On June 19, 2020, I started building a spreadsheet. At the time—can you remember the feeling—real world reporting held considerable danger. So I retreated to archives to stave off boredom and chase a particular line of inquiry. I was curious if I could map Mexican immigration patterns across the Southern United States by analyzing Southern Living’s Annual Recipes cookbooks.

For a few months, in dark times, I thought it might be possible. Starting in the late ’60s, Southern Living almost exclusively published reader recipes. Starting in 1979, the magazine produced an annual cookbook with all the recipes from a single year. Flipping through the cookbooks page by, I collected data on all Mexican, Tex-Mex, and Latin-ish recipes from 1979 to 1996. (Remember how much I love spreadsheets.) I noted the recipe’s author, their city and state, and if they had a Hispanic last name. I wanted to see if the timing of the first Mexican recipes from readers in, say, Georgia or Arkansas or Tennessee corresponded in any way with regional Mexican immigration.

Ha!

Reader, I did not find patterns. I could not, at least not without devoting years to the effort, perhaps enrolling in grad school, and writing a masters thesis on the topic.

But before I realized my folly, I documented 878 recipes, including Easy Turkey Empanadas (with olives, fajita seasoning, and refrigerated pie dough, oh my!), Hot Melon Salsa, and Crab Tostadas. I witnessed the emergence of flour tortillas as an early 90s convenience food. I found the anniversary dates for the margarita machine and Caesar salad, which helped me sell future stories to Garden & Gun and The Washington Post, respectively. In parsing the data, I also noticed that Carol Barclay of Portland, Texas, had contributed 14 recipes to Southern Living, more than any other person on my spreadsheet.

I had a feeling Carol would make a great story. I sniffed around the internet and found that she had published recipes in The Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Her repertoire ranged from bulgogi and kimchi to Mexican casserole and German-style baked fish fillets with sauerkraut, caraway, and cream cheese. I found her number on Whitepages. I called and left a message on an answering machine. I never heard back.

I couldn’t quite shake Carole. Every once in a while I’d think of her and, in a morbid ritual, I’d search for an obituary. Late last year, I looked again and found one. Carol died in December 2024 at 86 years old. Her obituary included these lines: “Perhaps Carol is best known for her love of cooking. She had many recipes published in several publications including Southern Living Magazine.”

The magazine had been part of Carol’s identity. That’s something I understood. I came from a Southern Living household. Even as a kid, I obsessed over the architectural plans for its model homes. My mom clipped gardening tips and recipes from its pages. I remember sitting on the couch in our living room, reading recipes, and earmarking dishes I wanted to try. Once I figured out I wanted to write about food, I assumed that I would work in the Southern Living test kitchen in Birmingham.

I interviewed for a coveted summer internship but did not get it. It broke my heart and helped push me to move to New York City—out of the South completely. I cannot imagine my life without that consequential rejection. Here I am, writing to you as a Southerner in exile.

At last, with Carol, I felt like I had something to bring to Southern Living again. This April, I pitched her story as a window into the heyday of reader recipes and a generation of women who shaped how the South ate. I got the assignment, Southern Living sent PDFs of its back issues, and I found that Carol had 40 recipes published in the magazine from 1983 to 2001. I spoke with her daughter Beth, who was still mourning her mama; she had dispersed Carol’s cookbook collection among friends but still had a bag of her homemade apricot bars in the freezer. She couldn’t bear to throw them out.

Beth and I talked and talked about Carol, and I pieced together the life of a mother, Marine wife, spitfire, Southern lady, and superb cook. I hosted a party for friends and served Carol’s Congealed Gazpacho Salad with Avocado Cream (so refreshing), Texas Firecrackers (a tasty pain in the ass), Margarita Cheesecake (a salty-sweet delight), and Chile Rellenos Egg Rolls (pure trashy bliss).

Six years after starting a Quixotic spreadsheet, Carol’s story (and her Margarita Cheesecake) made the cover of September’s Southern Living. Even better, the magazine used her profile to announce that all of its vintage recipes are available online with a special subscription.

Carol understood the potency of the Southern Living brand and the women who defined it. I think she’d be pleased.

You can find recipes for Carol’s Chicken Enchiladas with Tomatillo Salsa, Margarita Cheesecake, and Texas Firecrackers here.

Please, go buy a September issue to read all about this special lady.

The bowl of strawberries at Rossli did not change my opinion of the hike, even if the hike made me relish it more. On the morning of July 8, a forager delivered Fragaria vesca, Alpine strawberries no bigger than a fingernail, to the restaurant in Feutersoey. That evening—after a meal of Simmental cattle tartare and trout meuniere—our server brought us the fruit topped with a dainty quenelle of vanilla ice cream. I could fit 15 berries to a spoon, and the whole effect was like eating strawberries as cereal. I’m embarrassed to say Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries came to mind. The strawberries were so potent and sweet they could have been manufactured in a lab. But they were not. They were grown in a field, buzzing with pollen-drunk bees, on a sun-drenched hill in the Swiss Alps, a near cliché for pastoral beauty.

Before dinner, my husband and I had trekked up and down the picturesque slopes above Feutersoey. William does not like to hike. You should see his histrionics when confronted by a single bee. He prefers the chlorinated water of a pool to the depths of a lake. He does not trust me when I hand him a left or wild berry to eat.

On vacation, we balance our competing urges to flee from and wallow in the outdoors by staying in very nice hotels, often in the countryside, ideally situated near some wild body of water. He watches me from the shore with a book in hand. I dangle my legs in a pool.

I make William hike at least once, just for just a few hours. But because we hike so seldomly, we are rarely prepared and often overwhelmed. On one of our first dates, 20-ish years ago, we hiked Brasstown Bald in Georgia with one water bottle between us and no jackets for when the weather turned cold. Upstate New York, we started a hike too late in the afternoon and had to turn around after two hours—without the satisfaction of a summit—to beat sunset. A few years ago, we hiked Minyon Falls near Byron Bay, Australia in rubber Birkenstocks. The 8.5-kilometer trail included a rock scramble and unavoidable mud slicks. My ankle siezed.

On a trip to Switzerland earlier this month, we consulted our hotel concierge about a hike to one of the glacial lakes near Gstaad. He suggested Arnensee. It’s easy, he said, an hour and a half to the lake, an hour to walk around it, and an hour back. What about the heat, I asked. It’s a walk in the woods, he said. It’s shaded. Plus, we’d be able to see the region’s Simmental cows, who had retreated to the mountains for the summer. I had also read that locals pick strawberries along the trail in July and August. Sold.

So we departed with optimism. We parked in front of a bramble of ripe raspberries, a promising sign. Then we immediately ascended up a clearly marked and very steep trail. We were winded in the first five minutes. The trail continued to rise through the woods and then onto a farm road in full sun. We heard the tinkle of bells inside a barn. It was too hot outside even for the cows.

After walking a half hour, we reached a sign that said we had an hour and a half more to the lake. Ha! We felt duped but pressed on. If the concierge told us it would be an easy hike, surely we would meet a level path. But the unknown put us both in a cranky mood.

I, at least, had plants to entertain me. I drew a lungful of air perfumed with fresh cut hay. Next to a rocky stream, I snagged what I thought was a stalk of rhubarb but was a doppelgänger, butterbur, a plant whose leaves were traditionally used to wrap butter in summer. Stubby blueberry bushes grew under the canopy of Swiss pine and offered a handful of early season fruit.

Then there were the strawberries, little red jewels flashing from the roadside. They tasted like strawberry jam whose flavor had been concentrated in the sun. They were so ripe I was sure they’d be ruined by evening. I took a few here and there, at their literal and ephemeral peak, to sustain my wonder.

We eventually arrived at the Arnensee, and she was beautiful—turquoise and lined with soft white clay formed from a mass of ancient sea creatures. Trout scooted along the lake’s edge. The water was cool, ideal for a swim. I dived in. William stood knee deep. We sat on a towel and passed a half bottle of Gamay back and forth. We felt somewhat accomplished, if humbled. We rested.

Our return home was mostly downhill, a relief until my right knee started yelling with every step. I woke the next morning to find my glutes and lower back turned to stone. After a full spa day, a Swiss back release massage, two weeks, and two acupuncture appointments later, I have mostly recovered. The hike was indeed hard, according to the internet, which we should have consulted. We walked close to 9 miles with an elevation gain of 2,604 feet. We had the right footwear and enough water this time (and Gamay!), but apparently I have to start stretching before and after mountain hikes.

Oh, and we could have driven to the lake. We probably should have. But we wouldn’t have found the strawberries, I said, or fully appreciated the luxury of eating them by the spoonful at Rossli. But for the strawberries, William conceded.

