Happy new year. Read More The words “revise and resubmit” carry with them a particular emotional response in academia: a unique combination of hopeful self-satisfaction, anxiety, and existential dread. Its a trite truism that we all need to learn to accept criticism. Academia turns accepting criticism into an art, that also happens to be part […]
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? Don’t get me wrong – I have a real sweet tooth. But sweet potatoes can be so much more than sweet, and I think […]
Did you know it’s hard to do research and also take care of two babies? This week required a lot of childcare maneuvering. My dad stepped in a lot, giving me a few extra hours a day while he entertained and fed my kids. Balancing childcare and work is especially difficult right now – my […]
So…. it’s been a while. I kind of anticipated that I would eventually stop writing regularly, which is part of why I didn’t tell anyone this blog existed when I first started it – I wanted to see how long I could write without the external pressure of someone else noticing. But I thought that […]
All aspects of culture are slaves of fashion, and cooking and by extension our relationship to food is no exception. These days, food is wrapped up in emotion. You can see this especially in the way diet programs advertise, or in the way we talk about eating disorders. People either eat or don’t eat because […]
I’m full of wrong opinions, so here’s one: I hate the phrase “happy holidays”. Yeah, I know, I’m a liberal Jew, I should be championing this along with friendsgiving, BCE, and liberal use of the term verklempt. But like all of those, I think it’s a hugely problematic and superficial solution to a much deeper […]
Happy new year. Read More The other day, a completely innocuous thing happened while I was at work: my coworker complemented my hairstyle. She and I have just about the same hair in color and texture, but that day we had opposite styles – hers was in full fabulous curl, and mine was braided down […]
Pregnancy, like any major life event, has a steep learning curve. You can’t really prepare, because you don’t know how things are going to be for you, but at the same time, you can learn about the range of things you can expect and know what resources are available once you run into trouble. Read […]
I guess since I’m writing this, the answer is yes. I feel the same way about recipes for salads – dishes that are assembled rather than cooked don’t really need a recipe per se, but sometimes it’s helpful to see a certain technique or a combination of ingredients, or in the case of salad dressing, […]
About two months into my pregnancy, my older brother D said “you’re so lucky you’re doing this in school, it’s way easier.” He wasn’t wrong. Grad school (by which I mean a funded PhD program) is the perfect time to have kids in some ways. You have a flexible schedule and workload, and if, like […]
Week one of archival research in London has been emotionally difficult but rewarding. Taking time for my emotional needs. I and everyone around me knew when I started planning this research year that it was going to be hard on me as a new mother. But even without my kids 6,000 miles away, living on […]
It’s winter squash season, which means it’s finally seasonally relevant to share my trick – hack, if you will – for cleanly and easily removing seeds from pumpkins, butternut squash, kabocha, and all other manner of hard-sided gourds. Every year I wonder whether someone else will share this trick, and yet somehow no one has. […]
Cheese and yogurt waiting to be stirred. Enchiladas are a labor of love, so I keep coming up with lazy methods for getting the same flavors and textures. I’ve already made enchilada casserole – layering the tortillas with the sauce and other ingredients like lasagna instead of individually rolling them – and it makes for […]
I got irrationally angry today when I read this New Yorker article. It should be obvious by now that I have very strong opinions about history in general and certain topics in particular, one being the Black Death. And so when large publications make claims about the Black Death that I find … problematic … […]
