As I pause to reflect, I look back on last year and see all of my efforts, wins, losses. I see what it looks like to intentionally craft the world I want to be a part of, hyperlocally and otherwise. Last year, three years after moving to the mountains full-time, we put effort into rooting down in our local community. We grew our Family Nature Club, free outings to connect kids and caregivers to the Earth in unstructured play and hikes. We met lots of local families who hold similar values to us and we will continue getting our kids together out on trails and in outdoor spaces for free play in nature. A challenge that arose was that we ended up having to make some cancellations due to unforeseen circumstances and are exploring what it would look like to invite others in to help us manage it.

This year I also co-created a new group in my local area called Upper Delaware Action for A Free Palestine and met lots of people who were united with the common goal to take action against the horrific genocide and land theft in Palestine. We gathered the community together for letter writing campaigns, we had a beautiful event where we cooked ancestral recipes together and screened Foragers by Jumana Manna. We hosted teach-ins and screenings and community talks and events. We made efforts to form voting blocs and influence our local political landscape but it’s been a failure in many ways too. The local politician we worked toward getting elected, Josh Riley, campaigned with the promise of not taking super PAC money but, lo and behold, he voted to sanction the ICC for their arrest warrants against war criminals. Turns out he received hefty donations from AIPAC including at least one trip to Isr**l. We’re at a loss for what to do next as we reassess the impact of all of our collective work.

In an effort to make a tangible positive impact in my community I joined my local volunteer fire department as a volunteer firefighter in June. I’ve been going to the drills and meetings at least once or twice a month as well as any emergency calls I can when I have help with child care. I still have to complete my intensive training-- that’s on the horizon for this summer. I’ve learned some hard skills and will definitely learn more. I’ve also experienced the sometimes uncomfortable reality of being in community with people who hold different social and political views. It’s opened my mind in ways I didn’t expect. It has also opened my eyes to a lot of hypocrisy and it’s taught me lessons about who shows up when emergencies strike. I can see more clearly how many of us are indoctrinated, whether from news media or other ways, to judge and turn against our neighbors when we all hold more in common than we think and can benefit from joining together.

Even with all of this local community work, the area we have the most influence over changing for the better is our own home. Several years ago, my husband and I started a New Year’s tradition to clean the whole house, reorganize and let go of things that serve more as clutter than enrichment. This year I remembered that it extends beyond just physical clutter. We can and must also reassess patterns of behavior that no longer serve us. I finished reading Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Lisa M. Ross and it helped remind me of our responsibility as parents to create and maintain a nourishing and nurturing home life. In the rush of excitement with the holidays, parties, family visits, and decadence, our toddler started to get pickier after being around other picky kids. I got lazy and started parking the kids in front of the TV while I prepared dinner.

After some reflection, and a loving reality check from my sister, we began putting more effort into reaffirming our household rhythms. We started cooking together again, and eating together began to feel more like an intentional act. We now light a candle at the beginning of each meal and blow it out at the end of the meal to mark that this family ritual is a sacred time where we’re all engaged and collaborative. When the kids help prepare the meal they not only snack on the fresh vegetables as we chop them together but they also eat our collaboratively cooked food at dinnertime and don’t ask for a special picky-eater version. They feel connected to the food because they helped prepare it. We’ve never been a household that feeds kids “kid-food” or has a separate meal time for the children as we all eat together, but we had begun to fall into the trap of kowtowing to our toddler’s demands because it felt like the path of least resistance. This holistic shift was a powerful reminder that it is up to us to create the world we want to see, we don’t have to sit by passively as we see things unravel. When things get haywire, it is up to us to notice, and find out what we can do to bring them back to center, back to balance.

New habits take time to implement, and rhythm is our friend. I’m two months into my “break” from instagram and it’s been freeing. In releasing my bad habit of getting sucked into instagram, I’ve been replacing the pull of mild emptiness that drives me to look for the dopamine hit on my phone with reading books, listening to audiobooks, or checking in with friends. In some ways this Substack is like my nicotine patch, it scratches the itch I feel to get my thoughts out to anyone who will connect with them but I still sometimes feel gross and egocentric pontificating into the void.

Sitting with the discomfort is something I hope to embrace more with time, as that is still a big challenge for me. In divesting my attention from the metaverse, I realized that social media is especially addictive and damaging for me. I can’t just have one drink, so to speak. The element I miss the most is the human connection, and I can find that through other channels. Even if it may be more challenging to cultivate offline, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for me.

I’m working on releasing my bad habit of late night snacking and trying to replace it with yoga and herbal tea so I can really connect into my body. Not because I necessarily want to begrudge myself of my treats but because I can feel myself getting weaker and more tired with each passing day and I want to actively support my body (and especially my teeth) as I grow into the later stages of my life. I endeavor to implement new habits that will give me life and strength and vitality, instead of imprisoning me in an ill cared for body. This swap is still very much a work in progress, as I often turn to my treats after a stressful day and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is exercise. But I also do not want to wake up before the kids do and get out of my cozy bed while it’s still dark out to get on the mat. Hell no.

The herbs in the following infusion are deeply nutritive, balancing, and restoring. They help calm nerves and recenter with their earthy taste and mildly sweet flavor. When I sip this infusion it helps make me feel more rooted, calm, and centered. I started thinking of these herbs as pals who are here to support me and I hope I can start to support them more, get back into the garden and give them space to grow.

Recipe: Herbal infusion

Ingredients:

• 2 oz dried Nettles

• 2 oz dried Oat Straw

• 1 oz dried Lemon Balm

• 1 oz dried Raspberry Leaf

Instructions:

Combine all the dry herbs above and mix well to make a big batch of blended herbal infusion and keep it in a glass jar.

To brew, take 1-2 heaping tablespoons of herbs per 20 oz of water and heat up the water and dried herbs in a pot. Bring to a boil and then simmer on low for 5 minutes. Strain the herbs as you pour your infusion into a large glass for storing, or drink it all warm from a mug.

Spell: Reflecting and Recentering

Look back on your year and celebrate your wins. Write them down. See how far you’ve come since this time last year. Have you gotten better at sharing your truth? Have you repaired any relationships? Have you created anything you feel good about, or made any progress toward your goals? Have you survived hardships and are you still here? Have you learned to treat yourself with more kindness and appreciation?

Release the noise of others’ thoughts and opinions and find your center. What is important to you to affirm? What rhythms can you begin to implement that will work in service to your goals? How can you transform patterns that bring you suffering and replace them with new habits that bring vitality and abundance? Identify one element you’d like to fold into your rhythm. Maybe it’s lighting a candle over shared dinnertime, maybe it’s bringing in more plants from outside, in whatever stage of hibernation, as a reminder of the season we’re in. Whatever element you land on, let it be a reminder that you can recenter whenever you put your mind to it.

How can you fold in small daily rituals that support your health and wellbeing without doing it in an ascetic way? Can you swap in an herbal infusion when you feel the nightly hankering for sweet treats? As my husband keeps reminding me, we are mammals in winter, we’re supposed to be tired and lazy. Don’t begrudge yourself of your treats but do make sure to floss!

When we attune to nature’s cues, we feel the pull to conserve and slow down in the winter time. After the last bountiful harvest of the year, when we worked hard to preserve fruits, dry herbs, process and freeze vegetables and meats, stocking our larders and woodsheds for the winter ahead, it’s now time to begin shifting into a slower and less consumptive rhythm to get through these leaner months. More time to rest and ponder and conserve. So when met with the conflicting messages from the commercial industries that say spend all you can, go in debt up to your eyeballs so you can flood your kids with toys, overindulge until you feel sick, the dissonance can be dizzying. This holiday that should be about bringing the family together around good food, hospitality and charitable giving has turned into keeping up with the ever increasing demands and being left feeling depleted before winter even sets in.

Last Christmas, my sister-in-law gifted my husband a book titled, Post Growth Living: An Alternative Hedonism by Kate Soper. In it, the author posits that in affluent societies such as ours, we must substantially change our ways of living, working, and consuming in order to curb the ongoing ecological disasters that result from endless unchecked economic growth and extractive industry. By doing so, we may have fewer material luxuries but we can make our lives much richer in other ways. Rather than working overtime to be able to afford more possessions, if we make an effort to curb spending and consumption as much as we possibly can, we can experience the gift of quality time with our loved ones, learn the joys that can come with frugality (like spending the day taking a bath and reading a book with a nice cup of tea, and maybe straightening up the house a little instead of out dealing with traffic and holiday shoppers buying stuff we really don’t need) and the creativity that comes with making do while having less (like showing our loved ones we appreciate them and care about them by making them a meaningful gift or writing a heartfelt card).

Of course there is privilege in being able to choose slow-living and thrift over working several jobs just to keep up with the most vital expenses. But many of us will find that if we go through our household budgets and line-item everything that’s not a necessity, we will find that much can be saved, and thus time can be freed up. In our household, after we had our first baby, my then-full time job laid me off and we had to figure out how to make ends meet. We have since gotten much better at curbing excess spending, and learned that it’s been a gift to have the time to raise our young kids while our freelance work pays for our basic necessities. We cook nearly all of our meals at home and aren’t able to afford extravagant gifts for each other or ourselves but we make up for it in quality time together and acts of service.

Degrowth is about meeting our needs as humans, including for food and housing but also for connection and purpose. It’s about developing better relationships to the natural world around us, and not tying the success of a people to gross domestic product. We are in the late stage of capitalism when industry as we know it rewards extreme resource hoarding among the one percent, and when shareholder value is prized over actual value of well-made items that last a lifetime. It’s cheaper and easier to buy something new than to fix what we have. And so by design, in order to increase revenues for the higher ups, nearly everything is made with increasingly cheaper inputs and labor.

I went the entire year without buying any items of clothing for myself, new or used. (The one exception is I had to buy a pair of pants from Walmart to fit the uniform for my volunteer fire dept parade this summer.) What I found was that I was able to clothe myself with the same old stretchy maternity leggings and t-shirts while I allowed my postpartum body the time to come back to its own new normal, before buying a reactionary wardrobe to quell my body dysmorphia. It taught me a lot about how much I associate my worth with the items I buy. I learned about how to value myself as a person and a mother in other ways besides how I look. About patience and taking the time to discern what I really needed vs what I wanted. Having the self-imposed limit allowed me to take the time I needed to make decisions on purchases, rather than get sucked in to clickbaity ads that promise to improve my life.

This month’s recipe mirrors the theme of making magic from fewer material inputs and more time. Bone broth is a slow, low-waste, simple recipe that takes a long time but uses all of the parts, alchemizes cheap cuts and scraps into nourishing, sparkling, collagen-rich decadence. Making this broth keeps you home for a couple of days while it cooks and warms your house with an inviting aromas. Once you begin, you’ll have to put a pause on outings and find other ways to keep yourself busy around the house. Taking this extended time at home to be in your space and feel the rhythms of home life may make you want to shift into some changes. It made me want to make my house feel cozier and less cluttered when we were experiencing a fever-pitch of toys all over the house.

I started reading Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Lisa M Ross, and it aligned with a lot of ideas we have for our family. This year, we asked for no birthday gifts and are imploring friends and family who would otherwise give the children gifts to keep gifting very small and simple, handmade, or focus on experiences, contribute to their education fund, anything that helps curb the ever-growing toy avalanche that seems to mount ever higher. By keeping gifts small and simple, we feel, it will still share the love and spirit of the holiday season but not overwhelm them or groom them into consumers who want more and more stuff from an early age. While intentions don’t always align with the intended result, we can try and see how we go. We’re working on what it would look like to keep the gifting to a minimum but make the holiday feel special with all of the quality time, crafting gifts for our family and loved ones, cooking together, playing outside, hiking and filling our lungs with cold air, making each other laugh and creating memories that aren’t so attached to possessions.

This bone broth recipe uses good quality local vegetable scraps and bones, it’s all good, real, and from the earth. With heat and time, it alchemizes into something like liquid gold. I like to make it when the outside temperatures are consistently well below 35 degrees, so that when it comes time to cool the individual jars or containers from near-boiling to food-safe in the fridge or freezer, we can make use of nature’s blast chiller, also known as the outside fridge.

Bone Broth

Ingredients:

2-3 lbs knuckle bones or other collagen and connective tissue-rich bones from pasture raised animals of your choosing

Scraps from celery, carrots, garlic, and onions

2 onions, halved

1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

Instructions:

1. The first step is optional, but for a richer more caramelized flavor, roast the bones first. Place bones on a baking sheet and roast at 400 degrees for 20 mins. This works best for larger bones.

2. Add bones, scraps, onions, and vinegar to a large stockpot and fill with cold water. Bring to a boil and then cover the pot and reduce to the lowest heat setting.

3. After 20 minutes, skim off all the muck from the surface.

4. Continue to simmer, covered, on low, for 24-48 hours. Make sure there is nothing flammable near the stove and keep a watchful eye.

5. Strain out all of the solids with a fine mesh sieve and ladle the stock into glass containers for freezing and storing.

6. To serve, warm it up in a mug, and add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a crack of salt, and any aromatics you’d like. Or use in soups, stews, or braises.

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Spell:

Take the time while the stock is cooking to figuratively take stock of your life. What's working well and what isn’t? What do you wish you had more time for? What’s holding you back from making changes? Is your home life harmonious? How can you make your home more cozy and comfortable so you want to spend more time present instead of looking to escape? Go through your schedule and through your budget and identify some key elements that bring you stress.

Journaling prompts: What can you focus on reducing or eliminating in the year ahead to free up some space in other areas of your life? What stressors at work can be curbed with a shift of mindset? If you spend several hours per day on social media, can you cut it partially or entirely so you can write letters to your friends or take up a new skill? If you spend a certain amount per month on gaming or streaming services, can you use that money and time to focus on a creative project you’d like to begin or continue? Can you try to downshift certain areas of consumption in your life to open up more possibilities of space or time?

