Year: 2016
December 7
Today it’s been 14 years since my dad died, and in most ways, it seems like longer than that. I’ve done a lot of living – maybe too much? – in those 14 years. But I can still hear his voice in my head, and I can still feel the hug he gave me in our driveway before I left to drive to Seattle for graduate school, in September of 2002. Burg would be 87 now, and I’m sort of glad I never had to see him diminished by old age – or, at least, not more than he was diminished in his last weeks, as cancer had its way with him. He would be glad to know that Mom and I now live a block apart, within sight of Puget Sound, and that one night in August, when things felt hard and I needed comfort, I pulled out an old t-shirt of his that I’d kept all this time but never worn, a royal blue Classen Grill t-shirt with the logo on the back and the words “peaches and cream” written in four languages on the front. It still smelled like him, and I put it on and slept in it, and I felt better. Wherever he is, I hope he’s doing it up right, as he was in this photo (he’s on the left, with family friend Ed Fretwell on the right), drinking something boozy out of a plastic coupe in a swimming pool, eating well, and grinning about it.
(By the way, as a kid, I was terrified of that pool cleaning device you see in the background, which propelled itself slowly and menacingly around, dragging its long tube of a tail. I half-expected to hear the Jaws theme song every time I got into the Fretwells’ pool. Burg and Ed clearly did not share my fear.)
Speaking of fear: I should have known, knowing this community, that I had no reason to be afraid when I wrote the previous post. I don’t understand it, but you have always been so good to me, and this post was no exception. I’ve read every single comment, most of them more than once, and I want to thank you, a million times over, for your understanding and kindness. What I’ve experienced is something that even I struggle to understand, and your compassion felt like a lot to ask or even hope for. But you offered it to me anyway. I am honored and astounded by what this site has become, and that has as much to do with you as it does with me.
A reader named Rosemary – hi, Rosemary! – left a link in the comments to the poem “Failing and Flying,” by Jack Gilbert. I’d not seen before, and if you’ve not seen it either, I recommend you go take a look. It’s so good and so wise. Thank you, Rosemary.
A couple of other good things: the writer Zadie Smith on Fresh Air, and longtime LGBTQ activist Cleve Jones, too. When I was a kid and my family was doing volunteer work for the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which Jones founded, his name came up often. Cleve Jones was a hero and a celebrity in our household, and I’m glad he’s still out there, fighting the good fight.
I want to eat this. (Thanks for the nudge, Gemma.)
This hilarity, via illustrator-writer Hallie Bateman. Sign me up for cocooning and sardining.
And last but not least, a holiday cookies episode of Spilled Milk! With a warning: we recorded this before the presidential election, so prepare to weep copiously when we express optimism about its outcome.
Thank you again. And again and again.
xo
November 30
I’ve always been drawn to the things we’re not supposed to talk about. I remember the night when, toward the end of writing A Homemade Life, I got into bed, switched off the light, and suddenly was hit with a very bad idea, an almost electric impulse to write about my father’s death. I wanted to take it out of my head and put it somewhere else: the color of his skin, the strange percussion of his breath, the nurse calling up the stairs in the middle of the night. I wasn’t writing a book about my dad, and I wasn’t writing a book about death; I was writing a food memoir, tra la la, with fifty recipes and a…
Read moreOctober 3
I started my Monday by listening to Blood Orange until my ears fell off, which was nice. Then my friend Jenny told me to watch this (old-news) video (that I somehow had never seen before), and with that, my week is off and running. Hi to you. Now, business: 1. The Guardian kindly invited me to write about a food that evokes home, and I wrote about a dead-simple, bare-cupboard soup that was first made for me by my aunt Tina. That’s her below, on the right, living the early-eighties hot tub life with me and my cousins. Most people thinks that June gets her hair color and texture from Brandon, but world, let it be known that I think she’s got my texture…
Read moreIt doesn’t look like much
Helloooooooooooooooo. I didn’t mean to be gone for so long. I know what some of you were thinking, and I am delighted to report that I did not give up on blogging. I also did not die. But it’s been a long, hard, dizzying summer, I will say that, with, among other things, Herculean staffing woes at Delancey, Essex, and Dino’s. (Did you know there’s currently a shortage of restaurant cooks in a lot of cities, including Seattle? I could tell you stories.) But now that June is in school again, I’ve been able to tiptoe my way back to writing, and that’s a relief. I turned 38 last week, and that too feels good. I’ve also been cooking again, after the lazy, happy ease…
Read moreOut here, up here
Today I come to you from Sitka, Alaska, where I’ve been since last Saturday, leading a writing workshop on memoir and place. I’m among the faculty for the first-ever Sitka Arts and Science Festival, a week of multi-disciplinary cross-pollination and collaboration dreamed up by the Sitka Fine Arts Camp and several local partners, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s been cool and misty almost every day, summer-in-Sitka-y. I didn’t bring enough clothing for this weather, even though, after fourteen years in the Pacific Northwest, I ought to know better. I’m re-wearing what I did bring. Today is day four for these leggings, day two for this sweatshirt. I’ve been wearing my cheap Uniqlo down vest, and it spits out tiny white…
Read moreJune 28
