A Wide Open Road: On Dropping the Last Nap and Trying to Find My "Niche"

A few days ago -- after reading 15 books (one of which was Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester, one of my favorite childhood reads, read in its entirety. She barely cracked a yawn.), an entire sippy cup of milk, singing "The Wheels on the Bus" at least a hundred times, lots of tossing and turning while my daughter said with sleepy-ish frustration, "Mommy, I want to sleep" -- my daughter finally fell asleep around midnight, and I had to acknowledge the reality: she no longer needs a nap.

When I woke up the next morning, the frustration and upset I felt at the 2.5+ hour bedtime from the night before was fresh in my mind. I thought, with steely resolve, *Okay, fine. We're done with naps. Let's freakin' go.* That day, I had a play date with another mom at the library, and it took up most of the day, so our first no-nap day felt easy. Breezy. (Sort of. My husband took over for awhile in the afternoon so I could fall into a very deep hour-long sleep on the couch, where I dreamed about trying to buy tacos from a biker bar but got caught in some kind of biker gang war.)

I've been sending letters here on Substack for 3 months now. It feels like both a very long time and no time at all. When I first started here, I felt so frantic about defining what this newsletter would be "about" and I felt so undecided about what to name it. So I named it something that felt familiar to me and my blog writing (Friday Bites). It didn't feel quite right, but I went with it anyway. Trying to summarize what my newsletter would be about felt like trying to fold clean clothes while my toddler rolled around in them. But I came up with something, and decided to just...do it. Just write. I can always change things later.

So I started sending letters. It felt important to get out of my head and just start. Stop worrying that no one would subscribe or be interested or read. As I started feeling my way around the Notes section, I tried not to be intimidated by all the other brilliant and beautiful work I encountered. I tried not to get discouraged into silencing myself after reading a lot of Discourse about the state of "good" and "bad" Substack writing. When people started sharing their subscriber counts, I tried not to feel inconsequential and a failure because my subscriber numbers are not huge.

Instead of scrolling Notes and getting sucked into all the noise, I read newsletters from my inbox first thing in the morning, and I use the Notes feature to find new letters to read. When I write, I tell myself that I'm writing for me because I love it and I need to and whoever needs to hear what I'm saying will find me.

Even so, I've been trying to not feel like a mess because my writerly instincts are punching their way out of the little niche box I've been trying to contain them in. Content creator wisdom (which is actually very different from writer wisdom) tells us to find our niche, to specialize, to compartmentalize. To put a magnifying glass on one interest and ignore all the rest. (Much like academia and the MFA, but that's a discussion for another time.)

I just cannot do that. Trying to compartmentalize myself and my writing and my thoughts is like trying to put my beloved late cat in a cat carrier. She clawed, spit, kicked, hissed, dead-fished, ran away, hid -- did everything she could to keep us from putting her in that small, dark cage, so I held her on my lap on the car rides to and from the vet. Everything was less stressful and went more smoothly when we stopped trying to cram her in a box and just let her breathe and be free.

So we're in the middle of transitioning to no-nap days. There have been a couple days where my girl has asked for a nap at 3pm, and I've given it to her. (And yes, on those days, she's fallen asleep past 10:30pm. On those nights, I have only myself to blame.)

I haven't fully recognized the extent to which I've built our days around naptime. When she was doing 3 naps a day, it felt impossible to do any activity that felt longer than a couple hours. When she dropped to 2, it felt a little easier to plan activities and work meetings around them. When she dropped to 1, it felt like a heavy blanket got thrown off our days. We had more flexibility, could plan longer outings. Dropping to zero naps, though, feels like starting a marathon that I am absolutely unprepared to run.

Naptime has always been *my* time. When I worked for someone else, I sometimes used nap time to get things done, and I disliked it very much. When I quit my job, naptime became my respite. Sometimes it was the only time in the day I got to sit down and rest. Sometimes I napped, or read, or caught up on my trash tv. I've structured our days around Before Naptime and After Naptime.

Now, without a nap to break up the day, there is no Before and After. It's all just...Endless Time.

I wake up in the morning and see my day stretch out before me like I-80 from Salt Lake City to my hometown in northern Nevada -- an infinite straight-shot drive under a relentless sun, very few rest stops, and nothing but blinding salt flats to feast my eyes on for what feels like an eternity. I have no idea what to do with all this Time and Space and Light in our days.

What Substack has given me in the midst of the all-over-the-place-ness of toddler motherhood is structure and an outlet. I've set the publishing timeline for myself, and I'm very proud that I've stuck to it. Even though I have days where the only person I talk to is a nearly-3-year-old, my brain doesn't feel like goo anymore, and I suspect it's partly because I'm using it to write and string semi-coherent sentences together on a regular basis.

Writing letters here has reminded me that there are things that I'm excited to write about that are not necessarily related to the niche (grief and motherhood and food) I've put myself in.

And I've decided to say fuck it. I'm going to write about whatever I want here. Because this writing (I've started to call it my public-facing writing) fuels my other writing -- my poems, my more vulnerable essays. I've learned about what I feel comfortable sharing here, in real-time, and what feels better to work on in private by myself and with trusted readers (and my therapist) when it comes time for it.

With the days stretching out like a wagon ride on the Oregon Trail (for a visual, see: Meek's Crossing), I'm starting to feel out our new rhythms, suss out what we need for this new phase we're embarking on. It requires more storytimes at the library, more nature walks, more art time, more playground trips. It requires letting go of guilt around screen time, and it requires more structure for my toddler. Within the structure I make for her, I know I will begin to find time for myself again, the way I did during nap time. (I just have to remind myself, on days that feel like absolute chaotic failures, that I'm doing my best, we're figuring this out, everyone is fed and clean, and tomorrow will be a new day, a clean slate, an opportunity to try again.)

We're about a week into our no-nap life, and I'm starting to feel more comfortable with all the Space, Time, and Light my days are seeing. I don't feel in control of anything, and we still don't have a lot of structure, but I'm figuring out how to adapt. It doesn't feel so daunting anymore -- it's starting to feel more like possibility.

Somehow, my Substack life feels like it's getting more Space, Time, and Light, too. With a no-nap day, I suddenly feel free to write about whatever I want, whether it has to do with motherhood, grief, and food or not. I'm cooking up some fun projects that I'll probably launch in the new year, one to do with cakes and the other with music.

6 months ago, I couldn't have even conceived of feeling capable of planning a regular newsletter, and here I am, doing the damn thing. I'm my own boss, I get to write about whatever I want, name it whatever I want, and I get to choose the box I put myself in. And guess what -- the boxes are getting recycled, and I'm heading out onto the open road.

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A Primer in Grief Horror (A Friday Bites Re-Issue, With Minor Revisions and One Addition)

Hello! As I continue to figure out my writing and publishing rhythms in the Substack universe, I've decided to give my public-facing writing brain a break so I can focus on my private writing projects. I want to keep my promise to publish every two weeks, though, so I've decided to re-issue this post that I originally published on here in February 2020 (with some minor revisions and an addition). While I’m on the horror film track (tis the season!), this letter will share some of my favorite movies in the "grief horror" subgenre. Enjoy! I'll see you again with something new in 2 weeks.

Growing up, I unintentionally traumatized my little brothers with all the horror films I used to watch, so neither of them are big horror fans. So after my brother watched The Babadook, I was over the moon excited when he and I had a conversation about the way the entire movie was a metaphor for grief, and then he got intrigued about the potential of horror movies to serve as metaphors for grief/loss/guilt.

And then I got even more excited because that’s one of my favorite subgenres of horror — horror as a metaphor or analogy for grief/loss/guilt. You can make the argument that a good horror film is always serving as a metaphor for something, which would be true, but I especially love ones that star grief, guilt and loss.

So I decided to write up a crash course in this subgenre for my brother and for all of you. In no particular order, I present to you: a primer in grief/loss/guilt horror:

Pet Sematary (1989)

Stephen King is a true master of horror, and Pet Sematary is no exception. A doctor and his wife move to a new town with their too-adorable-for-their-own-good kids, yadda yadda yadda, an ancient Native American ritual site whose soil has “gone sour” gets involved (I know, it’s a…questionable choice, but here we are) (although, you might be able to argue that the crux of the film resting on an ancient Native American ritual site is also some kind of commentary on colonialism, I don’t want to start reading things into the text that aren’t really there), things get weird with a zombie cat, and then things get REALLY creepy. This movie is iconic for a reason.

The Babadook (2014)

Obviously. The catalyst for this list. There is so much to love about this film — that it’s about a woman whose husband died while she was giving birth to her son is heartbreaking enough. To watch her struggle to be a “good” mother to her son, who is a constant reminder of her husband and his death is so real and gut-wrenching. It upends tropes about what it means to be a “good” mother and what “good” parenthood looks like, and asks questions about what it means to be a mother and parent when you’ve experienced devastating trauma alongside an event that is supposed to be one of the happiest of your life, and what it means to struggle with a grief that threatens to consume you. UGH. Plus, it’ll keep you double-taking the shit you see out of the corner of your eye for at least 24 hours after you watch it.

Dark Was The Night (2015)

A favorite horror trope of mine is “small town law enforcement suddenly has to deal with a whole bunch of supernatural shenanigans and MAN, is it above their pay grade” and Dark Was The Night fits that bill. A creature feature shot mostly in frosty, moody blue tones, this one follows a small town sheriff who is swimming in grief and guilt following the loss of his son. His backstory is revealed bit by bit in tandem with his investigation into what exactly is terrorizing his small town. We grow to really love the sheriff and his deputy, and all you want for them is love, happiness, lively earth tones, and some sunshine, for god’s sake. Creature features (another absolute favorite horror subgenre of mine) can be hit or miss with the creature effects, but Dark was the Night keeps the mystery alive throughout most of the film and saves the big reveal for the very end, which is the best move they could have made. I’ve watched this movie three times now, and still, every time, my heart just wants that sheriff to open himself to love again.

The Final Girls (2015)

I love a good horror comedy, and The Final Girls is such a pleasant surprise. Taissa Farmiga stars as a woman whose late mother was an actress whose claim to fame was the lead role in a campy 80s slasher flick (that is clearly a spoof of Friday the 13th). Through some weird inexplicable twists, Farmiga’s character gets to see her mother again, except they’re all inside the campy 80s slasher film. This film will startle you with slasher scares while making you laugh and breaking your heart and sending up the campy 80s horror genre, all at the same time. Also, you can’t beat this cast: Malin Akerman, Nina Dobrev from The Vampire Diaries, Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development, and Adam Devine from Pitch Perfect and Workaholics. SO GOOD.

The Ritual (2017)

This is a British creature feature that follows 4 friends who go on a backpacking trip through northern Sweden in honor of their murdered friend. One of them busts an ankle, and they opt to take a shortcut to their hotel through some ominous-looking woods. We all know what happens next, but also…we don’t. I’ve watched this one at least three times, and get a mood for it more often than you’d think. This film is a seamless blend of creature feature, Swedish folklore, and a metaphor for an overwhelming grief and guilt that forces you to bow down to it.

The Void (2017)

A small-town cop finds a drugged out guy in the middle of nowhere and brings him to a hospital that is in the process of shutting down. The bare-bones night staff includes his wife, from whom he’s separated, and things get real intense, real quick from there. Many reviews of this movie call it an homage to low-budget ‘80s horror, which it is, but it really is so much more than that. There are nods to Lovecraftian horror and even ‘80s Italian horror director Lucio Fulci, and it’s clear that horror video games like Resident Evil are an influence here too. Aesthetics aside, at its heart, The Void is about different facets of grief, and all the ways it can destroy a person’s humanity.

Phantasm (1979)

Now, this one might be stretch, but I can’t not put it on the list. Phantasm is a Don Coscarelli film, and it’s a bonkers one at that. Jody and Mike are brothers whose parents have recently passed away. When Mike begins to be chased by a creepy entity they call the Tall Man, Jody tries to protect him, and things get pretty bananas from there. This movie is full of bonkers one-liners and WTF moments, and you’re probably never going to fully understand what’s going on. You’ll just have to be okay with that, and go along with wherever the movie takes you. It’s like a glorious, hilarious, campy, gory poem. In the midst of all its disorientation, Phantasm has great moments of tenderness and its characters live out emotions that will feel familiar to anyone who has been stricken with panic about the possible death of a loved one or has felt fiercely protective of a family member for whatever reason. I’ve seen this one countless times, and it hits me just as profoundly (and hilariously) every time.

The Murmuring (2022)

The Murmuring (written and directed by Jennifer Kent, who also wrote and directed The Babadook) is the last entry in Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities horror anthology series. It stars Essie Davis (who was also in The Babadook!) and Andrew Lincoln (ever heard of a little show called The Walking Dead?) as an ornithologist couple who move to a secluded house in order to study the movements of starlings. It quickly becomes clear that they are also living through a thick and heartwrenching grief, both from within themselves and the house they're living in. I love this short film’s quietness and its solitude, even as they become oppressive and suffocating. It's a film with a full heart, exploring and witnessing every character's grief with tenderness and nuance, taking us on a tour of the lonely islands that grief can make of each of us.

These are only the first few that came to mind when I started this list — I’m sure there are many obvious ones that I’ve forgotten to add (The Descent is the first obvious one to come to mind), but this is a good start. There are also movies I initially wanted to put on this list that didn’t make the cut because they featured grief, but not as a metaphor (see: Hereditary and Midsommar) (although, the more I think about it, Midsommar might qualify, but I'd need to watch it again). If you’ve thought of more films that fit in this genre, please comment and let’s get a list going!

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Motherhood, Horror, and Me : Processing How Motherhood Has Changed My Relationship to the Genre

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Me, circa 1988, modeling my clown makeup.

I am, and have always been, a horror girlie through and through. I was recently stopped by a community access television team on the street to answer questions about movies -- unprompted, all of my answers were about horror films. Some of my favorite books growing up were the Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark series, and R.L. Stine's Fear Street series. When I was pregnant, I not-so-secretly hoped that my daughter would be born on Halloween so that we could have Halloween birthday parties forever.

My first horror movie memory is a scene from Friday the 13th, though I couldn’t tell you which one. All I remember is that hockey-masked Jason is chasing a young woman through the woods. She screams as she runs through the trees, and Jason ambles along after her, his long strides somehow closing the distance between them. 

That’s all I remember. I must have been maybe 4 or 5 when I saw this. It must have been on in the background at my mom’s friend’s house during a party. Even though I was so young (too young), I wasn’t terrified or scared. I was too young to know what was going on or to be worried about death.

I can't imagine showing something like this to my own child at so young an age. Now that I have my own kid, my relationship to horror has changed in unexpected ways.

Now, what I'm about to tell you will sound wild. Like, really, extremely out there. If you don't have a kid or have the same values as me, this might be a horror story in its own right, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

From the time my kid was about 6 to 9 months old, she slept just fine in her crib, in her own room. She slept through the night every night, and everyone got great sleep. As soon as she hit the 9-month mark, she began waking up instantaneously upon hitting her crib mattress. Sometimes, she would open her eyes mid-transfer and refuse to go back to sleep unless I picked her up. Sometimes, I'd be able to put her down and sneak out, only to have to return 5 minutes later when she woke up and realized she was no longer being held. My husband, M, would try to settle her, and she would only cry harder and louder. The only way my kid would go to sleep and stay asleep was to be held. By me.

And so, I started getting ready for bed when she did, which meant I was holding my child for hours in our nursing chair, reading a book or watching Gilmore Girls on my phone, until I was ready to go to bed — so I was essentially changing into my PJs, brushing my teeth, and going to bed with my kid around 8pm. I didn't get to watch tv or enjoy precious alone time with my husband. Sometimes, we would swap places so I got a break -- she would always stir or wake up during a transfer, though, and M would have to hold her tight and shhh her back to sleep. We were like two lone, exhausted ships passing in the night, tossing a small, infuriating but wholly beloved package back and forth. It was another lonely time.

A friend, who has raised her own children, suggested that I hold her while I watched tv or movies in the living room with M, instead of going to bed when she fell asleep. We tried it out one night -- and it worked. It turns out our Velcro kid is a heavy sleeper (except when she's being put down?!), and we were able to once again spend time together and watch our shows and movies. Of course, we had a tiny sleeping third wheel, and we had to whisper everything to each other, but we were able to return to a somewhat normal routine (...while holding a sleeping child).

In this new phase of life, I was able to begin watching horror again (again, while holding a sleeping baby/toddler). It felt like stumbling out of a dark cave (a la The Descent) into the light. I had no idea where I was or what new horror movies had come out. I didn't even know what I was in the mood to watch most of the time.

We started out light with My Best Friend's Exorcism (Disappointing! The book by Grady Hendrix is and will always be better! Please read it!). I kept falling asleep during Teen Wolf (1985). I finally watched and loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). And then we waded out a little farther into the horror waters with Hellraiser (1987). And then we dove into the deep end with Barbarian (loved it) and The Black Phone.

The Black Phone stars Ethan Hawke as a truly terrifying man who kidnaps children, keeps them captive in his basement and eventually kills them. (I’m getting the creeps just seeing the thumbnail of the trailer above.) It's worth a watch, but not more than one. As a mother, actively holding her sleeping child while watching a child in a film be terrorized, this film was bone-chilling. Of course, I wanted our protagonist to make it out alive and I felt a deep sorrow for all the dead children and their parents. Most surprisingly though, the largest thought in my mind was: this serial killer was a baby once. He had a mother and a father, and he was a small, innocent child at one time. What happened to him?

Yes, yes, I know, he's not real, he's a character in a horror film. But I've found that this sentiment has traveled with me to most other human interactions in life. Even my girl, Britney Spears, talks in her memoir about this _seeing_ of other humans after becoming a mother. I listened to the audiobook (highly recommend!) so I wasn’t able to underline the things she wrote that were profound (which were many!), so I'm paraphrasing. She says something about how she looks at everyone, even those who have fucked her over, and thinks about how they used to be a baby.

