Last Thursday, at a book event with Kitchen Arts & Letters (a New York institution in the independent bookstore world), I attended an intimate panel conversation with some of the most respected voices in food. I got there to find almost every seat filled, except a few scattered ones right smack in the middle of the front row. I took the one by the aisle, center-stage, with two women buzzing with excitement to my right. They were dressed in that sassy, creative, easy, expressive style that older New York women seem to come by so naturally, as if they’ve always known exactly who they are. I looked around the room silently, and I watched these ladies beside me gab and giggle on. I noticed they had wine, got up to grab myself one, sat back down, and then after another beat…I braved up, leaned over, and asked if they had been to events like this before.

Ten minutes later, one of them had my phone number and a loose plan to grab dinner soon. She lives one street over from me on the Upper West Side…who knows, I’ve probably walked past her a hundred times.

This is the version of me I’m most proud of…the one that’s open, present, unguarded enough to talk to literally anyone, finding some common ground along the way. I love this woman who puts her phone away and smiles at people and means it. She showed up at that moment…and then the panel ended.

I walked up to , which felt as surreal as it sounds. Ruth Reichl, whose memoir Comfort Me with Apples walked me through my thirties and felt like someone had finally dared me to dream bigger than what I thought I was capable of…who understood the hunger inside of me…the hunger not just for food but for a life organized around it, the hunger to step out from whatever was expected and into whatever was true. I shook her hand, and I shook moderator Julia Moskin’s (of the NY Times) hand. I said thank you, this was wonderful, so glad to meet you to both of them. And then I turned back to Ruth and told her how much of a fan of her writing I am, that it had genuinely changed something in me, and had given me permission. She asked what I was doing now.

And I heard myself say: I’m a private chef. And then, immediately…before she could even respond…before she had a chance to form a single thought about what that meant…I started explaining, excusing. Oh, I was a restaurant chef for a few years, but I had to step back because my daughter hated the hours, so for now I’m doing private work until she’s a little older, and then hopefully I’ll get back to that side of things.

That was the sentence I handed to Ruth Reichl.

Draped embarrassingly in justification and temporariness…quietly apologetic “for now” and “until” and “hopefully.” I scanned her face while I said it, looking for…I don’t know what exactly…validation, maybe? Or at the very least, the absence of disappointment. I walked away feeling deflated in a way I didn’t quite understand at the moment, and I haven’t been able to shake that feeling since.

My therapist asked me recently if I felt like I was being my authentic self when I walk into rooms like that one. I answered immediately…yes, absolutely, explaining that, actually, more than in most contexts, because when no one knows me or has any preconceptions about who I am, I get to just be the version of myself I actually want to be.

And yet…I kept talking, and I started to unravel in mere moments.

Because the truth is…I realized…I don’t actually walk into those rooms as myself. I walk in as a version of myself I’ve already decided is most likely to be received well. I read the room first…assess the energy, the crowd, the vibe. I decide what parts to put out there and what to tuck away. I decide which version of Jess is most likely to be accepted, most liked, most…safe.

I perform…I present that version for however long the event lasts, and then I walk out…tired in ways I used to chalk up to introversion or a long work week, but in reality…it’s actually the exhaustion of holding a shape that isn’t quite yours for two hours straight.

Almost every time, I leave these events underwhelmed…a little disappointed. I used to think it was them…and yet…more recently, I’m realizing it’s actually me…it’s that the real meal didn’t show up.

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When I look at my life and think about who I am…I start running through the list: chef, mother, wife, eldest daughter, sister, writer, creative. But my therapist asked me to strip away all the roles and things that I DO…what’s left? And that’s the part I’m struggling to put into words…I’m not entirely sure who it is on the other side of that list.

What do I know to be true…who am I?

I know she has big, expressive earrings that are non-negotiable…literally the closest thing she has to a signature. I know she can spend three hours at a farmers market and feel like no time has passed, or at a thrift store chasing the thrill of the find…a perfect peach, a vintage treasure outfit, a jar of something unusual she doesn’t have a plan for yet. These are some of the small, steady joys of her life.

Wait…she is me.

And me…well, I love sushi more than anyone should. I love the restraint of it, and love how much precision it takes to make something look that effortless. I love scary movies and have a soft spot for 80’s & 90’s cult classics. I have a long-standing relationship with Schitt’s Creek and FRIENDS…and truly crave those long one-on-one conversations that go past midnight and dream and scheme. I love to climb, to push my body beyond what I think’s possible…and to walk around the city with no plan, popping into stores and cafes and shops that draw me in. I love the ocean, its terrifying vastness and the way it holds and moves and shapes…the waves that can wash over my legs and feet, leeching the parts no longer needed. I love to travel and explore…from a yoga retreat in Oaxaca where I crawled into a hot cave…naked for a rebirth Temazcal ceremony or to San Francisco for a photography workshop, both times understanding what it felt like to be entirely and completely myself…and loving every moment. I have an absolute obsession with notebooks and stationery…the physical weight of a good one in my hands, the right pen that spills the perfect amount of ink to effortlessly glide across the page, the satisfaction of clicking a mechanical pencil. Even in the world of tech, I remain a steadfast handwritten girl. I loved to make collages as a kid and still feel the pull of it when I see a stack of magazines or even when I push and pull a mound of clay between my fingers on a pottery wheel, something I’ve only done once but want to do more.

That girl…that woman…she’s in there…she’s been in there the whole time.

But that’s not who I introduced to Ruth Reichl last week.

I’ve been stuck on that “but” after I said I was a private chef…for days now.

The pause before the apology, the way I backed up before Ruth even had a chance to respond. I’m a private chef…but…

That singular word carried SO much weight in that moment. It harbored so much grief and shame I didn’t know was there…lurking underneath. I realize I do this constantly…any time someone asks what restaurant I’m cooking for, I can feel it before it even starts. In that shortness of breath, I feel my face get hot, my chest tighten and I try my best to convince my own heart and my mind…and the person in front of me…that stepping down as Head Chef of the restaurant wasn’t a step backwards, but it was a step I HAD to take to repair what was broken with my daughter after the divorce. I know the brutal reality was that I literally couldn’t afford not to step away at that time…emotionally, physically or financially.

And yet…even knowing that reality…living through that really hard time in my life, when I said that BUT…the one I said to myself and to Ruth…I am still very much so… embarrassed and ashamed that I had to leave, that somehow being a private chef feels like a step back, a demotion…like it wasn’t a real…or the job isn’t as hard or as challenging or as prestigious or as badass as being a restaurant chef. It’s in that moment, in those feelings, that I diminish the journey I went through…all the hardships, lonely and isolating moments, all the tears and the heartache, the losses and the abandonment, all the strength I found to pull myself up and out…to a better place, to a better…no, wait…to the most authentic and real version of me I had ever allowed to just BE.

