It was a spectacular week of recipe fails around here, which is why I haven’t had anything to post. Not just recipes that needed fine tuning, mind you, but real duds. It was frustrating. Needless to say, I reacted by bearing down and retesting everything, which only resulted in repeated failures. Finally, I decided to take a real break. I took the end of the week and the weekend off from cooking, assembling simple stuff and focusing on my baking adventures instead. I’m…

I learned three weeks ago that September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. As a result, I’ve wanted to say something particularly meaningful about depression, but I just haven’t known what. I can’t pretend to understand anyone else’s experience of despair. Then, a couple weeks ago, I was emailing with a reader and friend who mentioned a line of poetry from Rebecca Hazelton, quoted as an epigraph in Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, which I’m reading right now. “The world is a wonder,…

I’ve been casually saying that I’m in the home stretch of graduate school all year, because relatively speaking—relative to having been a dietetics or pre-health student since 2010—I have been. But now I’m really in the home stretch, sprinting across my last few weeks of classes. I had to laugh when I read this article about burnout, which described with eery precision the place I’ve found myself in for the last semester (and, if I’m being honest, most of this academic year). Apparently…

My next door neighbor—I’ll call him Glen—passed away recently. I’m not sure when. I’d known he wasn’t well for a long time, based on our passing encounters and the haunting sound of his cough echoing through the hallway we shared late at night. For the past few months I suspected things might have taken a turn, since I didn’t see or hear him. But I didn’t know for sure that he was gone until my management company started gutting the kitchen in his apartment…