Substack celebrity Emily Sundberg was hosting a talk about the importance of coffee shops when it comes to building both community and brand awareness, as evidenced by the digital brands having nothing to do with coffee that are now going brick and mortar. The Nitro Bar’s Audrey Finocchiaro would be discussing the making and breaking of viral lattes, a bit of ouroboros (as I’m sure Emily S would agree) as online brands go IRL in hopes of... going viral online. Hasan Minhaj, whom I still secretly like even if he has a loosey-goosey relationship with the truthy, was to talk about chai. I love chai and chai has never, to my knowledge, embellished a story about racism in the wake of 9/11. I cleared my schedule.

I nursed Rosie before I left and planned to pump at the office after the event. I did not want to bring pump stuff. I wanted to look like a normal lady out in the world without a cooler bag. Also, breastfeeding makes you feel like a dairy cow. Something about carrying around milk at an oat milk party just... didn’t seem right.

When I arrived the venue was packed and the media guests were media guest-ing, i.e. chatting with one eye roving around the room to see who’s over there. The “look” of a beverage came up frequently as one talk bled into the next; naturally in an age of social media every brand is conscious of how their drink or space will appear online. On a talk about the Gen-Z of it all, The New Consumer’s Dan Frommer said young consumers “want to try new things all the time” and care the most about visual appeal: “Gen-Z and millennials are about twice as likely as Gen X and older consumers to say they often buy beverages specifically because the packaging or branding catches their eye.” Looks alone won’t cut it, though. On a panel called “My Latte Just Went Viral,” Finocchiaro cautioned, “When the quality is good, the content performs well. If you just build a product that looks aesthetically pleasing... it will fall flat.”

I think we can all agree it is very annoying to spend money on something that looks but does not taste good. Frankly what I was most enjoying were the intergenerational dynamics at play among the panelists, particularly deftly handled by Sundberg, as boomers and Gen-Z speakers attempted to make sense of one another. The young founder of Montauk General Store talked about launching her (extremely successful) business as a silver-haired former colleague of mine from Vanity Fair absorbed the fact that it began neither as a store nor in Montauk.

Good stuff, 10/10 would watch again.

But my boobs had started sending out a mayday signal. Speaking of the youth, they said, are you aware you have a literal baby? Does not get younger than that.

Minhaj was closing out the day’s programming and I wanted to stay longer, but a familiar burning sensation spread across my chest and then my cheeks. It was too late, I was leaking. I tried to put my media badge in front of the growing wet circles on my shirt, which did not work. I grabbed the least weird drink as I hightailed my way out of there, a tortilla agave latte (?) rimmed in crunchy little chips.

It was amazing.

I thought about those panels in the days afterward, how many of them touched on the way that coffee shops can answer our desire for community and ritual, where we take comfort in having the same barista and order, or add a sprinkle of novelty to our day by trying something new. I’ll tell ya, no one loves their coffee more, or is more enthusiastic about a third space and a little treat, than a new parent.

Little did I know my world was about to be rocked by another oat milk creation when Levain, makers of my favorite cookies in the whole wide world, invited me to preview a cookie milk latte they were launching. It was developed at their Williamsburg location just blocks from where I live.

Oh cookie milk latte at Levain, how can I express my love for thee?

They steep cookies in oat milk overnight to thoroughly imbue the liquid with flavor, strain it 12 hours later, then add espresso and top with salted cold foam and cookie crumbles. “We love the ombre effect,” said the manager. Another barista behind the counter added, “The presentation’s fire.” Funnily enough, they use the “uglies” to make this gorgeous girl, giving cookies that are not deemed to be up to bakery case snuff a second chance at life.

Any Levain cookie is beautiful to me, I thought, smiling affectionately into my cup. But I have to admit I like the idea of upcycling uglies.

As for the drink? I was urged to mix it up when I was done admiring its “aesthetic.” Once you mush it all around, it’s not too sweet (the highest compliment for any treat.) I love that there’s no syrup and that the cookie flavor coming through is almost savory, more roasty toasty buttery than a slap in the face of sugar. There’s still sharp espresso dominating the taste, with pleasing little cookie crumbs coming up through the straw, like boba for Levain lovers. Kids online are loving it. It photographs very well. This thing had viral written all over it from the jump.

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Last night my friends at Butcher Box (hi, Ashley!!) hosted a cookbook club dinner with the lovely Jenn Lueke, aka @jenneatsgoood. She was just on Today (although not my hour, sadly— Jenn, come back in the 8am hour next time!) celebrating her debut cookbook “Don’t Think About Dinner.” Butcher Box hooked us up with some perfectly cooked steaks, which we devoured while talking about the book.

Jenn strikes me as the kind of gal who color-coded her planner at school; “Don’t Think About Dinner” takes a lot of the dreaded ~mental load~ out of grocery shopping and meal prepping by strategizing entire weeks at a time with interlocking ingredient needs. Nothing better than someone who’s done the thinking for you, eh? I have exactly zero extra brain cells at the moment (they are all in my boobs) so this is exactly where I am at, needs-wise, despite loving to cook. “I want to spare people from decision fatigue around the meal we stress about most,” she said. Her recipes prioritize affordability and whole ingredients that are good for your health, which certain other social media creators can make seem like a one-thing-or-the-other proposition.

But it wasn’t just steak on the menu! Jenn’s adorable concept for the evening was “don’t think about breakfast”— because she made us her viral high-protein breakfast biscuits to take home.

If you eat two, which she recommended and I indeed did, you’ll get about 30 grams of protein to start your day. Then you can feel not just satisfied, but also smug, even if you don’t technically have gym bro health goals. You could, and if you did, well, you would have met them. Jenn reports that these are great to make ahead; she stocked her pregnant sister’s freezer with them before baby D-Day. I wish someone had stocked my freezer with high-protein breakfast biscuits when I was pregnant. I spent the days after giving birth eating beans in a panic. Anyway, having Jenn as a sister sounds nice.

The recipe is on page 73 of the book, and also here.

I have to admit something before I leave you this afternoon.

I’m thinking about dinner.

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I’m trying to figure out why popcorn flavors are so exciting to me and I realized it’s probably because they are more likely to be sweet and salty than many other snacks. The best treats are both; just one is boring without the other. Good popcorn understands this.

Snacks have taken on supersized importance in my life while I am nursing a baby. You cannot imagine the amount of food this poor infant has had dropped on her head in her short time on earth while I attempt to fuel us both simultaneously. I read that breastfeeding burns the same amount of energy as walking seven miles a day, which is good because it is the extent of my fitness routine these days.

Do you know who else would like to connect eating popcorn with a fitness routine? Khloe Kardashian, whose Khloud protein popcorn caused a bit of a stir in the online food world when it launched last spring. It was an innocent time before even the foam on our coffee wasn’t safe from getting protein-maxxed, so the people wondered if popcorn needed to be gym bro-ified. Was that in popcorn’s job description?

Personally I’m in a place where I appreciate protein and fiber in any non-offensive way I can get them. So I tried the original three flavors and, no surprise, the salty-sweet kettle corn was my favorite. But over the holidays Khloud released a new flavor that is the best by far, cinnamon roll, calling it “a cozy classic reimagined with nostalgic, swirling sweetness and a protein crunch.”

Well, okay. I would personally describe it as “kettle corn, with cinnamon.” I don’t know that it evokes a baked good so much, but cinnamon rolls are viral gold these days so I can’t blame them for trying to khozy up to the trend. Here are Khloe and Kendall showing off how desserts can coexist with your abs if you just eat them in popcorn form.

Lest you think the Kardashians are the only sisters pushing the envelope of what popcorn can and can’t do, allow me to introduce you to Party Of. It’s a “party of” four sisters from Thailand who make these crazy delicious Pad Thai and Thai Chili Lime popcorn flavors. Thai lime and chili cashews from Trader Joe’s, which are universally recognized as elite, walked so that Party Of popcorn could fly.

And this packaging?! I’m sorry but they’ve left everyone else in their (non-protein) dust.

Getting even fancier, I cannot leave you without telling you about my favorite restaurant dessert I’ve had in a long time. It was at Cuna, the new-ish restaurant by Chef Maycoll Calderón at The Standard in the East Village. I went to the opening party there last fall, which had an excellent band and was packed with beautiful people throwing sharp modely-looking elbows for small bites on platters that never made it more than a few steps out of the kitchen before disappearing.

I went back for dinner recently to try more of the menu and that’s when I had it: corn cake with caramel, candied popcorn, peanuts, and caramel ice cream. Oh my god.

Chef Maycoll spent 13 years living and cooking in Mexico City, and said he was inspired by the corn desserts that are common there when developing this ode to corn, at whose temple I worship. When I asked about it over email, he wrote back:

“We start with a warm, tender cake inspired by the texture of pan de elote, but with the richness you expect from a New York restaurant. Then we add cajeta, the slow-cooked goat’s milk caramel that brings depth and nostalgia. A touch of mezcal gives the dessert smokiness and complexity, enough to make it interesting without taking over.

The New York part of the story comes through the caramelized popcorn and peanuts. Popcorn is everywhere here: on street carts, in bars, at the movies. It felt natural to use it as a bridge between the two cities, adding playfulness and texture. And finally, the caramel ice cream ties everything together the second it hits the warm cake.”

If you like the idea of Cracker Jacks but wish they were better… this dessert is IT. It haunts my dreams. I actually don’t tend to like caramel but the cajeta is tangy thanks to that goat milk and it all just works perfectly.

I made it all the way to the end of this post without including the Corn Kid, but just know, I wanted to.

Have a corntastic day.

This is how our pediatrician described the Moro reflex, more commonly known as the newborn startle reflex, to us, and I think about it every time Rosie flings out her starfish hands after a sudden noise. I have never been more aware of cars honking in the city, but the clatter of a pan in the kitchen will do it. Sometimes her eyes fly open but they might stay closed if she’s sleeping. Her arms lower slowly, drifting back down towards her belly in stops and starts, ready to grab onto my fur if need be. I would never leave you behind, I whisper, just in case she’s listening.

The first few months of parenthood feel like being started awake for all parties involved. The world is new to her but Alex and I are living in a new world too, through a haze of broken sleep punctuated by sweet snuggles and daily delights. Neither of us had ever changed a diaper before. I swing between the panic of too much information at my fingertips tempered by newfound confidence I can trust my own instincts. To my surprise they haven’t led me wrong yet.

