But there’s always unseasonable weather. What we think of the weather and behavior of life on this planet at any given season is really all a matter of statistical probabilities; at any given point, anything might happen. There is a bit of every season in each season. Green plants—deciduous green leaves—grow everywhere, all winter long, and small shoots come up pale and new in every season…everything overlaps smoothly or only a few weeks each season, and then it all tangles up again.

—Annie Dillard

August. Summer is two-thirds done and Hobby Lobby is full of pumpkins. The air in Kentucky is hot and wet and thick and heavy; my inbox is full of emails about school supplies, October, knit sweaters, and Thanksgiving plans.

Truthfully, I have never much cared for the month. There’s a throw-away quality to August that I don’t like; it feels like an oven that’s hot and full, crammed with things that are either cooking too fast or not fast enough. But this is the month my babygirl is due, so I reckon I should make peace with it and find some beauty while I’m at it.

As promised in my last newsletter, this is a brief look at the things I do every day, week, and month to create a sense of home in the season at hand.

These practices fall into one of seven categories: taste, humility, memory, communion, ritual, perseverance, and grace. They are the pillars that ground my domestic life and keep me from falling under the delusion that my daily choring is just a mundane set of hours I need to push through as quickly as possible.

Let me know your own August rhythms. This is a community bulletin; I, and others, read every helpful word you feel called to add in the comment section.

Taste // August aromatics

This summer, we experimented with the concept of having a house menu, a series of 5-6 staple dinners that we ate on rotation: grilled chicken, brats and/or hot dogs, chicken soup, pasta with tomatoes, burger bowls, and whatever new thing sounded good that week.

Aromatics are the ingredients that perfume and flavor a dish, and they change throughout the year: green onions, leeks, carrots, fresh herbs, tomatoes, peppers. Integrating seasonal aromatics into our house menu gave a sense of place to our homiest meals, making them fresh, novel, and full of summer flavor.

On a particular week, this has looked like…

Using carrots, zucchini, fresh tomatoes, a dash of white wine, ground pork, and spring onions for a quick and yummy summer pasta

Browning tomatillos (or green tomatoes) before making a standard chicken soup recipe

Grilling fresh tomatoes and zucchini on the grill or in a sheet pan with some chicken thighs and topping with fresh herbs

Humility // Intellectual Nesting

It’s an act of humility for me, an overthinker, to recognize that sometimes my mind does not need another challenge, puzzle, novelty, or literary notch on my belt. Sometimes it just needs to come home for a bit. August is a good time to do this because of the jumbled intensity of what lies behind and ahead.

In addition to reading this wonderful essay on prioritizing the intellectual life, there are three other things I’m doing to nest this month:

Read books that feel like home: Even just making a list of writers that feel like home can be cathartic work: Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Jane Austen, L.M. Montgomery, Teresa of Avila, and Mary Oliver. A few suggestions in a similar vein from some of my favorite Substackers are James Herriot, Sigrid Undset, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Goudge, and Claire Kegan. I prioritize these authors above any other reading, and I take my time with them.

Taking my ideas for a walk: Instead of writing and scribbling with a fury whenever an idea or thought hits me, I’ve started taking my ideas with me on a walk. Or I sit with them in quiet for a while. I enjoy not jumping at the first thought that strikes me as interesting or important. I try to think of having them over for tea and getting to know them before getting any serious work done.

When writing, imagine building a home instead of a case: When I do sit down to write, I imagine hosting someone in my home instead of arguing a point. How do I want my reader to feel when they enter the foyer (the first few sentences)? How do I appeal to their senses gradually so they are prepared for the main course? How do I get them to think of their life and experience while they’re with me? All these things put me in a more creative frame of mind. It also relieves me of the pressure I often feel to be “right” and moves me into the actual position I feel called to: one of offering beauty.

Memory // Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood

If you strip back Dillard’s childhood to the essentials, you do not get one that would sell well in a book proposal in 2026; born to a stable, upper-middle-class family that loves her, Dillard describes herself as all “untried courage”, blessed with a life that had given her no great losses or traumas.

There is no plot in this book but the surfacing of one brilliant little girl’s awareness. The extraordinariness of her life does not come down to the events that occurred but to the level of attention she brings to them.

Here Annie achieves a feat few memoirists do: the ability to expand a childhood memory with the intelligence of a more thoughtful adult mind, merging both mental states so that neither youthful innocence nor adult wisdom is lost. The effect this has on the reader is profound; I found my brain recalling the beauty and significance of some of my quietest, most contemplative moments as a child, moments I previously thought did not matter.

Here she reimagines the most ordinary place of all—the childhood bath—as the one place she scoops herself up with joy and recognition:

Whenever I stepped into the porcelain bathtub, the bath’s hot water sent a shock traveling up my bones. The skin on my arms pricked up, and the hair rose on the back of my skull. I saw my own firm foot press the tub, and the pale shadows hover over it, as if I were looking down from the sky and remembering this scene forever. The skin on my face tightened, as it had always done whenever I stepped into the tub, and remembering it all drew a swinging line, loops connecting the dots, all the way back. You again.

Communion // the neighborhood pound cake

There is something absolutely right and fitting about having a sweet treat on hand to offer others at all times. It brings me to my neighbor’s doorstep or coffee date with a small gift in hand.

Our communal dessert this year is the pound cake from Aran Goyaga’s Cannelle et Vanilla Bakes Simple. We had this thing with grilled peaches, yogurt, or plain from the pan. Every time I asked my husband what he wanted for dessert the coming week, he just looked at me and said, “well, you’re just gonna make the pound cake again, right?” And so I did.

I have been asked for the recipe for this cake more than almost anything I’ve ever made. The texture is moist and soft, while the taste is zippy, warm, and not too sweet. If you love gluten-free baking, I cannot recommend this enough. I will have you know that many a gluten lover has wanted the recipe too. The recipe for the pound cake alone is worth the price of admission.

Ritual // preserving summer flavors

If there’s one thing that brings dignity to the throwaway feeling of August, it is the act of preserving its flavors—by word, by picture, or by jar.

August, for all its faults, yields some of the best produce there is. Even if you aren’t much of a prepper or canner (I’m not), there is something to be gained by weekly making something from the earth that can be used when it all freezes over again.

My favorite recipe for a tomato sauce worth preserving and remembering is Samin Nosrat’s pomodoro recipe in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. There are also some wonderful treasures on the New York Times Cooking app. A good red sauce only needs some lovely ripe tomatoes, plenty of onion, good olive oil, and your loving attention. I never bother with seeding or blanching or taking off skins.

If the thought of heating something over the stove while it’s already hot as hell gives you pause, perhaps take extra care to write the smells, textures, colors, and tastes of August in whatever common book or journal you keep. I always try to write at least one or two of these things down a day.

Perseverance // finding a mantra for interruption

Teresa of Avila talks about how sometimes we can be so committed to the routine of something good, something as wholesome and unproblematic as prayer or meditation, that we sometimes miss when life, or, if you’re a believer, God, is up to something new.

When instructing her sisters on praying through internal distractions and external interruptions, she says this:

…the important thing is not to think much, but to love much; do then whatever most arouses you to love… do not imagine that the important thing is never to be thinking of anything else and that if your mind becomes slightly distracted all is lost.

It can be tempting to think of true perseverance as getting “back on track”, meaning getting back to whatever we initially thought the day was supposed to be. But sometimes true perseverance is knowing when the path and plan have changed, and God is calling for something different altogether. This is especially true in transitional months like August.

Having this mantra at the ready for interruptions—think less, love more—has become my anchor as I prepare for birth and a completely new season of life.

Grace // a life-saving list

A couple of weeks ago, I published a more tender piece about building family after many years of generational trauma. In the writing of this piece, I wrote a list of all the people who saved my life in a season when I’d turned to self-harm. I had to cut the list for pacing, but the physical practice of writing down everyone who saved me was one of the sweetest things I’ve done in a long time.

It reminded me how often people, books, and music have come into my life unbidden and unasked for, long before I knew how to look for them.

August can feel like a graceless time, a period of weeks in which there isn’t much margin for error, and no one’s coming to save you unless you booked their time 3 months in advance. Of course this is a lie but it can feel true unless left unchecked and unchallenged.

Maybe this month, for five or ten minutes, you make a list of the people who saved your life when you were in the middle of a divorce or after you miscarried. Maybe you make a list of the songs that brought you back from the brink of depression during postpartum months or during your most angsty teenage years. Maybe there’s a list of things you saw in nature after your mom died that reminded you of the resurrection.

Life is full of things that save us; seeing them on a list in one place is a special kind of grace.

Okay, now it’s your turn. What are you doing this August to bring you into the unique gift and joy and challenge of this month? We’re all ears.

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I was not the kind of girl people tell young men to marry. There was nothing nothing nothing I knew about food except that you ate it. The most feminine thing I did was overdraft at Anthropologie and Kowalski’s Deli. Though my version of loading the dishwasher made dishes dirtier or broken, being corrected on this point made me unreachable. Kids were out of the question and always would be.

By the age of four, I had adapted to the fact that there was such a thing as too much loving. The sexual abuse in my family and community had turned me into five different people, none of whom got along or knew how to do a pile of laundry without incident. My husband and I got married before any of this was resolved, when my personality was still in fragments and I was years away from becoming the type of woman mothers tell their sons to look for.

That I was married before I was marriageable material saved my life. As memories of my childhood worked their way to my conscious mind, I turned to self-harm. My husband’s face when he saw my arms was the single most sobering, life-saving look anyone had ever given me. For the first time in my life, I loved someone a fraction more than I hated myself.

I began to do everything people tell you to do to get well: find a therapist. Read books on trauma. Practice yoga. Eat healthy. Rest. Journal. Breath. Relax. Get a haircut. Go to church. Read the bible. Take a vacation. Repent. Forgive. Repeat.

But the facts of the day still had to be faced: laundry settings, dishes, vacuuming, errands, trash cans, marital tensions, and grocery lists. There was a dreary tension wending its way through these tasks, as if my house, though becoming more efficient, was still far from becoming a home. Something was missing. And no matter what I did, no matter how much I read or prayed or listened to my body or talked to my therapist or cooked or snarled less when corrected, I returned to a black and empty hole inside myself that ached, a hole that felt like it would never heal, a hole that would swallow me one day when I wasn’t looking.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a brief note on Substack about the Mormon cult documentary, Trust Me: The False Prophet. The movie follows the life of a self-proclaimed prophet in Utah who slowly gains the trust and leadership of his polygamist FLDS community. Over time, he gains twenty spiritual wives, one of them as young as nine years old.

The group is filmed by executive producer Christine Marie, a former Mormon and survivor. Over a series of weeks and months, she begins to embed herself into the community. Even when it becomes clear that some type of abuse is happening, she does not cause a scene or shame these women, some of whom have put their own children at risk. As time passes, it becomes clear to her that one of the wives is eager to talk. So Christine hangs around her house more. She sits with the wife on the porch (pictured below), offers to do lawn work, and performs other sundry tasks. At some point, the wife catches on and makes this statement: I could tell Christine was making herself available to me.

This availability turns the tide of the entire investigation, unlocking a trail of trafficking, violence, and abuse of minors. Multiple women and girls are freed, all because of one woman’s choice to be quietly and consistently available.

There were many such men and women in my life: Diana, Bill, Paul, Tracy, Spence, Olivia, Noelle, Mark, Jeannie, Brittany, Nina, Lisa, Eli, Cara, and, most of all, my husband. Most of them were not trauma-informed. They made themselves available to me in a variety of mundane ways, often for years on end and without a clue as to how much it meant: Thanksgiving dinner, Sunday coffee, movie nights, dance classes, and hours and hours of voice memos. They were not trying to be heroes or make a point; they were giving me the thing I’d been missing all along—a safe person to come home to should I ever need it.

Over time, this turned something over in me. After years of tending to the particulars of daily choring—dust bunnies beneath the bed, the brining of a roast chicken, and finally placing bowls face down in the dishwasher—I was being granted access to the underlying meaning of these rhythms. Perhaps home was not a destination after all, but an internal reality I could learn to cultivate. Perhaps these simple chores, far from being meaningless, empty drudgery, were teaching me how to attend to something deeper. This realization, paired with the people who lovingly exemplified it, began to ease the ache in my heart.

Something about being pregnant with a little girl has put me in touch with just how wonderful it was to feel so loved in those early days of healing. Bringing an apple pie and chocolate cake to Tracy’s house on Thanksgiving day and being treated like Joan of Arc. Watching Harry Potter and Charmed in my new husband’s arms and reading the letters he wrote to the small and broken parts of me. The hours and hours of voice notes sent back and forth with my best friend, Noelle. She listened, then listened again to my story, just because I needed to tell it one more time.

For years, good people took care of me without ever dropping the receipt detailing how much loving me had cost them. Because of them, one girl little exists who wouldn’t have had I been left to my own destructive devices. Their love, besides saving my own life, also created a safe place for another to be born.

Right now, the due date for babygirl is August 15th. I plan to post a couple more times before she comes, and then, after that, take a month or two off to rest and adjust to life with a newborn.

During that time, I’ll be doing some housekeeping on the future of this newsletter. While the tone and mission of this space will remain the same—to talk about home and the table in a way that helps people cultivate the healing of their inner world—I will be changing the format of how this is done. Instead of one very long essay per month, I’m going to be dividing that same thing into 2-3 smaller, more bite-sized pieces.

Here’s a snapshot of what I’m thinking:

1.) The Seasonal HomeBody Kit—a monthly list of the 7 things I do every day, week, and month to create a sense of home in season-specific ways. Think of it as a church bulletin with an invitation to share what you’re learning as well.

2.) The Personal Essay—same old same old: a (somewhat shorter) monthly account of something I’ve learned/am learning about the intersection of home, the table, and/or healing.

3.) Recipes—a monthly/bimonthly recipe of something physically, spiritually, and emotionally nourishing. These will be the briefest and most fun/practical.

My goal with this format is to start giving back some of what I’ve been so generously given and to lay the groundwork for a more cohesive community. Eventually, I’d love to include interviews of other homemakers and creatives, and one day have a space to meet in person and online. My end goal is watching you all meet each other over some of my sourdough bread with Normandy butter…

I would appreciate any prayers you can send me as I prepare for birth and motherhood. Please drop any last-minute tips and/or advice in the comments. I cherish writing for you and reading your writing as well. It’s easy to see the online world as one dark void; because of you, I’ve felt the opposite.

I hope that over time, this digital space begins to feel less like a newsletter and a little bit more like what a lot of us are secretly looking for when we go online: home.

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Photos by Tony Anderson

In the spring of 1997, my mom, dad, brother, sister, and I moved from a four-year missionary post in Istanbul, Turkey to the outskirts of St. Paul, Minnesota. That year we bought our very first home: a split-level, four-bedroom, two-bath with sage green siding, right off the highway leading to downtown.

Grandma Joan made me a calf-length beige jumper covered in tiny red apples to wear over a cream turtleneck with black Mary Janes. It was my first day of American public school. My earrings had red apples to match and my backpack too was red. When I got to the classroom, I realized that I dressed more like the teacher than the other children.

The teacher was a brunette woman in her early fifties. She had a vest for every season and dangly earrings that shook whenever she yelled at us. Her name was Mrs. Grammith and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen outside my mother.

Very quickly, the number of things I did not know piled up, the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance for starters. I’d never taken swimming lessons or heard a fire alarm before. When my friend Allie said that David McDonald wanted to go skinny dipping with me, my mind panned to those delectable American cookies dipped in frosting (Dunkaroos). I was smug with glee.

That first day, Mrs. Grammith shushed us all, saying that she wanted to introduce me to the class. Everyone was allowed to ask me a question. One child raised their hand and asked why we moved back to America.

“Because God told us to,” I said. And he had, or at least this is what my parents had told me.

Children stared, and Mrs. Grammith patted my knee sympathetically.

“I know what you mean, dear,” she said. Somehow I knew this only made it worse.

Living overseas as children had made us feel vague and unsettled, as if everything about us was still falling through mid-air, waiting to be caught by a pair of more capable hands. Being a missionary kid was like trying to explain color to the colorblind; it simply did not exist as a concept in anyone’s mind but ours.

The saving grace? I was growing up in the nineties, a time when life was simpler, quieter, forgiving, and home-like.

While people today store life’s memories on the cloud, my mama had every photo developed, spending whole days gluing, labeling, and embellishing each photo with stickers, borders, and colored paper. Every Friday night, families ordered pizza and headed to Blockbuster to grab a movie that featured the nuclear family in some way. Almost every movie had a beautiful, lived-in home as the anchor of the storyline. Practical Magic had the Owens’ estate, Little Women had Orchard House, Home Alone had the McCallister home, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had the Banks’ Mansion, and on and on and on.

The internet, photographs, movies, and basic information were not things you could pull up at any moment on a Tuesday while you waited at the dentist. You had to be patient. You had to plan for it. You felt the buildup. Everything had a time and a place, which made it feel all the more special.

The current nineties nostalgia is not just for better pizza huts or a lost sense of patriotism, but for containment, limits, and security. Just like my first day of school, the 2020s have heaved an impossible amount of information and technological/global change our way. It’s difficult to feel at home when everything’s shifting.

This is a list of the small, everyday moments that made the nineties, specifically around summertime, feel like home. And in case you didn’t grow up in the Lord’s favorite decade, this is the vibe we’re going for. Frankly, I care more that you watch this music video than that you finish this article.

The Computer Room: a home for the internet

Right above the garage of my childhood home was an old, fat, beige Apple computer, stuck on an antique desk overlooking the neighborhood cul-de-sac. Each of us got an email address—dance4him7@hotmail.com for me—and downloaded Oregon Trail.

Since then, the internet has crept into every facet of American life, guzzling up all that good attention, imagination, and daydreaming that felt so plentiful pre-smartphone. Our steps are counted, our journeys charted, and groceries delivered with no more than the tap of a thumb. Instead of feeling like a separate place, the internet now feels like a constant presence.

This summer, my husband and I moved back to the Burbs and discovered the same setup from my childhood: a small cream room nestled over the garage, with a window overlooking our quiet street. Right now it’s just stacks of books, a chair, a writing desk that broke during the move, and my laptop, but over time I hope to add a table, some bookshelves, and maybe even Oregon Trail.

Designing a home for the internet—a phrase I cannot take credit for as it has been popping up everywhere—has made other parts of my home feel more restful. I don’t have to have Safari, Substack, YouTube, or email on my phone anymore; there are one or two times a day when I check everything. The fact that it’s upstairs also helps: downstairs is for family time, cooking, evening TV, reading, journaling, and rest. Keeping the two things separate has restored a sense of peace and order to both places.

Jellies: a home for the feet

Back then, girls everywhere looked forward to having a very specific, sparkly home for their feet every summer. Jellies were like walking on a squishy, waterproof, breathable cloud. They trumped the god-awful crocs people wear. I have some from here and here.

The Analog Car: learning the landscape of home

I sat in a quiet, faded aquamarine Plymouth Town and Country for at least half my childhood, and not once did we have screens or internet. My parents, unencumbered by the belief that it was their job to entertain us, expected us to develop our own forms of fun. This meant that even when we were little, there were long stretches of absolute silence. I swore I could feel my leg bones growing.

Cut off from any possible mode of a digital escape, I memorized the landscape and began accepting the most real and true thing about me: I was a Minnesotan, a place of baked grass, cornfields, Amoco gas stations, pine, and rock. I pressed the rim of my thumbnail into the underside creases of my fingers to a rhythm only I could hear. I felt every tar-covered crack in the road hiccup beneath us. I smelled burnt rubber and waited. For what I’m not exactly sure. Talk of end times was big those days, so probably I was waiting for Jesus to come back. A deer running into the road would have been nice. Or maybe Bill Clinton would have another affair and set my conservative parents talking. These seemed the best possible outcomes.

Of course, now I’m hoping for the opposite; I look forward to the drives where nothing happens and no one calls. The car has become the place where I do not force my mind into any direction except the road that I’m on.

Burned CD’s and mixtapes: a home for memory

There are entire seasons of my life that are remembered by the CD’s and cassettes my friends and I made each other: Dixie Chicks, Brittney Spears, Destiny’s Child, Shania Twain, N*Sync, Faith Hill, Celine Dion, and, if you were an evangelical child like myself, Reliant K, Jars of Clay, Twila Paris, Rich Mullins, and SonicFlood.

Because you could only listen to whatever was on that particular CD, certain artists and songs wove themselves into the fabric of memory, becoming a part of who you were and that specific time in your life.

In case you don’t have time to build a playlist, I’ve got a starter pack for you. I play these when I’ve had enough of a quiet car, or while I’m cooking or getting ready in the morning. I listen to these playlists over and over again, and exclusively during summer. Next year, when I listen to these playlists, I will think of the summer of ’26, the months when my husband and I moved back to Kentucky, began renovating our home, and got ready to welcome our baby girl.

