But in this issue I have no recipes. Over the past 2 months, food in our house has been provided by our neighbors, anything I had pre-prepped that we could dig out of the freezer and, lately, some simple favorites.

On the first Tuesday in November I started the day thinking of my to-do’s which included making time to go into town to vote for local elections and state issues. Voting in our tiny town can take some time, not because of long lines but because of all the neighbors you have to catch up with before and after you cast your ballot.

I wandered to the bathroom and before I could move on to change out of my pjs, I was hit by the worst headache of my life. It felt like someone was squeezing my head in a vice. There was sharp pain behind my eyes. My neck was stiff as if I slept on it wrong. I thought I was going to barf.

I went back to the bed and held my head in my hands. I convinced myself it was a migraine brought on by perimenopause because everyone online tells me everything is menopause. I’ve never had migraines.

Thankfully, my newly-trained volunteer EMT husband had not left for the day. He ignored my suggestions that it would be fine and he needed to get to work. He took my blood pressure. It was extremely high. I told him he did it wrong. After the third try, he insisted we go to the ER.

They call it a Thunderclap headache. It’s an appropriate description. It came out of nowhere like a clap of thunder. If you ever get one, please go to the hospital.

To make a long story sorta shorter, I had a subarachnoid hemorrhage, but fortunately not an aneurysm. It is a type of stroke that means a vein in my brain decided to burst that morning and doctors don’t know why. It required 10 days in the hospital for monitoring. I was extremely lucky in that I had no outward neural or physical symptoms other than the really awful headache.

I went through all stages of grief.

I tried negotiating an early release from the hospital, but that was before the pain of the blood and toxins that did not belong in my brain had made their way down my spine. It felt like the worst menstrual cramps and labor pains when I tried to walk. I had to stop to do Lamaze breathing on my way to the toilet. I was grateful to have hospital drugs and someone to bring me coffee all day.

Before I knew what the treatment would be I was worried they were going to shave my head. To distract myself, I thought about how I needed to cancel my upcoming haircut appointments and how far out do I need to rebook? Six months? A year? My hairstylist books up so this is important! I decided I’d just wear my knit hats until it grew in and I was thinking of a new style anyway. Would my hair grow in grey? Curly? Thankfully the treatment is an angiogram probe through the major artery at the hip. My hair remains intact and as straight as ever.

I definitely had some anger that it happened at all.

I did some what-if thinking when I got home from the hospital when I realized… Oh, I could have died. I went deep into learning about the condition and how it could have killed me or been worse than it was. I thought of my husband and the sad meals he’d be eating after the neighbors stopped feeding him and how the kids would manage. I imagine this is some post-trauma coping mechanism (I’ll let my therapist friends let me know) and I told myself if it continued I’d seek professional help. I’m over it now.

Left to his own devices, my husband would eat a lot of ground turkey and frozen peas. How lucky for him that he got me to the hospital so quickly.

We were overwhelmed by the community support we received. Our freezer was too full to fit it all. This week we received another delivery of 8-9 crockpot meals that the volunteer fire department coordinated. We are set for the winter. I’ll report back on any favorites.

I am doing extremely well now, only with some dull annoying headaches that are helped by eating, napping and exercising. Luckily, those are among my favorite hobbies.

I’m so over the coping mechanisms now I’ve given up worrying about the things I was worried about before. I’m a planner and a worrier by nature. I had things to do and taking a month and a half off was not on that list.

While I don’t recommend having a stroke, I do recommend letting the worries and timelines go. Are you alive? Did you eat? Do you need a nap? Do you need to take a pill? Cool. Keep going.

Sometimes I start things and wander off to do something else or lose words, but that’s probably menopause.

Now for the Fun Idea

During my recovery I spent a lot of time on my phone. A lot. Happily a good chunk of that time was texting with friends from all the different eras of my life. But I also spent an insane amount of time on social media. Stuck in a windowless room for 10 days, it was my window to the world.

I love social media. I’ve been on it since the beginning. In the early 2000s I worked at an “internet marketing agency” back when we separated internet marketing from everything else. I wrote a report on “Social Networking Websites” in 2007 to look at what competing brands were doing on these new sites. I wish I still had a copy of that report that I printed on 4-color glossy paper to deliver. I’m that old.

Social media has allowed me to stay in touch and become re-acquainted with friends from all corners of my life. It has allowed me to stay connected to my kids because I know the memes and the current conspiracy theories. My friends tell me I’m good at it. What a dumb thing to be good at.

By December something clicked with me. I was so sick of it. Sick of trying to stop myself with time limit apps I’d ignore. Sick of looking up and realizing I just wasted another hour. I don’t need help procrastinating. I’m also really good at procrastinating!

I do not like AI being forced on us for search or watching people share stuff they do not know is fake. I don’t like that it makes everyone feel bad about their lives, their homes and their bodies. I really don’t like parents who make their young children act for clicks and free stuff.

I’ve become nostalgic for spending weekends reading magazines and the days before we knew everything about everyone.

Over the holidays, we made our 20-year-old son watch Before Sunrise, a movie that would not be made today. (The romantic loved it. He did feel a little weird because he looks and dresses a lot like 1990s Ethan Hawke.)

So, I decided January 1 that I would stop all socials for the month and see how it felt.

Dear reader, it feels great. I’ve read more in 2 weeks than I had in 2 months. I’m less stressed in general, although no less informed. Unfortunately, reading the news might be more upsetting because I read the whole article and it’s not followed by a cute cat video to replenish my dopamine. I’m not attached to my phone all day. In fact, I’m starting to associate it with the dread of reading the news.

But I miss the connections. I have made friends with people here in my tiny town through socials. I have contacts I may never meet who I chat with over shared interests. So, how do we keep that going?

I considered contributing more to this Substack. Yet I hate that it’s another email to linger as another to-do in your inbox.

Last summer, out of the blue, I received a post card from my friend, a talented illustrator and water color artist. She lives 2 miles up the road and could have hand delivered it, but instead she put a stamp on it and let the post office put it in my mailbox for her. A few weeks later, out of the blue, another post card arrived from a high school friend who had taken my address down a couple years ago.

It felt like a sign. Two recent deliveries from the New York Review of Books and Rancho Gordo Beans* included post cards. The signs keep coming.

Now, it’s time to do something about the signs.