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Blessed Yule and happy winter solstice to everyone. Thanks for reading and supporting this little project. If you have enjoyed reading any of it, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend. Wishing you and yours a restful and nourishing holiday season.

It’s November, which means the food media world is all about Thanksgiving* - sides, unique dishes, how to prepare a turkey, what to make, it’s all a big frenzy. As someone who lives for food and expresses my love by cooking for others, and also is aware of the blood-soaked history of the federally recognized holiday, I feel deep conflict in celebrating on this day. I appreciate the rare opportunity to have family gathered together in our home. I’ve always loved the tradition of expressing our gratitudes as we go around the table and I really treasure honest, vulnerable shares of challenges and true gratitudes. But it feels hollow to me to continue on with the surface level celebrations without addressing the underlying rot.

In years past, I have donated to the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, in order to support food sovereignty that has been erased and eroded. And I will continue to do so, not just as a penance, something to assuage my guilt for having access to biodiverse foods (many of which were developed and stewarded by First Nations peoples) while many, if not most, reservations are under food apartheid, but as an investment in land-based pathways to reclaim ancestral wisdom and regain sovereignty for Native peoples.

Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately is how much we as a society slap a band-aid on something and forge ahead without addressing the root cause. In therapy, I’ve learned that I can recall and talk through traumatic incidents of my past to sit with my feelings, see them for what they are, assure myself that I am presently safe, and move forward in life without so many hair-triggers that spiral me into a 4F response. Each time I can heal past an open wound, it no longer has the same effect of ruling my present life that it previously did. 

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Growing up in a household where my mom worked on most holidays including Thanksgiving, it became especially important to me to carve out time for annual traditions and holidays to mark the passage of time. On the years that my mom didn’t work on this holiday, we went upstate to celebrate with her side of the family, my uncle, aunt, and cousins, and our Jido (which means maternal grandfather in Arabic). 

At our Thanksgiving celebrations, my Jido would make a low & slow roast turkey that he’d put in the oven at 5am to cook all day until the succulent meat fell off the bone, and along with other traditional American sides, we’d have hashweh (which means stuffing in Arabic) and zippy garlicky lemony sauteed spinach. Hashweh was not something I’d subsequently see on any other Thanksgiving tables until I started hosting my own friendsgiving once I moved into my own place. Whenever I’d ask my grandma for her stuffing recipe, she’d say, “hashweh or American stuffing?” And told me she once tried making hashweh for her American friends but they said, “Rice? On Thanksgiving?” and aside from a few polite nibbles it largely went uneaten. She stopped making it after that, but I think it’s something worth keeping in rotation.

Hashweh is the stuffing we use in Arab cooking to stuff kousa (small zucchini), or grape leaves, or cabbage leaves, or poultry, or even kibbeh. The stuffing is made with onions, lamb or beef, spices, pine nuts, and in most applications aside from kibbeh, rice. Although it’s often used to stuff things, hashweh also shines as a main dish. The warm, spiced, pillowy rice and tender, savory meat meet the crunch of the pine nuts or sliced almonds, and when I serve it with laban, cool, rich yogurt and bright parsley, they tie it all together. It’s one of my favorite comfort foods and simple weeknight dinners.

In August I wrote about becoming local to place as someone from a diaspora, and when I think of the story we’re told about Thanksgiving, of gratitude and reciprocity with the land, I think of incorporating more native wild foods to our tables and talking about where they come from. “No matter where you are in North America, you are on indigenous land. And so on this holiday, and any day really, I urge people to explore a deeper connection to what are called “American” foods by understanding true Native-American histories, and begin using what grows naturally around us, and to support Native-American growers. There is no need to make Thanksgiving about a false past. It is so much better when it celebrates the beauty of the present.” Sean Sherman, The Sioux Chef, from this piece in Time Magazine.

As I develop my own family traditions, pulling from my past and incorporating the ecosystem around me, I started making hashweh with manoomin, wild rice native to Turtle Island. I added beets and green apples, for harvest-season flavor and crunch, and instead of the beef or lamb, I used mushrooms. I dressed it all with a tangy mushroom vinegar and a touch of birch bark syrup. The result is a deeply satisfying, savory dish that pairs well with the classic sides but also tells a story of resilience and respect for the land. Incorporating the stories of our foods, where they come from and how they got to our tables is a tradition I can get behind.

If you’d like, you can share some history behind the food you’re making at your Thanksgiving table. Here’s a short excerpt from The Honorable Harvest chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer:

“Settlers in the Great Lakes wrote in their journals about the extraordinary abundance of wild rice harvested by Native peoples; in just a few days, they could fill their canoes with enough rice to last all year. But the settlers were puzzled by the fact that, as one of them wrote, ‘the savages stopped gathering long before all the rice was harvested.’ She observed that ‘the rice harvest starts with a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayers for good weather for the next four days. They will harvest dawn till dusk for the prescribed four days then stop, often leaving much rice to stand unreaped. This rice, they say, is not for them but the Thunders. Nothing will compel them to continue, therefore much goes to waste.’ The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how Indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered.”

Kimmerer then goes on to describe that the rice is purposely left and dropped into the waters to reseed for the following year, and to feed the other critters. The Honorable Harvest is about always asking permission and never taking more than half. It’s a lesson we can all benefit from hearing again and again, in this culture of overconsumption and general disregard for the natural ecosystems around us. 

Through the Intertribal Agriculture Council, I found Spirit Lake, a Native-owned brand of wild rice and if you are cooking or hosting this year, I recommend doing as much of your shopping for pantry staples for this holiday and any other day using their search function. 

*Also known as National Day of Mourning

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Recipe: Wild Rice Hashweh

Serves 4 as a main or 6-8 as a side. This can be made up to two days in advance, and actually benefits from the flavors melding together when making it a couple of days ahead of serving.

Ingredients:

1 cup of wild rice, such as Spirit Lake

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, divided

1 medium-large red onion, chopped

1 lb mushrooms of choice (I used lion’s mane) or 1 lb ground turkey, lamb, or beef

1 heaping tbsp allspice

1 cup sliced almonds or chopped walnuts or pecans

1 small red beet, finely diced

1 green apple, diced

2 tbsp mushroom ale vinegar or apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp birch syrup or maple syrup

1 tsp ground coriander

Instructions:

1. Cook the wild rice according to package instructions. Different varieties will cook differently, so just make sure it’s fully cooked. Undercooked rice will be chewy, so add more water and cook longer as necessary.

2. In a large skillet, add a drizzle of olive oil and saute the onion until it sweats and appears translucent, 2-3 minutes. Add the mushrooms or meat, some salt and pepper to taste, and cook, stirring often, until golden and fully cooked. Add 1 tsp of the ground allspice, and half of the nuts, and stir well, cook a minute or two more until nuts are lightly toasted. Add the onion mixture to a large mixing bowl. 

3. In the same skillet, add more oil and beets. Saute a few minutes until golden but still crunchy. Add beets to the mixing bowl, along with apples.

4. When the wild rice is done cooking, add it to the mixing bowl along with the vinegar, syrup, remaining allspice and coriander, and remaining olive oil. Mix well and season with salt and pepper to taste.

5. Add chopped parsley and remaining nuts as a garnish.

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Spell:

Practice gentleness with yourself and others as you reconcile the bitter history of this holiday. Slow down and try to recognize when you’re coming from a reactionary place, and sit with your feelings so that you don’t create more harm by attempting quick-fixes. It takes a lifetime of embodied practice to help shift the tides toward deep, real, and honest reconciliation.

Instead of a spell, I recommend learning about the peoples whose land you’re on, how you can be a good steward of the land, and reading books by First Nations authors. I’m about a quarter of the way through Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, and I highly recommend it.

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October is here and with it, a marked shift of seasons. It’s the birth month of both of my babies. I’m flooded with a wave of happy memories and joy when the autumn chill enters the air and the leaves turn from green to gold, burnt orange and fiery red. I’m transported back to the feeling of holding my swaddled newborns nuzzled close to my body to keep them warm. Tiny fists and yawning mouths. The intricate details of the earth growing colder and darker. The warmth in the kitchen as our household prepares for the descent into cozy winter slumber, in parallel with our forest critter neighbors.

At the same time, it’s been one year of the crushing sensation and deepest pit in my stomach knowing how brutally people in Palestine are suffering, how gaslit we are by the media, how it’s somehow more controversial to be against mass civilian death than it is to call for the extermination and erasure of an entire people, how I’m complicit because my tax dollars are funding and fueling the atrocities and despite all efforts to write my reps, organize my community, use my voice, nothing seems to move the needle in this alleged representative democracy.

“The old world is dying, a new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters," wrote Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political prisoner who was critical of Mussolini and fascism, and was jailed until his death.

We are at a precipice of global awakening to the power structures that siphon resources from the many into the pockets of a select few. And because people are awakening en masse and mobilizing, those in power are doubling down with unprecedented ferocity to try and suppress the awakening. We are seeing the masks come off of the ghouls who inflict living hell and multi-generational trauma and hellscapes on such a massive scale that we cannot even comprehend it. They lie through their teeth like classic abusers, deny-attack-reverse-victim-offender, and then smugly come home to their riches. All while rivers of blood soak the earth and mass graves grow larger.

I think about all of the ghosts in the ancient lands of beauty and fertility. Desecrated, their lives violently wrested from them, ancient historical sites are vaporized and tons of white phosphorus and other poisons are indiscriminately dumped on the sacred lands to expel land-based people. I think about how it’s continuing this very moment as I write from the comfort of my home. Every photo, video, interview, story I see of children being shredded to bits, people’s disembodied limbs in trash bags, the remains of people stripped, bound, and crushed alive by tanks. And it has been going on this way, under cover, for far too long. Only now do we see through the television-ready smiles and lies spewed by those in power who are driving this death ship, downplaying the abject terror to serve the interests of shareholders of extractive industries. 

How are monsters made? And what can we possibly do to stop them? October is a potent time for shadow work. If we have not addressed our past traumas and transgressions, they will continue to haunt us and others in malignant ways. When I see people at political rallies harassing, blocking, or trying to “shut up” those speaking out about genocide, I see the same malignancy that lives in families who scramble to silence family members who dare to speak out about abuses they have experienced. Whether or not these perpetrators see themselves as trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy, I see deadened, disembodied zombies, grasping at stability at a time when no amount of pretending everything is fine will suffice.

I struggle to blend the two worlds I feel pulled toward - to write in ethereal, gripping detail about the ecosystem around me, the cyclical nature of seasonal and lunar change, the ripe, luxurious joys of eating delicious food made from locally sourced ingredients with love, the impossibly difficult and incredibly heart-filling work of raising babies into good people and stewards of this Earth. The ways of land-based people who just want to live and grow and care for the Earth and feed each other.

And yet I hold immense privilege in reconnecting to my land-based roots when indigenous people who have lived this way for hundreds of generations are being forcibly expelled in the most horrifying ways. I cannot shake the deep, clinging, meat hooks that pull me into despair and the thick mud of hopelessness when I see, time and time and time again, not only the lack of any accountability of the crimes against humanity we pay for, but the boasting by even the “lesser of two evils” candidate to create the world’s most lethal fighting force, or her VP pick who had been seemingly a progressive candidate, condoning Israel’s invasion of neighboring sovereign nations as it escalates and escalates.

I watch in disbelief as they continue to use the same talking points, spread false information that has been debunked, and spin narratives to serve their interests, and wonder if they really believe the public is dim or distracted enough to believe them. I wonder if they actually believe themselves. Though I’d love to rally behind a political candidate who vows to change things, we don’t have that option. Up and down the ballot, they’re all genocide enablers. And then when confronted with the polling numbers that reflect a large percentage of Americans would support an arms embargo, and how they may be in danger of losing their elections for siding with such flagrant human rights violations, they smugly brush it off. The liberals have shifted so far right that they debate with each other who will be tougher on immigration and who will frack and extract oil the fastest.

I wonder how others can compartmentalize, how they can live and go on vacations and and write about food and literally anything else. I try to bring the joy of cooking recipes from the Cana’an, to share with my local community, to create events that celebrate Arab culture and humanize Palestinians but then I end up depleted, going to great lengths to cook for people who talk in circles about “peace talks” and such high-level conceptual theory, who enjoy my food but do not bear the same immediacy that I do, the frantic pleas to stop. sending. the weapons. 

I pour my energy into keeping busy and sharing love in the ways I do best. I try to initiate creative projects to keep the spark alive and work on collaborations and then end up beside myself that people I know and love are not as beside themselves as I am. It makes me feel alone, dejected, heartbroken. How can we not all agree that these daily terrors and dizzying escalation are inexcusable? Is there any way we can stop them? Is it even reasonable to hope that our shared humanity would compel us to band together to put an end to this hellscape in any way possible? I begin to lose hope for this idea of shared humanity.

Then I return to my cocoon and remember, as Audre Lorde said, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” This quotation is often taken out of context, and the whole ~self care~ trend used by marketing companies to sell junk and promote indulgent consumerism is not what I’m talking about here. Lorde was a self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and as such, her acts of self-preservation were inherently acts of political warfare in a system that benefits from her silence. It’s important to keep that context in mind. The real point here is that we must replenish our reserves so we can keep fighting the good fight, continue to raise resilient, caring children, reimagine a new world, and build communities of care.

I look to myself to examine my own shadows that are getting in the way of doing meaningful work to progress forward. How are my past hurts influencing the way I show up in the world? Why am I so afraid to speak truth? Do I feel comfort in my worldview in the same way that perpetrators feel comfort, terrified of any introspection lest their entire facade come crashing down around them? What keeps blocking me from doing meaningful work to connect and collaborate with others? Why do I tend to shift so easily into feeling betrayed by people I thought I knew?