There's something about how this way of seeing people unlocks a deep compassion for others, a way into understanding who they are and why they are the way they are. It’s not a path to excusing bad behavior, but understanding it. For me, this has become a form of radical empathy, providing a foundation for setting firm and loving boundaries with the people in my life.

The other thing I've discovered about horror films when I watch them in this way (while holding a sleeping angel) is how the body physically reacts to the terror on the screen -- the jump scares, the eerieness, tension.

When I was learning how to breastfeed, I learned that relaxing my body helped my baby relax, which helped her nurse better. Breathing deeply helped my fussy baby calm down. The same applies to the contact nap -- my relaxed body leads to a sleeping baby. A tense body might mean baby has a harder time getting comfortable and falling asleep, or they might wake up more easily. (This is all just my personal experience, not a science!)

So watching a horror movie -- especially one with jump scares The Nun and The Nun 2, I'm looking at you) -- shed a light on all the ways horror is a bodily experience. I can't remember what we were watching, but there was a jump scare and I somehow had enough control over my body (which, remember, was holding a sleeping baby) to NOT jump. Instead of jumping, though, I felt every hair on my body stand on end. It’s how I imagine it feels like to realize you’re being watched by a creature in the dark woods.

While watching the first Orphan film, I found myself holding my breath because I was so worried about the children. I had to keep taking deep breaths, and at one point, I turned to my husband and whispered, "Are these kids going to be okay?" I remember he looked at me and said grimly, "I don't know."

And of course, there are the jump scares where I actually jumped and/or whisper-shouted, "Oh shit!" Miraculously, my kid stirred but did not wake up a single time after one of these incidents.

I have expanded my definition of horror and spooky, which has expanded what I love. Paradoxically, what has also changed is that I now have limits on it -- what I know I can enjoy and when.

I’ve discovered that I have a distinction between comfort horror (i.e. The Lost Boys (1987), Fright Night (1985), The Crow (1994)), horror that I love that truly scares me (i.e. The Taking of Deborah Logan, The Ritual, Pontypool), and the horror that is out to get me in real life (meaning it is scary enough to keep me creeped out after the film is long over) (i.e. Evil Dead Rise, Barbarian, Hereditary). Entire months can go by where I don't watch a single horror film because I just don't have the stomach for any of it. Daily parenthood shreds my nerves enough some days.

Something else that’s new is my renewed enthusiasm for horror literature. While spending hours nap trapped, I came to read and love so much horror lit. The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte, both by Isabel Cañas. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth. Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. Mister Magic by Kiersten White. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. I could go on for awhile.

My definition of spooky has come to include murder mysteries, noir, and some thrillers. I'm talking about Tana French novels, and Sherlock (starring the dream team of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman), and things like Glass Onion and Knives Out, Only Murders in the Building, and the Poirot murder mystery movies (like A Haunting in Venice).

I appreciate a well-built spooky atmosphere, an uneasy ambience, characters that feel untrustworthy but you're not sure why, the feeling that something is not quite right but you can't put your finger on it (see: the Midnight Mass limited series on Netflix for a master class in what I'm talking about).

These days, I am able to transfer my sleeping toddler to a sleep surface (our bed), so I am learning what it feels like to enjoy horror -- and also regular films! -- with the wholeness of my body again without trying to suppress my body's reactions, or whisper my shocked profanities.

September means that Spooky Season is officially here. This year, my husband and I have decided that our Spooktember film list will be comprised mostly of our favorites, rather than trying to watch every horror film we haven't seen yet that is on the streaming platforms we have access to. We'll be watching what I consider comfort horror -- The Crow (1994), Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1985), the entire Phantasm series, The Ritual, and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)are a few of the titles on our list.

I've prematurely asked my toddler, who has no sense of time or seasons, what she wants to be for Halloween and how she feels about going trick-or-treating. She doesn't quite "get" Halloween yet, but I hope she eventually comes to love it the way I do. I'm unsure what movies I'd feel comfortable introducing to her and and at what age. We'll figure it out when and if the time comes. Right now, she's an Xmas girlie. If she never shares my enthusiasm for the spooky, that's okay. I have room in my life to enjoy the extra sparkle of lights on the tree, wrapping presents, the warming comfort of butter rum shortbread cookies, the punchy spice of gingerbread, and the chilly terror of Krampus (2015).

P.S. Now that I’ve finished this letter, I’m finding I have so much more to say about the intersection of motherhood and horror, so this is very likely the first of a few letters about it. Stay tuned.

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The Sophomore Slump : Some incomplete notes on gardening, surviving vs thriving, and the pressure to "do it all" all of the time

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I have longed to have my own garden for a very long time. I have many Pinterest boards dedicated to planning out container gardens, gardens for small spaces, indoor gardens, tiny back porch gardens. On the back porch of my townhouse, I tried to grow a strawberry plant (bought from the farmer's market), which eventually withered away and died. A coworker gave me little ornamental pepper and basil plants that I managed to keep alive for a season before they died. Someone once bought me an orchid that was supposed to be foolproof to keep alive -- it died. A friend gave me a clipping of a succulent that didn't make it very long.

Though I kept killing things (or rather, letting them die), I still dreamed of having my own garden.

My mother had the greenest thumb I've ever seen. She could make anything grow. She could bring a plant on the brink of death back to life. At least it felt that way to me. Growing up, there were cacti growing on the kitchen window sill (before everyone called them 'succulents') and tropical plants growing in the east-facing dining room and the west-facing living room. Spider plants, mother-in-law's tongue, aloe, bamboo, money plants, jade plants, a Norfolk pine that served as our Christmas tree for at least a decade and then some. I have memories of her watering each plant with her long-neck watering can, needing to refill it several times during each watering session.

Outside, her high desert garden flourished. She converted an old pig sty that had been built on our property long before we'd moved there into a garden. Pumpkins and squash growing in the stalls, long rows of snap peas (I can still hear the tiny snip and crunch from pinching each snap pea off its stem). I remember delighting in beets, freshly dug out of the ground, their deep purple and sweet earthiness. After awhile, my parents expanded the garden so my mother could grow rows and rows of corn.

On top of that, my mother grew dozens, if not hundreds, of irises all along the foundation of the house. The front yard had a verdant flower bed and the backyard had what I remember to be a small pollinator garden.

I'm not sure I ever went out with my mother to tend the garden. I do remember what feels like whole days where my brothers and I were left to our own devices inside the house while my mom worked in the garden. This is where I learned to make lunch for myself and my brothers -- hot dogs, ramen, cans of soup, sandwiches. I used to eat spoonfuls of sweet corn right from the can.

Knowing what I know now about having a kid, though, maybe my mom just wanted to do something by herself for once.

Last year, I started my first raised bed garden. For the entire year prior, I planned the supplies I needed and what I wanted to grow. I bought seeds and starts from the company I remember my parents buying their seeds from. After Mother's Day weekend, my husband helped me fill the bed with raised bed garden soil, and I put in my tomato, basil, chives, mint, and lemon verbena starts. I sowed zucchini, yellow squash, watermelon radish, peas, cucumber and swiss chard seeds.

Despite all this planning, I remain a "chaos gardener," which I thought was just a term I'd made up for myself. Turns out it's an entire Facebook community of people.

I underestimate the amount of space each plant will take up in my garden bed. I had no idea zucchini and yellow squash plants grew so large, so that first year, eight to ten squash plants grew, crowded together and bursting out of my garden bed. No matter what I did, the radishes never grew. The swiss chard seedlings never grew past the microgreen stage.

What a chaos garden looks like.

The two cherry tomato plants I had grew all through the summer, right up until the first frost. I had little weird shaped cucumbers that tasted, shockingly, like cucumbers. I had basil and chives and mint for days. I had a surplus of zucchini and yellow squash, enough to give away and enough to try out a plethora of interesting recipes beyond zucchini bread.

Summer squash pizza, recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Honestly so good. Worth all the squeezing.

That summer, we went through long stretches of heat advisories and no rain. Squash bugs came for my squash plants, but zucchini continued to grow prolifically, somehow. (Don't ask me, I have no idea.) I was diligent about watering the garden nearly every day. Every morning when I watered the garden, most of the time with my daughter on my hip or standing next to me holding onto my pant leg, I talked to the plants and my mother. I asked the swiss chard what they needed, I asked my mom why these radishes weren't growing ("I read that radishes are supposed to be easy to grow! What the hell is going on with these?"). I marveled at finding new zucchini every other day, and my kid loved pulling tomatoes off the plants, ripe or not, and biting into them. ("Juicy!")

Whenever I brought in a harvest of those little tomatoes, I thought of one of the meals I made for my mother in the last months of her life. She, too, was growing a few tomato plants like mine, in flower pots in the backyard. Even as her health began to fail, her green thumb persisted. Her tomato plants were heavy with yellow, red, and orange fruits. One afternoon, I made her a caprese-ish salad with her tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, olive oil, salt, and pepper. "This is good," she said. "Something different."

A version of “Mom’s caprese salad,” made last summer with the tomatoes from my first chaos garden.

This year, my garden looks much different. I'm calling this year The Sophomore Slump. My zucchini and yellow squash plants have produced nothing but limp blossoms. I planted strawberry crowns and they are sending out runners. I have a couple sage plants, grown from seed. I have Italian parsley and chives for days. I have small basil plants growing from seed -- by frost, they may be big enough for me to harvest enough for a batch of pesto, maybe. The marigolds are growing beautifully and starting to bloom now -- right on schedule. I have a couple dill plants in a flowerpot on our back step that are growing tall. The lettuce is, startlingly, growing enough for me to use for tacos.

The Sophomore Slump Garden.

The garden doesn't have the bounty that it did last year. Maybe I needed to use more plant food and compost. Maybe I need to water more often. Maybe it's simply the heat -- I've read in some gardening groups that others have had similar issues with their zucchini this season. Maybe I just need to talk to the plants more.

Swiss chard seedlings, in limbo.

I do admit that I've spent less time and attention on my garden this summer than last. I've made plans to do black-eyed susan starts to plant in the front yard and haven't done it. I made mental notes to chelsea chop the native goldenrods and asters that have popped up in my backyard, and forgotten to do it (they are now taller than me). I've made plans to clear out an area of creeping charlie and sow bee balm and blanketflower in its place. Have I done it? Nope. I haven't even been able to do my regular poison ivy patrols.

My kid is an actual toddler with very real wants and needs and expresses them clearly (sometimes with words, a lot of times with tears and collapsing on the floor with them (we joke sometimes that she's got Italian footballer blood in her (we can say that because she does))). The struggle to find a balance between doing toddler-centered activities and my own is real. Sometimes, the toddler stuff wins out. A lot of times it does.

(Sure, could I involve my kid in some of these garden chores that have languished on my to-do list? I could try! The only item on that garden list that she might be even remotely interested in right now is pulling weeds. She also really wants to help me hand pull poison ivy, which...of course, she does.)

I've been trying to slow down this summer, which means consciously not trying to do *everything* every day. It means spending more time playing with my kid and filling her connection cup and leaving the bread making for another day. It means allowing myself to make the same meals again and again so I can use that time and creative energy to write instead. Sometimes, it means allowing myself to play Stardew Valley for awhile on my Switch during my "me" time rather than be "productive."

In doing this, I've come to the realization that my plate was piled with too much. The expectations I have for myself as a mother, a writer, and just a human being trying to save her sanity are far too high. I see now that there isn't room on my plate for everything. There are weeks where cooking and baking projects take priority over writing, and that's okay. There are weeks where my writing takes precedence over a baking project or squeezing in more time to read a book. There are weeks where vegging out and playing Stardew or watching Sherlock or Vanderpump Rules are all I have the energy for. There are weeks where my kid and I will spend lots of time outside and there will be weeks where we don't. There are weeks where the laundry gets done and there are weeks where the pile of laundry will remain unfolded in the crib. There's a balance, and it changes all the time. There are things that will get done, and there are things that will not.

It's also meant that because I've made writing a priority this summer, the garden gets less of my attention. I try not to feel guilty, like things are just falling off my plate without rhyme or reason. I remind myself that I'm actually pausing, looking at what's on my plate, and deciding what I want to keep today and what I want to save for later. I'm also deciding that some of what's on my plate doesn't actually need to be there at all.

I think back to my mom coming inside, finally, after hours of work in the garden, her big sun hat tied around her chin, her long-sleeved shirts and gloves to protect her skin. I wonder about what was on my mom's plate then, what were her tradeoffs. Time spent inside doing house chores for time out in the garden? Putting work into the garden out of economic necessity so we could have food to eat later? Letting my brothers and I take care of ourselves so she could get some peace and quiet in the garden?

The thing about gardening and growing plants is that it's an investment -- of time, energy, economic and material resources, patience. It takes time to see what will become of all your work. There is a lot of time to course correct, and sometimes course correcting means waiting for the next growing season to apply a new technique or new knowledge. Sometimes course correcting can mean ripping out a bunch of plants and starting all over again.

There are ebbs and flows to all of it. This year, my mental health and my writing are my top priority, rather than the garden. Next year, maybe the garden will flourish again with two years of gardening experience under my belt. Maybe this is just the year of...slowing down and figuring everything out. Life has been a bit of chaos since having a kid. Maybe this is just the season to say, "Time out -- stop. Let's rearrange everything and figure this out."

This year's lone zucchini.

Maybe I shouldn't think of this year as my garden's The Sophomore Slump. Just because it isn't bursting at the seams doesn't mean it's any less successful. In fact, now that I think of it -- I haven't let a single plant die this summer. The radishes never went anywhere, but everything else I've planted this season has remained alive. I have dill, chives, parsley, and sage to snip fresh for meals, I have beautiful flowering black-eyed susans, buddleia, lavender, salvia, and marigolds in the garden and the flower beds. I have a cute picture of my kid standing next to the peony I planted the first autumn we moved into this house. Just yesterday, I looked at my squash plants and found one small zucchini growing strong.

I've come a long way for a girl who used to let every plant she touched die. When I wasn't looking, I became someone who keeps things alive. I'm glad I've stopped for a minute to meet her.

The most important thing I’ve kept alive.

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Nothing Lasts Forever: On Sleep, 3am Googling, and Trusting Your Gut

Before we get started…have you heard? Friday Bites has moved to Substack!
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I come to the keyboard today feeling like a fresh new human. Yes, I got 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night and I feel incredible. I feel coherent. My body isn't screaming at me to lie down. I feel like I could do a LOT of shit right now.

When you are a caregiver for a tiny human, sleep rules your life, whether you want it to or not. It becomes an obsession, unwittingly and unwillingly (for me, anyway). Timing naps and wake windows, wondering whether it's okay for your child to be able to sleep only while touching you, wondering what you're doing wrong when the baby wakes up immediately upon being set down in the bassinet. Crying in the kitchen at 4:30am while your coffee brews because you are so. fucking. tired. Fighting off murderous rage by repeating to yourself: "She's not GIVING me a hard time, she's HAVING a hard time" when your toddler wakes up in the middle of the night, tossing and turning and sitting up and asking for milk and then lying down again (repeat for two hours).

After a good stretch of sleeping through the night, my child began waking up at weird times in the night/early morning and nursing nearly nonstop until the sun rose. One morning she woke up at 4:30am, another at 2:30am. I spent the rest of the night, in a half-awake/half-asleep state as she nursed, fell asleep, woke up, cried for milk, nursed, fell asleep, cried for milk, etc. It's a special kind of torture to be allowed to fall only halfway asleep for hours at a time.

Now, I'm making it sound like this lasted for weeks. It happened only two nights -- Tuesday and Wednesday. It was enough to feel like I had been awake for a hundred years. Time slows down when you're sleep-deprived and you've been pushed out of bed at 7am by a toddler shouting, "Get UP, mama! Get UP!" I feel like I'm just trying to make it to nap time so I, too, can maybe close my eyes. I've started to get headaches when I haven't gotten enough sleep (22-year-old night-owl me would be extremely weirded out by this), and I've started trying to practice "good sleep hygiene" so that even when I've had a bad night, I don't collapse into a heap.

Wednesday night was the worst night. 1.5 hours (maybe) of uninterrupted sleep. 5 hours of being half-asleep. I woke up with a whisper of a migraine. As my toddler ran off to "read her books" and I changed into my daytime sweatpants, I repeated a couple things to myself.

1. Stay cool. Remember, she can't help it. She's a toddler. She's not giving me a hard time. She's having a hard time. She doesn't know what's going on either. She's also not sleeping well.

2. This will not last forever. She will sleep again, and so will I.

When I was an extremely sleep-deprived fresh new parent, I did a lot of internet searching for anything about infant sleep, and also, was it normal for my 3-week-old to be attached to my boobs for hours and hours on end? (Yes, it is, and it's called cluster feeding. No one told me about it, so thanks to the NewParents of Reddit!)

I couldn’t ask any of my friends about these things because none of my friends have babies, and I couldn’t ask my mom — the one person I wanted to ask the most — because she’s no longer on this earthly plane. It was an extremely lonely and isolating time. I sent desperate prayers into the universe for my mom to visit me in a dream (as if I slept deeply and long enough to dream in that era of life) so she could give me advice and tell me what she did with me. The one thing she did tell me when she was alive was that baby-me was a terrible sleeper and cried all the time, so I was certain she would have something useful or comforting to tell me.

Instead, I had to rely on myself. And the internet.

Lots of people claim to be experts on baby sleep, and many of the people who claim to be experts make a lot of money off making sleep-deprived parents feel terrible about "creating bad habits" with their babies. When you're desperate to do the "right thing" for your kid and when you feel like your arms are going to fall off from rocking your child to sleep, you just want someone to tell you what to do. And there are a lot of people who will tell you what to do, especially if you pay them money.

