publish once a week, in two formats. Every other Friday, I'll drop my "Friday Five": five things, big or small, that I'm obsessed with at the time. On the alternating Thursdays in between, I'll publish a "Thursday Dive": a deeper dive into a thing I love, hate, or simply feel like ranting about. I have long thought of myself as an influencer in my own deluded mind, and this is an attempt to make it a teensy bit official. These posts will span the subjects I've always loved and written about here — books, music, general lifestyle — and the things that (lest we forget) I do actually cover professionally, like travel and food. Want to know my favorite Chicago burgers? You might see that here. Itching to get your hands on the apocryphal Dublin travel guide I occasionally share if people ask very nicely? This might be the place. Consider this my fun-but-authoritative free space for publishing the lifestyle tips and tricks I hand out in my day job, with a few less pitching-and-commissioning strings.
Since today is Friday, I'm launching this new era of The Domerberry with a Friday Five. Enjoy this glimpse at the benevolent bugbears currently occupying my brain space — and come back next week to kick off the Thursday Dive with an oft-requested list: my favorite Chicago restaurants.
The Friday Five: 09.25.26
1. Theming my entire life around the fact that it's fall. If you've been here a while, you know — and if you've met me even once, you can probably guess — that fall is my favorite time of year. The weather is dreamy, the leaves turn all fun, and there are endless possibilities for my favorite thing: sticking to a theme. I am the person who wore pink to Barbie, green to Wicked (parts one and two), and a bustier to see Moulin Rouge on tour (apologies to the elementary-school-aged child seated next to me for having parents who somehow did not foresee this). I prepared for a rodeo trip this summer by making a six-hour country playlist and reading a cowboy romance novel. If it's fall, then, you bet my daily life is showing it. How, exactly? Well:
a. Books. 'Tis the season for witch books and slasher novels, folks. I've read almost nothing in the past month that isn't fall-themed, and while I can't say these are all great works of literature, I can say that Feel the Bern is a Vermont-in-autumn-set mystery novel where the amateur detective is Bernie Sanders. I believe this speaks for itself.
b. Candles. This is obvious but bears repeating. If you walk into my house between August and Advent and it doesn't smell like you've fallen into a vat of mulled apples, I have done something wrong. For the record, my favorite fall candle is Spiced Cider by Capri Blue for Anthropologie. Bury me with this so I can huff the cloves for all eternity.
c. Food. If you think I'm cooking from any source but my soup-themed Pinterest board this fall, you are out of your mind.
2. All Too Well (and not the one you're thinking of). Yes, Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" is a masterpiece (and, as it happens, a great fit for my fall theme; see "scarf"). But the All Too Well I'm currently obsessing over is a sandwich shop. If you are in Chicago — or randomly Naples, Florida, where they have their other location — you need to eat at this place. I've spent eleven years chasing the high of my time in Dublin, when there were so many worldbeating sandwich shops that I hardly went a day without a life-changing sando. Nowhere has lived up to it since, Chicago included, but this place gives me some hope. They make their own schiacciata bread (foccaccia but thinner and sandwichier) and stuff it with some truly A-grade fillings. There's the Bombay Chulet, with Indian chili crisp and spicy fig on top of turkey and prosciutto. There's the perfectly named "...I Make You Lamb," with shredded lamb, feta, and chimichurri. If they had an outlet closer to my house, I would be 80% bread by now.
3. Colorado. I recently booked a vacation to Aspen (it's in December; send me your recs), and it has me fantasizing about all things Colorado. I would looove to step on a crunchy leaf out there while gazing up at a canopy of aspens. I'll miss fall this year, but that won't stop me from fantasizing, especially about these travel-writery tidbits:
a. Hotel Jerome, Auberge Collection. The most swankified hotel in Aspen, according to me and many, many other basic white women. Moody mountain lodge vibes; 130 years of history; a price tag that we will not be discussing at this time. 🙏
b. The Winter Park Express Train. Amtrak runs a train every winter that gets you from downtown Denver to the literal base of a ski mountain in under three hours. This is one rare, isolated instance of us being a proper country.
c. DIVA at the Denver Art Museum. They have an exhibit opening next month that's A) comprised solely of costumes and artifacts related to the great pop divas, and B) built in conjunction with the V&A, which anyone with taste knows is the best museum in London. I envy all who get to go.
4. Applesauce cake with brown butter frosting. As Logansporters of a certain age may be aware, one of my old choir- and school- and churchmates is now a highly aspirational family and home influencer. I live for her posts; my mom lives for her posts; if you're reading this, there's a good chance you live for them too. This week (in keeping with obsession #1), I decided to try out her recipe for applesauce cake with brown butter frosting. Oh...my God. The recipe said you'd likely have extra frosting, and she suggested you just bake up another cake the next week to use it up. I wrote this off immediately as something I would never put forth the effort to do, but this thing was so good that I might actually bother. The cake is moist and warm-fall-spice-y (and comes together in what felt like 10 seconds in a single bowl, which is a huge plus), and the frosting is, to speak plainly, the best thing that has happened to me since at least the first Trump administration. Brown butter really is That Girl, and you should make frosting with her at your earliest convenience.
5. The new Taylor Swift songs. You know I couldn't publish today and not talk about them. Yes, The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is here, and I have of course been listening to the new tracks on repeat. With one exception, I like them. "Patient Zero" is a good concept, well executed except for opening hook being a note-for-note copy of "Wait for Me" from Hadestown. "Pink Clouding" is fun; "Babylon" is nice. And then, well, there's "Cleveland!" With nothing but the purest love for my friends from the Cle, this song is a mess. Cleveland is fine! We love that our girl is happy! But this is the first big love song from Taylor Swift after her wedding. The greatest lyricist of our generation just gave us "I have an important announcement to make" and "this - is - the - love - of - my - life." It is not her best work. But I guess I'd be phoning it in at the office too if I were newly married to a man large enough to throw me around like a sack of flour and who will retire before 40 as a multimillionaire. Good for you, girl. Good for you.
See you next week!
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