“I Just Want to Eat Her Up!” in The New York Times

Illustration for “I Just Want to Eat Her Up!” used with permission from Beth Hoeckel

Well, then. It has been a momentous year. Got married, had a kid, and had my first piece published in The New York Times. 

It’s about why we talk about fetuses and babies as comestibles. Why do we compare a six-week-old fetus to a blueberry, and a 26-week one to a chuck roast? Why do we talk about gnawing on babies’ legs as though they’re fried chicken legs? Where did the cultural taboo on cannibalism go?

I interviewed eight women at the top of their various fields for this one, including a genius anthropologist, a very smart linguist, a professor of food history and a talented psychotherapist. I couldn’t be more pleased with the results, and learned a ton. The article is here, and I’m grateful to you for clicking.

By the by, if you haven’t yet checked out the NYT Parenting hub, it is wonderful, featuring some of my favorite writers, so I hope you check it out as soon as possible.

food, feminism, and freedom

Stilton in Hudson
Eating Stilton and celery while sipping walnut liqueur, as one does in Hudson, New York.

I have another piece live in The Washington Post this week, and somehow the copyeditors let my Dad’s verb “snarfle” slide right into the final copy! The feature, which I believe will be in print tomorrow, is about women, cooking, and freedom. It’s loosely a profile of Tamar Adler, a talented writer and cook whose new book is coming out this spring, but the piece is also about inclusivity and feminism. I so hope you enjoy it, and thanks for reading. (And jeez, make that tipsy cake! It’s so good and so simple.)

thoughts on Southern living

512B68D6-0643-48BC-8260-6C6B8AC93685Biking in Charleston. Credit: Alex Van Buren, Instagram

It’s an often-repeated saying among the women I know: “You should leave New York before it makes you hard. That’s what Nora Ephron said.”

Nora Ephron didn’t say that, nor did Kurt Vonnegut, but it remains solid advice. And I really didn’t think I was one of those. I thought I was pretty chill. I certainly wasn’t that woman on the subway with the sharp elbows, who pinned me in the fleshiest part of my arm for the duration of the ride. Or the guy who double-parks in the bike lane, swings his door wide without looking, and almost nails me as I cruise by on my clunky hybrid. I’m pretty nice—maybe even the nicest one in my whole subway car.

And then I went south. For two months. Two months of the greasiest pulled-pork sandwiches, which I ate alone, in the dark, in the passenger’s seat of my rented Jetta outside of Bullock’s Bar-B-Cue in Durham, North Carolina. Hushpuppies as fat as your fingers, and deep-fried, snug in a paper bag. I ate it all, between two other dinners in Chapel Hill and Raleigh. (“Because who knows when I’ll be back in the South?”) Two months of fried chicken, the best of which came from a gas station in New Orleans. Two months of insistent small talk with strangers, and hugs instead of handshakes for hellos.

This was a challenge for a New Englander. My heritage is all snow, khakis, and icily quiet masses. I am not a hugger of strangers.

It is not, I now realize, that Southerners are necessarily nicer, but they tend (broadly speaking) to go into a situation from a neutral or positive stance—and Northeasterners tend to go in neutral or negative. And everything stems from that: It’s the difference between making friends at the Nashville honky-tonk dive or fighting for stool space at the bar.

The 10 best things I ate in NOLA are here. The 10 best things I ate all over the damn South—in Nashville and NOLA, Charleston and Durham, Atlanta and Raleigh—are here. I gave props to the late Mr. Duncan Hines, America’s O.G. food critic, here. I wrote for Travel + Leisure as I rambled, stopped off at the Charleston Wine + Food Festival, visited beautiful Blackberry Farm, and attended a cool writers’ colony in Sewanee, Tennessee. (I’d snagged a merit scholarship from the Southern Foodways Alliance to work on a book proposal.)

I met some amazing people along the way: The super-sweet baking savant Lisa Donovan, of Nashville. BBQ superstars Sam Jones, Nick Pihakis, and up-and-coming Charleston brisket hotshot John Lewis. Angie Mosier, the talented photographer who met me on a bus full of barbecue nerds and gave me a place to hang my hat in Atlanta a few weeks later.

I’m still tweeting and Instagramming my adventures (which have taken a slightly domestic turn of late, because I missed cooking and just signed a new lease in Crown Heights, Brooklyn). Spring—and its tulips, asparagus, ramps, and farmers’ market mobs—is fully, totally sprung.

It’s a marvelous time to be in New York City, but my reminder to myself of the South—and how I moved a little more slowly, and thoughtfully, there—is now right on my “to do” list. It says, gently, “Don’t try to do too much.”

picnic like you mean it

It’s been a while. And now it’s hot outside. I’m not one of these people who covets salads, tiny berries and buckets of water when it’s hot. I covet ice cream and barbecue, lobster rolls and chicken liver mousse. Weird but true.