For me, there was a lot of advice that made me feel like I was fucking up my kid by doing certain things. Feeding her to sleep (even though it's biologically normal to do that -- literally, when you nurse, hormones are released that make baby and caregiver sleepy). Holding her while she slept. Co-sleeping/bedsharing safely. All of it was, according to 'experts,' laying the foundation for "bad habits" that would ensure my child would never be able to sleep on her own and that she would be sleeping in our bed until she left for college. I read things that told me not to make eye contact with my baby in the middle of the night because it was too stimulating and would keep her up all night. I made jokes with my husband about it ("Don't look her in the eye!"), but one night, after rocking her for what felt like hours and avoiding eye contact with her because it might be too stimulating and keep her awake (even though she was already awake!!), I thought, Wait, what the fuck? I shouldn't make eye contact with my baby? This tiny being who has been living inside my body and has no idea what the fuck is going on out here? I should treat her like a creepy stranger on the street? What???

So I looked down at my sweet girl's face and *gasp* made eye contact. I stroked her eyebrows, her chin, her cute little unibrow. I kissed her on the forehead and held her close. Her eyelids grew heavy almost instantly, and she fell asleep.

From then on, I knew that I had to trust my gut when it came to how to care for my kid. I'd never been a parent before, but I knew how to be a human and I knew how to care for another human being. Caring for another human being simply requires empathy and a recognition that the person you are caring for is another human -- no matter how small, how young, how old, how mobile, how healthy, how sick. They are a human, and they should be treated with respect and dignity.

Because babies can only communicate by crying (and sometimes mysterious hand gestures that are supposed to signal that they're hungry), we forget that they are humans. They have minds, they can and do process the world, what’s going on around them, and how people respond to them. They have mental health. They are biologically wired to connect to their caregivers so they can survive. They are wired to tell us that they need something by crying. Crying is, in fact, our very first form of communication. Crying is always a message, an ask for connection — whether you're a baby, a toddler, or a full-grown adult.

(Also, their little brains are still forming! Their little brains will be forming until they're 25 years old! When they're so young, all they know is the comfort of the womb! And now they're out in this cold, bright, weird world, and they just want something familiar and comforting -- their caregivers! They can't do things their brains aren't developed enough to do (like sleep through the night by themselves! or regulate their emotions! or “self-soothe.” Many adults can't even do these things and *their* brains ARE fully developed (yikes!)!).)

My kid is now 2 and a half years old, and we're here. Bedsharing, nursing to sleep, contact napping, following our guts. We have more good nights than bad, but when the nights are bad, they feel really terrible. The terrible nights feel like they go on forever, but the reality is: it all changes. The tough times pass. From birth to now, we have lived through so much change. I know that one day, she will want to sleep in her own bed, and I'll be so happy and so sad and so proud at the same time.

I try to remind myself of this when I am about to lose my shit. I am not always successful at not losing my shit. Yesterday, after the worst night, I did several things to survive the day:

  • drank a lot of water

  • spent time in the sunshine

  • ate a high protein breakfast (scrambled eggs with ricotta)

  • did some yoga for energy (always with Adriene)

  • did a meditation for inner peace (again, with Adriene!)

  • threw together some whole wheat raspberry scones in a normal amount of time and popped them in the oven before my kid got home from swim lessons

  • napped while my kid napped

  • breathed a LOT

I have to remind myself, though, that even though yesterday felt like a good day despite the exhaustion, I don't have it all figured out. I, actually, never will, because every day is different. And that's okay. It's okay to take the day as it comes. To take a few minutes to close my eyes, imagine my mother’s voice and what she might say to me. Listen to my body and heart and spirit so I can do what I can to take care of myself so I can take care of my kid. What worked yesterday may not work on the next hard day.

Everything changes, nothing lasts forever.

But I did have everything figured out yesterday, though, and I will take that win.

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The Truth About Making Food With A Toddler

When I first found out I was pregnant, I went hard into parenting research mode. I tried to find pregnancy and parenting websites and forums that didn't make me feel like I was joining a weird tradwife club or like I was going to damn my baby to a lifetime of developmental delays if I had coffee or even *clutches pearls* a glass of wine while pregnant. If I saw the word "hubby" written even one time anywhere, I immediately closed the window and moved on to something else.

Soon enough, the algorithm began to flood my social media feeds with parenting and pregnancy content. There are so many fucking opinions out there on what pregnant people should and should not be doing with their bodies, and there are even more opinions on what you should be doing once that infant exits the pregnant body. Lots of fearmongering and finger-wagging about screen time, sleep, routines of all stripes, tummy time, wake windows, feeding schedules, breastfeeding versus formula feeding, etc. etc. etc. I won't step both feet onto my soapbox here, but I'll say that patriarchy and capitalism have done a great job of making parents feel like they a-cannot trust themselves and their instincts when it comes to their own children, and b-are fucking up their infants/kids all of the time. In the midst of all this, I remember reading one article that implored parents to "let" their toddlers "help" them around the house. Sure, the article's author wrote, it might take longer, but the benefits of having your cutie pie help you plant your garden or bake a cake will win out in the long-run. Something about them feeling like part of a team, they'll be more likely to do their chores when they're older, something about them getting good grades when they get to school-age, etc. etc.

I remember looking out into my brand new backyard, imagining my thriving garden, and thinking, What kind of monster *wouldn't* let their toddler *help* them do stuff??? Why would you care about doing a thing slowly if the trade-off is getting to have your little cutie by your side dropping seeds into holes in the ground or watching them whisk up some wet ingredients in a bowl?

Taken shortly before the wet ingredients got sloshed all over the counter.

Fast forward two years to me and my cutie pie in our kitchen on any weekend morning. Let's say we're making waffles, something fairly simple. She's standing in her little Montessori "Discovery Tower" or whatever they're calling it these days, and she's got her cutie pie-sized whisk, and she whisking the shit out of the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. Everything is covered in a fine layer of white stuff. And by everything, I mean *everything* -- the table, her stool, the splash mat underneath her stool, the floor, her feet, her pajamas, her face.

While she's doing this, I'm staring into the middle distance, trying to appear present but also thinking: I may have to replace these dry ingredients with an approximation of what she's flung all over the place (do we think it's a quarter cup of stuff? It might be. Would it destroy the recipe if I was wrong? There's only one way to find out, I guess.)

Okay, so technically this is a pic of the chaos of making dinner, but same rules apply.

This scene would extremely cute if it had not taken us 35 minutes to simply put all the dry ingredients into a bowl. We haven't even measured our wet ingredients yet. We've been up since 8 am, it is now 9:30am, and Mama (that's me) is very hungry.

On a good day (by "good day," I mean my cutie pie has allowed me to sleep enough to not feel sleep-deprived (which could be anywhere from 3 hours to 6 hours, uninterrupted), my patience has not been tested to its breaking point yet, and I'm feeling pretty que sera sera about my kid making a gigantic mess in the kitchen), I can feel whimsical. I can enjoy the fun my sweet girl is having with the whisk and trying out all the different ways she can fling flour across the room. I can take a deep breath, sip my coffee, and let go and let god. We'll clean this all up later, it'll be just fine.

On a not-so-great day (and by "not-so-great day," I mean my cutie pie has been asking for "mommy milk" all night, which means I'm sleep deprived and touched out, my patience ran out at 3am, and there is not enough coffee in the world to make me feel more awake or alive), I sip my coffee and tell her repeatedly: keep the flour in the bowl please, it's mommy's turn to mix now, okay, we'll count to five and then it'll be mommy's turn, wow, you're doing so great, sweetheart, okay, it's mommy's turn, keep it in the bowl please. Repeat all morning.

Either way, our waffles will be done by 10:30am or even 11am. And that's assuming she even wants to help me cook. There are mornings when she doesn't want anything to do with cooking, and she doesn't want me to have anything to do with it either. Instead, she shouts about wanting to play puzzles (with me), freeze tag (with me) or with her doctor bag (with me). Whatever it is she wants to do, it must. be. with. me.

Then, there are other mornings when she's perfectly content to sit in her room, "reading" her books by herself for what feels like a weirdly long amount of time. These are the mornings when I can whip up a Dutch baby or waffles in no time (which is to say, a regular amount of time), and then I can sit and read my own book with my own coffee while it cooks.

Posted up on a stool and read through 3/4 of this collection while making breakfast and my kid “read” through 25 Pete the Cat books.

It seems like cooking or baking with a toddler is exceedingly cute and also exceedingly a pain in the ass. It is both at the same time, no matter what my mood. No matter how messy the kitchen gets or how exasperated I become, it's always worth it to me at the end. Yes, it gives my kid a sense of accomplishment that she helped make breakfast. Yes, my kid's face lights up when she realizes that Bobby Flay/Molly Yeh/The Pioneer Woman/Daniel Tiger is mixing stuff in a bowl exactly the way she does. Yes, my kid now goes on and on about how, when we cook/bake together, we're a team. That is all 1000% percent worth it to me.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is: I've stopped paying attention to Instagram mom influencer accounts and their immaculate kitchens and their children who are doing everything perfectly and also not getting any flour on their clothes or anywhere else and everyone appears to be having the best time and making SO many memories. They’re making the journey look easy, when in reality, the journey is very messy and not always that fun. (In fact, it’s very rarely fun.)

What I am actually, really, trying to say is: I've learned that the key to making food with a toddler is to know my limits and adjust my expectations accordingly. In fact, it helps immensely to have zero expectations. If I can just banish the thought from my mind that my toddler is here to actually help me work toward the end goal (a meal), then I'll be okay when all she does is make a massive mess for me to clean up later. Also, I've learned it's okay if there are some days I'd rather just make the food on my own rather than have my kid "help" me. That's okay, too. Every household chore does not have to be a learning opportunity.

When I think about making food with and/or for my toddler, what's most important to me instead is that she have memories of Dutch Baby Saturdays, or the smell of something good and tasty always cooking or baking. She'll eventually learn how to dump a half teaspoon of salt into a bowl without flinging it three feet away from its target. She's only 2.5 years old -- we have plenty of time.

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Welcome to Friday Bites! (A Reorientation)

Yes, it’s true — Friday Bites has moved to Substack! As always, I’m feeling it out as I go. If you’re a regular reader, you might want to hop over to Substack and subscribe to Friday Bites there so you can get future Friday Bite adventures in your inbox. For now, all content is free and I’m planning on posting both there and here, so you can get your fix either way. Thank you for coming on this journey with me, and here’s to the next phase of Friday Bites!

In 2016, I began blogging about my adventures in cooking and baking. I wasn’t good at either of them, but I was determined to practice, to try making all kinds of dishes — anything from a basic chicken soup to chai-spiced cinnamon rolls to my mom’s empanadas. I wanted to chronicle the journey that food-making was taking me on. It felt significant. 

Fast forward to 2024. We’re surviving through a pandemic, uprisings against state violence, insurrections, corrupt presidencies. People who can get pregnant are losing our right to privacy and our access to healthcare. We’re surviving astronomical prices at the grocery store. We’re protesting against our tax dollars being used for genocide. It turns out plastic can't actually be recycled, and climate change is very, very real. Amidst all this, I’m surviving losing my mother to lung cancer. I’m surviving becoming a mother without my mother. I’m surviving (barely) becoming an at-home mom to my 2-year-old-daughter. 

Have you ever tried to feed a toddler? Mine asks for “a pinch of sprinkles” for breakfast most days, and tries to pivot to “a pinch of chocolate chips” if she can’t have the former. Food making has become something I do on autopilot these days. I’m frequently on the hunt for dishes that include at least one nutritious food I’m certain my child will eat, don’t include a ton of ingredients or a lot of prep, and take less than 60 minutes to make. I don’t take the time to enjoy the aromas and the sounds of cooking dinner anymore. My food journey seems to wandered off into the weeds, as has my writing. 

The process of becoming a mother is called matrescence. It’s a word I’d never heard of until I got pregnant. Something we don’t talk about often enough is this process, and how painful and uncomfortable and devastating and confusing and depressing it is. We also don’t talk about how LONG this process is. Did you know that a person’s brain is actually physically altered by the mere act of becoming a parent? You quite literally become a different person. Do you know what else physically alters the brain? Grief. I've been trying to imagine all the changing my brain has done between losing my mother, growing a human inside me, giving birth, and becoming a mother. Even though I had my daughter two and a half years ago, it still feels like I don't know who I am anymore some days.

On the days I look into my closet and wonder who wore these clothes and when and where she wore them, and then wonder if she will ever come back, I find myself returning to my first loves, the things that bring me joy, connection, a sense of rootedness: writing, cooking, baking, music, books.

So here I am -- here we are -- returning to the basics. This will be a newsletter about food, mostly. But most of the time, I can't write about food without writing about my mom or my kid. Which means I'll also be writing about grief, and motherhood, and daughterhood. And sometimes I’ll be really excited about the books I’m reading, the shows I’m watching, the music I’m listening to, so I’ll be writing about those things too.

I guess I need some kind of succinct elevator pitch for this thing, so let's try: a newsletter about food, pop culture, grief, moms, and daughters. Which sounds heavy, but I promise there will be lightness. And there will be playlists that you can dance to while you cook your own food in your own kitchens. I will aim to publish this newsletter every two weeks, on Fridays. You don't need to be a mom or have kids or be a daughter to enjoy this newsletter. You just need to be a human, and maybe you need to like food and have a good sense of humor.

(Also, this is not going to be a recipe type of newsletter. However, I will always tell you where I got the recipe for whatever I'm cooking. But if it's a recipe that's been passed down to me by my mom or something, then you're just shit out of luck (happy Googling).)

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. I’m excited to see where this new iteration of Friday Bites takes us.

Some Jams to Start Your Summer Off with a Fancy Leg Kick Dance Move

Summer is here and life has been full of good stuff. Setting up the garden, walks, water tables, grilling, wearing shorts, brunches, sunshine, cold beers on the porch, fireflies, little O pulling her wagon around and filling it with sticks and rocks. The list goes on.

One of my favorite things about summer is the music. I’ve made playlists for almost every summer for a very long time. I love putting on an old summer playlist —it brings back beautiful, sensory moments of that year’s summer. It doesn’t matter if it was an awful summer or a great one — the memories of driving down a dirt road, or watching a beach sunset, or falling asleep on a cross-country plane ride stick with me the most.

M and I are collaborating on this summer’s playlist. My contributions so far are only two songs but the summer is young.

Here are a couple of my favorites this year (so far) and a few from years past.

Blame Brett — The Beaches

Two years before the pandemic hit, M scored tickets to see Pearl Jam. In the pit. In Seattle. At T-Mobile Park where the Mariners play (it was called Safeco Park at the time). We decided to go at the last minute. We bought our plane tickets and booked our hotel the night before our departure day, I somehow managed to find someone to cover my shifts at the bakery, and off we went to Seattle for a 36-hour visit. Our hotel had Ricky Gervais pillows (as in, the pillows were screen printed with his image) and a hipster happy hour. We had fresh sushi and tingly soup, we stood in line to get special PJ Seattle show merch (IYKYK), and we got to T-Mobile Park early so we could get good spots in the pit, which means we spent about 2 hours standing/sitting in one general area.

Pearl Jam fans are maybe the nicest fans on the planet (aside from Toad the Wet Sprocket fans), so we ended up getting to know Ray and Lisa. They had kids who were teenagers, and you could tell that they were like, legitimately, a cool mom and dad. I remember two things specifically about them — Lisa was a pro at simultaneously saving spots in the pit and moving all of us further toward the stage. Lisa also recommended The Beaches to us.

M and I talk about Ray and Lisa every now and then — how cool they were, how fun that trip was, how epic that show was (we almost touched Eddie Vedder). The Beaches are awesome, and I still think of Ray and Lisa and that entire whirlwind trip when I listen to them.

Dance (Our Own Party) - The Busker

We were introduced to The Busker, Malta’s version of Chromeo, while watching the Eurovision semi-finals on Mother’s Day while M cooked up a delish eggplant parmesan for dinner. We’re here for the saxophone and the writing on the hands, and the thing about sweaters, and the countless opportunities to work a well-timed kick into your dance. Personally, I think it’s bullshit that they didn’t make it to the finals, and that’s what I have to say about that.

Want You Back - Haim

I recently introduced O to Haim (anything to stop her from asking for Happy by Pharrell for the 400th time in a day), and she was transfixed by this video. I don’t blame her. This song is the absolute best and so is the video. Revive it for your own summer playlist. You’re welcome.

Little Bit More - Jidenna

One summer night out with my dear friend Breon, we split a watermelon salad appetizer that we still talk about to this day. It was dainty pieces of watermelon topped with feta cheese and mint and maybe a couple other things that all came together in a flavor symphony of salty and sweet and juicy and savory. My mouth is watering thinking about it.

Oh, and then we saw Jidenna that night. He was pretty great, too.

Everything Is Embarrassing - Sky Ferreira

There used to be this awesome website called Songza that had incredible playlists. Their 90s Club Bangers mix was what I put on to get shit done at work (I can’t count how many times my boss caught me whisper-rapping, and to her credit, she was unflappable and never seemed surprised ). Their New Goth playlist is unmatched in my house to this day. It was on one of these playlists that I came across Sky Ferreira and this jam that I loved so much, I downloaded it (!!!) and burned it to a CD (!!!!!!!) to play in our beloved and ancient little Toyota Camry on our various summer excursions around town.

Volcanic Love - The Aces

I don’t have a ton to say about this song except that I played it a million times the summer I found it, and love that the video is a spoof of Heathers.