So. Here’s the deal. You send me your mailing address in a DM and I’ll send you a post card. It may or may not be a free postcard I find. It might be one I make from some of my own photos of Maine. You can write me back. If it gets too big, I reserve the right to start making pen pal matches. What a 1980s girl dream.

I had thoughts of creating a printed-and-mailed newsletter. I still might, but let’s see where this goes before I create more work for myself. I still have a headache to manage.

Below are some things I would have shared on Instagram. Next time I’ll write about the analog things I’m doing instead of scrolling.

A Recipe

Here is one recipe recommendation for Baked Oatmeal (scroll to the bottom). When she said it’s like having apple pie for breakfast I said, in. I’m a poached eggs and sourdough toast girl most mornings, but it is nice to have something pre-made and cozy in winter. I recommend adding a 1/2 teaspoon or so of salt to the mix before baking.

A Poem

Today’s poem is not an original, but one of my favorites. It seemed appropriate. So yummy.

Knitting

Being off my phone and on my couch has proven to be very productive knitting-wise. Details here for the knitters.

Look at My Cat

One leg out for temperature control.

But first… Here are some yummy things you could make!

If you want a little pumpkin spice but not a muffin or bread, make these Pumpkin Cookies. They are soft, like a mix of cookie and cake, and use up just that little bit of leftover pumpkin from another recipe. (Freeze leftover canned pumpkin if needed.) The pickiest eater in our house ate almost all of them and I don’t mind. Pumpkin is a vegetable and he needs vegetables.

Photo of my second batch below that turned out a little flat. I think my butter was too warm or I overmixed, but 100% edible.

Last summer I was drowning in zucchini with about 8 plants in my garden. I meant for half of them to be cucumbers - oops. This year I only grew 4 and it’s still pumping out the squash into late September, so I’m looking for ways to use it up. This Whole Wheat Maple Zucchini Bread is a nice treat that is less sweet than typical zucchini bread. I convinced myself it’s healthy because of the whole wheat, added dates and walnuts and upped the cardamom. Adding this Melted Zucchini Pasta to my list to try next. Maybe next summer I grow only 2 zucchini plants.

For psychos only: On a random Tuesday I decided I needed to fry up falafel and make naan because I had some at the best fair, Common Ground Fair, and it needed to be replicated. I soaked the chickpeas in the morning, not overnight, and started the naan in my newly-eBay-acquired used bread machine. I experimented by putting some falafel in the air fryer and results were not good! Stick with frying.

Featuring homegrown tomatoes, cucumber!

The dream to be apple famous

In exciting apple news, we have 3 apples trees in our yard, part of what was once a large orchard that included to our neighbors’ yards. When I learned that there is a group of heritage apple fanatics trying to trace back the original apple trees brought to Maine from France in the 1700s and focusing on our area, I reached out with pictures of our trees. They instantly asked to schedule a visit.

We spent some time wandering the property together. They gave us pruning tips and taught us how to graft to make more apple trees. A few weeks later, they returned a few weeks later to take DNA samples. We anxiously await the results. Will we be apple famous? A girl can dream.

On Logging Off

I decided to take time off from Instagram last week because everything has become so offensively stupid. Between the anti-vaccine movement, the president can’t pronounce Acetaminophen, and the martyr-making of a podcaster who wasn’t actually good at debate and promoted really horrible ideas, I had enough.

I deleted the ‘gram and have been working at not picking up my phone and not thinking, “I should take a photo to share.” The experts say it takes 21 days to start or stop a habit*, if we still listen to experts anymore. I intend to stay off at least that long and see if I can return in small bits without getting sucked back in. I miss the small connections I have with IRL friends and virtual friends there, but it is a big time suck. I joked to my husband that I might take pictures of my garden and what I made for dinner, have the photos developed, and mail them to friends. (DM me if you’d like such silliness!)

*This seems to be a made up stat, but I’ll still try.

One unexpected outcome, besides being blissfully unaware of the latest stupidity, is now I understand how people who aren’t chronically online could be clueless about all the things and maybe they would have voted differently had they known just how bad a certain person is for our country. While I’ll never quite understand how people did not seek out information and chose that man 3 times, I am developing empathy, perhaps, for those who just didn’t know. Is it possible?

There is a troubling movement now promoting the idea that we should not embrace empathy (see previously mentioned podcaster). It’s an old tactic used by slavers and Nazis to make the citizenry turn away from awful things the leadership is doing to other people. How convenient right now that we should be encouraged to turn empathy off when people are being taken away from their homes and shipped off to other countries. I worry that social media is contributing to this by spreading this anti-empathy message and pushing everyone deeper into silos as viewers accept as truth the clips that are fed to them and don’t seek out more information. The propaganda machine is strong.

When my son texted me that it was going around that the rapture was coming this week my response was, “Thank god.” Rapture, alien invasion, I’ll take either even if they only take some of us. Sometimes I hum, “come, Armageddon, come” in my darkest GenX moments. I suppose I shouldn’t. How about, Calgon, take me away.

However, we’re still here and we need to figure out a way to stay informed, but not get overwhelmed by the chaos and propaganda. For me, for now, it’s staying out of the online fray, reading entire newspaper and magazine articles - not just the clips someone else picked, calling “concerned” Susan Collins again, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my zucchini.

A poem

Here’s a poem I wrote a few years ago. I was driving on a crowded highway in Austin and noticed the guy next to me had “LOG OFF DAN” written on his hand in sharpie. It stuck with me.

Log off Dan

The words scrawled in black sharpie
on the back of his hand 
that pressed against the window 
as his car crawled slowly away from downtown
He stared beyond the cars ahead 
to the middle distance
Not here
Not there

Log Off DAN

Was it simply a reminder 
a new safety protocol 
to shut down the system
called DAN
To keep those out
who shouldn’t be in

Log off, Dan

Or was it a command 
for Dan to escape 
From spreadsheets 
clicks 
likes 
and trolls 
And make his way 
to a place
where clicks come from frogs and 
follows from footsteps
Where he could spread a sheet
on the grass
to find
trolls hiding under logs 
And respond only to the 
tweets in the trees 
 
Log off, Dan

Leave a comment

Here are Some Yummy Recipes to Try

At this point in winter, my body consists of approximately 1/3 soup. On Monday I warmed up some 15 Bean Soup* we had in the freezer and realized my soup reserves were low. Every time I make a pot I freeze a few servings in silicone trays. That habit has been a lifesaver on nights when I just can’t and/or for lunch when I don’t have other leftovers. If you’re new here, I live in a tiny town with limited dinner options in winter (ie: one dive bar) and, for some weird reason, I hate making lunch.

