Recently at school, our Inclusion and Diversity Collaborative held a community meeting to talk about books. We used a textual lineage activity to learn about the books that have informed who we are. (The link is to a version of a textual lineage I documented from my life and instructions on how to do a…

My family has a somewhat new holiday tradition. Rather than eating the whole meal at one apartment, we have different courses at different places with the opportunity to get a bit of air and movement between each course. I get to end the evening by hosting the dessert course. This year, the dessert menu had…

I used to wonder what comfort food is in different cultures. A bowl of pasta with red sauce, mac and cheese, or a piece of good bread and cheese have been soothing to me during the pandemic. Over the course of the past 18 months, I have had more solo meals than I would prefer….

After school one recent afternoon, I had a craving for cookies. Who, me? I wanted to sit with a glass of milk and have a home baked sweet. It seemed energizing and comforting at the same time. I had just finished watching High on the Hog on Netflix and was reading the book, High on…

Kitchen tables play an important role in our culture. Children do homework and grownups pay bills at them, families gather around them to share meals. Politicians woo voters by discussing “kitchen table” issues. An article in The Counter, an online newsletter about food and culture in the US, explored the history of the politicization of…

There is something very satisfying about planning a meal and then taking the time to attentively and purposefully follow the process of preparing the meal. Making ragú is a time consuming process. It requires planning and getting ingredients. Reading blogs for recipes. Marinating the meat over night. Attending to the ragú simmering on the stove…

“Cooking is a troublesome sprite. Often it may drive you to despair. Yet, it is also very rewarding, for when you do succeed, or overcome a difficulty in doing so, you feel the satisfaction of a great triumph.”  This is how Pelligrino Artusi opens his book, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.  Pelligrino…

  “What do you do for fun?” Although it seems like a fairly boring conversation starter, it actually made me pause. What do I do for fun? There is a lot of mental health research on the importance of having hobbies. Since hobbies decrease stress, engaging in activities that are absorbing and relaxing is more…

A while back, I read a history book, Crossing the Continent, by Robert Goodwin, about Esteban, an enslaved Black man who was a member of Coronado’s expeditions to the Americas.  The expedition shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico and the survivors walked for 8 years across the southwest back to Mexico City. The first chapter…

I am usually in charge of desserts for family gatherings. Because of the kind of recipes I make (chocolate cakes, custards for pies and ice creams), I use a lot of egg yolks which lead to me having a lot of left over egg whites. So I search for recipes that use a lot of…