Bonus: Put the Hurt On Me - Midland

Now, I know you’re saying, “Excuse me, you’ve put a country song on this list, I think you’ve made a mistake.” Hear me out. Do you need a karaoke song? This would probably be a great one (or maybe not). Do you need a song to play to wind your night down with a slow dance with your boo? This could be it. I just…love this song and I like this band a lot. They’re goofy and retro, and there’s just a lot to love once you start listening. (After you give this song a chance, check out Drinkin’ Problem and Mr. Lonely. If you want. If you’re curious. *shrugs* Do whatever you want, I don’t care.)

I’ll stop here. If you’re inspired, I’d love to know your favorite summer jam(s). I’ll be back next week, and I might talk about something called a cherry yum-yum. Or I might talk about something else. We’ll see!

Mother’s Day, Prince Harry, and Making Siopao My Mom’s Way

I didn’t intend to miss Friday Bites last week. I tried writing it, and it ended up being a jumble of words. A really tedious play by play of M obtaining pork belly and me pressure cooking it into a beautiful Korean soy-glazed pork belly dish, and then deciding to make it into a filling for siopao. (I’ll still talk about the siopao.) My brain was fried. Raising a toddler can do that.

The other thing was that it was coming up on Mother’s Day, and that’s been an excruciating day for me since my mom died.

I just finished Prince Harry’s biography the other day (is it still called an autobiography if it’s ghostwritten? Or is it categorized as a memoir?). My mom was a Princess Diana fan, so I was too. I remember where I was when I found out about her horrific car accident. It feels like a formative moment for me, though I couldn’t tell you why. My mom was also a Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fan, although now that I think back on our conversations, maybe she was just a Meghan Markle fan.

(We’re a house divided here — to say it nicely, M is actively uninterested in British royalty. I am not obsessed but I like the gossip and I do love Prince Harry and Meghan’s love story from beginning to present.)

I expected a lot of scandalous moments and wild stories from Prince Harry’s early life. Sure, there’s the bit about his frostbitten penis and the sentence about losing his virginity behind a pub. There are the stories behind his decision to go to a party dressed as a Nazi, and the story behind his Vegas butt-nakedry. On the whole though, these stories, their context, and much of Prince Harry’s life is…mundane. It’s not that interesting. These things could have happened to anybody, really, but he happens to be a prince and thus, more visible than a lot of people.

What is interesting to me is how so much of his life and how he lives it is, consciously and unconsciously, built around the mother-shaped hole in his life and his heart. And his grief, which he was unable to process or express from the very beginning — can we even imagine being unable and/or not allowed to even cry when a loved one passes away? And what that repression does to a body, mind and spirit, no matter who you are?

The ways we keep my mother’s memory alive in my house are many. We keep her picture in a prominent place in our living room. We say hello to her every day. Sometimes I bring her food. O sometimes brings her a rock that she’s found. I tell stories to O every day about what her Lola Solly liked to eat or do or say. I do this so O knows my mom, and I do it so I can feel like my mom is close to me.

Whenever I make siopao, I feel my mom close. I feel her when I make the dough using her recipe, I feel her when I make the decision to make it her way (and when I don’t), and I feel her when I roll out each ball of dough, load it with filling and try to seal it up the way she did. I have not been successful at making them look as pretty and cute as she did, even though I’ve taken videos of her rolling, filling, shaping, forming, sealing. I watch her hands and it’s like she’s performing a magic trick before my eyes.

Mom’s siopao, pre-steamed.

Throughout Prince Harry’s book, particularly the third section, I found myself eager to talk about it with someone who was also interested in his story. That someone I was eager to talk about it with, I realized, was my mom.

My mom didn’t read often (except The Bible) but I think she would’ve been excited to read the third section of Prince Harry’s book with me. I think she would’ve been furious on his and Meghan’s behalf. I can see her shake her head, and I can hear her fume about Prince Harry’s father and brother. I can hear her say, “Why don’t they do anything? Why don’t they help them?”

Every time I make siopao, I use my mom’s ingredient amounts but I try different techniques and processes that I find in various cookbooks. This time around, I decided to do it all my mom’s way. I halved her recipe (her original recipe makes enough dough for…a LOT of siopao) and decided to do one long rise. Other recipes I’ve found call for three rises, but I mean…who has the time? My mom sure didn’t, and I don’t either, so I followed her lead instead: one long rise, cut the dough into smaller pieces, let them rise while I fill and shape them (I call that the half rise). I let the shaped siopao rest in the steamer baskets while I fill and shape the remaining dough — I consider that as like, maybe a quarter rise? It’s what my mom did, and her siopao were flawless in flavor and design, so who am I to mess with her recipe?

Mom’s siopao, ready to eat.

(The siopao tasted great with the pressure cooked soy-glazed pork belly, btw. They didn’t look so cute but they were delicious. My mom would probably have laughed at how much these little buns popped open, and then she would have said, “Keep practicing.”)

I ended up having a beautiful Mother’s Day. It’s become a bit more emotionally complicated, but somehow more bearable, since becoming a mother myself. M and I stayed up late on Saturday night reminiscing about my mom in whispers over O’s sweet sleeping face. I made a lemon blueberry Dutch baby for breakfast, M made a delightful eggplant parmesan for dinner. We danced around to Eurovision performances, and I took a leisurely shower (they’re hard to come by these days). We said happy Mother’s Day to my mom. O said my mom’s name, which made my heart swell with happiness and heartache simultaneously.

I don’t quite know how to end this thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is that grieving for a beloved mother never goes away, whether you’re a normie or a royal. Every person’s journey with grief is different, truly. I think we all may just be muddling our way through it, trying different things until we figure out what feels like healing. Or maybe we never find out what works. Maybe there is no one thing that works. Maybe we just figure out what works for this particular moment of grief.

Or this particular batch of siopao.

My siopao, looking nothing like my mom’s.

My Top 5 Bakes of the Past 18 Months

Of course, as soon as I relaunched Friday Bites, I got sick. Again. So yes, this is a Friday Bites, Monday Edition.

Some context: in my household of three, we’ve been passing this absolutely miserable upper respiratory cold thing back and forth to each other for the past month or so. We don’t know who patient zero is, we don’t know where it came from, but it’s been laying M and I out every other week (we’ve been alternating weeks, at least, so the household is half-functional most of the time). The baby gets a runny nose that we wipe down with Boogie Wipes but she’s otherwise fine, thank god. When M and I get it? Stuffy noses that are also runny. Dry sinuses that are also snotty? Being very cold all the time no matter what (I think that one’s just me). Fatigue. A kind of scratchy throat that goes away after the first day.  We’ve gone through at least three boxes of Kleenex in two weeks. When I caught it again this past week, I had the runniest nose and the leakiest eyes. It was pure misery, especially when you add a breastfeeding, contact-napping baby to the mix.

Anyway, I finally feel like a human again and not a leaking skin sack of organs and bones, which is nice. I obviously did not get to bake anything this week, so instead I’m here with my top 5 favorite bakes of the past 18 months.

Why 18 months? Because as of May 5, my kid is 18 months old, which means I have 18 months of bakes with her strapped into the baby carrier on my chest or sitting in the knock-off Tush Baby on my hip. Some of you may also know that getting anything done in the kitchen with an infant/baby/toddler within a 5-foot-radius is a difficult thing to do sometimes (and sometimes it is impossible). Every bake I’m able to pull off these days feels like a huge accomplishment.

So I present to you my top 5 bakes since having a kid.

#5 A First Birthday Cake

I’ll start by saying I’m not a visual artist. I cannot draw for shit (we’ve recently discovered in my house that when I draw hearts, they actually look more like mittens). My presentation of baked goods and cooked food is better because I don’t have to make them look like anything but tasty and themselves.

But when O’s first birthday appeared on the horizon, it felt like the only way she would know it was a special day was if her cake was super awesome (plus there would need to be balloons).

So I made her a cake that looked like one of her favorite animals: a cat. Did I sweat the baking of the cakes? No. When it came time to assemble the cakes, was I nervous? No, I was excited! Piping the fur? Very fun and I felt like I was on GBBO. When I got out my marzipan and food coloring to start making the face? Sweaty palms, racing heart. What if this thing didn’t look like a cat? Would it scare the daylights out of my kid? Would she look at me blankly and be like, “Umm…what’s that???”

Luckily, it looked like a cat, and my kid was tickled.

#4 Wedding Cake Cupcakes

Since we got married, it’s been an annual wedding anniversary tradition of mine to recreate our Milk Bar wedding cake: chocolate chip cake with a passionfruit soak and a passon fruit curd, coffee buttercream and chocolate crumb.

In 2022, I decided to do a remix of our cake and make it into cupcakes instead. Chocolate chip vanilla cupcakes with a passionfruit curd filling, and coffee buttercream. Instead of a chocolate crumble, I went for sprinkles because who doesn’t like sprinkles?

Rows of chocolate chip cupcakes with a tan-colored coffee frosting sit on a cooling rack. They are covered in multi-colored sprinkles.

#3 Buttered Rum Cookies

I baked some stuff over the holidays. I made a double crusted chicken pot pie, I made some baby-led weaning cookies that were basically cardboard (O took one bite of one cookie, put it down and never looked at it again — she didn’t even bother throwing it on the floor, that’s how much these cookies stunk), and I made these buttered rum shortbread cookies that were so delicious that we (M and I, yes, just the two of us) ate them ALL in a matter of days.

#2 Matcha and Black Sesame Swirl Milk Bread

Sometime in the past few months, I’ve decided to make our bread rather than buying it. The pros: I get to practice making bread, which I have not been good at, and we get to spend less money on store-bought stuff that I could make at home for much cheaper (inflation is a real asshole). I’ve made all kinds of bread, but this one — the matcha and black sesame swirl milk bread — was pillowy perfection. Not only did it taste so different and amazing, but it was so satisfying to make at every step of the process. It was the first time in a very long time where I took pictures at multiple stages in the process.

And not only that, O loved it and asked for more, even when it wasn’t mealtime.

#1 Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Cookies

This is the very first thing I baked with O. It wasn’t intentional — this was actually the first thing I wanted to bake postpartum, and M had taken over baby duty so I could make these. About halfway through the process, O got real fussy and the only thing that chilled her out was sitting in her bouncer next to me while I rushed to finish these cookies and pop them in the oven. Because I hadn’t figured out how to babywear yet (and every time I tried, O screamed like she was being torn limb from limb), I had to keep pausing to show her what I was doing and let her touch the cookie dough, etc.

The peanut butter filling ended up oozing out of the cookies, but I kind of liked it that way in the end. They were extremely rich, tasty, and an indulgent snack for me whenever I got nap trapped (which was often in those days). The process of making them is also now a very fond memory for me.

Runners up: Lemon blueberry scones and Stuffed cinnamon streusel muffins

I would be remiss if I left these bakes out. They’re not anything special but they need to be included here because they were baked at ungodly hours of the morning, when the baby woke up and started shrieking because staying in her bassinet was booorrrring. The only thing that stopped me crying hysterically from pure exhaustion was firing up the French press, putting the baby in the baby wrap and baking.

So there you have it — my top 5 bakes of the past 18 months. It’s been a good run, and I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do with a baby attached to my body in some way, shape or form. Now that she’s got a little kitchen helper stool, it’s a whole new world, and I’m betting I’ll have a whole new top 5 bakes list in another 18 months.

Recipes sourced and adapted from:
First Birthday Cake from Coco Cake Land by Lyndsay Sung
Wedding Cake Cupcakes from Momofuku Milk Bar and All About Cake by Christina Tosi
Buttered Rum Cookies from Sister Pie by Lisa Ludwinski
Matcha and Black Sesame Marbled Milk Bread from Mooncakes and Milk Bread by Kristina Cho
Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Cookies from Cook’s Country
Lemon Blueberry Scones from King Arthur Baking
Stuffed Cinnamon Streusel Muffins from King Arthur Baking

How We Live Now: On Not Being Emotionally Ready to Bake, Cook, Read, Write, Listen to Music or Binge-Watch Anything In Self-Isolation

I…don’t even know what to say or where to begin. The only thing I know is that I’m here, with my laptop, and finally emotionally ready to write. Kind of.

I’ll start here. I haven’t been able to make it to Friday Bites for the past few weeks. Not only because of the coronavirus, but because my mom was in the hospital one week and I was sleeping in a vinyl recliner at her bedside, getting canker sores in my mouth from stress. And then the week after, I was busy trying to catch up on rest and also making panna cotta for my mom’s birthday because that was a better dessert for her chemo mouth sores than cake. And then I was flying back to Indiana through eerily half-empty airports while washing my hands at every opportunity, not touching my face, wiping everything in my general vicinity down with antibacterial wipes, and not touching anything I hadn’t already wiped down.

It’s been two weeks since I returned to Indiana, and I’ve only left the house five times. Twice in the past couple days to go for a walk in the sunshine (it’s been cloudy, gloomy, and stormy for days at a time), and three times for grocery runs. Every time we leave the house, M and I are vigilant about washing our hands, not touching our faces, staying 6 feet away from everyone we see, and wiping high-touch areas and everything else down with disinfectant. We’re doing our best to eat well and stay hydrated. I video call my mom every day. I try to check in with my friends to make sure everyone is healthy and okay.

You would think that with all this home time I’ve had, I would be cooking and baking up a storm. That hasn’t been the case. I’ve cooked plenty and I’ve baked a cake, but it hasn’t been an adventure and I haven’t really taken photos of anything. Surprisingly, I’m not interested in the fact that everyone else who’s self-isolating is suddenly learning to cook, and they’re learning the value of dried and canned beans. In fact, I’m annoyed that everyone is suddenly a baker, and the flour and the sugar and the butter is all gone.

It’s actually a thing that should make me happy, but instead, I’m irritated.

I cannot recall from memory what I’ve cooked in the past two weeks. When I look through my camera roll, I remember that the first dish I made during self-isolation was shepherd’s pie.

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The second was a black-eyed pea stew (sorry, I don’t have a link for a recipe because I made this one out of my own brain and the notes I took on my mom’s recipe).

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The next food photo in my camera roll is chopped butter and pieces of baking chocolate in a bowl, ready to go on top of a saucepan of boiling water for a double boiler situation.

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That was for a Lisbon Chocolate Cake. It’s a recipe from the cooking section of the New York Times, and I made it because all I knew I wanted was a rich chocolate bomb of flavor. Just chocolate on chocolate on chocolate. It’s like a brownie cake with a layer of chocolate mousse on top with cocoa powder sprinkled on top. It turned out delicious, even though I knocked all the air out of the cake itself.

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One night, I fried up some lumpia that my mom and I had made and stashed in my freezer a few months ago. To go with it, I microwaved some frozen veggies and mac and cheese. It was a meal that made no sense, but it also was one of the most comforting things I’ve eaten recently. There was one night where we had sausage and rice and brussels sprouts.

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Last night, I made creamy braised white beans with garbanzo beans, great northern beans, garlic, milk, radishes, and kale with toast.

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Which brings us to today. I have a vague idea of what I want to make for dinner. I keep forgetting what my idea is, and then I remember it again.

So here’s the thing. We’re grieving and we’re anxious. I don’t just mean me. I mean all of us who are in self-isolation. We all thought we were going to be incredibly productive with our home time. Or some of us are introverts and/or some of us work from home already, and we thought things were going to proceed as normal because being inside all day is already our lives.

It turns out that needing to stay home and distance from people because of a global pandemic is vastly different from choosing to do these things because it’s just want we want to do. For the first week of isolation, I kept forgetting why I was staying inside and then I kept remembering why I was staying inside. It felt like a lightning bolt kept hitting me. Over and over and over and over again. That sensation of everything feeling normal and then suddenly remembering that everything is not normal at all and there’s potential danger everywhere is jarring.

Then the anxiety of knowing that the world is different, and it’s constantly changing, and there’s no end in sight to this chaos. And whenever it finally does end, we don’t know what the world will be like. There’s no way to know.

And then the fear and worry — what if M gets it? What if my mom gets it? What if my dad gets it? What if my brothers get it? What if I get it? When will I get to see my family in person again? What if I have it and have been spreading it to others when I go to the grocery store? What if what if what if. I don’t let myself dwell too long in the What-If space because it’s a recipe for a panic attack (one of which I’ve already had in this time period).

And then the rage — this administration and some of these politicians are truly heinous, and I have to believe in hell and that they will rot there because otherwise, I will drown in my own anger. And all the people who are panicking and treating grocery store workers terribly and hoarding toilet paper (who knows why) and food. And the people who don’t care that they may be spreading the virus to vulnerable people. The people who think there are no consequences for them.

And the despair and helplessness — all the people who are losing their jobs, the small local businesses and restaurants that I love shutting down, all the people who cannot pay their rent but their landlords are demanding full on-time payment, student loan service providers and credit card companies who are carrying on as if the world is exactly the same.

It’s a lot. So much. On top of all the personal crises and emergencies we all may be experiencing without all of this chaos.

So we’re grieving and we’re anxious, and we can’t do anything but flit around the house, and not focus on anything. Even the things we love. I want to read, but I can’t focus on anything. I don’t know what music will soothe me. I don’t know what I want to cook. I don’t know what to bake. I don’t know what to watch on tv. I don’t know what to do.

My therapist reminds me: I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing: staying home, washing my hands, not touching my face, staying away from people. That’s the best possible thing I could be doing right now. There will be plenty of time for “helping” later.

As for the rest: focus on the things I do want, the things that soothe me and comfort me, rather than on the things that irritate me. If I don’t know what I want to cook: open a cookbook, randomly choose a recipe, and cook it. If I don’t know what to watch: just choose something; if I don’t like it, I can stop it and choose something else.

The point is to just make a decision and try something. These decisions have the lowest possible stakes; if I don’t like it, I can always choose something else.

The second week of isolation has gone by faster and also slower. Individual ten-minute increments of time feel an hour long; a week feels like it’s only been three days. I’ve decided to limit my time on social media because even though it’s important to be connected to the world and know that we’re not alone, it feels like a giant room where everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs in anger and panic, and it’s exhausting.