Americana

The 90’s Saved My Life

Cowboy Summer

Salad Dressing: a home for vegetables

The nineties were the golden age of packaged food: Little Debbies, Poptarts, Bagel Bites, Fish Sticks, Eggo Waffles, Uncrustables, Doritos, Zebra Cakes, and Kool-Aid. I never had an actual glass of water for ten long years.

But we did have salad. Mostly iceberg or some limp mixed greens from a bag. Every household had an assortment of the same salad dressings—mostly Hidden Valley: ranch, French, Thousand Island, Italian, blue cheese, and Catalina. Each of us had our own proprietary blend, something we only shared with the closest of friends.

My old standby for dressings is this Homemade Ranch, which my husband has told me I could sell for lots of money (imagine that!). But my favorite dressing for summer is a simplified version of Samin Nosrat’s lemon poppyseed from her cookbook Good Things.

Add a little Bruce Hornsby, some jellies, and a long drive in the evening with no news, no podcasts, and no absolutely no TikTok, and you’ve got yourself a little slice of heaven.

Lemon Poppyseed Dressing (adapted from Samin Nosrat’s Creamy Lemon-Miso Dressing)

1 cup mayo (I love Graza’s extra virgin olive oil mayo—it is divine and has a great neutral flavor)

1 Tablespoon dijon mustard

4 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar

Zest of 1 lemon

1/4 cup of lemon juice

2 garlic cloves, finely minced or crushed (I use a mortar and pestle for this)

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 Tablespoons poppy seeds

Special Tools

Mortar & Pestle

Technique

Macerate garlic // Pound or mince 2 garlic cloves in a mortar and pestle until paste-like, with no chunks remaining. Add 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice to the garlic. Allow garlic to sit in acid for 10-15 minutes. This process is called maceration and removes some of the harsh taste of the garlic.

Mix + Taste // Add all other ingredients to the garlic and lemon juice. Stir and taste. Adjust seasoning as needed.

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“Why do you think women love dessert so much?”

We were at our favorite restaurant in Paris, watching les Américains. The woman my husband was referring to was a stuffy, stoic type, a figure of tight lips, stiff limbs, and stormy eyes. She sat as if awaiting the arrival of something truly impressive, emotions kept close to her chest like money to be spent on the exact right thing. If the New York Times had an avatar, it would have been this woman.

The waitress, our friend Lan, came over to ask about dessert. At that single word, the woman produced her first smile. Lan offered a digestif to go with her mille-feuille, and the woman clasped her hands beneath her chin and shivered with pleasure. The change was remarkable.

I watched the woman and thought of myself.

“I think all women need something to look forward to at the end of the day,” I said. “A chocolate, a smutty book, a junky but engaging show, some vitamin D….”

Tony chuckled.

“Really I think it’s just the vitamin D,” I said. “I think what women really want is sex, but we settle for sugar or smut because it’s easier and there’s no rejection baked in. Then we need more and more of it to be happy until it dulls our senses and makes us unsatisfied with our bodies. We just stop wanting sex at all after that.”

“You should write about that,” Tony said.

“I don’t think I can. It would offend people.”

“Everything good is offensive,” he said, as if that sealed the deal. As if that was that. I looked down at my dessert, ponderous.

Years ago, a glut of highly sexualized books began hitting the top of many female influencers’ book lists.

The trend peaked in 2020, when podcasts and booktok were both on the rise. I took several recommendations from popular podcast hosts, having no idea what I was about to find. Around 40% of what was recommended was literary pornography, all with the same basic premise: an average, misunderstood girl gets the attention of a hyper-masculine male who is so attracted to her that he can barely restrain himself. The books were charged with the kind of sexual tension that only exists in porn. They presented a version of people, especially of men, that resembled masculinity the way ketchup resembles a homegrown heirloom tomato.

Around this time, reports began detailing that sexlessness was rising across all demographics, with Gen Z becoming the least sexually active generation in modern history. People were watching, reading, and posting more porn than ever, and they were also having less and less sex. Like the woman at the restaurant, an entire generation was being groomed to sit back, relax, and wait for their orgasm to come to them.

The alarm bells were swift and mighty. Some blamed the sexual revolution. Men were up in arms about how unfair the double standard was: so men couldn’t watch porn without being judged, but women could read it and be unscathed? There was much hand-wringing and highfalutin theological language from the Christians. The general tone was heady, bordering on hysterical.

Meanwhile, I wondered how much practical good this would do for the one person I knew who really needed it: me.

For most of my teen years, I vacillated between feeling completely sexually inert and stuck in a cycle of masturbation and sexual fantasies I saw on TV or read about in the small amount of smut I found at the library. It wasn’t much but it was enough. My young mind blossomed with all the steamy scenarios and expectations my parents tried their damndest to protect me from.

The shame I felt about my thought life was unbearable. All I knew about sex from my years as a Southern Baptist was that it was wrong to have it pre-vows. Plus my pastor declared that serving the homeless had a much more soporific effect than masturbating. So one day I vowed to never pleasure myself again or read anything remotely sexy in the form of the written word. For kicks, I pledged to become an impoverished single missionary in India (or Saudi Arabia, depending on the mood). An overcorrection if ever there was one. But the underlying longing, the one for connection, love, beauty, and physical pleasure, remained completely intact and unabsolved.

So my addictive tendency graduated to sugar. I never saw it that way at the time, but that is exactly how it happened. Once I left home, I began eating whatever I pleased. I had one, often two, sugary lattes from a Starbucks beneath the Target corporate offices where I worked. This was after drinking my coffee with hazelnut creamer and eating packaged oatmeal with cinnamon sugar (something I only ate if I didn’t stop to get a blueberry pancake-glazed donut at the gas station). In the afternoons, I dove for the iced lemon loaf sitting like baked sunshine behind the glass window. Every night before I dropped off to bed, I had whiskey. Sometimes a lot.

I rode that sugar wave for years. Never had sex. Didn’t even kiss someone till I met my husband. My libido was dormant for most of my early twenties—the result of a metabolism that had been hijacked by sugar, shame, and processed food. Any remnant of sensual desire, even the desire to be touched kindly and platonically by a friend, was masked or replaced by the immediate rush of warmth certain foods and drinks gave me.

Then one day I fell in love. I wish there were a more elegant way to say it, but that is exactly what happened. To make matters worse, I fell in love with the opposite of what I’d fantasized about. I had hoped Mr. Right would be a hot, sexually dominant Mr. Darcy type, quietly undressing me with his eyes and never saying more than a word or two in the process. To this day I’m not sure my husband even knows who that is.

The guy I fell for was more like a character from Napoleon Dynamite than a Jane Austen novel. He was boisterous, gregarious, and liked to talk very fast and never on socially acceptable topics. His opinions were politically incorrect. His body type? Well it can only be described as mine was then: soft, pliant, and very comfortable to lean on. I was smitten. I could not believe how instantly and totally I loved him. No one understood it, least of all me.

We got married and started having sex (in that order, believe it or not). Having sex for the first time was just like falling into an ocean without any edges: full of unexpected warm and cold spots; bursting with salty smells and tastes; and undulating with unforeseen currents. I did not recognize any of what I’d fantasized about as a girl in my sex life as a married woman. Increasingly, I could barely recognize myself. In time, I was beset with the oldest of womanly predilections: I wanted to cook for this man I loved.

The only other place I had to be so physically involved and alert was the bedroom. At the stove, I caressed, tasted, inhaled, licked, and checked the oven for the moment things gave themselves over to one another and became one. The kitchen flowed with oils, juices, smells, and skin-prickling heat. It was the single most formative sexual education of my life.

I made chicken the most in those early days of lovemaking. I learned that you cannot set and forget a roast chicken if you want the thing to cook well. There are signs in the cooking of a roast chicken that the bird is coming along: cold, thick goose flesh softens, goes lax, and then hardens and crisps up. The muscle becomes succulent, its juices running clear when pierced. The sound of sizzling fills the air as the bird loses its paleness in favor of bronze. A buoyancy remains to the best cooked bird, the kind that can never be timed, only tested with a very practiced index finger.

I brushed up against these revelations for some time before realizing I was learning to do the same thing with my husband; watching for signs of arousal, satisfaction, comfort, and connection in his body. There were looks on his face, ones belonging to him alone, that told me when he felt pleasure. While there were patterns to these signals, every day was also different and required a different form of attention and affection.

Before I knew it, the pleasure of cooking and making love was not just in the tastes, smells, and orgasms: it was in the process of self-giving, of handing myself over completely and finally to something (or someone) I loved. The binges on sugar, smut, and shame were never knowingly cut off, just replaced by a person, a place, and a feeling I’d been waiting for all my life: the feeling of being spent but never used.

Photos by Bethany Schrock

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Somewhere between Vegas and Moab, my husband and I drove across a stretch of land so wide and flat that I could spot the shadows the clouds cast like wet spots on the earth. Over tufts of grass and sage-green brush, the terracotta flats and plateaus gave way to snow-capped mountains. I watched the changing landscape flick through the car window, thinking I could do this for twelve more years and not get bored.

Without turning, I said to my husband, “It feels like I haven’t been present all year.”

We were in the process of moving across the country while pregnant with our first, meaning we were either perpetually in the past (saying goodbye to a life I loved in L.A.) or in the future (planning a move, a birth, renovations for a new home, and finding a rental in Kentucky).

It felt like I had fallen into a river with an unpredictable current. I’d been watching this river from the shore for years, wondering. What would it be like to become a mother? To own land? To have a home with a garden, a barn, a horse fence, and a riding lawn mower? Now that I was in the current, some part of me wanted to crawl back on dry land, just to feel something familiar.

Truth was, I had been present all along; I just hadn’t expected it to feel like drowning.

For a week and a half, we drove across California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and, at long last, Kentucky. Then the grueling process of unpacking everything we’d just carefully stowed a couple of weeks prior. I do think one of the rings of hell is packing, unpacking, and then repacking everything the very next day, never to arrive at anywhere in particular.

For seven years in L.A., I had relied on a certain kind of routine to keep me grounded throughout the day: the backyard garden, my morning matcha, the farmer’s market, and seeing our neighbors get out of their cars at the end of the day. I had a general sense of what each day would hold, and it was this very predictability, not any real virtue, that was helping me stay present. Once it was gone, I floundered.

I’ve encountered four internal blocks to being present while my world is upside down. I hope naming them out loud helps you as much as it did me.

Block #1: Everything needs to be in order before I become present

As I’ve said in other places, this time last year we miscarried. For the next six months, I was almost always on the outskirts of my body, planning my emotional response in case the next pregnancy test came back negative or in the event that I did get pregnant but lost another little one.

Of course, I did all the health things to curb my anxiety: I took vitamins and supplements, drank only purified water, never ate carbs without protein, fiber, and fat, and rarely missed a workout. For God’s sake, I saved my virginity for marriage, never did drugs, and still read my Bible faithfully! But in the months that followed the miscarriage, none of that mattered. I coped with the loss of our baby by adding more stuff to my routine: sunlight, cold plunges, saunas, phospholipids, colostrum, electrolytes, and on and on and on.

Somewhere in that sixth month, it hit me just how tired I was of being good. So I went out for champagne and oysters in the middle of the day. I swallowed none of my vitamins and bought some pants, two belts, and a big soft grey sweater that felt like a hug. Then I came back to smoke cigarettes while the sun set. That first drag released something tight in my chest: the truth of how disappointed I was spun up from my gut like a razor blade and my mind expanded with forbidden prayers.

If you don’t give me a baby, then you better make me the best freaking memoirist of my generation, I said out loud to God (except I didn’t say freaking). I told Him that if he didn’t make my husband a daddy, then he owed that man a hundred million dollars. Not a penny less. I counted the assholes in my life who had kids easily (a lot) and then smiled (smiled!) at the thought that maybe I’d spend less time in purgatory than them. So, really chill and humble and holy-like.

Nothing in that moment was solved, except for this: for one precious moment, I was relieved of the feeling that life was a test that I was constantly failing. The Lord did not need me to be something I wasn’t in that moment—a sane or pious person—He just needed me to be Brooke in the backyard, smoking and wanting a baby.

Block #2: Being present starts with morning pages (or some other extensive superstitious ritual)

I am convinced that one of the things that has derailed my generation’s creativity is the obsession with starting perfectly, or, for me, morning pages. Morning pages is the concept of writing a daily stream of consciousness. The idea first appeared in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, and it has endured in its popularity among artists. The idea is to begin each day by writing three pages of whatever comes to mind. You can talk about how jealous you are of Marilynne Robinson (me) or your secret nose-picking habit. Whatever comes to you in that moment goes onto the page. It takes about thirty minutes and can feel quite cathartic.

I did this practice for a while until I went back over pages and pages of emotionally-charged drivel and wondered why I hadn’t made better records of my first trip to the Santa Monica farmer’s market, or the death of my mother-in-law, or the way that first California blueberry exploded in my mouth. The practice hadn’t actually helped me become more present; it had only made me more inward and obsessed with having a superstitious morning, like I couldn’t start my life until I did this one particular thing.

Instead, a couple of years ago, I started writing five things every day (or every couple of days) that I wanted to remember. These were moments where I felt truly alive, and they did not have to be positive to make the cut. Once, I wrote about the car crash that happened five hundred feet from my house. The crunched-up pile of metal held four teens recently escaped from rehab, and I sat there with them until their sponsors came. Through bloodshot eyes, they all swore to me that they were not high.

The brevity of this practice keeps me consistent. If I only have five minutes at the end of the day, the practice still works; I write down what I ate, the weather, any significant happenings, and one tender detail about my family and/or friends. The point is not to complete an elaborate ritual but to be present with my day for however long I have.

Block #3: Being present is a solo endeavor

Two weeks before our move to Kentucky, we had two rental properties fall through. We needed a place to stay while the heftier renovations to our farm were happening, and nothing remotely appealing had surfaced. In short, the movers were coming in 14 days, and we had nowhere to live.

I imagined floating from one Airbnb to another while trying to care for a newborn. Images of living out of a suitcase for a whole year coalesced with sleepless nights and endless work on our new farm. This was not how I wanted to become a mom or a homeowner. The to-do list of what must happen before the baby eclipsed my personal capacity to get all done—and I knew it.

Then I felt it: a little internal nudge to write two lists: one was all the stuff that only I could do (carry my child, nourish my body, love my husband) and the rest was stuff everyone else in my life could do or help me do (plan a baby shower, clean the house, monitor renovations, unpack boxes, make a registry, prepare for birth, etc).

The list of stuff only I could do was tiny (maybe four things long), but the list of what my community could help me with stretched on and on and on. Once I made that list of everything people could help me with, I felt like I could breathe again.

Need opens up channels of connection that appear in no other way. If our rental hadn’t fallen through and the movers hadn’t been very late with our stuff, then I never would have stayed with my dear friend, Sus, for a week and a half while she was also pregnant. If I’d had time to plan out everything on my registry, I wouldn’t be having half the conversations I’m having with the women I love right now. In short, I might be more prepared, but I’d also be a lot less connected.

Block #4: Being present requires or begets a certain lifestyle (re: rural, quiet, safe)

For the past seven years, I have lived in a very gritty part of Los Angeles. We’ve had our home burglarized, and my husband even had a gun pulled on him. A woman down the street was assaulted in broad daylight, and another woman was almost abducted while I was walking just a hundred yards away. A guy down the block was shot just for asking someone in a parked car to turn their music down. One week, all the vehicles on our street were keyed by a machete. There were times I was followed weekly; sometimes by a homeless person tweaking on meth, and other times by a young gang member who needed to shout about the virtues of my butt (which is, in truth, quite wonderful).

One of the things we are loath to realize here in the West is that there is a very real cost to being present, especially in a world that is increasingly disconnected and hostile. When I stopped listening to podcasts and audiobooks on my walks, I felt a lot more aware of how dangerous my neighborhood was. I heard the gunshots and felt the tremors in my body as the helicopters swarmed. Everyone around me was choosing to be absorbed in their phone instead of engaging with their neighbors. Being present actually made me feel more lonely, not less. This realization made me begin to rethink my life and whether or not I truly wanted to stay in L.A. long term: a process that was years-long and sometimes agonizing.

The truth is that you don’t learn how to live by extensively planning your experience ahead of time, any more than you learn how to surf by watching waves from the shoreline. There are days when the waves of this life have crushed my bones, and others where they’ve lifted me higher than I’ve ever gone before. The point is not to be prepared or have a routine to execute every moment to perfection; the point has always been to get in the water and live.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

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December. The city air is cool and fresh from leftover rain. I have locked myself out of the house in my preoccupation with the familiar bodily symptoms: nausea, hunger, and breasts as hard and heavy as melons. I sit down on the steps to our kitchen and grab the box of corn someone gifted us. I check the delivery time of the pregnancy test, try to pray, fail, then shuck 12 cobs of corn, flicking off brown worms and enjoying the wet crack of the husk being peeled from the cob. I sweep away tendrils of corn silk and worry. An hour later, the door opens behind me.

“Morning babu,” my husband says. The test is now clutched in my right hand.

Silently, I march to the bathroom, shut the door, pee in the cup, plunge the stick in, and wait. Two versions of my life, each twelve hundred light-years apart, skip through the field of my mind as I stand there, hands folded, stomach clenched, eyes trained to the yellowing ceiling to avoid peeking.

A scream rises in my throat when I finally look down to see that blessed word. I run to the kitchen. My husband is making coffee and frowning at his phone. Is this a good time? I wonder. Doesn’t matter. I sweep the test beneath him.

“Babu!” he sings, and then he squeezes me so tight my heart leaps into my throat. I squeeze back, praying for the strength to be this happy again.

A month and a half later, I am in Beverly Hills, looking for a new bra and pair of pants to accommodate my swollen belly. I am nine weeks pregnant and no longer burying my face in a pillow to avoid the smell of cooking meat on the other side of the house. I have peed on a closed toilet seat only once. Sprite tastes like Bordeaux, and tears have been shed while listening to Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass. Tony calls from Kentucky to say he’s found us a house.

“It’s just outside of Lexington, surrounded by horse farms,” he says, describing an old home with four bedrooms built in the 1800s and tucked into 10 acres of country. There is a 300-year-old cabin and a small cemetery where Revolutionary War veterans are buried. It’s a few miles from some of our favorite people in the world.

I think I can’t be any happier than I already am until I comb through photos of rolling hills, a beautiful wooden banister, timber as old as this country, and a long driveway bordered by fences, pastures, and trees. It’s a lot of work, we both say seriously to one another, as if we’re discussing an exorbitantly priced dog and not everything we’ve ever wanted. It’s the kind of home where you raise kids, host all-night parties, take care of chickens, gather friends from afar, and shelter aging parents. It is large enough for a big, fat, juicy life and then some. We put in an offer; they accept it within the hour.

In the beginning of March, we flew to Kentucky to close on the house. An hour and a half before we signed the documents saying the home is ours, I sat on a damp log, looking out over the gentle slope of a hill that will be our front yard. Daffodils are budding in patches on the lawn, pale yellow buds drooping on the slender necks of stems.

My eyes settle on the horizon where a white house with turquoise shutters sits. My hand flutters to the smooth mound of skin that is my belly, waiting for my little girl to kick against my palm for the first time.

I imagine her tumbling down the hill and running back up to my arms; she is carrying eggs from the henhouse and dropping them as she goes, or she’s toddling to the cabin to watch her daddy make music, yelling back to me that she wants to marry him someday. I can see her walking down the staircase in a powder-blue prom dress, fingers skimming the banister, or driving up the hill for Christmas with her first boyfriend. I see it all as if it has already happened, and am bowled over with wave after wave of unrelenting joy. There is a sense that my whole life has led up to this moment and that I am just beginning the sweetest chapter of my life. It leaves me breathless, fragile, weary, and disoriented, as if I have just summited a mountain and seen the top of the world for the very first time.

Eleven years ago, if you had asked me if I believed in happy endings, I would have said absolutely yes. I was about to walk down the aisle to marry the funniest, most adorable man I’d ever met, and looked positively ravishing in my wedding dress. Nothing could disrupt my love, which was incorruptible.

Six years later, I was unravelling a knot of unprocessed childhood trauma; my mother-in-law had just died, and my husband’s companionable joy was, understandably, dormant. Ten people we loved left L.A. during the pandemic. Even our cat had the audacity to die on us. Concerning the matter of happy endings, I’d have said then, very truthfully, “I don’t know.”

Because of this, I’m fairly confident in my ability to walk with my daughter through pain and disappointment, and a little less so about my capacity to walk with her through joy. Joy makes me want to jump out of my skin and reach for a more comfortable tonic like anxiety.

What will I say, for example, when she comes home lovesick for the very first time, or charged with the need to dance, sing, or, God forbid, write? Will I do what dozens of other well-meaning, secretly unhappy women did when they saw me on the precipice of happiness and warned me of the perils of hope, the dangers of joy. Don’t get too attached, they said, or Just you wait till (fill-in-the-blank) happens; life isn’t all sunshine and roses.