When I look deeply and with brutal honesty, I cringe at the superiority and righteousness that can be read from my words. I know that we are all complicit. It’s not a contest of who can perform their activism better and it’s not about my feelings. I may feel rejection and disgust at the lack of others’ action, I may feel abandonment by people I thought would be there for me, but what does that tell me about myself? I’m passing judgment on others instead of focusing my efforts on mobilizing and uniting. In the same way that feelings of jealousy can be an indicator of what we need to work on ourselves, feelings of resentment can be signs that we should stop getting so distracted by others. Separating from our egos, working in service to the collective in any way we can, and confronting our fears is the work we need to be doing. Shadow work is confronting the ugly parts of ourselves that we don’t want to see so that we can be more honest and live in more integrity.

The dejected, hopeless, lost, depressed feelings of worthlessness can shift rather quickly into inspired action and collective empowerment when we remember to care for ourselves and each other. For me, that looks like reading the work of other land-based people in diaspora (I keep turning back to Layla K. Feghali’s The Land in our Bones), cooking for myself and my family and friends, nourishing ourselves from the fruits of the Earth in locally sourced and seasonal foods. I’m inspired by other Palestinian food artists and writers like Reem Assil and Amanny Ahmad. I endeavor to carry on the lives and vibrancy and resilience of all of the ghosts who weren’t able to live out their incarnated days in peace, and to buck the system and foil the plans of the monsters who profit from this sheer destruction in any way we can.

Amanny Ahmad posted something that really stuck with me. It goes, “one thing i’ve learned / come to a provisional conclusion about: when it comes to fighting [for liberation], there are people who will help you fight & there are people who will not & there are people who will stand in the way. Find the people who will help / be loud & clear so they know where you are-- focus on them, be encouraged by them, encourage them, work with them. Don’t worry about the people who won’t help. They will be of no help even if they are on your side. Waste as little energy as possible fighting people who stand in the way, which is to say don’t talk don’t argue, just get them out of the way of the fight you came for”

I remember that each person has their own story, their own daily struggles, their own demons, and I need not get caught up in what others choose to share, or how they show up. The best I can do is work toward justice and inspire others to do so, not through shame and guilt, but through setting examples and working creatively with allies to do meaningful work. Though I may feel alone scrolling through social media, when I connect with others tangibly, I feel the power of collective efforts.

My local group is shifting focus to harness the power of collective spending by educating and sharing locally about the global BDS movement, and simultaneously working toward achieving a local ceasefire and arms embargo resolution as other municipalities in upstate New York and across the country have done. I’m currently reading Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis and am drawing inspiration from it and other similar texts. I am divesting from national brands as much as I can and investing more in my local community by buying more food directly from farms.

And at home, I am cooking. Hearty, thick stews filled with locally grown and pasture raised ingredients. Vitamin-rich broths with good fats that glisten, a crack of salt from the grinder and a squeeze of lemon. Nutrient-dense breads made with active and alive wild yeasts. Silky spiced stews with buttery herbed rice. And I am roasting all of the late season vegetables until they turn caramelized and sweet. Eggplant and zucchini, peppers and beets, onions and garlic. And so much winter squash.

The recipe I’m sharing today on this October full moon is a roasted winter squash with orange flesh, like butternut, honeynut, or acorn. It’s inspired by the beginning of a recipe by Reem Assil in her fantastic book Arabiyya. The squash is halved, with the seeds scooped out, and brushed with olive oil, an Arab pomegranate molasses known as dibs remaan, spices, salt and pepper. The prep is exceedingly simple but the result is a buttery soft, highly craveable warm hug of a nourishing food. Finish it off with labneh, pomegranate seeds and herbs. I’ll be back with a recipe for hashweh next month, which pairs really nicely with this dish.

Hold your loved ones tight and be present with them. If I died tomorrow, would I regret not doing more to further the cause for liberation? While the veil is thin I will remember how fleeting life is and will endeavor to live the life of service and love that I hope will leave a lasting impact on others around me. This time on Earth is temporary. Remember, every single one of us has a role to play.

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Recipe:

Roasted Winter Squash with dibs remaan 

This time of year, the focus is on ancestors, the death part of the life-death-rebirth cycle. Consuming the fruit of harvest season, ripe and soft roasted squash, along with the seeds which represent the promise of rebirth, along with the molasses and arils of the pomegranate, harken back to the story of Persephone and the pomegranate. Like Persephone, we can descend into the darkness of this season to do healing shadow work, so we may emerge in the spring as more embodied, kinder people.

Ingredients:

2-3 winter squash (acorn, butternut, or honeynut)

¼ cup olive oil

2 tbsp dibs remaan (pomegranate molasses)

1 tsp allspice

Pinch of cinnamon

Salt & pepper

Labneh, for serving

Pomegranate seeds, for garnish

Parsley, for garnish

Samhain dukkah for garnish

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Halve squashes with the skin on. Scoop out the seeds and put them into a bowl of heavily salted water.

3. In a small bowl, combine olive oil, dibs remaan, and spices.

4. On a rimmed baking sheet, place squashes, cut side up, and brush with olive oil mixture. Season all over with salt & pepper to taste.

5. Roast, uncovered, for 1 hour and 30 minutes, until golden and soft. Enjoy the aromas and the warmth from the oven.

6. After putting the squash in the oven, take the bowl of seeds in saltwater and separate out the seeds from the pulp. Add the seeds to a towel-lined baking sheet so they may dry a bit. Then place them onto a rimmed baking sheet and toss with a drizzle of olive oil. Add to the oven to roast along with the squash, checking after 30 minutes to toss and then resume roasting them until crispy and golden.

7. When squash is ready, allow to cool slightly, add a dollop of labneh, a hearty sprinkle of dukkah, pomegranate seeds, and chopped parsley.

Samhain dukkah

¼ cup Pecans

¼ cup winter squash seeds from squash you just roasted

1 tbsp sesame seeds

1 tsp coriander seeds

1 tsp nigella seeds

1. Toast seeds and nuts in a dry pan until fragrant. Crush in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder to the crunchiness of your liking.

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Spell:

Descend into the darkness and do some shadow work. We can’t fully show up as our authentic selves without visiting with our shadows every now and then. This time of year when the veil is thin and ancestor work is more readily available to us, look to the ghost realm to provide us with the real, no-BS honesty of confronting and working through the shadowy aspects that may be influencing the way we act. 

How are perpetual patterns presenting themselves and what shadow work do you need to contend with in order for these elements to not take over in subtly or overtly malignant ways? Try a shadow work guided meditation and nurture yourself as you work through some potentially ugly stuff you’ve been hiding away for too long. The more honest with yourself that you can be, even if it means breaking the facade of your self-comfort, it will come back to you with greater rewards as we build a new and thriving world together.

When a plant or animal is considered invasive, it takes over and is detrimental to the native populations of fellow plants and animals. It colonizes the homes of native species, siphons resources, or destroys the local environment. Some plants and animals that are not native, however, form a symbiotic relationship with the native populations and rather than taking over, they offer food and medicine to the local populations and don’t choke out the native populations. They live in harmony, integrate into their new homes without inflicting harm on local populations, and they are considered “naturalized.”

Wild Sumac, or more specifically, Staghorn Sumac, is a native plant that grows abundantly in the Northeast, and there is plenty of it around our mountainside. I see its characteristic deep red clusters or bracts all along the roadsides and we have a volunteer Sumac plant growing in our garden. Sumac has been on this land for thousands of years and is supportive of native wildlife, birds, and insects. Some accounts tell of stories of indigenous peoples making sumac lemonade, a tart, vitamin-rich drink whose acidity comes from sumac and not actually lemons.  

Concurrently, the plant has grown natively in the Middle East or Cana’an for thousands of years and is an inextricable part of Arab cooking. Its signature deep red color and pronounced tartness add a visual and flavor dimension to so many of my family’s Arab recipes, and it’s also a key ingredient in za’atar. You can find sumac in fattoush and all sorts of salads and types of mutabal.

One of Palestine’s most famous dishes is musakhan. Dubbed Palestine’s national dish, the sumac-rubbed roasted chicken with caramelized onions, olive oil, taboon bread, and toasted nuts is special for its connection to the land. And as I work to right my relationship to my diasporic home of several generations which is not my ancestral land, I seek to cook food that is in harmony with the land I live on so that I may live in harmony with my co-inhabitants, naturalized rather than invasive. I’ve been noticing Staghorn Sumac everywhere and it has been calling to me, a parallel point of connection to the cooking of my ancestral lands.

Although there are many varieties of Sumac, including perhaps the most well known poison Sumac, the poisonous variety has white berries and not the fuzzy red horn-shaped clusters of berries that you harvest for the sour punch. Because staghorn sumac is often misunderstood as a poisonous plant, it can be treated as a weed and eradicated because of this misunderstanding. 

From Serious Eats:

“... the neighboring farm lets me clip off fruit clusters from their sumac trees, but the farm manager anxiously rushes over to warn me that "those trees are the most poisonous plants in the country!" We tell him that poison sumac has white clusters and not red, and since that is the only part of the tree we are after, there is no chance of mistake. He still looks at us skeptically and shrugs—"Don't say I didn't warn you." In fact, many a sumac grove has been mistakenly knocked down in the belief that it is poisonous.”

This story makes me think of harmful beliefs about immigrants and diaspora communities that are dominating headlines due to the xenophopic government officials and political candidates. Like plants, people can also arrive as invasives - but even more insidious than any plant or animal. The worst offenders came with a genocidal rampage, employed chattel slavery, and to this day, continue to destroy the Earth and water supply, dumping chemicals into the air and environment. And then many communities who arrive from a diaspora can act like naturalized plants do in service to their ecosystems- tending the Earth, creating thriving communities and working in defense of the land and all of her inhabitants. We decide which ones we will be.

Although I set out to draw a parallel between how Sumac may have come and naturalized, I ended up being wrong and it’s actually native itself. But similar to the Sumac that grows in the Middle East, our North American variety can also be foraged and made into a sour-tangy powder to add to all sorts of dishes. Today we will be making a riff on the Palestinian dish, musakhan, Sumac-spiced chicken and onions, but with wild ingredients local to my diaspora home in the Catskill Mountains. Sumac is everywhere here, thriving in the medians between highway lanes, their bright red bracts in stark contrast to the sea of green. As autumn falls, their leaves also turn bright red.

Staghorn Sumac is best harvested when it ripens and before heavy rainfall which washes off the citric acid which gives it its sour punch. If you’re not sure, taste a bit before harvesting the entire bract. Once you have the bract, hang it up on a line (in a dry spot, covered from the rain) to dry fully. After drying, break up the clusters of berries, put them in a blender for a few pulses, and pass them through a medium-fine mesh strainer. This will allow you to collect the citric red powder without the large seeds. Make sure it is fully dry before storing in an airtight jar.

In addition to the succulent chicken, the deeply caramelized onions are what really make this dish shine. They take some time to make correctly, but the time it takes to alchemize a harsh raw onion into a jammy, sweet soft bed of caramelized onions is well worth it. I have been buying local onions from the farm near me and they are dense, hard, and packed with flavor. I slice the ends off, halve them, and slice the onions thinly. Though I may have developed somewhat of an immunity to my eyes tearing up from cutting onions because I cook with them every day, these farm onions are sharp and potent and my eyes just well up with tears.

I decide to lean into it and allow myself a deep, full cry, because my body yearns for one. I’ve been taking in so much terror and have not been able to release the traumas sitting in my emotional body, so when I physically begin to tear up from the onions, the floodgates open. First, I cook the onions in some olive oil and a little salt on medium-high, until they turn translucent and sweat a bit. My own tears expel some cortisol I’ve had building up. Then, slowly, as the onions begin to brown, I lower the heat and stir them every couple of minutes. It takes about 25 minutes to finish cooking them. Watching the transformation of the raw onion into a silky, glistening sweet texture, I’m reminded of the necessity to feel through our emotions so we can come out the other side with our tenderness and humanity intact. If you rush this step, you end up with burnt, bitter onions.

“Musakhan is an ode to the fellaheen-- the farmers, harvesters, and cultivators of Palestinian land-- and a tribute to the olive tree, which has a special place in our cuisine and heritage. Under Israeli occupation, authorities have uprooted more than 800,000 olive trees, some centuries old, and taken the land beneath them, politicizing the very ingredient that makes this dish so special.” - Reem Assil, in an excerpt from her stunning book, Arabiyya

The heat from the fire and the time spent tending it, alchemizes something harsh into something sweet and tender. I have hope that we will see a future filled with more tenderness and far less brutality. But it’s up to us to engage in daily practices to hold on to our humanity. With each painful transition we live through, we have the ability to see it through and get stronger and more connected, or to let it sour us and get bitter. We must find avenues of release so that we can move forward as we keep building the movement for global solidarity.

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Recipe:

Sumac Chicken with Caramelized Onions (Musakhan)

You’ll find many versions of this recipe, and this one is a variation of the more traditional serving with taboon bread. Since I can’t find taboon bread near me, when I don’t have the time to make it, I like to serve this chicken with rice. When you spoon the chicken fat and caramelized onions over the rice, it rounds out a decadent comfort meal. Serve with lemony garlicky bitter greens if you’d like.

Ingredients:

1 whole pasture-raised chicken

¼ cup olive oil, divided

3 tbsp sumac

1 tbsp allspice or seven spice

2  tsp salt

1 lemon

3 large yellow onions

2 cups long grain rice

½ cup sliced almonds or pine nuts

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Meanwhile, prepare the chicken. 

2. First, quarter the lemon and one of the onions. Then season the chicken liberally with sumac, allspice, and salt. Drizzle with olive oil and rub all over the skin and inside the cavity. Stuff the bird with the quartered onion and lemon, and truss the legs with butcher’s twine.