Last week, I was just so pleased to have an essay published in Gloria. If you haven’t read it, I make a case for reclaiming hag. It’s a word I’ve identified with for a long time and that’s become even more resonant as I enter middle age with a body in decay but a life—and personal style—in prime time.

I wrote in the essay that hags aren’t “victims of the algorithm, nor do they worship the false god of youth.” And yet, yet!, this week, this hag found herself riled up by boys of the internet. While doom-scrolling Instagram, I learned the word hiplet, a term incels have coined to describe women with hip dips. I didn’t know what hip dips were either, but boy I got ’em. It’s when your body curves inward between your hip and upper thigh. In another era, we may have referred to hip dips as saddlebags. Mine are so prominent you could ski jump off the slope.

They’re a wonder, these thunder thighs. Now I have a name for how they curve. It’s strange to behold a body with new perspective, with a new vocabulary to describe it. It’s like, how could I have lived in oblivion with something so intimate as my own flesh and bones? But it’s something that’s happened to me, again and again, since childhood.

This whole hiplet nonsense reminded me of times when my perception of body has changed and those moments after which I could never unsee some feature good, bad, or neutral.

Weight. I was 8 or 9 and beanpole thin. My mom came back from a doctor’s appointment, and I overheard her complaining that she weighed 138 pounds. Girl. She needed to lose weight, she told someone on the phone. I sat on the white laminate counter of my bathroom, looked in the mirror and pinched what I thought was excess belly fat but was definitely SKIN. Sorry to out you Cindy, but before that day I don’t think I had considered weight as a value. I’m still working through that one.

Ears. Look at little Ron Howard in a pink tutu. It’s me! I got that pixie cut at 5, and I loved it. The cut, however, had a serious flaw. It exposed my ears, and I had not yet grown into them. The boys called me Dumbo. To be fair, my ears were large. They stuck out too. Even my grandfather teased me and told me he’d pay for plastic surgery to pin them back to my head. But eventually I realized why my ears appeared so large. They don’t have a proper fold at the top like yours, which gives me an extra ⅛ inch of untucked ear that I now find ideal for styling a bob.

Bowlegs. Thanks, Shane Whatever-Your-Last-Name-Is-I-Don’t-Remember, for pointing out that my legs bowed at the knees. I had never considered their curvature. For at least a year in middle school, I tried to squeeze my calves together in a vain effort to correct my bone structure. It didn’t work!

Curly hair: I have curly hair that I keratin into submission. It’s a form of control. I know I know I know. But for the first 16 years of my life I didn’t realize I had curly hair. It’s still wild to me. Every morning, I blew my hair dry, brushed it out into a puffy mass, and sprayed on hairspray as a prayer against humidity. Then one spring break, I emerged from the ocean and didn’t immediately futz with my wet hair. It must have had the perfect alchemy of oil and salt, and when it dried, it formed into perfect curls. I had curly hair. And, wow, that was super helpful information.

Hips and ass: In between my junior and senior years of high school, I went away to nerd camp, Georgia’s Governor’s Honors Program. It was the longest I’d ever been away from home and my mom’s cooking. At least five days a week for six weeks I ate biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Throw in fries, ice cream, and pizza at lunch. I gained 12 pounds. I had to buy all new pants. This was devastating. I could only see the weight. But upon returning to school, one of my classmates looked at me and said: Damn, girl, you done grown into a woman. And that’s the day I learned I had hips and an ass.

Cleft chin: I have my father’s hands, feet, and jawline. But I mostly look like my mom: height, pear shape, hair, eyes, smile. That’s probably why I never noticed the little cleft in my chin, not until my late 20s. I was in the living room of my parents’ house looking at a portrait of them. It’s not a particularly artful representation, painted by a great aunt who overemphasized the cleft in Tom’s chin. I had never noticed the detail. Reflexively, I touched my chin and felt a wee valley, a cleft, on my own face. Who knew?

Hernia: During the pandemic, my body softened into a marshmallow. I tried not to look too hard or critically upon it. I told myself, this time will pass. I will return to the gym and dance classes and firm my belly and glutes once more. In the meantime, I got an MRI of my abdomen for my garbage kidneys. When the results came back, they held a surprise diagnosis: a fatty umbilical hernia. WTF? Other than that being the cruelest phrase I’d ever read, I had not noticed any conspicuous bulges in my middle. But sure enough, I went to a mirror, lifted my shirt, and there it was creeping into my previously perfect belly button, peeking its head out like a prairie dog. I will fix this one. I promise. I just need to find six weeks to be still.

Hip dips: Yesterday, I queried my trainer about hip dips, and he had never heard of them either. None of his clients have come to him asking for a smoothing fix (though there are plastic surgeons who offer to fill hip dips with hyaluronic acid). Hiplets = mostly an internet moment of rage baiting and trolling. Apparently, the incels are upset that women prefer tall men, so they arbitrarily picked a body part to disparage online (BTW, men have hip dips too). It’s an absurd and nasty algorithmic vortex dependent on our attention to survive. I’m sorry I dragged you into it, and I’m going to step out of it now, newly enlightened about the widest part of my body and comforted that I am safe from incel desire.

My apartment smells like mangoes, a ripe and tropical perfume. In certain, unexpected moments—as I write an essay, read a book on the couch, or eat a lunch of sole meunier—the aroma of mango overpowers my consciousness. It demands my attention.

My husband and I lived in Miami for three years, and I joked for a long time that the only thing I missed were the mangoes. And it was always partially true.

As Americans go, I come from mango people. My great-grandmother Addie lived on a farm in Palm Beach County and grew mangoes in her yard. In summer, she made mango pan dowdy and mango cake, and she shipped boxes of the fruit to my mother in Georgia. My grandma Joanne didn’t have her own mango trees, but her neighbors did. The fruit would hang from slim stems over the fence she shared with a ne’er-do-well named Dwight; we took those mangoes after they fell to the ground, before the ants and rot came for them. Another neighbor, Jerry, picked mangoes from his trees and placed them on his front porch for passersby to collect. “Free mangoes,” he wrote on a cardboard sign. Jerry is a saint.

My friend Alexis lives in Wellington, and this summer her back yard trees have produced 853 mangoes. This is not a farm. She lives in a planned community in a home with a slim lot and five mango trees—one each Haden, Kent, and Francis, plus two unknown varieties—that she inherited from the previous owner. Those trees are a miracle in suburban South Florida. They produce a sticky, messy, wild abundance in defiance of HOA bylaws. Mangoes are the reward of natives, the people who stay put for summer heat and humidity.

Alexis mailed a mess of mangoes to me in Manhattan. The few fruits that bruised in transit went into banana-mango smoothies that rivaled Robert Is Here. IYKYK. The rest, we ate greedily for breakfast every morning until they were gone. Each fruit had a slightly different texture, sweetness, and aroma—some subtly piney and others a little coconut-y. This is the height of luxury, having a mango friend, receiving her gift, slitting open a box, and breathing in the first feral gush of summer.

Bonus fruit content.

Three weeks ago tiny strawberries arrived at Norwich Meadows farm stand, which signals the beginning—finally!—of fruit season in New York City. We’ve since infused a bottle of Fernet with strawberries for post-dinner digestifs. Blueberries will be great soon. Peaches and nectarines need until mid-July. Currants are having a moment.

Once a year, I buy two big boxes of sour cherries and make this crumble from NYT Cooking. It’s so good that in May our favorite panhandler, Maryanne from Citarella, reminded me that she wanted her annual a bowl of it. It’s a perfect dessert, assuming you can catch the two to three week cherry season. All it needs is a little scoop of Haagen Dazs vanilla.

Five years ago, I took May off, kind of. I filed one small assignment at the beginning of the month and decided not to pitch another story until June. I went out to lunch each week with my friend Sean. I read books. I let myself fall into archival rabbit holes. I stalked editors and studied publications. I made a breakthrough with research on what would become my first long form story. I found the seed of my first national news story. I interviewed ’90s country icon Vince Gill. It was a luxurious and magical time of tending my writing garden.

Then the next month, I got an editing job with Plate (RIP). Then for four busy years, I helped produce a print magazine. I wrote for the restaurant industry. I squeezed in all the freelance assignments I could. I WAS HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE! As the writing life goes, I MADE MONEY! Still, every spring I pined for the feeling of that slow month of rest and creative renewal.

It’s finally happening again. I finished an enormous project this April. I traveled in May. At the beginning of June, I wrapped edits on a signature Caroline piece. (You know the sort: older women, Southern culture, casseroles and congealed salads, labor, etc.)

So I’m giving myself the gift of a quiet-ish June, work-wise at least. Last week, I attended a talk on Pope Leo’s AI encyclical. I went to Coney Island with Sean, where we took down a Nathan’s hot dog each, rode the Coney Tower and Steeplechase rides (screaming like children), and visited the New York Aquarium (where we saw nurse sharks in repose, giant Japanese crabs, and stunning, backlit men-o-war). We ate an early dinner at Randazzo’s Clam Bar. And now I get it. Their fried calamari, smothered with hot tomato sauce is a singular culinary treasure.