Except that sometimes it is. Sometimes, as Catherine Shannon recently intimated, life is so sweet it hurts. And I wish someone had prepared me for this as thoroughly as they tried to prepare me for disappointment.

These 20 weeks of carrying my daughter and buying our first house have split me open with joy. The afternoon I heard her heartbeat for the first time in the doctor’s office, Tony took an audio sample of the rapid thumping, and we listened to that damn thing morning, noon, and night. We sent it to all our friends, who were kind enough to pretend they cared. I marveled at the cornucopia of fruits illustrating my baby’s impossible size in utero: cherry, kumquat, lime, fig, lemon, peach, orange, avocado, mango, banana. The neighbor kids pressed their tiny hands to my belly and whispered secrets to her, glancing up at me to ask when she’d be as big as a watermelon.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, but roses do grow from even the deepest cracks of loss.

When she’s old enough, I’ll show my daughter pictures of the giant rose bush that grew over where her sister, Blueberry Norah, is buried. Blueberry never got much bigger than a cherry— but our love for her felt as big as a mountain. And just a handful of months later, this precious life came—one who could never be unless the other had passed.

Beneath the shadow of God’s wing, I’ll tell my girl, death is but a temporary, fleeting thing. But joy? That shit goes on and on and on and on. In the event that you live happily ever after, I’ll say, I hope you drink it in; I hope you let it lead you home.

If all else fails, I’ll make her these muffins, which were one of the most frequent things we ate during the first half of pregnancy. They became a way of making our intensely new, busy, and happy season feel routine, homey, and ours.

These muffins are best served hot in the morning with some coffee, bacon, and eggs. They are forgiving, adaptable, and rich with the fat of butter and creme fraîche. You do not need to be in a season of abundance to enjoy them, but I will warn you that making them may make you feel like you are very rich indeed.

Blueberry Corn Muffins (slightly adapted from Melissa Clark’s Rich and Buttery Corn Muffins)

12 big muffins

Special Tools

Muffin tin

Ingredients

1 cup / 225 grams salted butter (2 sticks), melted and cooled

Olive oil for greasing pan

2 cups / 240 grams coarse or stone-ground cornmeal

1½ cups / 190 grams gluten-free flour, or a mix of brown rice flour and almond meal

1/2 cup / 120 grams brown sugar

1½ tablespoons baking powder

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

¼ teaspoon baking soda

1 cup / 240 milliliters creme fraîche or sour cream or whole-milk Greek yogurt

½ cup / 120 milliliters whole milk

2 eggs

2 cups fresh blueberries

Technique

Preheat oven, prep muffin tin, and melt butter // Heat oven to 400 degrees, and generously oil the cups of a muffin tin. While oven is heating, melt both sticks of butter on medium-low heat.

Mix dry ingredients // In a large bowl, whisk together 2 cups cornmeal, 1.5 cups gluten-free flour, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1.5 tablespoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon baking soda.

Mix wet ingredients // In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted butter, 1 cup creme fraîche, 1/2 cup milk, and 2 eggs. Mix wet and dry ingredients together and then fold in the blueberries. Fill the muffin tin with batter (it will feel very full).

Bake // Bake muffins 20-25 minutes, or until the edges are bronze and a knife comes out clean. Serve with eggs, bacon, and very hot black coffee.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

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Three years ago, I was approached by a chief editor at a magazine I deeply admire. We followed one another on Instagram and often fell into conversations on Botox and how it was sweeping our little corner of the world (Los Angeles). She asked if I would contribute an op-ed with my thoughts on the growing trend. I told her I already had one.

I was wild about the opportunity to write for this woman; finally, I’d found an ally —a champion even—of women being on the list of things that improve with time. Things like laugh lines, Bourdeaux, and a seasoned cast-iron skillet. Day and night, I charted the course for this article, imagining her response, which would mirror my own exuberance. At some point in the editing process, the conversation became pedantic. She wanted me to change the phrase surgically altered to the phrase surgically enhanced. Instead of focusing on the immense number of women opting into these procedures, she wanted me to shift blame onto the predatory nature of the cosmetic industry. I wrote in my screed that I wanted to live in a world where we were all content to die with our normal faces instead of having skin stretched like the hide of a drum, a desire she deigned as “heady and judgmental.” Fair point.

When I pushed back, the editor confessed that while she personally agreed with the sharpness of my critique, the board of the magazine was full of women who had Botox, filler, and breast implants. She was afraid of hurting feelings and alienating her readers. She knew that what I wrote would do a little bit of both. After some spirited exchanges on what to do about the piece, I decided to pull it. The article dropped back into the recesses of a file titled: “In process” where it has lived until today.

Sometimes, a creative piece will ask to lie fallow for a while. To rest, and dare I say, age. So I used this time to await further instructions on what to do with it next, and I kept the piece alive by talking about it constantly. I discussed cosmetic procedures and their growing popularity with women in every corner of L.A. Nine out of ten women already had something done to cosmetically alter their appearance, and seemed relieved to be talking about it. I felt like the confessor of suburbanite women who had done things she felt wrong about and yet enjoyed for the result. It left me living out my brief but fleeting fantasy of a career choice that I had become a nun.

In a swift polling of most rooms I was in while discussing this topic, I remained among the lonely one or two abstainers whose face had never been pumped with hyaluronic acid. It was not self-congratulatory to learn this, but a sign of the times. The only other abstainer confessed to me that she was planning on getting Botox for the first time in a couple of months.

Youth is wasted on the young. None of these women, neither famous nor rich, had even begun to age. They were talented, creative, and gorgeous, spanning every ethnic, economic, and religious background. And all shared a common thread: they were stubbornly insistent on never falling off that cliff where their cheeks lost volume or their breasts sagged. There is always a litany of justifications women have for it, a list of things they say to assure me, and probably themselves, that they have not crossed the invisible line:

I really just want to look natural, and then I’ll stop

I still want to age gracefully

No one can even tell, so why not?

You can’t judge me because you’re gonna get it too one day

The flippancy of these excuses still amazes me. The notion that stress, experience lines, and the exercise your brow gets from developing mirroring neurons in your baby should all slide off your face like softened butter is remarkably naive. It is not normal to paralyze the microexpressions of the face. This is a rift in the social fabric of what it means to be human. It is not gracious to limit and anesthetize smile lines. It is not cosmetic improvement to steam out the wrinkles and patina of craftsmanship on a woman’s face when one would never dream of doing this to something far less valuable, i.e., a pair of good leather gloves or a favorite purse. When we bend the laws of nature too far, we cannot help but distort reality for vast swathes of women who feel that there is no other higher good than looking 25 at 52, because they do not see the alternative anymore.

Nothing has taught me more about the benefits of aging than food. Just like the face of a woman, certain foods deepen their expressions over time. My nine-year-old sourdough starter is nutty, sweet, and malty after years of care. The five-year-old aged cheddar sitting in my fridge far outperforms a vacuum-sealed tube of string cheese produced a month ago. And then there is the wine in my cellar, which at this very moment is eleven years into its mellowing and aging process.

Three stages define the life of a wine: the crush, fermentation, and maturation. Once the crushed grapes’ sugars have converted to alcohol during fermentation, the aging process begins; first in the barrel, then in the bottle. At this stage, the wine is still raw—more like juice than anything else. In aged oak barrels, the wine gains woody, vanilla, and clove notes. The oxygen burns off some of the wine’s astringency— that sharp, bitter taste that puckers the back of the mouth. Not unlike the transition from teenage years to adulthood, the wine becomes less angry and acerbic. Molecules forming the wine’s original aromatic composition break down and begin to form deeper, more subdued fruit expressions.

Once bottled, the oxidative process slows down but continues; month by month, minute by minute, evolving. Color shifts from cherry to rust and then to blood-red. In his masterpiece, On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee says that the exact chemical process that changes an aged wine is still mysterious. But one thing is constant: the wine is ever changing.

While a high-quality wine will keep and give joy at any stage of its life, the best bottles get better and more complex the longer they sit. Never in my life have I heard of a winemaker freezing a good vintage simply because he liked it best then and wanted it to last. The result would be catastrophic. A wine lover knows that the best thing to do when a vintage is at its peak is to taste it, to savor the flavors, and share the bottle with loved ones.

Aging can have the extravagance of good wine if we do not artificially disrupt it, but it does not always mean that this process will feel welcome. Sometimes, as with a great old vintage, there is a high cost to pay.

One day, in my early thirties, I saw, with a sensation like falling off a cliff, that my face had begun to change. I looked at pictures of myself on my wedding day, smooth-faced, tan, and impossibly thin, and thought, “Where the hell did she go?” My twenties— lauded as the most fertile, beautiful, and energetic years of a woman’s life—were over. I had spent them trying to heal from the trauma of a childhood I had never asked for. That my reward was now a weathered, aging face seemed like a sick joke.

I began researching Botox and filler regimens around this time, and my husband said, I wish you wouldn’t. So I dyed my hair to the color it was when I was young and sexy. I drank collagen. I bought a box of wrinkle patches that did not actually remove any of my forehead lines. I tried pilates and daily assessed my flaws for more obvious signs of decay.

Then one day, I was thirty-five. Then thirty-six. Now thirty-seven. I opened the window in my bathroom one cool spring morning, my face settling into well-worn cracks in a seemingly overnight phenomenon skin experts call “a loss of volume.” There were faint crow’s feet, forehead wrinkles, and marionette lines. My cheeks were less buoyant, the skin on my stomach more tired. My hair had gone back to its natural mousy brown flecked with silver. The wrinkle patches had blurred the harsh lines, but none were erased. And I felt something that surprised me: relief.

Then, I revisited pictures of my changing face; my joy had more ferocity, my laughter more depth. There was a juicy, gritty look to my smile. My facial expressions had a ring of authenticity about them, elegance, and mirth with the deepening of each feature. Was my skin smoother and tighter when I was younger? That it was. But it was also blander then. There was no solemnity to my pain, no bending arc to my laughter, or foreknowledge in my smile. When you step into the presence of a being who has lived, their whole countenance tells it. That, to me, is timeless.

Edits by Lauren Ruef, who cannot be thanked enough for making this piece truly sing

Pictures by Tony Anderson

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When I was still newly married, I had this awful idea to never cook the same thing twice. I believed that if it came too easily to me, then it “didn’t count.” So I made coq au vin, blanquette de veau, chicken supreme, and tiny pots of creme brûlée that required the work of a blow torch and a water bath. Sometimes I slept with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking underneath my pillow.

Then one day, I brought home a single box of Annie’s Mac-n-Cheese. I had a fond memory of cooking it with one of my childhood friends and wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered. The noodles clanked into the pot, then bulged and softened in the boiling water. I strained and set aside the pasta, bringing the empty pot back to the hob. Butter hissed and foamed across my copper pot; the packaged cheese and tablespoon of milk clumped and then smoothed into a velvety roux.

I brought the plate to my hungry husband and set it down, watching him. The look on his face while he ate was one of dawning recognition, like I’d just returned something lost and very beloved to him. It was a look, I realized, he’d never had at dinner before: transcendence. Though the French dishes took far more skill, patience, and labor, it was the mac-n-cheese that elicited the thing I’d been after this whole time.

I’ve had a complex relationship with simple enjoyment that started with the church of my growing-up years. From it, I remembered three distinct ways to please God. While there were seemingly infinite ways to offend the Almighty, there were only a few ways to make him proud. The first was to be born poor or disabled, since this ensured perpetual suffering and therefore sanctification. The second way was to get killed for being a Christian. The third and final path was to become a missionary, but this only counted if it was to a country you secretly hated, to double up on the suffering. I fantasized about all three every Sunday.

Later in life, this way of overthinking complicated my preferences. I couldn’t major in English simply because I loved to read and write, but because the degree would open doors to teach English to kids rescued from forced labor camps in India. I couldn’t date a guy because I trusted him and thought he was attractive; he had to know the Bible inside and out and be a “spiritual leader”—a phrase that still makes me cringe for how many truly decent men it made me pass over. God required a serious soldier in all pursuits, no matter how innocent or frivolous.

My therapist handled the brunt of this twisted way of thinking in my mid-twenties. I came to her early in my marriage, around the same time I’d picked up cooking, to work through some difficult stuff from childhood. I treated these appointments like I was studying for a test, or like rounds of chemotherapy; the harder and quicker I worked, the sooner I could heal and get the hell out of there.

But Jeannie was a jovial woman; kind, self-possessed, and wholly unserious about my goals to get well as quickly as possible. One day, in an effort to help me calm down my nervous system in overdrive, she asked me a question.

“Brooke,” she paused thoughtfully. “What do you do that’s just for fun?”

I flinched as if slapped. Fun? Fun was the “f-word” in my old church. The quickest way to lose control of a life I feared was already too far gone. Who had time for such a thing?

“Cooking,” I lied.

“Well then,” she smiled. “Try cooking some more.”

Even though it was a lie, I wanted it to be true; I wanted cooking to be fun. Hell, I wanted life to be fun. I wanted to stop bearing down so hard on all my suffering and flaws. Mostly, I just wanted to make good food and write about it someday.

My husband is still my greatest teacher of fun in the kitchen, incapable as he is of holding a serious conversation past a minute or two. Tony has spent the past 15 years as a composer and backer of my food writing dreams. He is an artist in his own right, and yet, for someone so talented, he has never taken himself very seriously. He has also never run out of good ideas.

On a day when I was struggling with my writing, he told me about a secret ritual of his to spark fun. After he is done with work and I’ve gone off to bed, he spends just a little bit of time noodling around on the piano. He never records these sessions or plays a song he’s actively working on. This time is just for him, for the sheer pleasure of smoothing his hands over the keys.

“Every artist needs time like this,” he told me. “Time to play. It’s what refreshes your soul and reminds you of why you got into it in the first place.”

As an artist in the kitchen, I’ve had my preferred methods of self-sabotage in the extreme: working until exhaustion, producing complicated, technical dishes to prove my worth as a cook, and focusing on the meal’s flaws instead of enjoying its triumphs. But Tony’s flash of creative insight struck me as authentic. In every season of life when I’ve been artistically stifled, there was always first a slow, imperceptible vanishing of play and of joy from my daily routines.

Alan Watts says a similar thing in one of my favorite monologues on art:

Music as an art form is essentially playful. We say you play the piano. You don’t work the piano. Why? Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere. But one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played the fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one cracking chord, ‘cause that’s the end… We thought of life by analogy with a journey, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe Heaven after you’re dead. But, we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.

Polenta pizza bowls are that jazzy, joy-bringing meal for my little family. In my childhood, pizza was never a “bad day” meal. Every single memory I have of pizza involved celebration: Friday movie night, birthday pizza parties, or school meetings for the free Coke and pizza at the end. A pizza bowl brings together all the resonant flavors without the fuss and bother of rising, proofing, and baking dough.

When I first started making this, I tried rice in place of dough; fine, but not quite. Then I tried pasta, which had the effect of making it taste like regular old spaghetti and meatballs. Then I tried polenta, et voilà ! Perfection. Polenta evoked the cornmeal often found at the bottom of a slice of pizza. It is also one of the best vehicles for butter and parmesan, so there’s that.

I hope that whatever you get up to in the kitchen this year, you find the recipes that make your heart sing because this one does for me.

Polenta Pizza Bowls

Serves 2

Olive oil

1 pound sweet Italian sausage

1 16 oz can tomato sauce

Pepperoni slices

1 eight ounce ball Mozzarella (DiStefano and Bel Gioioso are good for this)

1 cup polenta (Bob’s Red Mill is so easy)

A handful of fresh basil

Optional: mixed greens, olive oil, salt & pepper for salad

Optional: 3 Tablespoons butter (for polenta)

Optional: Parmesan (for polenta)

Special Tools

Cast iron or a skillet that can handle a broiler

Technique

Brown sausage // Warm a cast-iron pan over medium heat. While the pan is heating, remove sausage from its casing and place in a small bowl. Heat a drizzle of olive oil in the pan and add the sausage. Break up the sausage with a spatula and brown the meat. This will take 10 to 15 minutes. You want the meat very caramelized, so don’t rush this part.

Please note: if your oven doesn’t have a broiling function, now is the time to turn it to its highest setting so it has time to preheat for later.

Add tomato sauce // Add tomato sauce to the sausage, reducing heat to medium-low. Do NOT add water to the pan, even to swirl out the excess sauce in the can. Extra water will loosen the sauce and make it runny.

Make polenta // While the sauce cooks, add polenta and required water to a separate pot (see instructions on the box for ratios). Bring the pot up to a boil. Add a few pinches of salt and some coarse grinds of black pepper. Very important: whisk the polenta and water frequently while it comes to a boil, otherwise it will clump together and stay lumpy. Once polenta is boiling, turn the heat down to medium-low or until it simmers. Continue to stir intermittently.

Make toppings // While sauce warms and polenta cooks, cut the mozzarella ball into thin slices—about 1/8 of an inch. Arrange cheese and pepperoni to your liking in the cast-iron pan with sauce and sausage. Flip the heat off.

Broil sauce // Turn your oven to broil. Place the pan in the oven on a middle rack and watch it closely. You want the cheese to bubble and for the outsides of the pepperoni to begin browning. Depending on how quickly your broiler works, this could take anywhere from three to 10 minutes. Don’t walk away, and turn your exhaust fan on if you have one. If you’re making a salad, now is a good time to pull it together.

Finish polenta // Add a few tablespoons of butter and some fresh parmesan gratings to the polenta. Stir and adjust seasoning to taste.

Garnish and serve // Ladle a cup or so of polenta into a bowl. Cover with a generous scoop of tomato sauce, meat, and cheese. Finish with fresh basil and parmesan.

Notes

On Valentine’s Day… This is the perfect thing to make for someone you love on Valentine’s Day. It’s easy, relatively cheap, and fancy without being stuffy and unapproachable. I have made this dozens of times; it does not take more than thirty minutes to come together. It pairs well with a chilled Beaujolais. Ask your husband, partner, boyfriend, or lover to bring a little chocolate or a pan of brownies. If you’re not married, you will be soon after.

On subbing out polenta… The only other starch I think would fit here is grits. While rice, pasta, or some kind of dough or bread are still great, polenta is really what makes this dish taste like pizza.

On music… What is cooking without music? I made this wintery instrumental playlist for the transition between Christmas and New Year’s. Whether you are experiencing five-foot snow drifts or 70-degree sunny days like me (sorry), I think this is a sparkly addition to any kitchen in need of warmth.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

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In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks says that everyone has an “upper limit” for happiness, a personal tolerance for how good they will allow themselves to feel. Humans do not move towards what is best for them, he posits; they move towards what is most familiar. Every Christmas movie worth its salt has this idea embedded in its plot. In It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey almost kills himself on Christmas Eve because he believes his life is a total failure. Scrooge’s whole personality is his hatred of Christmas. And Christmas Vacation is one long lesson in just how physically dangerous it is when our grandiose dreams outpace whatever is right in front of us.

It’s hard to be happy. Harder, I think, than being low-key miserable. If sabotaging joy was a part of our upbringing, then repeating the cycle will feel more comforting and reliable than actual comfort. It is a miracle when such a cycle is broken. Thankfully, history is full of such examples. Christmas Eve of 1914 is one.

On December 24th, 1914, men from either side of the Western Front emerged from their trenches to meet their enemy in No Man’s Land. It was the first time in the early months of World War I that there was no exchange of fire; German and British troops met in the middle of the carnage to celebrate Christmas. They exchanged gifts, played football, and sang Christmas carols on the battlefield. While Stille Nacht filled the air, soldiers buried their fallen comrades. It became known as “The Christmas Truce”.

“The Christmas spirit,” Morris Eksteins wrote of the event, “Had simply conquered the battlefield.”

Surely no one felt like celebrating Christmas that year. One in eight of these men would never return home, and those who did would not go back the same. Every day, more than 6,000 men died, the equivalent of 9/11 happening twice a day for years on end. And yet, for some reason, the weapons were laid down on Christmas Eve, wine was poured, and music played.

This tells me that joy does not require conflict to cease, but it does require a truce and a strategic change of tactics. Some methods help more than others. If a truce is going to be successful, there must be alternative methods of coping. Our nervous system goes haywire with nothing to do in place of its normal fretting, and so we must lovingly accommodate this.

Below is a list of ways to end the year without sabotaging it. At the end is an option to enter a small giveaway. No matter which war you’re waging, I hope you find the joy that is waiting for you this holiday season

Read Authentically Happy Endings

Amid the chaos of World War I, J.R.R. Tolkien began laying the foundation for The Lord of the Rings while in the hospital, the trenches, and on the battlefield. Tolkien drew heavily from his experiences in the Battle of the Somme, which killed 1.2 million people and achieved essentially nothing. Most of the dead were killed on the ground the British held before the advance even began. The Dead Marshes from his book were an exact parallel to the endless carnage he saw. Even Samwise Gamgee was an homage to the spirit of the common British soldier who took great risks daily with little thought of himself.

