Happy Sunday, all. I’m just getting ready to head back home after a restorative weekend with Chloe. It’s always so good to see her, and to enjoy some time in the Big Easy.

These recipes and articles have been excellent travel reading so far!

An intensely flavorful Schezwan dish that could be made either with zucchini noodles or with soba noodles (or a combination of both) from Tieghan at Half-Baked Harvest.

This zucchini basil soup from Andrea at Dishing Up The Dirt is simple, seasonal, and lovely. Fried shallots add a nice bit of texture and flavor.

Another simple and delicious recipe, perfect for a busy weeknight: one pot courgette, pea, and lemon pasta from Aimee at Wallflower Girl.

A colorful and unconventional twist on paella from Food Porn, Vegan Style: summer vegetable paella with chickpeas and millet. Really cool idea to use millet in place of rice here!

Finally, these key lime pistachio truffles from Rose at The Clean Dish are a healthy, bite sized, portable, and irresistible afternoon treat.

Reads

1. To begin, an in-depth look at some of the efforts to protect rhinoceroses from extinction–a possibility that is unfortunately more and more real, thanks to poaching. Some of the conservation methods described seem controversial and/or problematic (such as private ownership of rhinos, or dehorning), but the topic is important, and the article is very comprehensive.

2. Also on the topic of animal conservation and rescue, perhaps some of you have already seen that a ritual mass slaughter of animals in Nepal–typically in the realm of 500,000 animals–is coming to an end.

3. Writer Christian Donlan reflects on his first year living with a diagnosis of relapsing remitting MS. It’s an deeply personal and meditative piece, and very humble. Part of Donlan’s struggle has been to find language to assign to his experience. He writes,

When I look back, it becomes clear that language is at the heart of many of my problems, real and imagined. Even when I’m thinking straight, I am still trying to describe sensations that are internalised and involve aspects of myself that I have never had to come up with names for. MS has given me an inside: it has opened up all the territory of the interior – the skeleton, the organs, the strange connections strung between them. It has made me aware of these places, and it gives me irregular causes to think of them every day. But it has not given me the language to discuss the things that go on there.

4. A short but powerful meditation on the difficulties of living with autoimmune diseases and other diseases that are difficult to detect from the outside world. Through blogging and my work in the wellness sphere, I interact with a great many individuals who have chronic and/or mysterious health conditions. Their sentiments echo those expressed in the article: there is a unique kind of loneliness in living with a hazily understood or “invisible” illness. Sometimes friends and family fail to take the struggle seriously because it’s not visible to them, or they suggest that it is entirely emotional/psychological in origin. Hopefully this kind of reporting will make it easier and easier for those who are struggling with hard-to-explain, chronic health conditions to receive the emotional support they need.

5. Finally, a fascinating article about a neurology resident who has mirror-touch synesthesia, a condition in which he experiences physical manifestations of the pain or discomfort he witnesses in others. In other words, he can quite literally feel others’ pain. The article is not only a profile of this rare condition and how it intersects with his career as a physician, but also a broader exploration of synesthesia of many kinds. Really interesting stuff.

And that, friends, is it for this Sunday. Enjoy the reading, and I’ll be back soon with a new recipe!

xo