3. Bake the chicken on a rimmed baking sheet or in a casserole dish for 3 hours.

4. Slice the remaining onions thinly, and add to a large pan with a drizzle of olive oil. Cook on medium-high heat for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until the onions start to brown, then reduce heat to medium-low and continue to stir every minute or so, until they completely soften and turn jammy, 20 minutes more.

5. Prepare rice and serve with chicken, caramelized onions, and a scattering of nuts.

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Spell:

Cleansing fire and release

As the leaves begin to turn colors and release from their trees, take a cue from the natural world around us and identify what needs to be released and composted for us to root into the Earth a little deeper, and prepare for the autumn and winter of rest. What activities or projects are a little too much to handle and might be sapping your energy? Although summer may be a time for a rush of activity and growth, this season marks the time to begin to slow down again. Now is the time to identify the elements that need to be released. Make a small fire and either literally (after writing them down on pieces of paper) or figuratively burn away the identified elements you need to release this season. 

Resist the urge to fill that space with something else. Sit with the slowness and allow it to inform what comes next. Be careful not to rush things. By filling the void constantly, we don’t allow ourselves to deeply feel our feelings or sit with our feelings. Take this time to honor whatever  feelings come up for you. If you need to release it all with a nice deep cry, go for it.

Cooking Syrian and Palestinian food from my cultural roots was one of the few things I did learn from my bloodline, through my Grandma and my Jido. I have memories as a little kid in the car with my Grandma, seeing her spot wild grape leaves and asking her husband to pull over so she could harvest some. I have such vibrant memories of heaps of her rolled grape leaves piled high on a platter, and I always call her when I’m cooking her recipes, even after knowing them by heart, because I love to hear the passion in her voice when she talks about cooking. It’s a great love we share. “What are you having for dinner?” is always a topic of discussion.

I've been noticing wild grape leaves everywhere this summer. I was on the hunt for them in the spring before our benefit for Palestine, the foraged dinner and Foragers screening, and could not find enough of them, probably too early in the season up in these mountains. Then I finally found some in June after much searching and roadside foraging, and since then, it feels like a light has been switched on for me. I notice the wild grape leaves everywhere now. As I drive around these mountains, I see them low on the ground encasing highway barriers, I see them growing tall and enveloping trees, I see them on the bridge near our favorite swimming hole. When I spot them in a sea of green, it feels like encountering friends, people I recognize, in the unlikeliest of places. Behind the gas station, around the corner from the bookshop, crawling up high on that abandoned house on the corner.

Their tough, woody stems root firmly into the rocky soil, and their vines expand their reach with each growing season. As the grapevines grow, they attach themselves onto trunks, fences, brambles, entire trees, stretching ever upward and outward. Their delicate spiraling tendrils have a sticky grip that allows them to climb into the precious sunlight. Grape leaves are most tender and delicious when they are young, in the early summer for our growing season up in the mountains. As the season continues, the leaves grow larger and thicker as their veins become tough and woody and thus are no longer palatable. 

In July I harvested a stack grape leaves that I gathered and froze, saving them for a future time when I’d have more time to prepare a large batch. Stuffing and rolling grape leaves is an activity best achieved communally, around a table with friends or relatives, like the sisters and aunties and sittos and tetas of the old country, catching up on the happenings of the day. Spending time together with others while engaged in a handicraft is a soothing balm, and something we’re sorely lacking in our present-day culture. We need more opportunities to imagine new lifeways as we build a new culture of reciprocity and mutual respect. With practice and repetition, we can create a new tradition of such gatherings.

Today I cook with local onions and local garlic, from a farm down the road. Peeling off the skins, I reveal the jewel-like clove of garlic, still alive, seemingly. Not like the rubbery lackluster garlic from the grocery store shipped from across the globe. I smash the cloves of garlic with the flat side of the wooden handled knife from my Grandma that came to me dull as ever but I brought it back to life with a new edge to it. I use the same knife to chop the onion, and then a mountain of parsley. Using her knife that she’s used so many times before makes me feel connected to her.

It is a hot day in August, and the cool stuffed grape leaves, exploding with flavor and dripping with lemony juices and unctuous olive oil are the only things I want to eat. I remember eating my Grandma’s stuffed grape leaves on a day like today, not too far away from where I am now but decades ago. Picking blueberries, shucking corn, harvesting mint leaves, setting the table, listening to the buzz of the insects in the tall grasses all around us on a sunny day in Pennsylvania. When I cook them now, I see her weathered hands and hear the clank of her thin gold bangles as she lovingly prepares and rolls with the precision that comes from decades of experience. 

A few months ago, during the spring thaw, I gathered with new friends and fellow activists to roll hundreds of grape leaves to share with our community. And now as I ponder becoming local to place, as much as it is about growing intimacy with our local plant life, it’s also about the community we cultivate. When making these recipes, especially if they’re not from your own bloodline, it is essential to root the food in the resistance and steadfastness of the people that these traditions originated from. To ally yourself with the people of the land whose customs have been stolen is to learn more about their histories, stand with them, and give thanks to their land-based lifeways, that will live on through you every time you make this recipe. That’s where the magic lies.

With the repetitive and meditative act of rolling these grape leaves, we have the opportunity to imbue our dreams and ambitions into the food we have an active hand in making. With every tiny package we roll up, we weave a story of love, fortitude, and care that goes directly to our loved ones. Each hand rolled leaf contains a morsel of nourishing food from the earth, and in a culture of heavily processed foodstuffs, when we can feed this locally rooted food to our families, we can nourish and strengthen our bonds and commitments to the lands we call home. With every intricately veined and smooth grape leaf we touch, we give thanks to the abundance of our ecosystem and honor the indigenous people who have tended this place for generations, promising to care for the lands as we become naturalized, rather than invasive.

As we eat this ancestral food, we give thanks to the land and the people, vow to use our nourishment to keep working toward liberation in any and every avenue we have a chance to. I recommend making this recipe with a group, and while you’re gathered around, ideate around how you can build a better world in your immediate circle. How can that circle of care and life reverberate from your microcosm into the macrocosm? How can we work together to build a culture of mutual respect for each other and the land we owe everything to? Summertime is a time for gathering, for embracing the slow, and for preparing nourishing meals together from the bounty that grows wild all around us. Together we can dream of a world of mutual respect, reciprocity, and harmony with the land and together, through tangible daily actions, we can create it.

Stuffed Grape leaves (siammi)

Ingredients:

100-120 grape leaves (either hand foraged, or from a jar)

2 bunches of parsley, chopped finely

2 large tomatoes, chopped finely

1 large onion, chopped finely

2 cups long grain white rice, uncooked

1 tbsp allspice

½ cup pine nuts

Juice from 4 lemons, plus 2 whole lemons

8 cloves garlic, smashed

2 tsp salt

Locally sourced lamb stew bones, for flavor (optional, omit if keeping vegetarian)

Directions:

1. If using foraged or otherwise fresh grape leaves, wash them well and make sure any tiny critters on them have a chance to find another leaf to munch on outside. After washing, I like to submerge them in boiling water for a minute to soften them a bit and make them easier to roll. If using jarred grape leaves you can omit this step.

2. Chop tomatoes, parsley, and onion, and add to a large bowl along with 2 cups of uncooked long grain rice, allspice, and pine nuts. Add juice from 4 lemons and mix well with your hands.

3. In a medium or large-sized pot that you have a plate you can submerge perfectly into (save the plate for step 6) place lamb bones if using, lemon slices, and smashed garlic cloves, and cover them with any broken or unusable grape leaves.

4. On a clean work surface, place your first unbroken whole grape leaf. With the shiny side of the grape leaf facing down and the veined side facing up, scoop a teaspoon full of the stuffing mixture onto the center of the leaf. Fold each side inward over the filling and roll from the bottom up, like you’re wrapping a burrito. Place each finished rolled grape leaf into the pot, tucking them next to each other snugly.

5. Repeat until all of the grape leaves are filled. Do this with a group of friends if you can!

6. Add salt to the pot and enough water to cover the rolled grape leaves by an inch or so. Place your plate on top of the grape leaves with a weight or some cans on top to keep the grape leaves from floating around or bursting while cooking.

7. Bring to a simmer and keep on low for an hour. When they are done the rice should be perfectly smooth and creamy, not crunchy at all. If any near the top have rice that is still undercooked in the center, cook for 15 more minutes.

8. Pour out the liquid and reserve it. If you’re feeling intrepid, take a platter and invert it over the top of the pot (after removing your weights and plate) and in one swift move, invert the pot and platter together so the grape leaves come out in a stack and serve warm or at room temperature. I also love to eat them cold the next day. Once cooked, they last about a week in the refrigerator, if they can last that long before being eaten.

Spell:

Many hands make light work. How can you rely on your community to come together for the most challenging tasks? What are some ways you can gather in community to use your hands and make things together for the benefit of the whole group? Meditate on this and write down some ideas. As it takes time to manifest a dream into reality, start thinking about who could be supportive community members to join together and work on something collaboratively. 

This past week, there have been multiple outages in communications systems, locally and globally. Moving up to the mountains has taught us to have multiple backup plans, because things can go sideways real quick when you’re this far removed from the embedded networks of support in more urban communities. We’ve learned to be more self-sufficient, honed our skills, and gotten much better at planning ahead. Our experience with stocking the pantry and sourcing with thrift have greatly improved since our days of living in the city when everything was available almost instantly, at any time of day.

Still, we have come to rely on our mechanized systems of support like our generator, which instantly kicks on the moment we lose power. Up here, that can be every couple weeks and sometimes it can mean being without power for several days or even a week. The generator has proven to be a necessity for us, especially through the winters, keeping our house warm for days on end, and keeping our food temperature-safe while having young babies to take care of.

But just this past week, while Roky was helping me prep, cutting cucumbers into chunks with her little knife while I was next to her slicing scallions with my big knife, all the lights went out. The hum of the refrigerator stopped, the digital clocks went blank, and the HVAC fell silent. We waited expectantly for the generator to kick on, as it has every time we lost power dozens of times before, but it didn’t. We all stopped what we were doing and headed outside to check on it. The orange-red light on its side told us something was wrong. We were in the midst of a summer storm, so we went into problem-solving mode as we quickly realized we needed a backup-backup system for when our usual backup system was out of commission.

We mentally ran through the elements we needed to conserve, prepare for, and procure. Flashlights, check. We’d keep the windows and doors closed as it was a hot day and we wanted to minimize heat transfer. Our well water uses an electric powered pump to reach our faucets, so we filled every container we could while we still had water pressure in the event we’d be out of power for days. We’d keep the refrigerator closed as much as possible and transfer deep-frozen food from the chest freezer to the fridge to keep the temps down. Because we have an electric powered phone, our phone and internet comms were effectively down. But we had food, water, shelter, and each other.

Once we had a plan for our basic needs, we finished prepping dinner. Roky, perceptive as she is, could tell something was off, but we weren’t panicking and we were trying to have fun with it, “sort of like going camping.” I’d already defrosted and marinated the shrimp, pulled out the cabbage slaw, and started cooking the rice, so we just needed to finish the scallion sesame cucumbers and fire the shrimp. We ate together with more presence that night, as the unanticipated turn of events lit up parts of our senses that usually lay somewhat dormant in the expected day to day.

We’ve been spending a ton of time outdoors this summer. As the kids amble around and create their own games, one thing they are consistently thrilled by is the idea that there is wild food growing all around us. They love to pick the various berries that grow with wild abandon this time of year. The blueberries, the blackberries, the raspberries, and most abundantly, what we call brambleberries. Brambleberries technically include all types of raspberries and blackberries, but we use the term to refer to the tiny wild blackberries that grow on brambles all over our mountain. 

The small compound berries turn purple-black when ripe but are a bit smaller than a raspberry. They taste like an untamed berry, subtly sweet, flavorful, a little bit tart for balance, and their small delicate seeds encased in their fruit lobes are pleasantly crunchy, unlike the larger Allegheny blackberry, the ones found in plastic clamshells in grocery stores, whose seeds can get stuck in your teeth. My favorite way to eat brambleberries are straight off the bush as they ripen- they grow in long clustered bunches and the berries at the ends of the bunch ripen first. At this point in the season, they’re ripening rapidly, and each day you can harvest a new haul. The time to bake with them is now.

As I pull together the simple ingredients I need for this buckle, I feel gratitude that such pantry staples are immediately accessible to me. It’s because of the collective efforts of many people and systems that I’m able to source locally grown and milled flour, locally produced maple sugar, and the standard-issue baking leaveners and salt. Though this recipe is a simple one, if any of our systems failed, this would be an absolute luxury. I treat it as such and feel the immense pleasure and decadence of this sweet, golden cake studded with the fruits so freely offered to us.

As we endeavor to be more intimate with the land with every passing season, I think of how we can be the best stewards of this land and treat it with respect and veneration. While some may say brambles are a nuisance and to get rid of them before they spread, we see this gift as a naturally occurring, native wild plant that feeds not only our family but dozens of other critters in the cascade of the ecosystem. By learning who the wild plants around us are, we can tune into a different, more connected way of feeding ourselves.

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Recipe: Brambleberry Buckle

Ingredients:

1-2 cups brambleberries (of any kind)

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 cup all purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

3/4 cup maple sugar (or granulated sugar)

1 cup whole milk

1 ½ tsp kosher salt

Instructions:

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F and place rack in center of oven. Add the butter to a 9-inch cast iron skillet, or round cake pan, or 9x5 inch loaf pan, and put it in the hot oven. Once the butter has melted and slightly browned, remove from oven.

2. Meanwhile, whisk together the dry ingredients and milk in a large bowl (it will be a little lumpy). Pour the batter into the pan with the melted butter and use a spoon to gently swirl it together - there should still be streaks of butter.