I am not, in general, someone who keeps a running catalog of her favorites: favorite movie, favorite book, favorite song, favorite color, favorite number, and so on. A couple of decades ago, if pressed, I might have offered The Shawshank Redemption as my favorite movie, because I have a thing for Tim Robbins, and I also have a thing for Morgan Freeman’s voice, and, of course, it’s also a first-rate story. But then I moved to Seattle and rekindled my teenage love for Singles, which you know all about because I mention it near-constantly, and because it’s the only movie I can actually quote lines from. Still, I don’t know that I’d call it my favorite. That’s a strong word, and it scares…
Read moreThe opposite of fancy
In August of 2014 – which, for those who are counting, was twenty-two entire months ago – I mentioned my friend Natalie’s “famous cucumber dip.” A bunch of you asked for the recipe, so I e-mailed Natalie, and she sent it promptly. The recipe is not fancy. It’s the opposite of fancy. I liked that about it, and I was very excited about the new chapter of my existence that was revealing itself, an existence promising as much famous cucumber dip as I could get myself around. I was going to write about it immediately. But then a few days went by, and then more days after that, and some more after that. By then, it was sometime around New Year’s Day of…
Read moreApril 29
It seems lately that I’ve found a lot of good reasons to not cook – or, if I do cook, to not cook anything new or anything that requires more than a passing thought. I’m a big champion of scrambled eggs for dinner, as you likely know, and a seven-minute egg on anything that holds still, and I could eat Ed Fretwell Soup for an entire week of every month. I am currently in a very pleasant rut of all of the above, plus whatever-is-in-the-fridge-cut-up-and-dunked-in-vinaigrette and a decent amount of pizza from my own establishments, because what is the point of having restaurants if you can’t eat in them, right? Someday I will cook something new and write about it. But not today.…
Read moreMarch 28
Every year, my friend Brandi takes her preteen niece Paige on a trip for spring break, and this year, June and I went along. Last week, the four of us spent four days exploring the Grand Canyon and nearby Antelope Canyon, eating trail mix (the kind with M&Ms in it, the only kind), and feeling a quasi-religious level of gratitude that the flat tire we got while driving between the aforementioned canyons didn’t occur in the desolation of mid-desert but rather in the parking lot of one of only two gas stations along the route. Somehow, June is now big enough to carry her own backpack. My life passes before my eyes. Back at home, I find that we have reached, yet again,…
Read moreDino’s Tomato Pie
Yesterday, my mom took June to the aquarium, and Brandon and I spent the day at Dino’s Tomato Pie, hanging photographs and making lists, getting ready to open the day after tomorrow. Like Delancey and Essex, Dino’s is owned by the two of us, but this business is more purely Brandon’s brainchild than either of the first two. I know I once said Delancey was Brandon’s baby, and then Essex was Brandon’s baby, but no, Dino’s is really, really, really Brandon’s baby. Dino’s – which is pronounced deeno, a shortened version of Brandino, the faux-talian nickname some of our friends have given Brandon – is a pizza tavern, modeled on the kind of place you find along the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s wood…
Read moreCooking with a young child
Today, on the ole blog: some thoughts about cooking with a kid! After the jump! Because I totally get that not everyone wants to read about kid stuff! See you next time!
Read moreNo one awake but us
On the night we got there, when we checked in, the lady at the front desk wrote out the wifi network and password on the corner of a pad of paper, ripped it free, and handed it to me. I slid it into my phone case, so that I wouldn’t lose it, and last week, three months later, I noticed it still wedged there. “How’s that Rancho Pescadero wifi working for you?” Brandon says, peering over my shoulder. “Little slow, from 2,000 miles away?” I roll my eyes, yank out the scrap of paper, and crumple it up. But when he looks away, I press it flat again and slip it back in. I first heard about Rancho Pescadero was from a couple of Delancey neighbors and longtime…
Read moreThat January thing
Split pea, the ugliest soup! The food whose appearance most closely approximates toxic waste water! The miraculous substance capable of making a home kitchen feel like a military chow hall! Capable of making a person who has never used the words “chow hall” in her entire life suddenly feel like Chow Hall is what she will call her vast, sweeping estate in the English countryside, when she somehow inherits a vast, sweeping estate in the English countryside! Split pea, a voyage for the mind! I have written before about split pea soup. It is apparently a January thing for me: I last wrote about it four years ago this month. Until yesterday, in fact, I wasn’t going to write about this particular version,…
Read moreJanuary 15
I’ve spent half of the past week sitting on the couch with a cold-y, not-at-school three-year-old, attempting to work while holding my neck cocked to the right at a 45-degree angle because she wants to hold a hank of my hair and smell it while she watches Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. We’ve all three got whatever’s been going around, the cough and constant need for Kleenex and now, naturally, a sore neck. It could always be worse, I remind myself; it could be the stomach flu. My hair could be shorter. I could, yet again, have that one Daniel Tiger song stuck in my head. After somehow forgetting about it for a couple of months, I made a fresh batch of Granola…
Read moreOn esoteric fruit
I first tasted quince the first time I had dinner with my first editor, an exceedingly kind, thoughtful woman of whom I nonetheless was terrified, because she was very New York Publishing World, and because she was my first editor. She had let me choose the restaurant, which only ratcheted up the stakes. I’m surprised that I don’t remember what I wore, because I surely would have labored over the decision with a degree of care most commonly seen among people handling live explosives. The evening went better than I had expected: she told a funny story about her cat and gracefully ignored my elaborate, enthusiastic mispronunciation of the white wine she’d ordered. And when we arrived at dessert, she opened the menu…
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