Six months ago, I thought to myself, "Who am I to start Tableroot?" That will be so embarrassing… to tell people I’m starting a company? Who is she to do that?

And then the other day I caught myself thinking, I can’t believe there was a time I even thought that way.

Now I’m spending my days seeing the company. Seeing the success. Seeing the possibilities before they’ve even happened. Filled with creativity instead of doubt. And I don’t think anything about my circumstances changed in those six months. What changed is I gave myself permission to be ready.

You get back what you put out,

I used to roll my eyes a little at the idea that the energy you put into the world is the energy you get back. It felt like a thing people said on a vision board. But I’ve watched it happen in real time this year, and it’s less mystical than it sounds. It’s just this: when you’re closed off, scared, still telling yourself you’re not allowed to want this yet, you move through the world guarded. You don’t reach out. You don’t say the scary thing out loud. You don’t show up fully. And people can feel that, even if they can’t name it.

But when you’re ready, really ready, you move differently. You say yes to the coffee chat. You post the thing before you’ve talked yourself out of it. You tell all these strangers on the internet that you’re building a food company without worrying about who sees it. And the number of people who show up on the other side of that is honestly unbelievable to me.

I’ve met the most incredible women founders and creators this year. Trading excitement over each other’s products. Figuring out ways to collaborate that didn’t exist three months ago. None of that happens if I’m still hiding behind the version of myself that thought starting a company was embarrassing.

I’ve opened up to so many people, most of them strangers when we started talking, and what I keep noticing is that we’re all trying to do the same thing in our own way. Open the table up for as many women as possible.

The other day I met with Arshi, the founder of Her Story Lab, about the company she’s building. is creating brand films for women founders, artists & creatives. She’s not chasing the big obvious names. Not the Emma Gredes or the Allison Ellsworths of the world, though I love and respect what they’ve built. She’s telling the stories of people like me. Women who are choosing to pivot. Who are taking matters into their own hands mid-career, mid-life, mid-whatever they thought their path was supposed to be. What does that initial window look like? The scary, uncertain, nobody’s-watching-yet part.

Because betting on yourself is one of the scariest things you can do. But I think the more of us who say it out loud, who share what that first leap actually felt like instead of the polished version six months later, the more possible it becomes for the next person. That’s the whole point. It’s not a competition; it’s a table. And tables are better with more chairs pulled up to them.

This is hosting too.

I didn’t expect this to loop back to hosting when I sat down to write it, but of course it does, because everything I think about lives inside that same idea.

Readiness and hosting are the same muscle. Both require you to stop performing a version of yourself you think you’re supposed to be, whether that’s the perfectly optimized founder or the host with the twelve-foot charcuterie board, and instead just show up as you actually are. Imperfect, a little unsure, but present. Both ask you to let something take as long as it takes instead of rushing to look finished. Both are, at their core, an act of generosity toward other people that starts with being generous to yourself first.

You can’t set a beautiful table from a place of scarcity. And you can’t build the life you want from a place of not yet deserving it. At some point, you just have to decide you’re ready, pull out the chair, and sit down as you belong there.

Because you do.

Here’s the secret most people miss with eggplant: you can marinate it ahead. Slice it, toss it in a simple marinade, cover the bowl, and it sits in the fridge for a few hours doing all the work while you set the table, get ready, or even better, do absolutely nothing. Then ten minutes on a hot grill takes eggplant somewhere completely different — charred, crispy, nothing like the sad roasted version. It’s the kind of dish that makes people think you fussed, and the entire active effort is one flip.

And it’s endlessly recreatable. Swap to another hardy vegetable, zucchini, peppers. You can adjust the herbs, place burrata on top, tuck it into a sandwich the next day, serve it warm or room temp. This is a summer staple with range.

The recipe

Serves 6 as a side or part of an aperitivo spread

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Not about the people. About the prep. The mental math of what can be made ahead. The last thirty minutes before the doorbell. And to top it off while the candles are unlit, the good napkins are still in the drawer, and oops…you still haven’t gotten dressed. Sometimes hosting feels like putting on a performance, with a specific loneliness of being the only one in the kitchen while everyone enjoys the space you’ve created in the other room.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: if I find this hard, and I love it, what about everyone who’s on the fence about hosting at all?

We are seeing each other less

You don’t need me to cite the loneliness statistics. You can feel it. Plans get pushed to “sometime soon.” Dinner with friends becomes dinner out, becomes drinks, becomes a string of texts about how we really need to get together. Everyone is busy, and everyone is tired, and somewhere along the way, having people over started to feel like a production instead of a default.

I think part of the blame goes to what hosting looks like now. Open Instagram and hosting is a twelve-foot charcuterie board. It’s a tablescape with a florist’s invoice behind it. It’s beautiful, and I screenshot it too, but it’s also, quietly and cumulatively, likely the reason so many of us never host. We’re nervous! The bar got raised so high that the most human thing in the world, feeding people you love, started to feel like a performance you could fail.