Getting pregnant again after a loss took so long, and IVF did such a number on my mental health, I felt like all my body did was betray me. Then I got knocked up on vacation (of course) and didn’t really believe it, couldn’t fully trust this was happening until the baby was basically almost full term. Once she reached a point where Google told me she could survive outside my swollen belly, I was like okay, I think we are having a baby for real. No shit, everyone said.

In my 38th week, the day before my water broke, my OBGYN told me I wasn’t dilated at all and she was going to schedule an induction at 40 weeks. I threw up as usual and went to a barre class and packed a weekend bag for a pool party we were going to. That night I woke up with what seemed like contractions but couldn’t possibly be… except they became very intense and frequent, very quickly. Alex and I stared at each other wide-eyed in the dark.

After years of feeling so frustrated that my body wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, giving birth was a turning point. The challenges gave me a certain toughness that suddenly felt like a real gift. I was calm and perfectly still while the epidural needle went into my spine.

I had been so sick throughout my pregnancy that the baby was tiny, just 4th percentile, but that had its blessings during the delivery. I felt so proud and strong when Rosie came out not long later in just a few pushes. The euphoria when they placed her on my chest was a high unlike anything I ever would have believed. I felt it flooded the room. The nurses were laughing with us, maybe they thought we were crazy. I was only out of my mind with joy.

Rosie was my guide for everything that came next. She latched immediately, knew how to feed before I had a clue. She survived on colostrum and I prayed that my milk would come in while my nipples bled. She was the skinniest little alien thing, with wrinkles instead of rolls. For a few days the pain was excruciating and then the floodgates opened. She had a lot of ground to make up and she knew it and she drank and drank and I cried with relief.

The first month was a blur but I never felt like we couldn’t do it. She started to get squishier and happier. I stopped worrying that I would smush her if I fell asleep during a night feed, a physical trust between us I can’t really explain. I woke up when she needed me, I learned how to comfort her when she cried. We found that when she yells, most of the time it’s for a reason, except when it isn’t, and that’s okay too. She slept for stretches that got longer with each passing week. We started putting her down in her crib and she didn’t protest.

Already we have favorite sounds that she doesn’t seem to make any more. Alex loved her “heh-heh-heh” dolphin cackle when he’d lay her on the changing table. For me, a purr that would come babbling out after she sneezed. I would give anything to have them captured on video. I didn’t know how fast they would be gone.

The days, they simply evaporate. Every morning I have ideas about what I might do and then time slips away and I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done except keep us alive. I am overcome with gratitude for the maternity leave that enables me not to worry about anything else for a while. It’s especially jarring since my job is a daily grind mired in the relentless 24-hour news cycle. I have almost completely checked out of what’s happening out there.

What a privilege to turn inward for this brief precious moment. My world feels both incredibly small and vast, shrunk down to the needs of this little cooing miracle at the center of our universe who sprinkled us with stardust.

After we give Rosie her evening bath I take her into her nursery to feed her to sleep, something some people on the internet think you shouldn’t do. Alex shuts off all the lights and turns on the sound machine while I cozy her up to my breast. The street lamps are visible through the window just enough to watch her face as she drifts off.

Some hours later I’ll hear her stir and we will do it again in the middle of the night, moonlight streaming in and casting a glow across her silky cheek. With one hand I cradle the back of her head, a thumb stroking fuzzy tufts of hair that remind me of a little chick. So absorbed in her am I that I am always surprised to realize I am beaming.

Even when she can’t see my smile it stretches from ear to ear. It’s just us in this liminal space, half asleep, two heartbeats in the dark. I have a few more weeks left of maternity leave, a few more weeks to give her everything I have, all my focus, my time, my body. Soon we will be startled awake.

Mindful, by Mary Oliver

Every day
    I see or hear
       something
            that more or less
kills me 
   with delight,
      that leaves me
           like a needle
in the haystack
    of light.
        It is what I was born for—
            to look, to listen,
to lose myself
    inside this soft world—
        to instruct myself
            over and over
in joy,
   and acclamation.
      Nor am I talking
          about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
     the very extravagant—
        but of the ordinary,
            the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
     Oh, good scholar,
          I say to myself,
              how can you help
but grow wise
    with such teachings
         as these—
             the untrimmable light,
of the world,
    the ocean’s shine,
         the prayers that are made
             out of grass?

Thanks to the Morning Person newsletter for bringing me back to this poem I love.

Christina seems to be full of Elf-style good cheer year round, but over the holidays she kicks into an even higher gear, like a Rockette. I interviewed her last week at the launch of her newest treat, an eggnog English toffee cookie. Is there a drink that is more singularly associated with an American holiday than eggnog is with Christmas? Festive, seasonal, a limited-time-offering before LTO was overused to the point of meaninglessness by chains like Starbucks. Perfect flavor inspiration– but how to turn a cocktail into a cookie?

In addition to the clever use of vanilla pudding powder in the batter that mimics the velvety milkshake-ness of the drink, Christina put considerable thought into evoking a glass of eggnog, with a frothy head and a sprinkle of cinnamon on top. She said the visual impact is something she’s always considering when developing a recipe.

“The way I think about it is, we eat with our eyes first,” she told me. “We always have, but especially now, because we all have phones and often we’re seeing something there before we taste it. So knowing that, as bakers, we’re all trying to figure out: how do I differentiate my desserts? You can make something taste good, but how do you convey that it tastes good?” In this case, she recreated that look by icing the cookie with a thick sugar glaze and a shake of finishing sugar that brings both shimmer and crunch.

I’ve noticed that Christina’s recipes tend to fall into two different camps. Some are incredibly simple. Forget about one-bowl wonders: I went to a class she hosted with Ziploc where we made chocolate peanut butter puppy chow using nothing more than pantry staples and plastic bags. I inhaled a party-sized portion of it on the car ride home and pretended we didn’t get any to take with us.

On the other end of the spectrum are elaborate and ambitious projects. Of course, Christina built an empire around a now-iconic birthday cake that Willy Wonka-fies the taste of funfetti from a box but with fancy textural elements, like a soak for moisture and frosting studded with pebble-sized shortbread crumbs. She may give off a casual cool-girl vibe, but Christina takes her job incredibly seriously. “800,000 people celebrate a birthday, every day in the world,” she noted. I couldn’t believe she knew a stat like that off the top of her head, but then again, that technically makes everyone a potential customer. “Well, I’m in the business of birthdays,” she said, and I swear she winked.

The eggnog cookie is the best of both worlds, from a home cook’s perspective. The batter is a one-bowl dump-and-stir situation, and is delicious on its own without the toppings. But Christina has found that bakers are willing to take an extra step to gild the lily this time of year. These are win-the-cookie-swap cookies. I wrote about her number-one tip for holiday baking here, and you’ll find the recipe there as well.

I typed “Tosi” into my inbox to find the transcript from our interview, and stumbled upon this incredibly un-chill email I wrote to some friends in 2012 about going to an event where she was a speaker. At the time I worked at Vanity Fair, where nobody ate anything, let alone the homemade desserts I used to bring in to share before I gave up. If you had told me that someday I’d be spending one-on-one time with her for my job I think I would’ve fainted.

Speaking of jobs, I’m supposed to be on maternity leave. Funnily enough I seem to be running my very own milk bar…

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But now it’s decorative gourd season, motherfuckers! Getting to experience fall, my favorite time of year, with a newborn? It’s been so glorious I’ve almost— almost!!— forgotten those godawful sweaty subway rides. And what a fall it’s been here in New York. Daily walks in Riverside Park kept us not only sane but goofily happy in the first month postpartum. Then things got even better when we headed upstate to our friends’ place in the Catskills just in time for prime leaf-peeping.

Ariel and Joyce have an extraordinarily special home in West Kill that we’ve been lucky enough to experience in all four seasons. Every time I post here on Instagram I get a chorus of “OMG WHERE?!!” responses. There’s a river right outside that flows into a swimming hole with panoramic views, and Hunter Mountain nearby for skiing in winter. Being a poet and yogi, Joyce even designed a meditation path in the field outside where a figure-eight-shaped loop invites endless reflective walks. We’ve seen foxes and deer, bald eagles and river otters all on the property. Plus the house is a rare mix of chic and cozy, with the most comfortable beds I’ve ever slept in in my life, all decked out in Parachute linens.

I’m being so selfless sharing the booking link with you at the risk of filling up their calendar. Please don’t go. But if you do, here are some of our favorite things to do in the area.

HIKES

Diamond Notch Falls

You’re in the woods, breathing in the scent of piney air, golden light filtering through the trees and a burbling brook guiding your path. The water gets deeper, flowing faster, and before you know it a cascading waterfall comes into view. This is Diamond Notch Falls (we like the trail that starts on Spruceton Road) and it’s the roast chicken of hikes, a straightforward crowd pleaser that fits any occasion. The path is rocky but wide and there’s not much elevation gain; we were pleased to find it was easily doable carrying a baby. Zadie loves bounding along ahead of us, pausing to wade in the water for a drink whenever she fancies. These spectacular colors took my breath away and I kind of think she was soaking them up too?

Windham Path

For even lower effort with 360-degree views, don’t miss the Windham Path. Most hikes require effort to get to a payoff like this; Windham just spoils you the whole way. It’s more of a stroll than a hike, which makes it perfect for families with strollers. This time for the first time we noticed an “extension path” option towards the end of the walk that takes you on an extra loop through the woods if you want that lost-in-the-trees feeling.

EATS

Fellow Mountain Cafe

Cinnamon rolls are having a big moment right now on social media and Fellow is famous for them. They’re pleasingly squishy and caramelized on the bottom, but I wish the frosting was a little tangier. (At least it’s not vanilla glaze, which is an abomination.) We tried a bunch of their seasonal pastries and liked them even better than the cinnamon roll. The slices of iced maple pumpkin bundt cake were fluffy yet moist, and perfectly spiced, as they’d say on Great British Bakeoff. Also, I’m really picky about granola since I bake my own and know how easy it is make at home, but their granola is fantastic, full of crunchy clusters slick with brown sugar. Grab an $8 bag or two to take home— you’d pay double that in the city.

West Kill Brewing

I’m not gonna lie to you: I went here hoping for a pumpkin beer and was shocked there wasn’t one on the menu. I can’t be the only basic bitch in town! But a hazy local IPA still made me very happy (and went straight to my head, as I’ve only had a drink or two since 2024). There are rotating food trucks outside where you can grab a bite and enjoy the scenery. We paid $19 for wildly overpriced “tikka nachos” that turned out to be cold tortilla chips with sauce drizzled on top, but I was too tipsy from my one beer to be mad. If you go on a Friday or Saturday it’s a pretty lively vibe; there were a couple groups of under-30’s dressed in their flannel and boots best, snapping photos and monopolizing the cornhole setup.

