lunch 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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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 […]

Summer Salmon Tacos with Peaches, Avocado & Basil

These salmon tacos are the best of summer produce in one bite: juicy peach, creamy avocado, charred corn & fresh basil make simply prepared salmon shine!

I’ll admit, I had no intention of making salmon tacos about twenty minutes before I made these for the first time. For that stroke of inspiration, I have an over abundance of glorious summer produce and an aversion to turning on the oven in the heat to thank. (As I dubbed them in an Instagram […]

Summer Tomato Tart with Basil Ricotta (grain, gluten & dairy free)

Nothing says summer better than this tomato tart layered with herbed vegan ricotta and heirloom tomatoes, all wrapped in a savory grain free crust.

It’s somewhat typical of me to throw myself into something with next to impossible standards from the get-go, which this summery tomato tart accidentally exemplifies perfectly. Haven’t baked a savory pastry anything in ten years? Why not start with attempting both a grain free crust and a dairy free ricotta filling right outta the gate?! […]

Summery Harissa Carrot Salad

With summer comes my favorite make ahead harissa carrot salad! It's light & crisp, sweet & spicy, packed with fresh herbs, lemon zest & a hint of garlic.

With summer comes my favorite make ahead harissa carrot salad! It’s light & crisp, sweet & spicy, packed with fresh herbs, lemon zest & a hint of garlic. Plus, it gets better with the time it spends in its dressing, so you can keep it for several days in the fridge. And my husband hates […]

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. […]

Crispy Chicken Salad with Black Pepper Strawberries & Creamy Golden Balsamic Dressing

These macerated black pepper strawberries upgrade any summer salad & pair beautifully with fresh greens, chicken, avocado and a light balsamic dressing.

These black pepper strawberries are such a simple salad game changer. You’ve probably seen or had a few variations on the typical spinach + strawberry salads before, but this easiest of tricks is the way to level up strawberries to their very best life. This is especially true if your grocery strawberries are less than […]

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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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