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The following Sunday post is part of what we would love to turn into an ongoing series here at the blog, in which writers conversationally share about the ways they write. If reading this post gets your wheels turning about your own stories, let us know. Submissions are being accepted at WritingSeries [at] FoodLovesWriting [dot] ...
The other night, when Tim and I ate this salad, we’d just come back from a few hours of driving through neighborhoods. Tim and I do a lot of driving through neighborhoods. You could say driving through neighborhoods is our thing. I guess that’s good—that there’s a thing we have, you know, together. When my ...
From where I sit in Nashville, it’s is a balmy 80+ degrees right now. Neighbors are sitting on porches, people are biking down our street and the sun is turning everything this gorgeous golden hue. It’s so easy to love this time of year—and not just because of the warmth and daylight. I mean, you ...
We interrupt this regularly quiet Friday night to share ten moments from the day today. (If you’re looking for a recipe, might I direct you to this morning’s Brussels sprouts salad post?) My friend Sarah participated in this photo project two months ago, and, since I’m a sucker for documentation exercises of any kind (365 ...
No burying the lead in this post, folks: I’m nuts about this Brussels sprouts salad. I want to tell you I almost cried when I tasted it, but then I’d have to tell you how my brother almost rolls his eyes whenever he hears me say that. “Yeah, that tortilla soup you posted is good,” he ...
Although Tim’s lived in Nashville almost four years longer than I have, we both consider ourselves transplants—he from Ohio and me from Illinois. As born and bred Midwesterners, we can tell you this town’s a whole lot bigger than Dayton and much easier to navigate than Chicago; the weather’s nice, especially this time of year; ...
Today’s post features one of those ideas that, before you try it, sounds crazy and needless and hard; but that, after you try it, becomes brilliant and easy and so simple, you can’t believe you waited so long to give it a go. Tim and I have made homemade almond milk twice in the last ...
Every time we drive home to Ohio or Chicago, we make a pit stop in Louisville—but it wasn’t until Tim’s birthday that a stop became a visit. Arriving Thursday afternoon and leaving Saturday night, here’s what we did with just over 48 hours in the city that everybody’s talking about. ... Finish reading this post ...
Today is Tim’s birthday, which makes it the perfect time to tell you how another year of living life with him—cooking together, working side by side, analyzing the nuanced details of relationships with each other, budgeting, traveling, laughing, yelling, learning about each other and from each other—has been such a gift. What is also a ...
The other day, I bought fresh fennel at the grocery store. Fresh fennel, if you’re not familiar with it, is awkward and big, not unlike many of us were when we were back in junior high. Undeterred by the way my two bulbs wouldn’t fit inside a standard produce bag, their dill-like fronds poking out ...
Hi, gang. Today’s post is something of a bonus for the week because it’s actually a guest post published over at the ever beautiful, truly inspiring g0lubka blog. While they’re in the midst of editing an upcoming cookbook (set to publish in 2014!), Anya’s been gathering a series of guest posts from fellow bloggers for ...
I heard about the marathon bombings on Twitter. I hear about most everything on Twitter. I had been cleaning the house, vacuuming under chairs, tidying up stacks of papers, when I checked in at the computer. Then, there I was, along with much of America, sitting, glued to the screen, Googling for more information, clicking ...
Every spring, when the ground brings new life and the trees turn every shade of green, I think of Julius. Julius and I met in grad school. He wore silver-rimmed spectacles, ironed business shirts and dress pants and a neatly trimmed reddish-brown beard that was quickly going gray. He came to class with his work ...
For a person who is regularly bemoaning the complexities of adult life, a three-day juice fast provides a wonderful simplicity. When you remove the daily tasks of buying, storing, preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals, you find yourself with this new and unusual void of time—and in it, a surprising clarity about the rest ...
Tim and I came home yesterday from a quick weekend visit to Chicago. The first time we’ve been back since Christmas, this trip was a whirlwind of loud, excited family conversation, the kind that leaves you out of breath, with everyone talking over everyone else; long, lazy mornings, the ones you almost forgot how much ...
I should start off by telling you my blog friend Megan doesn’t call this recipe curry in a hurry. Curry in a hurry is what I call it—because, my friends, this is a curry that can be on the table in 10 to 15 minutes flat. If the rice and vegetables are cooked ahead of ...