Is it time to make more soup or is it time to transition to non-soup foods? Based on the snow and cold front headed our way this weekend, I believe there is some of Ina’s Tuscan Bean soup in my future. Maybe a Guinness Beef Stew for St. Patrick’s Day.

*(a pantry staple - discard the seasoning packet and season it with your own flavors!)

Soup in all the stages. All winter I keep carrots, celery and onions on hand. Along with broth, beans, grains and meat (if you want), you can make any kind of soup. Here I had some leftover wild rice so I made a mushroom-rice soup. I freeze extras in the silicone trays and after they are frozen, keep the cubes in a reusable bag.

When I was a working girl before kids, twice a year I had to go to Detroit with the other members of my team to meet with the team at headquarters. Over the years, the ladies I worked with had formed friendships with our colleagues in Detroit.

One visit, the ladies from our Texas office and the California office were all a twitter about Dwayne from headquarters. Dwayne had lost a significant amount of weight. So much his pants were sagging and his belt was barely holding them up.

The ladies were so worried. Did he have cancer? Had his wife left him? What was going on with Dwayne? Finally, one of them cautiously brought it up with him. He explained, “There’s a new soup restaurant in town. They have a new soup every day. I go there for lunch instead of getting a burger or a sandwich.”

I think about Dwayne and those gossipy ladies almost every time I have soup for lunch. I’m not telling you this to say that you’re fat and need to lose weight, but if you switched to soup from burgers or a sandwich and chips for lunch… you might need some new pants like Dwyane.

Soup is good food, as the Dead Kennedys sing (A very relevant song for our times, by the way…Go read the lyrics.)

Etc

Other than soup I am obsessed with our new air fryer.

I am late to the air fryer game. When it first came out I borrowed a friend’s and decided it wasn’t worth the extra appliance to clean. But, now I have a teenager who eats very few things and I don’t want to heat the whole oven for two chicken strips. Plus, when you wait on things like new appliances the later versions are generally better.

I turned to my heroes at America’s Test Kitchen for their recommendation and bought it for the house for Christmas. Dear reader, it was the best gift we all got this year. We live exciting lives!

Have I mentioned you can get cookbooks at your library? I checked out this cookbook and, sorry to yell but, YOU CAN COOK A WHOLE CHICKEN IN THE AIR FRYER! And it’s as good or better than the rotisserie chicken from the grocery store without the extra plastic in your life. Bonus, those bones make chicken broth for more soup.

Besides the whole chicken, our favorites have been Pistachio Crusted Salmon (I didn’t have panko so I ground up some sourdough discard crackers with the pistachios) and these potato wedges. I’m very much into this air fryer tofu! Made it with some stir fry veggies and this easy sauce.

I realize ATK recipes are behind a paywall, but you can usually find similar or copied versions with a little searching.

Other yummy things:

Sheet-Pan Coconut Curry with Squash - even better as leftovers. Just don’t drop the glass container and shatter it all over the floor like I did. I’m still not over it.

I made this Rich Chocolate Tart from The Lost Kitchen for Valentine’s Day. I cut the recipe in half and there was still too much.

A Poem

Hanging around my office are small bits of poetry that I print when I’m in a mood or one arrives in my inbox and just hits right. I have this Robert Frost gem, “Dust of Snow,” hanging on the door and this Maggie Smith favorite, “Good Bones,” in my journal. The other day, my 16 yo son was standing in the doorway reading the Frost poem and said, “What does this even mean?” and then he launched into a complaint about his English class.

I showed him the Maggie Smith poem (even though a part of me thought, I’m supposed to keep these truths from my children!) and I tried to explain what it meant. He said, “Why can’t they just say what they mean?!”

So I wrote this one for him.

A poem for my teenager

I was having a bad day
And then I noticed
A bird do something cool
And I realized  
The world is pretty amazing
If you stop to notice
So I wrote it down
To remind myself 
(And maybe someone else)
Things can be pretty shitty
But we have to find reasons 
To keep going 

- Casey Bernard

P.S.

I’ve had a few people reach out on Instagram saying they are leaving app, but want to keep in touch. I’ve been considering, but I have so many fun chats with followers and friends there it is hard to give up. Perhaps I’ll post more in the chats here.

I am on BlueSky but haven’t been posting much. Rumor has it they are working on an alternative to Instagram which might be the place where we meet up again, as long as no one addicted to ketamine takes it over and ruins it.

Sigh.

Stay safe and eat some soup.

I grew a lot of squashes and a few sweet potatoes. Here’s how I’ve used them so far:

1. Trust me on this one. The list of ingredients sounded weird, but it’s good. And the article title made me laugh: This Roasted Vegetable Soup Is Good for Your Gut

2. I like to welcome fall with chili and corn bread. I made this Sweet Potato Beef Chili. I usually would make this vegetarian, but wanted a little extra protein. The spice combo is especially good in this recipe.

3. I grew only enough sweet potatoes to make this one (delicious) recipe. Better luck next year.

4. Brown Butter Lentil and Sweet Potato Salad. I used butternut squash. With goat cheese. Say no more.

On Puritans

Please forgive that I don’t have the spirit to write much about the recipes today. I am writing a few days after the election, trying to make sense of it all. Most of all, I’m trying to understand those who chose to vote for Trump a 3rd time.

To quote my husband, I recognize that I’m a divergent thinker. All the TV shows I like get cancelled, but this is really hard to understand.

I haven’t asked who among my friends and family were part of his support. But I have a good sense. The people I know who likely supported Trump are not struggling over the price of eggs. Many I know wear crosses around their necks, volunteer at church and go to Bible Study.

It’s hard for me to reconcile how they who are kind and well-meaning would support a fraud1, sexual abuser2, and someone with no respect for our constitution and military.

How could they hear the promises he made of mass deportations, the threats to punish his enemies and fear-mongering about trans people and ignore the lessons of Mark 12:31 and Leviticus 19:33-34?

I realize we are victims of our information silos. We humans tend to seek out information that validates our beliefs. So maybe they didn’t know he said those things. Maybe they didn’t realize he was found guilty in ALL THOSE COURT CASES.