This week, I hosted an Icelandic hot dog party (so many hot dogs). I started re-reading a 600-page, 200-year-old Italian novel. I bought too much rhubarb at the farmers market and made rhubarb compote, rhubarb syrup for cocktails, a superb rhubarb tres leches cake, and chicken tagine with rhubarb. I’m tending to an actual garden. Did you see those okra seedlings!?

I visited my Batsheva Hag sweater in the Met, where it’s part of the current Costume Art exhibition. OK, it’s not my sweater, but I have the same one! (So many exclamation marks today, forgive me.) Hag in all its meanings really appeals to me and the way I want to present my aging body to the world. And, apparently, Batsheva’s radical reclamation of hag is good enough for the Met. Icon.

I’m also wading through lists of old and half-cooked ideas and trying to figure out how to turn them into stories. I’m figuring out what I want to write for pleasure vs. what’s a Substack post vs. what do I try to sell. I’m taking a few big swings with pitches, many of which will be rejected. But I have enough optimism, at the moment at least, to keep swinging.

I have been on a traveling spree. L.A. in February. Paris in April. Puerto Rico in early May (to dig up iguana nests)! Iceland last week with my nephew Bert.

Though the tradition is still young, I plan on taking my godchildren—all six of ’em, one by one—on a big trip between middle and high school. It’s an awkward, delightfully corruptible age. Bert had proposed a helicopter hog hunting excursion in Texas, and I countered with fishing in Iceland. I knew I’d never visit Iceland with my husband, who prefers poolside comforts and art galleries to the outdoors, so I took a mostly charming 14 year old with whom I now share inside jokes about a doll named Larsson.

We did all the things: waterfalls, hikes, a lagoon spa day, Norse history. We watched a puffin in flight and went spelunking in a lava tunnel. From a gal who grew up on the flat and piney coastal plain of Georgia and who lives adjacent to the river of traffic that is 6th Avenue in New York City, here are a few of moments of wonder from a foreign land.

The Dish: Svartfugl

Yes, I ate an Icelandic hot dog, seven of them in fact, sometimes two in a day. Bert and I developed criteria by which we judged the country’s lamb-beef-pork pylsur. We evaluated snap, bun and onion ratios, and saucing, and gave bonus points for flare. Hot dogs are essential eating on the island.

However, I ate a single svartfugl, and in my lifetime there may never be another. I spotted the speckled turquoise eggs in a market the day we arrived in Reykjavik. In spring, foragers descend sea cliffs by rope to collect the eggs from the nests of the common murre, thick-billed murre, and other seabird species. The eggs’ conical shape prevents them from rolling from their rocky nests into the ocean. On the final night of the trip, we dined at Þrír Frakkar, whose chef happened to receive his first-of-the-season svartfugls that morning (oh, destiny!). The restaurant served them simply, soft-boiled with a little bowl of flaky sea salt on the side. The yolk was an amber custard that tasted of seaweed and ocean, of place. It was a perfect and decadent wild food.

Best Bangs: Icelandic Horses

Iceland’s original parliament, the Althingi, banned the importation of horses in 982 A.D., so there’s a single breed on the island, the hearty, somewhat diminutive Icelandic. I had not been on horse since the cattle drive in January and booked a ride at the Skálakot Manor Hotel and horse farm. I rode a sassy mare named Hilda across glacial creeks and to a waterfall. With coaching from our guide, I coaxed her into a tölt, a fifth gait that’s as fast a trot but incredibly smooth. Also: after stuffing my hair under a beanie for days, I found myself envious of the herd’s best-in-class bangs.

Who Knew: Cervidae Penises

My visit to the Icelandic Phallological Museum was a tad rushed. My travel companion had reluctantly consented to the visit but could not yet fully appreciate the world’s only dedicated penis museum. But, oh my, in our speed walk through the space, I encountered a sperm whale penis almost as tall as me, Icelandic horse penises, an elephant penis, molds of human penises, hooked boar penises, and the most delightful assortment of cervidae penises. Side by side cylinders held the penises of elk, red deer, white-tailed deer, and roe deer, illustrating the penile diversity of the cervidae family. As phalluses go, I’d rather be a red deer than a roe.

The Cover Up: Wooly Fringe Moss

We drove five hours from Reykjavik along the southern coast of Iceland, and for miles and miles at a time we passed through lava fields in varying states of aging. In June 1783, the Laki volcano erupted, spewing 42 billion tons of basalt lava for eight months. Plumes of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen fluoride killed 80 percent of the country’s sheep and 20 percent of Iceland’s human population. The sulfur dioxide dropped global temperatures by 1°C, triggering an extreme volcanic winter (and possibly the French Revolution).

We stood atop rocks in the Eldhraun lava field, Laki’s lasting monument, now blanketed with a shag rug of wooly fringe moss, plush and cool to the touch with the occasional cluster of tiny white flowers poking through. The moss softened the landscape and shrouded its violent past.

Can’t Unsee It: Glacier Freeze

We hiked Falljökull, an outlet of the Vatnajökull glacier. With crampons, we crunched through ice the texture of a hardened snow cone. We stepped over rivulets as they formed in the morning sun, delivering water from the largest glacier in Iceland—in Europe—to the sea. Ice axes in hand, we steadied ourselves, pierced the glacier, and ascended its slopes. This was the moment I traveled for. Standing atop that mass of ice, I felt the immensity of climate change and history, and the raw natural beauty of it all smacked me in the heart.

Far less profoundly, I noticed that glacial ice, at its densest, is the color of Gatorade Glacier Freeze. And I could not unsee it. Compressed over a hundred or more years, glacial ice absorbs all colors except for blue, which it scatters, and which is why I saw turquoise peaking out from below the thin and crunchy layer of ice on the glacier’s surface. It’s also why, in the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon, where large hunks of ice break off each day and serve as day beds for seals, I felt as if I were floating on the headwaters of the world’s electrolyte supply.

Fishing for Idiots: Cod

Bert and I fly fished the tiny Lake Villingavatn an hour outside of Reykjavik. More accurately, Bert fished. After 20 minutes of tangled lines and poor wrist work, our guide mercifully cast for me the rest of the day. I simply waited for the fish to strike and bumbled from there. I reeled in a single slippery brown trout and lost two more hooked fish—at least one of which was a whopper. Otherwise, for eight hours, I scanned the water for rising fish. I listened to bird calls and rain drops. I felt the wind shift and watched flies descend on the lake. It was quiet and calming with just enough of an adrenaline rush to make me want to take lessons back home.

But, baby, let me tell you about cod. We also took a sea angling tour from the Reykjavik harbor. After a 20 minute boat ride and one-minute tutorial, I dropped my line in the water and, bam, cod. It felt as if the captain had steered us to a stocked pond. They just kept biting. Twice I reeled in two fish at once, a cod and smaller haddock with big mournful eyes. A deckhand filleted the fish, tossing their carcasses to a flock of seagulls, and then baked/steamed them in aluminum pans set in a grill. We feasted on the fruits of our unskilled labor on the ride back to the docks. Cod never tasted so good.

Readers, I abandoned you this winter. Life has been hectic. I have written a book(!), a history of Atlanta in collaboration with the Bitter Southerner and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (it will be stunning and you will get all the details soon). Joanne died. I flew back and forth from New York City to Palm Beach and then to Los Angeles for Charlotte’s birthday (because that’s what aunties do). William and I bought an apartment.

Mostly, though, I researched and wrote for six to eight hours a day, plus a few hours on weekends. And there was no creative reserve left for Cream of Caroline. No cream!

But now I am finished.

Last Friday I flew to Paris with a single restaurant reservation and no plans save for visiting friends: my fabulous Adrien, plus Australian adventurers Jules, Dale, and bébé Oscar, who were finishing an epic five-week parental leave holiday in Paris (socialism ain’t so bad). I ate escargots and white asparagus. I drank champagne at Bar Vendôme. I sat in the sunshine in parks. I went to mass at Notre Dame. I stopped to smell lilacs in bloom. I bought a colorblock vintage bolero and yellow ballet flats. I walked an average of 21,613 steps a day. I cried and cackled. I slurped up the beauty I had been missing for months while I stared at a laptop.

I also purchased a membership to Grand Palais so I could get into the sold-out, blockbuster Matisse exhibition, which focused on the last 13 years of the artist’s life. There was plenty of the Matisse I knew: the cut-outs, dancing forms, and color-saturated interiors. But in this season, after stepping back from a monumental project, I absorbed the work, the process and progress, the edits.