This week’s usual Tuesday post is coming a day early because it’s a little different from our usual chats and, instead of a recipe or a roundup, it’s a guest post up over at my beloved Seed + Water Blog. This post is fourth in a series Holly and Meagan have been running entitled “For ...
When I was a kid, my parents would dart around the house in the final moments before company arrived, lighting candles, cleaning bathrooms, setting appetizers out just right. You could feel the energy in the air in those almost-game-time minutes—a sort of nervous, happy energy—something greater than the sound of my mom’s boom box playing ...
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of too much [insert green here] must be in want of a pesto—or, at least, that’s how this recipe was born, as a response to too much tarragon in the fridge. Now, I realize I won’t be telling you anything you don’t know when ...
If you haven’t already heard of The Sprouted Kitchen Cookbook, named for the blog Sara and Hugh Forte keep by the same name, you’re probably not a food blogger (nor someone who follows The James Beard Awards, for which it is a recent nominee). Last summer, when the book first launched, I only slightly exaggerate that ...
I had a lightbulb moment last week where I realized I cannot do everything (including, this post seems to indicate, take a non-blurry photo of a roasted vegetable dinner). I was sitting in the dining room when it happened: Like most workdays, I had my laptop open before me, streaming sunlight to my right, and, ...
Like cookies and reading and the beginning of spring, banana bread is something I would tell you I’ve loved a long, long time. In this blog’s infant years, I baked Joy of Cooking banana bread, Boston bakery banana bread and a banana bread with streusel topping that stole my heart. I baked Mrs. Newman’s banana ...
As promised, here I am again, on another Tuesday, with another recipe—only, after reading your comments on that last post, today doesn’t feel like just another Tuesday. In the time since we last spoke, I’ve received kind emails and comments full of wise words and advice, and I’ve found myself stepping back a little, at ...
Hi, gang. Happy Sunday. I know, since last April, we’ve been keeping our chats mainly Tuesday and Friday affairs, but I hope you won’t mind my coming in today with one extra post because, mostly, I’ve got something extra to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging. ... Finish reading this post The Value ...
If you had stepped into our kitchen at around 4 p.m. a few Wednesday afternoons ago, you would have seen our side door, the one that exits to the driveway and our upstairs neighbor’s black iron stairs, flung wide open. You would have seen smoke wafting from the stove through that door, intermingling with the ...
In the time since we last spoke, I did not make black bean soup; Tim and I took a look at our remaining refrigerator loot on Friday and, supplemented by his work lunch and a homemade weekend dinner from friends, spent the next three days eating sumptuously from its contents instead. Sunday, we did not ...
Last Saturday night, at a time when most people our age were out with friends or stretched out on sofas, unwinding in front of TV screens, Tim and I sat across from each other at our dining room table, a laptop and a weekly planner before us, and discussed our menu for the next six ...
About a week ago, Tim and I made a quick stop at McKay’s, which, for the record, is the largest, cleanest used bookstore I’ve ever been to in my life. Set high up off Old Hickory Boulevard on Nashville’s west side, McKay’s exterior looks more like a bulk warehouse shopping center than a place that ...
There’s something about a weekend morning that demands a special breakfast. After waking up to sunshine, lazing around in bed, whiling away hours reading and talking and staring out your windows at the brightening sky, when at last you stretch your legs onto the wood floors, the only sensible thing to do is continue the ...
A few Saturdays ago, wearing red lipstick and riding boots, I took a free Mexican cooking class with my old Nashville roommates, Sara and Sarah. We met in a bright, sunny space dubbed the grocery store’s “community room,” where the tall ceiling stretched as high as a church building’s and the kitchen featured two portable ...
Like businesses, music, vacations and books, most meals begin as ideas—but as ideas that come more quickly down the mental conveyor belt than sonatas or summer getaway plans. A conversation at the office jogs a memory of Grandma’s butter cookies, and the kitchen finds you rolling dough; a blog post inspires dessert and you’re beelining ...
“A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.” Andre Maurois You may assume a couple that works from home together shares a great deal of time—and, in fact, they do. In our daily routine, Tim and I prepare joint breakfasts, raise questions to one another from across the room, share work ...
Tim lived in Nashville when I met him, on the first floor of a large, yellow house at the top of a hill. His roommates were his older brother, Nathan, a big-time Bengals fan who looks enough like Tim that strangers still confuse them, and their long-time friend Jared, a red-headed thinker who wears grandpa ...