Shandaken Inn

Autumn in the Meadow happened to fall on our first Saturday in West Kill, and I think we’ll have to make it an annual tradition. There was fun music from a colorful hippie band, a bunch of local artisans selling everything from hand-knit sweaters to flower crowns, and even some friendly alpacas to meet. The food was way better than I expected it to be— I had phenomenal glazed pork belly buns, and the baked goods were also exceptional. The apple cider donuts were airy inside with a crispy cinnamon sugar crunch on the outside, just perfect. We also bought a $25 apple walnut pie to take home and again it was so good we would have gladly paid double. Flaky butter crust, gooey filling studded with little bitter crunches from the walnuts. I ate a slice with plain Greek yogurt for breakfast every day for a week.

DIGS

Obviously, you should stay at Joyce and Ariel’s house if you have a decent-sized group. It’s huge and can comfortably sleep a lot of lucky people. For a budget-friendly option if you’re traveling solo or as a couple, I recommend The Graham and Co. It’s my ideal type of no-frills hotel, really reasonably priced without feeling cheap.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we balled out one night at Scribner’s Catskill Lodge. We’re pros at turning one expensive hotel night into two full days of entertainment, and Scribner’s has amazing amenities to take advantage of. The lounges are super chic, there’s a tiny but stunning ice skating rink, and our cabin had its own Japanese hot tub on the deck. I could spend hours watching the steam float up from the tub into the starry night sky, and I’m pretty sure that pre-bedtime soak led to my best night of sleep since before the baby.

SNACKS

Van Dusen’s

Van Dusen’s is our closest local spot for iced coffee and sundries in Lexington, right across the border from West Kill. It cracks me up that there’s not even cell service in the area and yet you can get Momofuku pantry noodles and Milk Bar ice cream at this bougie Brooklyn-esque shoppy shop. On our most recent visit, a little event stage had gone up, and the owner told us they’d just had a documentary screening there. I’m totally planning on forcing Alex to have the world’s tiniest screening at Van Dusen’s next time he has a project coming out.

Cabot maple cheddar popcorn

I honestly didn’t realize this would be so controversial but my brother said this flavor was “an abomination” and Alex refused to touch it. More for me! I grabbed this on a whim and was so glad I did; if you like sweet/salty snacks that taste like New England, it fits the bill perfectly. I’m a bit psycho about perfectly balanced bites and kept wishing I could sprinkle Maldon salt and red pepper flakes on top, but that didn’t stop me from eating the whole bag on the drive home from a hike.

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Fortunately for him, nine months came and went without any such visions. As a culinary writer and producer, I am normally very excited about eating, and it was destabilizing to lose my passion for something I consider so central to my identity. Even when I could keep it down, food just didn’t taste as good.

Postpartum, breastfeeding and no longer constantly throwing up, I expected my appetite to come roaring back. But deciding what to consume several times a day still felt oddly like a chore. Alex and I were staying at my mom’s house, where she was doing her best to keep us fed. In the morning she presented me with huge bowls of oatmeal with berries and nuts. Then she’d get busy making provisions for the rest of the day. There were platters of Dijon-crusted salmon, big tubs of chicken salad with celery and apples, stockpots full of split pea soup with ham.

I ate it all gratefully, knowing it was good for me and our newborn, but still not relishing my meals the way I was used to. Eventually she floated the idea of takeout– “Anything you’re in the mood for.” Suddenly I could see it: I wanted spicy Thai food, khao soy or some type of coconut curry situation from our local spot. Mom looked aghast. “You can’t have that,” she said. “Spicy food could upset the baby’s stomach.”

This was news to me– and Alex, who, thrilled I finally had a request, jumped to my defense. Before I knew it, they were arguing about what I was “allowed” to eat. My mom insisted that when she was nursing my brother and me, she had been under strict orders to avoid spicy food and strong flavors like garlic and onion. Alex’s mom is Korean, and he had a hard time believing that she would have done the same. Perhaps what American women had been told in the ‘90s was outdated… or culturally, uh, myopic. Of course cultures with very different ideas about what constitutes “healthy” food would have different approaches to the postpartum diet. “You think Korean women give up kimchi and gochujang?” he asked. “There’s no way.”

Before things got any spicier between the three of us, Alex and I retreated to our room and furiously started investigating whether there was any truth to her claims. In her bedroom, my mom was obviously doing the same.

In the interest of diplomacy, I’ll let this fascinating NIH study do the talking: “Literature review identified no foods that mothers should absolutely avoid during breastfeeding unless the infant reacts negatively to the food.” In fact, the changing flavors of a mother’s breast milk can apparently be “exciting” for a baby, in contrast with formula that always tastes the same. Some women with colicky newborns do find that particular things seem to cause indigestion, but the study concluded that “most mothers restricted certain foods unnecessarily.”

Talking it out once we’d cooled down, my mom lamented the bland diet she’d subjected herself to on my behalf. I appreciate her dedication to doing what she thought was best for me at the time, but decided this was one maternal sacrifice I wasn’t going to make if I didn’t have to.

Dinner that night was deliciously pungent khao soy with a side of ungrateful daughter.

Back in our own home a few weeks later, Alex’s mom, who knew nothing of our debate, came to visit bearing miyeokguk she’d made from scratch. Miyeokguk is a seaweed soup, bursting with umami from garlic and fish sauce, that has been a staple meal for postpartum moms in Korea for hundreds of years. All the women in their family swore by it. Rich in nutrients with myriad health benefits, it’s believed to restore strength to a mother’s healing body, in addition to helping with lactation. Since it’s traditionally eaten multiple times a day after childbirth, miyeokguk is also known as “birthday soup.” Men and women enjoy miyeokguk as a celebratory meal throughout their lives.

Alex was excited for some good Korean home cooking. My mother-in-law reached into the insulated bags she’d brought all the way from her house in Virginia, unloading big containers of the special soup I’d heard so much about. “Don’t worry,” she said as she ladled up a bowl and handed it to me. “I didn’t make it with any garlic or fish sauce. It’s more bland than it should be, but you can’t have strong flavors while you’re breastfeeding.”

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For those who might be curious, I do realize I’ve written very inconsistently about my journey with infertility, miscarriage, (unsuccessful!!) IVF, and now pregnancy. It has been a wild ride and it doesn’t all make sense in my head yet. I wonder if it will feel like a narrative emerges when I look back on all this. For now it’s just been a lot of unanswered questions and traumas to muddle through in real time, although I am very happy to talk details with anyone else going through it. I will say that aside from this weekend’s hospitalization, pregnancy has still been kinder to me than IVF. I don’t want to scare anyone; some people deal better with IVF than I did. If there’s one thing all this teaches you it’s that everything’s different for everybody. Maybe that’s why it gives you such a powerful urge to hear different kinds of stories, searching for a glimpse of what you’re going through, someone else who’s been there and made it to the other side, whatever that may be.

The morning (and afternoon, and night) sickness arrived in my first trimester and I learned pretty quickly how to cope. I’d wake up to throw up and feel better right away, at which point I could eat a buttered English muffin with scrambled eggs. It was weird reorienting not just my palate but honestly my whole sense of self around simple foods that made me feel kind of like a child. Normally I’d smother that egg sandwich with Taleggio and chili crisp and preferably some bacon or prosciutto. Pregnant me no longer wanted everything to be maximally spicy, salty, and flavor-bombed. Instead, the key was never letting myself get too hungry during the day, because in that state, hunger = nausea. I have thrown up in some unspeakable places over the last 9 months while trying to go about my business. And almost always, a stranger materializes with a bottle of water or the offer of a tissue while I’m hunched behind a tree or head-down in a trash can. People are really kind, and it’s never the ones you expect to stop in their tracks.

I felt a lot better in my second trimester and my palate came back to life. Thrilled to have my appetite back, I didn’t adhere to the normal pregnancy dietary restrictions. If I wanted cold cuts, I ate cold cuts (and no I didn’t microwave them). Cured meats, soft cheeses, rare beef, even the occasional bite of sushi from restaurants I trust. Everyone has to make her own risk assessment, of course, but it seems weirdly patriarchal and controlling to me to cut out all these food groups—not to mention deeply American. Generations of Italian and Japanese women can’t be wrong, right?

This led to some sticky situations at restaurants that simply refused to serve me dishes I wanted that they considered unsafe for pregnancy, even after telling them I had no dietary restrictions. One brought me cold soba noodles instead of the carbonara-type dish I ordered, because of the runny egg. Another, during a Michelin-star tasting menu with my husband and father-in-law, made the executive decision to make substitutions for me (again, not welcome ones). I understand that safety is a top priority, but having male servers tell me why I “couldn’t” eat what I wanted felt like having my bodily autonomy taken away from me at a particularly vulnerable time. Have you ever been in the mood for spaghetti carbonara and been served cold soba noodles instead? I don’t think you have to be a food writer to agree those are not the same thing.

I realize it may sound petty to gripe about this, but so little about my body has been within my control over the past few years that it really got to me. But don’t worry, I’m not terrorizing restaurants any more because I am not feeling quite so adventurous at 36 weeks. The vomiting picked back up with ferocity, and while I am now on new medication to control it, I’ve reverted back to a boring diet. Unfortunately, most of the staples that got me through my first trimester are unappealing now, as they remind me of, well, my first trimester. English muffins are inconceivable, replaced by other foods from my childhood that bring comfort. Mac and cheese, chicken soup, oatmeal. But I need to bump up the nutrition factor while keeping things inoffensive. (Keeping on weight has been a challenge due to all the… you know). Funnily enough, judging from what I see on social media, there are a lot of moms out there trying to do the same for picky eaters.

My #1 life-saving meal is Annie’s Shells, which now comes in a Super Mac variety with extra protein. I stir in some cottage cheese and peas at the end, and feel like that’s a pretty decent dish. Oatmeal gets fresh fruit and a dollop of Greek yogurt. That’ll do, I think.

Another go-to is chicken and rice soup. I add extra rotisserie chicken and vegetables, plus little cubes of cheddar cheese because that’s how my mom always used to give us soup when we were kids. It feels bizarre to be babying myself as I crawl closer to the finish line that separates me from my own impending identity as a mother. And yet, it’s oddly fitting, no?