The Lord of the Rings would never have existed without Tolkien’s painful experiences. All of this makes the ending of The Return of the King feel deserved, earned, and perfectly satisfying. There are no easy answers; the hobbits return to a shire that is greatly changed and old friends who have no idea how to relate to their experiences. Aragorn inherits a kingdom that will take years to rebuild. Still, at the end of their journey, Tolkien says this of the fellowship, “Their joy was like swords and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together, and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”

My rule for Christmas movies and books is simple: happy endings only. And if possible, endings that are well-earned and beautifully developed. This year, I’m reading The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander. I’m also plowing through J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike like it’s my job. Last year, I read Orthodoxy by Chesterton and some frothy rom-com on Audible; it was the perfect combination.

Take Care of Your Hands

Nothing is more sabotaged than our hands at wintertime. If you are like me and do not enjoy sitting in a manicure chair for three hours covered in the dead skin cells of strangers, then behold, I have the secret to elegant, well-nourished hands. It can take less than two minutes a day to keep your fingers looking their best.

A tube of hand cream sits in the junk drawer of my kitchen; this one by Necessaire or this one by Aleavia is wonderful in the winter months. For my cuticles, I like a French lip balm that doubles as the perfect salve for brittle, worn-out cuticles. I use this cuticle oil religiously at night. And for what drying effect you can’t prevent, a good pair of kitchen gloves does the trick.

Your hands are the part of your body you see more than any other. They are also the part of you that does the most work for others. Nourishing them just a minute or two a day honors that sacrifice. The simpler the better for polish. Manicurist has a wonderful, clear shade that nourishes the nail bed and doesn’t crack easily, even with lots of work in the kitchen. It takes a couple of minutes to apply, and just one coat can last a whole week.

Refresh the Home Uniform

It was common in the forties and fifties to invest as much energy in your “homemaking” clothes as it was to invest in your “going-out” clothes. This dignified the woman’s role in the kitchen, and lent a certain feminine power and mystique to the drudgery. Especially if you’re hosting, consider an apron and a good pair of socks or slippers part of your home uniform! One year, knowing I would be doing lots of cooking for others, I decided to buy a pair of slippers that coordinated with my dress for the evening. It made my role that night feel just a little bit more lovely. My favorite place to get a new apron is at an antique store, but I also find some wonderful stuff on Etsy. Good socks are everywhere; Le Bon Shoppe is best for socks, and Salter House is perfect for home goods, nightgowns, and slippers.

Beautify a Private Corner of the House

There are three places I like to decorate during the holidays that no one else sees but me: my office, my nightstand, and my bathroom. My office is where I finished my first book this year; the bathroom is where I miscarried my first baby; my nightstand is where I learned to rest more deeply than I ever have.

This year, I bought extra velvet ribbon to use as garland in these special but more private places of my life. It feels like one small way of celebrating the invisible work that no one else sees but God. The simplicity of the decor makes it so that I can leave the ribbons up well past Christmas, which I encourage.

Take Your Ego to the Spa

The holidays require the accomplishment of many tasks, but often not in the same direction. This can make us feel frazzled, like a lot is happening while none of it is particularly momentous. Whenever this happens, I pull from Julia Cameron’s Walking in This World. She encourages artists to create a “Ta-Da” list. This is a list of things I did that were significant but small. It really works at boosting morale when energy is frantic. You may not have time to actually go to the spa, but sometimes it’s nice to treat your ego to a little mothering, a little feeling of, Wow! Look at all you did today!

Here’s an example from a truly frantic Thanksgiving day in my life:

1.) Made Tony the oatmeal he loves

2.) Read and made notes on Joel Miller’s article

3.) Sent insurance info to Maximo

4 .) Defrosted a turkey

5.) Made a list of things to buy for house and winter wardrobe

6 .) Did the sheets and whites

7. ) Caught up on email

8.) Brainstormed a pro/con list of working with Halpern agency in New York

9.) Made roast chicken for dinner

10.) Wrote in my common book

11.) Planned menu for the week

12.) Worked out

13.) Mentally planned menu for cheffing job

Develop a Theme Song for Your Nervous System

It is impossible to absorb the beauty of an entire year if you are still stuck in survival mode. This year, I developed a theme song for my nervous system, something that placed me back inside feelings of wellbeing, safety, and warmth. This was a song I played after I got rear-ended and whenever I knew I was going to have an extra busy day. Whenever I hear this song, I will think of 2025 from now on. After listening to it, I can feel my pulse lower.

Share Your Secrets

I was planning on having my first child this month, but the Lord had other plans. In the months that followed my miscarriage, I came face to face with a kind of jealousy, even resentment, that took my breath away. It seemed that every woman I knew was popping out babies; watching it happen curdled something in my heart. I decided to tell my friend Noelle that I was struggling. My throat closed when I picked up the phone; I was jealous of the ease with which her body made babies, and I felt so much shame because of it. What resulted was a conversation that made me cry for how tender it was. I felt more seen in that single conversation than I had all year (love you NOLE!).

Confession wipes the slate clean unlike anything else. Whatever burden you’re carrying— and we all have at least one—you do not need to carry it alone. Maybe this is not the Christmas you get everything you wanted, but you can end the year feeling seen and known.

A Giveaway

Thank you for subscribing to The HomeBody Ritual this year. I pray for all of you every day. It’s such a privilege and a joy to be here with you. As a way to express my gratitude, I’m gifting two boxes of goodies inspired by the above list. All you have to do to enter is like, subscribe, and comment “gift” down below. If you’re one of the old farts who “doesn’t do Substack,” just reply to this email; I’d love to hear from you as well. I’ll take your email as an entry into the giveaway :)

Merry Christmas, homebodies!!!

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Photos by Bethany Schrock

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On the morning of April 22, 2025, my husband turned to me in bed and laid his head on my womb. I scratched the folds on his stiff neck, barely visible in the plume of down comforter between us. Neither of us moved; we were waiting, waiting for the midwife to call with test results about the bleeding.

The difference between normal pregnancy bleeding, a hematoma, a burst polyp, and a miscarriage was the intensity of pain and volume of blood loss, I read. So I touched my boxers, as I had almost a hundred times a day for the past week, to feel for blood. There was wetness, a pad that sagged; my heart skipped a beat. I rolled away from Tony and went to the bathroom to see blood all over my pajama bottoms and a white pad soaked through. I sat on the toilet and flipped my head down to watch a slow and steady drip of burgundy fall from my body and down the slant of the toilet bowl. I had been laying toilet paper across the toilet to “catch” her, folding it under the seat. I had been too tired to do it this morning, so instead I fell to my knees and looked for whatever remained of the nine best weeks of my life.

I took a wad of toilet paper and slid it into the water. What I grabbed were slippery and dark clots —dark like a right-bank Bordeaux. I washed my hands. Left my panties in a bunch at my feet and walked back to the bedroom. My hands were shaking as I looked for new underwear and slid back into bed where my husband lay.

“What’s wrong, Babu?” he asked, and I don’t remember what I said. I mentioned blood, lots of blood. I lay on my back and he put his head back on my abdomen. Like everyone says, I felt empty. No more hunger. No more achy breasts. Not a speck of nausea.

For the rest of that hour, I would think that I had come to the end of my tears, only to find another batch welling within me. I wept on my back, on my side, in Tony’s arms, and facing my closet, as if the position of my body would bring some resolution to my weeping. The midwife called; my progesterone was low; we made another appointment.

I put on overalls, a white long-sleeve shirt, and another huge pad. I sat outside with my granola bar and water. Tony said he had to wash the sheets, and so I waited. I waited five minutes. Then ten. Then fifteen. When he came out, his eyes were red and his posture looked crumpled.

”Blue for Blueberry,” I said, and I pointed at his blue jacket and my overalls. We had found out that our baby was the size of a blueberry a couple of weeks back. The name stuck.

We drove to the radiologist in warm sunshine. Tony later said it was just like the weather on our wedding day. We got to the appointment, and I filled out a questionnaire detailing every possible human ailment. Then a woman with soft grey hair and bright pink lips appeared and ushered me into the room alone.

“How old are you?” she asked once we were in the doctor’s room.

“Thirty six.”

“What a perfect age to be pregnant.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You are older, more mature.” She tapped her shoulders lightly, indicating she was speaking of herself.

“My sister got married at seventeen and had four by twenty-two.”

“Four!”

“Si. I had my first at thirty-one and my second at thirty-seven. You live your life and you are so much more... relax.”

“Chill,” I agreed.

We did the ultrasound, and I pulled my overalls halfway down, buckles clinking. She pressed into my low abdomen with her instrument.

“You bleed?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Like period?”

“Yes.”

I was staring at the desktop in front of me, listening to the click of her keys. Occasionally, there was a soft chirp from her computer, like a bell, like the tone from a video game when you capture the prize. She left, and I got ready for the transvaginal ultrasound.

This time, I peeled my overalls and underwear all the way off and slid into the blue gown. Then I shimmied my hips onto the slanted platform and covered myself in tissue paper from the waist down.

She rapped softly on the door and came in.

“Relax,” she said gently, and I parted my knees some more and gentled what muscles I could as she stuck the sensor inside me. The same noises continued. And the clicking. I stared at the cheap speckled ceiling. When I looked at my knees, they were shaking.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

She turned the screen around and pointed to something I did not fully understand.

“Sac,” she repeated. “This is the gestational sac.”

I looked at the blurry image of a black hole set against a field of fuzzy grey.

“I will get your husband.”

She came back and gave him her seat and pointed to the same thing.

“This is where the embryo lives,” she said.

I stared and stared at that black hole.

Signs of home, I thought. Signs of life.

The pain started two days later, after we were told that the sac was too small; only five or six weeks when I was over eight. Words I’d never heard like ”blighted ovum” or “chemical pregnancy” were frantically typed into my laptop and spit back up in cold and unfeeling explanations: termination, chromosomal abnormalities, natural selection.

At first, the cramping was just uncomfortable, and then it was like two ropes twisting and constricting deep inside my womb, unable to relax or relent. It was sharp and hot. I got up and began to pace, rubbing my tummy as I went.

I ended up on my hands and knees, rocking back and forth, an electric warming pad from Target strapped to my middle and plugged into the outlet nearby. Tony lit a candle. I asked him to rub my lower back. The pain was at an eight out of ten, and I was groaning very softly. My hips circled rhythmically, and both feet became tangled in blankets.

A quiet, inner voice spoke very gently to me, as if it were just down the hallway. Two more, it said. And sure enough, two more contractions came, one after the other, and it was done. I was so relieved the pain had stopped that I fell asleep, still trembling in my own sweat. When I woke up, it was 2:20 pm, and the left side of my face was covered in saliva. I walked to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. At first, there was nothing. Then I felt something soft roll out of me. A light plopping noise, a gentle splash. I got down on my knees and reached into the toilet bowl with my wad of toilet paper.

The sac was much bigger than a cherry, more like a very large walnut; three inches long and tapered at both ends. It was hard when pressed and squirted blood. The color was very dark, nearly purple. I wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in a glass jar so we could bury it. I remember feeling that this was the most natural thing I had ever done. Even as my hands shook, I thought one word over and over again as I held the little purple cocoon, as I wrapped it up and put it away in a jar I’d used for beans: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

The next day, our front steps were covered in flowers from friends; my husband bought an arrangement fit for the death of a Don: white, towering, spreading. Our house smelled like a funeral home, which it was.

I went into the kitchen and thought, Dear God how do you cook on a day like this? I didn’t have to, I knew that. But a sadness was collecting in my chest like a little black pool, sucking me in. I had been weakened by the wanting of a baby, then by the having, now by the losing. The weakness made me a stranger to myself; the idea of cooking felt familiar.

One of the better things about coming from the Midwest is that you will never inherit a recipe that is outside of a regular person’s ability to master. Desserts growing up were homemade frosting on Saltines or a square of poke cake (boxed white cake baked in a tray, poked with holes, and doused in boiling hot Jello). There’s something wholesome about this, something pure about food designed to comfort, not to impress.

I thought about these recipes the day after everything had passed from my body, and I was still lightly bleeding. In particular, I thought of a recipe for hamburger soup I had flagged on the New York Times Cooking app. It reminded me of the Midwestern chili my grandma made every time we drove to her house in Madison, Wisconsin.

I brought myself into the kitchen, stiff as a stone, and began to cook. I browned an onion and a couple of pounds of beef together, just like I’d seen mom and grandma do a couple of hundred times before. I chopped veggies and measured out some seasoning while it cooked. I made a batch of corn muffins too, perfect for sopping up the stubborn wells of leftover broth that collect at the bottom of the bowl.

We sat down to eat an hour later. I shut my eyes at that first bite: the burst of sweet, juicy corn; salty beef; tomato paste. I realized then that one of the Midwest’s hallmark flavor profiles is tomato paste—lots of it. Somehow, despite everything, I softened at this, and that empty place inside me flushed with a faint warmth.

I would have many worries in the coming days: how to go to a friend’s baby shower in three weeks’ time, how to face our tenth wedding anniversary in Paris without a baby in my belly, how to face Christmas, the one that was supposed to have an extra stocking this time. Mostly: how to face a new future I had already filled and furnished with the tiny life that was now lying cold in a bean jar.

To have hope, the good Lord reminded me, you do not need to know the future; you need only to remember the Love that has carried you this far. So I swallowed my soup, pressed the leftover corn muffin crumbs with the pad of my index finger, and remembered a grandmother who made chili when it was snowing outside.

We buried Blueberry on a Sunday, a day when the sun shifted in and out of a bank of steel grey clouds. I was barefoot as Tony dug the hole. I unwrapped her from the jar for Tony to see, some toilet paper sticking as I did.

“Wow,” Tony said, and I rolled her into the hole, covering her with a freezer label that read “Blueberry Norah.” The soil was damp and soft, clumping as we filled in the little grave. We said some things about how happy she’d made us, that she was not a failure or a disappointment or a mistake. I told her to plant many blueberry fields with Jesus before I came home for good and I kissed the ground where she slept when I was done.

You never forget how people love you when you’re hurting. Even if the energy to say a proper thank you doesn’t materialize, the memory of their love becomes as permanent as the scars. Neighbors made quiche and lentils; bestie sent a bangle with the word “Blueberry”; another friend sent a bracelet with a sapphire; still another wrote a poem I printed and kept in my treasure box. My dentist and her assistant held me with gloved hands when I burst out crying. I told them I was no longer pregnant because they needed to take an X-ray of my cavities. Even Mother Nature chipped in and grew the roses we planted over the grave; they grew higher than any of the others. Right now, they stand a foot taller than my husband.

While I happened to make this soup while grieving it is also perfect for a postpartum mom. In fact, it is perfect for anyone who needs to be reminded of how loved they are. The leftovers are even better a couple of days later, and it freezes well.

I’m not including a lengthy recipe or notes because this recipe does not need them. You can sub anything for anything just as long as you make it with tenderness and a hearty amount of salt.

Hamburger Soup (or Midwestern Chili)

Feeds 4 with leftovers

Ingredients

Olive oil

2 lbs ground beef

4 cloves garlic

1 large onion

4-5 cups stock, any kind

3 stalks celery

18 oz can of crushed tomatoes

3 bell peppers, in varying colors

4-5 fat carrots

4 red potatoes

4-5 Tablespoons tomato paste

Salt (a lot)

Italian seasoning

Ground chili flakes

Dash of Worcestershire

Frozen corn

Frozen peas

Fixings like crackers, cheese, sour cream, cilantro, lemon, or parsley

Technique

Brown // In a large stock pot or Dutch oven, brown 2 pounds of beef, 4 chopped cloves of garlic, and 1 large minced onion together with 4 to 5 teaspoons salt. Drain fat once done.

Simmer // Bring one 18-ounce can of tomatoes, 3 minced bell peppers, 5 cups stock, 4 diced carrots, 4 quartered potatoes, 5 tablespoons tomato paste, some worcestershire, and more salt up to a boil. After a minute of boiling, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for 25 minutes, or until the flavors sweeten and meld.

Finish // Add a cup of frozen corn and a cup of frozen peas and cook for 3 to 5 minutes. Serve with saltines, cornbread, cheese, and sour cream or crème fraîche.

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Edits by Lauren Ruef.

Pictures by Tony Anderson.

When I was a girl, I played a game with my friends called “Storm.” One of us would pull a blanket from the couch, throw it over all our heads, and whisper, “A storm is coming.”

We chattered our teeth, interlacing fingers and trying not to giggle. Tucking the blanket beneath our bottoms sealed us in from the terrors outside.

“Can you hear the thunder?” someone asked. We could.

As the storm raged, we filled our little toy pot with imaginary soup, told ghost stories, and took care of whoever it was that had fallen “ill.” From beneath our little tent, we gave ourselves to a truth that would take the rest of our lives to understand: darkness binds people together in a way that nothing else can.

Autumn is a reminder that darkness is sewn into the fabric of life; days shorten, temperatures fall, and plants sleep. We become hemmed in, morning and evening, by shadow. Sunlight hours are compressed and punctuated by thick clouds, rain, or snow.

A rare and special magic abounds in these hours, the kind that does not reveal itself in seasons of heat, growth, or celebration. Right as the leaves are about to shrivel and fall away from the trees, they become more brilliant than they’ve ever been, bearing hues of scarlet, ochre, mustard, and pumpkin.

The following list is a testament to the beauty of fall and a follow-up to last year’s diatribe. Troubled times are not always what they seem, and darkness is not always a bad omen; sometimes a storm is the impetus to shelter, comfort, and commune with one another.

Writing “Spells”

In folk magic, women used to keep books of spells, cures, and tonics to pass down to their daughters. They called it a grimoire or A Book of Shadows.

A spell is a form of words supposed to have some magical power. It is an enchantment, an invocation, or a charm. As an eternal pragmatist, I like to think of it as a recipe for life that’s bound to work: an elixir for a broken heart, a blessing for the first day of school, or a ritual for casting out disappointment.

These written intentions make different seasons of life memorable and holy. I have a thick leather manual containing all my recipes, ranging from savory to sweet to spiritual. Below is an example I wrote after a season of extensive travel.

A Recipe for Peace After Travel

1.) Wake up early the morning after a trip, ideally before the rest of the family.

2.) Wash face with cold water and wear linen; something forgiving, roomy, and soft is fine.

3.) Open windows.

4.) Make a large glass of warm water with lemon, ginger, and salt.

5.) Light a candle and burn sage or palo santo to bring life back to each room.

6.) While seated, count the blessings of the journey and give thanks. Release whatever drained you. Pray for the grace to stay present as unpacking begins and details flood in.

7.) Make sure to sit down at least once and stare into the middle distance, pondering nothing.

Vampire Perfume

Because of its biological connection to our memory, scent has a way of mentally and physically transitioning us from one season to another. Last year, in honor of the vampire movie Nosferatu, Heretic launched the one and only perfume my husband actually likes. With notes of lilac, petrichor, oud, and violet, the aroma leaves a fresh, floral, clean, and nocturnal impression. I like it because it reminds me of my first true crush (I still love you, Peter Held!) and the many times he brought me fistfuls of lilacs. The perfume comes packaged in a pitch-black box with a ribbon and velvet-like cushioning; opening it is a spooky pleasure.

Two other scents for fall are Coeur Noir and Smudge. Coeur is a woodsy and romantic scent, with a soft vanilla base that is sweet without being overpowering. Sumdge is smoky, deep, sexy, and feral; it smells like a witch’s campfire. It contains frankincense, cedar, juniper, and clary sage, and I like wearing it during my period because it has a frank and cleansing potency.

The Discovery Set is the perfect way to try different smells without breaking the bank. The sample sizes are ideal for a purse, a gift basket, or a suitcase. All fragrances are nontoxic.

Autumnal Mise En Place

A friend once told me that she never prepares food after three pm. Every afternoon, she dices, measures, and marinates her dinner so that all she has to do is throw the ingredients together when it’s dinnertime.

Mise en place is French for “everything in its place.” In the cooler months, I follow my friend’s lead and set out a cup of rice, chop some vegetables, and ensure some meat is ready to cook before the shadows fall. I do this after breakfast or during lunch when I still have extra energy. This makes cooking in a dark kitchen feel kinder and much more spacious. I also keep a candle, a pumpkin, and a jar of some of my favorite fall spices nearby to add some warmth to my evening habits.

Home Systems Inspiration

Fall is a time when many of us reevaluate our home rituals. A fellow homemaker I love is a YouTuber named Intentional Allie. Allie coaches women who work full-time and still want to keep a good home. I recently bought her homemaking course after finishing my manuscript. She brought immense clarity and organization to a season of my life when I was anticipating significant change.

Tater Tot Hotdish

For the uninitiated, a tater tot hotdish is akin to a shepherd’s pie, but tailored for Midwesterners. It is a casserole comprised of ground meat and gravy, baked beneath a lid of tater tots.

As a proud Minnesotan, I consider myself a connoisseur of such fineries. The best recipe I’ve found comes from Molly Yeh’s archives several years back. My best friend Noelle tried this recipe and agreed that it’s peerless.

