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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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Honeyed Ginger Peach Ice Cream Slice

This naturally sweetened peach ice cream from https://meatified.com is the perfect way to celebrate summer. Ripe peaches meet creamy, honey & spice kissed dairy & egg free ice cream.

Apparently, when I was photographing this peach ice cream, I was clearly not all about that scoop life. And it was only after I started slicing this block rather than digging out my never-used & only-owned-for-photo-shoots scooper that I remembered the earliest ice cream in my memories came in a long, rectangular cardboard sleeve. The […]

Night Time Cherry Lavender Milk

This soothing cherry lavender milk from https://meatified.com is the perfect send off for a good night's sleep, made with tart cherry juice and lightly scented with lavender & vanilla. Plot twist: it's also great over ice!

Let me get two things straight about this cherry lavender milk, immediately: 1) I may be 102495,2938455395829 years behind the times, but I refuse to call it “moon milk”. 2) Yes, I know this is obnoxiously, Millennial Pink. (The latter was not on purpose. But I will say that it’s accidentally pretty!) I will admit […]

Coconut Mango Panna Cotta

Simple, decadent and beyond delicious, this dairy free Coconut Mango Panna Cotta from https://meatified.com will be your summer go-to dessert. Bonus, it can be added sugar free, too.

I’ve been on quite the mango kick this summer. First there were Sour Mango Smoothies and Salted Mango Popsicles and now I’ve added this Coconut Mango Panna Cotta to my summer creations. Which is a little funny, because I’m not usually one for sweets or smoothies. But the mangoes have just been so fantastically wonderful […]

Salted Caramel Date Shakes

These naturally sweetened, dairy free date shakes from http://meatified.com have your name on 'em. They're creamy, caramel-y goodness with a hint of salt that's decidedly addictive!

I almost called these sticky toffee pudding shakes, based on the classic British dessert that gets its caramel-y goodness from soaked dates. But I figured that might get a little lost in translation if you didn’t grow up in the land where “pudding” means dessert instead of something cold, creamy and kinda spongy in a […]

Paleo White Chocolate Mousse with Lemon Zest & Cranberry-Apple Compote

Paleo White Chocolate Mousse with Lemon Zest and Cranberry-Apple Compote from http://meatified.com

This Paleo White Chocolate Mousse actually started off life as a panna cotta recipe. I don’t know if it happens a lot to other people, but I have a pretty consistent habit of changing my mind or experimenting mid way through a recipe. I’d had my heart set on making a lovely grass fed gelatin […]

Paleo Yogurt Pots

Paleo Yogurt Pots from http://meatified.com - no cultures or fancy equipment needed! #paleo #dairyfree #yogurt #glutenfree

I really like yogurt. But I’m never, ever going to buy a yogurt maker. It’s not even that I’m a little intimidated by the whole live cultures thing, it’s just that I don’t have space anywhere in my kitchen for another appliance. Even if it looks really cool. And I really, really want one. Because […]

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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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