This post brought to you with immense love and gratitude for my husband, family, a job that’s possible to do remote, and the staff at Weill Cornell.

The meat came lightly grilled, slicked with a soy glaze, atop thin slices of potato. The chefs placed the dish in front of me with a flourish and watched attentively as I took my first bite. “Tastes like chicken,” I said.

That might not sound like a huge compliment, but in these circumstances, it was exactly what they were hoping to hear. Because this was no ordinary restaurant and no ordinary chicken. It was not free-range or organic, because it didn’t come from a farm — it came from a lab.

The quest to be an ethical meat consumer is not an easy one these days. Montana just became the fourth state to ban the manufacture or sale of cultivated meat, its governor citing support for the state’s ranchers. But there is growing demand for animal protein that puts humane and environmentally-friendly practices at the forefront. Poultry is the most consumed livestock commodity in the world, and in many cases farmers and chickens are subject to mistreatment. This New Yorker article from 2017 paints an unforgettable picture of the horrifying conditions at a plant in Ohio; don’t read it while you’re eating.

Some traditional purveyors are trying to do better. A report from ButcherBox, a certified B-Corporation and leading direct-to-consumer meat and seafood brand that saw explosive growth during the pandemic, found that social media is impacting consumers’ purchasing behavior. This is especially true when it comes to education around conscious consumption. Nearly a quarter of respondents in a national survey said they’d purchased food items with specific labels they learned about on social media, including “grass-fed” and “cage-free.” My favorite eggs, which come from Vital Farms, include a code to “see the girls for yourself!” online in a 360-degree video of hens in a pasture. Also a certified B-Corp, Vital Farms publishes impact reports after finding consumers “want to know where their food comes from and how it is produced.”

But GOOD Meat, which got full regulatory approval from the FDA and USDA in 2023, is banking on the idea that consumers will come around to an entirely different alternative. All the radical transparency in the world can't compete with products that simply don’t cost a life — or the environmental resources required to raise it.

“My hope is that meat that does not require the slaughter of an animal makes up the majority of production globally, in my lifetime,” said Josh Tetrick, the CEO and cofounder of GOOD Meat’s parent company, Eat Just. “An uphill climb, but a worthy one.”

Singapore, where land constraints inspired significant investment in alternative proteins long before the U.S., gave world-first regulatory approval to GOOD Meat in 2020. There you can find their chicken everywhere from butchers to restaurants to street carts. Tetrick said that most of those customers are not vegan: “They’re people who like meat but realize that there are real issues with it.”

In this case, the egg came first, or rather, JUST Egg, its plant-based substitute. “We started with this idea of, is there a better way to make an egg? And when we were thinking about what might be next, we thought a lot about the relationship people have with meat, how connected it is to our culture,” Tetrick, who is from the South, told me. “I grew up going to barbecues in Birmingham, Alabama. So I know meat speaks to your identity.”

Tetrick described himself as a “strange eater” now, being a vegan who eats cultivated meat. He doesn’t like the term “lab-grown,” which conjures images of unfamiliar substances growing in petri dishes. “You really have to walk people through it to help demystify its unfamiliar nature,” he added.

That’s how I found myself in GOOD Meat’s plant in Alameda, California, surrounded by enormous bioreactors, while scientists in white coats tinkered with test tubes. Unlike a traditional chicken plant, there were no nauseating smells or pools of blood on the floor. They may as well have been developing the next Covid booster for all I could tell.

Vítor Espírito Santo leads the cellular agriculture team. He tried to explain the process in layman’s terms, which starts with the painless extraction of cells from chicken, cows, turkey, duck and pigs. This can be done in a number of ways, from biopsies to selecting embryonic stem cells, although the company now has a well-stocked reserve they draw from.

Cells are then fed with nutrients to simulate the animal’s diet without any animal components, a broth of amino acids, lipids and vitamins that is constantly being fine-tuned. “It’s pretty much like a protein shake,” said Santo. They must be rigorous about preventing contamination; part of getting that green light from the FDA required demonstrating that what they’re producing is “free of viruses and other pathogens that are actually very common in conventional feeds.”

The sterile lab environment enables them to avoid using antibiotics. “For us, that’s a big advantage,” Santo said. “When you compare the microbiological data from our harvested chicken cells to conventional chicken, the difference is huge. For instance, no salmonella. Or even fecal matter, because with the slaughtering process, there’s a lot of cross-contamination.”

As I walked around the plant, I got an overview of how cells growing in that nutrient-rich liquid are then separated via centrifuge. The result is a pale mush of ground chicken. It's easy to make a nugget from there — creating the fibrousness of chicken breast was much trickier. The team now accomplishes that by extruding it with plant matter to mimic a texture you can pull apart with a knife and fork.

My first taste was a bite of chicken salad atop a crunchy crouton. If I hadn’t known that this was cultivated meat, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Then came a take on chicken teriyaki, the meat flavorful and tender.

Impressing me is one thing. But will this win over vegans who gave up meat for ethical reasons? After my visit to the plant I called up my old friend Joanne Molinaro, a James Beard award-winning cookbook author, for a gut check.

As the Korean Vegan, Molinaro translates familiar dishes for a plant-based audience. She has partnered with JUST Egg on many successful recipes. “I think JUST Egg was a great introduction to people on more sustainable alternatives to the foods we grew up eating and loved,” she told me. “And meat is the obvious next step.”

However, somewhat unexpectedly for someone who was a meat-eater most of her life, Molinaro said she is not interested in the cultivated kind. “I don’t miss the taste or texture of meat. I’m very happy with the way that I eat right now.”

Eggs are a different story: “They’re so much a part of these Korean dishes that I grew up eating. But I have a bit of a more visceral reaction to something like meat. It’s just a little uncomfortable for me personally.”

Molinaro, a marathoner, avoids processed foods that have a negative impact on her health and fitness. This is a common concern among critics of cultivated meat who see it as a “Frankenfood.” But for other palates it could be a game-changer. “A lot of people might be more inclined to remove animal products from their lives when they know that the alternative is so close to the original,” she said. “Subject to scaling and cost and of course the carbon footprint, I’m very, very excited about this technology.”

There are still significant hurdles to tackle that explain why consumers can’t purchase cultivated meat in stores. After regulators spent years puzzling out how these products should be labeled and how to inspect the facilities where they’re grown, a growing number of states are now banning them entirely. There's also a question of affordability. Production levels will have to ramp up in order to bring prices down, although there’s been significant progress since the first cultivated burger cost more than $300,000 to make in 2013.

But the potential of cultivated meat to transform the global economy is huge. Molinaro believes that some of the world’s biggest problems can be addressed by reimagining our food systems. “When you start changing some of the levers of any GDP, it often starts with food. Not just Big Agriculture, but hunger in general. I think the implications might be far broader-reaching than we can even imagine."

For my part, one thing I can’t stop thinking about is GOOD Meat’s cell bank. It’s cryopreserved so that the samples will continue to be available for decades, biding their time for the controversy to die down, long after we're gone. The animals’ last laugh, perhaps; their Franken-kin outliving us all.

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Just before the much-anticipated weekend of celebration, the bride found out one of her friends was going to have to end her pregnancy. She and her husband had gone through a lot to conceive, and all seemed well this time until they went in for their 20-week anatomy scan and found out their baby girl’s bones had stopped developing at around 12 weeks.

The idea that this woman had been walking around for two months, doing all the things you do to prepare your body and your life during pregnancy, without knowing that something was wrong, seemed so astonishingly cruel it took me a while to catch my breath after I heard the news. Their inner circle, of which I am not a member, rallied around them for support during and after an emergency surgery. Everyone was surprised when she said she still wanted to come to the bachelorette. But I understood.

We were told she didn’t want to talk about it over the weekend, just have something to look forward to and see if she could manage to enjoy herself even a little bit, drink the drinks she hadn’t planned on. Maybe she could get through a meal without thinking about the future that had suddenly evaporated like smoke through grasping fingers.

When she walked in on the first night we all carried on with “great to see you’s” and too-tight hugs. Poured her glasses of wine, grabbed her hands for a dance. It was a festive weekend but I wondered how many of us had that specter of grief looming just out of sight, thinking of her sorrow, thinking of our own.

The last morning just so happened to be Mother’s Day and we found ourselves alone in the kitchen making coffee while the rest of the house slept off hangovers. We leaned against the cutlery drawers, holding paper cups of Nespresso, and her eyes met mine. “You know, we just lost a baby,” she said softly. She hadn’t broken eye contact and mine immediately welled with tears. “I know,” I confessed. “I heard you wanted to be distracted and didn’t want to talk about it this weekend, but my heart has been breaking for you.” She buried her head in my shoulder. I told her I knew what it was like to lose a pregnancy and she looked back up at me. “I will never be the same,” she said. “I don’t know who I’ll be, but the me of three weeks ago will never exist again.”

The first time I got a positive pregnancy test after years of trying, I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. Great gobs of snot hung from my nose as my shaking hands held that stick and my sobs turned into hiccups. I was still sitting on the toilet. I was so unprepared for the results to be positive that I hadn’t taken the test with any sense of ceremony. I would have waited for my husband if any part of me had believed two lines were in the cards that morning.

In the movies, a positive pregnancy test results in a baby. I now know that isn’t how it works in real life, for more women than I ever realized. The pee stick is just the first step in a long list of things that still have to go right, and may well not. The pure serotonin that shot through my veins when I found out I could, and had, gotten pregnant is a feeling I will never forget, and I’m so grateful I got to experience it once unabashedly. The next time, that unbridled joy was tempered with caution, a wall around my heart, fear whispering around the edges.

I was anxious about writing about all this, but after I pressed publish on my last essay I got some astonishingly vulnerable and kind messages from women I didn’t know were in this sad sisterhood. It was like the floodgates were open and once people knew that I was talking about it, they wanted to, too. One wrote to me about “the frustration, blame/guilt, torment of not knowing why our perfectly healthy bodies couldn’t do something they are designed to do (and feared would happen before we were ready!)” Another talked about her experience with “women’s health topics that are so often pushed down or minimized… we need to be sharing these stories because other women are facing similar things and it can feel so isolating.” “Felt like you were in my head,” said another.

I’d worried it was too corny, in that post, to explicitly say “you’re not alone,” but a lot of people said that to me afterwards, and it felt really nice. So I’m back, trying to repay the favor, trying to say thank you.