I think I know where it comes from…I’ve watched women throughout my whole life talk about what they were good at in ways that made it sound like less than it was. I’m just a… For now I’m…I was supposed to, but…Hedging in advance, making room for someone to disagree by disagreeing first…don’t say the thing too loud, leave yourself a way out, take up space but not too much.

It’s the scarcity heirloom…the belief, passed quietly between generations like a good recipe, that there’s only so much room, so much permission, so much approval in circulation at any given time, and if you claim too much of it, it might get taken back. So you learn to claim less…pre-emptively…putting the asterisk…the disclaimer in that no one asked for.

I’ve been doing private chef work for almost two years, and I still describe it as a detour. Like a thing I’m “in between.” Like the real version of my career is still out there waiting for me to earn my way back to it…as if what I’m doing every morning at 7 am isn’t already exactly as real as it gets. I plan and source and prep and execute breakfast and lunch for 25 people each day…people who trust me with their nutrition, their family meals, the things that carry them through a given week. That IS the work. Private cheffing is exacting, intimate, demanding work that calls on everything I know. I didn’t default to it or take a step back…I’m cooking more creatively, more honestly, more intuitively than I ever did before…at home, in the restaurant or wherever I was…I am proud of the work I do. And yet, I’ve never introduced myself like that.

Women (including me) in my orbit use these disclaimers and excuses all the time…we find ways to make ourselves sound less impactful or less important. But these women are truly brilliant and generous and capable of more than they would admit, and yet…they move through rooms the way they’ve been told, in a hundred small ways over a long lifetime, that certainty is unbecoming. I’ve taken that mindset on my own…without even realizing it.

I don’t want to pass that down to Millie…I think about her watching me qualify myself out of my own story at dinner parties, watching me scan faces for something I should already know mid-sentence. I don’t want her to see me hand my confidence to the room for safekeeping before I’ve finished the thought. What’s she learning from those behaviors? That capability needs a disclaimer? That you lead with the apology so no one can be disappointed later? That if you hold the thing loosely enough, no one could ever accuse you of being too sure?

Ruth Reichl wrote about hunger and about the life you build when you stop apologizing for what you want. She told stories about stepping out from whatever is expected and into whatever is true. I read this in my thirties, and it cracked something open in me. Reading her, I felt like someone had handed me permission…and I took that permission…I stood in front of her and apologized for how I had used it.

The woman who walked into that room last week and took the middle seat in the front row…that was me. The one who started talking to the strangers beside her and ended up with a new friend and a phone number before the panel even began…the one that was open, present, curious, unguarded…that was me. She’s the one I want to and should have kept introducing. The woman who doesn’t have to read the room and decide how much of herself it’s safe to bring.

I don’t know if this is a scarcity problem or a worthiness problem or an inheritance that comes from being an eldest daughter watching the women she loves make themselves smaller first. Probably a combination of all three, threaded through each other in ways I’m still trying to unravel. What I know is that the “but” came along from somewhere…I wasn’t born with it.

Whenever it shows up, it doesn’t really matter at this point…what matters is that I realize I’ve been carrying it like armor…like a requirement. I don’t know exactly what I said to Ruth Reichl when I was scanning her face for the validation that I shouldn’t need…But I know what I wish I’d said…

I’m a chef here in New York, and I’m so glad to finally meet you. Thank you for sharing your story; it inspired me in more ways than I can say.

Just the thing, said cleanly, without the detour and the asterisk and the apology for having found what I do. She wrote the book…she’s written SO many books…and I’ve read them. I am where I am because of them and others…in this city, in this life, at this table.

That counts for something.

I think she would’ve been glad to know it…and to know me.

I landed back in New York last weekend with a slight tan…a thousand more freckles…a full heart…and ZERO desire to open my laptop or scroll on my phone.

That’s some straight-up vacation math, isn’t it?! You spend the whole trip slowly unwinding, finding your way back to yourself, and then just on the other side of the door…real life is standing there waiting for you to return, arms crossed, to-do lists ready, loaded schedule be-damned. Yas and I were just talking about how we could possibly hold onto the pace of the last week…the slower mornings, the hours that weren’t assigned, actual moments for rest and breathing. How can we weave it back into our reality…before all those good vibes just evaporate into the hustle of the work week?

Summer always brings such a wave of inspiration for me…everything moves differently in the sun, in the warmth…I get hyper-motivated to try new things, to learn something new. Before I knew it, I was googling drop-in dance classes, pottery wheel sessions (my pottery session from last summer pictured above). I want to do something with my hands that isn’t cooking and something with my body that isn’t running from one appointment to the next. I want to be a newb at something again…something that has nothing to do with work.

Like tonight, I am going to a writing event at Kitchen Arts & Letters here in NYC to hear from one of my favorites, Ruth Reichl, and others. Going by myself, a little fly-on-the-wall moment…and the kind of event that past-Jess wouldn’t dare go to alone…but, this…this will be fun and out of that comfort zone that feels a little too small these days. Do you ever feel that way too? What are some fun new things you’ve tried?

Last night I realized…I’ve officially surpassed 50…5-0…published posts on The Table Between since January.

Fifty times I’ve sat down and decided to do the damn thing, Thursdays and Sundays. I write because the alternative is carrying it all around in my closed fist…a ticking time bomb of emotions…the pent-up feelings, the observations, the tightness in my chest, the big feelings and emotions that this recovering people-pleaser would otherwise just bury down deep inside and keep hidden. Writing…well, it’s how I open my hand…it’s been more therapeutic than I could’ve ever imagined, and I’ve met SO many amazing people and writers along the way. Substack has truly been a game-changer for me.

And yet…it can also feel profoundly isolating on this side of the screen. I hit publish, and sometimes the silence that follows is just enough to send me into a tailspin of self-doubt and wondering if any of it even matters. And then…someone responds, someone leaves a comment or restacks, or “hearts” the post, or sends a note that they forwarded it to their sister…and it turns out the table…my table…actually has guests. Every single moment of engagement…I mean it when I say it’s the salve for whatever is still healing inside me…every single time.

Thank you for being here, for pulling up a chair… 50 times at this table.
The best part? I’m just getting started.
Let’s set the table, friends ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• low-effort things that are actually good for your nervous system from Ayushi Thakkar —
  “sometimes, the nervous system needs the lights lowered and everyone to stop asking questions for twenty minutes.” This was a perfect read for me on my re-entry back to the work grind after vacation last week. A great list of low-lift things that actually do something for your brain when everything feels a little louder than it should. This is where I’d start the weekend.

• Why Don’t European Women Hate Their Bodies? from Rachel in Italia —
  Rachel Signer is a writer living in Italy, and this one started with what she noticed on European beaches: women playing badminton topless with all their bits moving around and zero fucks to be given or apologies to be made. She goes on to ask the bigger question of how we can raise daughters…in America…to avoid spending their twenties at war with their own reflection. With Millie heading into middle school in the fall, I’m thinking a lot about what I want to model for her before the world gets a chance to start chipping away at it.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The Steady Table —
While we were home in Blythewood, I got to see my Nanny Sis. She actually looked a lot better than I’d expected…she just laid in her hospital bed, quietly, her eyes moving slowly around the room…looking…searching the faces staring back at her for any remembrance, present but somewhere just past the reach of words. I think there were flashes where she did, in fact, recognize us. She would tear up, and there was a glimmer of familiarity. When it was time to leave, I looked her in the eyes and said: “I love you so much.” She looked at me, and the glimmer appeared again. She found her words and said I love you, too. In that moment…she knew me.

