fennel Archives - meatified

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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Spicy Orange Shrimp Tacos with Fennel Slaw & Avocado Cream

No boring tacos here! These Orange Shrimp Tacos from https://meatified.com are spiced with ginger, piled high with a crunchy, punchy slaw, finished with a rich avocado cream & held together with a grain free tortilla.

Shrimp, tortillas, fennel and avocado… I grew up eating precisely none of these things. It’s amazing how one dish can be a visual marker of change; of evolving tastes and aversions overcome. My overriding memory of prawns was the 80s culinary blast from the past that would not be destroyed… the prawn cocktail. Swimming in […]

Chilled Parsnip Apple & Fennel Soup with Cucumber Salad

This Parsnip Apple & Fennel Soup from http://meatified.com is a season stretcher. It's creamy & comforting, but chilled & topped with cucumber salad, it's light & bright, too.

I’ve been gone from here a while, soaking up some summer, celebrating my wedding anniversary and not really in the mood to focus so much on food lately. The thing is, the very fact that I’m able to make a living sitting on my butt in my own little home is a blessing and a […]

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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,

Are you meatified?