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PS

Quotes shared with permission, stories that aren’t my own slightly altered to protect anonymity

PPS

I love you mom! (not anonymous)

Unfortunately, my editor was right- things were about to get much worse. With the next year came miscarriage and IVF, isolating miseries that turned me into someone I did not recognize. Someday maybe I’ll write about that, but I still feel tenderness for this earlier chapter. Even if I didn’t yet know that 2024 was the one that was truly going to kick me in the nuts.

If you or someone you love are dealing with the grief around unexplained infertility, this is for you.

The summer between 7th and 8th grades I got contacts and boobs at the same time and my whole life changed. A slightly cooler friend urged (bullied) me to swap my rolling backpack for back pain and try something that didn't have wheels. Suddenly guys in other grades knew my name and, crucially, did not know I did not have the personality to pull off being actually popular. I got invited to the movies and prom. My mom's actress friend gave me an old velvet dress of hers I tried on with a new push-up bra. "Oh boy," sighed the actress to my parents. "You're in trouble now."

From then on, I was terrified of becoming pregnant. At school, our education around sex was more about fear-mongering than it was about mechanics. One mistake and your bright future would go poof, that kind of thing. It would be years before I was doing anything more than kissing a teammate in the back of the swim team bus, but still. I knew that if you were getting your period, you could get pregnant.

Or theoretically, anyway. Two decades later, I have discovered that I am not, in fact, someone who can get knocked up if a man so much as sneezes in my direction. It felt like such a big deal when I decided I was ready to go off birth control. I didn't care about a wedding or a house when envisioning my future with my husband, just being a parent. The logistics of motherhood often sound awful in a culture that doesn't provide any meaningful support for families, and yet unfortunately I want in. I want it so much.

We went on a hilariously misjudged "last trip," partied with pointed enthusiasm, then agreed to reach for The Next Thing. My god how cute the baby would be, we said, uploading our pictures into a “What will your child look like?” image generator. We are Ready, I intimated to a fertility goddess who was surely listening. Mother Nature, you may finally bring it on.

Trying for a baby, the wink-wink part, is fun, obviously. "You are super fertile," my husband said solemnly, massaging me after a meal because, not unlike an infant, I sometimes need to be burped. "I can just tell."

Despite his degree from the Doesn't Exist school of medicine, this turned out to be incorrect. Coming up on two years since I went off the pill, still no baby. We both went through a bunch of tests, mine more painful than his (as seems to be the way), only to be told there is no findable reason why we should not be able to conceive.

I’ve optimized my diet and habits to prioritize my health, cut back on drinking. I work out every day, a sad consolation prize to be in good shape. In my early mid-thirties, everyone around me is, of course, pregnant. My best friend from childhood, my closest circle from college. Coworkers past and present, my favorite yoga teacher. People on TV shows, eternally, after a one-night stand during which they apparently just so happened to be ovulating. Cousins, in-laws. I become a person who squeaks "I'm so happy for you!" when loved ones tell me their news and then hides in the bathroom, filled with self-loathing over embarrassed tears I can't control. I can’t believe what a sad sack I am, weeping as though it’s a zero-sum game.

I know there are medical options to explore when we’re ready, but I’m not quite there yet. I am stuck in limbo, not old enough that people think I should panic, but I am panicking. These reproductive organs I have spent a lifetime aggressively mistrusting are now giving me a completely unexpected fight. I baby my dog, smother her until I begin to see my own anxieties reflected back through her usually vacant eyes. "Get a grip," I’m sure she’s saying, as she wriggles away from me. "Get a life."

I make a show of trying to do that. I assure sweetly tentative friends I am not triggered, optimize for fun like I have something to prove. I savor my free time even though I would trade every single minute of it in a heartbeat for a heartbeat. "You have no idea," my mom says, "how quickly it will all change. Enjoy it now." She is confident this will eventually happen for us, but I don’t know why. I’m not getting younger or more fertile as the years tick by. I listen to "Happy & Sad" by Kacey Musgraves a lot. I have so much to be grateful for. I am healthy and loved, I remind myself. Well, healthy enough for one, anyway.

An acupuncturist tells me to dial back the HIIT classes where I work out my sorrow and not to eat anything cold, to zap my salads in the microwave. She wonders if my teenage bout with anorexia, when I stopped getting my period for a while, could have had lifelong repercussions. I still remember so vividly what it felt like to punish myself during that time, the row of bruises down my spine when I sat down where each vertebra jutted against the chair. I feel like I am being punished again. There’s no one to blame but myself.

I have a Chinese medicine consult with an herbalist who prescribes me 10 expensive pills a day that make me nauseous and, excitingly, throw up on the street. I eat up other women’s stories; I especially like the ones where they find out they are pregnant the day they were scheduled to begin IVF, like when you're waiting for your food at a restaurant and it comes as soon as you get up to pee.

There are tragic stories too. Women suffering through miscarriages, and abortions they needed but didn't want, or ones that they did. I hear through the grapevine that a mother of two I know is depressed because she is unable to have a third. I have a complicated reaction to this that I am not proud of. I berate myself and buy an iced coffee to turn my mood around on the walk to the gym, then remember what the acupuncturist said. I sip it guiltily, wondering if I really am trading ice cubes for the prospect of a child.

My yoga teacher's end-of-class platitudes have begun to hit hard. If that ain't a bad sign, I don't know what is. She puts on Otis Redding for our wind-down. Shielded by darkness and the sound of 20 tone-deaf people chanting "Om," I hear mine turn into a whimper and can't stand myself for a second. Shut the fuck up, I say to my inner voice. Then, ashamedly: I'm sorry.

I will get a room-temperature coffee with no ice cubes tomorrow. I will try a little tenderness. I will try.

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Allegedly.

I was so furious that the memory still makes me want to… scream.

Anyway I’m completely normal about ice cream and I come to you today with something that I truly believe is the culmination of my life’s work. It’s all been building to this, a taste test courtesy of Jeni’s.

Jeni’s has a pretty unique cookie dough flavor that has been in and out of rotation until this spring, when they made it available for shipping nationwide. It is so beloved, one dude’s quest to get them to bring it back became his whole Twitter personality.

Jeni’s is so confident in the supremacy of their cookie dough flavor that they reached out asking me to compare their pint to some other top brands.

They sent six cartons of cookie dough ice cream to my house, and I made the very brave decision to invite my brother to join me in the taste test. Not that he deserved my benificence, but I was feeling magnanimous due to the sheer volume of treats. My husband Alex was called in to mediate participate.

Here are the contenders.

Halo Top: chocolate chip cookie dough light ice cream

We started with Halo Top, a diet ice cream that clearly did not stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. It tasted like chemicals. Next.

Ben & Jerry’s: vanilla ice cream with gobs of chocolate chip cookie dough

A reasonably-priced grocery and drugstore standby, this was better than I expected. There is a strong vanilla flavor to the ice cream that Alex found “comforting,” peppered with a generous amount of cookie dough that tastes more like sugar cookie than chocolate chip. Some people who aren’t me may prefer that. I’m on the record as being a sugar cookie hater.

Haagen-Dazs: chocolate chip cookie dough

This was the go-to brand at our house growing up. It is my mom’s favorite, and was my grandma’s too. So I was surprised we didn’t like it as much as Ben and Jerry’s. Haagen-Dazs makes a mean vanilla, but the cookie dough felt like an afterthought. The chunks are few and far between, with negligible chocolate flecks. The three of us agreed this one was not very exciting.

Graeter’s: cookie dough chocolate chip “French pot” ice cream

We audibly gasped when I popped the lid of the Graeter’s pint. The chocolate chunks are so big it feels like someone was just breaking off pieces of a bar by hand, and taste noticeably high-quality. The cookie dough flavor was also top-notch. “It feels like this would actually be a delicious cookie if you were to bake it,” Nick said, which I admit is a good point. The ice cream is silky with a perfect flavor balance and we couldn’t get over how heavy-handed they are with the treasures. A unanimous LOVE.

Van Leeuwen: malted cookie dough shake French ice cream

Poor Van Leeuwen- we should have had this before Graeter’s, because the chocolate chunk situation was good compared to the others. Compared to Graeter’s, though, they are also a bit stingier with the cookie dough. What does make this pint unique is the malted flavor of the ice cream base. As a huge Whoppers fan, I loved that roasty toasty element. To me, it’s so much more interesting than vanilla. I would happily never eat vanilla ice cream again in my life if it could always be malted instead.

Jeni’s Double Dough: chocolate chip cookie dough swirled into a buttery brown sugar custard

Once a save-the-best-for-last girl, always a save-the-best-for-last girl. Like Van Leeuwen, Jeni’s also left plain vanilla in the dust with a base of brown sugar ice cream that gives off strong Speculoos cookie butter vibes. The chocolate is not the point here, but Alex preferred the caramelly notes of the ice cream to anything else we’d tried. A scoop of this tastes like eating Biscoff cookies in ice cream form, so the cookie dough pieces themselves are almost superfluous. But we appreciated that they were evenly and generously distributed. Nick and I were able to dig around without bickering, which may have been the sweetest treat of all.

I was producing a cooking segment with him that morning after working until midnight the night before, and while my subway was on track to get me there by 8am when we’d agreed to meet, I did not expect a phone call at 7:45 from a member of his team informing he was there, ready to go, but no pressure if I wasn’t. I tried to control my breathing as I raced up the stairs from underground at 7:52. The last thing I wanted was to seem flustered. I apologized for keeping him waiting and he was disturbingly nice about it— worse than being yelled at, of course. He was dressed casually but I could tell his sneakers were cool. I don’t know shit about shoes so I just asked how his weekend was as I guided him along the labyrinthine maze towards the studio kitchen. Oh, he had run the Boston Marathon yesterday and hadn’t thought to mention it until now. I searched for any sign of a hobble in his long lopey strides and saw no evidence this person was recovering from 26 miles in another state. Unbelievable. I was in worse shape after my subway ride from Brooklyn.

Inside we went over the demo steps he’d be doing on air for the recipe. It had not been easy choosing something he wanted to make that would resonate with our audience. I’d been intrigued by the idea of what a 3-Michelin star chef eats at home, but it turns out the answer is— not what you and I do. His idea of a casual meal involved a type of seaweed I’d never even heard of. It was Earth Week and we landed on baked rice with seasonal spring produce. There were specific instructions for how to prepare not just each vegetable but each part of each vegetable. Asparagus stalks, for instance, were to be sliced into thin coins, while the spears were left intact, cut on the diagonal. We do a lot of football food segments at work; this is a kitchen that sees vast quantities of queso. He seemed happy with how the asparagus had been arranged on the beauty platter by our talented culinary team.

