Hello!
Thank you for visiting. I am truly so happy that you’re here.
This Morning is a space where I share whatever has come up for me during the past week. There are many mentions of food, but mostly of life in general. If I could sit quietly and observe the world all day, I would. This Morning is reflecting on what I see.
A bit about me…
It’s a long story as we all obviously are, but in brief. If I had to put a title on myself I’d say I’m a chef and writer, based in NYC. I worked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and then went on to open Nellie’s, small meal delivery service on Salt Spring Island, and am currently working as a private chef. My attraction to food is in the spirit of it, the weight of a ripe tomato in your hand, sharing a bottle of wine with someone you’ve been missing, that feeling of your body thanking you when you eat food that has been grown well. More the energetics of it than the top 50 restaurant lists, precise plating, and brigade culture. My food is centered around local and sustainable practices but doesn’t take itself too seriously. Food that makes you feel good.
The intention behind my writing is to understand what feels true to me. Sitting down and writing through something has always helped me mine myself for how I actually feel, and what I actually mean. I used to do that in a revolving cast of yellow notebooks and untitled documents on my computer that once written disappeared into the ether. My disparate writings have quietly anchored me and I thought, this past winter during a time of transition, that I would share them with others, in the hopes that they can help anchor you too.
Audre Lorde, American writer and civil rights activist, remarks on the role of poetry and says much more eloquently what I’m trying to say about why I write.
“As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
