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.