I watched a video of Matisse making paper cut-outs with scissors, and his fluid, intuitive movements—his eyes locked on the camera rather than his handiwork—reminded me of once watching Michel Bras shave carrots and asparagus for Gargouillou. It also reminded me of the golden narrative nuggets I get free-form writing exercises. “You cannot imagine how much, in the cut-outs period, the sensation of flying that was unleashed in me helped me to refine the motion of my hand when it guided the path of my scissors,” Matisse said.

I saw the final mock-up of Matisse’s La Gerbe, a ceramic mural that lived poolside at a Los Angeles home before being donated to LACMA. Matisse presented several iterations of the mural before his patrons, Sidney and Frances Brody, accepted the design. Even Matisse, even near his death, had buyers to answer to.

Somehow, I had missed that Matisse designed a chapel in Vence, Chapelle du Rosaire, as a complete ecosystem with stained glass windows, minimalist saints drawn in black and white, and vestments accented with cut-outs of fish, coral, and palm fronds. “This work has taken me four years of exclusive and diligent work, and it is the result of my entire working life,” Matisse said of the project. “Despite all its imperfections I consider it to be my masterpiece.”

Early in the exhibition, the museum displayed series of charcoal drawings, studies of that mapped the progression of a work. Matisse liked to show a subject’s various angles, glances, and moods alongside his final shaded drawings. He wanted to demonstrate to his viewers the effort it took to execute abstract figures. These charcoals did not light up my beauty synapses, but what a joy to see Matisse’s edits, to watch his studies snap together, to contemplate what he chose to withhold and share and shade.

Later that afternoon, sitting at a cafe off Canal Saint-Martin and drinking my second Americano, I scribbled down the beginning of a new book, in fact two versions, both of which I’ll chase this week. Both of which I’m sure I’ll eventually trash.

I’m looking forward to the work.

Joanne—my grandmother and loving antagonist—died last Thursday morning. The night before, my mother and sister slept in recliners in her hospital room so she would not be alone. I stayed up to write the first draft of her obituary. 919 words in three hours. I dropped in TKTKs for dates and details I didn’t know.

Before that, when Joanne could no longer talk and her breath sounded like Rice Krispies, I asked my mom and uncles and cousins about their favorite Joanne memories. I typed their answers on my laptop while sitting at the foot of her bed. As I left Joanne for the last time, and hoping she could hear me, I kissed her forehead and told her she had one more chance to be nice before I wrote her obituary.

The day before that, Joanne still had some of zing. As I lifted a straw to her mouth so she could drink, I made a joke about vaginal dryness. She rolled her eyes. Among our shared traits, nobody ever called us sweet. I also started listening to interviews with her that I recorded back in November. I picked out character-defining moments and sparkly details that would cement her life in time and place. I wanted people to know that she smelled like Oil of Olay. I wanted to remember that she smelled like Oil of Olay.

Obituaries don’t get written in one night. 919 words in three hours. Journalists compile files on the fabulous and famous for years. Sometime last summer, The Atlantic served me an article on Facebook: The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families but Should. Anthropologist Elizabeth Keaton wrote a book, The Essential Questions, to help her students and lay people interview their elders. “Whole ways of life were passing away unknown,” she said. “A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.”

I fancy myself as a solid interviewer, but I bought the book anyway and packed it for a trip to Delray Beach. Over the course of three days, Joanne and I got about halfway through its contents. She mostly failed at answering woo-woo, introspective questions, at least to my satisfaction.

Can you remember a moment when you first became conscious of who you are as a person, and thought this is who I am? “I’ve never felt that way. I always knew I was.”

Did having children change your identity? If so, in what ways? “I hope not.”

But listening to her stories, for the first time, I could see her childhood bedroom and the maple tree outside her window. I was a fly on the wall as her family ate dinner with a few ragtag workers from a nearby Civilian Conservation Core camp. I saw her at 12 in the moment she first realized polio had paralyzed her legs. She was in a hospital gown, crumbled on the floor. I saw my grandmother.

I did not interview Joanne solely for obituary research, but I knew I had good material. My family added extra color. Where did her nickname, Taters, come from? My granddaddy. Four-plus decades after my birth, my mom was still grateful for the nights Joanne stayed up to rock and soothe bébé Caroline back to sleep. Joanne did not wear make-up, except, my sister reminded me, a fuchsia lip. What dishes did her children love? Fried grouper. They could see her at the stove, scooping filets from the oil into a paper bag.

I process the world through writing stories. I rarely know how I feel about a piece or subject until I get through the last few paragraphs. What a gift to write Joanne’s obituary, to have started processing her death while I could still get a few questions in.

Before last week, I had not contemplated how much polio still haunted Joanne—although she’d probably deny it. My God, she spent six months of her life in a polio ward, isolated from her family. Joanne couldn’t touch her mother’s hand. We are burying her in a prayer bracelet for her youngest great-granddaughter, who has spent much of her life in a hospital. Among our clan, only Joanne knew what it felt like to be a sick and scared child. In her last week, too, Joanne’s legs started to fail for the second time in her life. I can’t imagine how frightening that must have been.

For a long time, too, I thought that her big lesson for me was to see the world, suck the marrow, use my body. Since March 2020, Joanne rarely left her home. She passed the day sitting in a cream leather recliner from which she watched birds at her feeder and television at night. She hunched over her phone playing word games. She stopped cooking—COVID robbed her of taste—and started eating frozen dinners. She did not read smart books. This was incredibly frustrating for me. I wanted her to go to lunch and mass. She should have traveled to see her great-grandchildren. Someone would have driven her.

But now, after listening and writing, I think in her stillness she had enough. I’m sure she was lonely at times, but birds at the feeder were enough. Beholding orchids in bloom was enough, beating the idiots on Wheel of Fortune her joy. Gathering her family around her and that damned recliner was all she wanted, and in that, Joanne showed me I am enough.

And that is going to take more time for me to process.

My uncle Lee and I officially rode the Great Florida Cattle Drive—40-plus miles from Yeehaw Junction to Okeechobee, through prairie and the headwaters of the Everglades. We arrived at the Okeechobee Cattlemen’s Arena last Sunday, greeted by family and well-wishers and trailing a few hundred cows. I cried a little as we clip-clopped down the final stretch on U.S. 441.

My arrival was not assured. Within the first 15 minutes of the ride, I saw a thoroughbred buck a man to the earth. For two nights, I shivered so violently that I did not sleep. Surprise! Mother nature delivered freezing weather to South Florida at precisely the moment I was tent camping with a sleeping bag graded for 50°F. (Thank you to my fellow Rust riders who donated jackets, blankets, and hand warmers.)

I had only ridden a horse once, for two hours, in 20 years. Readers, I did not hold my reins correctly for the first hour. Holly, my leased horse, could smell the unnerved amateur on her back and revolted in turn. Other riders gave welcomed advice on my form, and as the days progressed, Holly and I relaxed. I think sharing the crusts of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made her love me a little more too.

I will eventually write a big ole essay about the ride and what it meant to connect to my history. For a while now, I have been a little resentful of growing up disconnected from family land and cracker stories and rites, of having to double back to track down my place in the world. The only tangible thread of pioneer Florida I knew was food—frog legs, fish fries, swamp cabbage, whole hogs. But after driving cattle (OK, following professional cowboys who drove cattle) for six days in Florida’s in-between-the-coasts backcountry, I think I better understand why one might raise a daughter to become a Manhattan-dwelling writer instead of a whip-crackin’ roper. The Florida cowboy life, to quote my cousin Christine, “ain’t for sissies.”

There were a few precious moments of the ride when I felt powerful-bordering-on-badass. Holly and I most certainly prevented a cow from escaping the herd. It took one look at us through the palmettoes and skedaddled back to his kind. (Holly will verify this. Just ask her.) I stopped a loose horse from running wild through camp. I became an expert hobbler. I picked up cow patties and flung them over a fence so I could make camp. Clad in a heavy duty yellow slicker, I rode Holly through a mighty South Florida downpour. My body and back survived hauling water, feed, and hay.

I am not saddle sore, but I am humbled.

I’m breaking in a pair of cowboy boots in Coconut Grove by walking to Chug’s Diner to eat a chicken salad plate in the sunshine and escorting Reggie to Blanche Park to tussle with neighborhood dogs.

William and I have been in Miami for 21 days. I have been mostly holed up in a hotel room writing writing writing with little breaks to explore Matheson Hammock and Kampong botanical garden. I have eaten at Sunny’s, Ghee, Tinta y Cafe, Happy Wine, Recoveco, ViceVersa, Macchialina, Walrus Rodeo, Double Luck, El Palacio de los Jugos, Francesco Martucci, etc. (Let me know if you want my recs.) And I have waited until the last possible moment to break in these boots. They’re nothing fancy, a working pair of Ariats. When I slip my foot down the leather shaft, there’s still that moment of tension at the instep, when I have to jam my foot through and I fear I’ll never be able to wiggle it free.

