If you haven’t been to the High Line yet I highly recommend going. Check out my recently published article in the Huffington Post.

We all know it’s been raining like WHAT??!!, and apparently won’t end anytime soon. While I can’t suggest cures for rain blues and b*tchiness (other than a shot of Whiskey), I can offer up my tricks for the rain: miso, a rain shell with a billed hat (mine is a simple EMS), and giant green rain boots with tiny tennis rackets (yes, that’s right). The shell will keep you dry outdoors, the miso cozy and healthy indoors, and the boots… they let you to stomp around in puddles. These tricks (all three) may make you stick your tongue out. I’m not going to argue style and function with you, but I will speak to the food. Miso, how the Japanese it, and how any who make it at home eat it, is not how you find it at a Westernized sushi restaurant in a US city.

On our surprise visit up to see my dad on Father’s Day we made a trip out to my mother’s garden with scissors and a basket to fill up on greens. The garden is flourishing despite the rain and resulting slug infestation. Even in such a small space (about 4 x 2 parking spaces) there’s still enough bounty that I can take home a week’s worth of lettuce, scapes, chard, kale, and herbs and barely make a dent.

Sometimes cooking sounds like a sentence of being shackled to the kitchen counter in a prom dress and pink pumps, and makes me want to run away screaming and wielding a knife. A food blog gives you a unique sense of time and cooking. I have realized, for instance, that the domesticity of making food currently gives me hives. Before the blog I simply would have shirked the cooking and ordered takeout, four weeks in a row. While I will never be a housewife angel, I also relish the audience and the gift of nourishing others. I love cooking, and learning, and creating, but hate constraints, habit, and tedious tasks. I move fast and need to keep learning. I rarely put things in my mouth I don’t like, regardless of whether it’s food, ideas, or labels. But if I don’t love to cook all the time, how can I expect anyone else to?