This recipe takes a bit of time to come together, as it requires you to make your own cream soup instead of using canned ingredients. I promise it’s worth it. You can make the soup gluten-free by subbing in an alternative flour (I used Bob’s Red Mill 1:1 ratio).

I tend to use a lot more salt and seasoning than Molly does. Be watchful as you cook and taste as you go; this recipe, cooked as is, would be bland to me. Instead of a soup mix, I used 3-4 teaspoons Better Than Bouillon Roasted Chicken Base. Whatever you do, please, for the love of God, serve this meal with ketchup.

Activating the Dark Feminine

Like everything in life, femininity works on a spectrum of light to dark. Most of us are only familiar with the light: pastels, flowers, springtime, flirtation, playfulness, youth, and sundresses. This side is more marketable and easier to put into a Disney movie.

The other side of femininity is the dark, and it is often misconstrued as evil or villainous. True dark feminine energy is characterized by mystery, elegance, magnetism, strength, and intensity. Jillz Guerins describes it as “being comfortable in the depths.” A dark feminine woman leaves space for silence while holding your gaze. She is not afraid of intimacy or of saying no as a complete sentence. She is assertive, wise, sexy, and grounded; there is richness to her sensuality.

Jillz provides a wonderful introduction to the essence of the dark feminine. This one offers practical tips on grounding into that energy and practicing it in small yet profound ways.

Mystic Pizza

Remember when movies were wholesome without feeling like a Hallmark card? Me neither. At least not until I saw Mystic Pizza.

Mystic Pizza was released in 1988 and features three young women coming of age in the small town of Mystic, Connecticut. It is charming, sweet, autumnal, and funny without being too sentimental. Julia Roberts is as stunning as she’s ever been, and the wardrobe for this film could all be worn today. I went back to my natural curly locks because I was so inspired.

Alice Hoffman

Responsible for the greatest fall movie of all time, Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman wrote two other, lesser-known books that precluded the novel inspiring the film adaptation.

Magic Lessons begins with the story of Maria, born in Essex, England and abandoned in a snowy field near the house of the village outcast, Hannah Owens. Hannah takes Maria under her wing and discovers that the two of them have the same gift for the Nameless Art; Maria is a witch just like Hannah. What follows is the beautiful and poignant origin story of the premise for Practical Magic; every man who falls in love with an Owens woman winds up dead or cursed.

I put off reading this book for many years, thinking it would be just like every other witchy book I’ve read; style over substance. Oh, how wrong I was. Magic Lessons is rich, moody, warm, and full of well-researched historical material. There are real spells, recipes for Tell the Truth Tea, and a cast of characters you come to feel genuine affection for, some of whom are based on historical figures. I don’t think any book has ever put me in the mood for fall like this one; it is a true treasure.

Marilynne Robinson

Robinson is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gilead, but she wrote one novel before this, and it is every bit as good. It’s also perfect for colder weather.

Housekeeping follows the story of two sisters abandoned by their mother and sent to live in a small town with their eccentric and very remote aunt. The story is a meditation on “the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.” It is a quiet epic; the pitch-perfect prose lays down one perfect sentence after another, building a landscape from the domestic rituals of women that is real, tender, and haunting.

Here is one of the greatest lines I’ve ever read:

“Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory-there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.”

Music

I have compiled two autumnal playlists for your listening pleasure: one with lyrics and one without. The son of one of my readers said that last year’s instrumental playlist was “too scary”, so I took a lighter, warmer tack with this one. Both are perfect for baking, getting ready in the morning, walking, driving, or reading.

Charmed

If Little Women were to follow three burgeoning witches living in San Francisco in the 90s, that show would be Charmed.

When three sisters reunite at the family mansion, they discover a secret their deceased mother never shared with them: they are descended from witches. What follows is playful pandemonium: warlocks, demons, love triangles, and big Alanis Morissette vibes.

This is not a serious show, and I hesitate to call it a good one. But it is cozy as hell, involving one of my favorite sets of all time: an enormous, haunted San Francisco mansion.

This is the perfect thing to watch on a long road trip or plane ride. It’s also nice to have in the background during a leisurely afternoon of baking. And it’s husband-approved! Tony watched every single episode with me and never complained; I didn’t even have to put a spell on him.

This summer, my husband and I spent time in the rural areas of Nebraska and Pennsylvania visiting friends and family. Out into the cornfields of Burt County, an hour north of Omaha, we stood on dirt roads where the only sound was the whisper of corn tassels blowing in the wind. In Felton, Pennsylvania, the sound of cicadas was singular and loud; the swallowtail butterflies were so unused to seeing people that they danced around our ankles. 

These sparsely populated areas were inhabited by older folks who’d rather rot in hell than live in the city. One of these locals was a guy named Carroll. Carroll still runs a small antique shop in Pennsylvania that is open three hours a week. When I met him, he wore a ball cap and a worn flannel jacket even though the air was hot and sticky at a hundred percent humidity. His eyes drooped, as if the length of his life made him permanently sleepy. I flipped through one of his editions of Farmer’s Wife magazine from June of 1937, pausing on an article about the impact of new machinery on family farms.

“Look at this,” I told him. “Here’s an article predicting fewer farmers than ever in the next twenty-five years.”

His sleepy eyes opened as far as they could. 

“If they only knew,” he said, and I clucked my agreement. He told me of life growing up on a farm before modern-day machinery: hay bales, languid summer days, boyhood, and of relatives long gone. 

“Those were such good times,” he said. “I think they were the best times, actually.” I looked up at his old face and saw a glimmer of water just below his right eyelid, so I waited before I asked. 

“You write?”

“Funny thing,” he began. “I used to in Covid, for my granddaughters… but then I stopped.”

“You should reconsider,” I said. “Your stories should not die with you.”

“Maybe I should,” he said. “Maybe I should.”

Not long before meeting Carroll, I finished reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Notre Dame de Paris as it was originally titled. In the novel, Victor Hugo hoped to restore interest, mystery, and love for Notre Dame, which had—unbelievably—fallen into a state of neglect and disrepair. Love for Gothic architecture, then out of vogue, slipped into obscurity because of the printing press. In the Middle Ages, when few people could read, buildings were constructed to tell stories. Regular folks did not pore over the written word the way they do now; they heard or saw the stories in the structures. These cathedrals became living representations of the faith they held dear, making it feel all the more tangible.

I imagine Hugo’s horror at the state of churches and houses today; everything square, slick, grey, and beige, the only colorful things springing from screens. By every measure, the beautiful places of this world are dying and have been for quite some time. This is true in Oakland, Nebraska, where Walmart and Dollar General have put every mom-and-pop store out of business. And it’s true in Bordeaux, France, where the French government is paying winemakers to destroy generational vines due to a lack of interest in both the buying and making of wine. 

The world is changing so fast that I often need a seatbelt to survive it. Hundreds if not thousands of essays urge us to just read more books, buy a flip phone, or get rid of all social media. Fine and good, but won’t we just find something else to become addicted to if we don’t get to the heart of the issue?

One of the things I’ve learned from homemakers who lived anytime before the 1950s is that the bulk of people’s lives, particularly the lives of women, were centered around cooking, cleaning, mending, shopping, gardening, and child-rearing. The further back into history you go, the closer to the land (and others) people lived. There was an anticipation that most of life would be uncomfortable, each day requiring physical, mundane labor around other human beings.

Post-sexual revolution, the prevailing narrative has been that these were primitive, restrictive, punishing times; women have come so far since then. God knows I agree; I don’t want to live without a dishwasher or a dryer or a shower. But to every technological advance there is a cost, and it’s worthwhile to count it every now and then.

With the advent of the phone, we have the pretense of online “community”. We no longer need to invite someone over to be with them. With the boon of grocery delivery and meal prep services, many of us live our whole lives never knowing the people who grow and care for our ingredients. Streaming takes the place of evening conversations. And with TikTok and Substack churning out thousands of delicious recipes every day, the need to go and learn from a grandma, auntie, or that neighbor next door is obsolete.

With every new convenience, we funnel into our little silos of convenience, individuality, and “freedom”. Thomas Sowell summarized it best: “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs”.

A communally-focused home woos people back to reality: the marrow of a roasting chicken in the oven, the glow of shelves alight with candles, the sounds of soft music. A good home is like a good church; it’s the physical embodiment of love delivered through aesthetics. In such a home, there are enough blankets for everyone’s laps and enough meat to invite second and third helpings without self-consciousness. The wine never runs dry, and the couches are not too expensive for you to prop your feet up on. You can tell that stupid story you’ve already told to others twelve hundred times. And while people might roll their eyes, they’ll still protect your need to share it again.

How to create a kitchen haven not smothered by the machine? Yes, read more books, preferably cookbooks authored by older generations Buy a cast-iron and learn to season it properly, or better yet, cook biscuits in it. Sure, get rid of TikTok and ask your neighbor to teach you how to roll a pie crust (or, if you live in L.A., ask me!). But also fill your life, and your senses, with beauty. 

Think of your senses—sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound—as the little doorways back to reality. When you are able, fill the kitchen with color: copper pots, flowers, hand-drawn pictures, fruit in a bowl. When cooking, notice the textures of the ingredients in your hands: the pockmarked flesh of a lemon, the flaky skin of onion wrappings, the smooth-as-marble feel of beans.

Fill the silence with good music, or better yet, nothing at all. Tune into the sounds of burbling water, clattering pans, or thumping knives against the cutting board. Taste your food; slide still firm noodles on your tongue and sip the broth while it’s still closing in on itself. Taste is the deepest level of presence available to us and the only one that requires us to swallow and take in the thing we are beholding.

Around each sense, build a cathedral of real, human, sensory delights. And keep a notebook nearby to record your revelations! One of the things that happens when you fold yourself back into your body while cooking is that food sends a variety of different signals, some of them profound. To become tender, most meat is cooked at a slow pace. Slowness and tenderness are co-conspirators in this life; pork being no exception.

Normally carnitas require pork fat—lard. This is the most traditional approach. But I usually have just olive oil on hand and find it works just perfectly. 

There is nothing about making carnitas that requires excess skill. All you need is an oven, some time, and the willingness to pay attention. What I like most about this recipe is the lack of searing to develop flavor or crispiness. It’s a low-maintenance dish that develops slowly, with no fancy gadgets required except for an oven.

Most of us are not called to rewrite history by overthrowing dictators or tech oligarchs or broken systems. Most of us are called to know less and love more; click on the stove, silence the phone, and invite the lonesome over. If it was good enough for Jesus then it’s good enough for me. My entire faith boils down to this: in his final hours, Christ presented his life not as a thesis but as a meal.  

Carnitas

Serves two with leftovers

Ingredients

2 pounds pork shoulder

1 cup olive oil

1/2 cup orange juice

3 bay leaves

2 cinnamon sticks

3 thick garlic cloves

Salt and fresh-cracked pepper

Optional sides

Refried beans

Rice

Mixed greens

Guacamole

Sour cream or crème fraîche

Cheese

Tortilla chips

Lemon or lime wedges

Raw onion

Cilantro

Salsa (a tomatillo-based salsa is perfect here)

Tools

12-inch cast-iron skillet, casserole dish, or roasting pan for cooking meat

Technique

Prep meat // Preheat oven to 325°F. Cut pork shoulder into one-inch cubes. Season with salt and fresh-cracked pepper all over. Add meat to a cast-iron skillet with olive oil, orange juice, bay leaves, cinnamon sticks, and garlic. It’s okay if meat touches but it should not bunch or overlap. Put pan in oven and set a timer for 1 hour.

Turn meat // One hour into cooking, check the meat and turn the skillet 180 degrees. Set timer for 1 more hour.

Make sides // 30 minutes before the meat is done, prep the rest of the meal. We like rice, beans, greens, guacamole, cheese, and crème fraîche. 

Broil Carnitas // Once the carnitas give very easily to the press of a fork, pull them out of the oven. Shred the meat with two forks, mixing in with the oil and juice as you go. If craving a crispy finish, send the whole thing into the oven once more to broil for one to three minutes.

Serve // Serve carnitas with rice, beans, guacamole, cheese, greens, and any other sides. Enjoy with mezcal or a fruity, chilled Italian red.

Notes 

On meat quality… Because the ingredient list for this recipe is so minimalistic, it’s important to have meat that can stand well on its own. This can mean local and organic, but really it means a pig fed on more than wheat or corn or soy. Of the dozen or so times I’ve made this, the biggest difference maker is the quality of the pork.

On timing… While two hours at 325 degrees Fahrenheit works well for my tastes, you may require something different. Keep an eye on the meat in that second hour of cooking and don’t be afraid to let it go another 15 to 30 minutes if the texture isn’t tender enough yet. The fat will protect it from drying out too fast so check on it every 15 minutes or so until you like what you see.

On subbing fat + acid… Though I haven’t tried other fats, I’ve seen many a recipe for carnitas cooked in lard. You could also probably use schmalz (chicken fat) or beef tallow. I’ve also cooked the pork in apple cider vinegar when I don’t have orange juice. If using vinegar, cut the amount down to 1/4 cup. If using an alternative fat like lard, a one-to-one swap should be just fine.

On salting the meat beforehand… Because the pork is chopped into such small pieces, salting the meat ahead of time is not necessary, but it does season the meat a bit more thoroughly. It’s also nice to have the meat chopped, seasoned, and ready to douse in some olive oil and orange juice before sending into the oven.

More on The Machine… Much of what I’ve read about the slow creep of the machine into every facet of human existence comes from Ted Gioia, Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau. Ted’s approach is from a long career in the music industry, and Paul and Jonathan are Orthodox Christians and artists. Christian or not, musician or not, all three men have something to say for everyone.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Photos by Tony Anderson (and me!)

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Of all the things I had to be ashamed of as a young college girl, the worst and most persistent was my inability to form an eating disorder. It was a condition nearly all of my roommates and close friends had, but it was one I literally and figuratively could not stomach. Instead of sex, alcohol, drugs, or venturing out to The Pickle at sub-zero temps in a denim mini-skirt and puffer jacket, I ate without limit or reserve exactly what I wanted that first year at college. 

Since I primarily avoided the cardinal sins that unravelled the most chaste of collegiate souls—sex, marijuana, drunkenness, and worst of all, “a loss of faith”—I thought food might be the one adult freedom I could finally sink into with complete abandon and zero guilt. My tuition furnished an unlimited food credit: access to cafes, buffets, and little coffee shops around campus. I planned these meals the way some women plan outfits for a date.

On Sunday mornings, I ate French toast drenched in syrup plus an omelette loaded with processed cheese. For lunch, I built salads swimming in ranch and soup smothered in oyster crackers. There was ice cream topped with sugary cereal for a midnight snack. I sat in a booth bathed in fluorescent lighting with my pretty, much skinnier friends who “liked salad” and I all but snorted at their foolishness.

One day, back home from school break, I found myself upstairs looking for a towel in hopes of taking an extra-long shower without the interruption of my floormates or flip-flops. The voices from the stairway beneath me dropped to a whisper, making me pause to crane my neck and listen. Two of my female relatives were talking quietly, but not so quietly I couldn’t hear, about my body. One was worried about how much weight I’d gained in the past several months and the second was trying to deflect the concern with some sort of vague explanation I couldn’t fully catch. 

I held my breath as I heard the first relative emphasize how concerned she was that I was getting fatter. I waited without breathing for the second family member to say something in my defense. Then I realized, in the pit of my stomach, that they were done talking. The matter was closed between them, but it had opened a brand-new world for me: a world where everyone was not only looking at my body but assessing it, day and night, for flaws.

Long before I knew that I had a body other people were paying attention to, I had hobbies. My favorite was to sit on my bed and draw for hours. At home, beneath a lime-green bedspread flushed with an ambiguous species of pink and white flowers, lived a swollen plastic box stuffed to the brim with paper dolls. I had to snap the white top shut with a heave of the hip to keep the overflowing papers inside. Lifting the lid off my creations released the smell of wax and must, paper, and childish hope. 

On top of my bed, box open and set before me, I assembled my ingredients: paper, pencils, markers, crayons, pencil sharpeners, gel pens, magazines, scissors, Scotch Tape, and Elmer’s Glue. Paper dolls from every time period and personality loosed themselves, as if they’d been suffocated in that box for centuries. My right middle finger grew a hardened callous from where the crayons, pens, and pencils would press and shed scales of color and lead.

Hours passed in this world of my creation. Most of what I drew involved tables full of food surrounded by people who loved each other. My subconscious summoned every dream I had for the future and I watched it bloom on the page. For a few precious hours, I got lost in those dreams and I was free.

Adulthood allows precious few opportunities for this kind of bliss. After that moment at the top of the stairs, I grew suspect of anything powerful enough to make me lose track of the shape of my body. I didn’t pass a mirror without stopping to assess and take stock of my flaws. Instead of creating, I consumed content about getting smaller and staying that way. Instead of getting lost in something bigger than me, I did grooming activities (workouts, juice cleanses, manicures, hair extensions, tanning, lashes) aimed at keeping me the center of my own universe. And the more I did it, the more I seemed to dislike myself.

Nowadays, this kind of behavior is not just common but rewarded. It is not only acceptable but “trending” to spend hours filming yourself while looking in a mirror. Women receive millions of views for simply getting ready in the morning with products they are paid to tell you about. There are videos of a 20-step hand care (hand care!) routine, children applying eye creams and lip masks, bathroom restocks that cost a small fortune, and hairstyling rituals that function as a part-time job.

That genuine self-care has been replaced by narcissistic consumerism over the past decade is incontrovertible. I recently returned from a getaway where the entire weekend functioned as one long photoshoot for Instagram. In the mornings, phones sat against coffee cans and supplement jars in the kitchen to film “content.” Hours were spent getting ready, with the only endgame being to take more pictures. Otherwise meaningful moments–toasts or opening gifts, for example–felt strangely performative as every pair of eyes zoomed in on the videos they were taking of the moment, but never the moment itself. 

What many of us forget is that somewhere beneath that proclivity to perfect appearances is a wound. No child wakes up wanting to spend hours posting pictures of themselves on Instagram or TikTok. We are trained into hating ourselves that much. Every one of us had that moment at the top of the stairs when we realized, with horror, that we were being looked at with more scrutiny than we ever dreamed.

Authentic self-care is the opposite of self-absorption; it grants a kind of self-forgetting. We get lost in drawing the picture, eating the food, watching the movie, kissing the lover, hugging the friend, sewing the quilt. For awhile, we become one with the object of our love and we feel momentarily reborn. These are “whole being” moments. They are also avenues of transformation, thin places where we heal the wounds that catalyzed our self-absorption.

Until about a hundred years ago, life offered this kind of experience pretty regularly. Without digital distractions, important days were celebrated together in someone’s home where cooking was done by hand and on the cheap. Mealtimes were not social-media-ready, but they were affordable, communal, and relatively unencumbered by the pinging of cell phones.

This sort of self-care took effort, planning, and an acceptance that something would probably go wrong. Grocery lists were made, tasks delegated, and food cooked imperfectly. It was nourishing not because it was easy, effortless, or perfectly suited to every individual’s allergies, but because it addressed that core psychological need that all of us have: to remember that we are not alone.

In recent years, I’ve found that the axis of self-care and hospitality is my sweet spot. I host through the lens of how I’d like to be cared for. Even as an introvert, I say yes to having people over as often as I can. And I do this because I make things that are as nourishing and soulful to me as they are to the people I cook for.

Nothing in the world does this like a burger bowl. I can’t think of a single unhappy memory involving a burger. And this recipe is even easier than the classic burger; the meal comes together in 30 to 40 minutes and pairs beautifully with my recipe for homemade ranch. Add a Johnny Cash playlist (mine’s here), a good friend, a great movie, and you have a formula for self-care that takes the whole person into consideration.

To heal from self-absorption, we have to get back to our childlike flow state. As the world seeks non-real places for connection (porn instead of sex; social media instead of friendship; clickbait instead of books), it is critical to share a meal face to face (sans phones please). Now, more than ever, we need to belong not just to ourselves, but to one another. 

Homemade Ranch

Ingredients

1/2 cup créme fraiche 

3 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt (more to taste)

1 teaspoon dried dill (you can use fresh, but dried is what makes it taste like ranch from a bottle)

1/2 teaspoon olive oil

1 garlic clove

Fresh cracked pepper

Special Tools

Mortar & Pestle

Technique

Macerate garlic // Pound 1 clove garlic with a mortar and pestle until paste-like and no chunks remain. Add 3 teaspoons fresh lemon juice to the garlic. Allow garlic to sit in acid for 10-15 minutes. This process is called maceration and removes some of the harsh taste of the garlic.

Mix + Taste // Add crème fraîche, salt, dill, olive oil, and fresh-cracked black pepper. Stir and taste. Adjust seasoning as needed.