I need the boots for The Great Florida Cattle Drive. Starting on Sunday, I will join a few hundred cowboys and wannabes, and we will drive 600 head of cattle across the South Florida prairie on horseback. Why? Because my great-grandfather Aaron was a Florida cracker cow hunter, and I love to throw my body into the unknown for a good story.

On day one, we’re scheduled to ride for eight hours. I’m gonna tent camp for five nights. I’m not sure about showering, but I pray my hair holds up for my grand trot into the Okeechobee County Cattlemen’s Arena on January 31st. (Also, dear Lord, don’t let my slipped discs revolt.)

I roped my uncle Lee, who once worked as a cowboy, into this adventure. We will dress up in Western wear. We have matching vintage Stetsons. I bought a yellow slicker in case of rain, and I’ll be tying a red bandana around my neck to go with a trio snap button shirts.

I’m excited—if not quite ready—for the challenge. I’m eager to slam my laptop shut, re-wild myself, re-learn to ride a horse, gather around a campfire with strangers (hi, it’s me, I’m an extrovert), and get a little closer to the marrow of my family’s history in the state. I will do my best to post real-time pictures and videos (my unofficial marketing manager, Meg, says I must).

But if you’ll forgive me, I must go. I have another 2,000 words to write before Friday EOD and a stiff pair of boots that needs breaking.

My great-grandmother Addie’s cedar chest spent the first 60-ish years of its existence in a farm house in Pahokee, Florida, with just a concrete wall separating it from sugarcane fields and avocado trees. The first week of the first October the chest spent in New York City, its veneer split and peeled in protest of my building’s moisture-thieving, desert-manufacturing, furniture-desiccating boiler system.

The chest has been restored. Its fibers have since adjusted to Northeastern winters. But I have never lived through another cold season in the city without a humidifier. In autumn, as soon as I hear the clink-clanking and hissing of pipes, I unbox the units and spend the next six months pouring water into their holding tanks. Where does it go? My pothos and aloe plants, baseboards, skin, cabinetry, and parquet floors hoard whatever molecule of water they can snatch from the air. There are two humidifiers running in my apartment right now, maintained by a wonderful neighbor (thank you, Qinying!), while William and I are in Miami.

This morning, it’s 68°F and 91 percent humidity. I let my hair air dry overnight, and it is therefore hiding beneath a ball cap. In high school, when I threatened to apply to the University of Miami, my mother warned that my hair would be horrible for four years. Oh, what delicious manipulation. I went to the University of Georgia instead (and still had bad hair!). But she was mostly right. When William and I moved to Miami for him to attend law school, I wore a mass of loose, fickle, unruly curls. I couldn’t afford a Keratin treatment to tame them, and the tropical climate egged them on.

But it’s January in Miami, not oppressive August. This is not the fevered, sweaty atmosphere of a Tennessee Williams play. Nor Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, where the air is “damp that fish could have come in through doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms.” My bangs are fluffy but not embarrassing. There’s just enough steam to smooth the wrinkles from a cotton dress hanging from a rack. I can feel a constant, light, most pleasant brushstroke of moisture under my sleeves, on my forehead, beneath my underwire bra.

I also wake in the morning a little sweaty, my armpits smelling like celery juice. Dog treats and leftover Christmas Chex Mix have lost their crunch. Yeast rapidly colonized Reggie’s ears, which required a visit to the vet on Monday.

Still, I think I’m a body meant for humidity, for drinking iced tea from sweating glasses and letting my nose cheekbones glow with oil.

We’re staying at the Mayfair House Hotel, whose rooms surround an atrium open to the sky and filled with monstera plants. Morning rain collects in interior copper gutters and falls to the mezzanine floor. The doors to my balcony are open. The air conditioning is turned off. Sitting in my room most of the day, writing, I imagine myself as an air plant latched to an oak, an iguana sunning in mangroves. Until the end of the month, I’m an orchid spritzed.

I have officially finished Christmas shopping. Have you? After a marathon stocking stuffer hunt last weekend, I re-holstered my credit card and sent wrapping instructions to my niece, who’s attending to packages I mailed to Georgia. So when I read Rachel Syme’s gift guide in The New Yorker, Treasures That Are Old, or Old at Heart, I thought, “Damn, Rachel, why didn’t you have posted this in October so I could have bought my sister an antique candle snuffer or gone looking for a vintage fan for Sean?”

I am not immune to the algorithm and have a new, easy-to-clean humidifier to prove it. But I much prefer buying old things with stories and ghosts, possessions possessed. I thrill at finding pieces through happenstance, whether it’s for a friend or me me me. In that spirit, and to remind myself that I have everything in the world I need, I decided to shop my own home and bring you my top secondhand finds of 2025. Just for the fun of it, in no particular order:

Victorian-era Scottish Brooch

Last fall, while strolling Milan’s Navigli neighborhood, a button popped off my favorite vintage St. John sweater. I bought the navy knit number at Dina C’s Fab & Funky in West Palm Beach and wore it whenever I wanted to look elegant or indulge in a little Upper East Side cosplay. For months, in vain, I tried to find a replacement button. Then I gave up. Typically, I’d throw on something conspicuously off-kilter (for example, I have a vintage Saks cream blazer with a nacho pin in place of another lost button), but I didn’t want to defile the St. John.

Spring passed. Fall passed, and I still hadn’t worn her. In early December, an hour before I was scheduled to arrive at a Christmas party, I walked to Tudor Rose Antiques to find a button alternative. The owner pinned gold mizpah hearts in the button’s place. We tried big gold coins and 90s clip-on earrings. Then I affixed a Scottish agate and citrine brooch to the sweater. It added a discrete pop up color and looked as if St. John had produced a capsule collection with a Victorian-era jeweler. Reader, it was perfect. The brooch was the first thing people commented on when I walked into that party, and I rather like the idea that my original button—surely lying in a Milanese dump—is connected in some way to a Scottish artisan, a Palm Beach doyenne, and a Greenwich Avenue shopkeeper.

‘90s Moschino Goose Dress

I bought this dress in May at Aloe&Wolf in Siena. The goose is the mascot for Contrada dell’Oca, a Siena neighborhood with the winningest record in the annual Il Palio horse race. Wandering through the medieval town, with only aesthetic context, I decided I would root for team l’Oca. William pulled the dress from a rack, my body fit into it, and I couldn’t bear to leave my designer Italian sports jersey in Siena. To boot, Contrada dell’Oca won its 68th Il Palio in July. Huzzah!

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Diane Keaton’s Clown Paintings

I’m really into clowns. Do you know that about me yet? While descending down a clown rabbit hole this summer, I found out that, in 2002, Diane Keaton published a book of 60 amateur clown paintings. My style icon, RIP, nursed a clown obsession and wrangled commentary from the likes Martin Short and Larry David. This is the jewel of my coffee table. Come visit and flip through its pages.

Rooster Weathervane Cocktail Glasses

William and I spent the first two weeks of the year in Los Angeles, and with the Palisades Fire roaring, we did not dine out and explore as we normally would. We ordered Thai take-out and drank freezer martinis in our Airbnb. Luckily, the wine store down the block sold vintage barware, and we picked up these silly cocktail glasses as a creature comfort and souvenir.

Jimi Hendrix and Me Sarcastic? Never? Tees

The great tragedy of my middle-aged life is that I cannot power walk to good health. I have to lift weights, and I must enlist a trainer. Ugh. I belong to a fancy gym, where the ladies wear matching ALO and the boys are in all black. My wardrobe is my only form of resistance in this obnoxiously serious space . So I wear the tackiest t-shirts I can find. My all-time favorite is a cut-off Duke’s mayo shirt (take that power lifters!), but this year I added two ridiculous tops to my rotation: a purple tie-dyed Jimi Hendrix tee (thanks, Aunt Carrie) and a black number with tragic font and a bad joke.

A Bag, Refinished

I’m not a bag person, but in 2015-ish, I sprung for an MCM work bag. It dragged it all over the country for four years. It rode on the subway. It held sloppy lunches. I absolutely murdered it and then retired it to a dusty corner of my closet. This fall, I took it to the Waverly Leather & Luggage, and those miracle workers moisturized her, dyed her, and restored her youth. They promise she’ll look great through 2030.

In mid-September I gathered a blend of chiles from the farmers market—aji gold, aji dulce, Fresno, fiesta cayenne, jalapeño, habanero, and, new to me, wrinkled Rezha Macedonian. I placed them in a sturdy crock with a sliced onion and a few garlic cloves and covered the chiles with a 3 percent salt brine. I waited. Last Sunday, nearly two months later, I scooped the contents into a pot, simmered them ever so briefly, and puréed the chiles with a splash of brine and a ¼ cup toasted pumpkin seeds to thicken.