When Tim makes Italian-style green beans, he thinks of his grandma Emily, a beautiful Italian woman with short white hair and smiling blue eyes, who still explains recipes with a flick of her wrist and an “Oh, it’s so simple!” When I make Italian-style green beans, I think of Tim, the man who brought them, ...
Turns out, for us, today is more than the first day of February. Today is the first day of our email newsletter, something we’ve hardly hinted at here on the blog before but that’s been in the works since the end of last year. A few of you noticed that we’ve had a signup button ...
Here we are, gang, a new week, another early Tuesday morning, and I’m still talking about einkorn. I know. But I figure, when I brought you Friday’s post, less a story and more a list of FAQs, you all were such champs, and I mean you all, every last one of you, looking a new ...
The idea of einkorn flour is nothing new around here, not when we’ve brought you einkorn pizza crust, einkorn apple tartlets, einkorn overnight pancakes and einkorn pumpkin cake. But, ask any wife of a fantasy-football-lover, even familiar ideas can be confusing (am I right?). We’ve received so many questions about this ingredient—Why are we using ...
Tim and I spent this past long weekend in Charleston and Savannah, with my brother, who flew down from Chicago and met us there. We’d booked the tickets back in October, when Southwest ran a deal that turned the total cost of two round-trip flights into a price lower than my dream cardigan (half that, ...
We ate this ice cream late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, amidst some of the coldest temperatures Nashville has seen this year. I was just finishing my second (but not last) bowl as Parenthood ended, crying to Tim about something Crosby said to Julia and epiphanizing about how we all have these moments where ...
Listen, I’m under no delusions that you’re all out there, biting your fingernails, anxiously awaiting our fresh blog post this morning, but I’m still going to tell you about the roadblocks involved in its getting here because apparently, admitting to your blog community that you aim to post every Tuesday and Friday is a little ...
Looking ahead to Friday’s post begins for me, usually, sometime on Wednesday, which this week was the gray and shady afternoon in which Tim and I ventured way out to the west side of town, to Bellevue, the Nashville neighborhood of older shopping plazas and brand-new housing communities where Perl, a new-to-us café Yelp users ...
It should come as no surprise that the day after I finished The Fault in Our Stars, the New York Times bestseller written by John Green and given to us as a gift New Year’s Day by Sonja and Alex, Tim and I were in the kitchen mixing and rolling homemade gnocchi dough, he with ...
Of all the reasons for blogging, there’s no contest, the greatest fringe benefit is the people, this amazing community of thoughtful individuals who are interested in other people’s stories and find enjoyment in good food (and sometimes even become real-life friends, inviting us into their homes). Does it get old to hear we’re so thankful ...
A long time ago, I heard a superstition that says the activities in which you partake on New Year’s Day set the tone for the way your coming year will go: Spend money, and it will be a year of loss. Receive money, and it will be a year of gain. Work, and you’ll be ...
I’m not going to say this year flew by quickly. That’s what everyone says at the end of December. But I will say, looking back at the last 12 months, that I’m overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of life a person lives in one year. The trips, the work, the conversations, the movies, the driving, ...
Christmas is always the time of year when our cup feels especially full, what with the visits to family and gifts being exchanged, but, in fact, it’s our entire month that’s been filled with good gifts. Around here, December has meant cloudy Sunday afternoons walking around downtown Franklin, cozy nights doodling and watching Christmas movies, ...
It’s almost Christmas! While we’re hitting the road for Ohio, we thought we might share a roundup of some of our favorite packaged snack-type products (proof that we don’t make everything we eat). When we’re road-tripping like we are this weekend, when we’re out for the night and want a snack, when we’re stuffing stockings, ...
I’ve got to be honest with you and say my thoughts are still with Newtown today, but I’m bringing you a fun, light, pretty giveaway from a company I like that has a gorgeous aesthetic anyway because, as Kathryn White put it so well yesterday, “there is a place for the trivial, the normal, the ...
Some days, I’m overwhelmed by the lack of love in the world: the snubbing, the name-calling, the pushing, the overlooking, the thoughtlessness human beings show to one another. For as many of you as relate to a genuine curiosity and interest in other people like I mentioned in the last post, there are others who ...