This has all actually been a preamble to what I really wanted to write about: all the things that have brought me comfort and joy this week. It’s my favorite: a top 5 list, in no particular order and with probably more than 5 items on it.

Life of the Party, by Olivia Gatwood

This week, I was finally able to read a book cover to cover, and I loved it. That book was Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood. It’s a collection of poetry inspired by true crime, which is the last thing I expected to bring me joy, but it did. I highly recommend it for those who love poems, for those who love true crime, for those who are, have been, or love girls.

The Great British Baking Show

When I’m in the shit, I rewatch episodes of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix. I know most of the contestants’ names from the Mel and Sue and Mary Berry seasons, and I remember exactly who the final three were for each season. I have favorite bakes and favorite contestants and favorite episodes. It’s calming and nerdy and fun and I am forever learning something new every time I watch.

All Elite Wrestling

The past two episodes of All Elite Wrestling on TNT, sans audience, have been awkward and brilliant and the most entertaining avant-garde black box theater. Because I didn’t love wrestling growing up, I didn’t know I could love any wrestler or wrestling show this much. But I do.

Dispatches From Elsewhere

Dispatches from Elsewhere is created by Jason Segal. I fell in love with him as Nick Andopolis on Freak and Geeks, but you probably know him better as a stoner in a Judd Apatow movie or from How I Met Your Mother. Dispatches is based on an actual documentary, and it stars Jason Segal, Sally Field, Andre 3000 and Eve Lindley. I won’t say more about it because watching it is like unwrapping a mystery present, but it’s refreshing and funny and profound and heartbreaking and so, so good. The last time I checked, you could stream the first 4 episodes on the AMC website.

The Detectorists

After years of nudging from our good friends, we’ve finally started watching The Detectorists on Amazon Prime. It stars Mackenzie Crook (who was in the British version of The Office as the original Dwight) and Toby Jones (I know and love him from Berberian Sound Studio, but he’s in lots of things that you’ll know better than that (brilliant) obscure art horror film) as two men who are avid metal detectorists. It’s quiet, and it’s funny, and it’s nerdy, and I love it so far.

The Highwomen

The Highwomen are what you call a country supergroup, comprised of Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile, and Natalie Hemby. They released their album pretty recently, and I’ve loved it from the moment I listened to it. It’s just so good. If you listen to it, you’ll understand why it’s brought me comfort these past two weeks.

There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it there for now. I want to leave on a love note. I’m already planning my bakes for the next week, and I’m kind of excited for them. I might even write about them, but I can’t promise anything.

I hope that each of you are washing your hands (and counting to 20 when you do it), not touching your face, staying home, and holding close to every thing and person that brings you comfort and joy. We really are all in this together, and even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, we are going to make it out the other side.

xoxo

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To People Who Complain About Having To Read a Bunch Before They Get To Food Blogger Recipes

These days, there aren’t too many things that whip me into an immediate, spiraling frenzy. I feel so inundated every day with horrifying headlines and Am I The Asshole reddit posts that the biggest reaction something might get from me is an eye roll and a head shake. There are very few things in this world anymore that really surprise or devastate me, and not much makes me instantaneously viscerally angry.

But there is one topic that grinds my gears these days: the sentiment I see every few months or so, where people complain about the “endless” paragraphs that they have to scroll through to get to a recipe on a food blog.

I have SO many thoughts and feelings about this, but the gist is: if your Google-searching ass is too inconvenienced by skimming through a wordy prologue, or you can’t be bothered to just scroll through it to get to the (free) recipe, then find your recipe elsewhere. There are plenty of websites that will give you just a recipe, so take your search there. Try Epicurious or Food 52 or All Recipes, to name a few.

So many food bloggers put time and work into every single blog post and recipe, and many of them give that content out for free. Writing is work; developing, adapting and writing recipes is work. Giving that work away for free is a gift to the world, and if you want to be a dick about it, you don’t deserve the content.

Last week, I tackled my first test version of a pie that I’ve been planning to make for quite awhile. It all started with Joy the Baker’s recipe for a no-bake Dark and Stormy Cream pie. For those who don’t know, a Dark and Stormy is an alcoholic beverage that is made of rum, ginger beer and lime juice. It’s one of my favorite drinks, and to have that in pie form? An obvious no-brainer.

So I made it to take over to a friend’s house for a dinner party.

Joy’s recipe calls for a ready-made pecan crust and relies on gelatin, pasteurized egg yolks, chilling, and time to hold everything together. The pecan crust she called for wasn’t available in my area, so I made my own crust out of home-baked gingersnaps. I followed the rest of the recipe pretty exactly. By the time I realized I should have chosen to make a baked good that I had extensive experience with, I was knee-deep in the process, so I crossed my fingers and prayed that it would all set in the fridge and no one would get food poisoning.

When I took the pie out of the fridge 6 hours later to put the whipped cream and candied pecans on top, I sensed something was terribly wrong. The filling was jiggly, but it seemed to be firm on top. When I watched the whipped cream sink into the filling a little bit on contact, I started to panic. Since the whipped cream didn’t sink all the way into the filling, I held out hope that everything would be okay.

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Long story short, this pie was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made, but turned out to be 100% soup. It was delicious and boozy and my homemade gingersnap crust with a thin layer of chocolate complemented everything, but it was soup just the same. I was mortified and quietly talked myself out of crying actual tears at the dinner table.

Since then though, I’ve wanted to make the pie again, but I wanted to make it my way, without the gelatin and raw egg yolks (sorry, Joy the Baker!).

So what I did first was look at a pie recipe that I’m familiar with and have executed successfully at least twice — Cook’s Country’s North Carolina Lemon Pie. The crust is made out of saltines, butter (I use salted butter because I love that salty-sweet combo), caro syrup and salt. The filling is made from sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, heavy cream, lemon juice and zest, and salt. The result is tangy, lemony, a hint of salty, and sweet-but-not-too-sweet. I’ve made this pie for the past two Thanksgivings, and I’ve never regretted it.

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And then I took Joy the Baker’s recipe and made a color-coordinated spreadsheet, where I compared the two: ingredient by ingredient, stage by stage. This seems a little nutty (and maybe it is), but breaking down the two recipes side by side really helped me visualize what happens at each stage of the process so I could see where each recipe was similar and where they diverged in ingredient or process.

And then, I added my own test recipe to the spreadsheet. I put together my own ingredient list and wrote out the process I would go through to make my very own version of the Dark and Stormy pie.

I don’t consider myself a food blogger, at least not in the traditional sense. I started blogging about my food adventures because food and writing about food was a way to keep myself alive. Learning to cook and bake while writing about everything I learned in the process helped remind myself that I was a human being who was still very capable of learning new things and self-reflection and skill-having when a lot of things in my life kept telling me that I wasn’t doing enough or good enough or capable enough to accomplish anything.

Actually making this pie took 2-3 days. On the first day, I made gingersnaps for the crust. I opted to go with the same gingersnaps I made for the first disaster pie. They’re softer than your standard gingersnap, but I figured it would be fine. They tasted great with the soup I made the first time around.

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The next day, I used a Martha Stewart gingersnap crust recipe to make the crust, which entailed crushing up gingersnaps in the food processor, mixing the crumbs with melted butter, brown sugar, flour and salt, and then pressing them into my 9-inch pie plate. I popped the whole thing into the oven at 350 on a baking sheet for a few minutes, and then took it out to cool on a rack.

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These days, I don’t blog in hopes of finding sponsors or monetizing it (although, dang, that would be nice), and I’m not so concerned with SEO or being an influencer, and I don’t blog so I can share my mom’s empanada recipes with the masses for free. I guess I continue blogging because it helps me explore and learn things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise without cooking and writing about the cooking.

That probably doesn’t fit under the definition of a food blog, and it certainly doesn’t exist in the same universe with SEO, trending search terms, cute influencer Instagram posts, posting 3 times a day at peak times, etc.

I embrace the slowness, the messiness, the uncategorizable-ness of whatever this is I’m doing.

While the pie crust cooled, I made the pie filling by whisking together condensed milk, egg yolks, heavy cream, ground ginger, fresh ginger, and lime zest. When that was fully combined, I whisked in lime juice and a lot of spiced rum from our favorite local distillery until it was all fully incorporated. I poured the filling into the crust and baked at 350 for about 15 minutes, until the edges were just set and the center still jiggled a little bit.

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When I took the pie out of the oven, the consistency was what I wanted, but it looked like the filling had split a little bit at the edges. Maybe I hadn’t incorporated the rum and lime juice as thoroughly as I thought? Maybe I had added too much rum and lime juice?

I let the pie cool on a rack for a few hours, and then I popped it into the refrigerator to chill and fully set.

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There are some weeks or months where everything you plan goes pretty much according to schedule. You can predict how much time and energy you’ll have that week, you set your goals accordingly, and you follow through on every single thing on your list for the week. I love those weeks. I used to never have them, and now I have them on a regular basis. I love that feeling of crossing to-dos off my list, even if my to-do list is made up of a bunch of basic stuff.

And then there are some weeks or months where nothing goes according to plan. Where you overbook yourself, set too many goals, and plan your time far too ambitiously. For example, you think you’ll be in the mood to write a Friday Bites post while on a plane flying across the Grand Canyon, but when it really comes down to it, you’ll only have the energy to pretend you’re asleep and turn up the volume on your podcast when your airplane seat mate tries to talk to you. And then, you think you’ll be able to bang out a post while you’re sitting with your mom as she goes through a chemo treatment, but when it really comes down to it, all you want to do is eat snacks with your mom, read recipes for people going through chemo, chat with your mom and the nurses, and finish the book you’re reading.

And when I say “you,” I mean, “me.” I think you’ll be able to relate though. I hope.

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A day later, I made whipped cream, spread it on top of the pie, and then garnished it with candied pecans. The crust was welded to the pie plate. I wondered if it would still weld itself to a disposable aluminum pan. The filling was appropriately firm, but it was so boozy that even Mary Berry would’ve taken issue with it. Don’t get me wrong — I love a boozy dessert, but I could taste mostly the (delicious!) Lake House Spiced Rum and only hints of the ginger and lime that, to someone who didn’t know what the pie flavors were supposed to be, were rumored to be in the filling as well.

Still, M and I ate slices of that pie every night, and I made notes every night about what I wanted to do differently the next time I made it. I’m becoming obsessed with getting this pie just right.

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I don’t have the baking knowledge to adapt a recipe exactly right the first time. When I tell you I’m testing a recipe, I mean I’m testing it over a period of months. Because ingredients don’t come cheap, I don’t live or work in a test kitchen (can you imagine if I did though?!), and who wants to eat versions upon versions of the same dessert week after week (unless you’re practicing for Bake Off)?

If you’ve made it this far, I’m so very pleased to tell you that I’m not going to give you my recipe for my version of the Dark and Stormy Pie. Partly because it’s not right yet, and partly because…I don’t feel like it?

I guess what I’m trying to say is: so much work goes into blogging (and writing in general) that a reader never actually sees. The same is true for recipe testing and recipe writing. This is why I get so irritated with people who complain about food bloggers and their stories.

That writing is important. It took a lot of work. It gives you context for the recipe. Food and recipes don’t exist in a vacuum. They tell you a story, sometimes very personal ones, and if you don’t want to sit there for it, go buy an issue of Bon Appetit or Food & Wine (no offense, honestly, I buy them both every time I fly). They’ll give you plenty of recipes without bothersome context or stories.

Plus, the people who write those recipes get paid. There’s so much to say about that, too, but I’ll leave you there for now.

When I get this recipe right, I might share it but you’ll probably have to read a lot of words before I actually get to it. :)

A Primer in Grief Horror Films, Just In Time For Valentine's Day

We all have feelings about Valentine’s Day. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m not grumpy about it either. Originally, this week’s post was going to be a “real love song” playlist, but I just couldn’t get excited about it or make up my mind about what the theme would actually be.

And then my brother and I started talking about one of my all-time favorite topics: horror movies. Growing up, I unintentionally traumatized my little brothers with all the horror I used to watch, so neither of them are big horror fans. My brother watched The Babadook recently and loved the way the entire movie was a metaphor for grief, and he got intrigued about the potential of horror movies to serve as metaphors for grief/loss/guilt.

And then I got excited because that’s one of my favorite subgenres of horror — horror as a metaphor or analogy for grief/loss/guilt. You can make the argument that a good horror film is always serving as a metaphor for something, which would be true, but I especially love ones that star grief, guilt and loss.

So I decided to write up a crash course in this subgenre for my brother and for all of you. In no particular order, I present to you: a primer in grief/loss/guilt horror:

Pet Sematary (1989)

If you’re on Twitter, you might know that Stephen King has really stepped in it recently and shown his cis-male white privilege on a few occasions. While that’s unfortunate, it doesn’t change the fact that Stephen King is a true master of horror, and Pet Sematary is no exception. A doctor and his wife move to a new town with their too-adorable-for-their-own-good kids, yadda yadda yadda, an ancient Native American ritual site whose soil has “gone sour” gets involved (I know, I know, it’s a…questionable choice, but here we are) (although, you might be able to argue that the crux of the film resting on an ancient Native American ritual site is also some kind of commentary on colonialism, I don’t want to start reading things into the text that aren’t really there), things get weird with a zombie cat, and then things get REALLY creepy. This movie is iconic for a reason.

The Babadook

Obviously. The catalyst for this list. There is so much to love about this film — that it’s about a woman whose husband died while she was giving birth to her son is heartbreaking enough. To watch her struggle to be a “good” mother to her son, who is a constant reminder of her husband and his death is so real and gut-wrenching. It upends tropes about what it means to be a “good” mother and what “good” parenthood looks like, and asks questions about what it means to be a mother and parent when you’ve experienced devastating trauma alongside an event that is supposed to be one of the happiest of your life, and what it means to struggle with a grief that threatens to consume you. UGH. Plus, it’ll keep you double-taking the shit you see out of the corner of your eye for at least 24 hours after you watch it.

Dark Was The Night

A favorite trope of mine is “small town law enforcement suddenly has to deal with a whole bunch of supernatural shenanigans and MAN, is it above their pay grade” and Dark Was The Night fits that bill. A creature feature shot mostly in frosty, moody blue tones, this one follows a small town sheriff who is swimming in grief and guilt following the loss of his son. His backstory is revealed bit by bit in tandem with his investigation into what exactly is terrorizing his small town. We grow to really love the sheriff and his deputy, and all you want for them is love, happiness, lively earth tones, and some sunshine, for god’s sake. Creature features (another absolute favorite horror subgenre of mine) can be hit or miss with the creature effects, but Dark was the Night keeps the mystery alive throughout most of the film and saves the big reveal for the very end, which is the best move they could have made. I’ve watched this movie three times now, and still, every time, my heart just wants that sheriff to open himself to love again.

The Final Girls

I love a good horror comedy, and The Final Girls is such a pleasant surprise. Taissa Farmiga stars as a woman whose late mother was an actress whose claim to fame was the lead role in a campy 80s slasher flick (that is clearly a spoof of Friday the 13th). Through some weird inexplicable twists, Farmiga’s character gets to see her mother again, except they’re all inside the campy 80s slasher film. This film will startle you with slasher scares while making you laugh and breaking your heart and sending up the campy 80s horror genre, all at the same time. Also, you can’t beat this cast: Malin Akerman, Nina Dobrev from The Vampire Diaries, Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development, and Adam Devine from Pitch Perfect and Workaholics. SO GOOD.

The Ritual (2017)

This is a British creature feature that follows 4 friends who go on a backpacking trip through northern Sweden in honor of their murdered friend. One of them busts an ankle, and they opt to take a shortcut to their hotel through some ominous-looking woods. We all know what happens next, but also…we don’t. I’ve watched this one twice, and get a mood for it more often than you’d think. This film is a seamless blend of creature feature, Swedish folklore, and a metaphor for an overwhelming grief and guilt that forces you to bow down to it.

The Void

A small-town cop finds a drugged out guy in the middle of nowhere and brings him to a hospital that is in the process of shutting down. The bare-bones night staff includes his wife, from whom he’s separated, and things get real intense, real quick from there. Many reviews of this movie call it an homage to low-budget ‘80s horror, which it is, but it really is so much more than that. There are nods to Lovecraftian horror and even ‘80s Italian horror director Lucio Fulci, and it’s clear that horror video games like Resident Evil are an influence here too. Aesthetics aside, at its heart, The Void is about different facets of grief, and all the ways it can destroy a person’s humanity.

Phantasm

Now, this one might be stretch, but I can’t not put it on the list. Phantasm is a Don Coscarelli film, and it’s a bonkers one at that. Jody and Mike are brothers whose parents have recently passed away. When Mike begins to be chased by a creepy entity they call the Tall Man, Jody tries to protect him, and things get pretty bananas from there. This movie is full of bonkers one-liners and WTF moments, and you’re probably never going to fully understand what’s going on. You’ll just have to be okay with that, and go along with wherever the movie takes you. It’s like a glorious, hilarious, campy, gory poem. In the midst of all its disorientation, Phantasm has great moments of tenderness and its characters live out emotions that will feel familiar to anyone who has been stricken with panic about the possible death of a loved one or has felt fiercely protective of a family member for whatever reason. I’ve seen this one countless times, and it hits me just as profoundly (and hilariously) every time.

These are only the first few that came to mind when I started this list — I’m sure there are many obvious ones that I’ve forgotten to add, but this is a good start. There are also movies I initially wanted to put on this list that didn’t make the cut because they featured grief, but not as a metaphor (see: Hereditary and Midsommar). If I left a film off this list that you think would be a good addition, tell me about it!

If you have a dark, broody, twisted side, like me, then this actually feels like the perfect Valentine’s Day post. So happy Valentine’s Day anyway, everyone. Hang out or snuggle up with your preferred scary movie partner and please, please, please, for the love of god, watch and enjoy these movies. These ones are some of my favorites, and I hope you all love them as much as I do.