This piece is about the table that holds…what it means to feed someone when language has left the room, the act of cooking as the thing that has steadied me when everything else shifted beneath, and why I keep setting this table every single week.

Read it here →

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Toothpaste & Tears: Grief Before My Eyes Open from mind on the loose —
  Tina Lance quit her job as a CPA in New York, traveled solo through India for a year, became a professional acrobat, and now lives in Italy. (so badass…) This piece is a single morning in her apartment…the thrashing around before her eyes open, the specific weight of whatever she’s carrying that day, crying while brushing her teeth with the windows letting in the Northern Italian light. “Nothing is really wrong. But also nothing is right.” She writes about the emotional freedom of living alone with your own feelings, no one there to interrupt them or ask you to explain yourself. I found her on Substack recently, and her words pulled me in.

• The Fading Line from Rhythm’s —
  On the slow erosion of how you’re seen by someone you trusted, and the strange quiet beauty that survives the fall. Hina Gondal is so talented and writes with real tenderness about losing your worth in the eyes of someone close and what comes after.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Is It Too Late to Try Something Different? from You’d Like Her —
May is amazing and just happens to be someone I’ve met in person…I love how her brain works. This episode is about work exchanges…the totally under-discussed world of traveling and living there for free in exchange for your skills…at any age, at any point in your career. She cold-called her way into living at a yoga retreat in exchange for building their marketing strategy…lived in France for free…and even worked on a farm. She’s gathered all the helpful links and resources in one place. Coming home from vacation, wanting to try new things, this one felt like a green light to dream a little bigger, you know?

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• If No One Is Coming to Save You, No One Is Coming to Stop You Either from The Secret Life of Leyla —
  On responsibility, fear, and the freedom of realizing permission was never required. Whew…I read this one a few times…The same logic that means no one’s coming to save you is the logic that means nothing is actually stopping you either. Read this one when moments feel heavy or you feel stuck.

• The Roles We Write for People from Kodit ja vuoret —
  A quiet, ruminative piece about the roles we cast for the people in our peripheral lives…the stories we build around them and what those stories say more about us than about them. I found this one through the recommendation feed, and it really resonated with me and the expectations I sometimes put on those around me (and they have zero idea I’m holding them to those or that I’m being disappointed by those hidden expectations not being met). Such a good read.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Why men don’t like women’s writing from Baba Was A Witch —
  So many interesting takes in this one piece…did you know that among the top 10 bestselling female authors, 81% of readers are women and only 19% are men? For the top 10 bestselling male authors, it’s nearly 50/50. Women read across the gender line. Men, statistically, do not. Linda traces that same bias into who rises on Substack…a piece that makes the invisible structure visible…read it alongside the Celeste Davis piece below.

• Why Harry Styles Can Wear a Dress, Why Everyone Thinks Mormon Men Are Gay, and Why Male Actors Are So Needy from Matriarchal Blessing —
  Celeste Davis makes the case that masculinity works like a credit score…constantly recalculated, publicly assessed, something that can be earned and lost. Like, how can Harry Styles wear sequins, and a 14-year-old in rural Iowa can’t do the same thing without it costing him something huge? Really interesting piece…the most fun I’ve had reading this week.

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More soon. xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

I landed on grilled BBQ chicken thighs, roasted potatoes and peppers, vinegar-pickled tomatoes with cucumbers and onion, and a salad. Nothing that required a written plan or a special run to the store. Bit by bit, it all came together: first, I brined the chicken in pickle juice I found in the back of the fridge…then tossed potatoes with peppers, herbs, and red wine vinegar, and then quick-pickled the tomatoes and cucumbers while everything else came together. Somewhere between shooing the kids away from “just a little snack” and helping Yas and Matt find the right Aperol balance in their mixed drinks, between turning and basting the chicken, tasting and salting, I stopped and exhaled…long and slow…and I smiled. My childhood home was loud with music and the cousins playing in the pool, but the kitchen was quiet. The kitchen was mine.

I was exactly where I was supposed to be…I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted to do.

That morning, before the pool shenanigans began, we took the kids to visit Nanny Sis in hospice. I sat with her, rubbed her face, and looked into her eyes…trying to find her as she was trying to find her own recognition of me. As we sat there, visiting and feeding her hospital food for lunch, I remembered her own table back when I was a kid. I remember how each Sunday morning after church, we would gather around her table in Ridgeway, SC.

Her handmade biscuits…the ones none of us can quite replicate…those glorious biscuits fresh out of the oven, carefully placed in a basket with a towel over to keep them warm…they drew us all into this space. People found their way to the table from wherever they were, chairs pulled in from all the other rooms. Nanny would set out butter and a plate of sliced tomatoes from the garden…and that was the whole meal…and it was always enough. As a kid, I didn’t understand what she was doing or why it worked the way it did. I didn’t yet understand how whatever went on outside of that kitchen stopped mattering the moment she put food on the table.

After sitting with her a while in her hospital bed, the grandkids gathered around while Nanny looked on silently, searching for that glimmer of knowing. I combed her hair with my hands as we were about to leave and I said, “Nanny…I love you so much.” And it was that moment she did something that surprised us all; she found her voice, her words…and managed to say “I love you” back to me. Tears welled in my eyes, and the light in her finally saw and knew the light in me. That knowing…it’s her legacy, it’s the foundation for everything my family does, it’s what I live for, and it’s what I hope to always give.

That same feeling of knowing…of recognition is one I’ve also felt making lentils for no one on a Tuesday in the city…or at a cutting board in my client’s kitchen at seven in the morning, before the first jeweler arrived…or in the family’s apartment on the Upper East Side, prepping their week of plant-based meals…and also in my head chef spot at expo in the restaurant, prepping for 150 tickets about to fly. The location doesn’t change the feeling. The act of preparing something for someone to receive…to meet their needs…it feels the same, every time.

I have served some of the most elaborate meals of my life...whole fish grilled over delicate potatoes with a truffled pea purée, slow braises of ossobuco with the market’s best vegetables that needed most of the day to settle, soft and low. And I have set tables with mismatched plates, a fresh baguette still warm in the paper bag, a dish of butter softened with Maldon salt scattered on top, a half-eaten jar of jam from the back of the fridge (à la Nanny Sis but with my own twist). And you know what…that second table moves a room as completely as any of the first, maybe more.

Something shifts when people are fed...fed well, simply and with intention. The air moves differently…their shoulders come down…the version of them who arrived, perhaps guarded or rushed or somewhere else entirely, starts to ease its grip, and underneath it, the person who was always there…is just...there.

