“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.)

new feature in the washington post

washington post instant pot

If you’re a journalist working in food, odds are good that someone has asked you write a piece about the Instant Pot. Thanks to its efficiency, it’s enormously popular, but I felt compelled to find out whether it could make a few of my favorite dishes taste as good. So I did a side-by-side taste test and feature for a newspaper I’ve long admired, The Washington Post. The piece is here, a few of my other clips are here, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see it as the cover story for the food section this week.

Thanks for reading, and if you have questions, please come ask them in an online chat on Weds, January 24th, at noon, right here!

otto’s one-legged turkey

granny pop-pop

I was lucky enough to know all four of my grandparents. Grandpa Van Buren showed up every Christmas as round and rosy-cheeked as Santa Claus, bringing with him a big suitcase full of gifts—sweaters with snowflakes, and sensible things like that—he and Grandma had picked out in Florida. Even into his 80’s, he remembered meeting her, clear as day, when she was a nurse at the hospital where he was a doctor: “Her red hair shone like an angel’s!” He fought in Korea, and they raised eight kids in Flatbush, and then Long Island. Though Grandpa has passed on, grandma is still with us, living in Massachusetts. She is 99. She still looks like an angel.

Granny and Pop-Pop raised my mother first in Queens and then in Long Island, just down the street from the Van Burens. The photo above shows them on their first date, on Central Park South, on May 1, 1936. They were so clearly already smitten, and they went on to marry and raise seven children together. (Our family weddings—teeming with aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ babies, all of whom think they can dance—are no joke.)

My memories of Granny and Pop-Pop are ferociously strong, so I wrote about them—my Granny’s frugality, my Pop-Pop’s pride, and a one-legged, possibly rabid, rather Irish-Catholic turkey—for The Daily Beast this Thanksgiving. I think I edited this piece 33 times on my own before sending it to Noah Rothbaum, who is running one heck of a food and drink page for TDB. I hope you enjoy it, and that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

cat-sized watermelons and other indignities

My last post overstated things. Prosciutto and butter and bread are excellent, yes. But that was then (May), and this is now (July), and the city has an ineffable stickiness that makes you root, root, root for the kids wasting water with the open hydrants (you know it’s wrong, but man is it fun to bike through the spray).

So I’ve been eating my share of squash and blueberries, favas and corn like the rest of the local food crazies. This being my first year in a CSA, I’m gonna crack open the cat-sized watermelon* I just got and turn it into the glorious watermelon-feta salad featured in the August InStyle (the one with Jessica Biel on the cover). It’s a Hugh Acheson recipe, and part of an article on summery Southern cooking by yours truly. All of his recipes are lovely and light, and I’ve been dreaming up riffs on his Pimm’s Cup all summer. Pictured above (right) is Acheson’s fava bean, prosciutto and mint appetizer. It is wonderful.

In less melony news, a bunch of my copy for Bon Appétit is live; I worked on this “Dress for Dinner” project (scroll down) and wrote all the little restaurant reviews. I’ve also been working on guides to various cities in collaboration with Restaurant and Drinks Editor Andrew Knowlton. I’m particularly pleased with the Boston and San Francisco writeups, so please clickety click.

A couple of parting notes: If you are biking, please wear your helmet: I got doored by a car that was illegally parked in a bike lane a couple of months ago, went flying, and was bruised for weeks. I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this if I hadn’t been properly kitted out.

Fellow stone fruit aficionados, don’t miss this article by Mark Bittman. Each approach is so easy: Cherries are simmered in a touch of water and sugar, then maybe topped with mint and crème fraîche (above, left): I am an ice cream fanatic, and I temporarily forgot about ice cream’s existence when I ate these cherries.

Hope you’re having a rad summer.

* We have a large cat. This was a very large melon. It dwarfed her. She seemed indignant. Post title explained.