But in this Information Age not knowing is a choice.

Or, maybe they knew and didn’t care. On Wednesday I started reading a book about a woman living among Puritans who is accused of witchcraft. I picked it up hoping to take my mind off things, but soon came to a scene that showed me how far we have not come. A man was sentenced to the stocks, punished for resting in his barn instead of attending church that week. He was sitting on the ground in the cold, bleeding from a beating and covered in mud and manure. As they made their way to worship, fellow members of the church gleefully threw more mud and manure at him to humiliate him even further. They proved their superiority by punishing him while attempting protecting themselves from similar treatment. At the same time, the young woman who chose to show empathy by giving him a blanket was scolded and threatened by the minister. These are the white people who built our country and it seems as though we have not changed all that much.

I wonder, how many of the white Christians who voted for Trump waked into that booth with the intention to punish others, throwing mud on someone who was already beaten and bruised proving they were somehow better?

It’s the women that I have the hardest time understanding. I’ve been thinking a lot about women like Megyn Kelly in the past few weeks. She was sexually harassed at Fox and moderated a presidential debate in 2016. Afterward Trump famously said she had “blood coming out of her whatever.” Yet she continues to carry water for him on her XM radio show in an effort to become a female Rush Limbaugh, I suppose.

She made headlines in recent weeks when she ranted about Taylor Swift’s support of Harris and the LGBTQ+ community. Her remarks weren’t nuanced or intelligent, they were just ranty and mean with hate especially directed at trans people.

It’s easy to be mean. It’s easier for Megyn to yell about the threat to her own children than to work to find empathy for a child different than hers. It’s easier to “other” and find comfort in our tribes than to have curiosity about what someone else is going through. It’s easier to talk trash about someone than do the hard work of finding out why you are going along with the bullies.

Women like Kelly and those who voted for Trump align with the patriarchy in hopes for protection and power. In the end, they will likely find themselves used, abused and never given the protection they were promised. (See also: Niki Haley.)

Now we are about to be a nation lead by meanness, a lack of introspection and empathy. 

When my sensitive son was in kindergarten he once became inconsolable when he watched another child accidentally close their hand in a car door. He feels everything on an 11 out of 10 and his sweet soul could not bear to watch that child suffer. He was often punished in school for overreacting, for feeling too hard. As a teen he manages with a quieter life in art and music and a fantastic sense of humor.

Right now I feel like I’m watching someone closing the car door on the hands my black, gay, trans and “other” friends. I’m a white woman post-childbearing with privilege in a blue state and will likely be fine. But two days after the election they are already talking about plans for mass deportations and men and boys are threatening women online and at school with “your body, my choice.” I can only watch from afar and imagine the pain.

I am figuring out how to manage. You may see less of me on socials, but I refuse to stay silent.

But I’m sure, when I do shout about the injustices we will inevitably witness in the next few years, those good Christians who voted for him will shut their curtains to avoid the scene and pray for me to get over my anger.

Some recommendations

Donate:

• The News Literacy Project

• National Network of Abortion Funds

• The Trevor Project 

Read (or give to a Christian Trump voter):

• The False White Gospel

• Jesus and John Wayne

Watch:

• Will and Harper - Watching this movie is an exercise in building empathy for trans people.

2

Jury finds Trump liable for sexual abuse, https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a4b98bb3947d42af9ec83d7db

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A Poem

Thanks for reading This Is Yummy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In this issue:

Scroll for a story: It looks like Disneyland

Keep scrolling for an original poem: Los Angeles

Here are some recipes you might like!

It’s all zucchini all the time. I built myself a little vegetable garden this spring and things got a little chaotic. I thought I planted both cucumber and zucchini, but no cucumbers ever appeared. Zucchini grows like crazy anyway and when you have 6 zucchini plants, the whole neighborhood gets a zucchini. I literally give away 5-10 a week.

Quiche with Zucchini Crust - The crust is made of zucchini and eggs - healthier than butter and flour and, honestly, just as delicious. This recipe is for quiche Lorraine, but if you’ve ever cooked quiche you know you can throw in just about any other veggies. I added tomatoes and some mushrooms.

Obviously, you can make sweet zucchini bread, but I had my eye on this recipe for Zucchini Feta Dill bread since I bought this book, The Savory Baker. The recipe I used is not available without a subscription, but this one is pretty close. It’s a very rich loaf that is good for sopping up soup or something tomatoey. Just warn people it’s savory before they taste it or they are in for a shock if they are expecting sweet bread!

And, when you do want something sweet, make this Chocolate Zucchini Cake. It is so good, it doesn’t even need the frosting.

Other things I made with zucchini this month:

• Meatballs! I don’t use a recipe but this one will do. Add about a cup shredded.

• Ho Bak Jun (Korean Zucchini Pancakes)

• Morning Glory Muffins (sub zucchini for the apple)

• Zucchini White Bean Salad (pictured below)

  

I’m currently harvesting handfuls of tomatoes everyday so you can bet the next newsletter will be all tomatoes. And, based on how the acorn and butternut squash coming in, a future newsletter will likely include lots of squash recipes! Feel free to send ideas to me.

Things I’m Thinking About While In The Garden

A couple weeks ago, I went on a nighttime kayak tour in our harbor to see the bioluminescent waters and the Perseid meteor shower. It’s not something I normally do, but a friend was supposed to visit and unfortunately a hurricane was on the same path and the airline cancelled her flight. It was too late to cancel kayaking so I invited a local friend and we played tourists in our own town.

To the naked eye, the lights just look like a purple glow on the horizon. Only when you take a photo with your phone or camera can you really capture the range of colors one associates with the Northern Lights.

As we discussed if we were all seeing the glow, to me it just looked like the reflection of city lights or a football game or concert in the distance. But, the town has less than 1,000 people and there was no concert happening.

My perception of the natural world is forever tainted by growing up in Los Angeles and going to Disneyland.

Earlier in the summer as I got up in the night to use the bathroom, I looked out into the darkness behind our house and I stopped to stare out the window in a half-asleep confusion. I thought someone was in the yard with a flashlight. It took me a while to realize it was fireflies dancing in the field of tall grass.

My first experience with fireflies was on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. In the ‘80s I lived in Southern California and went to Disneyland fairly regularly. Tickets weren’t as expensive as they are now and often there was some special night with an organization or a friend who invited you for their birthday.