I have watched this phenomenon happen at long dinner tables and around kitchen counters and on picnic blankets in the park and in living rooms with improvised seating where no one planned to stay as long as they did. I have felt it from the other side of the counter every single time. What I’m finally able to see but never fully able to explain is why it works…without exception. The food may change, the setting shifts, the people move...and yet…still and always…something greater than ourselves opens up.

Joy Harjo wrote that the world begins at a kitchen table; it’s there that children are given their first instructions on what it means to be human; it’s there wars have started and ended; it’s there we have given birth and prepared our dead; it’s there we sing and grieve and give thanks. And it's there we've always understood, maybe before we had words for it, that the kitchen table isn’t just a piece of furniture.

It’s the oldest and most reliable gathering place we have, the space that has always known how to hold whatever we bring to it.

My posts over the past month have been all about looking inward...about learning to listen to our body, to feed it what it’s actually asking for, to recognize what a nervous system in alarm mode feels like and to know what it really takes to bring it back to something like rest. Rest as a verb. All of those things are necessary, and I believe in them completely…but they were never meant to be the whole story.

There’s a thing they tell you on airplanes, so familiar that most of us have stopped even really hearing it. I mean, my AirPods are on before I even get on the plane, so I watch the airline attendant pantomime buckling a seat belt, but all I hear is Amy Winehouse belting back to black.

Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.

This morning as I’m writing this, it hit me…this means more than just keeping yourself alive.

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All the inward work, all the careful tending to our own nervous systems and hunger and rest…to our hearts and our minds, it’s all necessary and in service of this. “Secure the oxygen” prepares us to sit across from someone and actually BE there with them, settled enough in ourselves to let someone else’s experience have somewhere to land.

There is a Bantu philosophy from Southern Africa called Ubuntu, and its central idea translates roughly as this:

umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
a person is a person through other persons

Ubuntu holds that your fullest self, your complete humanity, is not something you can find alone or in solitude, but it’s through your relationships with others. That identity itself isn’t a private achievement but a relational one…one that’s built in the spaces between people…in the practice of looking at someone and being looked back at, in the act of being known.

I am because we are.

The Latin root of the word companion carries the same truth in a different tongue. *Com* means together, *panis* means bread. A companion is literally someone you break bread with...someone you eat alongside…the concept of moving through life beside another person…made inseparable from the act of sharing a meal.

What I didn’t quite expect when I became a professional chef was what feeding people would do to me. I knew I would fall in love with the food, the craft, the seasons, the beautiful challenge of technique. And for sure, I did fall…madly in love with all of it. But what I didn’t see coming was how feeding people would settle something in my chest that almost nothing else ever would. The way I feel more certain of my purpose and more like myself when I am giving something through food…it’s unlike any other certainty I’ve ever felt.

What happens when we gather around the table, I can only describe as the light in me seeing the light in them...when someone takes that first bite and goes quiet for half a second, when a room of strangers gets loud with laughter around the second course, when someone pulls me aside at the end of the night and says they haven’t eaten like that in years. They almost never mean just the food…they are really talking about the feeling…the one of being held, the feeling of being truly seen and cared for.

I met up with last month for coffee, and we spent most of the afternoon chatting. Having never met before, we settled in like lifelong friends, talking about our lives, our paths, and how we are still figuring it all out, and I felt it then, too. That same feeling of recognition you feel when someone describes their life, and you realize you’re hearing your own story in a slightly different arrangement. You recognize the fear of building something not fully baked yet, the leap from what’s safe to something more true, and the uncertainty of how any of it will land and of choosing to go for it anyway. She knew it, I knew it, and it was in that shared knowing where we both were able to exhale in a way that had nothing to do with the coffee.

The comparison game can’t survive this feeling…it’s a creature that keeps us living in isolation, behind our screens…it needs closed doors and it feeds on the quiet, endless scroll to keep itself alive. But it’s in those moments…when you’re actually sitting across from a real human who’s in the middle of the same alive thing you are…it’s there that the gap between your life and everyone else’s curated version of their own collapses into something finally clear…finally honest. We’re not as alone as isolation tries to convince us, and we’re all considerably more capable than we tend to believe.

I didn’t know this was the “why” of The Freckled Fork when I started it…I was literally and physically trying to piece together my “chef” path after choosing to leave the restaurant for my daughter. But, what I’ve come to realize is that this has always been my path, long before it ever became a reality. A path that began at my Nanny Sis’ table in South Carolina. A path that meandered and forked (pun most definitely intended) through marriage, infertility, adoption, divorce, and the prescribed burn of the walls I had built up to keep myself small.

This path was never a business model or a content strategy but a practice. This path was to build a table that holds…a steady place where people can come a little frayed and as they are…a place of joy that sends them off a little more whole because they were fed well…they were seen…they were heard more clearly. They were reminded, somewhere over a simple plate of good food, that they’re in the company of others doing the same hard and hopeful and uncertain thing.

Derek Walcott ended his poem “Love After Love” with four words that have become a guiding light for me:

Feast on your Life.

His words are about returning to yourself, to the stranger you ignored in the business of living…and that the way back is through the table, through the offering of wine and bread, through the act of sitting down and staying.

It feels like the most honest description of what I am trying to create in this world…in this space…in my little corner of the Upper West Side in New York City.

Come as you are…here is something I made with my hands for you. Because you chose to come here, and it mattered that you would be fed. Here is a room where your story is welcome and the person across from you has one, too…and the gap between you both is smaller than anything we’ve been led to believe.

I’ll keep setting that table, I’ll keep inviting people to sit, and I’ll keep feeding them until I run out of days to do so.

I am because we are.

And the table is where we see it…where we remember it…where we know it…and each other.

I found my way to the water.

Three days in Charleston with Yas, eating our way through the city, and somewhere in all of it, I made it to Sullivan’s Island. Late afternoon, the light coming in sideways, everything smelling like salt and heat. I took off my shoes, walked down to the line where the waves still had enough weight to roll over your legs before pulling back, sat down, and stayed there.

Before we left New York, I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone. Not a break, not a detox…just gone. My screentime was embarrassing, and more than that, those apps were leaving me feeling smaller than when I arrived…mediocre…like I was always chasing something that had no intention of stopping long enough for me to catch up. I hated how it made me feel, and I decided I’d rather take a vacation from it all, not just work, but the mother-truckin’ grind…on and offline.

In Charleston I kept reaching for my phone and finding nothing to scroll. So I looked out the window; I held my husband’s hand; I stayed in the conversation, in the present moment. I noticed I was lighter; I noticed I was more myself; I noticed I couldn’t care less about what anyone else was doing, online or wherever else.

Now I’m back in Blythewood, my childhood home, for the first time in a while. Being here does what it always does: gives me back some version of myself I’d started to lose track of. Today we go see my Nanny Sis at her nursing home. Some days she knows me, and some days she doesn’t, and I’ve been thinking about walking through that door today…whether she’ll look up and something in her face will shift. I want to hug her neck. And if she doesn’t know me today, the love and recognition are still in the room anyway…because some things don’t require a name.