I’m hard at work this week testing a recipe for a (hopefully) super delicious pie for M’s and my own V-Day celebrations, and I’ll tell you all about it next week. It might even have a playlist to go with it. And you might need to get ready for a lot of Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves.

What I Cooked for The Big Game, or How Do We Enjoy Anything During the End Times?

Friends. Readers. Y’all. I’m tired. You might be, too.

What am I tired of?

Well…where do I begin?

The impeachment trial proceedings? The seemingly-75-candidate-strong Democratic primaries? The Iowa caucus debacle? The spread of the coronavirus in China that feels like we’re in the beginning stages of the board game Pandemic? The Harvey Weinstein trial? Children being separated from their families at the border?

Since transitioning out of my nonprofit life, I got my news from Twitter for a year and a half, which was a big mistake. I tried listening to NPR, which is a better option, but listening to a news cycle that repeats itself and goes in depth into every infuriating news item gives me actual anxiety. One morning, after listening to the news, I felt a literal rage-ache in my body that I haven’t felt since working at a non-profit.

I didn’t feel good about completely shutting myself off from the news entirely, though, so I decided that I would rely on two news podcasts to tell me what I needed to know every day: NPR’s Up First (a 15-minute daily podcast that tells you the top 3 news stories of the day) and the New York Times’ The Daily (a 30-minute-ish daily podcast that goes in depth into one facet of one news story).

Last week, I had to take a break from even those.

M’s and my house is not one that is dedicated to American football. We are mostly a fùtbol, baseball, and pro wrestling house, but there’s something really cozy about having football on in the background while we do things. There’s even something cozy about watching it when it’s cold outside, and you’re inside, warm and boozed up and full of good food.

We don’t make it a point to watch the Super Bowl (or, I’m sorry, The Big Game), but this year we wanted to. The 49ers were in it, and we decided it’d be fun to have a whole Big Game spread — even though we’ve never had the hankering for such a thing before and not many of our local friends are football fans.

In the midst of everything, planning a Big Game spread for two was a welcome distraction.

For a successful Big Game spread, I figure you have to have the following categories of food:

The Dip

When I think of a dip to eat during The Big Game, It has to be gooey and cheesy and potentially contain Velveeta or some other kind of chemically-created cheese substitute. While doing research, I entertained the healthier options of a salsa or a hummus or a smoked eggplant dip, but I ended up settling on a happy medium: M’s co-worker’s white queso dip. It’s full of white American cheese, milk, pickled jalapeños and green chiles. You don’t even have to put anything on the stove — you just throw the cheese, milk and a splash of water into a microwave-safe bowl, put that sucker in the microwave, and alternate between microwaving and stirring until the cheese has melted.

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Then you add the jalapeños and chiles, stir it to make sure everything is evenly incorporated and put it in a crockpot on the warm setting. I didn’t get any photos of the final product because I’m a terrible food blogger.

The Snackable

Now, there’s some overlap between categories. I originally envisioned something that could be eaten by the handful throughout the day, like a Chex Mix or a flavored nut combo. Something that wouldn’t require an entire plate. I thought about tackling Melissa Clark’s Tamarind Spiced Nuts with Mint, but eliminated it from the list right before we went shopping because it felt like the white queso and chips fulfilled this requirement. It killed two birds with one stone.

How about the rollbacks of a whole bunch of vitally important environmental protections our dear leader has enacted?

Maybe, more than anything, it’s these that enrage and exhaust me the most. It’ll be a slog, but we can rebuild society. We can’t rebuild nature and our natural resources.

In maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, when I learned the rate at which rain forests were being logged (it was an astronomical rate even back then), I felt such horror and sadness and anguish. I thought of all the animals and plants we’d lose and never see again, of all the animals and plants we’d never see at all. How irreplaceable these ecosystems are. How once these ecosystems and resources and wildlife are gone, they will never come back.

And how overwhelming that thought was to my very young self, and how powerless I felt to stop it.

That overwhelm and powerlessness is something I feel in abundance now.

The Hors d’oeuvre-y Finger Food

Who doesn’t love a tray of small perfect-bite-sized things that you can just pop in your mouth? You can load your plate up with them, or you can pop them into your mouth while standing over your Big Game buffet or on your way back to the TV. Also, the aesthetic delight of making an entire tray of tiny edible items that look mostly the same is not to be dismissed — think a good tray of deviled eggs or mini-pistachio chocolate chip cookies. It’s always a delight, and I bet you will find anyone making these in the comfort of their own home cooing to the tray and calling them “babies.”

I chose to make Priya Krishna’s Mushroom-Stuffed Mushrooms from her cookbook, Indian-ish (which I wrote about for Hyphen magazine! Go check it out!). While fatty and fried things feel like the traditional theme for a Big Game buffet, I wanted to stay healthy-ish when I could because I’m 34 years old, and my digestive system isn’t what it used to be.

These are so simple to make and so tasty. You take the stems out of regular white mushrooms, and then chop the stems up very finely. You cook them up with olive oil, garlic, ginger, a chile pepper (I chose a serrano), olive oil, salt, pepper, turmeric, Parmesan, and cooked quinoa. Then using a small spoon, you put that stuffing into the little cavities of your patiently-waiting mushroom caps, put them on a baking tray, and put them in the oven.

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When you take them out 12-15 minutes later, I guarantee you’ll coo at them and say something like, “Look at these babies!”

The Hearty Side Dish

At some point in the course of your Big Game celebrations, you’re going to want something that feels like you’re eating at least half of a meal. Hence, the hearty side dish.

I made two hearty sides: Chrissy Teigen’s chicken lettuce wraps from her cookbook Cravings, and my own mac and cheese creation topped with Chrissy’s cheesy garlicky bread crumbs. For the sake of my own sanity (and yours), I’ll only recap the lettuce wraps because they are SO good.

I first had a version of these many moons ago, when a supervisor treated me to P.F. Chang’s and asked if I liked their lettuce wraps. I said, “I’ve never had them.” She literally gasped and put her hand on her heart. Say what you will about P.F. Chang’s, but their lettuce wraps have never steered me wrong.

Chrissy Teigen’s chicken lettuce wraps are no different. This recipe is all over the food blogosphere, so you can just google it if you want it — or do yourself and your local library a favor and check her cookbook out because there are so many drool-worthy delicious recipes in there. Plus, Chrissy’s headnotes are hilarious.

You make a sauce out of Thai sweet chili sauce, hoisin, soy sauce, Sriracha, vegetable oil, sesame oil, rice vinegar, garlic and ginger. Then you cook up a pound of ground chicken along with scallions, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, water chestnut and red bell pepper (all of which is chopped up very finely). Once it’s cooked, throw that sauce you made on top, stir, let the sauce reduce down, take it off the heat and let it cool so you don’t burn the hell out of your mouth, and spoon the filling into a leaf of butter lettuce and shove it into your mouth. Repeat.

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Wings

Wings are a category all on their own. I considered many options, decided I didn’t want to fry chicken, and went with a Sweet Chili Chicken Wing recipe from Food52 because M and I are big suckers for anything that has Thai sweet chili sauce as its main ingredient. These bad boys get marinated for a few hours (I opted to go overnight) and then get baked for 45 minutes or so. After you take them out, you toss them in the chili sauce you make and then you eat them. When I make these again, I’m going to marinate the chicken in a ziplock bag for more even flavor, and I’m going to double up that sauce recipe because it’s too good not to double up on.

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Even watching the Big Game feels exhausting. The game of football can be excruciatingly tense and/or completely deflating or invigorating if your team is playing (which they were) and, and this year had great moments and terrible moments. My only neutral public comment on the actual game is that Jimmy Garoppolo’s eyebrows are impressive.

Aside from the game itself, knowing what we know now about football players and the high likelihood that they will develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease from repeated head trauma, makes it doubly difficult for me to enjoy a game where we watch in slow motion as players smash their helmets together during every single play or make headfirst tackles. (In many ways, it feels like watching pro wrestling, except the wrestlers know how their bodies will degenerate and can take action to lessen the effects. (See: DDP Yoga.) Research on CTE is still fairly new and, at this point, a person can only be diagnosed with it after they die. That’s horrifying.)

And the gall of the NFL to air their brand of “we’re not racist!” commercials while they’ve actively destroyed Colin Kaepernick’s football career for his peaceful protest against police brutality.

There’s that rage-ache again.

The Veggie-Forward Thing

Sure, a veggie plate could do in a pinch, but overall, I’m thinking about something that would cut the heaviness of everything in your spread and help your guts digest a little bit. I recently watched Sohla El-Waylly’s first Bon Appetit video (yay!), where she cooks Zucchini Lentil Fritters with a lemony yogurt. They looked so good, that these were actually the first Big Game item I decided on with certainty.

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Since they’re made out of lentils, zucchini and onion, I’m assuming they’re fairly healthy even though they’re fried? I don’t care, these were so delicious and I can’t wait to make them again.

(Also, I’m making an effort to give YouTube views to every Bon Appetit video that features a Black or brown cook — join me! (It also, sadly, won’t take you very long.))

The Sweet

I don’t think a sweet thing is actually necessary for a Big Game spread, but sweet things are necessary for every day, so I made something sweet anyway. I went with Diced Cinnamon Donut Cakes from Odette Williams’s Simple Cake cookbook, which is basically just baking off her Cinnamon Spice cake, cutting it into squares, brushing each square with melted butter and sprinkling cinnamon sugar on top.

These were the perfect bite-sized conclusion to a giant day-long bite-sized meal.

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I guess the big question is: how do we live and thrive when everything feels like it’s burning down around us? AND that’s not even mentioning any personal or professional stress that we might have on any given day?

I don’t have an answer. It astonishes me, the amount of infuriating things happening in our country that I haven’t even begun to mention. Almost every day feels like trying to scramble up a gravelly mountainside. More and more, I’m embracing the idea of a “slow lifestyle,” which I imagine looks different for everybody.

I’m still working it out, but for me, it feels like it starts with controlling the speed and quality of information that I consume. It means taking the time to listen to an in-depth podcast on a single news story rather than skimming its Twitter moment and all associated hot takes. To live with the possibility that human beings and the things they say and do are nuanced and complex and messy. And that nuance and complexity and messiness deserve consideration and thought and a little bit of empathy. Not many people are deserving of the pedestals we put them on, and not many people are entirely deserving of being “cancelled,” as the kids say (but so many of the “cancelled” deserve a firm and substantive hold toward accountability). And we also cannot and should not tolerate ideologies and behaviors that have historically led to and currently are very clearly leading toward genocide and dictatorship.

It also means taking the time sit with discomfort and rage. To feel it, breathe through it. To listen to it, and listen to what it’s calling me to do. Is my rage telling me to fire off a hot take on social media or is it telling me to do something more sustainable, something that will have a greater impact? In the long run, what will nourish our hearts and minds and souls while also creating long-lasting change?

I don’t have an answer for you.

There is a balance we have to strike, and that balance will look different for each person. The work of figuring it out is something we all have to do for ourselves. I don’t know what it looks like for me just yet. What I do know how to do: cook a lot of food while I figure it out.

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Dancing While Cooking: A Kitchen Dance Party Playlist

So…I’ve been thinking about reviving Friday Bites for a solid month now, but does that mean I’ve planned or prepared to actually start it? No. Have I been cooking? Absolutely. Have I been documenting my efforts step-by-step? Not really. I’ve fallen out of the habits of documenting my cooking and baking adventures — taking photos, jotting down notes, etc.

Taking a break from Friday Bites for the past year or so has given me the experience of being present with my cooking and baking. It’s allowed me to take a step back and see how much I’ve learned over the years from cooking/baking while writing Friday Bites. It’s allowed me to recognize that I don’t need to follow recipes to the letter anymore, that I am honing more accurate instincts and gut feelings about food. It’s felt really good.

What I’m excited to think more about these days, along with the process of cooking/baking, is what happens alongside the food. The days we decide to dance while we prep our ingredients, or the nights we decide to belt out Britney Spears songs while we broth and stir our risotto in perfectly timed increments, or the times when we put on a podcast or try to catch up on The Bachelor while we try out a new recipe, or the days when silence is the only thing we want to hear. I’m excited to think about the food “studying” I’ve embarked on in the past year, and food genealogies and food memories and histories and stories, and making family recipes and honing my own dishes (!!!).

So anyway, that’s a very clunky way to tell you that this week, I’m going to come clean about what Spotify says I’ve been listening to the most while I’ve been away from Friday Bites, and I’ve spent a lot of that time listening to music while cooking. Also, January 2020 has felt 6 months long. Every time I log onto twitter dot com, I want to scream and rip my hair out while also rolling my eyes all the way back into my head and muttering, “Jesus fucking Christ.” I have to take a break from even my news podcasts because…well, you know why. I think we all need a dance break.

#10 - Sorry Not Sorry - Demi Lovato

As usual, I’m several years late to this party, and I honestly don’t care. This song is SO good. I have a Fuck ‘Em Up playlist that I’ve been adding to since 2008, and this is the latest addition. Do you need to an extra shot of ‘tude before you head in to a meeting where you’re going to have to do some stuff that gives you anxiety? Are you doubting a decision you made or are about to make? Do you just need to shake some shit off at the end of the day? Listen to this song. It will give you superpowers.


#9 - Cross Me - Ed Sheeran feat Chance The Rapper & PnB Rock

So look. Ed Sheeran is…Ed Sheeran. I feel like if you really love music, you won’t be afraid of a good pop song. Ed Sheeran is good at pop songs, and I love this one in particular because the speaker tells us that if “you cross her, then you cross me.” If you fuck with my girl, I’m going to fuck with you. I think it’s the pop love song we all need right now. And I’m not ashamed to say that it’s come in the form of Ed Sheeran.


#8 - Please Me - Cardi B. and Bruno Mars

Speaking of good pop songs, everything Bruno Mars touches turns to gold. And everything he touches with Cardi B turns into a glorious glowing ball of sweat and sex and ‘90s throwback vibes. Come for the jams, stay for the iconic Cardi B lines. You know the one I’m talking about.


#7 - Slow It Down - Charlie Puth

In 2016, Charlie Puth came out with the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life. It was called “Marvin Gaye,” and he did it with Meghan Trainor, and it was the most atrocious and sacrilegious thing I’ve heard in recent memory. The first and only time I heard it, I was still working in an office, and I fully stopped what I was working on to research the song and make sure that I never heard it again.

In 2018, Switched on Pop, one of my all-time favorite podcasts, analyzed a Charlie Puth song from his 2018 album, Voicenotes. It was a decent song, so I reluctantly dove into the album. It turns out that Charlie Puth can write a good fucking pop album when he’s not churning out garbage like “Marvin Gaye.”


#6 - The Way I Am - Charlie Puth

Even though Charlie Puth has a babyface and it feels like he’s constantly trying to look and act older, I do really love this song. You can go ahead and put this on the Fuck ‘Em Up playlist alongside Demi Lovato.


#5 - The Distance - Mariah Carey

I’ve loved Mariah since I could consciously love music. I had Daydream on cassette and I literally carried it around with me everywhere, just in case I had an opportunity to play it somewhere. I haven’t listened to a full Mariah Carey album after The Emancipation of Mimi, but I still love her and I love this song. (P.S. If you’re making a playlist of solid love songs, you can throw this one on there along side the Ed Sheeran song.)


#4 - Empty Cups - Charlie Puth

So here’s where I think Spotify is lying about my most-listened to tunes of the past year. I know there’s an algorithm and numbers don’t lie, but…three (3) whole Charlie Puth songs? I can think of at least 5 other songs that I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to more than these three (3) Charlie Puth songs. I thought about subbing out this one for an Ariana Grande song that I’m nearly positive I’ve listened to more, but in the interest of shining the light on guilt and shame, I GUESS I’VE LISTENED TO CHARLIE PUTH THIS MUCH.


#3 - Look What God Gave Her - Thomas Rhett

Spotify told me that I listened to like, 20 hours of Thomas Rhett’s music in 2019????? I also think that’s a lie, but here we are. For those of you who are not fans of country pop (I don’t blame you), Thomas Rhett is a baby-faced Georgia boy who writes pretty catchy pop songs and has some pretty terrible dance moves that will give you second-hand embarrassment for him. There are other songs of his that I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to more, but Spotify doesn’t think so.


#2 - Emotion - Carly Rae Jepsen

I’ve fallen in actual love with Carly Rae Jepsen over the past year and a half, thanks to my baker pals. I read a tweet some time ago (I can’t remember who said it, otherwise I’d give credit) that said Carly Rae Jepsen makes music for 30-somethings who were in fucked-up relationships in their teens/20s, and are now figuring out what good, healthy love looks and feels and sounds like. AMEN.

(Also, Hanif Abdurraqib wrote an amazing essay on Carly Rae Jepsen’s music. You can find it in his book of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Highly recommend.)


#1 - Juice - Lizzo
If Spotify had told me anything different, I would have deleted my account. Honestly. I have loved Lizzo for a long time and I’m so happy that she has blown up over the past year. I don’t know if we deserve her, but we need her so much right now.

So, there it is. What I’ve apparently been bopping around to in my kitchen over the past 12 months. I hope you’ve found something new to dance around to, and I hope it’s gotten you excited about your own faves. And because I’m curious and always on the hunt for new music — dear reader, what are your favorite songs to dance around and cook to? Tell me! No guilt, no shame, no judgement. I really want to know. Tell me in the comment box below, tell me in a comment on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Shoot me a DM, whatevs. Let’s dance and cook together.

An Ode to Anthony Bourdain (feat. Banana-Rum Icebox Cake)

I’ve started this post over and over. A lot has happened in the past month and a half. I got married. I went on an epic mini-honeymoon road trip. We had a second reception in my hometown, right next door to my high school’s prom. I couldn’t decide on whether I wanted to write about my wedding cake, or make a top 5 list of the things we ate on our honeymoon, or whether I should just steam ahead and write about what I was cooking.