Burger Bowls

serves 2

Ingredients

1.5 lb ground beef

1 15 oz bag frozen French fries 

Mixed greens or romaine or gem/butter lettuce (1 handful per person)

Cornichons (Maille brand is good)

Ketchup

Mustard

Cheddar cheese (Hook’s five-year is phenomenal and easy to find) 

1 onion

2 teaspoons salt 

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon Coleman’s ground mustard

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon garlic powder

Pepper

Technique

Bake // Turn oven to 425°F and line a cookie sheet with parchment. Spread fries on the sheet and season with salt and pepper. Put on a middle rack in the oven, turning once to cook evenly on all sides.

Brown // Add a slick of oil to a skillet and turn burner to medium-low. Add meat, salt, paprika, ground mustard, garlic powder, onion powder, and fresh cracked pepper. Cook until no longer red and beginning to caramelize in spots.

Fixings // While meat and fries cook, take a few handfuls of mixed greens and place them in a bowl. Season with lemon, olive oil, salt, and fresh cracked pepper. Grate cheese, mince onion, and slice cornichons into bite-sized pieces. Allow guests to arrange their own bowls and enjoy with a beer or a young, fresh bottle of red.

Notes 

On using something other than crème fraîche // I’m sorry, you can’t. Next!

On sourcing good fries // Pretty much any bag of frozen fries is good for this recipe. These are my favorite seed-oil-free fries. I always keep a stash in my freezer along with some ground meat. The crinkle-cut ones just taste better.

On sourcing good movies // Most modern-day movies are bad remakes. So my husband and I have been going back to movies made in the 90s and early 2000s. These are a few of our favorites from the past year or so. Please look up trigger warnings as some of these delve into pretty heavy topics not suitable for kids.

Edward Scissorhands — Johnny Depp has scissors for hands and Winona Ryder falls for him.

Kate & Leopold — Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman fall in love, but he’s from 1876 and she’s from the early aughts. 

Magnolia — A lot of broken people find love, hope, and connection in Los Angeles (this is my favorite role for Tom Cruise).

Phantom Thread — Daniel Day-Lewis makes clothes and falls in love even though he’s an artist and an asshole.

Practical Magic — Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock are sisters, witches, and completely unhinged.

Thelma & Louise — Feminism gets a gun. Finally.

The Client — A precocious child witnesses a murder that puts his life in jeopardy, and Susan Sarandon steps in.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Full of moments for both adults and kids, plus some of the most beautiful music ever written.

The Green Mile – Tom Hanks works as an officer on death row and witnesses the best and worst parts of humanity.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

—Hemingway

Ten years ago, on a bright, clear day in June, my husband and I went to France for a month-long honeymoon. Our cultural capacity back then was measurable in teaspoons; we knew as much about French culture as we did about sex. As small-town Christians with our virginity still intact, we felt about as French as a hot dog on the 4th of July. Miraculously, that didn’t matter. Paris is a strong current that blesses humility. If you wake up in the Marais with no agenda but to be alive, this current will find you and take you places you could never go if you were full of plans and certainty.

After four weeks of touring vineyards and eating terrine and baguette by the pound, we were converts. We made a second vow, promising to visit France once a year for as long as we both shall live. Excepting the year of our Lord 2020, we have kept that promise. Everything I have ever learned about loving another person started in France a decade ago. This year, we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary back where it all began. Here, in no particular order, is everything we’ve learned about love since then, plus a handful of pictures from our time there.

Focus on union

One of my favorite dishes in France is called a quenelle, a mixture of fish, pastry dough, egg, and cream. It is usually baked and served in a creamy tomato sauce, and the full effect is out of this world. Though I’ve had it twice—once in Lyon and once in Paris—I still find it impossible to describe. It doesn’t taste like any of its individual elements, but like something transformed and completely new.

There are a thousand examples just like this in France, of ingredients coalescing in a technicolor experience that transports the soul. Over time, I’ve come to see this as a recipe—pun intended—for a wonderful marriage. In love, the goal is to become a union that surpasses what either individual could have on his or her own. Modern thinking has distilled this complex and mysterious process down to lists of traits and terms like “high-value man” (or woman), both separating and objectifying the sexes. It also diverts focus from the real question in any relationship: How do we work together?

Our era of digital curation preaches that you can “self-help” your way to a good life, as if cold plunges and bath bombs and ten-step morning routines will make you a magnet for the right person. It’s all bullshit. Self-actualization happens in the tension of real-life relationships and daily doses of self-sacrifice. In a good union, you end up finding more of who you are, not less. Coming together does not erase distinctions but sharpens them. This is love’s greatest mystery and paradox; in laying our life down for another person, we finally find more of it than we ever planned.

Beauty is a necessity

Every time I visit Paris, I am amazed by its excesses: the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées, the Luxembourg Gardens, Versailles, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pont Neuf, and hotels like The Ritz or Le Meurice. Even the Eiffel Tower sparkles with golden lights every 30 minutes in the evening. Most of these attractions are free or open to the public for little to no cost, including hotels that offer the most sublime bathroom experiences. This makes what would otherwise be an overstimulating place feel restful.

One of the things we fail to be honest about when it comes to marriage is the simple fact that you will look at your spouse every day until you die. How you feel when you look at that person matters. Marriage is a lifelong, full-contact sport, and being chronically careless about the way we show up in that sport is selfish and psychologically destructive. It’s like buying a house and never bothering to hang a picture or paint the walls, or tend to the landscaping.

Beauty triggers arousal, excitement, and all the other fun erotic things. But it’s so much deeper than that. Beauty also cultivates feelings of comfort, joy, calm, vitality, and even safety. When a person or a place is beautiful, we relax and soften into our best selves. What separates beauty from hotness is timelessness. Even in the postpartum belly rolls, chronic pain, and cancer diagnoses, elegance exists. A big smile, a dress worn for no particular reason, wine in good stemware, wildflowers near the sink, clean hair, and bright, attentive eyes don’t hurt either.

As my husband says, “Beauty may not be everything, but it sure makes everything nicer.”

You don’t find time, you make it

Anthony Bourdain once said that the only true way to enjoy Paris is to have sex and spend an entire afternoon at an average cafe smoking cigarettes and drinking a glass of wine. This is the French way of enjoying France. There is also the American way of enjoying France. People come and visit museums and landmarks in quick succession, often without more than an hour’s breadth between stops to notice what is happening around them. Some come back to the States and proclaim that France was “fine”.

The same France exists for all people: the slow one by the Seine and the quick one darting from the Champs-Élysées to the Eiffel to the Louvre. The difference in experience comes down to choice.

Our French friends have this saying: You make what you like. It’s a poor translation of the verb faire, which means ‘to make’, but the idea is simple: In life, you don’t find what you like, you take part in its creation.

I think back to seasons in marriage when Tony and I fought the most, and they were always during our busiest periods; times when we allowed every open slot in our schedule to be co-opted by others. Instead of being masters of our lives, we were victims of it. Space to do nothing in a relationship is like oxygen to the brain. It leaves room for the crucial and unstructured parts of a relationship—intimacy, humor, comfort—to emerge naturally. Time together for connection operates by design. It arises in the form of a slow and refreshed attentiveness. Paying real attention to the person you love also cures a multiplicity of evils, even if you did put their favorite shirt in the dryer, yet again.

Pleasure is not a reward for being “good”; it is an essential part of being alive

Parisians take little breaks for pleasure all throughout the day. In the mornings, it's a coffee and a cigarette, while for lunch, it’s a small glass of white wine with their meal. At happy hour, most Parisians empty out into the cafes, known as the “living room of Paris”.

This worldview is somewhat antithetical to the American way of thinking. The French do not view pleasure as a “reward” for doing something good, but as an integral part of daily living. It is sustenance, much in the same way food is to us.

Every evening, Tony and I drink a glass of wine together. It doesn’t matter if we got home from a long trip at 10:30 pm or have succeeded at nothing else but driving the other person nuts. The ritual reminds us to stop, take a beat, and find pleasure, yes, in the food, but also in each other. We take time to smell the wine and repeat back to each other what we like about it. The consistency of this ritual reminds us that just being human is enough of a reason to celebrate, even on the shittiest day when we both feel like we did everything wrong. Pleasure is not a reward for being good; it is a grace to all for being human.

The pursuit of perfection kills libido 

Every time I go to Paris, I am reminded of how truly weird America’s obsession with Botox, implants, extreme fitness, crash diets, and fillers is. In Paris, the norms of feminine flaws are blessedly restored. I can count on one hand the number of women I’ve seen in Paris who look like they’ve had work done. It’s extremely rare. Yet they still manage to look sexier than the average American, probably because they’re not wearing Crocs, my editor quipped.

In my observations, French women do not focus on perfection, but on sensuality. There is an emphasis not just on how a body part looks but also on how it feels: the texture of a fabric, the scent of a perfume, the thickness of a lipstick. The focus of European beauty is different. Parisians do not spend so much time eradicating their imperfections as they do highlighting natural beauty. They draw attention to the color of their eyes, the glow of their cheeks, the warmth of their hair. This subdued polishedness to me is the sexiest thing of all.

Perfection, on the other hand, rips the soul from the body in striving after “the ideal”. In the absence of time to feel alive or aroused, we go for metrics: counting calories, getting our steps in, injecting units, and depriving ourselves of a big, juicy life. Much like in our relationship to sex, enjoyment resents approaches that are too intense. Eventually, aging has a way of imposing certain ultimatums: you can choose now to have great sex without having lost the ten pounds, or you can chase the “perfect" body without having time for good sex. You cannot, as the good Lord says, serve two masters.

Attention is the key to longevity 

Like all good wine lovers, I have endured the litmus test of buying a beautifully labeled, often expensive bottle of wine that stinks of vinegar and tastes like cardboard. Even some of the most renowned French wines have broken my heart in such a manner. The freshness is all gone, and in its place is something empty, flat, and lifeless.

The primary difference between an old wine that has lost its sparkle and an old wine that tastes like the blood of God is preservation. Many things can happen to a wine in its lifetime that compromise its integrity. Exposure to too much heat or temperature variation causes oxidation and flavor loss. Some wines have a bad start due to careless winemaking pre-bottling. But the vintages that make it to the ten, twenty, and thirty-year mark with their youth still intact and full maturation all have this in common: the careful hands of a craftsman vintner.

In a word, the make-or-break of a lifelong partnership is the simple act of paying attention. We don’t stay faithful to the people who have stopped seeing us and treating our lives as worthy of their fullest engagement. If ever I feel like Tony and I are fighting and not finding a resolution, I backtrack to the moment things went sour. In every single case, it contains a moment where one or both of us stopped listening and paying attention to the other person. And not just with the mind, but with the heart. 

Susan Sarandon says it best.

We need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet—I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying, ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.

–Shall We Dance?

The vines that suffer produce the best wine 

Someone once told me that marriage itself is not what’s hard; life in general is hard, and marriage is life to a magnitude of two. Our honeymoon in Burgundy exactly ten years ago evidenced that truth. After some painful flashbacks, I intuited that I had enough childhood trauma to make an HBO documentary with several seasons. Tony had a similar story. 

One day, while he and I overlooked a field of gold and green vines that stretched on for miles, my new husband told me that the vines that experience drought produce the best wine. Harsh conditions force a plant to reach deeper into the soil for the nutrients that a fairer set of weather conditions wouldn’t provide. I sighed at that like it was the life raft I needed.

Sometimes it is as simple as a glass of wine or sex or an hour on the couch surfing Netflix or listening (again). But I do acknowledge that there are times when life hits so hard and fast that there’s no time for any of that. All I ask is that you try to remain. Remain close, remain present, remain still open to the possibility of union, despite the imperfection.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Photos by Tony Anderson

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By the time second grade rolled around, I knew I was middle class simply by how Mom put our lunches together. Every day, we received a small paper bag with 4 Ziplock baggies filled with the same thing: a whole-wheat sandwich with mayonnaise and baloney, carrots that smelled like a pool, dusty grapes, and a jumble of disembodied Teddy Graham parts. I had a quarter, maybe two for a carton of milk. My food paled in comparison to my companions’ fat and golden Twinkies, packages of personalized pizzas (all hail the Lunchable!), and soft pebbles full of liquified citric acid and sugar called Gushers. Cool kids got processed food in abundance and therefore always had something to trade: Goldfish, Oreos, name-brand potato chips, and the lovely Uncrustables I drooled over (circular sandwiches made of white bread, seedless jelly, and peanut butter smooth as silk). 

My poorest friend Ruth got sandwich bread with a swipe of mustard on one side, a swipe of ketchup on the other, and a single slice of American cheese as the only filling. Her seven other siblings got the exact same thing and she claimed everyone loved it. But one day Ruth got baloney in that cheese, mustard, and ketchup sandwich. The look on her face—relief, hunger, pride, joy—as she pulled the surprise morsel from her weathered grocery bag amazed me. I saw firsthand just how familiarity breeds contempt. I got baloney every day and it never made me look at my sandwich that way.  

The small prefab kitchen of my childhood was a lesson in efficiency, routine, and sameness. There was one window tucked in the corner overlooking the neighbor’s vast pool, a forbidden oasis on the hot and soggy Midwest afternoons that required a sprinkler to survive. To the right of this view was our cramped and pool-less backyard, fit with a big oak in the center, a sandbox, and a tiny garden. Winter was long and wearying; a series of cold, short days with the sun setting into white snowbanks around 5 or often 4 pm. Mom thawed frozen chicken breast and sloshed cans of curry and coconut milk into a skillet on these days. On Fridays, we argued about where to get pizza, and on Sundays, we got the ten-dollar platter at Taco Bell to feed the entire family. Pop (not soda) was not allowed because it was an extra expense. Mom moved fast enough around the kitchen to indicate she derived no real pleasure in being there. I parked myself at the laminate countertop to watch her, looking for signs of the romance I read about in books or saw in movies: wistful glances at the stew, splotched recipes written by grandma, or an apron smeared in blood-red homemade tomato sauce.

One day, I got exactly that. An early winter darkness smothered out the sun as mom pulled a chicken out of the oven. It was resting in a camping enamelware vessel with white speckles and handles. The breasts were barely golden, freckled with pepper and surrounded by juicy carrots and quartered russet potatoes. We had chicken for what seemed like every day of our lives, but never like this. The bird appeared out of place at our table, like it belonged to some perfect TV family and not us. But something came to life in me at the sight of it, some childish desire to be part of a family that celebrates the mundane by lighting candles, making bread, writing recipes in leather journals, and never, ever taking the same old lunches to school. Something in me felt right at home.

Why cooking romances some but not others is a question I have pondered. Reasons given are a lack of time, creative talent, money, and basic skill. As someone who once hated cooking and now loves it, I know such excuses by heart.

Much of what drains midlife of its color is the feeling of sameness that grown-up living requires: meals, bills, toilet cleaning, dentist appointments, oil changes, and taxes. Cooking can feel like just another physical burden with no immediate reward. Some, however, whether by choice or by nature, are not eroded by the sameness. Instead, it motivates them. A special habit of attentiveness graces these souls. We are all given the same raw materials as Julia Child. Cooking requires having an imagination.

Sometimes a change of shape is all it takes. I’ve said before that ground meat is perfect for the regular old weekday hunger that pinches the stomach Monday through Friday. But it’s also good for the deeper kind of hunger that yearns for variety. Ground meat can become just about anything: ragu, Thai larb, deconstructed Shepherd’s Pie, and others. On days when that deeper hunger calls, the very same pound of ground beef ordinarily used for taco bowls or cheeseburgers can become a meatball. 

Now. In my opinion the term “meatball” is deceptive, for truthfully, no ball of ground meat ever stays spherical once browned, but a girl can try. Here are my best shaping suggestions, none of which require fancy olive oil or a special pot.

Thaw meat in the fridge // My final evening chore is to open my freezer in search of some packet of meat to thaw for the next day’s dinner. Whenever I forget to do this I am forced to thaw meat in a bucket of cold water over the hour before my planned cook time. While this isn’t the end of the world, I find soaking the frozen ground beef does make for a mealy texture. So: 24 hours before you plan to cook your meatballs, move that meat to the fridge.

Wet your hands before forming spheres // Deb Perelman and Kenji López-Alt taught me this trick and it does make a difference. After mixing the meatball ingredients, wet your hands under a faucet or in a bowl of lukewarm water. With damp hands, form the meat into five or six equally-sized balls, wetting hands again whenever the meat sticks to your fingers. These meatballs are large by design. I find that they are more tender and flavorful on the inside because they don’t overcook too easily.

Go for pyramid // This is the real trick: brown the ball on three “sides” averaging three to five minutes per side. You will want a pair of nice tongs for gently turning the meatballs. What will emerge is a shape more like a pyramid than a planet but who gives a shit. This is weeknight cooking, and you’ve been nice enough to make meatballs. 

This recipe is our favorite new addition to the regular weekday round-up. Whenever I want something special without having to go out and buy fancy things, this is what I make. You can use panko instead of cornmeal, regular sugar instead of maple, real tomatoes instead  of tomato paste, and so on. Ground beef, especially if it is on the 80/20 variety (80 percent lean and 20 percent fat) is forgiving, flexible, and oh so novel when treated right. And a bonus: if you don’t turn the heat up too high, the grease splattering is very, very minimal.

Meatballs in Broth & Polenta

serves 2

Ingredients

1 pound ground beef (80% lean, 20% fat)

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon onion powder

1/2 teaspoon chili powder

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon cornmeal

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1/8 cup tomato paste

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 egg

Olive oil

Grits or polenta 

1/4 cup parmesan

1 bunch chard

3 tablespoons butter

Parmesan rind (optional)

Special Tools

Tongs

Dutch oven or stock pot (a pot with high sides is preferable to minimize the splattering of grease)

Technique

Thaw Meat // One night before cooking, take meat from freezer and place in fridge. If thawing meat the same day, place packet in a bowl of ice-cold water for 45 minutes to an hour before cook time.

Mix & Form Meatballs // Add thawed meat to a large bowl along with spices, salt, cornmeal, egg, and sugar. With rings and bracelets off, mix ingredients together with hands until everything is thoroughly combined. Wash and dry hands. Take out a dinner plate and fill a small bowl with water. Wet both hands a little in the water and then, grabbing a small handful of the meat mixture, gently press and roll into a ball that fits nicely in the palm of a closed hand. One pound should make about 5 to 6 meatballs. Don’t worry: the broth will keep these nice and moist. Wet hands again, or whenever meat sticks to fingers.

Brown Meatballs // Cover surface of a Dutch oven or cast iron with 1 to 2 tablespoons of oil. Turn heat to medium. Once oil shimmers, gently place all meatballs in pot with tongs. Allow to cook untouched for 5 minutes or until a warm brown crust forms. Then, very gently wriggle meatballs free with tongs and shift over so that browned sides are perpendicular to the pan. Wait another 3 to 5 minutes until second side is similarly browned. The meatball will slouch some on the second side, leaving a third and final “side” to cook. Wriggle the meatball once more and turn it to that final side, leaving until browned completely.

Cook Polenta // While browning meatballs, cook grits, polenta, or rice according to packaging instructions. Season water as for pasta until pleasantly and lightly salty. Parmesan rinds are a nice addition here to flavor grains. While grains cook, destem and roughly chop chard. Grate parmesan as well. 

Season Broth // Once browned, move meatballs to the outer rim of pot and add a fresh drizzle of oil to the center. Add tomato paste to oil and cook until darkened (rust red is a good sign). Add broth and mix paste in with liquid. Turn heat to medium-high or until a gentle simmer takes place.

Wilt Chard // After 15 to 20 minutes of simmering broth, add chard to liquid. Wait until chard is wilted but still very bright green (2 to 3 minutes).

Season Grains // Once polenta is fully cooked, add a 1/4 cup parmesan cheese to pot and stir to combine. Add butter. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed, making sure to add ample black pepper. Remove the parmesan rind if one was added.

Plate // Once both polenta and meat are finished, add a big scoopful of polenta to a serving bowl. Pour broth and meatballs over polenta. Serve hot and enjoy with a bright, effervescent bottle of chilled red. Beaujolais is always nice here.

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For the past five springs, Tony and I have gone looking for signs of life in the wall of jasmine outside our kitchen door. Every March, soft green shoots appear from the nodes of twigs opening over weeks to reveal snow-white blossoms. At night, the flowers heave up a fragrance so heady we shut our eyes with the pleasure of it. In the morning, there are nests in the vines; bundles of hair, laundry fluff, and twigs woven by the Rufus hummingbirds vibrating through our backyard without rest. The nests are miniatures of life, able to fit in the palm of even the smallest hand. And the eggs are smaller still; powder blue and no bigger than a single jelly bean.

Praying for life from these vines and nests feels like walking across a tightrope. Hope is like that: fragile and suspended over a canyon of disappointment. Still, we fight for it every year. Most eggs never make it to hatching. They are gobbled up by bigger birds, lizards, squirrels, or raccoons. The ones that hatch are as thick as a pencil and squirm beneath veils of heavy rain, evening chills, and Santa Ana winds. Even the most fastidious nest can slip down the neck of a branch, tipping the little eggs out as it goes. If the babies do survive, they become a fuzz of feathers, jumping from the nest to test their infant wings. Sometimes we have to gentle them back into the nest or feed them a little sugar water to revive them again. Altogether, they weigh less than a postage stamp. Attachment is less dangerous at this point and so we choose names: Lily, Luna, Basil, or Poppy.

