As I enter a new and especially busy period, I’ve been thinking a lot (and sharing a lot) about time management.

One of the funny things about time is that it seems so concrete in one moment and so subjective in the next.

Sometimes looking at the clock gives me an unwelcome reality check—how have hours gone by, when it felt like only minutes?

And sometimes the opposite feels true: it’s as if time has expanded to accommodate my engagement with something. (I think this is part of what we mean when we talk about getting into a flow state.)

In any case, as I think about all of this, I thought I’d share a nice tidbit that speaks to our perspective on time, lost and found.

Earlier this month, an acquaintance mentioned to me that we all tend to think about spring daylight savings, which happened last night, as the loss of an hour of sleep.

That may be true, but daylight savings also brings about more light for the evening commute. And for the month of March, we gain an additional 3 minutes of daylight per day on average: a total of over 90 minutes of daylight in a single month.

Where I live, this is the fastest rate of daylight gained over the course of the year.

I happen not to mind winter, or short days. I like sunlight, but my mood is less affected by sunlight exposure than is true for many.

Even so, I liked this piece of trivia. There are so many ways that we can choose to perceive time and navigate our relationship with it; lately, I’m choosing to look on the bright side. Pun intended.

Happy Sunday, friends. Here are some recipes and reads.

Recipes

1. Somebody was just telling me about how she blends silken tofu with pesto to create a creamy green sauce. It sounded great, which led me to poke around for more sauces made with silken tofu. Not a recipe, per se, but this article gives some good ideas.

2. Speaking of pesto, pea pesto for springtime.

3. I’m not very creative about cooking with plantains; roasting them for these black bean bowls is about the extent of my repertoire. I was excited to spot this recipe for green plantains braised in cashew milk, which sounds so rich and tasty.

4. A simple salad idea for the asparagus that’s on its way.

5. I’m able to get the Nature’s Bakery fig bars for free at work, which is a nice little perk, but it would be fun to try making my own fruit and oat snack bars, too.

Reads

1. A really thoughtful and thought-provoking dialog about queer ecology.

2. I love Alice Feiring’s writing about wine, and I love this essay, in which she describes inheriting and caring for her friend Joe’s sourdough starter after his sudden death.

3. I spend a lot of time thinking about how health tech and the “quantified self” can feed into obsessive tendencies that are (ironically) not-so-healthy. I found it refreshing to read this article‘s perspective on doing away with efforts to “optimize” one’s bedtime routine, and instead focus on a holistic, big-picture approach.

4. One of the hardest things about being a clinician of any kind is to wrestle with the fact that so many of one’s decisions will ultimately rely on subjective judgment and clinical intuition. I felt sympathy as I read an anesthesiologist’s account of having his sense of certainty falter.

5. Also on the topic of medicine, women have lower mortality rates than men do, but a new study suggests that this is not true for female doctors. Probing into why this is the case brings up interesting points about the medical profession and how its pressures may affect the sexes unequally.

I’ve been meal prepping a lot of oatmeal since I started my new role, and I’m now officially getting tired of it. Time for some variety!

Yesterday, I was delighted to discover that I could microwave cook the simple, eggy scramble from The Vegan Week (for those of you who know and like that recipe, try 2 minutes covered, then 1 minute and 30 seconds uncovered, on high).

Now I’m trying to figure out whether I can come up with a shortcut for the book’s lentil sage breakfast patties.

I’ve also made a batch of my easy baked chickpea frittata, and I’m so happy to have it. If I don’t end up eating it for breakfast, the slices will make for good, savory snacks.

Hope you’ve got some good food planned for this fresh week of longer, lighter days!

xo