3. Scatter berries on top of the batter evenly. Bake until top is golden brown all over, 50-60 minutes, and allow to cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Serve warm with a scoop of (preferably vanilla) ice cream.

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Spell: Go to a wilderness preserve or trail and be present. Notice what you can about the plant life around you. Go in with the lantern consciousness of a child, rather than the task-oriented mindset with the goal of completing a predetermined hiking trail. If you need to eat some mushrooms first to help with that, go for it. What can you learn from stillness and presence? Reflect on goals you may have or projects you may be rushing and try to sit with the idea of trusting in divine timing. What comes up for you when you take away all of the tasks on your to-do list? Listen closely and write it down.

I awoke at dawn to the blaring alarm of my baby’s cries. Bleary eyed, I scooped him up and brought him outside before he could wake my toddler, and it instantly calmed him as he took in the world around him. The air is beginning to thicken with warmth and humidity and my skin drinks in the warm sun as it begins to rise in the sky. All around us, a biodiverse array of plants have started to grow, untamed, and the wild strawberry plants that have been spreading are starting to fruit.

“You could smell ripe strawberries before you saw them, the fragrance mingling with the smell  of sun on the damp ground. It was the smell of June, the last day of school, when we were set free, and the strawberry moon, ode’mini-giizis.  I’d lie on my stomach in my favorite patches,  watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves. Each tiny wild berry was scarcely bigger than a raindrop, dimpled with seeds under the cap of leaves. From that vantage point I could pick only the reddest of the red, leaving the pink ones for tomorrow.” 

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

To find and harvest wild strawberries, we need to get really low and look closely. My toddler  Roky and I each have small wooden bowls to fill as we set out to harvest berries for a Father’s Day galette. We kneel down around the strawberry patches, bring our faces down low to the ground, and gently pull aside the leaves to reveal little spots of red. When ripe, the berries easily yield to any pressure and release their bright red, sweet, sticky juice. Her little hands are getting better at gingerly picking the tiny berries without crushing them. For each one she picks to put in her bowl, several more go straight into her mouth. She’s excited about all of the strawberries, and she picks the white ones, green ones, and pink and red, whichever ones she can find. She gestures to my bowl and says, “mommy, you got strawberries for me?” 

It is the summer solstice and the strawberry full moon, a time of year ripe with possibilities. After the rush of spring, when we were excited to dream up new projects and get active again after a long winter, we may find ourselves with schedules full to the brim. The solstice, which roughly translates to “time stands still” can be a good reminder to take a pause, reflect, and decide which actions are worth taking now and which are worth slowing down on so that we can lay the groundwork for the future. Not everything needs to happen right now, and oftentimes rushing things can bring about mistakes, accidents, and recklessness.

Driving from town back to our home the other day, I slowed down when I saw a wake of turkey vultures gathered around a carcass in the road. As I approached, they flapped away and I saw the devastating image of a small body, a delicate, new and tender spotted fawn, bloodied and dismembered. A few paces away, a doe watched on. It absolutely wrecked me. I drove the rest of the way, at a slowed pace, and felt gutted, thinking of all of the mothers around the world who have to live through the loss of a child. 

I know these moments of connection I share with my babies are so fleeting and that nothing is guaranteed in life. Even if things turn out for the best, soon enough my husband and I will find ourselves in a quiet and empty home once the babies have left the nest to pursue their own lives and dreams. And in spite of all of the loss in the world, perhaps because of it, while we have the chance to live with fullness in the moment, I endeavor to live with fullness, richness, and presence in this very moment.

This week, I reduced my screen time by a whopping 78 percent and my goal is to keep screen time to under 2 hours per day. Just this past week alone, I have had so many more chances to live in the presence of such joyous wonder, awe, and discovery. One evening when the opportunity presented itself for Roky to be awake after dark, we took her outside to experience the magic of fireflies. The awe with which she took in this magical sight was palpable. I caught one and let it crawl onto her hand and she was lit up with delight.

After reading many books about the importance of outdoor time for little kids in an age where an overwhelming majority of Americans far surpass their outdoor time with screen time, one of the elements that stuck out to me was this idea that young children possess lantern consciousness as opposed to a more directed, task-oriented spotlight consciousness that enables adults to complete tasks, focus, and prioritize. This is why they can take in and notice so much around them and also why it’s so hard to convince them to put their shoes on, or pick something up, or do any directed task when they’re immersed in their worlds of play.

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My husband and I started a Family Nature Club in our town, inspired by Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods and at our outing this month, most of the families had babies as opposed to the usual mix of babies and toddlers. My husband noticed that those of us with babies strapped to us hiked like we would before kids, at a decent pace with an objective to move ahead on the trail. He and Roky kept getting left behind because she was going at the standard toddler  pace-- even though she was in a wagon, she wanted to stop much more often to take in the sights around her, or wanted to get out to walk by herself. When we have a group of toddlers with us, we move at a snail’s pace but it really helps the adults shift to a slower, more present state where we notice terrain, flora and fauna we never have before because we’re usually moving so quickly.

When I slow down enough to notice, I hear Roky singing songs in her sweet little voice as she explores the soggy ground after a heavy rain. I watch her splashing in puddles, collecting rocks and putting them into little piles, picking wildflowers and giving them as gifts, trying to feed the moon, and birdies, and slugs. At the end of the day, I see dirt under her fingernails, scrapes and bruises on her knees, sweaty and knotted hair, and a happy, present kid doing exactly as she’s meant to. I just have to slow down and embrace the sweetness.

Our last little unexpected treat this month was that we had strawberries in our CSA pickup this week,  after I’d been meditating on them and their wisdom so much. About ten times the size of the wild strawberries, they were still quite small and ruby red in comparison to supermarket strawberries, and I brought them outside for the kids to eat them with reckless abandon. Red sticky juice dripped down their faces and hands and arms and they relished in such a simple yet decadent summertime gift. 

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Recipe: Strawberry Galette

Roky helped me make this for Father’s Day - as you can see we never quite collected enough wild ones so we supplemented.

Ingredients:

• 1 pie crust (homemade is best)

• 2 cups strawberries (whole if wild or sliced if not)

• 2 tsp sugar

• Zest from 1 lemon and juice from ½ lemon

• 1 tbsp tapioca flour or cornstarch

• 1 tbsp turbinado sugar

• 1 egg, beaten, for egg wash

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. In a bowl, combine strawberries, sugar, lemon zest and juice, and tapioca flour or cornstarch.

3. Roll out your pie crust onto a sheet of parchment paper.

4. Dump the strawberry mixture into the center of your pie crust, leaving 1.5-2 inches on each side. Fold up each side to form a barrier to keep the filling inside, while leaving the center open.

5. Brush the egg wash all over the edges of the pastry crust, and sprinkle with turbinado sugar.

6. Transfer galette on parchment paper to a rimmed baking sheet and bake for 25-30 minutes, until golden and bubbling.

   

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Spell:

Try a journaling exercise. Visualize time slowing way down. Sit in a meditative state, and find a recording of a guided meditation if needed. Recall a memory when you were fully immersed in the moment, and not distracted thinking about the past or the future. Can you remember the sights, sounds, textures? Write down everything you can remember sensing in your immediate surroundings. How did you stay present to the moments unfolding around you, and how can you take that energy with you so that you can experience life in the present? Meditate on what it means to fully take in your surroundings in the present moment and carry that energy with you today and through the weekend. How can you make your full moon and solstice special and keep the memory alive for years to come?

I observe the changes in plant life from this time last year and notice that the wildflowers are growing in quantity as we allow much of our lawn to “rewild” into a meadow simply by not mowing it. The little patches of wild strawberries have proliferated vastly, the blackberries have spread all over, the wild violets are surely not shrinking. I notice the baby stinging nettles I planted about this time two years ago-- they are starting to extend around the boundaries of my garden-- and I see the vast depths of plant medicine all around me.

As ferns unfurl and stretch out, I am reminded to feel into my body. To expand from my winter cocoon of curling up and feeding my baby with rounded shoulders and contorted into strange positions. I’ve been holding two realities at once-- the joy and presence of being with my young baby and toddler, and also hunched over my phone, chest concave, crying my eyes out when looking at the news, feeling a pit in my stomach due to generalized despair. I dust off the winter atrophy to breathe new life into my body, growing stronger each day, and I pay more attention to my nutrition so that I can be nurturing and sturdy, a rock of stability for my family.

I’ve been experiencing more joy and groundedness from reading books and nourishing my mind with longer form content. Instagram and social media can feel like a heavy hit of sugar- so addictive and intoxicating in the moment, hitting all of my dopamine receptors, followed by a heavy crash and depressive feelings with too much use. Books feed me as I learn more deeply about histories often presented in infographics online. This information age that we’re in can feel like an assault on our senses. But it’s still so important to not look away.

With the fascistic advances of heavily armed police forces against people protesting for peace, and depressing news everywhere we turn, it’s easy to fall into a pit of despair. But as we work toward dismantling oppressive systems with one hand, we must create and nourish the world we want to see with the other. Too often on social media, I feel the bleakness and not the motivation to create anew.

When reading books and connecting with my community in person, I feel more hopeful. I have the drive to work on building thriving connections, I have the time to allow information to percolate as I consider solutions, and I feel the warmth of a tangible community of people who also want to work toward making a better world. When we hosted our dinner and film screening, earlier this month, we united nearly 70 people in person to raise some funds, pay witness to, and understand the unfolding events in Palestine but also to share our cuisine, break bread, and ponder a better, freer, and more just world for all.

As I look for sustenance, literally and figuratively, in my wild backyard, I’m struck by the symbolism of Stinging Nettle. Nettle is a highly nutritive plant, loaded with potassium, magnesium, vitamins A, C, and K, calcium, protein, flavonoids, and terpenes. But in order to ingest the nutritive qualities of Nettle, you have to approach her carefully to circumvent her characteristic sting. If you’re not paying attention, Stinging Nettle will make you pay attention.

At the same time, I notice the bounty of spring wildflowers, openly offering their gifts for all the pollinators. The medicine of the flowers is that of love, tenderness, and abundance, without the protective mechanism of the Nettle. I’m called to bring the two together. The soothing, mucilaginous Wild Violet with her delicate blue-purple flowers, rounded edges and smooth heart-shaped leaves that has proliferated among the shadowy soil provides a good foil to the harsh, jagged, spiky, venomous Stinging Nettle living on the boundary. 

With my baby on one hip, I harvest Stinging Nettle carefully, taking only the tops and leaving enough to keep growing. Snip, snip, snip, a distinctive cut for each nettle plant, as it falls to the ground and I collect it, taking care to keep it out of reach of my grabby, curious, infant. Then I load up my basket with violets, who easily give way to my shears in bunches. These are safe for him to grab and he delights in holding and studying the leaves. I bring the basket, and the baby, inside with me as I work on processing the leaves.

I set down the baby to play with his new leaves, then put a pot of water on the stove. I snip off each individual leaf from the nettle plant and prepare it for a quick blanch-then-shock to retain that deep, emerald green hue. I do the same for the violet leaves, and reserve the stray violet flowers. Using the same water that cooked the plants, I boil two peeled potatoes until they’re fork tender. Their creamy white flesh gives way to the tines of a fork and signifies that they are ready to remove from the liquid to cool. I mash the potato until it’s fully smooth.

I’m taken aback by the beauty of the bright green color of the spring greens, as I blend them into a viridescent puree. After pondering all of the directions I could take this puree in, I finally decide on a nourishing, hearty, verdant gnocchi. As I mix the dough together the green color stays vibrant even after adding the potato, egg, and flours. Though the resulting dough is soft and sticky, I toss some flour on a surface and on my hands and coax the dough into a ball, then wrap it tightly in beeswax coated cloth to rest in the fridge overnight. 

On the eve of the full moon, I cut off a wedge from the dough ball and gingerly roll it into a ¾-inch thick log and slice it into 1-inch long pieces. Then I work with my daughter to roll each piece against my gnocchi board which was handcrafted by my dear brother-in-law. I feel the tenderness of each moment-- harvesting the leaves and flowers, rolling the pieces of dough on this handmade board, trying to keep my cool while my toddler delights in throwing fistfuls of flour off the table. I know each of these moments is so fleeting.

After I toss the pieces into the bubbling cauldron to cook, they rise to the surface of the water after a minute or two and I scoop them off the surface before the next round goes in. As they release steam on their plate after their brief boil, they look like fat little grubs, straight from the earth itself. When I’m finished plating, with the tiny dollops of ricotta, drizzle of olive oil, fresh violets and a crack of salt and pepper, the dish looks like it’s from the earth, too.

I think about how foraged foods catapulted in popularity on the mainstream “food scene” due to the new Scandinavian haute cuisine of the early aughts but that they really are the food of the people. Though we now see hot commodities in ramps and fiddleheads, our relationship to wild foods is not about commerce at all, as many of the most nutritive plant medicines grow as weeds, free to harvest. Globally, many cultures that have since been displaced, built their cuisine on their relationships to the land, the commons, as a source of sustenance.

As I eat this labor-of-love imbued dish, I taste the earthy, herbaceous, pillowy-soft gnocchi with a toothsome bite commingling with the cool and decadent pockets of ricotta and the delicate, grassy violet flowers. The drizzle of olive oil lends a richness that complements the earthiness rather than overpowering it the way a brown butter sauce might. It took some time to make but I’m happy with it. And in this moment I’m feeling deeply nourished.

The road to liberation is long and never ending, and it’s so important to celebrate life when and where we can. Experiencing my immediate ecosystem in this way gives me the context for a healthy, thriving life-death-rebirth cycle. This is the natural order of things great and small. When the human-imposed systems fail us, from the wars on humans to the wars on wild plants, this wildflower meadow densely buzzing with life is the symbiosis we will return to. Living our fullest worlds through our senses gives us the wherewithal, drive, and experience to promote love and respect for the earth and all her beings at every chance we can get. Even when it feels like surviving and thriving is against all odds, the wild will always win out in the long run.

