red wine Archives - meatified

That First 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

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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French Onion Pot Roast

If you're looking for rich, deep flavors & simple ingredients, this French onion pot roast is for you. Bonus: it makes its own addictive onion-packed jus!

I’ve carried a single photo of my mother & I to every place I’ve ever lived for the last 20-plus years, but I’ve never really looked at it. I’d tuck the blurred image – me, squinty & self-assured despite the fact that my pink-buttoned dress likely hides a diaper; her, focused on the camera, the […]

Classic Cosy Weekend Beef Stew

If you love a cozy, craveable one pot meal but don't want to babysit it on the stove top, this classic weekend beef stew is the recipe for you!`

I flip my face to the other side of a too-thin pillow, a smushed pancake of sleep resting on the crook of the elbow I’m using to hold my head aloft. My hand is, predictably, numb. But that’s not what woke me. Tilting my head, I search for voices, either raised & unrepentant or muffled […]

Cream Of Tomato-Less Tomato Soup with Basil Oil & Parm Sprinkles

I was on a mission to make a nightshade free version of the tomato soup I craved, so this Cream Of Tomato-Less Tomato Soup from https://meatified.com was the result! It's creamy, velvety and has a lovely tangy kick that pairs perfectly with a swirl of basil oil on top & a sprinkle of my nut free vegan parm.

I’m doing it again. Because my Tomato-Less Tomato Soup is one of the most popular recipes of the year so far, I just couldn’t leave well enough alone and made a Cream Of Tomato-Less Tomato Soup, too! Yes, both recipes really are nightshade free! But both recipes have that can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it flavor of a classic tomato […]

Baked Greek Meatballs, or: Nightshade Free Soutzoukakia

A nightshade free take on the classic soutzoukakia, these Baked Greek Meatballs from https://meatified.com are perfect for the weekend or general comfort food vibes.

One of my first food loves, courtesy of a vacation I took back when the drachma still existed and I was totally at one with drinking straight ouzo, was Greek cuisine. I claim absolutely no special claim to fame when it comes to the intricacies and nuances of regional Greek food, but I do know […]

Classic Nomato Meat Sauce

No tomatoes or nightshades were harmed in the making of this Nomato Meat Sauce from https://meatified.com! This AIP version of your favorite slow simmered meat sauce will stand up to Nanas & the pickiest of eaters.

Honestly, the phrase “nomato” drives me up the wall for reasons I can’t figure out, given that I usually love me a good portmanteau. But! I’ve taken one for the team with this Nomato Meat Sauce recipe, because it’s honestly the best description. And a lot shorter than writing out “nightshade free, tomato-less meat sauce”! […]

Saucy Italian Meatballs

No, Italian style tomato sauces aren't off the menu if you can't tolerate tomatoes! These Saucy Italian Meatballs from https://meatified.com are juicy and tender, swimming in a delicious fragrant sauce with lots of hidden veggies. Win-win!

I’m just saying that if you’re gonna make Italian meatballs, they need to be saucy. In my humble opinion. Which probably isn’t so humble. I don’t mind me a naked meatball, but there’s something just so freaking comforting about Italian meatballs swimming and simmering in a big cauldron of saucy goodness. For all the time […]

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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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