We had plenty of time before his hit so I took the chance to tell him I had been to Eleven Madison Park once, years ago. It was my high school graduation gift, to eat there with my family, what I cared about more than a car or a watch or whatever other teenagers ask for. I hoped it didn’t make me sound like too much of a fan girl to share, but if I always think if I were a celebrity doing a TV segment, I’d be happy to get matched with a producer who really cared. He asked when that was and seemed impressed it had been in the early days of the restaurant. Now, of course, it’s all plant-based. Secretly I was glad my memory involved steak. I told him it was a perfect celebration because it was. I’m sure my parents saved up a long time to afford that meal.

Now I’m in my mid-thirties and think often about how they managed it, giving my brother and me such a rich life in the city on two journalists’ salaries. Of course I’ve followed in their footsteps, albeit pivoting to TV instead of print, and I see now how the world opens up to you when you are in media. Getting to work with chefs I’ve admired my entire life is both an enormous honor and a regular Tuesday. Last week an invitation arrived in my inbox: would I like to attend a press dinner at Eleven Madison Park?

Indeed I would.

The dinner was hosted by Prolon, a company that supplies “precise nutrition” for people detoxing on a fast. I honestly can’t stop thinking about their decision to host a dinner at the one-time best restaurant in the world in order to tell us about their longevity juices and supplements. The vegan menu did feel kind of ascetic, especially in comparison with the feast I remembered from 17 years ago. By far the best part was the bread course, a warm and flaky croissant-like roll with onion butter (or “butter,” I guess, although I have no idea what kind of witchcraft produced this magic without dairy) that tasted like pure luxury. Slathering it on until it glistened while a Prolon spokesperson at the head of the table talked about the benefits of being on a diet that “mimics fasting,” I briefly entertained a thought about whether I’m doing enough to protect future me. Eating-wise, career-wise. There are always things I, a non-marathon-running non-vegan in a terrifically unstable industry, could be doing to better face the giant question mark of the years ahead. I’m here for a good time, not a long time, baby, I tried joking to myself as I dragged the last shards of pastry through the remaining swipe of butter on my plate. It felt a little hollow, but I still enjoyed every crumb.

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When I got my first job at Vanity Fair, my salary was $25,000. That necessitated picking up extra work and living in a commune, which is a story for another time, but after that I got my first job in TV, which paid $32k, and felt like an enormous improvement. I do want to say thank you so much to Alligator Lounge for the legendary free pizza program, which sustained more than its fair share of yuppie strivers. And to our sainted landlord, who appears to have forgotten that we exist and hasn’t raised the rent in all this time. I found out the average price for a Williamsburg apartment recently and just about fell off my chair. With full awareness that the gentrification of this neighborhood was already shocking to locals when I first arrived in 2014, I still can’t help but gape when I see those numbers and try to figure out how that many people are that rich. Watching the cookie-cutter waterfront condos popping up like mushrooms in a neighborhood once dominated by fellow grungy young people, I wondered who they were for. Then a controversial Hermes store took up residence (what is this, SoHo??) and it was time to accept that I am simply not the target audience here any more.

Some things haven’t changed, like the polarizing Peter Luger’s, a steakhouse from 1887 which can’t be accused of catering to people with parents with money because it has always been expensive, and remains as committed to its old-world bit as ever. But there are some amazing and affordable local businesses that still make it feel like home here and that I love supporting due to my constant fear they’ll be replaced by a Bondi Sushi. In a time of razor-thin restaurant margins, not to mention a political climate that imperils all I hold dear and delicious, I don’t know how they do it, but I am so grateful for every day that they do. And the love that goes into this world-class food for under $20. When folks come to visit or ask for local recs, I send them to:

Noods ‘n Chill

It is so embarrassing recommending this dumb name to people but I persist, because I love spreading the word about this tiny but mighty gem. Their khao soy comes with two braised chicken legs in a flavorful coconut curry broth, plus a separate container of noodles to mix in as well as crispy noodles for topping, salty pickled veg, sliced fresh onion and herbs, and insanely spicy chili paste to add at your discretion. A single order lasts me two full meals and costs $17. I would gladly pay twice that and am always scared they’re not charging enough.

My order: fried chive cakes (crispy, mochi-like chew, addictive, unusual), crab fried rice (generous amounts of sweet crab meat make it really special), khao soy that haunts my dreams.

Tikka Indian Grill

Every container of the fragrantly spiced basmati rice that comes with the entrees has a curry leaf or two along with whole pods of green cardamom- which is how you know they’re neither cutting corners nor messing around. I get tons and eat leftovers over spinach the next few days for lunch.

My order: butter chicken (creamy, irresistible), Chennai lamb (coconutty with fork-tender meat), black lentil dal (the most luxurious lentils ever), mixed pickle (for some necessary salt and tang), paratha (buttery, flaky).

Pies ‘n Thighs

Rightfully famous Southern fried chicken that’s crunchy without being greasy. As a hangover cure, the chicken buttermilk biscuit slathered with hot sauce and honey butter might actually kill you, but you’ll die happy.

My order: fried chicken box with mac and cheese (the platonic ideal of both), cherry pie (same).

L’Industrie Pizza

Living a block away from some of the best pizza in New York is such a flex, especially because it means I can monitor the line on dog walks and pop over at weird times. They just expanded into the space next door, which seems to be helping with said line.

My order: the L’Industrie (prosciutto, fresh basil, and cooling blobs of burrata), the Spicy Salami (Italian soppressata, add hot honey). IYKYK: the Wednesday-only sandwich special.

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I reached back out to Girls Write Now, an organization I’ve volunteered with in years past, to get involved again as a mentor. Last time for some reason I got paired with a kid who wanted to be a lawyer. She was a sweetie and we did our best for the semester, but she could not have been less interested in what I do and I knew precious little about how to help her make her professional dreams come true. She deserved a better match. Surely, I asked this time, there must be a young student out there who’s interested in journalism or TV news who could use me as a resource?

(What was meant to be a rhetorical question is now going to hang there but we’re going to move on.)

Next thing to hit my inbox was this.

We’ve fostered with Social Tees before, but not since adopting Zadie on this fateful Clear the Shelters Day:

Their well-timed email blast to former fosters explained they had a litter of puppies coming in from Puerto Rico who were in desperate need of temporary homes. Social Tees doesn’t have any sort of kennel space where dogs can spend time. Their rescues go straight from the plane into a foster home and if there’s none available, that dog gets left behind. We can’t have that, can we? (Heavy on the rhetorical questions today). Within a few hours I was waiting for their delivery truck to arrive from JFK, gobsmacked as someone reached into a crate full of puppies, pulled one out and handed it to me. Then I just… walked away??

I feel like this is sufficient explanation for how I ended up mentoring (kids) and fostering (puppies) at a very chaotic time both personally and professionally.

She was the runt of her litter, nine bony pounds shivering as I zipped her into my coat to take her home on the subway. I kept thinking about the shock of going from a beach puppy in Puerto Rico with all your siblings to landing in freezing cold New York with snow and salt on the streets. She was starving, though, and not in a “I’m starving” way between lunch and dinner. Her distended belly is soft and hot. When I run my finger over ribs it feels like playing a xylophone.

She has kind of a stupid name that she doesn’t even know, so we just call her “it,” a way of not getting too attached that is scientifically proven logic-wise and airtight, emotionally. It has tender puds not yet hardened by city streets and is absolutely terrified of its leash, walks, and all things outside, but inside it came out of its shell with astonishing speed. I thought Zadie would be thrilled for the company, as I can tell she’s lonely in the winter when our trips to the dog park are more rare. As it turns out, a psychotic tree frog who uses her as a launchpad for bouncing off the walls and destroys all her favorite toys with its tiny razor teeth is not Zadie’s idea of good company.

Unfortunately for Zadie, I enjoy this even more.

It has been so funny to watch her grumble at this puppy energy and start to teach the little one some manners when she is too much, which is always. The little one, in turn, has learned just how to provoke her into a game of tug of war or chasing each other around the dining room table, occasionally bumping into chair legs with different-sized thuds. It dials it down when it wants to nuzzle next to Zadie for a nap, sneaking up on her slowly, chipping away at her resistance to snuggles when she is too exhausted to move. My main job is fattening it up, which of course I do with great relish. As someone who threw dinner parties in her college dorm I know a thing or two about nurturing skinny ladies!!

When I stand in the kitchen cooking it curls up on my feet. Sitting here now with my laptop it has wedged its snoot underneath my arm, chin resting just close enough to the keys that there’s an occasional a;lsdkfjl;adfjk I have to delete. Is this the baby writer I have been waiting for?

My sneezes upset it greatly and it licks my nose while maintaining disconcerting eye contact. Its breath smells like coffee. It is completely black, no white socks even, and incredibly difficult to photograph. It looks like negative space. I want it to take up as much space as possible while it is here, fill out, fill up every corner of the house. It’s such a tiny thing. A little Beanie Baby that came to life like Frosty the Snowman. It’s not here to stay. It. It. It.

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I am absolutely obsessed with group fitness classes, which changed my life when I first joined Equinox in 2018. Until then I associated exercise with punishment. Oh the hours I wasted miserably counting down the minutes on a treadmill or elliptical machine, barely burning the calories of a Luna Bar! Also, why was I eating Luna Bars!! Learning the fundamentals of building actual strength changed my body and my mind and I am forever grateful to the instructors who make it so fun to go to the gym. I do a different class every day now; barre, HIIT, weight-lifting, pilates, yoga, I love it all. My Equinox membership is the biggest luxury in my life, so I don’t tend to do any boutique fitness classes outside of it, unless they’re connected to a press event. I will say that even though I put considerable effort into mixing up my routine, there’s nothing like the burn of a new class. I was shakin’ and quakin’ by the end of those 57 minutes but oh, it hurt so good.