New life always begins in these undetectable forms. Nature’s births and resurrections are small, tender, ordinary, vulnerable, and sometimes indecipherable from death. An egg, once fertilized by a sperm, is no bigger than a poppy seed. And signs of pregnancy are identical to menstruation: cramping, spotting, tiredness, and mood swings. Creative ideas are similar; swelling and changing within the soul of a person so undetected it’s like trying to pin wind to a wall. While human revelry around springtime is loud, colorful, and boisterous—think Easter, Mardi Gras, May Day, Holi, and Ramadan feasting—nature is more unassuming in its revelations. Trying to tell if new life is afoot is like trying to catch a tree in the act of growing: only time will tell.

But sometimes we have the pleasure of plainly recognizing the sweetness of spring. I was at the farmer’s market several years ago during Ash Wednesday. In the liturgical year, Ash Wednesday signifies the beginning of  forty days of reflection, fasting, and prayer called Lent. Christians go to church and get their foreheads marked with ashes by a priest. 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. 

That day, there was a small knot of Episcopalians by the pork stall offering ashes and blessings to go. One of them had a sign which read “God’s love is for everyone.” I stood before the one in long robes and bowed my head. Calling me her child, the priest smudged her thumb across my forehead and smiled tenderly at me. When I lifted my eyes, they were glazed with tears. In a moment full of hard blue sky and cold March winds, God had come to me exactly where I was, and blessed me.

Whether or not it is obvious—and, okay, let’s be real, usually it’s not—this kind of tenderness is all around us at the start of spring. Filling up on beauty helps us to detect it better. In the moment the priest touched me, she softened my heart to the world at hand. Below is a testament to this same fragile beauty I found in that moment; a collection of books, movies, recipes, and other springtime delights that have shown me the goodness of God and new life in any frame of mind I find myself in.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

When I finished An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures years ago, my first thought was This is exactly what I’d give to a daughter if I wanted her to understand the depth and power of love and sex.

Clarice Lispector—often called the Brazilian Kafka— is considered by many as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I first discovered her work on Clifford Lee Sargent’s YouTube channel, Better Than Food, and his synopsis hooked me: “Even though it’s the exact same story you or I have read, heard, watched, or lived—man falls in love with woman, woman falls in love with man— it’s like nothing else I’ve ever read in my life… An Apprenticeship is about a woman and her metamorphosis into pure being, and how that pertains to love and connection with another individual.”

The book begins with a chapter called “The Origin of Spring” and introduces two lovers: a mild-mannered school teacher named Lori and a philosopher-mystic named Ulisses. Under the guidance of Ulisses, Lori undertakes a slow and mystical inner journey to prepare herself for love. This is a story about the ways true love forces the death of our illusions. It is about the joys and sufferings of becoming truly vulnerable to reality and coming home in a way that is surrendered, humble, and immediate. While it is not explicit or graphic, it is sensual, engrossing, cerebral, and like many Latin American works of art, simultaneously haunting and hopeful. Fans of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and any of the Spanish nuptial mystics like St.Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross will experience this book as a sort of homecoming.

I was not expecting to love this book more on the second time through, but I did. No doubt it will feel like torture to non-introspective types (no shame) and like validation to the ones who stay up at night wondering if death will feel like falling asleep or like waking up. 

This is one of my favorite passages:

“It was a red apple, with a smooth tough skin. She took the apple in both hands: it was fresh and heavy. She replaced it on the table in order to see it as before. And it was as if she were seeing the photo of an apple in empty space.

After examining it, turning it over, seeing as never before its roundness and its scarlet color—then slowly, she took a bite.

And, oh God, as if it were the forbidden apple of paradise, but this time she knew good, and not just evil as before. Unlike Eve, when she bit the apple she entered paradise. She just took a bite and put the apple back down on the table. Because some unknown thing was gently happening. It was the start—of a state of grace.

Only someone who has been in grace, could recognize what she was feeling. It wasn’t an inspiration, which was a special grace that so often happens to people who work in art.

The state of grace she was in wasn’t used for anything. It was as if it came just to let you know you really existed.”

Music

Spring is the muse for many a composer or artist, whether it’s Vivaldi or The Beatles or my wonderful husband. Here is a playlist of instrumental music perfect for baking, driving, writing, or gardening.

Chocolat

One of my favorite movies of all time, Chocolat, is a love letter to spring, small towns, found family, rural France, second chances, and, of course, chocolate. The movie is set in a tiny pastoral village run by a religiously austere mayor, the Comte de Reynaud (played perfectly by Alfred Molina). The story begins at the start of Lent when a beautiful stranger, Vianne (played by Juliette Binoche), comes to town to refurbish a run-down patisserie. While everyone has sworn off sweets for forty days, Vianne lures them into her Mayan-themed chocolaterie with the promise that she can guess their favorite chocolate and delight their secret passions. 

What ensues is a comical, poignant, sensual clash of the ordinary and the sacred, a testament to the power of people being good to one another when they have precious little in common. 

This movie is perfection, boasting one of the best casts of all time: Judy Dench, Johnny Depp, and Carrie-Ann Moss, to name a few. Juliette Binoche’s wardrobe is unmatched in its feminine essence of springtime. Best of all, this story is dignifying both to the outsider and to the religious community. Each has something the other needs: the church offers Vianne friendship and family in an unfamiliar place, while Vianne offers them beauty, a playful reprieve from the sterility of orthodoxy, and a zest for life. Even if you are not a little bit religious, this is a movie worth watching annually every single spring.

GF Banana Millet Muffins

A rough sketch for those interested in baking something simple for a springtime treat with little to no time to let the bananas ripen. This recipe is wholesome without tasting like it, sweetened by natural sugar, and totally gluten-free. Tony said these were my best muffins yet, and I hope you agree.

GF Banana Millet Muffins (adapted from Samantha Senevirante’s Banana Muffins)

Ingredients

4 barely ripe bananas*

2 eggs

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup créme fraîche (Greek yogurt is also fine)

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup maple sugar (coconut sugar or any other sweetener of choice works)

1 cup brown rice flour (regular flour or a gluten-free flour blend also works)

1 cup almond meal (regular flour can also be used)

1/2 cup millet

1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon 

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chips (optional)

Technique

1.) Preheat oven to 425 degrees and fill a muffin tray with paper liners.

2.) Peel and mash bananas in a large bowl until you reach an even, liquid-like consistency. Whisk in eggs, oil, vanilla extract, and créme fraîche. 

3.) In another bowl, sift together sugar, flours, millet, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Combine the ingredients, mixing in one-third of the dry ingredients at a time.

4.) Fill the muffin tin with the batter. It should be slightly full but not overflowing. Now turn the heat down to 350 degrees and bake for 25 minutes or until a fork or toothpick comes out dry.

*We tried this recipe with very ripe bananas (yellow with lots of brown spots) and barely ripe (yellow with a hint of green at the stem). We agreed that the texture and sweetness was better with barely ripe bananas. But either way is delicious!

God in the Garden

The Easter Sundays of my childhood began in the darkness of a church, waiting for the shades of the windows to lift, signaling the start of the service. As squares of light scattered across the pews, the congregation roared together in a swelling song. The Lord is risen! the pastor shouted from the pulpit. We peered up at him with eyes still watery from sleep, faces bobbing in a riot of Easter colors: violet, rose, periwinkle, and faded yellow. He is risen indeed! we shouted back. And for the next hour and a half, we sang as loud as Baptists are able, pondering the veil of white on the cross and pots of lilies at the foot of the pulpit. We sang “In Christ Alone”, and more hands raised at that famous line—then from the grave, his body rose—than ever did at any other time of year. The day ahead was full of ordinary treasures: musty-smelling relatives, ham and dry dinner rolls for lunch, baskets full of milk chocolate bunnies or jelly beans, and damp earth that smelled of snow melt. 

In recent years, the faith of my father has come alive to me in the garden. In the vineyard, I know that the vines that suffer the most produce the very best wine —hope for those of us with fucked-up childhoods. In a raised bed full of vegetables, I’ve learned how you can only truly care for the things your hands touch. Whole bunches of kale and arugula and tomatoes I’d have never lost to little green worms if I’d only found the time to caress the fibrous stalks with my fingertips. In vases spilling over with sunflowers and ranunculi and roses, the green necks of flowers have told me the truth. They tilt toward the sun without needing to be told of His virtues. Morning after morning, I have watched nature obey the will of God better than any saint or priest or pastor and all this without any consciousness of His existence.

The scriptures bear witness to this. In the Gospel of John, it is said that when the resurrected Christ confronted Mary Magdalene she did not recognize him. She thought he was the gardener. I have thought on that word for years. Mary could have mistaken Jesus for anything else: a guard, a fellow disciple, a Pharisee, a grave robber, or perhaps just another man. Instead, she thinks—gardener. Did he have his fingers in the soil or was he picking a flower? Or perhaps just admiring a shrub as his first act back from the dead? Whatever it was, it feels tender to the reader. This whole thing began with a woman in a garden— a very long time ago.

I still believe in the resurrection. Much more now than I ever did as a girl. But now I celebrate by planting chervil, parsnip, chard, celery, oregano, three kinds of cilantro, and jalapeños. Now, when I think of the Son of God, I think of someone so mild and unassuming, so marked by the tender strains of spring, that many did not recognize him as anything special or divine when he returned. One simply thought he was a gardener. 

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Whenever I was home sick as a girl, my mom would leave me with a pile of VHS tapes I was expected to watch instead of Maury and Judge Judy. There was one from the 1950s about an English missionary to China, some of the original, hand-illustrated Disney flicks, and then two versions of Little Women. Barring one exception, I always chose Little Women, in particular the 1994 version with Winona Ryder and Claire Danes.

Though our home was a very religious one, the most transcendence I experienced was from watching that film. For years, I slipped a hat over my head and ate orange slices like Jo March, all while “languishing” over my first full-length murder mystery novel. I sifted through a plastic garbage bin full of dress-up clothes pretending I was Amy or Meg; too poor to be ravishing but too pretty to be totally invisible. Or I was at the piano, like Beth, serenading the house while slowly dying of something no one could see but me. 

My favorite scene was always the same: the moment when Jo, after years of failed attempts, finally finished her manuscript. She ties the thick stack of handwritten papers with some brown string and slides a red gardenia through the center, stepping back from the work with a smile on her face. She has finally done it—created something honest—and she knows it.

Like Jo, I first told every version of my story except for the one that was true. I knew only one thing when I began my food memoir six years ago: the kitchen was the only place I did not regret spending my time. I wanted to know why.

I am tempted to say that I was a basket case when I first started cooking, but that feels like an insult to baskets everywhere and it also isn’t the full story. The truth is that I was wounded. After a decade of chronic childhood sexual abuse and just as much time spent trying to hide it, I was too broken and tired to do much else but function. That was difficult for quite some time. I got married at 26 and bam, out slid all my trauma. Minutes felt as long as days in the face of unrelenting PTSD. I began to think my husband would have fared better if he had married a potato. I had no sense of self and no reason to hope that things would ever be otherwise. Whenever a fragment of who I truly was did resurface, it seemed ugly, vulnerable, perverted, guilty, or too needy for me to satiate.

I stepped into the kitchen hoping for a peace I no longer felt within myself. But cooking, as it turned out, was hard. Real hard. Everyone who was good at it had grown up with happy memories of mom or grandma or auntie or dad flipping pancakes or shelling peas. I had some, but these were often tainted by the undercurrent of abuse and dysfunction simmering below a very slick family veneer. And then there were the words, the dismissive, culinary, high-falutin terms like “dash” and “brown” and “simmer” and “macerate.” So I struggled, both with myself and with my truly galling lack of cooking acumen.

There was no lightbulb moment. Time simply passed and slowly I observed things that had always been lost on me. I learned that chicken is toxic when eaten raw but nourishing when basted in butter and cooked gently at a very low temperature. I learned that stinging nettle will burn and poke unless blanched and sautéed with some sausage. I learned that when you combine flour and water to make bread, you create a final union of matter. I learned that some transfigurations are so final that they become blessed, even by God.

More importantly, I learned that life, however sore and tired, bizarre and banal, is always good enough to eat. One of my best dinner ideas came from an alcoholic grandfather who told me he ate poor man’s tomato soup growing up. Just ketchup and water, he said, and there it was: inspiration. Another idea came from the Chipotle takeout we ate in the years when everything I made burned or congealed. Still another was found in a box of Mac-n-Cheese made by a childhood best friend (it was Annie’s, of course). Then there was the stock I made in the months after my mother-in-law’s death, one of which, ahem, included a potato and leftover salsa verde?

Some things come perfect and cheap and can truly not be improved upon. The McDonald’s hot fudge sundae, for example, is a work of art you can eat any day of the week for just $3.65. Other things take time and expense and a part of ourselves that already feels weary. Knowing the difference has nothing to do with whether or not Mom knew how to pickle cauliflower or make sourdough baguettes. Mine reheated frozen bags of Bertolli rigatoni and, on special occasions, Digiorno’s pizza (both of which still slap, by the way). More than sufficient, if you ask me.

Finding one’s path in the kitchen, I learned, is not about being born special. Being born is special enough. Finding my voice was as easy and as difficult as learning to love the life I had already been given: Pain and disappointment included. Whenever something is loved and accepted for what it is instead of punished and chastised for what it isn’t, something like beauty emerges. Something like us.

It was this lesson I took with me into the rest of my life, and slowly, over ten years, something in my broken heart blossomed.

Today I sent my manuscript to my editor. There was no antique twine or gardenias. And unlike Jo and Professor Bhaer, I’m not secretly in love with Lo  (or am I?). But there was peace. And after ten long years—joy. Aftertaste (my book!) is everything I’ve learned about home—that it’s not a destination after all, but a decision to accept life and the inner voice as it truly comes to us. I thought of Jo a lot this week, and I thought of that little girl I once was, so eager to tell a story that would change the world, never knowing that the life she already had was exactly that.

Though I do not know what the future holds for my little book, I do know this: ten years ago I prayed for the ability to string two sensical thoughts together. And now look at me. I do know how to cook. My husband did not divorce me to marry a potato. And I have a 60,000-word document to prove it. I might even go to McDonald’s to celebrate.

Edits by Lauren Ruef.

On Wednesday January 8th, I woke up not knowing the sun had risen. Our room was full of muted blue light. It looked like dawn but my phone said 8 AM. Bleary, I slipped off the covers to look outside. Smoke in a thick, grey veil was smothering the sun. I tapped the weather app for the AQI reading: 455: Extremely Hazardous. 

In just a few hours, my world was distilled into these peripheral words: 0% containment, 100 mph winds, arson, go bags, evacuation orders, air purifiers, PM 2.5, Watch Duty, LAFD. I watched a digital map sporting cartoon flames just miles north of our neighborhood. We sat helpless in front of the TV, phone, and laptop, watching flames pour from the mouths of canyons, gushing orange-colored smoke which filled the air in central L.A. like a fog. At sunset, the smoke turned black and blue, like a bruise stretched over the horizon.

I had two answers to what I would pack should we have to evacuate. The first came to me the second morning of the fires, when it still seemed that we would escape the worst of things. I sat in my chair, perfectly still and monk-like with my matcha, planning it out: computer, one journal, marriage certificate, social security cards, sourdough starter, baby pictures, cast-iron, underwear, and knives. I almost smiled at myself. Not so materialistic after all, I thought.

Several hours later, the Sunset Fire five miles from our home was still not contained. I looked at my phone to see 56 text notifications from the neighbors. Everyone had received an alert to evacuate. People were sending lists of what to bring and others were asking where they should go. In that instant, the word everything flashed across my mind in big block letters. I imagined shoveling all my prized possessions into our pickup: the silver cutlery, a painting from France, an espresso machine, a cushion from the couch where my husband proposed, my copper, my Bottega Veneta mules, the bed where we both made love for the very first time. Maybe I’d take a chip of plaster from the walls for good measure. I was ravenous for every part and particle of my house, which I finally realized with a clarity that only comes in the face of turmoil, was also my life.

Moments later, we were alerted that the text warning was a mistake—something that became commonplace for residents in the days to come. There was no need to evacuate; the text had been sent out by accident. Huge, enormous sighs of relief poured from me like tides. They were so strong I wondered if people could sense them like gusts of the Santa Ana winds. 

Central L.A. is a hard place to live when it comes to physical beauty. The only place you are guaranteed to not get a parking ticket is in your own driveway. At precisely 7:30 AM every morning a symphony of sound fills the air: leaf blowers, helicopters, sirens, weed whackers, and the crackle of tired, old power lines from up above. The only time it is truly quiet here is when there is an emergency: a pandemic, a wildfire, or a state-imposed curfew. I did not feel like I’d cut my teeth as an Angeleno until my husband had a gun pulled on him and our house was robbed a few months later. People move to this urban purgatory hoping to make enough money to eventually escape the crime, grit, and endless slabs of cool, grey concrete.

Angelenos all have a place they one day dream of living. It’s different for every person, but for those of us in the middle of LA, it’s somewhere up north. If we become ludicrously wealthy, the dream is Malibu or the Palisades, preferably Mandeville Canyon. If we are handed a more reasonable deck of cards, the dream is a place like Topanga, Pasadena, or Altadena.

My real dream has always been the Palisades. The Palisades are the Eden of L.A. Spread out over 20 miles of bluffs, Pali glows like a city on a hill overlooking the ocean, the highlands, and the rest of L.A.’s working class. It is one of the only places that feels sufficiently green; trees, shrubs, brush, flowers, and man-sized aloe plants line every single street. Many places in  L.A., including my own neighborhood, feel like a bald spot on the crown of Southern California. The Palisades were lush, verdant, and smelled like security, like children who’d been breastfed since kindergarten and maybe a little bit longer.

I drove there many times just to walk around and imagine my life there. I wouldn’t have to sit through an hour of traffic to find a beach free of homeless encampments or syringes. My kids would go to good schools. Finding a patch of grass without dog—or human—feces would not be such a hassle. I’d join some sort of women’s club and teach the WASPs in my area the difference between good chardonnay (Burgundian) and bad (Californian). More than anything, I would not fall asleep to the sound of sirens and helicopters swirling around my house at 11 PM.

After 72 hours of waiting to be evacuated while watching flames gulp down all of L.A.’s crown jewels, it finally hit me: the most beautiful parts of our city are actually gone. My husband turned to me and said, “If we had gotten everything we wanted, we would have nothing now.”

A week before the fires began, I wrote down a single New Year’s resolution: make more space for beauty in 2025. It makes me chuckle now, reminding me of how gifted the subconscious is at knowing what we need before the rational mind. Beauty, in my experience, is often the first thing to drop from a life that is too full, especially if it is full of grief or chaos or some other horsemen of the unknown. It requires time, but more than time—space. As a gardener with a paved yard, I know that plants never blossom when the pot is too small, the water is too frequent, or the sun is hidden by smog or marine layer. So is it with our souls and whatever beautiful thing we are trying to create in this world.

“There are a thousand thousand ways to live this life, every one of them sufficient,” Marilynne Robinson says at the end of Gilead. I have to believe this is true, even in the aftermath of a natural disaster which will cost more than 9/11 to rebuild. In older civilizations, it was believed that whatever was left after the crucible of a fire was imbued with special powers. I am still looking for that thing, even as I have a meltdown after burning the pancakes and filling my kitchen with a different kind of smoke, the domestic cloud which reminds me that my kitchen is still standing.

Part 1: Give Past Beauty A Body

For my birthday this year, my husband drove me two hours north of L.A. to Los Olivos for a special dinner. As we climbed closer to the highlands, the air thickened to the consistency of shredded cotton. Tony told me we were in the middle of a cloud.

I stared out the window as he asked for my favorite moments of 2024. Images crowded my mind. I thought of the Bonnes-Mares we drank in Paris, of sitting outside our favorite restaurant with friends while eating pureed John Dory. I thought of trick-or-treating with my friend’s kiddos. I thought of the meatballs in broth we scooped over polenta almost weekly. I thought of smuggling our own popcorn into The Chinese Theater to watch “Twisters.” I thought of all the people that reached out after the break-in, and then, several months later, after the fires. I thought about how good life was and how easy it is to forget these things amid some really tough days. 

In the years I’ve helped people sort themselves out in the kitchen, I’ve discovered that most of us are preoccupied with our culinary flaws and aspirations instead of our actual likes. This is a recipe (pun intended) for disaster. Skill follows affection. Opulence is found in a chocolate mousse, or it can be appreciated in a corndog with mustard and a diet coke. Taking just 30 minutes to write down the most beautiful moments of the past year helped remind my brain of what true beauty looks and feels like in my body. It put me back in touch with my own palate. It also reminded me of the good which I had passed over and gave it a place to live and breathe.

