It’s been a long time since I posted.

Partially this is because I was writing elsewhere; the manuscript for the book I announced in my last post in (*gulp*) January was due at the beginning of June, and aside from the four chapters I wrote for the proposal, I was writing everything from scratch. Though I’d written a full manuscript already, chronicling my experience as my daughter Sammi’s advocate on our strange and perplexing medical odyssey, the COVID-19 pandemic squelched the publishing industry’s appetite for books about illness. Along with the proposal for a book on medical mystery went the entire 75,000+ word manuscript. In its place came a far more optimistic retelling, a story about my ambivalence for food that turned into a deep joy I found in cooking, feeding, and my own appetite. The story arc is the same, but — like in the parable of the blind men and the elephant — I’ve learned to tell it from a different perspective.

Writing the story from the trunk-end of the elephant, as it were, has helped me turn this even more into my own story and less of my daughter’s. Of course, she’s the key to revelation, but now that I have looked back with this lens — that food always held everything I valued, from nourishment to love to awe to compassion to delight — I can’t help seeing every meal I cook as an extension of that journey, the next chapter in the story. Continue Reading…

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