Recipe: Stinging Nettle & Violet Leaf Gnocchi

Ingredients:

Gnocchi:

70g fresh stinging nettle leaves

70g fresh wild violet leaves

2 medium potatoes, such as yellow or white potatoes, skinned and chopped

1 large egg

150g rye flour

90g bread flour

Toppings:

½ cup fresh ricotta

½  cup fresh wild violet flowers

Zest and juice of one lemon

4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Microbasil or small leaves from a basil plant

Pecorino romano

1. Wash your leaves very well, and snip the leaves from the stems. You may want to wear gloves while doing this for the stinging nettle. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Prepare a large bowl with an ice bath and set aside. Add leaves to boiling water and stir 1-2 minutes until wilted and bright green. Pull the leaves from the pot with tongs or a slotted spoon, and dunk them into the ice bath. Allow the water to continue boiling.

2. Add the skinned, chopped potatoes to the boiling water, and cook until fork-tender. Remove from water with a slotted spoon and turn the water off the heat. Mash the potatoes with the tines of a fork until they are uniformly smooth.

3. Squeeze the excess water from the stinging nettle and violet leaves. Chop coarsely, then add to a food processor. Puree until smooth. Add an egg and the mashed potato. Puree until completely incorporated.  Add enough flour for the dough to stick together, it will be sticky and soft. Wrap the dough tightly and leave it in the refrigerator overnight.

4. When ready to prepare dinner, put a large pot of salted water on to boil. Remove the dough and slice a piece from it. On a floured surface, and with floured hands, roll it into a log, about ¾-inches thick. Slice the log into 1-inch pieces. Optional: if you have a gnocchi board, roll the pieces on it to indent them with ridges.

5. Toss the pieces into the boiling water, and stir. After 1-2 minutes, the pieces should float to the top of the water and they will be ready to remove with a slotted spoon.

6. To plate the dish, add gnocchi to a plate or low bowl. Drizzle with high quality extra virgin olive oil. Using two small spoons, dollop the fresh ricotta on top of the gnocchi. Squeeze lemon juice and sprinkle lemon zest over the pasta. Sprinkle the violet leaves and micro basil leaves over the dish and season with a crack of salt and pepper, and pecorino romano to taste.

Spell:

Get off your phone and into a field. Lay on a blanket and look up at the sky. Notice where the treetops meet the sky.  Look around you at grass-level and notice the various pollinators. Sit here for as long as you can, drinking in the sights around you and nourishing your senses.

Pay attention to what each of your senses takes in and write them all down. Bring your focus to an area of your life that you’d like to blossom more fully in the coming months. How can the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures around you remind you to focus on your goal each time you notice them?

On my way to meet up with my local group of fellow mountainfolk who refuse to be complicit in the ongoing genocide, I notice the early pops of color this spring, among so much dreary brown and grey. It’s the yellow flowers who seem to come out first-- the forsythia, the daffodils, the coltsfoot popping up along the sides of the road, and all of those dandelions. We’re at a precipice, it seems. Spring is coming.

I’m feeling exposed, uncomfortable in my dry chapped skin and lips from a winter that has gone on for far too long. My postpartum body is stuffed into old leggings and an oversized sweater that’s hard to nurse in. Cracked cuticle beds, greasy hair, my skin feels pale and sickly and I haven’t been on top of my unsightly hair removal regimen, so my eyebrows and upper lip have rogue dark hairs sprouting. I still have some melasma on my face from my latest pregnancy that’s allegedly supposed to fade on its own someday. I really don’t want to look in the mirror up close so I just don’t. But I don’t have the mental space to put all the effort into looking presentable right now.

Yet, when I arrive, I light up from the nourishment of community. I’m with people who see me as I am because I show up as I am here. It’s not like other social events, where I’m  constantly tugging on my clothing or trying to rebraid my hair or cover up my belly when it’s time to nurse. Where I’m comparing myself to others, constantly overthinking whether I went too hard on social media, Are they talking about me? Why can’t I just be easy, civil, non-partisan like a good liberal? Why do I have to show the muck of what we’d really rather not look at? I feel like I make people uncomfortable by exposing the injustices. But the alternative feels like its own kind of hell, and I know I can’t keep hiding my truth to keep others comfortable.

The wounds of childhood rear their ugly head more often than I’d like to admit, and it takes practice, lots of work, and lots of attention to bear witness to them so that they don’t subconsciously run my life. And when I do take the time to grieve through the sticky and sad parts and sit with the uncomfortable parts, I find that I am able to be fully present as I build the life I want to create for my household. One of peace, joy, and contentment. Living in embodied truth instead of scurrying around mired in tasks and putting on personas and making decisions to fulfill some sort of illusion or delusion. 

Back home, I see the dandelions starting to sprout and I teach my toddler about them. She loves the idea that she can eat their tender little leaves and she stops to show me every time she recognizes them. Even though their flowers haven’t come up yet, she can recognize the toothed leaves growing in a basal rosette. “Ooh mommy I love dandelion” she sees and echoes back my enthusiasm in the plant I’m gathering so much inspiration from. I wrote a piece about dandelions in my friend’s forthcoming zine and here I am writing about them again. They  seem to represent a lot of what I’m feeling through right now.

What I’ve learned from the dandelions is that sometimes we need bitters to aid in our digestion, in the physical realm but also in the spiritual and mental realms. Bitter plants like dandelion, when eaten, increase salivation and gastric juices, and stimulate the release of bile from the gallbladder to aid in the work of digestion. And the symbolism follows, too. Dandelion’s spirit medicine is helping us digest our grief so that we can show up more fully as sunny, defiant, proud, steadfast beings who root deeply and pop up everywhere much to the dismay of suburban lawncare zealots. The dandelions united will never be defeated.

“You can cut off all the flowers but you cannot stop spring from coming” is a quote from Pablo Neruda that’s been making its rounds lately in the movement around freeing Palestine from occupation as well as various other concurrent liberatory struggles. Not only can the fascistic forces not keep us all down, but if we learn from dandelion and can all stand steadfast in our power, each time we seed and disseminate the truth, it spreads in the wind like the little seed pods and takes root all across the land. There really is no stopping us all. But we must be present, we must not hide or look away or shrink ourselves. We  must allow  our feelings to flow freely, to let our tears water the rage that moves us into action.

In her book, Awakening Artemis, Vanessa Chakour writes, “As a liver cleanser, dandelion root helps move anger and frustration out of  the body while feeding and supporting beneficial bacteria. And for those that deplete themselves trying to people please, Dandelion is an excellent ally.” I know that when I try to make myself more palatable, I end up feeling useless, unworthy, depressed, weak. When I stand in my power, however, I may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I like it better that way. I find my people more easily when I’m radically honest with myself and others. When I can stand up tall and face the sun like the mighty dandelion.

I took my first urban foraging class in 2015 and I started my “Through the Pagan Wheel” dinner series featuring wild and foraged foods in 2016. The ideas behind foraging foods have been compelling to me as I was interested in going back to the land and reconnecting with the old ways. In the letter writing event that I hosted this past February as a response to the grief-rage-fatigue cycle I’d been feeling as a spectator in the genocide of my distant relatives, I met a fellow Palestinian-Armenian elder and when I told her of my interest in foraging, she said, “that’s so Palestinian of you.”

I had never considered that my Arab side was so rooted in the craft and art of foraging and that’s probably due to the misinformation I’d been fed from the media my entire life but that’s a whole different story. The truth is I hadn't really had interest in exploring my levantine roots because I felt so much shame in them. But I can see now that it’s all interconnected. When I first heard of the film Foragers by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna, I knew I had to see it. A quiet, poignant, meditative look at a Palestinian village and the deep love and inextricable connection its people have for the land. “I am nature” one of the characters we follow says when he’s questioned by the Israeli authorities who have outlawed foraging.

Although the land of my current home doesn’t have the wild za’atar or akkoub which are focuses of the film, we do have lots of dandelions. A Palestinian dish called hindbeh b’zayt is made of dandelion leaves, fried onions, lemon and olive oil, and it’s a deeply nourishing and delicious way for me to connect my lineage with the present day. The richness of the olive oil, sweetness of the onions, and tang of the lemon bring balance to the bitter deep green dandelion leaves and together, they create a nourishing dish that pairs well with roasted chicken, mussakhan perhaps. My daughter can’t get enough. She shovels bites into her mouth and asks for more. She helped me hand pick all of the dandelion so it’s extra special to her to eat the fruits of her labor.

Our little mountain community is hosting a screening of Foragers and we’re coming together to make Palestinian mezze, featuring dandelion. We will connect, grieve, bear witness to each other as we work tirelessly to bring an end to this destruction and reimagine a better, more rooted world of mutual respect. The courageous dandelion will be our unifier, our guide, and our source of nourishment as we work together to stand in our truth and beckon in a new world ripe with possibility and liberation for all.

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Recipe: Hindbeh B’zeit

-1 large bunch of dandelion greens (from about 10-20 plants, depending of size)

-1 large yellow onion, sliced

-2 cloves garlic, chopped

-olive oil, to taste

-1 lemon, juiced

-salt to taste

1. Wash the dandelion leaves very well. It’s important that you forage them from a place that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides or environmental contaminants. Soak the leaves in salted water for 15 minutes.

2. In a large pan over medium-high heat, saute the sliced onions with some oil, stirring occasionally, until nicely caramelized and slightly burnt. This will take about 5 minutes first on high heat, then another 10-15 minutes on medium heat. Reserve half of the onions to top the dish.

3. Meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil. Rinse dandelion greens from salt water and add them to the boiling water. Boil for 15 minutes and strain water out. Rinse with cold water.

4. Squeeze the moisture out of the cooked dandelion, and roughly chop the drained and squeezed greens.

5. Add garlic to the onions mixture and saute until the garlic is fragrant, 1 minute or so. Add the chopped dandelion greens and a pinch of salt, and saute over medium-high heat for 5 minutes, stirring well to combine it all. 

6. Remove from heat, add the juice from a whole lemon and add more olive oil to finish. Transfer to a platter and top with reserved onions. Serve with pita bread.

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Spell:

Think back to a time when you were a kid. What was an embarrassing or shameful part of you that you worked to hide as you got older? Why? Are you still embarrassed or ashamed by it?

Revisit a movie or book that makes you cry. Sit with your feelings and allow yourself to cry for as long as you need to. Purge it all and let it wash through you. Afterward, freewrite in your journal for as long as it takes.

Now, envision your most vibrant future self. What can you take from your past experiences to integrate so that you can show up as your best, kindest, most generous future self?

In this transitional time on our mountainside, I feel the simultaneous pull to get out in the world to give and share and make a difference outwardly, and to replenish my reserves after already being pulled in so many directions, at the brink of exhaustion. As I write, there’s an ice storm outside, threatening to cut off our power with howling winds and fallen trees. On a clear night, the sky is bright with the waxing moon, casting stark moonshadows all around the icy landscape. I can see my breath. I feel so much gratitude for our material safety as I know at this very moment, under this very moon, there is a sinister genocide underway that we are all complicit in because our tax dollars are bankrolling it, and I rack my brain for ways to get through to our politicians who can end it with one phone call. It weighs heavily on my heart with every breath I take. 

Within my own home economy, I’m still working toward teaching myself, bit by bit, how to transform excessive food spending into a frugal but robust pantry system that feeds my family well at a fraction of the cost of what we used to spend on groceries. If I look back, I’ve made tremendous progress in just the last few years. Whereas a few years ago I could easily spend $60 in groceries for one night’s dinner for two people, I now cook nearly all of our meals at home with a monthly budget that translates to roughly $5 per day per person. And we eat decadently.

As we whittle away at our excess, I pick up new lifelong skills. Spending too much money on bread? I’ll teach myself to make the best crusty loaves of sourdough at home. The kids have an expensive berry habit? We endeavor to gather and freeze and jam as many of the wild raspberries, blackberries, and cultivated blueberries that we can this summer. My husband and I hope that our retirement plan includes getting to a point where we can live off the land with minimal monthly upkeep costs. I also look at the plastic packaging that goes along with buying our staple ingredients and hope to minimize our waste stream in as many ways as I can.

I’m half Arab-American and thus my culinary needs for plain yogurt far exceed the average American. In our household, we eat laban with everything. As a side to Arab dishes, of course. But also a dollop on soups and stews, a cool, tangy base to pair with roasted vegetables or grains, I stir it into spiced lentils and rice, pasta sauces, morning oatmeal, my daughter’s occasional treat, mac n cheese. It’s a natural way to get our daily dose of probiotics and it feels good to eat living food. As we go through tub after tub of organic whole milk plain yogurt, the cost and the plastic waste add up. It’s high time to start making our own.

I learned how to make laban from my mom, who learned from her mom. Like so many recipes from the Arab diaspora, these recipes are so second-nature that they don’t live as a written-down recipe but as a knowing, a skill that gets passed down after doing it together over and over again. But like many of those same recipes, in the move from the homeland to our present-day home, substitutions for convenience ingredients became more common and the knowing went from a regular household practice to a novelty.

I think about how forced displacement can separate a people from their sovereignty, their land, ecosystem, and sources of sustenance. I think about how at this very moment, Palestinians in Gaza are being systematically starved out, not because they are incapable of procuring their own food against all odds but because their ties to their agricultural lands were violently severed and now the in-flow of food is being purposely restricted. Not unlike how the Irish Potato Famine was a result of similar colonizing forces upon the food system of a previously self-determined people.