Let’s set the table for the weekend, turkeys…

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• In the Sound Alone from A Girl Writing The World
  A poem, which I am leading with because it is short and it will set the tone for everything else this weekend. Plums ripen in the sound alone / sugar still forms / and the morning will see them ready. Things are doing their work even when you can’t see them.

• The Good Girl Problem from The Equitable Home
  A working list for raising girls who don’t shrink to be liked…on how girls are trained, early and consistently, to be quiet, accommodating, easy, and what it costs them by the time they’re adults. With Millie transitioning out of elementary school and into whatever comes next, I read this one thinking about what I want to build into her now, before the world gets a chance to start chipping away at it.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The Clothes We Wear
Sunday’s essay, written from my parents’ back porch in Blythewood with a neighbor’s rooster crowing somewhere in the distance.

On hand-me-down adulthood…the way we put on the adult version of ourselves like clothes that don’t quite fit at first, because they were sewn by someone else’s experience before we ever got to try them on. My parents were 19 when they had me and moved to Orlando alone, figuring it out without a map. I’ve been thinking about what they were handed, and how forty years of living in it has altered it into something that actually fits them now. I plundered through my mom’s closet (I do this every single time I come home) and stood in her mirror and saw her in my own face, my own hips. Thought about how much of what I’ve spent years trying to alter beyond recognition is still just hers, underneath all of it.

Read it here →

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• You’re Not Overthinking. You’re Chasing Certainty. from Life Branches
  The science of why not knowing is harder on your nervous system than actual bad news. Researchers at University College London found that a 50 percent chance of pain stressed people more than a 100 percent guarantee…the maybe is harder than the yes. This week, the Instagram thing has felt like this for me…the discomfort of reaching for something you thought you needed and finding it isn’t there, and being okay.

• Nothing You Try and Quit Is EVER a Waste from You’d Like Her
  May and I had coffee a couple weeks back, and I love what she’s building. Her latest podcast episode features Dinara, who May met in Kazakhstan when she spotted a Yosemite water bottle sticker at a café and just said hi. Dinara was in the middle of dismantling everything she’d built her sense of worth on…her career, her body, her identity…figuring out who she was without any of it. What came out the other side: a film festival, a rock climbing shop, and the clarity that nothing she’d tried and quit was wasted.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Dirt That Was Never Not Holy from A Life in Season
On peaches, half-eaten tomatoes, and why waste doesn't exist in a living garden. Jess writes about her summer garden at peak abundance: a hundred pounds of tomatoes, basil going to seed, eating a dark red tomato like an apple at sunset, and how waste is a concept that belongs to barcodes and bottom lines, not to places where life is fueled by death and everything eventually returns to soil. Lush and sensory and fully in the season. I read this one in South Carolina and felt it in a particular way. It will make you want to put your hands in some dirt.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• The Strange Intimacy of Being Read from Echoes
  Michelle writes about what it feels like to put your work into the world when you choose writing specifically because you prefer observing to performing. The distance between “this is the best thing I’ve ever written” and “this is absolute shit, and I just let strangers look at it” is, she says, often only a cup of coffee and a reread apart. She publishes anyway, because the requirement was never certainty…it was honesty. Every Thursday…and every Sunday, when I press publish, I go through this exact same loop, and it’s useful to know the loop is just the work, not a sign something is wrong.

• I Am Terrified from Letters from Imi
  A poem…on the fear of losing your creative fire before you've done what you came here to do. "I am terrified of losing my fuel, my light, my dreamer's sight / the wonder that burned like the sun." Imi writes about sitting at a pub before noon trying to silence the beehive in her mind, about the dizziness of freedom, about what it feels like when the fire is down to its last pieces of wood. Quiet and devastating and beautiful. Read it right after Strange Intimacy, and you have the full portrait of what creative work costs.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

Making Your Own Chances Vol. 1: From Graphic Designer to Executive Chef
from The Long Game
After an impromptu phone call with a stranger who felt like a close friend after an hour of talking, Anjali wrote about me. I’m human; I’m not going to pretend I didn’t send this link to approximately everyone I know the moment I saw it…it’s one thing to tell your own story…it’s quite another to read about it through the lens of another…it somehow makes all the heartache, all the self-doubt and all the loss and all the growth…worth it.

She found me through a note I wrote about my career pivot, got on a call, and turned it into this. The whole story is here: Charlotte to New York in 2020, cold emailing every restaurant in the city with zero kitchen experience, COVID hitting the week we arrived, the six families I cooked for out of their homes, the weekend I bought bags of carrots and onions to practice my knife skills after a chef called me out in the first week, Sous Chef in six months, Executive Chef in a year, and why I stepped back when Millie started needing me present in a different way.

What she got right more than anything: she understood that it wasn’t reinvention…it was redirection. Everything I’d spent fifteen years building as a designer, a marketer, a mother, translated directly into what I needed to be in the kitchen. I just had to be willing to tell the story in a way that made sense to people who couldn’t see it yet.

I appreciate you guys, your love & support for women like Anjali, and, as always, for me as well. I couldn’t do any of it without you. And if you know someone sitting on a pivot they can’t quite figure out how to justify, send it to them.

Happy Thursday, turkeys! Going to hug Nanny Sis's neck today…more from the Carolinas soon.

xo, Jess

The Table Between is a reader-supported publication.
Subscribe, follow, share with friends & “heart” every post you love. LOVE the LOVE.

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. I'll be writing to you on Sunday back in NYC, probably still riding high on that Carolina sunshine. See you there. ♥

My parents still live in my childhood home in Blythewood, SC, although it looks drastically different from when I lived here. “Upgraded” is a major understatement, for sure. Before this home, we were a bit nomadic as my dad’s naval career had us living in Orlando, FL (where I was born), Saratoga Springs, NY, Charleston, SC (where my sister was born), all in the first five years of my life. We then finally settled in Blythewood when my dad left the Navy, and I entered first grade in the middle of the school year. Still unsure of where we wanted to settle in this small, rural town just northeast of the state’s capital, Columbia, we spent our first few years in a mobile home. Which, at the time, I honestly thought was pretty cool…it was my home, the only home I had any memory of, and the fact that we were able to move it from Charleston to Blythewood was pretty amazing in my six-year-old mind. It was only later at school that I learned that living in a trailer somehow meant I was poor…less than…with absolutely no trajectory to popularity in sight.

My brother and sister talk a lot about how we each had such different childhoods, such different parents, despite the fact that they are the same two people. The versions of Sam and Myra I experienced were the hard-working young teenagers just entering adulthood for the first time, and then, also, figuring out how to do it with a newborn. At the age of 19, after graduating from high school, my mom started college, and my dad entered the Navy, and then on the heels of those big decisive moves, they found out they were pregnant with me. They got married and moved to Orlando, so big and so different and so far away from their family and friends in Ridgeway & Winnsboro, SC. They were alone, figuring it all out, doing the best they could with what they had…and also, raising a baby, while they themselves probably felt very much still like kids.