And so, when I first saw fireflies it was in that cool air-conditioned building that offered relief from the California sun as we stood in a slow-moving line as we waited for our turn to ride. I can still smell the chlorinated water as our boat bumped into the boat in front of us and “Yo-Ho-Yo-Ho a Pirate’s Life for Me” played on repeat. My excitement for the ride always began when we could see the fireflies blinking in the darkness.

Eventually, I realized the fireflies were only intermittently flashing twinkle lights hung from the ceiling.

In high school, I was on a European bus tour with other students, parents and teachers from my high school. As we rode along the highway in Germany, we were awed by the rolling green hills in the pastoral countryside that was dotted with fairy tale cottages. Most of us lived in 1970s tract housing on perfectly measured streets. The grass in our planned lots was limited, surrounded by rugged chaparral shrub forests of the Angeles National Forest.

“It looks like Disneyland!” someone yelled.

“Yeah, it looks like Disneyland!” the rest of us students echoed.

“No,” a horrified teacher said, “It doesn’t look like Disneyland! Disneyland looks like THIS.”

For years I let the reminder echo in my head whenever my instinct was to think something looked like Disneyland.

No, Disneyland looks like this.

In 2018 my mother-in-law took us to Kenya on a trip of a lifetime. As soon as our kids were old enough for the long days of the safari drives, she took us to stay at a lodge with the safari tents and armed guards protecting us from wandering wildlife at night.

As I stood at the edge of the riverbank just outside our tent watching hippos surface and baboons call out from the trees, I had the strangest feeling that it felt familiar and somehow artificial. It nagged at me for the first few days until it hit me.

It looks like Disneyland. Specifically, it looks like the jungle cruise ride.

I half expected to see a boat come around the corner with a Disney cast member acting out a story, waiting for the animatronic crocodile to lurch at the boat on queue so he could shoot it with his fake rifle.

My initial instinct was to feel disgusted. Why couldn’t Mr. Disney things where they were? Who was he to bring this back to California? But then I considered that there are people who likely will never get to see the real thing. Especially when he built the parks, the closest thing many visitors would ever get to seeing what was right in front of me was an artificial recreation of it.

I haven’t spent much time to understand his intentions. I have a feeling they’re more gross than altruistic.

This spring I took my 16-year-old Star Wars obsessed son to Disneyland to see the new Galaxy’s Edge. [It really bothers me it is not called Star Wars Land when everything else is something-land. Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, etc… but I digress].

He didn’t care about Mickey ears or parades or the rest of the park. He would not indulge my nostalgia, so I had to ride the Pirates of the Caribbean by myself. But we had a few minutes to go before the Disney After Dark Star Wars party started so I dragged him onto the It’s a Small World ride. I felt like he had to experience a bit of the old Disneyland and there were no lines.

Dear reader, my Gen Z world-traveler child was horrified.

Besides the irritatingly loud ear-worm theme song, he found the representations of the different countries to be old fashioned stereotypes bordering on racist. (He was also a little disturbed by the toddler-sized Can-Can girls from France 😬). He has been to several other countries and knows there’s more to Mexico than sombreros and donkeys.

So, when I reflected on this again after watching the Northern Lights thinking how my brain is broken when I think, “This Looks Like Disneyland,” I am glad to know my kid instinctively knows, “No, Disneyland looks like this.”

Things are changing at Disney. This article about how they are reimagining Splash Mountain and the Song of the South ride is worth a read.

A Poem

I wrote this poem after looking at a picture of LA one day.

In the meantime…Here are some recipes you might like.

Strawberry Spinach Salad with Balsamic Vinagrette

It’s strawberry season! I love this salad because it’s flexible, strawberries equal happiness and it feels fancy when it’s actually pretty simple. I made this when I was mad I needed to find a vegetable for us to eat. It made me happier.

Spinach, berries, cheese, nuts and a tiny bit of onion. Cheese options: Blue, Feta or Goat cheese. Nuts: Walnuts, Almonds or Pecans. What do you have? Red onion is better than the yellow I had on hand. You could even use any berry!

Custom Pizza Night

We’ve got one kid who only eats cheese. One who wants buffalo chicken. And the parents who want veggies. Get yourself some ready made dough (unless you’re ambitious enough to make your own), a bottle of buffalo wing sauce, a can of tomato sauce, some pesto and mozzarella. Poach some chicken and toss half with the buffalo sauce, half with pesto. I added veggies on the pesto side. I’m hungry while writing this and wish I had this right now.

Treat Yourself!

Do you love chocolate and peanut butter together? Of course you do. These Magic in the Middles take one extra step beyond making any other cookies and they are worth it. They aren’t too sweet and they have lasted several days without going stale. I’m just surprised they haven’t been eaten up.

Can’t talk about peanut butter and chocolate without…

Things I’m Thinking About Instead of Cooking

I have the most amazing virtual writing group led by an even more amazing writing coach. She sends us on our way each month with a pull from the tarot deck.

It’s not all woo-woo. A lot of writers use tarot as a source of inspiration for ideas in our work. Tarot is built on archetypes and if there is one thing writers love it’s archetypes. Sometimes it can be like a horoscope, giving us a way of looking at what is going on in our lives or writing and try to make sense of it. Some writers use tarot because we are all a little insane and need another thing to lean on when we’ve decided we are a terrible writer and we should never write another word. Tarot can also help us see connections.

Our most recent card was a Page. I’m very much a light dabbler in tarot, so I don’t remember which type of Page. But, as our coach discussed that it was encouraging us to look around with the wonder of a Page and be amazed by what we are experiencing in the world and in our work, suddenly I remembered “Be Astonished Day!”

I was leaving my local gym a few weeks ago when a woman was standing at the exit telling someone who was exiting before me, “It is Be Astonished Day!” She was probably in her late 70s, she was definitely waving a star-topped ribbon wand and she might have been wearing fairy wings [I might have added the wings to my memory for illustrative purposes, but there’s a good chance it’s true]. She was instructing everyone that we should look around at the beauty around us and be astonished.

Spring comes very late in Maine and, let me tell you, after a long winter everyone is delighted when it finally arrives. On that sunny spring morning, everyone seemed happy to embrace Be Astonished Day.

And so the gym keeps the sign she made hanging by the exit. Some days I’m thinking, “Oh. Trust me. I am astonished…” but most days it reminds me to look around in appreciation.

