The Mostly Giving Tree
I want to start a The Giving Tree flickr group, and what it will be is a kind of collective parental revision of the book, offered in a diverse series of newly imagined scenes. Like, maybe I would draw a little picture of the tree lying on the couch with a beer, and the speech bubble [...]
Bedfellows
I have nearly all of my best conversations in bed. Not with friends as a rule – unless we’re lucky enough to have captured someone in the house for a sleepover. Usually friendship conversations happen now in deeply condensed bursts, and although I miss the languorous chitchat of pre-kid days, I treasure the way intimacy [...]
Easy Roasted Tomato Sauce
I feel like I’m living inside a tenth-grade drosophila experiment. The fruit flies are everywhere: clustered on the bananas, swarming the compost, flying up out of the drain in a way that makes me not want to think about what might be so exciting in the drain. But mostly, they are in love with the [...]
The Soup of 1000 Vegetables
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” Those are lines from the Mary Oliver poem, “When Death Comes,” which is a favorite of mine. I’m thinking of her because my children and mother and I went to hear her read last week, along with 2000 [...]
Panna Cotta
A friend of mine was recently describing to me how a grave illness and long recovery had returned him to the tastes of his long-ago childhood: soft foods, white foods, glasses of juice, dishes of tapioca. This is a person who, a year ago, would have served you coq au vin with 5 or 6 glasses [...]
Potato Leek Soup
This is as simple and satisfying a meal as I can imagine. I think that it’s important, when you’re expecting a baby, to think in terms of the stories you will tell your kids about their birth. Not, “I bent over so Daddy could look at my hemorrhoids and then, whoosh, my water broke!” or [...]