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Sometimes I think about what they might’ve felt in those early days. I’ve listened to their stories and those big, big feelings they’ve shared, and I very much recognize that same anxiety…the fear and stress of being adults for the very first time without fully knowing what that meant. Trying to prove their own success at adulthood to their families and friends, who probably thought they were nuts to pick up and move so far away from the safety and security of “home”.

There’s always this need to prove ourselves, right? Once you officially crossover from being a student in school (whether it stops at high school or college), there’s this transition, this moment…where you’re officially an adult…but really in title only…not quite in actuality. It’s almost as if we put on the adult versions of ourselves like clothes. But at first, they don’t quite fit, do they? Like most hand-me-downs, they’re too big, too bulky, and then there’s that voice in the background that says, “you’ll just have to grow into it”.

I’ve been thinking about those “clothes” we put on…how much the version of adulthood we grow up thinking about, aspiring to…was actually predestined by the hand-me-downs we were given…how they were shaped and sewn together by our parents and their experiences with their own adulthood (which, consequently, were also given and shaped by their parents before them and so on…). I think about the “fit” of those clothes and how each of us goes through life, growing and trying to fill them in. But it’s interesting, each of us experiences a moment (or multiple moments) where we realize some of those pieces and parts will never quite fit. Just like our personalities, our goals, our dreams, our decisions take on a different path, a different shape from our parents before us, we, too, find ourselves deciding which pieces to keep and fill in, and which parts demand alterations, a gentle rip of the seams. What started as a dress might end up looking like overalls (am I taking this clothing analogy too far? Probably so, but you get it, right?).

I’m sitting here this morning on a balmy June morning…on my parents’ back porch overlooking their pool…that sits behind their amazing two-story home on around four acres of land covered by trees…with the distant crow of a neighbor’s rooster a mile away…all of this is truly theirs. This place is a space that both my dad and my mom have spilled blood, sweat, and tears for over the years. Maybe they’ve finally grown into their adult bodysuits they first put on when they were 19. I wonder if they feel proud or like they finally “got it”.

Honestly, you wouldn’t think so, the way my dad constantly tinkers and “to-dos” around the house and yard…there’s always something to fix, something to repair, something to replace. And my mom? She’s changed the interior so many times, I can barely remember all the colors of the walls in each iteration. The kitchen I grew up with is no longer here, and in its place is a fully remodeled one that beautifully opens and extends through to the living room, which is now on the same floor level (there used to be a step down into the living room, and they literally raised the entire floor of that level to be even). There are now hardwoods where there was wall-to-wall emerald green carpet, and the garage is now an entire other room of the house, affectionately referred to as the “west wing” of the home.

All that to say…it’s a far, far cry and a major glow up from the mobile home we started in…and maybe, just maybe, their clothes finally fit them.

On this side of our story, I, in my 40’s and my parents in their early 60’s, I kind of love the fact that we feel so close in age. I feel a camaraderie and a kinship and a friendship with them that’s uniquely mine and different from the relationships they have with my siblings.

.Just yesterday, I was plundering in my mom’s clothes (I do this every single time I come home…in her clothes) and I put on a pair of her pants and a sweater (also because my mom keeps it a frigid 60-degrees in their house, hello ‘pause <3). But as I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought about those clothes. How hers have never really fit all the way, but just barely. My mom and I are SO similar, yet so different. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw my mom, I saw her in my eyes, in my smile, in my Boulware-wide hips. Her clothes have always fit me…sort of…but I’ve always required a little extra alteration…to make them my own, just to make them fit.

My parents never wanted or asked us kids, to follow in their footsteps. In fact, they were pretty adamant about each of us developing the critical thinking skills, integrity, and discernment necessary to forge our own paths. I think there’s a misconception that happens as we aim to go our own way, that it means we don’t appreciate or value the ways our parents chose to go. There’s an exchange of judgment and criticism that takes place when “different” somehow gets translated as “better than”. I know I’ve been guilty of it. I remember when we first adopted Amelia, and my sister had her son Levi at the same time…both of us, daughters now mothers, and we had our own ideas of the kind of parents we wanted to be. The ripping of those seams, the alterations and changes we were making to that part of the “outfits” were not very gentle, or gracious…they were quite literally dripping with judgment. We were going to talk to our kids differently, discipline them differently, dress them differently, etc.

Depending on our childhood experiences and how we relate to our parents, we seem to develop this sense of “oh, when I’m an adult/parent I’m not going to do it like them” as we lay responsibility and blame, even. As I’ve become a mother and have lived and experienced the world in my own ways, I’ve realized my own impact on Amelia throughout each stage of her 11-yr life so far…for good or bad…and I know the weight of my continued impact as she journeys through preteen, teenagerdom, and beyond. In realizing my own impact, I’ve come to have more and more grace for my parents and the decisions they made…unraveling the judgment I once held for those decisions and repairing that “sleeve”.

My version of these adulthood “clothes” sometimes seems as if they are so altered beyond recognition…post marriage (x2)...post divorce…post moving hundreds of miles away from SC to NYC…post career change…post political and religious shifts, etc. My version of adulthood…of womanhood…was handed down from my mom, and despite SO many of my attempts to alter or change and “be different” than her growing up, I realize now that she is and was my foundation. It’s in these moments…When I come home and spend time with them, even physically putting on my mom’s clothes that I recognize and realize the OG is still there underneath. I see the version of adulthood they wear and the one that I now wear; I see more similarities than differences (despite my best efforts 🙂). Seeing those similarities reminds me of where I’ve come from, what I’ve come through, and how grateful and how proud I am to wear these clothes.

Millie graduated from 5th grade on Tuesday.

She’s been a mess ever since, in all the ways…good and bad. One minute she’s crying about leaving the school that’s been her home since kindergarten, and the next she’s pouring water on Yas and trying to steal Emily’s tea and kicking her dad out of absolutely nowhere. Sad to feral in about 30-sec flat. I have nothing but compassion for her because I know…I can see exactly what’s happening: she is literally filled to the brim, overflowing with feelings and hormones she doesn’t know how to name, how to claim, or how to deal with…and the only thing I know how to do is hold her until she’s ready for the next wave. She knows all the right things to say to rationalize away what she’s feeling. But as those of us who may be older and somewhat experienced understand…the “knowing” doesn’t necessarily help you feel it any differently. So I told her to just let the feelings happen, and I’ll hold her until she’s ready for the next one.