Making hot sauce is one of my favorite rituals. I don’t remember exactly when I started to make it, maybe 2017 or 2018. In the first few batches, I rushed the fermentation. My initial salt ratio was closer to 6 percent. Yikes. Still, it tasted like exactly the kind of condiment I wanted to deposit on eggs, greens, mac and cheese, cottage cheese, tacos, beans, wings, you name it. I made massive quantities in 2020, a year in which I cooked all but one meal a week. We chugged through hot sauce in pandemic times. If we could taste its lightly cheesy-fruity funk, we knew we were safe.

My hot sauce is thick, more like a salsa in texture. I do not cut it with vinegar. Rather, I build up as much acid as I can through lactic fermentation. It’s the same process that produces sauerkraut, kimchi, and genuine half sour pickles. Salt creates an ideal ecosystem for lactic bacteria and certain yeasts to thrive, and as long as you keep out mold and less desirable organisms, it works without much effort or supervision. There are fermentation experts who obsess over details like salt types, temperatures, and bacterial strains. Not me. I enjoy not knowing exactly how one batch to the next will perform.

In hot years, thick sheets of bubbling yeast have caused my crock to burp up an intense vomit aroma. Two years ago, the bacterial growth and acidity were decidedly lackluster. But in 2025, baby, we had an ideally gentle fermentation, minimal yeast build-up, and maximum sour. The chile blend, which also varies year to year, is aggressively hot but not scorching, and I was patient enough with my ancient Vitamix to get a smooth emulsion.

It’s a small, superior vintage, perhaps my best ever, and I suspect it’s because I lowered my salt ratio. I read some chef’s Instagram post, probably from Apteka in Pittsburgh, about being bold and achieving real depth of flavor with minimal salt. I’m glad I took heed. I also tapped my neighbor’s filtered water for the brine. I’ve stubbornly used tap water all these years, and damn if lactobacillus aren’t MAHA purists with a distaste for chlorine and fluoride. Whatever. I will give them what they want from now on.

For the nerds among you, I’m sure you clocked that when I simmer the chiles I’m killing the gut-healthy bacteria produced by fermentation. It’s true. But the first year I made hot sauce, I went raw. After six months in the fridge, I shook a bottle one night and twisted off the cap. I heard a hiss, and hot sauce shot 10 feet from my kitchen to our living room. The ceiling was splattered orange. I found flecks of dried, crusted hot sauce in my home for weeks. So now I do a wimpy, imprecise pasteurization that murders most—but not all—the bacteria and yeast. The hot sauce still must be stored in the fridge, like the living, temperamental queen she is.

I ferment. I learn. I wait until chile season, and I adjust. Next year, I’m dropping the salt to 2.5 percent.

Before I had the chance to see my vegetable drawer full to gagging with the leaves, William confessed. “I think I bought too much kale.”

This is not his first offense. I have asked for a few carrots and gotten a dozen. I once reminded William not to buy a melon, because we had a perfectly good one yet uncracked, and received two more … two days before we left for vacation.

All I wanted was a kale salad, but in my failure to clearly define “a bunch,” William delivered an assignment for a kale project. The kale demanded creativity energy. So last night, I begrudgingly massaged miso and soy into kale leaves and baked kale chips for the first time in a decade. I hunted online for dinner ideas and simmered this perfectly fine salmon curry, subbing kale for the spinach and adding liberal pinch of hate.

Still, still, there’s an unmolested bunch of kale in my fridge. I do not need recipe recommendations. I do not want to pesto it, braise it, soup it, salad it, sautée it, look at it, eat it, waste it, think about it. Before William left for work this morning—with a container of kale chips tucked into his bag—I asked if he would consent to me slapping him with the remaining bunch. Gently. He declined, told me he loved me, and slipped away to Midtown.

My mother tells me I read too deeply into just about everything. But my kale angst feels rather adjacent to, perhaps concurrent with, my annual end-of-year-holiday-season agita. I can handle one bunch, easy baby, but my fridge—my life—is too full from Thanksgiving through the end of the year. It’s cliché, but I suspect you feel it too. Gifts to buy, reporting trips to plan, parties where I will surely drink too much, $$$ flights and rental cars to book, daily training for Reggie so he will willingly lie down in his travel bag at the airport so we don’t have to hold it vertically like a trash can and force him inside with dozens of people in the Delta lounge watching (and please Lord, not filming).

I have seasonal projects on projects, and, meanwhile, I am trying my best to attend to real, delicious, juicy not-kale projects. To write for you and slurp up joy. At night, I light a D.S & Durga Portable Christmas Tree candle next to the nativity scene that my niece Camille arranged last week. I am making more plans with people I love so much it would crush me not to see them. And, when it’s all too much, I threaten to assault my husband with a bunch of kale that I should probably throw into the compost.

Please enjoy Camille’s nativity scene complete with an iguana, an armadillo, a Colima dog, St. Francis of Assisi, a tarantula, a mosquito, a black panther with a glued on tail, a lucky cat, and one of her early school photos, among other treasures.

Normally, I’d be in a tizzy by now. My ideal Thanksgiving straddles traditional and fussy. I have tied chives around bundles of blanched carrot batons that I warm in the oven with brown butter and finish with carrot top salsa verde. My ultimate side is the 15-ingredient Rancho Gordo bean and wild rice Thanksgiving salad. I set my table with china, delicate stemware, and mismatched antique silver. I iron linen napkins. For me, effort, technique, and expensive ingredients are essential to holiday meal making. Otherwise the food gives weeknight dinner with more mouths to feed. Call me a snob! I will not deny it.

But for Thanksgiving 2025, I have offered up elegance for sanity. I bought paper napkins decorated with turkeys. After a high-wire negotiation with my husband William, we will be using dishwasher safe plates instead of china or, his pick, disposables.

“Embrace the chaos.” That’s what I’ve been telling William in the weeks leading up to the meal. In our small apartment with table seating for five, we are hosting four goddaughters, an honorary godson, and two friends from college and their husbands. Nine guests, plus the cook and her dishwasher/bartender. Until I used my veto power, William passive aggressively insisted on calling a restaurant for an 11-top. No, sir.

Still, I did not want to devote days to cooking for adventurous adults, a gluten free child, a nugget of a human who only eats her vegetables raw, and a kindergartener who’s not really into protein right now. I bow down to parents with enough patience and care to cater to their children’s dietary whims. But I’m not a mother. I’m a childless aunt, and I do not care what the kids eat as long as they are safe and consume enough calories to avoid a blood sugar crash. I will indoctrinate them into the cult of the obnoxious gourmand at a later date.

So out with turkey and in with a chaos take-out menu. We are eating a whole suckling pig, wontons, and stir-fried green beans from Wu’s Wonton King. I ordered saag paneer and black lentils from Bhatti, Rice Krispy Treats from Treat House (they look like a nightmare but I’m assured the kids will love them), and a marvelous carrot cake from Hani’s. I bought a can of cranberry sauce (aka ribbed jelly) because my friend does not eat homemade whole-berry. While the little ones are freezing on a New York City sidewalk and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I will prepare mashed potatoes and arroz imperial and drink from a magnum of Taittinger.

I’m excited about it. Genuinely. It feels like I’ve invited myself to a slightly deranged Thanksgiving potluck. If it works, you’re all invited next year.

A few weeks ago, a collaborator on a project (I cannot wait to tell you about) emailed me: “How do you feel about spreadsheets?”

How do I feel? Like my best self when I can sort data within ideally arranged cells. Spreadsheets impose order onto chaos. They fuel my most excessive reporting. They are my Virgo love language. Truly. Yesterday, I spent three hours, 46 minutes, and 54 seconds organizing data in Excel and Google Sheets. I FEEL ALIVE.

I started using shared Google Sheets for project management in 2011. For eight years, I worked on a small team, with an even smaller budget, that produced a culinary symposium—and an accompanying 350-page book—between July and late September. Event planners, marketers, and my editorial team filled in cell after magical cell until every recipe and bio had been submitted and edited. We knew what logos needed to appear on each sign and at what time a photographer would capture a Vitamix moment on the main stage. By August, I dreamed of sorting and resorting and finalizing the book tab.

It’s a little sick. I admit. But many days, in that job, spreadsheets felt like the only thing I could control. (Shout out to all my brilliant coworkers who lived with me in all those master Google docs.)

Naturally, when I started freelancing in 2019, I organized my editor contacts, story ideas, pitch progress, and file dates in a spreadsheet. And soon enough, spreadsheets became one of my favorite reporting tools.

