coconut free Archives - meatified

Let me show you the easiest most delicious way to cook the perfect prime rib roast from https://meatified.com. It seems intimidating, but is really both simple & forgiving!

don't be scared

Perfect Prime Rib

The easiest, dreamiest way to use up your holiday turkey without resorting to soup is this dairy & coconut free leftover turkey stroganoff.

it's turkey time

turkey stroganoff

leftovers never tasted so good

These no bake cranberry butter cups from https://meatified.com are the perfect last minute holiday treat. Bonus: they use up those last few cranberries you always have laying around!

the holidays in one bite

cranberry butter cups

I regret nothing

This simple caramelized onion dip takes its time and lets the sweet & savory onions headline this party favorite. You won't regret making a double batch!

everybody lies about

caramelized onion dip

but it's worth it

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Creamiest Parsnip & Cauliflower Mash with Garlic & Chives

One simple trick from https://meatified.com makes the creamiest cauliflower mash, with a hint of sweetness & a more potato-like texture, finished with plenty of garlic & chives.

I’m just gonna lay it out there: straight cauliflower mash is a lie. Maybe it’s my English-Irish heritage speaking, but if it ain’t got juuuust the right mouthfeel, it’s not mash. I’ve always maintained that while “cauliflower mash” can be tasty, it’s definitely closer to a puree than to anything I think is truly deserving […]

The Ultimate Sweet & Tangy Nightshade Free BBQ Sauce

Looking for a nightshade free bbq sauce that's rich, sweet & tangy? This is it. This AIP BBQ Sauce from https://meatified.com looks, tastes & acts just like your old favorite recipe.

If you’ve had a copy of The Paleo Healing Cookbook since before it was even called that… then you’ve known and loved this recipe for my nightshade free sweet & tangy BBQ Sauce since 2015. For the rest of you lovely people, consider this my gift to you! My husband has always said that it […]

Chicken Salsa Verde Soup with Cauliflower Rice

This nightshade free take on chicken salsa verde soup from https://meatified.com is packed with flavor and has that comfort food feel you crave from a bowl of chicken & rice soup.

It doesn’t matter how long I’ve lived in a place with sunshine almost utterly year round, my body doesn’t seem to want or need to acknowledge that fact. A case in food-point: I can happily eat soup year round, no matter how many salads I make in the summer because they’re “seasonal”; I’ll never, ever […]

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Alright, so cranberries are having their 3 spotlig

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?

If you, too, are seeking simplicity and comfort of

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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