But here’s what an actual good night requires: a table. A bottle of wine (or mocktail of choice). One good thing to eat. That’s it. Some of the best nights I’ve had have happened around a linen tablecloth in a backyard with a single appetizer and no plan.

Romanticize the 5–9

I think we’ve become a society built around the 9–5. Everything you are “allowed” to do revolves around these hours. We exhaust ourselves so much with schedules and optimization that by the time we pull into the driveway, we think: Netflix and Bed. But what if we romanticized the 5–9 instead? What if we shifted our focus to the end of the day. The part of the day that actually means something, the part where we recharge, we connect, we slow down.

Instead of building something to add to everyone’s already ridiculous schedules, I wanted to create something that allowed people to slow down.

Because hosting doesn’t mean spending $500 at the grocery store and dedicating an entire Saturday to party prep. It can, and trust me, I’ve spent a lot of Saturdays doing exactly that. But what if it meant catching up with a friend on a Thursday over a beautiful appetizer and a glass of wine? We need to be together more than ever, and that’s the whole concept: get people around the table.

So here’s my thoughts

Instead of stressing about hosting, what if hosting became the art of slowing down?

Not hosting as performance. Hosting as practice. The decision to gather people at a table and let an evening take as long as it takes. In a life optimized for instant gratification, a dinner party is one of the last places where nothing is trying to be efficient. It’s slow food and slow conversation and the radical act of being somewhere for hours, on purpose.

Everything I make lives inside that one idea.

This newsletter is where I write about it. Every Friday I share a hosting recipe. Not just the dish, but the system around it: what to make ahead, what to do in the thirty minutes before the doorbell, how to actually be at your own party. In between, I write about the slower stuff: intentional living, what I’m learning from my brother’s farm, and the honest, unfiltered process of building a food business from scratch.

Tableroot is the company I’m building because I believe the biggest barrier between people and their own table is prep. It’s a line of elevated frozen appetizers — real ingredients, farm-informed, freezer to oven to table. All for the host with the vision, just not the time. The tagline is “bake. serve. take all the credit.” and I stand behind every word, especially the credit part.

The recipes, the essays, the company - it’s all one project. Get more people around more tables, more often, with less stress. Slow down, together, and share something beautiful. And really tasty.

What to expect here

• Every Friday: a hosting recipe from the Friday Hosting Series, with the full make-ahead plan.

• Every week: essays on slowing down, the farm, and building Tableroot in the open

• Eventually: first access to Tableroot itself. Subscribers here will know before anyone

If you’ve ever wanted people around your table more often and talked yourself out of it, you’re exactly who I’m writing for.

Pull up a chair.

— Haley

For most of my career, I’ve chosen high-stress startup environments. That was the deal I signed up for, over and over again. A 9-to-5 where you clock out at the end of the day, or weeks of PTO where your inbox genuinely doesn’t exist for you, that hasn’t been my life. Every vacation I can remember, I’ve worked. Two hours here, a call there, a “quick” email reply while my husband patiently waited in the room. There hasn’t been a single day off when I actually stayed offline.

So when I took a trip with my husband a month ago and didn’t work at all, not once, for three full days, it felt almost illegal.

We spent three days in Santa Barbara. Lying on the beach. Eating at phenomenal restaurants. Wandering around town with nowhere to be. And I felt revived in a way I hadn’t in a long time. I’d been feeling a little bogged down before the trip. Flat, uninspired, going through the motions creatively, and coming home, I felt like a different person. More appreciative of my husband. More connected. More present. The change in my work was immediate and obvious to me, even if no one else could point to what shifted.

But on the last day of this trip, I felt this weird tug.

Part of me was encouraged and eager to get back. I knew I’d needed the break, I knew I’d needed the presence, and I could feel how much fuller I was because of it. And then, right alongside that, a wave of guilt. I felt genuinely uncomfortable not working. Not because anything was wrong, but because I hadn’t been productive. I wasn’t pushing the needle. I didn’t have a checklist to point to and say, look, I did this.

I fought that feeling hard. Even knowing, intellectually, that the rest was exactly what I needed. I still felt guilty for taking it.

I think that guilt says more about the world we’ve built than it does about me. We’ve somehow learned that productivity and burnout are supposed to feel the same. That if we’re not moving in a thousand directions every day, checking off some major list, performing achievements so everyone around us can see them, we’re falling behind. Somewhere in there, we lost room for the other kind of work: stepping away long enough to relight your own fire. Stepping outside to actually feel the sun on your body and think about life’s bigger picture. To have a sense of presence and appreciation that usually doesn’t get the attention and time it deserves

I’m not writing this because I have it figured out. I still felt that tug on the last day of my trip, and I’ll probably feel it again the next time I try to rest. I’m writing it because I needed the reminder today, and I have a feeling someone reading this needs it too.

Vacations are needed. A solo walk is needed. A podcast with no agenda is needed. Dinner out with a friend, for no reason other than wanting to see them, is needed. None of that is separate from the work - it’s part of it. It’s a piece of the puzzle. And if we stay in overdrive all the time, pushing, pushing, pushing, we end up missing the best part of building anything at all.

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