Aprovechar

Dear Sally,
I know the age of 20 is confusing for you, so I’m traveling back in time to give you a heads-up about what’s coming in life. Feel relieved? Good.
Right now, at 20, you’re a girl consumed with swirls of emotions about nearly everything in life.  You feel battered by some of what’s come your [...]

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I’m spending much of my week creating five fall (yes, fall already in the magazine world!) dessert recipes (gluten-free, casein-free, egg-free, soy-free, with vegan options) for a magazine.  I need about five additional testers right now—people who can make one of the recipes as it’s written and report back the results to me by next [...]

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What a gorgeous bounty of food.
Yesterday morning, my husband and I made our way to the park to join the wandering masses making their way through farmers’ booths, bakery stands, and stalls of homemade goods.
I picked out most of the produce we will eat this week.  We already had an avocado, red potatoes, limes, lemons, [...]

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“so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.”
–william carlos williams
I remember in high school, junior year, explications of William Carlos Williams’s poem. I remember learning that he was a doctor, a pediatrician. Someone (perhaps the text) suggested that Williams had written the poem after making a house call where a child died. [...]

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This is a very exciting time of year.  My husband and I try to eat seasonally as much as possible, sourcing many of the ingredients we use from local growers and purveyors who use sustainable methods for what they produce.  We’re fortunate, living in the South (the Southern U.S., that is), to have a variety [...]

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There’s so much we take for granted.
I’ve had this thought several times lately when I’ve been looking at food magazines, blogs, and books. It’s been nearly two years since my diagnoses of gluten intolerance and latent food allergies.  I can still look at photos or descriptions of recipes and imagine the way a crusty popover [...]

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When I quit my job, it seemed so plain to me:  I needed to quit my job. I love to write.  I had already researched freelance writing extensively.  The plan fit.  I knew the path wouldn’t be easy, but I felt pretty euphoric about it.
And then I crashed into an emotional wall and fell to [...]

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It’s been about a hundred years since I did a tidbits post.  I kid you not when I say that I had about 200—two hundred!—tabs open in Firefox that I needed to go through and close yesterday.  Some of those were links I was considering sharing with you. Here are a few of the best [...]

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I was in a deep funk.
In the midst of packing boxes and making holiday plans and attending my grandmother’s funeral and trying to work in a half-empty apartment (part of the contents of which had already disappeared with their new owner), I unraveled.  I grew anxious and angry.
Why was it always my responsibility to make [...]

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You might think from my earlier Thanksgiving post that traditional holiday foods don’t do much for me.  Au contraire—one of the more difficult things about food allergies has been dealing with family holiday gatherings where everyone, including me, has specific ideas about what we should be eating, how it should be constructed, and how it [...]

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