Telling the story of Be Astonished Day reminded me of Epic Day. What is Epic Day? It’s a day when you be epic.

Epic Day was invented by our second kid when he was in his 5-year-old wearing a cape everywhere era. We were camping and when he came across this perfect pile of rocks for letting the cape wave in the breeze, he climbed up, put his hands on his hips and declared it was Epic Day. I asked what Epic Day was and he explained it was a day to be epic.

This picture is so him. He is still such a one-of-a-kind creative force.

Interestingly, Epic Day and Be Astonished Day seem to fall around the same time of year!

And both of these days reminded me of Some Kind of Day.

My sister is seven years older than me, so when she was in high school I was a sassy elementary school kid. One day, she was getting dressed in our shared bathroom on one of those theme spirit days like kids still have, but it was the ‘80s so it was next-level. Nerd day, punk day, one of those. Her hair and her outfit were outrageous and she was up extra early to get the look right.

After rolling out of bed I wandered by and said, “What… is it… some kind of day?”

She laughed and told my mom and soon it was one of those phrases that gets repeated in a family for decades. At some point I shared it with my husband and now we say it to our kids. It works for all kinds of days.

Be Astonished Day. Epic Day. It’s always some kind of day.

A Poem

I am working on a poem inspired by “some kind of day.” In the meantime, I found this one called One Day below on the Poetry Foundation website. I love it. Hope you enjoy it too.

Dinner and Lunch

Kale and Cabbage Pad Thai Salad

Once you know what works you can play around with the veggies you have, but IMHO the key ingredients are cilantro, green onions or a bell pepper to give it a little zing. Add cashews (even better if they are spicy cashews). I added a mango. Throw in some chickpeas or chicken for protein. Make a big one and eat it for lunch for a few days.

Treats

King Arthur Flour Flourless Fudge Cookies

This recipe can be tricky. Be sure to read the blog post. Whole Foods had a chewy walnut fudge cookie like this years ago and I have been trying to replicate it for years. This comes close when I don’t over bake them. Works for gluten-free people.

Ignore Your Responsibilities

This is both a treat and time-consumer (no cooking is a time-waster!) and the perfect summer treat. In honor of my picky eater make an angel food cake. It’s the one cake he will eat and he will eat it all in a day or two. Make sure you whip those egg whites enough. Whip it real good.

You’ll have leftover yolks so make a curd to go with it. This recipe calls for whole eggs, but I just use the yolks. Lemon is classic, but you can use any fruit juice really. Blueberry, lime, raspberry… How about rhubarb?

You Don’t Need a Recipe to Make a Smoothie but Just in Case You Didn’t Know

1. Handful of frozen fruits (berries, mango, cherries, pineapple, banana, etc)

2. Liquid: orange juice or nut milk or oat milk or coconut water (kid favorite is oj+kefir)

3. Protein: yogurt or kefir or protein powder (my favorite is Orgain)

Plant points bonuses: 1/2 handful of kale or spinach (you won’t taste it!), chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp hearts.

Blend.

That’s it. There are so many frozen fruit mixes available now, you don’t even have to think about the combination.

I like a combo I call a Tropical Delight: mango, pineapple, banana, oj and a sprinkle of coconut. I even found frozen passion fruit in Maine. That really makes it a delight.

I make a smoothie almost every day. A few years ago, I read this book* and ever since I have been working on getting more varieties of plants into all the people in our house, especially my youngest.

Much to my chagrin we have a kid who is picky eater. I kept hoping that by his teen years he’d be out of it, but I’m afraid it’s going to stick. In a lot of ways he takes after his grandfather who likes routine and not a lot of adventurous eating. Some people are just like that. Parenting this kid has been a big lesson for me in accepting that some people march to their own drummer and no matter how loud you play the music they really don’t care what song your drummer is playing.

His diet has often been the subject in what I call the 4 am scaries. You know, you wake up at 4 am and everything that is not that hard to deal with when the sun is out keeps you up at night. Awkward conversations from decades ago, to-do lists and unreasonable worries all seem to show up when (And then there’s the fun twist of worrying about how you need to get back to sleep because you only have 2 hours left before you have to get up and deal with all the things that have you worried. Sigh.)

This painting came across my feed one day and I think about it when I’m fighting worries at 4 am. It is said to be about about sleep paralysis or it may be the demon Mare from Germanic folklore who brings nightmares. In Newfoundland there is a legend of The Old Hag who stands beside your bed while you sleep. If you are paralyzed by her they say you were hagged. [If you want to run down a rabbit hole into sleep folklore, check out this infographic of all the different sleep demons.]

Now that my kid is getting older, I don’t let the scaries get me as much. I’ve also found some helpful solutions*** including not drinking as much alcohol. But, I remain fascinated by sleep demons, dreams and that horse.

***Magnesium Glycinate and Martha Stewart’s CBD gummies or lotion have helped me fight the scaries.

[*TLDR: The premise of the book Fiber Fueled is that every plant has a different type of fiber which provides a different pre- or pro-biotic to your gut. More research shows that your gut is the key to so many health issues. The more variety of plants, the more good bacteria in your gut. The goal is to eat 30+ different plants a week which may sound difficult, but salads like the one I shared above and smoothies make it easy. I highly recommend this book if you have IBS, GERD, inflammation or you just want to feel better. My husband was gluten free for a while and then one day decided he really wanted a Guinness. This book helped him identify he didn’t really have an intolerance anyway - what he needed was more plants and less meat.

The author promotes a vegan lifestyle, but we still eat meat. I definitely recommend starting slow - one fibery plant-based meal a day because you’ll poop a lot until you get used to it. Just sayin’.]

Here’s a poem (work in progress)

4 am Scaries The demon who sits on your chest The Old Hag who stands at your beside Arrives at 4 am (like clockwork) Armed with Worries Dropped balls Failures What kind of parent feeds a kid french fries The client hasn't returned your call That thing you said in jr high Is the rain that’s pouring outside also Streaming through the roof Before electricity and the calendar They say people would sleep with rhythm of sunlight They would awake in darkness and enjoy A drink with a neighbor Stoke a fire Make love And then sleep again Until the sunrise said it was time to wake But we are trapped under the weight of the demon Who holds us down And reminds us We’re doing it all wrong

- Casey Bernard

Dinner or lunch

Gochujang Chicken Burgers with Kimchi Bacon Jam

This recipe calls for bacon but the college boy has been eating so much bacon, I refused to buy more. Instead I used his second favorite food: ham. (Canadian bacon!) These look like they would be spicy, but they weren’t to us.

