Hope that those of you who observed Thanksgiving in some way had a meaningful day. My day was nice and quiet; it was also a little melancholy. I have a feeling that this holiday season will be a tough one, but I’m trying not to turn that feeling into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I went to a mid-morning yoga class on Thanksgiving. This is basically a tradition of mine, but there are some years when I need it more badly than others. This was…

This is my second consecutive Sunday away from home. A few weeks ago, sort of spontaneously, I decided to make good on two trips I had been hoping to take for some time now. The first was to Washington, D.C., where I lived for part of grad school. The second, a one-on-one trip with my oldest friend, could have been to anywhere. But we chose Nashville, which was easy for me to fly to from D.C. and driving distance for her, from New…

In the past few days I’ve been reminded of how powerful it is to step away from things. I’m just back from Denver, where I was earlier this summer. I’m working with Ashley on cookbook photography, and we had a few big pieces of the project to finish this week. To shoot the food, we needed to cook the food. I hadn’t eaten some of the dishes in over a year, thanks to the time it has taken me to work on the…

Last weekend I went to visit an old friend from college. It had been over three years since I’d seen her, thanks to life getting busy and then Covid interrupting everything. Fortunately, she’s the sort of friend whom I can go years without seeing and months without talking to, and we always pick up very comfortably where we left off. She lives in a wooded and very lovely part of New Jersey, so we had all of these autumnal plans. We were going…

One of the big turning points in my recovery was the moment that I started to tell people that I was in recovery. This meant giving a name to my eating disorder. It’s not as if everyone who knew me didn’t already know that I had an eating disorder. It’s just that I was far too defensive to talk about it. I either denied that I had one, or—later, when orthorexia was especially bad—I tried to pass it off as a health initiative….

You know those moments when a bunch of signs seem to show up at once, all pointing toward the same thing? It’s World Mental Health Day, and this morning I posted something on Instagram about my ongoing effort to live in the present. This summer I told a friend of mine that, for the first time in my life, my main priority was to have good days and good memories. I meant two things when I said this. The first is that I’ve…

There’s this chocolate cake recipe I’ve been working on for the better part of two years. The recipe is intended for the cookbook I’m still working to complete, though I was playing around with versions of it even before the book became a reality. Like most cakes, it has required a lot of tinkering, but I’ve probably iterated it more than any other baking project that I can remember. At one point this past summer, after tasting maybe eight or nine versions, my…