To that effect, here’s my favorite picnic sandwich. A twist on the super-simple French classic of meat, butter and baguette, it combines prosciutto di parma, unsalted European butter, and a ramp dressing (minced ramps, olive oil, salt and pepper). Take a whole baguette, lace it with folds of prosciutto, and slather one side with butter and a scallion-or-ramp olive oil mixture (stick to butter if you don’t feel like puréeing scallions). Wrap the whole beastie in wax paper, then foil. Hand out mini wrapped sandwiches at a picnic. Wait for people to ask where you bought it. Laugh.

It’s expensive, sure, for the good prosciutto. But there’s nothing better than this and the Times on a lazy Sunday… unless it’s this, the Times, and a big glass of bourbon mint lemonade.

I’ve been writing for a few great clients lately. I did a piece for InStyle about which I can say nothing until it hits newsstands, wrote some fun marketing copy for Tasting Table (to which everyone should subscribe), and have started working with the lovely folks at Bon Appétit, where I’m a contributing writer. A few of my articles will be popping up there over the coming months.

Oh! And there’s this: Anthony Bourdain, whose life I find so fascinating, was kind enough to chat with me for an epic Grub Street piece—an effort to understand why people who love AB love him So Much.

Happy almost-summer, folks. Eat some salad. Just put cheese on it in case I’m in the vicinity.

here we go, then.

Hi! I’m a Rhode Island–based writer, editor and content strategist specializing in food, drink, travel, culture and parenting. My portfolio, which contains my professional email address, is here. 

My work has appeared in The New York TimesThe Washington Post, Gourmet, New York Magazine, The Daily BeastInStyleBon AppétitSalon, Food & Wine, Real SimpleMen’s Health,  Grub Street, Martha Stewart Living, MyRecipes, and Everyday Food, among other publications. I write and edit cookbooks (Phaidon; Melville House) and advise on content strategy for companies such as Panna, Pylon AI and Food Republic. I’ve been a staff editor at Yahoo Food, a senior research editor for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, the staff food writer for Time Out New York, and an editor at Da Capo Press.

The videos I hosted, wrote and produced for CHOW, which aired 12 times weekly on NY1, were nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award for best Televised Culinary Series in 2012. In 2009 I spent six months as Blog Editor of Slashfood, and co-authored the original edition of Clean Plates NYC, a restaurant guide. I’ve also done some copywriting for companies including Gilt Taste and American Express Custom Publishing. Most recently, I’ve learned that my essay for The New York Times about the language we use to describe and food and babies will be in the 2020 BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING anthology.

I’m on Instagram and Twitter. Here are a few favorite clips:

The New York Times: I was interested in why people talk about babies and fetuses as though they’re edible, so I interviewed a ton of smart academics and wrote “I Just Want to Eat Her Up!

The Washington Post:  A feature on topics close to my heart: cooking, feminism, and personal freedom. (It’s also a profile of the talented writer Tamar Adler.)

The New York Times: I apologized to new parents on behalf of food writers.

Gourmet: Some weekends you catch a film or make a nice bowl of soup, and other weekends you walk 32 miles under the I-5 freeway with a dinner table strapped to your back. (Click here.)

The Washington Post: I was curious as to whether the madly hyped Instant Pot could triumph over my Dutch oven in a side-by-side taste test, so I wrote a lengthy cover feature story for the Food section of this great publication.

The Daily Beast: An Irish family, Long Island, and a one-legged Thanksgiving turkey caper.

CHOW/ NY1: The New York CHOW Report, an (award-nominated!) weekly segment I wrote, hosted and produced for CHOW.com, aired 12 times weekly on NY1 from 2010 through 2011. Check it out!

MyRecipes: I wrote a thrice-weekly home cooking column for this site all through 2017, and had so much fun with it.

The Kitchn: A 2,000-word reported essay on the state of our protein obsession.

Bon Appétit: My many BonAppétit.com pieces include 10 Weekender travel guides to cities including Boston and Seattle.

Salon: How Gourmet was for the young and the scrappy, too.

Yahoo Food: Why we need to cook for the sick and heartbroken.

Grub Street: Easter egg hunting gone wild, the Anthony Bourdain brand, and some thoughts on crack pie.

Time Out: I interview former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl and ask whether her hobbies include the WWF. Sort of. A primer on Gotham’s wonderful ramen, and how to use cocktails to salve holiday woes.

InStyle: My features about Hugh Acheson, Katie Lee Joel, Giada De Laurentiis, Chace Crawford and Blair Underwood are available as PDFs upon request.

Metromix: Oenophile Ron Ciavolino knows more about wine—and life—than you do, and here elaborates.

Contact: If you want to discuss an assignment or full-time opportunity, or simply wish to say hello, please leave a comment (or email grublover AT gee mail dot com). Comments are vetted before posting. (NB: I don’t accept free meals in exchange for coverage, nor do I take press trips.) Thanks!