And then Anthony Bourdain died.

***
I always forget how torturous baking can be in the summer in Indiana, whether or not you have air conditioning. No matter what you do, the oven turns the entire apartment into a sweatbox. There’s an icebox cake cookbook that I’ve been checking out of the library for the past couple years, but I’ve never made any of the recipes.

This year, I’m determined. There are so many good options. A Milk Dud cake. A black pepper rum cake. Peanut butter cup cake. Lavender-blueberry.

What I decided on: banana-rum cake.

***
I’ve loved Anthony Bourdain for a very long time. Over the past few years (that, interestingly enough, coincide with the years I spent at my last job), I lost track of him. I think part of me had given up on him. I was tired of seeing and hearing about the world through the lens of a snarky white guy. I was disappointed with his choices to do things like hang out with Ted Nugent. I was tired of the “bad boy” thing, of the Hunter S. Thompson-inspired aesthetic thing. Of all the testosterone and macho stuff.

In the last few months, I began following him and his girlfriend Asia Argento more closely on Instagram. I watched as he vocally and strongly supported Asia, particularly at the Cannes Film Festival when she publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her. I watched as he supported the #MeToo movement, and modeled what it looked like to be a self-reflective man who realizes that he’s been contributing to rape culture. He asked himself why the women in his life didn’t feel comfortable enough to come to him with their stories of assault? He asked himself not only what he did, but what did he let happen? What did he let the men around him get away with?

***
The technically-late-spring weather here has been erratic. One week, it’s unbearably humid, sunny, and in the mid-90s. The next week, it’s overcast, humid-ish, stormy, and in the low to mid-80s (which feels a whole lot better than a humid 95 degrees, trust me).

This week is a stormy one, which means it’s cool enough for me to cook. So I started to caramelize bananas.

The bananas had been ripening on the counter for the past week or so, so they had lots of brown spots. I sliced up six of them, then threw them into a large sauce pan that had a nice chunk of nearly-browned butter in it.

Yes, I have a shitty red, plastic cutting board that has been with me for the past 10 years. I want to get rid of it, but I also love it?

Yes, I have a shitty red, plastic cutting board that has been with me for the past 10 years. I want to get rid of it, but I also love it?

As soon as the bananas hit the butter, the sweetest and best smell filled the air. I love the smell of browning butter and I love the smell of bananas. I didn’t know that, together, they make a knee-buckling aroma that I would gladly swaddle myself in for the rest of time.

After letting the bananas soften up a bit, I put in some brown sugar, a healthy glug of spiced rum, and a pinch of salt. Caramelizing things is the best thing.  

***
It feels important for me to tell you that the day Anthony died, I made boxed macaroni and cheese for dinner. I also made an avocado cream out of yogurt and spices (and avocado), and a lime sour cream made with lime zest and spices. I ate the mac and cheese along side my veggie burrito leftovers, and topped them both with that lime sour cream.

I took my weird, oddly comforting meal to the living room and ate it while I watched the Manila episode of Parts Unknown. I had never seen it before.

At the beginning of the episode in a voiceover, Anthony says, “Filipinos are, for reasons I have yet to figure out, probably the most giving of all people on the planet.”

I began crying into my weird sour cream and mac-and-cheese dinner, and I didn’t stop for the entire episode.

***
Next: the pudding. I threw sugar, cornstarch, salt, whole milk and heavy cream into a saucepan, whisked them all together, and then whisked an egg in. Then I turned the stove to medium-high and whisked the mixture constantly.

Banana Rum_3.jpg

While doing all this, I listened to Anthony Bourdain’s 2011 interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. He must have recently done the Ted Nugent episode, because he talked a little bit about it. About how, in all his travels, you can always find something in common with someone, no matter how different your worldviews are. Those common things are usually food and drink. He talked about how he had argued with Nugent and gotten him to agree that Michelle Obama’s lunch meal program was a good thing.

Three years ago, in a pre-45 world, I would have written this whole thing off. I would have said (and did say) that it wasn’t enough. Ted Nugent is a pretty disgusting human being, and he’s said some unconscionable things.

As it stands, it’s still not enough. But I also wonder, with the world we live in today, would Anthony have done anything differently in the same situation? Would he still have agreed to do the segment? Would he have leaned harder into difficult conversations? Would he have felt an obligation to try to straighten out Nugent, white dude to white dude? Would he have felt there was something at stake?

***
After the pudding thickened and began to bubble, I did a final frantic 45 seconds of vigorous whisking and then took it off the heat. I mixed in another healthy glug of rum, some butter, and vanilla extract.  I set it aside to cool a bit, next to my cooling-to-room-temp caramelized bananas. (My room temp was probably 83 degrees, so *shrugs*. Was that the temperature the cookbook authors had in mind? Probably not, but that’s how shit goes in my house.)

***
The day Anthony died, a friend sent me a New Yorker piece written by Helen Rosner. It’s a beautiful piece, and one of the best ones written in memory of him.

In it, she outlines exactly why I gave up on Anthony all those years ago:

““I asked him, point blank, if he considered himself a feminist. His answer was long and circuitous, what I’d come to think of as classic Bourdain: more of a story than a statement, eminently quotable, never quite landing on the reveal. He talked about his sympathy for the plight of women and gay men, his formative years as a student at Vassar, his forceful resentment of the “bro food” movement with which he remained entwined, and his unwavering support for reproductive rights. “I don’t know if that makes me a feminist,” he said. “It makes me a New Yorker. Doesn’t it?””
— Helen Rosner

Honestly, Tony. What’s so hard about admitting to being a feminist? For all his “bad boy” stuff, he could sure avoid actually answering a question.

***
After chilling my mixing bowl and whisk attachment in the freezer for about 10 minutes, I took them out, loaded them into my stand mixer and poured in a whole bunch of heavy cream. I whisked that creamy stuff at a medium speed until it just started to thicken, at which point I threw in another healthy glug of rum, some powdered sugar, and some vanilla extract. I turned the stand mixer up to a medium-high speed and meant to whip the cream until it formed stiff peaks. I’m pretty sure I overmixed it a hair, but it still tasted amazing.

And then: construction.

Banana Rum_5.jpg

***
The day Anthony died, I read so many Twitter and Instagram tributes, and so many from Black folks and people of color and women. They talked about how he didn’t exoticize or appropriate their culture. How he turned the cameras on even the “ugly” things, like politics, race, culture. About how he never presumed to know more than the people who cooked for him. How he never said ‘no’ to any dish. How, when he visited our home countries, we felt seen and validated.

And so often, more than I was expecting, he was described as “kind.”

***
So I took my brightly colored 8x8 baking dish and poured in a generous layer of boozy pudding, then lay some graham crackers on top.

Then came a layer of caramelized bananas. Then a layer of pudding. Then graham crackers. Then bananas again.

Banana Rum_7.JPG

I should have stopped there because the dish was full to the top. But I went against my instincts. I poured more pudding on top. It began to spill out the sides a bit, but I carried on. I plopped my slightly-overmixed boozy whipped cream on top, and that’s when things started to get real messy. As the laws of displacement began to the place (that’s the official scientific name for it, right?), pudding started to dribble over the walls of the dish and all over my kitchen table.

Before putting saran wrap over the top, I set the baking dish precariously inside a slightly larger one, so that the pudding that oozed out would pool somewhere that wasn’t all over the top shelf of my refrigerator.

Banana Rum_9.jpg

***

On the morning that Tony died, I took out my copy of A Cook’s Tour. It’s an old edition, and it’s dog-eared and well-worn. I flipped to the passage where he wrote about coming to the devastating realization of the impact of the Vietnam War on the country that he was clearly falling in love with. He wrote about the loathing he felt for the U.S. and its mindless destruction, and the loathing he felt at himself for his complicity in the U.S.’s actions and his privilege as an American tourist in Vietnam. I remembered how I felt when I read that passage. How he had put words to all the anger and helplessness and rage I felt when I had traveled to Thailand. When I read A Cook’s Tour, I finally felt like I wasn’t alone. That I wasn’t asking too much by wanting to see everything and acknowledge everything when I traveled or read about travel or watched someone travel somewhere. It wasn’t too much to ask to see the whole damn picture. It was okay to have complicated feelings and still see the world, engage with it.

Tony wasn’t perfect. He has said several things over the years that I still cringe thinking about. But he was human, in the best possible way. Which means that in these past three or so years while I was busy giving up on him, he was evolving as a person. While I wasn’t paying attention, he became a person I could stand behind again, look up to.  

***
After 24 hours, the banana-rum icebox cake was ready. And good lord, is it boozy and incredibly delicious. I eat a piece and feel a warmth in my chest, like I’ve just done a shot of bourbon in a Wild West saloon. Sweet, but not too sweet. So much booze. It’s the perfect treat for these hot days.

Banana Rum_10.jpg

***
I love the end of Helen Rosner’s article. She wrote:

““The last time I saw Bourdain was a few months ago, at a party in New York, for one of the books released by his imprint at the publishing house Ecco—of his many projects, his late-career role as a media rainmaker was one he assumed with an almost boyish delight. At the bar, where I’d just picked up my drink, he came up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Remember when you asked me if I was a feminist, and I was afraid to say yes?” he said, in that growling, companionable voice. “Write this down: I’m a fuckin’ feminist.””
— Helen Rosner

***
The things that I have made in honor of Tony in the past week, whether inadvertently or purposefully, have been incredibly strange. The Annie’s boxed mac and cheese with lime sour cream. This banana-rum icebox cake. He’s not particularly known for being a desert kind of guy. I’d like to think that he’d appreciate all the booze in it. I know I do.

Banana Rum_11.jpg

***
In a way, Anthony ended up modeling my ideal of human behavior. He was imperfect, flawed in so many ways. But he was self-reflective. He looked inward without flinching and with nuance. He held himself accountable. He spoke out about things that matter. He was endlessly curious, asking questions and really listening to the answers.  He traveled just to travel, but he also traveled for the people. To let them tell their stories. To show his viewers that they shouldn’t be afraid of the world, to pay attention to people and their food. To always say ‘yes’ to whatever is put in front of you.

***
I should end there. I'll leave you with this interview that Anthony did with Fast Company. I'm 90% sure that the answers he gives them are not what they're looking for. Their questions want quick, superficial, easy responses that they can turn into sound-bytes. His answers are long, reflective, and incredibly deep. That is, I think, the essence of Anthony. To never give an easy answer, to always take in the bigger picture. To examine not only that we're here, but to look back with nuance at how we got here.

Rest well, Tony. Thank you for everything.

This Week's Recipe:

My Top 5 In-No-Particular-Order Wedding Rom-Coms

This Friday Bites has nothing to do with food, but everything to do with what is currently occupying all my energy these days: weddings. By the time you read this, I will be in Vegas, bachelorette partying in a pool that is also a shark tank (?!) with my very best friends in the whole universe. I'll be a little over 24 hours away from marrying the love of my life, after being together for 9+ years. (WHAT?!) It's an exciting time, and it's also one that's full of details, timelines, obsessing over things like wedding veils, travel steamers, and my "dream" nails.

In the middle of all of the wedding planning I’ve been doing over the past couple weeks, one of my besties texted me to ask what my favorite wedding rom-coms were. I haven’t consciously been keeping a mental list of my favorite wedding rom-coms, but with ZERO hesitation, I listed off my top 5.

And so, the inspiration for this non-traditional edition of Friday Bites: my favorite wedding rom-coms, in no particular order.

***
27 Dresses

I realize that by putting 27 Dresses as the first in this no-particular-order list, I may lose a lot of you, and I don’t care. I love this movie. Katherine Heigl plays a woman who has been a bridesmaid an obscene amount of times (27 times, to be exact) and unironically loves weddings. James Marsden plays a cranky, cynical journalist who is stuck writing up fancy wedding announcements for a national newspaper. Can you even imagine the shenanigans these two get into?

Sure, this one is full of un-feminist tropes: the woman who spends her life caring for others and always putting herself last, and she isn’t bitter about it (mostly). The curmudgeonly dude who doesn’t believe in marriage, blah blah blah. Intellectually, I know it’s all wrong and silly and stupid. But goddammit, when Judy Greer’s character slaps Katherine Heigl in the face after Katherine whispers after her dreamboat boss (played by Ed Burns), “I love you, too,” it makes me laugh every time. And the “Bennie and the Jets” scene? Forget it. Have fun with your eye-rolling, I’m going to be over here singing about electric boobs with Katherine and James.

***
The Wedding Date

This one…this one is pretty terrible, I’ll admit it. Debra Messing plays a woman who hires a male escort as her date to her sister’s wedding and help her brave a minefield of ex-boyfriend sightings and fucked up family dynamics. Dermot Mulroney plays the male escort, who’s full of charm (obviously), wisdom, and romantic one-liners.

I don’t know what it is about this movie that technically makes it fall flat or why I continue to love it so much in spite of that. I just want Debra Messing’s character to blossom and be her best self. I want her to admit her love of Air Supply and belt out “All Out Of Love.” I want to believe in the chemistry between Debra and Dermot. I want to believe the dreamy one-liners. This one misses the mark in a lot of ways, but I kind of don’t care. I love Debra and I love Dermot, and this movie has enough funny moments to keep it as one of my fave rom-coms.

***
My Best Friend’s Wedding

If you haven’t already watched this movie by now, I can’t help you.

Just kidding. But honestly, this one is so good.

Julia Roberts plays a food critic (a-HA! There IS food in this edition of Friday Bites after all!) whose best friend, Dermot Mulroney, is a handsome sports writer. A million years ago, they made a pact to marry each other if they hadn’t found love by a certain age. On Julia Roberts’ pact birthday, Dermot tells her that he’s found the love of his life and they’re getting married. Julia realizes she loves Dermot, and the rest of the movie is dedicated to Julia plotting to destroy her best friend’s relationship. This movie has everything: Karaoke! Plotting and scheming! Devastating good looks! A gay best friend! Julia Roberts’ laugh! A bread truck car chase scene! Slow dancing! Etc.

This was one of the first rom-coms I loved and watched over and over again, and I’m not sorry about it. It’s also one of the few rom-coms whose characters (and audience!) don’t always get the ending they want, but the one they need. I’ve always loved that about this one. And also, this was the world’s introduction to Dermot Mulroney, and I don’t think the world was ever the same. Am I right? I’m totally right.

***
Wedding Crashers

This might be surprising, but it’s hard for me to pass up a Vince Vaughn movie. Swingers? Love it. Four Christmases? I might hesitate, but I’ll watch it. (I actually don’t remember this movie all that much, if I’m being honest.) The Break-Up? One of my favorite movies EVER. Wedding Crashers? I will say YES to this movie every time.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play two D.C. lawyers who spend their free time crashing weddings and sleeping with women. One weekend, they crash the holy grail of weddings (a politician’s family!) someone falls in love, Will Ferrell makes an appearance, Vince Vaughn is Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson is charming, Bradley Cooper plays a convincing DUDE, Rachel Adams plays sweet and uncertain really well, some questionable things are said and done, etc.

It’s a rom-com with enough silliness and raunchiness for the dudes (I say ‘dudes’ as a non-gender-specific aesthetic. I hope you know what I mean) among us, and enough sweetness and romance for the sensitive hearts. I have a little bit of both in me, and Wedding Crashers strikes the balance. It definitely has its problems, but whenever I just need to have a good, ridiculous laugh, Wedding Crashers is it.

***
Bend It Like Beckham

So, technically, Bend it Like Beckham is not a wedding movie. But it has a wedding IN it, and that’s good enough for me.

Parminder Nagra plays an Indian girl in Britain who idolizes David Beckham and dreams about playing football (or “soccer” for all the ‘mericans reading this) professionally. The dream begins to come true when she meets Kiera Knightly, who invites her to try out for a girls’ team coached by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. She makes the team, but has to walk a tightrope between her obligations to family, their expectations for her future, and her own goals and dreams.

I fucking. love. this. movie. I loved this movie when it first came out because it starred Indian women, and even though my own culture and theirs are vastly different, it still felt like I saw myself on the screen. A fellow brown girl trying to live up to her family’s expectations but wanting to pursue a path that might disappoint them. Growing up in a culture where family bonds and obligations are strong and inescapable. And crushing on a white guy who kind of doesn’t get it, but kind of does, and is cute, so why not?

Honestly, the story of my life.

***
Bridesmaids

Last but certainly not least.

Kristen Wiig, a failed baker (a-HA! More food!), plays best friend and maid of honor to Maya Rudolph, who just got engaged. The whole movie is the most hilarious shenanigans: Kristen Wiig’s character is honestly all of us, as she tries to do all the things a maid of honor does, but keeps getting outshined by Rose Byrne’s character, a snooty rich woman who is clearly competing for the title of best friend and maid of honor.

This movie is everything: it’s about best friends, it’s about making new friends. It’s about dancing to your favorite ‘90s jams with your bestie whenever and wherever. It’s a cautionary tale about eating rare meat and then getting horrific diarrhea in a fancy bridal shop after. It’s about how well Jon Hamm plays a douchebag. It’s about finding your footing and direction when you’re feeling uncertain about your place in the world. It’s about knowing the exact ratios of ingredients to make exactly ONE cupcake. It’s about finding your voice and being confident in it. It’s about breaking old patterns and receiving the love that the world brings to you.

***

WELL! I’m getting married tomorrow, and then I’m going off the grid for a bit, so no Friday Bites next week. I’ll be back the week after, and I will talk about all the food I ate (what if I dedicated a whole post to my wedding cake?! or the second reception we're having in my hometown?! or our reception meal?!), and I'll talk all about what's coming next.