I was at the farmer’s market recently where a Mexican family was selling salsa. I asked to buy the spicy one and, since I look like a white woman living in Maine, they said that I should taste it first because it was pretty spicy. I said I was from Texas and have been looking for a good salsa. The dad said, “Oh, well, it’s not like spicy-spicy.” I appreciated his understanding. It wasn’t that spicy. The hunt continues.

Teriyaki Chicken

When I don’t have a plan, I make stir fry. You can buy all sorts of bottled sauces, but when you live in the boonies like me you sometimes have to make the one you’re craving. I make most dressings and sauces because it’s cheaper, healthier and not that hard. I prefer this Teriyaki Sauce with pineapple juice, but had to go with orange juice because it’s what I had.

Black Bean and Corn Salad

This is a welcome summer dish! I make this so often I don’t really use a recipe. I add edamame and sometimes quinoa for extra protein or you might add chicken. You can eat it on spinach. You can eat it on tortilla chips. You can put it in a wrap with some kind of creamy avocado dressing. You can eat it standing over the sink.

Treats

If you haven’t heard, we have a patch of about 12 rhubarb plants at the house we inherited. I’m cooking all the rhubarb dishes and barely make a dent in the crop. I’m giving most away to local bakers. Having not grown up where rhubarb is a thing, it’s been a fun thing to research and experiment with. I’m like Bubba Blue of rhubarb. It’s becoming my personality. My son said I’m acting like I won a lifetime supply of rhubarb. Well, I did! Someday son, this will all be yours.

This Rhubarb Platz is nice because doesn’t make a huge cake that you feel obligated to eat for days on end. You could make this with any berry if you don’t live where rhubarb is easy to find. And if you’re drowning in rhubarb like me, you can use rhubarb in pretty much any recipe where you use berries.

Ignore Your Responsibilities

Ultra Creamy Hummus [video because the recipe is behind a paywall… sorry! Got it from a cookbook. You can figure it out!]

This is the best hummus ever. Truly. Except for Grandma’s Hummus from Austin (if you know, you know) which I can’t get so I have to try to replicate it. I’m not sure hummus qualifies as an ignore your responsibilities recipe, but if you’re taking time to boil chickpeas instead of throwing a container of hummus in your shopping cart then you must be procrastinating something.

What I’m thinking about while cooking this week

I walked into the gym when I was struck by a conversation between the guy who works the front desk and an older member. The man behind the desk is maybe in his 40s and he said, “I just worry about anything that comes up. Like it could be the big C or something bad.” (as in cancer)

The older man, probably in his 70s and remarkably fit said, “You just have to take things as they come. Take things day by day…” I didn’t hear the rest of his advice. As I changed from my outside shoes to inside shoes, I reflected on the special cross-generational relationships* that happen in this community where the average age is higher than most places I’ve lived. Taking things as they come is solid advice from someone who has seen a lot of days.

Not minutes before, I had read Margaret Atwood’s tribute to her friend Alice Munro. I was hung up on a parenthetical phrase where she remarked that she couldn’t believe she used to knit cable knit sweaters. It had nothing to do with the story, but I stopped and read it again. Margaret Atwood, prolific writer and poet, can’t believe she used to knit sweaters? Knitting a sweater is so much easier than writing all those books. It’s one stitch at a time until you have a sweater. And, then I realized in response she might say, writing a book is just placing one word after another.

Sometimes I stand at the side of the bed as I’m getting ready in the morning and knit a row of the project I’m working on. My husband thinks it’s a sign of addiction, but it centers me. I’m a terrible meditator, but knitting one row brings me to a similar place and, bonus, eventually I have a sweater.

And making dinner can feel like this too. I used to feel like baking was overwhelming because of all the dishes. Maybe it was because I had small kids and everything felt harder, but one day I watched my mom clean up after cooking and realized the secret was…just do it. Don’t look at the pile of dishes before you, but tackle it one piece at a time or clean a little as you go. I try to instill this on my kids when it is their turn to unload the dishwasher. “It takes 5 minutes!” Okay, I may have yelled it.

I’m a worrier so currently, I’m trying to live by these mantras. Day by day, dinner by dinner, stitch by stitch, word by word… just take them as they come.

[*A few days later at the same gym, an older woman yelled at a young woman and called her a privileged kid because she was watching a video on her phone in the women’s locker room where you’re not supposed to use phones. It’s not all intergenerational kumbaya around here.]

Here’s a poem

This is one of my favorite poems by Margaret Atwood. I wear some of the words printed on a bracelet.

Spelling
by Margaret Atwood 

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

Thank you for reading. Experimenting with the frequency here. The week ahead looks busy so dinners might be a lot of whatever.

If you have friends who might like this little newsletter, please share!

Share This Is Yummy

Here’s the concept: I love to cook. I love thinking about food. I love reading recipes, planning menus and making food for myself and those I love. Sometimes I find recipes I love so much I think about them for days and weeks later. But, I don’t want to write a cookbook. I don’t want to be a food blogger. I don’t want to be a chef. I just love recipes and I love sharing them with my friends.

And it’s a good thing, too. Because in 2020 we moved from Austin, Texas to a tiny coastal town in Maine. I traded Instacart and Torchy’s Tacos for a town where only one dive-bar restaurant is open in the winter. Grocery stores and other places to eat are a minimum 30 minute drive. If we want to eat well, I have to cook a lot.

Real life friends and Instagram friends have told me that they find the recipes I share helpful. One particular friend suggested I should create a service where I send suggested menus for the week. Alas, I’m not that organized, but also I find those kind of emails can be more overwhelming than helpful. Pretty soon you start ignoring them.

So, I’ll send a few recipes of things you might like to try because I liked them. I am just your friend who likes to cook giving you some ideas when you’re out of them.

And while we are here, I’m going to share share some writing. I’ve been working on a novel since 2018. In between raising kids, working, moving, family loss and a little pandemic you may have heard of, it has been hard. Really hard. No one asked me to write it, but I’ve come this far I can’t turn back.

