The past year has left me in an almost permanent state of nostalgia. I listen to a lot of Tom Petty (still able to smell the trampled grass and spilled beer from seeing him live as a teenager), I get emotional at the drop of a hat, I look through old pictures like a war… Continue reading Sweet Sixteen
It’s rare that people make their lunch anymore. Adults don’t really have the time, especially on a weekday, to wander through their kitchens and throw something together. Restaurants capitalize on their customer’s tendency to dine out at this time of day, offering shorter versions of their delicious menus for reduced prices. If you haven’t tried… Continue reading The Lunch Break
I’m better at cooking alone. My sisters and I joke that we all have that trait — super difficult to work with in the kitchen, so bossy and condescending — and that we get it from our father, one who still struggles to delegate tasks without a booming “I said MINCED!” when you do something… Continue reading Cooking with boys
During a recent visit to a (very popular) Austin restaurant, my best friend, in town for the weekend, ordered a plate of pasta, enticed by promises of local-only ingredients and housemade pappardelle. The portion was ginormous, for one, a forgivable offense but still wince-worthy. The cheese situation was confusing; though it TASTED like goat cheese,… Continue reading The Pasta Snob
In my mind, the meal-in-a-bowl is a quintessential young person thing. I always imagined true adulthood as at time when you start eating off of plates, large ones, piled with the main food groups. You might put a salad in a bowl, but that’s on the side. Never the main event. Here’s the thing though:… Continue reading Nostalgia, in a bowl
I had a “Joy of Cooking” childhood. That iconic cookbook sat in the breakfast room for years, its sticky pages covered in a pasty blend of butter and sugar, our favorite recipes (oatmeal cookies, pancakes, blueberry muffins, angel food cake) marked by their wrinkled, abused pages. My sisters and I were spoiled by homemade everything,… Continue reading The Sweetest Thing
When I moved to Tallahassee, Florida for law school, I was dead set on several things. 1) I was going to become an environmental lawyer and save the Everglades; 2) I would embrace any and all counterculture I could find, never morphing into the stereotypes that surrounded me; and 3) I was going to limit… Continue reading Free
I was going to write about Easter this week. Marc and I crafted a pretty legit spread on Sunday–foie gras, thick cut pork chops, gravy drenched egg noodles, a perfectly cooked zucchini frittata–and I even made him wait to eat so that I could take glorious photos. We ate the foie gras with fig jam… Continue reading Sleeping with the enemy
*Or, My Love Affair with Food & Wine Magazine The hours I spend in a grocery store feel like the most lost and wasted ones of my day. My struggle with grocery shopping–one that I realize is hardly a struggle and marks me as an extremely privileged human being–is mainly with the chore-like necessity of… Continue reading My Grand Grocery Experiment*
This week, two true human gems from our hometown arrived on our doorstep, smiling and hungry. We’d known for weeks that they were coming, and for weeks I mused, casually, on what I would prepare for this occasion. As I am often guilty of doing, I romanticized the event, picturing myself in front of a… Continue reading Entertaining
Daily Discussions of craft and the writing life
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