Posted on

“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.

Posted on

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.)

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.

Posted on

bread and circus

bread

Photo credit: Alex Van Buren 

It’s been—ack!—almost a year since I’ve posted here, which attests to the state of the world, my reluctance to write without pay, and my desire to revamp this site powered by WordPress as soon as humanly possible.

I’ve been busy in the best of ways; for a couple of fun months last summer, I served as digital strategist and temporary deputy editor for Panna Cooking. I got my analytics fix and revved up their social media voice, running a little editorial department while their EIC was overseas. It was a blast, as they’re good people doing good work.

I also wrote a ton of articles (164, Google?!) for Travel and Leisure, a few for Epicurious, Real Simple, and The Food Network, and ghost-wrote a cookbook for Phaidon. I picked up some neat new clients, among them The Daily Beast and The Kitchn, which has started to ramp up its long-form in the coolest way.

Lastly, I’ve been writing a cooking column for MyRecipes. Smart staffers from Bon Appétit have wended their way Birmingham-wards, and are making correspondingly smart changes to the site. (And I adore my editor, Darcy Lenz.) You can check out one of any number of oddball short pieces I’ve written here, from the power of baking a gateway loaf of bread to my mother’s thoughts on stretching a food dollar to how to prepare unattractive winter vegetables.

These have not been an easy few months, world-wise. I find myself sleeping uneasily.

But although there’s not a ton I can do to change international affairs right this second, I picked up my head from the laptop this Friday afternoon to see that the sun is shining and people are smiling on the streets of Brooklyn. A little boy is eating a folded slice while the cheese slops on to the sidewalk, in the style of this fantastic town.

I’m planning a trip to Paris. I made a few new wonderful friends this last year in New Orleans, Nashville, and Raleigh. Things are generally rad.

Here is the recipe for the bread pictured above. It’s a good one. And here is my recipe for spring: you, rosé, and a bag stuffed with olives, bread, cheese, and a blanket. Find the nearest green space. Pack your shades. Summon friends. Lie down. Shut off your phone. You can do it. Turn the newspaper into a pillow, for an hour. Self-soothing: It matters.

Is it your birthday? Good for you. Listen to “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes. No? “Israelites,” by Desmond Dekker. The whole album. It’ll help, I promise.

Hang in there, you. Hang in there, 2017. You got this.

Posted on

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.”

Posted on

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 Times, The Washington Post, Gourmet, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, InStyle, Bon Appétit, Salon, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Men’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!