In summer 2021, I was driving around rural Florida, listening to the radio, and heard two country songs that mentioned strawberry wine. Huh, I thought, that’s weird. Were the artists using the phrase as a cheap rhyme or possibly a throwback reference to Deana Carter’s country classic “Strawberry Wine,” whose recording was approaching its silver anniversary? I started logging every strawberry wine reference I could find in song lyrics, the earliest of which came from Johnny Burnett’s “Your 16” from 1960. I found 107 songs, many of which are pure trash, and plotted them in a spreadsheet. For Garden & Gun, I wrote about Deana Carter and how the meaning of strawberry wine has changed over time, most notably, after her 1996 hit. I interviewed Carter, Vince Gill, and Elizabeth Cook. What a dream of a story, powered by spreadsheets, baby!

L.A. writer Eve Babitz doesn’t get the credit she deserves as a food writer. Here’s Eve on a tuna melt:

“Just then something stupid arrived, the tuna melt, which was on the divine grilled rye bread (Victor’s rye bread costs seven dollars a loaf, so you know it’s too good for you), and the onions were grilled beyond dreams of gluttony, the tuna was fluffy, the Swiss cheese on top melted like a dream, and it was altogether a promise fulfilled.”

And Eve on a Look! bar:

“We went to the hot-dog stand at noon and both got our daily rations of snowcones (mine, pineapple—hers cherry) and frozen Look bars, which we shattered against the counter in their wrappers and ate the splintered pieces which were heaven—nougat so sweet and reluctant and coated with chocolate.

After Eve died, I reread her complete works and documented every food reference I found. I could have written a thesis about pleasure, womanhood, and eating, but the piece I could actually sell was a très short (but well-paid ) travel story for Town & Country.

I’ve mentioned this story before (because it’s one of my favorites), but for a Washington Post piece about casserole obituaries, I built a spreadsheet with data on 431 casserole devotees who died between March 2020 and December 2021. I included details on the dead’s signature casserole, their gender, and hometown. For two months, I’d spend an hour a night reading obituaries and transferring my notes to Google Sheets. The large data set helped me process and develop the story of an older generation of casserole cooks, many of whom died of Covid. (I also finally understood why I had to take statistics in college.)

I used spreadsheets to report on the 2025 James Beard Awards. In the last few years, a greater share of chefs with casual restaurants have won the honor, and I wanted to know how/if fine-dining would be relevant at the awards. So, yes, I added all the semifinalists and finalists to a document and categorized each one to the best of my ability. The day after the ceremony, a simple sort revealed that fine-dining still had an outsized grip on the chef awards. Thanks to a spreadsheet, I could provide quick-turnaround analysis (rather than rah-rah event coverage) for Robb Report, my home for fine-dining stories.

Indulge me for one more spreadsheet story. Please.

I grew up in rural Georgia, and my hometown got its first Mexican restaurant in the early 1990s. Now, taquerias and Mexican joints have surpassed good ole Southern restaurants in quality and popularity. When the world was shut down in 2020 and freelance assignments were scarce, I decided I wanted to trace the dispersion of Mexican food enthusiasm in the South through Southern Living and its annual cookbook. I had soooo much time, why not flip page by page, document Mexican and Mexican-adjacent recipes, who submitted them to the magazine, where that home cook lived, etc. I cataloged 878 recipes from 1979 to 1996.

Reader, I did not write a story about the dispersion of Mexican food enthusiasm in the South, a subject I will leave to a historian or Mexican food scholar. She was too big a spreadsheet for me to tame into a single coherent idea. But through that work, I first clocked the anniversaries of the margarita machine and Caesar salad, both of which yielded stories.

I also discovered a Southern Living super contributor, Carol Barclay of Portland, Texas, who published 14 of Mexican-adjacent recipes in the magazine (and likely more recipes in other genres). I tried to reach Carol. I dreamed of traveling to Portland to cook with her. She represented an era of unsung, unpaid, amateur recipe developers who preceded our own generation of food influencers. Sure, Carol’s tamale soup might be a little problematic, but she was no slave to the algorithm.

As I was researching this post, I Googled Carol one last time and found out she died last December. Southern Living made it into her obituary. If there’s an editor out there who still wants a Carol story, I would LOVE to tell it. I still have the receipts squirreled away in a beautifully organized, scrupulously filled spreadsheet.

Good afternoon from somewhere over Virginia. I’m writing as I fly home from a reporting trip to South Florida.

In 10 days, I have eaten Key West pink shrimp, stone crabs (twice!), snowy grouper, speckled perch, drum, kingfish, and catfish from a convenience store. I witnessed roe and silver mullet being hauled out of Pine Island creeks with a cast net, and there’s smoked mullet dip from The Fisherman’s Daughter on ice in my checked luggage. In the last three days, I have consumed so much of that iconic fish (fried, smoked, blackened, grilled, taco-ed, and baked with mayonnaise and parmesan) that I suspect you’ll read a story about mullet, and the last of its fishermen, in the near future.

The first week of the trip, I stayed in Delray with Joanne, my 90-year-old grandma. We went to bed before 9 p.m., woke before 6 a.m., and watched lots of and Jeopardy (I excelled in a Bougie Shoes category). I took beach walks in mushy sand until my calves screamed and dunked in the ocean before a cold front hit the state. I also started interviewing Joanne with the help of The Essential Questions, a book by anthropologist Elizabeth Keating. Over the course of a few days, Joanne told me stories about climbing trees in her childhood and the months she spent in West Palm Beach polio ward. She remembered her daddy finding skulls in vegetable fields decades after a deadly 1928 hurricane scattered and buried bodies near Lake Okeechobee. (The storm was the source material for Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.) I will resume my inquiries when I see her at Christmas.

Last Wednesday, I traveled to Joanne’s hometown of Belle Glade to attend my first Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission meeting, where I found out that Florida has lost 80 to 90 percent of its oyster reefs, there are record numbers of Red snapper off Florida’s Atlantic Coast, and because of the pollution that flows south from Lake Okeechobee, the Miccosukee tribal government recommends its people eat just one fish per month from the Everglades.

I also spent a day in Miami, trying to pry the secrets of sos pwa and legume from the cooks at Naomi’s Garden, a Haitian steam table restaurant that would win any meat-and-three-lover’s heart. My Haitian food vocabulary is incrementally growing thanks to chef translators like Gregory Gourdet and the women of Naomi’s, who patiently answered my questions while they attended to 40-quart pots, peeled Cambros full of chayote, and shooed the occasional feral chicken from the dish pit. I can’t wait for you to read more about Naomi’s in The Local Palate when my story runs early next year.

A few months ago, I discovered The Great Florida Cattle Drive, an 80-mile trail ride in which real cowboys and lots more wannabe cowboys drive some 450 cows across the peninsula. My great-grandfather was a cow hunter/cattleman, and I convinced my Uncle Lee to sign up with me for five days of tent camping and maybe not showering. Ha! The ride isn’t until late January, but this week I bought snap-button shirts, cowboy boots, and a giant yellow slicker at Eli’s Western Wear in Okeechobee. (Period dress or Western wear is required.) And to reacquaint myself (and my middle-aged body) with horses, I went on a trail ride with Kelli, my first-ever friend. It’s possible neither of us had ridden a horse since our senior year of high school when we galloped down a black sand beach in Costa Rica. Though less exotic, the Florida backcountry provided for scenery stout sabal palms, grazing cows, and ancient oak trees hairy with wild orchids and resurrection ferns. I’m happy to report my back and butt fared better than anticipated, except when my horse Romeo broke into a jarring trot.

For one hot month in 2025, Buffalo chicken dip was as inescapable as it was inexplicable. Everyone knew its lush warmth except, apparently, this snob.

I am a great lover of all things creamy, but I had never heard of Buffalo chicken dip, let alone considered combining chicken, cream cheese, ranch or sour cream, hot sauce, and cheese and baking it ‘til bubbly. Consider me educated. I made my first batch last week for a Halloween party and didn’t bring home leftovers.

But I wasn’t content to merely enjoy the dish. I needed to figure out how the hell Buffalo chicken dip emerged into the American culinary cannon.

The oldest reference I can find is from 1995 at Mick’s, an Atlanta restaurant mini-chain that made its way to Miami. Here’s a Miami Herald critic encountering the dip for the first time.

“Another Mick’s Original, the Buffalo Chicken Dip ($4.75), was quite interesting. It’s a thick, bubbling cauldron of cheese, with chunks of chicken breast mixed in, plus gobs of blue cheese and the occasional deposit of chicken wing sauce. It’s Buffalo-style chicken wings as if packaged for the astronauts in one handy unit, although logistically a large quantity of tortilla chips is needed to shovel the mess into your mouth.”

Perhaps more telling is a 2001 profile of Steve Ream, a Heinz R&D chef, in the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette.

“It’s 10 o’clock in the morning, and Steve Ream, research chef at H.J. Heinz Co. on the North Side, is cooking up a batch of spicy Buffalo chicken dip.”