Part 2: Decant The Mind

In December, I read this article about the making of A Christmas Carol. For six weeks while writing the book, Charles Dickens walked a twenty-mile loop through London, immersing himself in the world of Marley, Cratchett, Scrooge, and the other spirits. His first draft was written in one fell swoop, and was the only version ever completed. We can suspect that so many nights spent saturated in the world he was creating made the actual writing part much, much simpler.

It has never been easier in the modern era to fall for counterfeit inspiration. We are always halfway in, halfway out for the sake of “staying informed”. Every chore is accompanied by a podcast, every drive a playlist, every walk a FaceTime, every morning coffee a slurry of news apps. Older creatives were thrust into a realization which we have to choose by force: mundane tasks help us decant our creative ideas.

I’ve had wines taste like cardboard at first blush turn fruity, bold, rounded, and full of expression after hours in a decanter. What exactly does the wine do in a decanter? Nothing. It breathes. It rests. It opens. It becomes more of itself in a relaxed environment. I’m convinced that this is what the modern mind needs more than anything else. I’m convinced I need this more than anything else; less knowledge and more boredom.

The biggest wakeup call for me in this arena was watching The Taste of Things. Unlike The Bear or Chef’s Table, which focus on the performative, stressful nature of cooking in a restaurant, this film captures the mystical nature of home cooking at the highest order for someone you love. It also has no music whatsoever. It was a reminder to me that the kitchen fills us with its own music each and every day. It was a reminder of what I miss every time I try to do more than one thing at a time, even if that thing appears, at first blush, to be extremely dull. 

Part 3: Record When I Feel Most Alive

My current form of journaling is to record the four to five moments I feel most alive every single day. These moments cannot be feelings or intuitions; they must be physical and visceral events, moments involving taste, smell, sight, sound, or feel. It can, and often is, just a single sentence. I do the exercise first thing every morning and it feels like putting my glasses on each day. It helps prepare me to see the world through a more refined and open lens.

I don’t have an exact formula and what I write is rarely earth shattering. I usually jot down one thing involving food, another involving nature, and at least one or two things regarding the people I love and/or current events taking place. I’ve written about the single patch of grass by our driveway, a spot which actually belongs to the neighbors. I journal about my husband’s neck a lot. And if there’s time, I journal the recipe for dinner: massaman curry, a sheet pan with sausage and gnocchi, oatmeal with cornflakes. Most of the time, it’s unbelievably simple, just the four to five parts of the day that surprised me most and kept me rooted in the present moment. When I do sit down to write a scene, a lot of what I need is already there.

Part 4: Laugh

Several days after the fires, I was in a bookstore. The young man at the register asked me if I had an account. 

“Yes,” I replied with confidence. He then paused, making space for me to recite my account number, which was just my phone number.

“I need your number, ma’am,” he prodded gently.

My eyes were fixed in the middle distance as I realized that my phone number had flown to the moon, along with my name and address, and a good chunk of my sanity.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t know my own name today,” I chuckled, once the numbers finally pushed through. 

His face got grave, the kind of look people get when they remember the world is still on fire.

“I’m pretty sure we’re all fried today,” he said.

“Nice use of the word fried,” I said, and then he laughed. It was like the moment someone tells you a very expensive dinner is already paid for. Relief. For a second, I felt the same as Tony and I driving through that cloud, naming every good part of life.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

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We just hit 100 subscribers!!! One of the greatest blessings of my life is to write about how the kitchen has saved my life and in return to hear from some of you. I’d like to do a little giveaway to thank you. This—small!—gift box is a gathering of some of the things I’ve listed below, things which make my kitchen feel like home. To enter, simply do the following:

1. Subscribe to my Substack. 

2. Repost or re-stack this article. 

3. Comment down below, tagging the name of a friend you feel deserves some extra kitchen love this year. Whoever wins will get a gift box both for themselves and a friend.

Now, onto the good stuff. No matter your religion or season of life, the holidays remain the one time of year when we all need and want the same thing: home. There are many ways to create coziness in the kitchen; these are some of my tried and true. This guide can be used to invest in buying treasured items for your own kitchen space or as a gentle nudge to your significant other. Here, in no particular order, are the top ten things that make my kitchen feel like heaven on earth.

Copper

The first time I saw copper in abundance was at an old wine shop and cookery school in Beaune, France called The Cook’s Atelier (a great place to buy gifts if you are très riche). Artful stacks of copper roasting trays, the most beautiful kettles, strainers, ladles, and molds filled the shop. The ember-like glow of the copper endeared this little French shop to me. It is a texture and a feeling I have not since forgotten.

Copper is not just beautiful but one of the best, most even conductors of heat money can buy. Mauviel USA makes some very good copper. However, the quality does differ from the Mauviel created in France. In France, the copper lining in the pots is made thicker, dispersing heat more evenly. 

A wonderful place to start looking for copper is to peruse secondhand French items on Etsy. These are more affordable than new pots and pans and ensure that extra thickness in the lining which makes cooking with copper so special. The patina and scratches on older copper is also beautiful and adds a rustic quality.

A Book of Days

A book of days is exactly what it sounds like: a book with a recipe, quote, thought, or mantra for every day of the year. The one I keep in my kitchen is called Life is Meals. In it are thoughts on some of the world’s finest eaters; Thomas Jefferson, M.F.K. Fischer, and Madame de Pompadour. Vignettes on garlic, buying beef, yogurt, oysters, and Burgundy are peppered throughout. It is a wonderful way to mark the passing of time in the kitchen, like an Advent calendar for food. The book comes in a beautiful dust jacket but I like mine naked. The binding is a beautiful coral red, giving a much needed flourish to my kitchen countertops.

Love Notes, Poems, Quotes

For thirteen years, Tony and I have been writing love notes to each other. Many are now posted in the same cabinets with our blenders, cheese graters, and mason jars. I also fill the kitchen with poems and tidbits I find in my reading life. On the plywood wall behind my oven is a poem I wrote about the things which go missing after slipping through the cracks. Handwritten notes are free but they give the kitchen a feeling of utter richness, connection, and family. Maybe you decide to write a little note or prayer of blessing for the cook in your life and slide it into a frame so they can put it near the coffee grinder. 

Heirlooms From the Dead

Right before she died, Tony’s mom Ariane sent me a very funny note about the Gwyneth Paltrow crystals and body oil I’d cheekily sent her in the “hopes” that it would cure the terminal breast cancer she was dying from. I put her response on our fridge, where it stayed years after she passed. Recently, we had it professionally framed, making it look even lovelier.

There is a special power to the relics, icons, objects, and notes of people who have died. It turns our attention, which is bound by hours and days and school drop-offs, to something or someone more historical and timeless for a moment. Heirlooms are little touchstones of remembrance and I love keeping them around my house. If you don’t have a note, you could ask for an old apron from grandma, a trinket, or a church cookbook or picture of an important saint and wrap it in beautiful paper for your loved one. You can also use something cherished and dear—a marriage certificate or a picture of  great, great grandparents—framed. Anything which reminds your loved one that they are one link in a very long and wonderful ancestry of cooks and world builders.

Sharp Knives + Knife Skills

Our hospital visit tally due to kitchen accidents is only twice: once because of a rogue juicer (my fault) and once because of an incredibly dull blade which slipped and cut very deep, teaching a painful lesson requiring stitches. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: dull knives are the most dangerous thing a cook has in her kitchen.

There are so many places to buy good knives these days, but I always return to my tried and true: Epicurean Edge. If you already have a good knife, they provide reasonable knife sharpening services which are worth every penny and unharmed finger. All you must do is package up the blade, fill out a form, and send it in. They take care of the rest.

Candles

Something about a long tapered candle always slows me down. It takes just seconds to light and creates a mellow glow that melts the harshness of the day away. Because I don’t want candle scents interfering with the aroma of what I cook, I use Bluecorn Candles, a high-quality, non-toxic beeswax candle purveyor in Colorado. These candles last a good long while and cast a softer glow because of their natural golden hue. They are priced a little higher than the scented candles at Target but also last longer and cause fewer headaches.

Antique Finds

Similar to notes from the dead, antique finds give the kitchen a lived-in, warm, and storied feeling. A lot of things are cheaper and more beautiful when purchased  second-hand. While I have no comprehensive  guide to flea markets and antique stores—rural Pennsylvania is where I’ve had the best luck—I do have a handful of things I’m always on the lookout for. These include but are never limited to; glass measuring cups, aprons, candleholders, and large, hand-painted bowls. 

Painted items typically require  handwashing, but much of the old glassware from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s is made to be used, loved, and thrown in the dishwasher. If you have no place nearby to shop secondhand Etsy is one space where I’ve found excellent and durable vintage glass. They also have good silver, aprons, china, and candle holders from time to time. We even found an old French candelabra from a monastery on there. The possibilities are truly endless.

Color

Color can be anything: a bouquet of lilies, a pot of basil, a hand-painted mug, a framed drawing by your child. Color creates a dynamic, alive, richness within your space. Japanese and Scandinavian designers tend to do color in the most timeless and elegant ways. Below are some of my favorite spots to go looking for a pop of color (two are brick and mortar locations here in Los Angeles).

Tortoise General Store

The Good Liver

Nordic Nest

Music

Music, my old friend. You have coaxed me away from the edge of a nervous breakdown. You have sheltered me with the beauty of your soundscapes and wrapped my home in bliss. Because the kitchen is my most inhabited space, it also holds memories of great stress  (cue the time I cooked a Thanksgiving meal for 25 complete strangers after living in L.A. for less than 6 months). 

When we were dating long distance, my husband made me a Spotify playlist to listen to when I missed him. It’s still one of the most romantic things he’s ever done for me. This year, I made a cinematic Christmas music playlist for the both of us. He declared he loves it, which, since he’s a musician, means I can now die happy.

A Kitchen Blessing

In a post from earlier this year, I talked about the story behind my kitchen blessing—a handwritten quote hanging in our window—and how it has bolstered me in times of great need and mundanity. A kitchen blessing is a beacon, a prayer, a mantra, and a refuge. It’s a consolation when the kitchen rituals grow so repetitive we want to die. And it can be anything. Anything at all that gives hope. Maybe you throw a few dollars at that friend who has great handwriting and ask them to scribe your loved one’s favorite poem or recipe or move quote. Or maybe you type it up and slide it into a simple frame. Maybe you write a blessing yourself and title it “For the Hands Which Make Our Meals.” You don’t need to be a wordsmith to be a blessing. Being truthful is sufficient.

Thank You

Thank you again for coming along for this ride with me this year. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and Happy Holiday season full of love, warmth, and rest. I am taking the next month or two to be with family and to do some dreaming for the year ahead. I love it when you tell me what you’d like to hear more of. If anything strikes your fancy, please let me know in the comments. And, do tell me what you’re baking this year! Merry Christmas homebodies!

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Photos by Bethany Schrock

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Before I began cooking, I knew next to nothing about the fragile relationship between politics and friendship. I had a grandfather who lived as close to Canada as humanly possible and voted blue in every election because he was afraid his beloved woods would disappear under a more conservative leader. I also had an aunt who pulled me aside to tell me that Obama was the Antichrist and that she could prove it if I gave her enough time to explain. Still another grandfather stopped voting altogether in silent protest after the JFK assassination. He declared, rather clairvoyantly I’m afraid, that every politician after Kennedy was crooked. Every weekend and holiday, the whole family ate dinner together. I thought nothing of having family on both sides of the political aisle except that it felt normal.

Several weeks ago, I was at a dinner. Every possible political extreme was attendant. We disagreed on almost everything. Things got testy more than a couple of times. There were several moments when I thought my heart would explode for how fast it was beating. Still, the conversation resonated until the late hours of the night—12:48am—and we were all laughing and smiling and hugging and sending loving texts at the end. A few of us said it was the best night we’d had all year. All I kept thinking? This feels so incredibly abnormal.

There are a million reasons why healthy political debate has taken a turn for the worst in the three or so decades since I was a child, but mostly, people seem to spend more time reading and posting about their political opponent than actually speaking to them face to face. Because I live in a deep blue state and only believe in criticizing my own mama, I would be remiss to not mention how much the left has contributed to this trend. Weekly, sometimes daily, I hear a litany of derision which truly takes my breath away.

Can you believe half the country voted for him? 

We can only hope he keels over soon. 

Thank God he got Covid—a taste of his own medicine. 

Next time the assassin better not miss! 

Fuck you, fuck Trump, you’re a Nazi! (yelled by strangers to people wearing MAGA hats)

The real reason people don’t vote for Democrats is because they aren’t educated. 

Conservatives are transphobic, racist, bigoted misogynists.

I’m guilty too. Of course I am. In 2016, right after Trump won, I led an incredibly melodramatic yoga class. I was devastated Hillary lost and spent the whole week on the verge of tears. I gave permission to my clients to feel their feelings, intoning that some feelings were more obviously significant than others. My liberal condescension was probably felt in China. I played “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers and my favorite gay friend came up to me, also in tears, thanking me for the “safe space” I’d just created. Then I turned around. In the back of class was a woman rolling up her mat alone, face full of confusion, shame, embarrassment. Immediately I knew: she had just experienced the opposite of what my gay friend had.

I am not naive about what real political debates can do. Sometimes “safe space for all” turns into “safe space for all to explode.” Not every relationship survives vast and deep political differences. I know this firsthand. Some people will not listen to understand no matter how kind, well-informed, or well-meaning you actually are. But the alternative is a lifetime spent conflating a person’s private voting decisions with their entire personhood. The alternative is talking over people instead of to them. Or it’s hiding. I detest all three.

Nine or so years ago, I had a friend named Emily who modeled the kind of deep listening that I still aspire to. I don’t remember if we disagreed on politics or religion per say, but I do remember that we could not have been in more different stages of life at the time. I was coming apart at the seams, working through a bedrock of suppressed trauma which made me feel both numb and eager to talk all at once. Emily had been married a while, had a couple kids, was an accomplished painter. She was mature, better adjusted, maternal, and warm. I considered myself, at that time, like a scared squirrel.

Emily made me canned black beans as her main dish and it still stacks up as one of the best meals I’ve ever had. I don’t even think an onion was involved, in fact I’m sure it was not. It was summer and her house was full of paintings by her two young kids. There was a small hand painted sign that said, “These are the golden days”. And it felt that way. The home was filled with soft glades of light, lived-in and not fragile but still extremely precious, like an incubator for baby angels.

She dumped two cans of black beans into a skillet along with a packet of Trader Joe’s taco seasoning. She neither drained nor rinsed nor added any liquid. She simply used what was already in there (there’s a lesson in that somewhere). The bean syrup slowly melded with the packet of seasoning, making it rich and custardy. She sliced what seemed like a hundred small red cherry tomatoes (the non-organic kind) and just kept scattering them over everything, along with fistfuls of lime and sprays of salt and extra cilantro. A pot of quinoa bubbled and she made bowl after bowl of sharp, salty guacamole with chips. And that was it: canned black beans, quinoa, guacamole, chips, tomatoes, excessive lime, and cilantro.

What did she do with the rest of her energy? Well, she did what she does best: she listened. She cocked her head to one side as I spoke and didn’t finagle her way into my frequent pauses. I watched my words sink into her, filling up the chocolate brown depths of her big pretty eyes. For a few sweet hours, I felt so much more interesting and important than was normal. 

All these years later, I still think this is the host’s true job: to make every person feel as though they’ve come to the right place, that they are truly indispensable and wanted, that they are interesting and worthy objects of affection.

Of course, a post-election holiday season may provide unique challenges for this task. But have no fear: there is an invisible strength which rises to the aid of every host who decides to listen without building a rebuttal behind a curtain of silence. Some call it grace. I call it wisdom. Every time I think I’ve reached my patience limit at a dinner, some rises like a plume of warm steam from the dishwasher after it’s clicked off the wash cycle. It is a good, good gift, it is a free facial, and I know it comes from God and belongs to all. 

Perhaps if we can build more spaces like this into our lives, spaces for mastering our internal frustrations and not sharing every informed or uniformed thought that arises before our frontal lobes during a discourse with a friend, America will truly become great. Maybe we will even gain a few unlikely friends who will want to return to our homes for dinner. Perhaps we will make people feel more dignified and less judged in our presence. A blessed thought to cozy up to on the cusp of Thanksgiving. 

A Recipe for Hosting Guests with Political Differences

Ingredients

1 grain (quinoa or rice) pre-cooked to your liking, to be reheated in a cast iron at 200 degrees with butter for 10-15 min

2 cans of beans

Stuff for guacamole: 2-3 avocados, 3-4 limes, 1 bunch cilantro, salt

1 packet of taco seasoning (I love Sieté’s mild packet because it comes with coconut sugar and has a wonderfully nutty flavor)

Chips (also Sieté or Masa if I’m feeling opulent)

Many bottles of red Beaujolais or Arbois, found at any liquor store

Chorizo (optional)

Cheese (optional-ish)

Rotisserie Chicken (optional)

Tools

Patience

Courage

Sass

A shot—or two—of Mezcal, taken before guests arrive

Technique

Delegate // When inviting guests, consider your least favorite tasks and delegate them to other willing victims. Mine is dessert. I ask my most maternal guest to bring dessert because being helpful and lovely is always her highest aspiration, and I like to help her fulfill it. I also do not like to make extensive appetizers or sides, so I always ask my most responsible guest to bring an app or a side. This responsible guest will arrive on time, when people are requiring appetizers. I only allow one person to bring drinks and his name is Dev. His is the only taste which rivals my husband’s. 

Skip the assholes // As a former (sometimes current!) asshole, let me remind you that you are not morally obligated to invite someone to dinner who assumes your intent without first trying to understand it. There is a difference between genuine, healthy disagreement and truly hapless rhetoric. People who make snap judgements based on limited information, people who have a penchant, no, a gift! for interrupting, make for awful dinner guests (and friends). These people have a way of sliding off my invite list and into the dust bin where they belong. 

Good will and manners are a prerequisite, especially in matters of the heart, the table, politics, and culture. Mutual respect and a desire to learn from the other side are not nice-to-haves, they are absolute musts for a really good party. Even if it means the number at the table is smaller than desired, this boundary is godly. It has made my table a merrier and a genuinely safer one, indeed.

Leave an hour of slush time // A couple days before the party is when I do all my shopping. The morning of the event, I do all the things I don’t want to do while people are over: cook rice, set the table, wash the bathroom. Alice Waters’ advice on hosting is to only leave one hot thing to cook before the dinner party begins. I try to have everything finished an hour-ish before guests arrive so that I can take that time to do something for myself: take a shower, put some makeup on, drink my Mezcal.

Buy more wine // Have twice as much wine as you think you should. If the conversation is good that means it will last, and the only thing worse than a party where no passions are riled, is a party that runs out of wine. Even Christ himself did not let it happen. If I am going to sit on my ass in my best dress and listen to some insane shit go down, then I will not do it stone cold sober, and neither should you. My husband has mastered the art of the quiet, slow pour so no one gets drunk but everyone stays delightfully buzzed for hours.

Wear the dress // If you have it—a super pretty, sparkly, sexy thing—don’t wait to wear it. Just put the damn thing on. As long as it’s comfortable, warm, and makes you feel like a million bucks, it belongs on your body and not on the hanger. 

Let people help // While guests are arriving, you can make the guacamole, or you can give that task to the first person who offered to help. In my experience, almost everyone knows how to make guacamole. And if they don't, they can learn right then and there. People, especially introverts God bless us, really do love to be helpful. If someone offers a hand, give them a job. Usually they’re trying to move some of that nervous social anxiety into usefulness. Helping makes people feel like they are part of the family, which is the goal of any party. This familial, casual nature of letting people help makes guests less averse to conflict, should it arise. I try to give everyone at least one job throughout the night for this very reason.

Wait an hour or so after start time to eat dinner // My rule is to never start dinner until an hour after the stated start time. If everyone gathers at 6, we won’t be eating till 7 or 7:30. This gives people time to grab a drink, learn names, and have some guacamole. This primes the pumps for deeper conversation. Once we are about twenty to thirty minutes out from dinner time, I start cooking the beans, reheating/making rice, and assembling any other sides.

Don’t forget to breathe through hot emotions // The number of times I forget to breathe in a day every time a big thought passes from my brain to my mouth is more than I’d care to admit. If things get testy, which I only imagine they will if you have good wine flowing, find the smooth place in your soul and body which is not overrun with intense emotions. “Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense” (W.H Auden). If I can’t find a place in myself which has no strong and overwhelming emotions, I don’t speak at all. I just wait for the storm to pass, even if that storm takes all night. I don’t make myself small, I just sit and wait for sanity to return. If she does not, I go and take a bath. 

Take a bath // No matter how late the hour, I fill up my tub with hot water and magnesium salts to soak for a bit after the party. Usually my mind is buzzing after a rousing political or cultural debate. I need some time to let my energy come down. This is a moment of reward for me, a moment to remember what the true point of hosting has always been about—home—and my unique, albeit tiny, role in moving the country forward.

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Photos by Tony Anderson