Monthly Link Love Archives

A handful of simple ingredients come together with creamy Italian white beans in this one pan, weeknight friendly & dairy free meal.

It's One Bowl Wonder Time

Brothy Italian Beans with Sausage & Kale

Everything You Want In One Place

This weeknight take on chicken shawarma is beautifully spiced and hits the table fast, with no marinading time needed.

That Golden Glow

Speedy Sheet Pan Chicken Shawarma

The Only Sun Tan I Can Condone

Bring on the Fall desserts! This pumpkin cheesecake from https://meatified.com has a hint of maple & spice, but is totally dairy, grain & gluten free. Bonus: you don't have to bake.

Brace Yourself

No Bake Maple Spiced Pumpkin Cheesecake

Pumpkin Spice Is Coming

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Things I Loved in November

There are just so many wonderful, talented people whose blogs I happen to know and love, so it would be IMPOSSIBLE to include everyone. But I do try to share my very favorite posts with you here. So: take a peek at some of my favorite discoveries from the last month! I’ve included yummy foodie […]

Awesome Things I Loved in October

Here are some of my favorite discoveries from the month, ranging from delicious sweet and savory dishes all the way over to “how to’s” and natural living tidbits. Enjoy!

What I loved in August: Meatified’s Link Love

I am terrible at cooking hard boiled eggs. I blame the years of hating them based on sheer stinkyness alone. However, all is not lost! Here is how to make perfect hard boiled eggs. Apparently you need a secret supply usually more likely to be found in the office than the kitchen! Savory Lotus talks […]

Things I loved in June: meatified’s Top 5

I pretty much have no idea where this month went. I’ve come up with recipes for all kinds of things, from chowder to chocolate mousse – all the while, my kitchen has been well over 100 degrees. Yikes! Gotta love a freak heatwave! Here are some of the fabulous shiny internet gems I came across […]

Things I loved in May: meatified’s top 5

This is the first of what I plan to be a monthly roundup of great posts or articles I ran across while reading other awesome blogs. I’m going to try to offer things here that I wouldn’t otherwise cover myself here at meatified, including topics like natural homecare and health products, Paleo treats or more […]

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The further I got into sobriety, the more I realiz

Before & after // I didn’t take any photos for a $Before & after // I didn’t take any photos for a year. Sobering-up-me was a being of fractures. Sharp edges that didn’t fit anywhere, no matter how many times I rearranged or reimagined the pieces. People seem to think (or I apparently assumed) that becoming sober brings an automatic sense of the whole, of coming back together. That it’s as simple as taking away perhaps the only thing that was, in the strangest sense, holding them together in the first place. Magically yielding a version of the ‘before’ that is not yet broken in the ‘after’. Maybe that’s true for some people. But sobering me was an agonizing act of disassembly. It was heading back to cuckoo land and knowing that this time, the nest was never mine. It was realizing that I had always known I was the interloper, pushing others out of the nest to stay alive in a constant state of mimicry that became its own death anyway. Sobering-me wondered if her old creativity was another act of imitation pushing her ever closer to the edge. Hi, I’m the cuckoo, it’s me. When you’ve never known who you are, how can there be anything familiar to fly back to? For some, sobriety might be a reclamation, but mine has been a kind of excavation. Part extrication, part excommunication. I wasn’t yet a year sober when I picked up my camera again, my first foray into what may or may not be left behind. I picked something simple, a cozy soup as a placeholder to practice camera settings & styling again. But that March-cold light wasn’t what I wanted to see. I used to feel like editing photos after the fact was about ‘fixing’ them; that it was about finding what was ‘wrong’ with what I’d made in the first place. The same way that part of me wanted to portray my self-portrait last post as a sober ‘after’ without acknowledging the ‘before’. As though the after is a new version of me, as fixed as my stare. But any after cradles it’s before at it’s heart. So, just as I’ve warmed & brightened this photo to create the sense of contentment that I wanted to see, I’ve shown you the before, too. I can’t have one without the other. There’s no sobriety without what came before. No thawing tenderness that doesn’t follow the cold.$

Eighteen months of sobriety have me seeing myself,

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