cauliflower Archives - meatified

That Last Taste Of Summer

Easy Peasy Blueberry Pie Bars

All The Crispy Crust, No Rolling Required

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.

No Bake Maple Spiced Pumpkin Cheesecake

Pumpkin Spice Is Coming

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Lemony Roasted Cauliflower Soup

This simple roasted cauliflower soup is flecked with roasty-toasty bits, seasoned with warm spices & brightened with lemon at the end.

After an accidentally lengthy break, this roasted cauliflower soup was the first thing I had photographed in a long time. It’s simple and comforting, the cauliflower flecked all over with roasty-toasty bits, the garlic cooked until sweet and soft, with a kiss of warm spices brightened by fresh lemon at the end. I wanted these […]

Hearty Dairy Free Leek & Potato Soup

This healthy & hearty take on leek & potato soup skips the dairy & lets the flavors of the lightly roasted vegetables shine. Bonus: use up your holiday ham!

My mother cooked like she loved; not at all, or just for show. My father, however, brought a sense of irreverent frivolity to almost everything, which was true most of all in the kitchen. I wonder now if he ever really loved to cook, or if the few moments of actual joy sprinkled throughout the […]

Strawberry Sunflower Seed Cycling Smoothie

The easiest way to get your luteal seeds in! Just a handful of ingredients whip up into a delicious strawberry seed cycling smoothie that's dairy & nut free.

Hands up if the whole concept of seed cycling for hormone health sounded great until you realized that… you never eat seeds?! I liked the idea of such a simple addition to my day for a nutritional boost, but seeds aren’t really something I’ve ever included in my diet as much more than a garnish. […]

Cuban Pork Bowls with Mojo & Yellow Cauliflower Rice

These Cuban pork bowls have tender pork piled on herbed cauli rice, drizzled with citrusy mojo sauce, finished with creamy avocado & crispy plantain chips.

Earlier this week I shared a delicious way to make luscious, juicy pork shoulder in my 6 Quart Instant Pot, inspired by the citrusy-garlicky-cumin-y heaven that is Cuban mojo. That’s a recipe I usually make over the weekend so that I have plenty of ready to go protein for the week ahead. Now I’m gonna […]

Irish Shepherd’s Pie with Colcannon

Up your comfort food game with this Irish Shepherd's pie, a fun twist with extra hidden veggies in the mash up top & a rich, meaty filling underneath.

Some things are just not about looks. And Shepherd’s Pie is one of those things. When this Irish Shepherd’s Pie came out of the oven, those bubbly edges and almost-charred snaggles on top, along with the smatter of spatters along the edges almost made me want to skip photographing it altogether. Which got me thinking: […]

Parsnip Colcannon with Cabbage & Leeks

This fluffy parsnip Colcannon from https://meatified.com is a fun, nightshade free take on the classic recipe. Here, it's lighter, brighter & more spring-y, with leeks & green onions!

The most famous versions of this dish are made with good old-fashioned spuds, sometimes with other root vegetables thrown into the mix, but always with a potato-y backbone. However, my Parsnip Colcannon messes with that traditional tater taste by swapping in some other vegetables for my nightshade free friends who, somewhat tragically, can’t tolerate the […]

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The further I got into sobriety, the more I realiz

The further I got into sobriety, the more I realized I’ve been trying to make this food blogging thing fit when it doesn’t. You know when you’re kind of good at something, so you keep doing it because eventually that’s got to lead to success or happiness or something that you should want? But instead, I felt like I was constantly behind where I ‘should’ be, never able to make content fast or well or often enough. And nothing I produced ever felt good enough.

Later, I thought I was sabotaging myself to keep myself small. That I was scared to try because I was scared to fail. True and untrue, all at once. But underneath all of those ‘should’s, the real reason I never felt authentic or real doing any of these things is because, if I had really listened, I would have known that it has never been what I wanted.

I don’t want to be defined by a diet or how I eat, even when both of those things were a very true part of my life’s experience. I don’t want to be pouring myself into something that gives me nothing back. Which is exactly how slinging recipes into an abyss has felt for so long.

I haven’t been ‘doing it wrong’. I’ve been doing the wrong thing entirely.

For years of – perhaps all of -- my life, I’ve told myself that I’m lazy, unproductive, just not good enough. But I suspect my inability to do the things that I ‘should’ is intrinsically linked with my body trying its hardest to tell me what my mind refused to say clearly: “you’re not happy doing this, you don’t care about this, this isn’t who you are.”

And what is true about yourself is always, always worth knowing. Even if that means you don’t know what the way forward looks like.

The only part of this I’ve ever loved, the little snippet of truth in this mess my mind has made, is the creation. It’s the making of something from nothing, turning an idea into a tangible thing and then again into something intangible in the form of a photograph.

Turning nothing into something into a memory of what was.

Which means this tiny kernel of a beginning is that I’m not really a recipe developer or a food photographer or anything I thought or told myself I was. Maybe I’m just an artist?

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,

Eighteen months of sobriety have me seeing myself, if not for the very first time, perhaps in the most honest way.

I learned to put on my makeup in a compact mirror, a whole face in shattered parts. Piece by barely framed piece, directing an abstract spotlight on only the detail I thought I needed to fix somehow.

I taught myself never to take a step back, never to look at the whole, never to see truly what was in front of me. To fold myself into my own palm, an enclosed prism. Click.

My face has forever been something yo avoid, a thing I reflexively glaze over, unfocused eyes with too much zoom in the lens, an intrinsic crack in the glass of my sight. Click.

I’ve always been the person behind the camera so that no one could direct it at me. When it whispered, the thought of taking my own portrait for the first time surprised me. Sober me is starting to raise her voice, even if it’s only at herself for now.

The part of me that over complicates everything pulled at me to turn taking a quick snap into an overwhelmingly stylized photo shoot. Another mask; another performance. That voice started listing all the things I had to fix or tidy or make pretty or palatable. Which I realized now was another attempt at staying hidden while pretending to be visible.

Instead, I promised myself that I would set up my camera as simply as possible. Just the same as I would light anything else to let it shine as it is.

So here I am. No distractions, just me looking into my own camera for the first time and meeting myself on the other side. Click.

It’s strange to look at this image - of myself, for once - and see my typical photography style poking through without meaning to. Limited styling, rich depths, pops of bold natural color, perhaps a little more darkness than makes other people comfortable. And still: just me.

Hi, I’m Rach.

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