I have managed to schedule 4 appointments, a lunch, a coffee with a friend, a catering drop-off to LES Printshop for their gallery show this weekend (if you’re in NYC, go by, it’s a good one), and a handful of pantry box deliveries (have you pre-ordered yours yet?!)…all before an 8:45pm flight to South Carolina on Friday night. This is Messica at her best. :)

I’ve been talking a lot with Yas and with friends lately about rest…the need for it, the resistance to it, what gets in the way. I’ll be honest: I am not good at it…in fact, I’m pretty terrible at it…as the Type A, people-pleasing Virgo that I am. Rest makes me anxious because the to-do list is still there, staring at me, watching me delay the inevitable, every item just sitting there with its arms crossed, waiting, judging me for being “lazy”. Getting out of town is one of the only real ways I know how to actually stop…putting myself in situations where my body has literally no other choice but to surrender to the fact that I am somewhere else, and the list can’t come with me.

So…we are going south…Blythewood, Charleston, Charlotte…my childhood home, my people. Being with the people who made me always gives me back some version of myself I tend to lose track of when I’m away. For better or for worse. Then I’ll spend a few days in Charleston with Yas, eating our way through the city…and while we’re there, I’m going to find my way to the water’s edge at Isle of Palms or Sullivan’s or Folly Beach. I am going to sit down right at the line where the waves are still strong enough to roll over your legs with some weight before they pull back to the sea…and I am going to stay there a long time.

The ocean is my place. Beautiful, vast, and terrifying all at the same time, it’s where I go to remember my place in this BIG world…reminding me of a space and place greater than myself. It helps give me perspective; it’s where I feel like myself again. I’ll have more to say about that once I’m actually there.

Until then: let’s set the table for the weekend, turkeys…

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Well Crafted: June Edition No. 1 from Life Well Crafted
  A summer round-up with three things that caught my eye: hosting in small spaces, a summer fish sweater that I HAVE to have, and the gift of asking for help (I’m terrible at this…). I totally recommend this whole little thing as a Thursday morning warmup.

• Strawberry Ceremony from Good Food Jobs
  Literally the first I’ve ever heard of Ken’ niiohontésha…the Haudenosaunee thanksgiving ceremony for the first strawberries of the season…but I’m in love already. It’s the ongoing reclamation of ancestral land at Kana’tsiohare:ke. Strawberries are peaking proudly this month, and I’ve been making jam, eating them straight out of the pint container at the market, putting them in a bowl with some whipped cream for a late-night snack. Reading this…man, I love learning more about where these fruits come from, who has always known what they are, and what it means to give thanks for them with that kind of intention. Such a good read.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

What Our Grandmothers Already Knew
On what our ancestors carried in their hands, and what we owe to ourselves and to the people who come after us. With Millie's graduation this week, with the transition she's in, with the tenderness of watching her become the next version of herself, I recognize it all because someone before me knew it first…the good stuff that gets passed down without a single word said out loud. Women carry these things and more…in our bodies and our kitchens and our hands across generations…what does it look like to actually honor that instead of outrunning it?

Order Your Pantry Box!

THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Turns Out My Hyper-Fixation with Self-Improvement Was Just Another Strategy to Avoid My Anger from Heart Led Creates
  If you read last week’s Vessels piece from yas on people pleasing as repressed anger, here’s the next layer. The self-improvement addiction…the constant optimizing, the fixing, the endless work on yourself…can be its own form of avoidance. A way to stay productive-feeling while never actually getting to the thing underneath. The trap is that it looks like growth from the outside…it looks like you’re doing the work…and sometimes you are…and sometimes, you’re just running a cleaner-looking loop.

• It Felt Like Desire. That Was the Problem. from Living Between Worlds
  On wanting and wanting to want. The distinction between those two things is nuanced, for sure. There’s wanting something, and there’s the performance of wanting it because the idea of yourself wanting it feels right, feels like the person you’re trying to become or feels that the person you even used to be. They feel identical from the inside until they don’t…this piece asks some real questions…and has me doing the same.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Low-Effort Ways to Make This a Summer You'll Cherish from Midnight Crumbs
"Every summer I tell myself I want more memories and fewer screenshots. Some years I do better than others." This piece is the practical, gentle answer to that exact problem…low-lift things that actually shift how a summer feels in the living of it, not just in retrospect. I'm reading it right before I get on a plane to South Carolina and it couldn’t be a more perfect time…less planning, more presence. Fewer screenshots of the thing, more just being in it. I literally only have two things planned/set for Charleston…1 dinner reservation and my own personal appointment with the ocean…that’s it…the rest of the trip? Leaving it up to chance <3

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

So You Deleted Social Media…Now What? from Returning to Beauty
I consider doing this on a daily basis…Instagram literally makes me feel more inadequate and less creative, less cool, on a daily basis…why do I do this to myself?! This piece dives into what actually happens to the space when you step off…not a detox-triumphant piece, just an honest account of the strange discomfort and the slow reorientation. The 864 hours detail is the one that hit me square in the chest…I can’t even bring myself to look at my screentime, I’m already ashamed. What could I actually do with all the time I’d get back? I've been thinking about this all week in the context of rest, of what it means to really stop, of the way I reach for my phone the second I'm not doing something purposeful. UGH.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

Borrowed Courage from House of Flowers by Emory Hall
On the people who believe in us before we believe in ourselves. I'm ending here this week because in less than 24 hours, I’ll get on a plane to go be with some of those people. The ones who know where you came from…the ones who held the belief for you when you couldn't hold it for yourself…who handed it back to you like a thing they'd been keeping safe. Emory writes about borrowed courage with so much warmth that I read it twice and wanted to share it out immediately.

Happy Thursday, turkeys! See you from the other side of the Carolinas.

xo, Jess

The Table Between is a reader-supported publication.
Subscribe, follow, share with friends & “heart” every post you love. LOVE the LOVE.

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. I'll be writing to you on Sunday from somewhere warm, probably covered in sand. See you there. ♥

I wonder sometimes who first figured this out about lentils…or foods that nourish in this way? Who was the first woman to bloom cumin and coriander before anything else and notice that it changed something...in the food, in the room, in the people sitting down to eat it? She didn’t study or go to a prestigious culinary school. She had her hands, and she had people she was charged with nourishing, and she paid attention.

Before anyone called it nervous system regulation, before the supplements and the breathwork and somatic exercises and the $15 matcha…before all of that, there were kitchens…there were slow pots…fermented things in jars on a shelf, and there were women. Women who knew, without any research or knowledge behind the why…they just KNEW what it took to keep a body steady…what it took to keep a family standing when everything outside the door was trying to knock them down.

It’s no coincidence that our ancestors all knew the same thing…they knew how to keep a body regulated for the day, for the season, for a lifetime. The pot and the spices looked different in each place, but the answer was always the same: feed people…something warm, something that sticks to their bones, that gives them life…feed them together…don’t rush it, and always enough.

I wrote about my Nanny Sis a while ago in The Long Goodbye. I shared our experience with dementia and what it’s taken and how it feels to actively grieve and lose someone slowly while they’re still here. The grief and the goodbye are still happening, especially after she’s taken some falls and her health declines even more rapidly. I hope I can still see her next weekend when we travel south, maybe my last time saying goodbye…but, who knows…maybe not. But as I think about her and about legacy, I think about what she held in her hands before dementia started pulling at the threads of her mind.