But I digress. The basics of yogurt making are that you have two input ingredients: milk, and starter culture. While you can buy your starter culture, most people, myself included, just use a spoonful of yogurt they bought from the store as the starter culture that introduces the good strains of bacteria to the new batch of yogurt. You heat your milk to just under boiling- just to the point that steam and tiny bubbles start to form, then you remove it from the heat, and when it cools to the point that you can dip your finger in and count to ten without scalding yourself, it’s ready to add in the starter culture. You can also read more scientific and exact recipes online that require a thermometer, but this is the homespun way I was taught, and I’m sure millions of people before me have used a similar method. Then you leave it overnight in a warm place for 8-12 hours or so, and then it’s ready in the morning.

When I get to making my yogurt, the truth is I have been disconnected from my lineage of yogurt making at home. While I know the order of the steps from phone conversations with my mom and grandma, neither of them continue to make it as a regular practice. The subtleties that come with learning family recipes as an apprentice, watching over and over until it becomes second-nature, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions from a seasoned relative, have been lost. So when I start on my yogurt making journey, and my first batch comes out weirdly stringy and slimy, I look to the internet and reddit forums to determine what my issues might be. Apparently my batch was either cross-contaminated by wild yeasts in my kitchen due to all the bread baking I’ve been doing and/or the batch was not held at the ideal temperature for growing the good bacteria strains for long enough.

I could use a yogurt maker that holds the temperature to the exact degree for a predetermined amount of time, but I’m generally not a fan of single-use kitchen gadgets, as they take up space and use up electricity. So I try to do it the old way. I use a glass weck jar to incubate my yogurt in an insulated cooler, pre-warmed with a quart of boiling water to keep the yogurt jar warm. I know I don’t have as much control this way but I endeavor to keep trying until I can find the sweet spot. I opt for the long-term sustainable answer rather than the quick fix. Your mileage may vary. Like sourdough bread, making yogurt can come with its challenges at first and I recommend trying over and over again until you find a rhythm that works well for you. I’m still in my exploratory stages and I’ve learned a lot along the way but hope to continue learning and adding to my toolkit as I do.

This month, I don’t have a neat ending or way to tie it all together, but I do know that slow, sustained growth, and learning new skills and recipes in a fully embodied way feels more nourishing to me than having to constantly look things up online every time I want to try something new. This way I can draw upon my reserves and inner knowledge rather than feeling scattered like I constantly have to look to others for answers. Like the slow stirrings of the Vernal Equinox, on this day of the worm moon of March, I’m not quite in the flow of new growth yet. I’m in an uncomfortable season of growing pains, but I’m putting in the work so I can get to a better place in the future. I’m learning how to organize better, how to feed my family better, how to be more present and trust in the process. All we can do is stay humble, keep learning, and work toward a freer and more just world for all of the earth’s inhabitants.

Recipe: Homemade Yogurt (Laban)

Ingredients:

• 1 quart whole milk

• ¼ cup plain yogurt

Steps:

1. Sterilize your equipment in order to reduce the opportunities for cross-contamination. I use a quart-sized glass weck jar, boil all the parts for a few minutes, and set it aside.

2. In a clean saucepan, heat your milk until just before boiling. When it reaches the stage where it is steaming and bubbles are forming, remove it from the heat source and allow it to cool for approximately 20-25 minutes. When you can dip your (clean!) finger into the milk for ten seconds and not much longer without it scalding, you’re ready for the next step.

3. In the meantime, prepare your cooler by placing a quart of boiling water in it and allowing it to heat up. This is to create a warm, stable environment for the yogurt to set overnight.

4. Scoop ¼ cup of yogurt into your sanitized glass jar, and pour the warm milk over it. Stir briefly and cover the jar. 

5. Put the covered jar in your pre-warmed cooler and leave it overnight, 8-12 hours.

6. When you reopen the jar after waiting overnight, the yogurt should be firm and set. Store in the refrigerator until ready to use.

Spell: Planting seeds

My coven has just celebrated our 6th anniversary of gathering together on the equinoxes, solstices, and cross-quarter days through the wheel of the year, and a theme that came up was spanning time. I thought about the Crone self and future self and how we want our stories to go, our actions to live on. How are we creating a net positive in the world? How are we using our privilege, power and responsibility? 

Gather egg shells, or paper egg cartons, seed starting or potting soil, and seeds. Imbue the seeds with intentions of what you’d like to grow and manifest this growing season. Bury the seeds in the soil in the egg shells of egg carton. Water the seeds daily until they sprout. Care for them and transfer them to larger containers or to the outdoor soil when they have outgrown their starting nest.

We are being called to release the trappings of identity politics and virtue signaling, and rather than policing others about how they show up online, we’re being called to do the work on ourselves and in our communities to organize and act from a place of grounding. It’s so easy to criticize others for not speaking out and it’s much harder to learn to use our own voice, introspect, and identify the tools and strengths we have so we can do the work we were meant to do while in this short lifetime on the planet. This way we can lead by example and inspire people to find their own place in the resistance. There is great power in the collective, and it’s not time to fall into individualistic limiting beliefs. 

Let’s talk about food writing for a moment. It doesn’t feel good to me to write about the pleasures of food preparation while Palestinian people, after all of the horrors they’ve endured, are now being starved out, a horrific, slow, death after bearing witness to gruesome murders of all or most of their family members. What’s more, all sorts of cruel ways that withholding or destroying food is being weaponized by their oppressors against a starving population. 

Indigenous people being intentionally severed from their land to make way for extractivist industry is nothing new, of course. But right now, we’re in a part of history where people, by a large margin, are waking up to it en masse across the globe as we watch it happen in real time. To me, cooking, food justice, and collective liberation are inextricably entwined. Let’s talk about sourdough bread.

Bread. A staple. To feed a people. Made from flour, water, and leavener. Although commercial yeast is more often used in bread baking these days due to convenience, standardization, and shorter proofing time, sourdough bread is made with a natural leaven known as sourdough starter, a thriving colony of wild yeasts and microbes fed with only flour and water. 

Making bread with a natural leaven is an ancient practice that harnesses the work of these beneficial bacteria and yeasts to pre-digest and convert the carbohydrates in the flour into ethanol, carbon dioxide, and acids. The carbon dioxide makes the bread rise, and is responsible for those gorgeous large, almost pearlescent holes, enzymes in the bacteria pre-digest the flour, making the tender, springy, interior crumb easier on our gut, and the acids give the bread its characteristic flavor, which can vary in intensity depending on a few factors. Each element has a purpose and influences the character of the bread.

The sourdough culture microbiome, like our individual gut microbiome, is unique to each household or bakery in which it grows, and is influenced by such factors as location elevation, humidity, temperature, and other factors of terroir. My thriving little colony has attributes unique to my high-elevation mountainside, and also to my warm kitchen countertop which sees a lot of action in the way of food prep. All sorts of wild yeasts and microbes undoubtedly make their way over from fresh vegetables and fruits to the thriving culture in a glass Weck jar. 

With care and attentive feeding, the beneficial bacteria and yeasts crowd out the bad ones that turn it into a moldy swamp. As long as we feed it each day, mix it up and tend to it, the good outweighs the bad. And in a world where it can feel like bad stuff can be found everywhere, it’s a reminder to us that the good people who just want peace and prosperity outweigh the oppressors. We just need to keep feeding the good, lest the destructive ones take over. 

In this collective awakening, we’re being called to bear witness, and decide how to use our unique gifts in service to the resistance. I wrote about my own grappling with figuring out what my gifts are in the last new moon newsletter. But no matter how small, any action in service of good is not a wasted effort. It also helps our own psyches to transmute the grief and pain we’ve taken in with actions, no matter how small they may seem in the grand scheme. We never know which small action or collective effort will set off a chain reaction.

Both babies are asleep for the night. After I clean the kitchen, it’s time to feed the starter and mix my bread dough. I start with my large glass bowl and weigh out my starter, flours, water, and salt. As I work with my hands, my mind is constantly turning over the daily horrors I’ve ingested, searching my reserves for a solution, something I can do about it. I quickly combine the ingredients, let them sit together for twenty minutes and those wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria get to work. I send out an email to my local list-serv with the letter-writing event I’ve co-organized. A drop in the bucket, really. When the twenty minutes are up, the dough already has an elastic quality to it and I do the first set of stretch-and-fold. I cover it with a damp tea towel, since my house is very dry. I go to bed for the night.

Meditating on the sourdough culture, I draw some parallels to what I see as a sort of cultural shift happening as more and more people speak truth to power and buck various oppressive regimes. For the first eight to ten hours in my bowl sitting on the countertop overnight, much of the growth that’s happening is under the radar, but then in the final couple of hours, the dough seems to have more-than-doubled in volume. The hard work of all those microscopic critters really takes off and you can see the growth bloom. 

When the dough is roiling and bouncy and shiny with large bubbles, it’s ready to be shaped and placed in the brotform. I tenderly scrape the dough out of the big glass bowl, careful not to deflate it, and work swiftly but gingerly to shape it into a ball. I place the ball into my brotform for its final proof. I cover it with the damp tea towel. I join a zoom call “listening session on the Gaza issue” with a local NY state representative. He says the ordinary platitudes that politicians are so skilled at - so very careful not to commit to anything. Sanitized language crafted in a lab to not overtly offend everyone but also not really truly support anyone, just to give the feeling that he’s a supportive ally. How many ways can you creatively allude to ceasefire without saying the words “cease” or “fire”? He hops off after 50 minutes, taking up half of the listening session talking in his enigmas, but the rest of us stay on, for almost three hours, telling our stories and expressing poignant, justified, warranted frustrations at a so-called representative democracy that turns a blind eye and time-after-time votes lock-step with the money and not the constituents.

The dough ball continues to grow, like the movement. The brave ones speak out at first, even at the risk of losing everything, of getting killed or imprisoned or subjugated. But then as more people join in, the strength in numbers makes the movement stronger and stronger. And it also protects those who have risked everything. It’s easier to kill or suppress a movement when it’s first taking off, but much harder to publicly kill something when it becomes so visible that you can’t ignore it.

I preheat the oven to 450, and place the heavy, smooth, cool, cast iron dutch oven and its lid, side-by-side in the cold oven to allow it to heat up as the oven does. Once the oven dings, I flip the brotform over to dump out the dough into the cast iron dutch oven and whoops, it sticks… I mustn’t have dusted it with enough flour. But I decide to bake it off anyway and see how it turns out. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, right? As I read from Jim Lahey, a veritable pioneer in the world of no-knead bread baking, may as well bake it off. If it turns out to be a disaster, the loaf is easier to get rid of than the mass of living dough. I score it, cover it, and set the timer for 35 minutes.

In the book, “The Mountain is You” by Brianna Wiest, the author discusses the concept of micro-shifts that bring us closer to developing better habits. Rather than expecting wide-reaching change to come naturally with some sort of epiphany, changes need to be trained into our lives with slow, incremental shifts. The skills that come with bread making-- slow and steady mastery, under the radar sustained growth, patience in waiting for the dough to rise, and learning the nuance of how the dough should look, feel and behave, all make a good bread baker. And the skills that come with longer-term community organizing are much the same. It’s not about quick flash-in-the-pan success, but about the grassroots growth and success over the longer term. The timer goes off and I remove the lid, set another timer for 15 minutes.

There is a beauty and strength in the repetition it takes to achieve something great. Whereas my initial reaction has always been to beat myself up for any perceived mistakes or failures, I’m learning to extend grace to myself the same way I show up with patience and love and awe for my children who are naturally working through their mistakes and learning new things every day. Choosing something new to learn that is a stretch beyond our comfort zone is a humbling and rewarding process.

The bread is ready, what a beauty. A deep caramel hued thick crust with ridges and cracks and texture from the explosion that happens in the first part of the baking process. The surface texture of this one looks like it could be the moon. The irresistible aroma of fresh bread has filled our little house on the mountainside. You’re really supposed to wait for it to cool completely, but sometimes we crack into the loaf while it’s still hot and steam just billows out. The interior crumb is springy and pillowy soft.

I think of the families and people gathered together in Rafah in makeshift tents, still baking fresh bread in hand made outdoor ovens, burning whatever they can for fuel, at this point even using animal feed and grasses to make their bread, and the love that goes into caring for a community, deeply loving each other and hoping against all odds to get through this together. Even among unspeakable horrors enacted on them. The sheer resilience of a people who keep going. And for them, for all of us, we must keep going. 

This full moon I urge you to find or create your local, resilient, culture of resistance, however you can. To co-create a better world and to remember that with just a little care and feeding, the good always outnumber the bad. In my neck of the woods, ours is just starting to bubble. Who knows where it will be by autumn.

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Sourdough Bread

You will need a kitchen scale and a cast iron dutch oven with a tight fitting lid.

Recipe

• 170g sourdough starter (if you don’t have any or can’t get some from a friend, you can make your own)

• 120g whole wheat flour

• 300g bread flour

• 340-350g water

• 8g salt

1. In a large bowl, combine all ingredients. Mix them all quickly together, either by hand, or with a dough whisk, spoon, or silicone spatula.

2. Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel and wait 20 minutes. 

3. After 20 minutes, remove the tea towel and stretch and fold the dough over itself four to five times. If you’re not sure exactly how to do that, search for “sourdough stretch and fold technique” and you will find videos. Cover with the tea towel.

4. Leave the dough to sit for 10-18 hours. When the dough is roiling and bouncy and shiny with large bubbles, it’s ready to be shaped and placed in the brotform.

5. Very gently, remove the dough from the bowl and shape it like an orb, pulling it into itself and pressing the seam together. Place it seam-side up into a generously flour-dusted brotform, or seam-side down onto a generously flour-dusted piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Cover with the damp tea towel for the second proof, 2-3 hours.

