red pepper flakes 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

You're just a handful of ingredients away from this Peanut Butter & Jelly Granola, flavored & sweetened with your favorite preserves or jelly.

It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Gluten Free PB & J Granola

Big Cluster Appreciation Society

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

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Smoky Southern Greens

If you didn’t know that greens can be an utterly decadent dish all on their own, I present as evidence these smoky Southern greens. I most often give collards this pork-studded treatment, but any green you enjoy will benefit from the gentle braising that yields a silky-tender bite and aromatic pot liquor. Whether you stick […]

Spicy Cucumber Salad with Dry Roasted Almonds & Cilantro

This spicy cucumber salad is a refreshing side for almost every summer meal: crisp vegetables meet spicy sour dressing & a contrasting toasty topping.

I’ve been making this spicy cucumber salad at least once a week since it’s heated up here as our annual intro to summer. Which has been a big surprise for me, given that I’ve always been extremely avoidant of the sourer, vinegar-based dressings. (I blame that on growning up in the Land Of Malt Vinegar. […]

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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?