Chocolate chip cookies, plus a lot of ingredients that supposedly promote lactation in women who have just given birth, but anyone can eat them because really who is going to resist chocolate chip cookies? Once you dip a toe into the mommy internet, it’s not long before that becomes a deep dive. I spend a […]

Ok, so maybe sweet potatoes are only potatoes in name. But they’re still large starchy vegetables, so maybe lets lay off the sugar and let’s hear what they have to say? Read More Shredded brussels sprouts are faster and more reliable than roasted, and they come together with sweet potatoes and, in a surprise twist, […]

I started writing this one almost two years ago, but put it in the digital drawer because I thought it was kind of obvious. But as more people in my life have come up against the same problems with paralyzing anxiety or decision fatigue, I’m realizing this is actually worth saying. Throughout my year of […]

I’ve talked before about the biggest problem I see in my field – that we don’t know what History is and so we don’t know how to teach it. I’ve been thinking recently about how this also hurts the image of History as a field – it just doesn’t seem welcoming, useful, or enjoyable to […]

Like procrastibaking, but you shouldn’t eat the results. To start, I don’t really believe in procrastination. But I do think that it’s part of the work process to have periods of passive thinking. When you have a job (and I would consider school a job) that requires a lot of thinking/writing/processing, it gets exhausting really […]

Let me rant at you about a 10-month old podcast episode.Recently, I’ve been listening to the Cookery by the Book podcast, which is a well-meaning series of interviews with cookbook authors. It’s lovely and it tries hard to represent a wide range of perspectives on food in terms of culture, class, race, and gender, as […]

Thanks to my rapidly growing pregnant belly, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching the PBS series “Finding your Roots” and it’s got me thinking about how historians use sources and what the average person knows about them (and a lot about genealogy, which you can read my extended thoughts on here). In […]

I played an amazing (and free!) mobile game a few weeks ago, and it helped keep me sane. The Frostrune is a point and click mystery game by Snow Cannon Games. I played it on mobile but it’s also available for PC. The gameplay is set in a small Norse village in the 10th century, […]

This is almost more of a general PhD update than a dissertation update, but I thought I needed to write something about my work since it’s been a while. My dissertation is extremely close to being done. I feel like I’ve had a full draft of this thing for years, but maybe it’s only been […]

This week I did my research due diligence and thought about medieval Sicily in a new context. After last week, I was pretty sure I had identified all the relevant medieval manuscripts in both libraries here in Palermo. But I had this nagging feeling that something could have slipped through my fingers. So I went […]

In my first week in the archive, I consider appropriate packing strategies for short trips, grapple with late medieval handwriting, and deal with not being an expert in manuscripts. Minutiae: Ok this seems kind of silly, but when your work requires a lot of travel, you’ve got to figure out how to make that travel […]

This week I finished my research trips to LA. It feels like a real relief. Read More This week, I maybe learned something new, or maybe I relearned something I already knew. Who knows? Welcome to academia. Read More Oh hey, I got to look at a manuscript this week! And I asked my advisor […]

As far as I’m concerned, there are two ways to make vegetable soups. Method one is what I call the Ina Garten method – take all your vegetables, roast them, then mix them with stock and puree. Method two is the Jane Brody method – saute your aromatics, add your vegetables and stock, cook until […]

Promotional image for the PBS documentary. The documentary is full of jerky animations in this style, which doesn’t do much to help bolster the scholarship. If you are an avid PBS fan, you may have seen the premier of a new documentary titled Ornament of the World in the last month. It’s a piece about the […]