Yesterday I found myself at a breakfast with Siggi’s yogurt (sorry, SKYR) seated next to Siggi himself. I had no idea that Siggi was a real person but there he was, an absolutely ginormous Icelandic dude with an accent that can only be described as Bjork. Next to him was Emma Lovewell, the popular Peloton instructor, who was announcing her new partnership as Siggi’s “Chief Live Well Offiskyr.” (Far be it from a morning TV writer to 🙄 at a pun, but that one felt a little are-we-sure-we’re-done-workshopping-this to me.) Aaanyway. I was pretty fascinated by the gangly Siggi. He came to the U.S. for business school around 20 years ago and began making the thick Icelandic-style strained yogurt as a hobby out of homesickness. The yogurt that was popular here then was that nasty Light ‘n Fit-style stuff. I remember eating Yoplaits in chemically “flavors” like “ooh la la creme brulee” and calling it dessert without realizing that one dinky little cup could have as much sugar as a candy bar, with none of the joy. “In Icelandic, diabetes literally means ‘sugar disease,’” Siggi told me, so they were more concerned with cutting down sugar than fat while we were deep in the abyss of Snackwell’s over here. He said it was a tough sell for American palates back then and it took several years for the taste to catch on.

I remember my fratty college boyfriend eating Greek yogurt for protein years before some ad agency looking for new markets thought “What if— hear us out— bro-gurt?” He is as American as I am but I guess he was ahead of the curve when it came to nutrition. I tried it without any sweetener and found it inedible. Now it is no exaggeration to say I put it into almost everything I eat. Smoothies made with sweetened yogurt are missing a crucial tang to me. I put a dollop on top of my soup or mix in hot sauce or pesto for dipping. Protein: not just for boys!! Emma, who had a baby last year, said she started eating eggs with cottage cheese for breakfast when she was pregnant and started counting her macros for the first time. I assume she’s using skyr now AHEM.

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I wasn’t all Healthy McHealthface this week. Somewhere in there was dinner with Buffalo Trace Distillery at a literal cigar club on the Upper East Side. I didn’t know those existed, but I walked through the velvet curtains and into a cloud of smoke and thought baby, we are not in Kansas any more. Buffalo Trace was one of just a handful of distilleries that were allowed to make “medicinal” whisky during Prohibition, and they are releasing a new thousand-dollar collection of five whiskies from that era, each paired with a complementary (not complimentary) cigar. I can’t say I’ll be visiting Club Macanudo again on purpose; I’ve had similar meals on an airplane— “lobster bisque” without any discernible crustacean, steak with boiled green beans. I would have thought the food at a cigar club would need to be more flavor-forward than usual, not less, due to the impact of smoking on taste buds, but what do I know. My favorite part of the event was the beautiful packaging and the lore because I am #justagirl. Dessert was fried Oreo-style chocolate truffles in an inexplicable bowl of powdered sugar. I ate them, obviously.

You're insecure, don't know what for
You're turning heads when you walk through the door
Don't need make up to cover up
Being the way that you are is enough
Everyone else in the room can see it, everyone else but you
…If only you saw what I can see
You'll understand why I want you so desperately
Right now I'm looking at you and I can't believe you don't know
You don't know you're beautiful
That's what makes you beautiful

It sounds sweet at first, I guess, although the trope of men telling women they “don’t need” to wear makeup is so icky to me (really what you don’t want to see is evidence of effort or artifice– wait until you find out what goes into our no-makeup makeup looks!). But then they get to the crux of the message: “You don’t know you’re beautiful– that’s what makes you beautiful.”

This girl’s insecurity is the point– if she had walked into the room feeling like hot shit in addition to looking like hot shit, well, that wouldn’t have had the same effect on these lads at all!

I thought about this dumbass catchy song while seated in a crowded movie theater in Brooklyn this week with a bunch of horned-up thirty-somethings on dates trying to maintain their seriousness next to giggling groups of friends. The trailer for “Babygirl” made quite a splash online and in my cohort; people were counting down the days until this sexy, subversive-seeming movie came out. Nicole Kidman playing a boss bitch exploring power dynamics with her hot intern? The internet was ready with preemptive Oscars!

Better writers than I have already dissected the ways this movie was a disappointment when it comes to the kinks that the trailer makes you think it will explore; read the brilliant Jen “are the ‘dark thoughts’ in the room with us right now?” Winston for a perfect articulation of why.

What fewer folks seem to be talking about is the thing that stuck most in my craw. The first time Kidman’s character takes off her clothes in front of her new man, she presents him with a literally flawless body. “You’re so beautiful,” he says appreciatively, to which she demurs, “No I’m not.” I’m paraphrasing here, but they have this whole ludicrous exchange where she acts like she doesn’t look like Nicole Kidman while standing there looking like… Nicole Kidman.

All women have insecurities, sure. That’s a sad universal truth I can accept for a premise. But earlier scenes in “Babygirl” showed us her character going through all the body maintenance that it takes to look the way she does, down to the cryotherapy and Botox (which she doesn’t even need numbing cream for, because she is just that #hardcore.) She swans around her office in perfectly tailored Girl Boss attire looking like Melania Trump in pussy bow blouses, tight pencil skirts, and stilettos. Even in the privacy of her own home, she’s artfully draped in silk camisoles, not a sweatshirt in sight.

This woman is never, ever off-duty in her performance of the successful CEO– and this woman knows she is beautiful. Sorry, she may have insecurities about other things– would still really love to know what those dark thoughts were!!-– but they ain’t her appearance. This woman works very, very, hard to embody the role of sexpot executive (sexecutive? forgive me). The naked body we see in the movie– statuesque, perky, all toned limbs and ripped abs– could belong to a 20 year-old swimsuit model. At least in this movie the labor involved in looking like that isn’t invisibilized– but that’s part of the reason I just can’t accept this supposed insecurity about her looks.

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“The Substance,” a movie that caused a similar amount of commotion earlier this year, did a better job illustrating how an objectively gorgeous older woman can lose her confidence in our youth-obsessed culture. There’s a great, painful scene where Demi Moore gets all dressed up for a date, only to stare at herself in the mirror long enough to convince herself she’s actually a monster, unworthy of the desire she’s already inspired in the man who asked her out. Of course, by the end of the movie she’s turned into the actual old hag of her nightmares. What she wouldn’t give to go back to looking the way she did before she started taking “the Substance”!

It’s like when you see a photo of yourself from a while ago and think how great you looked and how you were self-conscious at the time but you’d kill to look like that again so you could enjoy it properly. Every woman knows this feeling.

Whether you blame Moore’s character for failing to appreciate what she had, or a patriarchal capitalist culture built around selling women solutions to kick the can down the road just a little bit further when it comes to insecurities it instilled in us in the first place… well, that’s up to you. In a world that has framed “preventative” Botox as an empowering act of self-care, the quest to fight the inevitable is neverending because, of course, time comes for us all. We’re marching in formation like obedient little soldiers investing our resources in our own inexorable declines. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, all that jazz.

“Our cultural fixation on youthfulness as the defining quality of beauty makes aging so much more daunting by contrast,” wrote beauty writer Sable Yong when “The Substance” came out. “Chasing youth will always backfire in a society that reviles and stigmatizes visible signs of aging nearly as much as any evidence of cosmetic intervention to obscure it.” Go off, Sable!! I wanted to write about this movie at the time but felt she had already done it so well there was no point. But after seeing “Babygirl” I’m once again ruminating on the dubious brand of feminism Hollywood is currently peddling.

I felt much sorrier for Demi Moore’s character than Nicole Kidman’s because no amount of exercise and starving herself to look “good for her age” could stop her from being replaced by a younger woman in her job, which appeared to be “being Jane Fonda.” But I can’t stop thinking about why those two actresses were chosen to tell these particular stories. They are both women who have held onto their status as sex symbols in Hollywood for decades. At 57 (Kidman) and 61 (Moore), they remain a triumph of zero percent body fat and glossy hair and smooth skin. How much more powerful would these parables be if they featured people who weren’t the product of a lifetime of energy devoted to cultivating physical perfection? How brave is it really to bare all when you have, objectively, nothing to hide? Kidman’s naked body in that scene may theoretically be unadorned, but actually it is sculpted by a lifetime of priorities optimizing for rigid beauty standards. She and Moore still represent an unattainable ideal for most women.

Women will continue to bring red carpet photos of celebrities to their injectors/trainers/hair dressers/stylists because beauty is a conduit to power and even the most beautiful among us can’t stay young forever and there will always be something to sell to make you feel “better” about your “flaws” or at least like you are taking action against them. This is when we are at our most attractive, boy banders and Hollywood can still agree– adhering to every beauty standard and still not feeling good enough. Now that’s a good girl.

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That's. A lot. Of stuff.

I'm never not thinking about my relationship to stuff. I know a lot of folks my age can relate to this, because it's a time when we either have aging parents or growing families or both. My mom, who has things like generations' worth of Tiffany china and sets of silver, is an elite stuff-haver. But she's reached the point in life when she's constantly trying to offload stuff to me or my brother. It is impossible to go home without being asked if you'd like to take some serving platters back to Brooklyn on the train (you wouldn't, but thanks). It is, admittedly, often really nice stuff on offer, although there's plenty of junk amid the jewels and I don't always know which is which. Grabbing a bowl from the kitchen cabinet after Thanksgiving, I noticed one in the stack was broken into pieces. I hadn't been the one to break it, but I still had to psych myself up to deliver the bad news. "Oh, don't worry," she said. "That came from H-Mart."

When I tell you I breathed a sigh of relief like no sigh has e'er been sighed before...

Back in Brooklyn, my mother-in-law had arrived with Costco-sized quantities of some favorite foods, a sweet gesture that unfortunately always causes issues for me as the apartment's CEO of Tetris. Eyeing the remaining seaweed packs from the carton she'd brought on her last visit earlier this fall, she tried to launch a new carton of seaweed packs on top of that one in an overhead storage space otherwise known as the Jenga tower of cartons wobbling threateningly on top of the refrigerator. "You guys need more space," she chuckled, which I don't disagree with, but also, people who live in less than 1,000 square feet don't shop at Costco. Not wanting to bite the hand that feeds me 32-packs of unrequested chestnuts, I kept this thought to myself.

At least edible gifts are ephemeral, if they are in quantities such that one can realistically consume them. Every time I finish a jar of peanut butter and hand it to the dog to "prepare it for recycling," I do a silent celebration for the peanut butter jar-sized space that has just opened up in the pantry. I will need to buy a new jar of peanut butter posthaste, of course, but not before I've taken one other jar off of the box of pasta on which it was balanced, just to give it a taste of shelf life.