The Plague, Birthday Donuts, and Labors of Love

So, here’s what happened: I woke up on my second to last day in Nevada with my throat on fire. It was as if some kind of tiny rat had crawled into my sinuses and used the inside of my face as its clawing bag. Everything inside my face felt swollen.

For the last two days of my visit, I was on the maximum dosage of DayQuil and NyQuil, just so I could make it through the day without collapsing into a heap somewhere and screaming for someone to just rip my sinuses out. And when I traveled back to Indiana, I was heavily dosed on DayQuil and kept my fingers crossed that my sinuses were clear enough to keep my eardrums from exploding.

When I finally got home, all I did for the rest of the week was sleep, eat, and watch television. That’s how you know I’m actually sick: my body forces me to do nothing but sit around and watch my favorite romantic comedies, guilt-free. I guess you could call my love of romantic comedies a guilty pleasure, but I don’t feel guilty about them.

I dragged myself out of bed for a wedding dress fitting that first Saturday after I’d come home, and I barely made it through. I felt entirely like shit, a cough had added itself to my symptoms, and I couldn’t even muster up excitement for my dress.  Afterward, I came home, changed into sweats, and fell asleep on the couch for 4 hours.

***
Finally, I went to urgent care after another few days of feeling like shit, and after M and my mom bugged me repeatedly to go get checked out. The doctor put me on an exciting 14-day rotation of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and codeine cough syrup.

I finished up my cycle of antibiotics two weeks ago, and I finally, FINALLY feel 100% like myself again.

***
So, being ridiculously sick for almost 3 weeks has meant no Friday Bites (though, believe me, I tried to write them). It’s meant no writing at all. I’ve been cooking, but haven’t had the wits about me to document my dishes properly.

It also means that instead of spending my post-plague time preparing action-packed Friday Bites posts, I’ve been wedding planning instead. Since emerging from my plague-cocoon, I’ve been doing almost nothing but wedding planning and cooking.

More on weddings in my next post.

For now, I’m celebrating chocolate. Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate.

And birthdays. And good friends. And chocolate.

***
I am not saying anything new by saying that baking is a labor of love. I bake for the people in my life that I love the most — my family, M, my friends. I used to be shy about sharing my baking with friends because I was afraid that whatever I made wasn’t good enough. I don’t know at what point that changed.

When I bake, I am thinking of the person for whom I am laboring, whether they are near or far. My fondness for each person goes into the whisking, the kneading, the mixing, the scooping, the shaping, the cooling, the sprinkling, the glazing. It probably also goes without saying that I don’t bake for just anybody.

One of my very closest friends’ birthdays is 3 days after mine. She’s a fellow Aries, and she is one of the best people I know. For her birthday this year, I made Joy the Baker’s double chocolate cake donuts.

***
When I discovered I could bake donuts instead of deep fry them (I am wary of the deep fry), it was game OVER. I have Joy the Baker to thank for that. For a period of time, I made all kinds of donuts, including browned butter and pistachio ones (also a Joy the Baker recipe).

The recipe I return to the most, and the one that gets the most requests, is one for the double  chocolate donuts.

***
Donuts are so magical. If you’re making cake donuts, they’re really easy to make.

I whisked together all my dry ingredients: flour, dark chocolate cocoa powder (Joy’s recipe calls for unsweetened cocoa powder, but I love the depth of flavor that dark chocolate cocoa brings), baking soda, salt and brown sugar.

ChocoDonuts_step 1.jpg

In a separate bowl, I whisk together buttermilk, an egg, melted butter and vanilla extract. I love the smells that come out of this particular bowl at all stages — the tanginess of the buttermilk, the smoothness of that butter, and the punch of sweetness from the vanilla. YUM.

ChocoDonuts_step 2.jpg

After the buttermilk, egg, butter, and vanilla are whisked to smooth, you pour them into the dry ingredients and fold the wet ones in with a spatula. Fold everything together until combined into a glossy, dark, and glorious cake batter. My batter was a little bit dry, so I added a splash more buttermilk to soften it up.

ChocoDonuts_step 3.jpg

Then, using a spoon, I spooned the batter into a well-greased donut pan. This is probably the trickiest part for me, and the reason why I didn’t get a photo of it — because my hands, somehow, got covered in batter. After wrestling the batter into the pan, I popped it into the oven for about 11 minutes.

After taking the donuts out and waiting for them to cool, I made the glaze by mixing together powdered sugar, more dark chocolate cocoa powder, salt, coconut milk and vanilla extract.

This is not a picture of the glaze, but it IS a picture of the donuts waiting to BE glazed.

This is not a picture of the glaze, but it IS a picture of the donuts waiting to BE glazed.

***
Honestly, the glazing and the sprinkles are the funnest part of donut making (aside from licking the bowl). The glaze makes the donuts look so dressed up and classy. On its own, with just the glaze, the donuts look amazing. The sprinkles though…they make these donuts a party. Every time I use them, I get so excited. I also feel like I’m being transported back to the ‘90s for some reason. If someone were to film me every time I made these donuts, they could probably put together a montage of me saying, “YAAAAYYY!” every time I throw sprinkles on the donuts.

ChocoDonuts_step 5.jpg

***
My favorite part of baking is the act of giving the finished product to a loved one, whether it’s M or a friend, or my mother, or whoever. I boxed these donuts up for my friend in a cute little cupcake box, wrote her a card, and put it in an envelope that matched the donuts’ sprinkle party perfectly.

ChocoDonuts_step 6.jpg

***
I made 10 donuts — 6 for my friend, and 4 left-overs for M and me. By the end of the evening, those 4 donuts were settled very comfortably in M’s and my bellies. I love sweet treats, but I don’t like sickly sweet ones — the dark chocolate cocoa powder made these babies just the right amount of sweet.

***
By the time I post this, there will be only 5 days left until our wedding. (!!!!!!) Stay tuned for a super fun wedding-themed Friday Bites this Friday. It won't necessarily be food-related, but it will have LOTS to do with weddings.

On Potlucks, Being Brown, and Belonging in the Desert

About an hour after getting off the plane in Reno, my mother started handing me food to “try” on the 2.5-hour drive back to my hometown Winnemucca. Since I got off the plane, I’ve been eating Gilmore Girls-quantities of food in the sometimes-indecorous style of Nigella Lawson. For those of you who are not fluent in either of these languages I’m speaking: I’m eating a lot of food and I’m stuffing it into my face without giving any fucks about looking demure.

***
I haven’t made anything this week. But I have eaten incredible amounts of good food. My mother’s birthday was last Saturday, and her friends threw her an impromptu potluck lunch.

***
I often describe Winnemucca’s location as being “the literal middle of nowhere,” not out of derision, but because it’s a little bit true. I guess you could describe any town in Nevada, excluding Reno and Las Vegas, as being in the middle of nowhere.

(Fun fact: Nevada has more ghost towns than actual towns. That might explain why I love spooky stuff so much.)

When I was growing up here, as I’ve written about before, I hated it. There weren’t any coffee shops until I was a junior or so in high school. There weren’t any bookstores or music shops or anything. There were only casinos, restaurants in casinos, Walmart, the public library, the volunteer-operated thrift store Poke-N-Peek, and one or two small clothing stores.  

What this town did have, though, was an unexpected and healthy (for the town’s size) Filipino population. My memories of Winnemucca are full of Filipino parties and potlucks. I met my childhood best friend, Chris, on Halloween night at a Filipino party when we were around 6 years old, and we’ve been BFFs ever since. (Our BFF status was cemented that very night in a very strange and inexplicable way, but that story is for another time when I can explain our weird behavior. Which will probably be never.)

Nevada seems like a great empty expanse in the western U.S. (and in a lot of ways, it is), but I grew up surrounded by people who (kind of) looked like me, and helped me know who I was and where I came from. At the time, I didn’t realize how lucky this was. To be familiar with the cadence and sounds of Tagalog and Ilocano, to know the smell of every good food and every stinky one, to know that every person has their own adobo or pancit recipes with their own trick or twist. To have a best friend who wouldn’t blink at the “weird” food you ate and wasn’t intimidated by large groups of Filipino women talking away in Tagalog.

Look at these skinny brown kids. Taken during a Filipino party in the early days.

Look at these skinny brown kids. Taken during a Filipino party in the early days.

***
What was on the menu for my mom’s potluck lunch this year: ceviche, a spicy Thai yellow curry, pancit, papaya salad (drooooool), fried chicken, mini quiches, squash pancakes with a vinegary garlicky sauce (more drool, especially with that sauce!), rice cooked with coconut oil and coconut milk (but not quite full-fledged coconut rice), cassava cake, meatballs, guacamole, baked beans with cocktail sausages (I’m dedicating an entire post to that dish, I promise you), marinated chicken breast strips, and fruit.

I haven’t even gotten to the cake yet. (More drool.)

And this potluck was smaller than last year’s. Can you even imagine? (No, no, you can’t.)

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***
A year ago, my mother had been on her cancer treatment for about 5 months or so. At that point, the cancer was responding so well to treatment that her tumors were shrinking down to almost nothing. It was the best possible news we could receive, and we were all relieved. Things were slowly going back to normal, but I didn’t want to get too comfortable because I knew that things could go pear-shaped at any moment. Cancer can be a real shitshow in that way. So I flew home to spend a few days with my mom for her birthday. That’s when I learned that her friend was organizing a big birthday party for her.

***
My mother is notoriously late to everything. She was two hours late to her own birthday party that year. And why? She was busy cooking like 5 extra dishes because she was worried there wouldn’t be enough food. (I had also been roped into cooking two dishes, somehow. I honestly don’t remember what they were — a spicy chorizo and shiitake mushroom soup and maybe browned butter chocolate chip cookies?)

This is one of two photos I took at the party that year. This is that chorizo and shiitake mushroom soup, presented in a styrofoam bowl.

This is one of two photos I took at the party that year. This is that chorizo and shiitake mushroom soup, presented in a styrofoam bowl.

By the time we arrived at the party, people had started to lose hope that my mother would ever show up. There was already a ton of food brought by the guests, and my mother and I just added more to the spread. It was excess of the best kind.

Looking back, I didn’t really take any pictures. I was just happy and thankful for my mom’s health, and that so many people had come to celebrate her. The party was big and loud and joyful. People from every aspect of my mom’s life were there. Church friends, volunteer friends, Avon friends, Filipino friends, Thai friends — the gang was all there.

***
The complexion of the Filipino party in Winnemucca, Nevada, has changed since I left here nearly 14 years ago. (!!!) It doesn’t feel accurate for me to call them Filipino parties anymore. Though there has always been a large Latinx community and there is still a steady Filipino community, there are more kinds of brown people: Cambodian and Thai are the newest communities (to me) to grow roots of some kind in this area.

Often, when I come home, it feels like I can finally relax and take a big breath of fresh air. For me, that feeling has always been more about the landscape than anything else. In this town, I’ve always walked the tightrope between feeling at home and feeling like an outsider. These days, I still feel at home, but also know that people who are current residents have a hard time believing that I grew up here.

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Now though, when I come here, I know that I will be around more brown people than I’ve ever been around in Indiana. I will feel more able to take up space as a woman of color here in rural Nevada than I do in Indiana. Even when I live in a college town that boasts an international appeal.

***
I haven’t even mentioned the birthday cake yet. It was perfect. The cake itself was spongy and light -- and the frosting! I’ve been telling everyone I know about it. It was a strawberry whipped frosting — so light, and fluffy, with just the right amount of sweetness. Most frostings I’ve tasted are heavy, both in texture and sweetness, but this one was divine. I honestly cannot stop thinking about it.  

Where was it made? A local grocery store.

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***
I don’t want to make rural Nevada seem like some kind of magical oasis. Don’t come to Winnemucca expecting to eat all this great food and attend great parties.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you are visitor to this town, you will not see the things that I see. You will not see all the people that I do, and you will not be able to eat the food that I get to eat when I am here. If you visit Winnemucca unaccompanied by a local, you will not remember anything about it except maybe the McDonalds, or the fact that the Burger King overlooks the cemetery, or that we have a giant (and I mean, truly giant) “Welcome to Winnemucca” marquee perched on the border of said cemetery if you come into town taking the West Winnemucca Boulevard exit off I-80.

The point of all this, I guess, is that no matter how small the town, how white it seems, how incredibly desolate it appears to be — we’re out here. We’re feeding and caring for each other. We’re creating and thriving our own communities when the larger world makes us feel like we’re walking a constant line between belonging and forever being seen as an outsider.

I don’t want to speak for anyone else. But this is what I’ve experienced and felt and remembered.

Sometimes, I worry that I’m remembering all this with a heavy filter. I worry that I’m forgetting all the bad shit. Not everything was or is amazing. I know that. I still get stares everywhere I go here. If you happen to accidentally interrupt a bingo game, you will get some intense glares. I can't find dried figs anywhere in town, which is maybe the most egregious insult of them all.

But memories are memories. Feelings are feelings. Delicious food is delicious food. The heart knows when things are good.

***
Also: happy birthday, Mom!

Bread, Bread, Bread.

Friday Bites is coming to you a few days late. I guess technically it’s a “Monday Bites,” at this point, but here we are. I spent my writing days last week running wedding errands and traveling across the country to visit my parents. Since I booked a 12:30pm flight, I thought that I would have the gumption and energy to write either on the 4-hour plane ride to Vegas, or during my 4-hour layover there.

Unfortunately, all I had the energy to do was sleep, eat, read a romance novel, and ignore the uber-Christian wedding party that surrounded me on the plane. (They talked over me, handed each other jelly beans and inspirational literature in front of my face, and, at one point, a bridesmaid crawled over me (without permission or even acknowledging that she was being rude AF) so she could sit next to the bride for 5 minutes while the groom used the restroom (he, on the other hand, was very polite). What did they talk about for that 5 minutes? SCRIPTURE. Whyyyyyy.)

***

In the days leading up to my trip, I decided it was time to make something completely new to me: bread. While searching for Great British Bake Off cookbooks at the library, I stumbled across Paul Hollywood’s new cookbook, A Baker’s Life. Depending on your tastes, Paul Hollywood is either an attractive man or a creepy one. For some of us, he’s a little of column A and a little of column B.

Regardless of how you feel about Paul’s blue eyes or the cryptic looks he gives GBBO contestants, this is a beautiful cookbook. He writes about growing up the son of a baker, and includes lots of pictures from his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The book divides the recipes into sections, beginning with childhood favorites or uncomplicated bakes and then progresses into more and more involved recipes. Paul does a lot of explaining between chapters, which is always my jam. He says novice bread makers should start with soda breads and then go from there.

So, I started with his Caramelized Onion Soda Bread. Easy enough.

***

Have you ever caramelized onions before? Like, really caramelized them? It takes a hundred years.

Okay, maybe not that long. Maybe it takes an hour or so. I’ve always heard that actually caramelizing onions takes a long time, but when you’re actually caramelizing, you start to realize that maybe you should have started doing this much earlier in the day. Maybe you should have started this at a time when you’re not super hungry and maybe you shouldn’t have thought that you could also make a soup that needs at least 90 minutes to simmer tonight.

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Did you know that, when caramelizing onions, you throw in brown sugar at some point in the process? I didn’t. It’s magic. At Paul’s suggestion, I also threw in leaves from “two bushy sprigs of thyme.” Which, who knows what that means. I’m not Barefoot Contessa enough to just pluck two fresh sprigs of thyme out of my garden. Not yet, anyway.

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Cooking those onions slow and low, though, pays off. When the onions start to get soft and juicy and golden is when you start smiling and stop being upset with yourself for your errors in time management judgement. This shit is going to taste GREAT, you whisper to yourself.

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After the onions are done and cooling on a plate, you start your dough. It’s simple: two kinds of flours (plain white and whole wheat), baking soda, and buttermilk. Paul advises that you mix everything with your hands. He doesn’t tell you whether you should actually knead the dough or not? And he also doesn’t tell you if it’s possible to “overwerk” soda bread? I can’t remember the details of that particular episode of GBBO.

What I do remember is that you have to make the cuts in your dough fairly deep. Why? I can’t remember that part. I just remember that Mat the firefighter in season 3 didn’t make the cuts in his soda bread deep enough and he got schooled on it by Paul during the judging. I wasn’t about to make that same mistake.

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Paul says the soda bread should be ready in about 35 minutes. You should be able to tap the bottom of the loaf, and it should sound hollow. I made my cuts too deep maybe, and the loaf began to break in half when I tried to pick it up. When it did, I could see that it wasn’t baked through yet. Also, the bread was really hot, and I don’t have what Nigella Lawson calls “asbestos hands” yet.

I finally took the bread out after 50 minutes or so. I did what Mary and Paul do on GBBO, which is cut a slice out of the middle of the loaf and press a finger into it to feel the texture and see if it springs back.

So I did it, too. It didn’t spring back. The outline of my finger stayed molded into the bread.

I’m not quite sure what went wrong — did I put too much oil in with the caramelized onions? Was there just too much moisture from the onions in the bread? Did I not mix the onions into the dough well enough? Was my conversion of Paul’s Celsius oven temps to my shitty American Fahrenheit oven off? Did I overwork the dough?

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I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what happened to my soda bread. I do know, however, that despite it all, that bread was delish AF, and I ate at least two and a half slices while I was cooking soup and then ate another slice with my soup.

The caramelized onions have a deep, complex, savory sweetness that is unlike anything I’ve eaten before. Honestly, caramelize onions the right way whenever you get the chance — it’s worth it. You don’t have to put them in bread. You can put them on a burger, or eat them on their own if that’s your thing, or whatever. They’re incredibly delicious, and I’m converted.

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Though I’m home with my parents right now, stuffing myself with all kinds of good food (guess what this Friday’s bite is going to be ALL about), I miss that caramelized onion soda bread a little bit.

Okay, a lot.

This Week's Recipe: