Last weekend I was in upstate New York, where my oldest friend’s parents have a home. It’s a very special place for me, a place where I spent a lot of time as a kid and young adult. I’ve celebrated weddings, graduations, and one memorial service in that home. When I think back on the most formative experiences that I had as a young person, many of them are linked to Chatham. Thanks to Covid and the fact that Chloe lives in another…

One of the interesting things that can happen when you recover from an eating disorder is that some of your compulsions get rerouted from food and exercise to other places. No one told me this about recovery. So I was surprised when, years after my food behaviors normalized, I found myself getting disproportionately worked up things like scheduling. Rigidity about food diffused. But a sneaky tendency to be rigid and anxious about planning emerged. It wasn’t so extreme that it interfered with my…

Have you seen My Octopus Teacher on Netflix? (Some spoilers below if you haven’t yet.) My Octopus Teacher is the story of filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster, who lives near an underwater kelp forest off the coast of South Africa. Foster is a free diver. On one of his dives he came across an octopus who captivated him with her ingenious methods of outsmarting prey. Foster was so fascinated by the octopus that he committed to visiting her every day for the course…

As soon as I returned from Denver this week, I got an unexpected visit from my oldest friend. She’s staying upstate this summer, and she had time to pop into NYC for the evening. We had a grand time wandering around downtown Manhattan, eating and drinking good things, laughing. It was the kind of carefree, one-on-one time that we rarely have these days, now that we live in different cities and she’s a mom of two young kids. I woke up on Saturday…

I’m celebrating the summer solstice in Denver, CO, today. I’m staying with my friend Ashley. Ashley took the beautiful photos in Power Plates. At the moment, she’s working on the photos for my next cookbook. I’ve written a lot about creative roadblocks this year, and this cookbook is the main reason why. I first started working on it early in the pandemic. Perfect timing, I thought. If I was going to be indoors for an indeterminate period of time, I might as well have…

It’s 4:20pm on a Sunday, which is usually the time that words or ideas are ready to pour out of me into a weekend reading post. Except that today, instead of thinking about a topic or things that I might say, I’ve been sitting on my couch giggling as I exchange dumb memes with a friend . In theory, I should be getting more done. I’m behind on work right now, and there’s a lot to do. But I’m feeling forgiving of the…

At some point in quarantine I read Emily Nunn’s The Comfort Food Diaries. I loved the premise of the book. The author, having recently gone through a series of deep personal losses, goes on a road trip to visit some of her closest friends and family around the country. Nunn’s focus is, of course, on food. Her loved ones share their favorite comfort foods with her. In receiving these recipes and their stories, she gets the nourishment she needs in order to heal….