It's a privilege to have everything you need, and I recognize how lucky I am that I didn't buy anything on Black Friday or Cyber Monday because I don't need anything. "Need" is subjective, of course. The handle on our microwave broke off ages ago and thus the door must be carefully pried open with two hands, but the microwave still performs its only job, so I feel no need to replace it. The air conditioner is duct-taped together in a manner that is most aesthetically unappealing, but which only bothers me when we have guests over and I'm trying to look at the apartment "through their eyes." You know those yard signs that got popular after the 2016 election? "In this house, we believe science is real, black lives matter, women's rights are human rights," etc. I'd add "things don't get replaced just for the sake of upgrading until they literally break down and can't even be fixed with duct tape." I think of it as the anti-iPhone mentality. It's my personal protest against a consumer culture that has convinced us we need new phones just because a different model has "launched."

iDigress. For my compatriots in a constant battle with stuff, the best things you can buy for yourself or as gifts are either consumable, as I wrote in this edible advent calendar roundup, or non-physical, like streaming deals and subscriptions. Supporting journalism is a nice place to put your dollars, any time of year. At the height of the Marie Kondo craze, I wrote about the periodicals cluttering my apartment in a piece called “Marie Kondo is not for me,” inspired by a friend who threw out all her wardrobe staples and then asked to borrow mine.

I cast a critical eye around my living room, landing on the magazine stack of shame™. At this point, the stack is making itself useful as a de facto coffee table, a fact which both delights and horrifies me. But each copy of Bon Appetit has been lovingly dog-eared with recipes I absolutely 100% am going to cook soon, and each issue of The New Yorker is full of articles that will make me smarter when I read them and thus able to hold court in a more brilliant manner at dinner parties. As for the New York Magazines, those contain the subscription code I need to link my online access, and I am eagerly looking forward to the time I do that so I can put an end to the daily scolding I get on the website telling me “You have reached your article limit!” despite the fact that I am, indeed, a paying subscriber. Sigh.

Five years later, my devotion hasn’t changed, but if nothing else, I can feel proud of the fact that I am now logged in on nymag.com. I’m avoiding it today, though— it’s full of Cyber Monday sales.

I failed at something I’m supposed to be good at. I like being bad at stuff I’m bad at, I think that’s good for the soul. The selective perfectionist in me is perfectly fine with embracing things I’ve defined as non-talents of mine. I am bad at bowling in a way that consistently defies belief, for example, and I still think it is very fun. But food is my wheelhouse. I love to cook for myself, I love to cook for my friends, and I especially love to cook for my cookbook club. The highlight of the month, every month. A group of women from fancy food media who have become dear friends in recent years. Big hearts, big eaters. My people!

It started because we’d see each other out at events all the time. We are lucky to be invited to cool restaurant openings and chef demos and such, but the scene here in NYC can be exhausting. Night after night making the same smalltalk with strangers (“So what are you working on lately?”). These gals became a beacon in a sea of repetition, familiar faces and then confidantes. We’d gather in corners or rearrange our place cards to sit next to one another at dinner. Afterwards we’d relive the best bites or talk a little bit of light smack about the event: did they ply us with drinks before (or, horror of horrors, without) properly feeding us? Did they insist we leave work early to arrive “promptly at 6” and then make us wait through a 90-minute cocktail “hour” before getting down to business? We’d compare notes on invitations, lining up our schedules when we could. Soon enough we were making our own dates to catch up, away from the watchful eye of work contacts.

That’s how cookbook club was born! Each month we pick a new release and plan a sort of potluck dinner where everybody cooks a dish from the book. I used to choose the easiest-looking thing (lazy!!), but now I try to take on a recipe that will teach me something. Collaborating on a big spread is such a good way to get a sense of the author’s taste and sensibilities. Plus we love eating, duh! We have a Google doc where we claim dibs on what we want to make and take turns hosting. At some point it happened: that yummy feeling when you realize new friends aren’t new any more. Connections and professional opportunities are shared generously, which makes the general upheaval in our industry feel just a little bit easier to bear. We’ve supported each other through layoffs and promotions, divorces and engagements. Take that, old boys club!

Like the events we go to, we have strong opinions after cooking from these books. Some of the girls are professional recipe developers and they will absolutely notice if a recipe is written in a way that’s confusing, unnecessarily complicated, or just flat-out doesn’t work. Sometimes someone has good gossip from behind the scenes of the book in question. But we didn’t choose a book this month because as you surely know if you opened Instagram this weekend, it’s Friendsgiving season.

(Actually, I rather enjoyed seeing Friendsgiving celebrations all across the country on my feed. There’s the former coworker who left the daily news grind behind and moved to Nashville, at a table full of people wearing cowboy hats! There’s the former schoolmate who moved to Portland and got really into baking elaborate pies he seems to take with him on hikes, beaming in front of his baked goods and bearded friends. Sorry but I love Instagram. Gimme that slice of life!!)

Instead, we each picked a recipe we were auditioning for Thanksgiving at home. For me it was the perfect chance to test a stuffing alternative.

We’re not the biggest stuffing guys at my house. Every year we’re like wait, what do we do about stuffing again? It’s the one dish we don’t have an emotional attachment to, probably because none of us really likes it that much. Mac and cheese, however, is always exciting (in my opinion). The divine Dan Pelosi, whose cookbook reads like a warm hug and who I have had the pleasure of working with, has a recipe for pumpkin mac and cheese with sage and brown-butter breadcrumbs that sounded like an automatic winner. He has you whisk up a roux, then mix in cheddar and parmesan and a whole can of pumpkin puree. It looked like Velveeta but it smelled like decorative gourd season, silky smooth while also giving cheese pull. I mixed in some fancy bronze-dyed noodles (thank you Eataly PR), topped it with all the crunchies, and baked it alongside an individual portion in a creme brûlée dish for taste-testing purposes. Hot out of the oven, it was freaking amazing. Chewy noodles, velvety sauce, crispy panko: texture perfection with all the flavors of fall.

It was going to take me an hour to get to the host’s house on the subway and I didn’t want to be carrying the baking dish when it was piping hot. So I did it all in the morning, figuring it would still be great later at room temperature.

It was not.

I think the pasta absorbed all the sauce as it cooled? By the time we sat down for our feast, my mac and cheese had congealed into a brick. You could have torn off a gluey hunk and slapped yourself with it, which is what I wanted to do. I watched in horror as people took seconds of everything else on the table. The pan was still mostly full after dinner and that does! not! happen!! The only person willing to take home leftovers was someone’s husband (*sobs*). Husbands cannot be trusted, they eat anything!!

Cookbook club is not a competition and yet I am still sulking around like a sore loser. Perhaps I am displacing some feelings from recent news events I am not allowed to talk about online, who’s to say. The only thing that cheers me up is planning to go extremely hard on the next one. It will be December, I’ll pull off my own little Christmas miracle. I’ll pregame the pregame, make my list and check i.e. cook it twice to ensure my contribution isn’t a dud. People always ask about the logistics when I post our get-togethers on Instagram, and one friend who recently moved out of state asked for tips on starting her own cookbook club as a way to build community there. Nothing could make me happier than that. So it’s a perfect time to take stock of what we’ve loved and why, for anyone else who might be curious.

Cookbook Club Hits (a subjective list)

Book: The Woks of Life by the Leung family

Favorite dishes: chicken curry puffs; mapo tofu

Book: Big Night by Katherine Lewin

Favorite dishes: crispiest chicken Milanese; strawberry “pop-by” cake

Book: The Cook You Want To Be by Andy Baraghani

Favorite dishes: spicy coconut chowder with toasted garlic; fennel gratin

Book: Stuzzichini by Stef Ferrari

Favorite dishes: anchovy butter rice cake crunchies; pasta chips and parm sauce

Book: Mozza by Nancy Silverton

Favorite dishes: all the pizzas, Nancy’s famous butterscotch budino

Book: Mi Cocina by Rick Martinez

Favorite dishes: pozole rojo; albondigas en chipotle

Book: Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden

Favorite dishes: cauliflower with plums, sesame, and yogurt; pasta alla Norma

Book: A Generous Meal by Christine Flynn

Favorite dishes: crispy potatoes over creamy tonnato; dark chocolate and molasses cookies

Book: Asada by Bricia Lopez

Favorite dishes: pollo in guajillo; grilled romaine ensalada Caesar con miso

Yeah I cried, I absolutely cried. A perfect and beautiful book, I loved it so much. 

And look at that, I’m talking like she writes. I find Rooney’s writing to be so affected at times and yet that’s exactly what it is, affecting, I have been affected by her. I think it’s part of what gives her books such an immersive quality; when I am interrupted reading I feel as though I am coming up from under water. She is so good at describing intangible things, like the feeling of sitting in an audience watching a performance as a room full of strangers is collectively transformed by the experience.

There’s another passage that’s stuck with me where one of the characters, Margaret, thinks about trying to contain the fallout of her messy romantic life like there’s a net she can cast around everything that’s escaping her control. She’s a divorcée who’s fallen in love with someone much too young for her, but she realizes the chaos agent that has upended her life, this new relationship, is the very thing that’s made it worth living again. (Sounds hyperbolic, but her ex is an alcoholic and her circumstances are pretty tragic tbh.) “Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting,” Rooney writes.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I am your standard type-A control freak trying to white-knuckle my way through these anxious times while also believing I am just a speck in an infinite, uncaring universe. You know what has really helped me wrestle with my illusions of control? Talking it out with friends and family.

Which brings me to the other thing I want to say about Intermezzo. These characters hold themselves back from communicating with their dearest loved ones in a way that is absolutely incomprehensible to me. They deal with relationship drama, struggle with suicidal depression, and make life-altering decisions without confiding in ANYONE. There are scenes with Margaret and her best friend where the best friend suspects Margaret’s finally happy again but neither of them says anything about it. These are two women in their 30’s; I tried to picture myself hanging out with any of my friends, let alone my closest confidante, and hiding the biggest thing going on in my life, about which I am desperate for advice. CANNOT RELATE. Same goes for the brothers at the center of the book’s plot, who are down bad grieving their dad’s recent death. These siblings, these best friends, even the couples are constantly all “well, I wouldn’t want to pry” or “I won’t ask, it’s none of my business” to one another. What do you mean you don’t want to pry?? Who says that to a best friend??

Rooney is Irish, as are her characters, and they’re so repressed it’s like reading about aliens. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, and I know from living in France that Europeans find me American af, but I wanted to give them all a big hug and a sweet treat and be like angel, talk to me. You don’t have to suffer alone.

As we head into election week, about which my employer forbids the sharing of any thoughts or opinions online (SILENCEDT!!), I just want to say that I truly believe emotional intimacy will save us. What is the literal point of having an inner circle if you don’t let them, you know, in?