January 5, 2025 Among the things we are grateful for this past year, my husband added this: those times when at least one child eats my cooking. Pleasing a single child is not so hard. Our eight year old son meets the dinner table with surprising flexibility. I ask which cross-section of the options I compile on an ordinary weeknight he would like on his plate, and he often replies, “Chef’s...
Empty. Full. Overflowing. The images these words convey are versatile and shifting. My kids head out the door to school and a prayer for the road calls on the love of God to so fill them that it spills out of their backpacks and touches everyone around them. The overflow of abundance, leading to generosity. Or the residue of family life dotted around the living room—the shoes and books that...
November 6, 2024 I pull nearly everything from the crisper out onto the counter, the staples you can munch mindlessly, raw, that I keep on hand for my best kid-hack, the ‘rainbow platter.’ The wilting scallions. The zucchini starting to go off. To this I add the pittance of vegetables I have grown and harvested myself, the last of the sweet peppers, the last of the onions planted 18 months...
January 14, 2023 I went hunting for ways to use up bananas that didn’t involve bread, and naturally found my way down a rabbit hole of puddings. I’m not southern, but I’ve lived around enough of them in DC to understand the value of a good banana pudding, and to know I wasn’t willing to work that hard. No buying Nilla wafers, no baking my own. I wanted something less than...
October 20, 2022 It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer west coast visit; a handful grew while we were away, and were, I’m assured, contendly...
Back From Vacation Soup Remove all passable contents of your fridge and stare at them. Wait for inspiration to strike. Put together whatever works for you. Or, to make what we ate, as described here, do as follows: Ingredients: “Just shy of 1lb” of carrots, peeled and trimmed and cut into large-ish pieces (don’t be precious; it is all getting pureed anyway)1 sweet potato, same treatment, to make...
August 26, 2022 In advance of vacation, we can look forward to the time away as a kind of salvation from the normal life that has grown to feel wearisome, like a burden. We’ll leave our boring normal life, and experience a taste of real life, something beautiful and thrilling. We’ll rest, we’ll adventure, we’ll get good instagram photos. But when vacation ends, real life is waiting, collecting a...
I can’t stop thinking about two very different kinds of violence. No one can avoid the war in Ukraine; it’s constantly on the news, on my feeds, on our minds. Is this Hitler invading Czechoslovakia, the first shot in a multi-year world war three? Is this going to end with massive nuclear slaughter? You don’t have to ask such big questions to feel upset about what seems like a groundless invasion...
January 7, 2022 My spiritual director tells me she thinks God is inviting me to make a cake. At the end of our session, we sit in silence together. You think that sounds awkward, try sitting in silence with someone over Zoom. But it doesn’t feel awkward to me, it feels like a reprieve: permission to stop taking care of people, to pause the inner swirl of problem-solving and risk-mitigating and...