Buffalo chicken dip most certainly belongs to the family of American foods developed, or at least heavily promoted, by food conglomerates. Among them: green bean casserole, chocolate chip cookies, Rice Krispies treats, Rotel dip, and sausage balls. What better way to sell hot sauce than tell cooks to dump a ½ cup into an appetizer?

What better way to repackage wet-nap-required Buffalo wings and their creamy dressing into a tidy yet decadent party food? I can’t think of one.

One of a Million Buffalo Chicken Dips on the Internet

INGREDIENTS

2 to 3 cups chicken diced

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

8 ounces sour cream

¼ teaspoon garlic powder

¼ teaspoon onion powder

⅓ cup hot sauce, such as Frank’s or Crystal

¼ cup crumbled blue cheese

¾ cup shredded cheddar cheese

Tortilla chips and celery sticks for serving

METHOD

Heat oven to 375°F. In a large bowl, combine chicken, cream cheese, sour cream, garlic and onion powders, hot sauce, blue cheese, ½ cup cheddar cheese. Pour mixture into a 9-inch x 11-inch baking dish, top with remaining cheddar, and bake 30 minutes, or until dip is bubbling in the center.

A few recipe notes: Lots of folks use canned chicken, but I prefer to trash up the poached breasts of a locally sourced bird. I am who I am. A critical mass of dip recipes call for ranch dressing, but I followed Shilpa Uskokovic’s lead and doctored sour cream with garlic and onion powders. Last, none of the versions I tried this summer included blue cheese, but I really enjoyed the light-handed addition of funk.

Google, by the way, is little help when you’re digging for answers to historical obscurities. ChatGBT wasn’t available back then, but I checked to see what it would tell me now, several years after I gave the world the answer. According to the large language model: “There’s no single firm ‘inventor’ or precise location known — but the dish originated in the pine-forest turpentine/rosin industry region in the Southern United States (Georgia/North Carolina area).”

That’s incorrect, non-human. Rosin potatoes hail from German-American breweries in late 19th century Cincinnati—and mostly likely the Christian Moerlein Brewing Co. I cracked the case with Newspapers.com, a digital archive of American and English newspapers. I had been searching for “rosin potatoes” and “rosin baked potatoes” and “turpentine camp potato,” etc. After reading about colonial turpentine production methods (I will spare you the details), I changed the search term to “pitch potatoes.” Et voila: I got a hit from 1899 in The Buffalo Times.

Those four lines eventually led me to Cincinnati, early lager production, and the menus of political fundraisers. Through the site, I was able to work my way toward a wholly unexpected conclusion, and you can read the complete story in The Bitter Southerner.

Admittedly, sifting through Newspapers.com can be tedious. The words pitch and potatoes appear together in hundreds of entries for early American exports. But as a journalist, it’s such a joy to source a nugget of truth from another journalist who wrote a century before me—our work connected by the thinnest of threads through space and time and the internet.

I’ve also found jewels while sifting through Newspapers.com pages. I got a little obsessed with seven layer salads a few years ago (seriously, why are they so good?!) and wanted to see what era spawned them (the first news hit came from 1970, which meant women were likely assembling them a decade-ish earlier). I was also surprised to see a seven layer salad mentioned in an obituary. Huh, I thought, what other foods do people include in their obituaries? That morbid line of inquiry led to my first Washington Post piece on Pandemic-era casserole obituaries.

I would have never found that story through Google or AI research. Efficiency rarely serves me creatively. On Newspapers.com I get to swim around in triviality, weirdness, and happenstance. Patterns emerge.

I also use the site to add context and history to stories. I confirmed arroz imperial’s post-Cuban-revolution backstory on Newspapers.com. I linked Bible Belt teetotalers with the rise of sweet tea in the South. I tapped the site’s geographical sorting tools to find Florida’s most iconic clam dish and connect Appalachian chestnut recipes with the food traditions of Madeira.

I have searched the site for my grandmother Pat, who died when I was young. I found pictures of her dressed as a clown for school fundraisers. When Disney World banned tent camping, she wrote a snarky letter to the Orlando Sentinel. Pat appears again and again in The Daytona Beach News-Journal as a bus driver, Audubon volunteer, scout troop leader, and event organizer. Nobody would have saved any one of those banal clips, but there are 89 of them on Newspapers.com. As a composite, they tell the story of a mother, community organizer, good mischief maker, and tree hugger—and also part of why I’m a writer enamored with “authentic mountains (not concrete), live animals and people (not computerized robots), real historical places (not replicas), virgin forests (not landscape gardens), and waterfalls, rivers, and streams that have coursed their way for years over rocks smoothed by the centuries (not pumped in cement bedded butters).”

The walls of my apartment are nearly filled up with art. It’s not that hard in 750 square feet, and this week, the team from ILevel installed a photograph of Parween Devi in my bedroom. (Professional art hangers = not fighting with my husband about hanging art. I recommend it). William and I have collected photography for 15 years. We buy for emotional resonance and joy, and adding a portrait to the wall feels like welcoming a new family member.

I’m not a confident art writer, but art informs how I write and aspire to create. So I thought I’d stretch a bit and share three pieces I love and how they’re helping me think about agency, process, and irreverence in storytelling.

Parween Devi

Without knowing anything about Spandita Malik’s practice, I was drawn to the colorful embroidery that borders her photographs. Oooh, I thought, these would be lovely in conversation with his and hers Hassan Hajjaj portraits that hang above our bed.

But the real conversation in Malik’s work takes place between the photographer and her subject, as well as fine art and craft. For her Nā́rī series, which I viewed at Robert Mann this summer, Malik photographed domestic abuse survivors in Rajasthan and Punjab. Her subjects chose where they wanted to be shot; they dressed and posed themselves. Malik printed their portraits on textile and mailed the work to the women, who then embroidered and altered them as they pleased. (You can read more about the series here.)

Parween Devi stands tall and saintlike in her living room beneath a photo of the men in her family, presumably her abuser and his enablers. For strength and sisterhood, she stitched three women in matching green and hot pink saris to flank her. Try us, they dare. Another favorite, Jamila Bhegam, transformed a broken plastic chair into a throne with golden thread. Heena covers her face with a mirror that reflects the viewer. I was gobsmacked by the women’s smart, coded, and elegant embroidery—how they imposed beauty onto darkness and found agency through art.

How might I similarly help sources tell and shape their complicated stories?

Armadillo, Waterproof, Louisiana

I first saw Baldwin Lee’s work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, which I visit on every trip New Orleans. In the 1980s, Lee was a recent transplant to the South, and he spent seven years documenting Black communities and abject poverty with tenderness and humanity. He’d show up in a neighborhood with his 4x5 camera and tripod, knock on doors, and find consenting portraiture subjects. Lee, a student of Walker Evans, shot close to 10,000 images before retiring. Among my favorite pieces from the Ogden show: a photo of children behind a screen door and two boys playing with a make-shift cart.

But the photo I connect with most as a writer is Armadillo. There’s a dead armadillo in the foreground lying belly up on a rural road. Lightning strikes in the distance. It reminds me of those rare moments when a great story surfaces in a flash, when I make a connection between two wild ideas, when I know it’s time to pursue a rabbit hole of a project.

William and I bought the photograph, and I plan to hang it behind my writing desk. But more than kismet or luck or genius, Armadillo represents process and the work it takes to capture brilliance. To get the shot, I learned that Lee stalked the storm. He drove toward it, found the dead armadillo on the road, and set up his hulking camera. Lee waited and, at the appointed moment, bottled lightning. Listen to Lee talk about the photo here.

Les Castors du Roi

On my recent trip to Montreal, I visited The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and saw Kent Monkman’s History Is Painted by the Victors with its monumental and subversive history paintings. I felt the same wide-eyed thrill I experienced the first time I saw a Kehinde Wiley. (It was 2014 at the Frist and Wiley’s Equestrian Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares.)

I immediately texted my friend and stylist Rodrigo Padilla, who knows a lot more about art than me. Did he know Monkman? Rodrigo shot back: “He’s probably the most important queer artist working now.” Aha! The Met recently acquired two of his paintings.

Monkman is a two-spirited, Indigenous artist whose alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, often appears in their work wearing Louboutins and painting naked cowboys, military men, and fur trappers. He layers irreverence and dark humor onto bleak histories. He reorders the colonial cosmos with erections and mythical beasts.

I’ve been beaver obsessed since reading Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, and Monkman’s Les Castors du Roi depicts the keystone species praying the rosary, ascending to heaven, with blood squirting from knife wounds, staring down certain death, and swimming to short-lived safety. It’s an absurd and furry massacre of the innocents, a commentary on Canada’s early economy and our complicity in evergreen, man-made violence. I was so horrified that I had to laugh. I’m working on an essay now about clowning in our political era, and I can only hope to channel humor as dark, unnerving, and effective as Monkman’s.