6. Place a cast iron dutch oven with a tight fitting lid, into the center rack of your oven, with the lid off and side by side with the pot. Preheat the oven to 450F.

7. Invert the brotform or place the entire parchment into the dutch oven and score the dough. Place the very hot lid on top of the very hot pot and place in the oven. Set a timer for 35 minutes.

8. Remove the lid and bake for another 15-20 minutes, until desired color is reached.

9. Allow bread to cool before cutting into it.

Spell: Microshifting

Since feeding your sourdough starter is a daily ritual, imbue a little magic into it by speaking one goal lovingly into fruition, and then following it up with a small action toward the goal.

1. Set an intention. Maybe you want to take better care of your body and want to stretch more regularly. Maybe you want to keep a more organized space, maybe you want to write creatively, maybe you want to learn to paint watercolor, or play a new instrument. Find one that you’d like to really pursue this year.

2. For just 5 minutes a day, after lovingly speaking your intention while feeding and mixing your sourdough starter, take an action toward your goal.The idea here is microshifts, so set a timer if you need to! Write in a journal for 5 minutes, or roll out your yoga mat and do 5 minutes of stretching, or work on decluttering a space in your home for just 5 minutes. Each of these daily actions, when practiced regularly over time, will lead to big change in your life and will become your new routine.

I am taking the Rewilding Through Writing course offered by . In the first class, she asked us, “is the hunger to communicate greater than the fear?” When the cost of staying silent outweighs the cost of being vulnerable, we find the bravery to use our voices. She also shared that some of her favorite writing comes from authors grappling with an issue and figuring it out on the page as they write.

So in the spirit of that, I’ve written a pretty intense and pretty vulnerable piece, here we go.

Before you read on, I would like to ask you to hear me out. The first paragraph may make you want to leave. If you’re like me, you may feel like Substack is one place on the internet you can go with all your burnt out frayed parts to read something uplifting or some medicinal balm that feels nourishing and/or inspiring and doesn’t have all the horrors of the news cycle on it. If that’s the case I’m hoping you can hear me out, sit with the uncomfortable parts, and find your own inspired action that results from it. If you read till the end you’ll find the inspiring parts. And at the very end there’s something sweet.

We each have a unique gift to bring to the resistance.

What privilege I have. What guilt. Do they feel it too? All of the people writing, posting pictures, living life as usual while a particularly horrific, brutal genocide unfolds in real time before our eyes. Fueled by our tax dollars. We toil away, with our basic infrastructure crumbling, no health care, no social safety net, while the funds siphoned off that were meant to pay for common goods are sent to destroy, displace, maim, harm, continue the cycle of violence and hatred.

We are implored by the victims, keep posting about us, remember us, give us a voice. It’s the very least we can do after all. Keep up the momentum on social media because institutional media intentionally turns a blind eye, warps language, omits facts, to make the mass destruction of a people more palatable. We’re purposely desensitized, we’ve seen all these images before. Brown people’s anguish among rubble. What a shame. International affairs, we call it. War in the Middle East we call it.

What scares me is, I find myself doing it too. With my already frayed nerves from caring for a sick infant and toddler, when I have a moment to myself I gravitate toward rest, words of nourishment, long-form writing that uplifts me, lest I go to a dark place. Sucked into my phone, my eyes glued to the screen, I can’t look away. Mind elsewhere while my kids need me to be here with them. Such guilt for not showing up online more. Such privilege to get to care for children in a stable home.

We each have unique gifts to bring to the resistance. Some make videos and infographics to share. Some organize mass sit-ins, rallies, and demonstrations. Some report from the ground. The poets, writers, and artists play a key role too. They bring humanity to the statistics and numbers and casualties and body count.

Outrage fatigue, they call it. Frozen into paralysis from the sheer magnitude of it all. What is my gift to bring to this resistance? I work as a food stylist, how silly, how trivial. What would my Palestinian ancestors want me to contribute? What would my Armenian ancestors who fled their own genocide teach me? I look inward. What can I offer?

And then I remember. The oppressors want us to see a broken, dirty, warring people in the Palestinians. They paint themselves as the voices of reason and prosperity and peace while the Arabs are vermin who must be eradicated. The new face of the Middle East, they call it. They want to build beachfront hotels and oil rigs on these mass graves and just be done with it all. How inconvenient, how audacious, for the vermin to fight back.

I turn inward and begin to unpack all of the shame of being Arab and the secret of being Palestinian as I’ve been told, subtly, all my life that I should be ashamed. “They’re a warring people, it’s in their blood,” my dad tells me. About my mother’s blood. My blood. 

That shame keeps us silent. We swallow the lump in our throat as we watch them denigrate, spin false narratives. I fight back tears, in secret, as I remember being called a terrorist, a gorilla (yes the animal) in middle school, in the wake of 9/11, when all Arabs were terrorists. I shy away from posting my story. It’s not about me, after all. But the guilt. It gnaws at me. I must do something. The fear-guilt-reactive reposts of infographics on instagram that no one sees because they’re shadowbanned isn’t enough.

In our collective liberation work, study, reading, we learned about how the Black community in the US, and the First Nations people, were systemically ridiculed, called dirty, savage, subhuman, and those tropes were absorbed and perpetuated in mainstream culture. How essential stories of Black excellence, Native resilience, celebrating all the greatness in these purposely maligned cultures have begun to shift the collective storytelling.

I’m learning, and remembering, the strength, beauty, resilience, hospitality, and love of my people. The incredible food! The way indigenous Palestinians work with native plants, venerate and care for olive trees, are people of the land rather than possessive of it. I endeavor to learn and share the beauty and multidimensionality of my people so they can be celebrated-- not just reduced to warn-torn images among rubble.

Maybe my part in the resistance, as I unpack and transmute my own feelings of shame and suppression, is to share the vibrancy, beauty, love, and resilience of a people so that we can, I don’t know, prove that Palestinians are real humans worthy of living instead of getting carpet bombed into oblivion?

In my lifetime I hope to see a vibrant, thriving community underpinned by mutual respect, sharing, and thriving. In my view, you can’t get there if having freedom means you need to keep your boot on someone else’s neck. How can we envision and create the most joyful collective liberation and what are the steps we can begin to take to get there?

Feel it, sit with it. If you’re feeling dysregulated from nonstop news bombardment, you’re not alone. Rather than ignoring it, sit with it and see how it really makes you feel, then check in with yourself to figure out what your gifts might be to contribute toward our collective liberation. This new moon is about inspired action, don't skip the “inspired” part.

After writing this, I came across a letter-writing campaign organized by Jewish Voices for Peace’s Albany chapter. And the purpose behind it is to put faces to names and flood our congresspeople with postcards of the victims and the photos so they see actual humans, real people and not just numbers. I’m working on organizing an event where I live to get the community together to work on this. I think it will help to have an in-person gathering rather than just falling into the pit of despair that is the scroll-hole. The tide is shifting and I hope our continued actions may bring peace.

Now, for something sweet…

Recipe: Knafeh

Knafeh is a traditional Palestinian* dessert and it’s one of my absolute favorites. It’s a baked dessert often served warm, with a crispy exterior and a slightly salty farmer’s cheese interior. I grew up eating it as my Grandma always cooked lots of traditional recipes and she used just a hint of orange blossom water in the uttar — the sweet syrup you pour over the sizzling hot dish when it comes out of the oven.

Below is an excerpt from my print magazine, Ravenous, and the photos were styled by me and taken by Emily Dryden.

*The dessert is common across the levant, or the Middle East. I first learned of it as a child in the context of my grandma’s Syrian cooking. I recently listened to a talk by Dr. Lila Sharif who discussed how terms like “Middle Eastern” or “Mediterranean” when talking about Palestinian food is a form of erasure and it struck a chord with me, so I endeavor to give more credit where credit is due, and Palestinian food is some of the best food in the world.

Leave a comment if you’d like me to share more family recipes of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese food on the new moons.

After the rush of the holiday season has died down, we settle into the quiet chill of January. Up here in the mountains, spring always comes late so we have to keep our spirits up during these long winters. Keeping our internal fire ablaze is an essential piece of surviving this otherwise dreary time of year.

Right now if we pay attention to the daily atrocities in the Middle East, it feels bleak. As a Middle Eastern person with Palestinian roots and a lineage of Armenian genocide survivors before me, I feel the heaviness constantly. I simultaneously feel so much grief and guilt and yet so much gratitude that my husband and I can provide safety and stability for our family.

A theme I’ve been reflecting on this month is slowing down, simplifying, creating space and clarity so we can feel through our feelings and unclutter our minds. In Kate Soper’s “Post-Growth Living for an Alternative Hedonism,” she writes, “We need, in short, to challenge the presumption that the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today is advancing human well-being than being detrimental to it.”

As a recovering workaholic who has long equated my worth to my productivity, it’s been an uncomfortable challenge to experience my slowest year, work-wise, since I entered the workforce. It also meant I got to spend more (nearly all of my) time with my growing family, a rewarding labor in itself. Last winter, my husband had a serious accident right after I found out I was pregnant with our second and we had to figure out how to get through it all.

I focused my efforts on reigning in our household spending, teaching myself how to shop with thrift, and home cooking all of our meals. I organized and streamlined our pantry, and stocked our chest freezer with a month’s worth of home-cooked meals for when our newborn arrived.

Simple, slow, and frugal can be at once liberating and restorative. Recognizing and curbing wasteful or excessive spending can free us, even if just a little bit, from the rat race and give us the most valuable gift of all: the gift of time. 

Chicken soup is a simple, humble, nourishing pot of magic greater than the sum of its parts. I first learned this soup from my mom, who would make it on occasion when we were sick. It then became my own go-to recipe for winter colds + flus. And then my husband started making it for us and he really perfected it. I feel so grateful when he makes this nourishing elixir for us.

This soup feels like medicine— loaded with ginger and garlic and turmeric and lemon, it has immune boosting properties. But it also contains the medicine and wisdom of remembering to slow down, tend to ourselves, our families, and our households. It’s warming in more ways than one— the heat from the ginger stokes our internal fire to keep the cold at bay. It gives us the boost we need to get us through the winter.

And today I offer it to you on this January full moon. The winter we moved into our house in the mountains, when we had nothing but camping chairs and a cooler as our furniture, we made a big pot of this soup and ate it together by the fire we built. In this recipe I hope to share that feeling of hygge: love, warmth, coziness, and simplicity— a reminder to slow down and take the easier, more relaxing route. To replenish our reserves. We have to stay healthy to get through the long winter ahead.

Recipe: Chicken Soup

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs chicken legs (or skinless boneless thighs if that’s your preference) - my husband prefers boneless skinless thighs which eliminate the work of picking out skin and bones, but I always preferred to keep the bones in while the pot is simmering.

• Salt + pepper to taste

• 2 tbsp olive oil

• 6 tbsp unsalted butter

• 1 large yellow onion, chopped coarsely

• 3 large carrots, sliced into thick rounds

• 3 stalks of celery, chopped coarsely

• 4 cloves garlic, smashed

• one 2” piece of ginger, peeled and chopped coarsely

• 1 tsp turmeric

• ½ tsp coriander

• ½ tsp allspice

• 4 cups chicken stock

• 2 cups kale, chopped (optional)

• 2 lemons, squeezed

• Plain yogurt for serving

• Fresh parsley for serving

• Sourdough bread for eating with the soup

1. Pat the chicken dry and season all over with salt and pepper. In a large pot with a lid, (we use a dutch oven) add 2 tbsp olive oil and sear the chicken all over until lightly browned but not cooked through (about 3-4 minutes on each side).

2. Remove the chicken and set aside. In the same pot, add the butter, onions, carrots, and celery and cook, stirring often, until softened and fragrant, 4-5 minutes.

3. Add the garlic, ginger, turmeric, coriander, and allspice and stir well, 2 more minutes.

4. Add the chicken back in to the pot, coating it with the mixture, and then add in the chicken stock. Add more water if needed to cover the chicken. Bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to low and cover.

5. Simmer on low for 2-3 hours until the meat falls off of the bone easily, or otherwise easily breaks apart if using boneless pieces. If using a bone-in chicken, remove bones when serving (or just eat around them).

6. Stir in kale and fresh squeezed lemon juice right before serving.

7. Ladle into bowls, then top with a hearty dollop of plain yogurt and a generous handful of chopped parsley. Serve with toasted sourdough bread.

Spell: Paring Down

Draw a hot bath, add some salts or herbal infusion if you’d like, and soak in the darkness with only candles as your light source. Enjoy this moment away from phones, tablets, books, things to distract your attention. Meditate on what elements of your life you can consciously slow down, and also what elements you can pare back.

Turn each limit into an affirmative statement of what the limit will allow you more time for. For instance, I’ll be (1) making a new household budget, (2) limiting my time on instagram to 15 minutes per day, and (3) committing to buying no new clothing for a year. My affirmative statements are (1) We will have a guide to keep us on our path to reach our financial goals, (2) I’ll have more face time and engagement with my family, and (3) I will find the usefulness of what I already have. Write the affirmations down and keep them in  plain view in a place you access frequently.

Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.

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A recipe, a spell, a reflection.

My writing has lived in private journals for decades and I’m beginning to share small tidbits of it with this newsletter.

Every month on the full moon I will share a reflection related to simple living, the natural world, and cooking. Each newsletter will culminate with a corresponding tried-and-true recipe, and a spell.

I work as a food stylist and recipe developer and I have a background in publishing and creating print and visual projects. My heart and passions live in the woods, the wild world, under the light of the moon and my husband and I are raising our two babies living the simple life on a mountainside.

After a few years of publishing the print magazine known as Ravenous Zine, I’m taking a hiatus while our babies are still young, and putting my creative energy into a simple newsletter.

Join me as I explore creative growth, nourishment, and cooking through all of the seasonal shifts of the year.