Writing is like a muscle. You know when you haven’t exercised in a while and you know you need to but you don’t want to because you know it will suck and you know you’ll be sore for days? It’s like that. If I don’t write a little, I don’t write at all. So, I’m using this like my writing gym. I have to train to get to the finish line. I have to stay in a writing space to keep the momentum going.

Think of this like being in my kitchen.

If you were to come over, I’d feed you and we’d tell stories. As you walk to the bathroom or around the house, you might read the poems I have hanging on the fridge and in miscellaneous places. Maybe through this newsletter you’ll find a recipe or a poem that you will want to hang on your own fridge. (The inspiration for my logo.)

Here’s the food part

Future updates will not have all that intro stuff at the top. I read a lot of food blogs and 95% of the time I click “jump to recipe”. Just give me the damn recipe. In future newsletters recipe links will be first. You can skip the rest if you want. I also promise these are things I actually have cooked and eaten myself.

Recipe recommendations will be organized by the following categories:

1. Easy/Attainable Dinner or Lunch

Might take 30 minutes. Might take longer if there’s a lot of chopping and making of sauces.

2. Treats

Self explanatory.

3. Ignore Your Other Responsibilities

I waste a lot of time messing around in the kitchen. Sometimes if I have the time, I put on a podcast and cook something ridiculous that has so many steps it makes a big mess and I regret my decision because I don’t have dinner done before 8 p.m. But, with the recipes I’ll share here, the food was worth it.

About 2-3 recipes for each category feels right for now. This is meant to be just a source of ideas for you, not to overwhelm you.

Other info

I “organize” most recipes in the Plan to Eat app. I say organize loosely because there are many features I don’t use. I primarily use it for the ability to forward a recipe from a website and add it to a calendar instead of printing out or bookmarking a bunch of recipes I never go back to. It is what I have been looking for for years.

Since the store is 30 minutes away I often have to make-do with what I have. If you’re a by-the-book recipe follower maybe this will give you inspiration to experiment.

Just show me the damn recipes!

Dinner or Lunch

Feta Eggs

In honor of my friend who suggested I make a meal plan newsletter, this is a viral recipe you may have heard of. We made this together one cold winter night and immediately were obsessed. This takes scrambled eggs for dinner to the next level. On a corn tortilla is my preferred way to eat it. Feta can be really salty so don’t go too crazy. Add avocado if you have one.

Potsticker Stir Fry

Pictured below. I never thought about using potstickers in a stir fry! It is kind of brilliant because it simplifies the meat+noodle or rice aspect of a stir fry dinner. Use whatever veggies you have. Potstickers were from Trader Joe’s which is 2 1/2 hours away. Yep, you read that right.

Creamy Red Pepper Pasta with Blistered Tomatoes

If you’ve never tried a cashew cream sauce, this is a great intro to it. Cashew cream is the foundation of “vegan cheese” which might scare some of you away. But, hear me out, if you don’t think of it as cheese and enjoy it just for what it is, it is delicious and versatile. This recipe was my gateway drug into cashew cream.

I had some sad looking grape tomatoes and this was the perfect way to use them up. The whole thing came together in about 20 minutes - the pasta and tomatoes cooked while I blended the sauce. That’s it. Add a simple salad for greens.

Treats

Tahini Chocolate Date Granola

Is granola a treat? It is now. The tahini in this one gives it a nice subtle nuttiness. Granola is so stupidly expensive yet very easy to make. Down with Big Granola. Spices in My DNA is another of my favorite food bloggers. I highly recommend her cookbook.

Ina's Morning Glory Muffins

It was teacher appreciation week and this was my contribution. These have a whole cup of oil in them which made them delicious, but I did not have a can of pineapple so I used frozen pineapple and added applesauce. I probably should have reduced the oil by the amount of applesauce I added because they ran over the edges a bit and that’s a lot of oil. I added some wheat germ on top because everyone needs more fiber.

Make a batch of muffins on the weekend and you’ll be happy at breakfast during the week. Or, as Ina says, store bought is fine!

Strawberry White Chocolate Cookies

The comments on these had me ready to never bake another cookie again. They were really good, but I don’t know why people lost their minds over them. A nice change from the usual cookies.

Ignore Your Responsibilities

Salmon and Lentil Salad with Soft Boiled Eggs and Herbs

I think about this one often. Seriously, I dream of it like an old crush. It’s not a difficult recipe but there are a lot of steps. You could strategize and do some work ahead.

Caramelized Onion Gallete

Caramelized onions take for-ev-er. But, if you love them you just do it. I made the crust the day before with the strawberry cookies and some chocolate chip cookies. I almost cooked the gallete dough as cookies before I realized they didn’t look right. 🤦‍♀️ Watch the bake time because I think it’s too long.

I made the gallete and cookies because Sarah Kilch Gaffney came to town to lead a workshop on Writing Through Grief. We ate lunch on the porch, which is ambitious for late April in Maine, but the sun was out and you take it as soon as you can here.

I met Sarah at a writing retreat last year. She was in the memoir group and I was in the fiction group, but somehow we ended up sitting next to each other and soon realized she grew up in the tiny town where I’m living. They say Maine is like a big small town and in the few years I’ve been living here I believe it to be true.

Sarah lost her first husband to cancer at an unfairly young age and writes about grief as well as hosts writing workshops. Her newsletter is another inspiration for this one. We were supposed to talk about the business of writing when we had lunch, but we found too many other things to talk about.

After a year of some big grief events I used my power as the literary chair of the town arts association to invite her to speak. We discovered a group of neighbors who also had things to grieve. It was a nice small group of us eating cookies and writing together at our local bookstore.

Here’s a Poem

Recently, I told my husband that eating scrambled eggs for dinner feels romantic to me. He thought I meant sexy-romantic and didn’t get it, but that’s not what I meant. Here’s what I meant. Now he gets it.

The Romance of Scrambled Eggs for Dinner

The fridge is bare but for
a few eggs and salad greens

I want to offer you more 
but today 
I have given everything to everyone 
but me

There is not much left 

You open a bottle of wine
and sing a line from the theme
of a show we watched decades ago
I roll my eyes but smile
while I stir
and watch 
the golden yellow
and white combine
into pillows of warm comfort

And we relax into the 
creamy soft romance 
of scrambled eggs for dinner

                                                                       - Casey Bernard

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.

I welcome your food questions and writing prompts.