My Nanny Sis would spend an entire Sunday with a pot of something on a low flame and make it seem like there was nowhere else in the world she needed to be…well, except for church first thing…that was a must, and then she would come back to whatever she was simmering on the stove. She cooked stewed tomatoes and rice...low and slow, her handmade biscuits that would bring any passersby in as her kitchen had the whole of Ridgeway, SC, smelling like something patient and good and real. Black-eyed peas and collard greens on New Year’s Day because we all needed the warmth, the good fortune, and the luck…and because the women before her did the same…and their mothers before that. Grits and eggs because they were there, they were cheap, and they were grounding…and the table on a Sunday was a weekly reset for us all…whether we called it that or not.

The pot likker from those collard greens held iron, magnesium, and folate concentrated into liquid. The black-eyed peas were B vitamins, prebiotic fiber, and protein in a bowl. My Nanny didn’t have this scientific understanding and certainly wasn’t reading books on nervous system regulation…she was reading the room. Nanny Sis read the people in her home, at her table, and she understood, without a single clinical word for it, what it took to feed them and make them steadier than they arrived.

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Over the past 2 years, I’ve had the honor of getting to know and explore the Bengali kitchens and culture of Yas’ family. I immediately recognized the warmth, the love, and the care…the communal shape of their meals, especially as his Babus and Mamis drop off containers of biryani, chicken roast, and dal to our apartment. His family FEEDS…and they know what we need without us even saying a word. Dal appears almost at every meal as lentils are the spine, the constant underneath everything else. Turmeric, cumin, coriander, ginger...warming spices that I’ve come to learn that beyond their transformative flavors, also have anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties. Researchers have literally spent decades studying these powers, and the wellness industry has tried to bottle and sell back to us at premium prices. These flavors, these grains were simmering in pots long before anyone wrote a paper about them, because the women in those ancestral kitchens understood something the research is only just now catching up to: that warmth has a physiological effect, the spices have an anti-inflammatory impact, and those shared meals eaten loud and together…they do something no supplement can replicate.

The Bengali table…the southern table…your grandmother’s table…they are all communal in a way that is physical, spiritual even, a way that resonates deep within our bones. You eat together, loudly, at a table that expands when it needs to…not alone at the counter at 10pm picking at whatever’s closest. The communal table isn’t an aesthetic choice; it’s a biological one. Our vagus nerve activates in the presence of other bodies, other warmth…and the slowing down that happens when eating becomes a shared event instead of a solo refueling stop.

The slow-kitchen has always been a place where I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. When I worked in the restaurant, it was FAST…yes…fast and chaotic and such a beautiful mess, but I loved every second of it. I especially loved the early prep times…before the people filled the seats, before the dinner ticket ding on the expo screen became the soundtrack of the night. The prep shift in the early morning was when I was able to learn, hold, and explore the produce and the prep for service. This was when the slow-cooking mattered…there were menu items that demanded multiple hours in the low oven…the ossobuco needed to be tender and soak up the best of the season’s roots and vegetables nestled around it. The half chicken longed for the hours over a bed of onions and wine while they softened it from below. The lamb shanks asked ever so politely for a braising broth so tender, so aromatic…so it could stretch itself away from the bone without quite letting go.

I started my professional kitchen career cooking in this Mediterranean tradition, and I love looking back at the common thread that’s been woven through every single kitchen that I’ve since been a part of. I think about what each of those kitchens taught me…what my chefs taught me...the art of choosing the freshest, seasonal produce, the act of doing very little to it to highlight its natural beauty, or even the slow braise, the long cook, the confidence in my own hands to prepare exactly what my body needs to be nourished…the patience necessary for the breaking down before anything can open up and become what it was always meant to be….all of it was nervous system education in disguise. You can’t rush a braise; the waiting is part of it, and while you wait, something shifts and settles within.

The restaurant was my Mediterranean classroom at a time when my life seemed to be falling apart around me. Those were the years I was pulling away from home, from the life I knew, becoming a chef whose ambition would eventually cost Millie her sense of safety.

All at the same time, ironically, this time was painful and hard and SO fulfilling and SO special and SO necessary. This was my classroom, and these slow-cooked meals reminded me that with a little heat, a little cuddle from the season’s vegetables and even a little wine to take the edge off…I, too, could grow…stretched, softened and tender.

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Nanny Sis never sat down to pass on this knowledge to me, and she surely can’t tell me any of this now. But thankfully, I watched her from a young age, and even into adulthood, I watched what she had in her hands. The passed-down knowledge was in the muscle memory of those slow Sunday afternoons, in the low flame she kept the stewed tomatoes on, in every table she set in Ridgeway, SC. Dementia has taken her words, her voice, the thread pulled almost bare…and what’s left is someone I love who can’t hand it forward the way she would have wanted to…the way we needed her to.

When I talk to her, these days, or look in her eyes, I mostly see a blankness, a lost mind fighting to remember anything at all…and then, sometimes, I catch it…a fleeting moment, but I still manage to catch it…the moment recognition floods her beautiful blue-gray eyes and she actually sees me and knows who I am. In those moments, I try to ask her something…quickly…from her past, about her biscuits or her notorious Christmas candies, whatever I can gather from her wisdom, any missing pieces from the puzzle that I know she still has in there, deep within her, before they fly away again into the blankness.

None of us is promised more time, or another day. Our ancestors, the ones who knew but didn’t always have time to say it out loud…they knew that the best, surefire way to calm a restless heart was a warm, slow-cooked pot of goodness. And like my Nanny did before her mind was slowly robbed from her, we probably all assumed there would be more Sundays, more slow pots, more years at the table before the thread started to unravel.

There’s a saying most of you know already...give a (wo)man a fish, and you feed them for a day, teach a (wo)man to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. I think it stops a little too short… because to go further with it…TEACH a (wo)man HOW TO COOK that fish...and you feed more than just her stomach for a lifetime. You feed her nervous system…you feed her confidence and ability to provide…you feed the part of her that knows she is capable of giving her own body what it needs…and you feed the people who pull a chair up to her table.

There’s something that happens when a meal comes from your own hands...from real things...made with patience and knowledge that were passed into your own hands from someone else’s. Something the finished plate can’t fully explain on its own…the act of cumin blooming until it pops in the oil, or onions low and slow until they almost disappear into themselves, the pot that asks you to wait because it isn’t done yet...it all tells your body that you are capable, that there is enough, that your hands know things your mind might have forgotten. That meal lands somewhere deeper than nutrition can reach.

I’m sure she wished she had more time to pass along the things she knew, the things her mother taught her, and beyond…I know I do. And so now, I’m writing this shit down…the things I’m learning, the things I’ve learned from this roller coaster of a life and the things I’ve learned from the women around me, from their kitchens, from their hands…and I’m passing it down to Millie, so she’ll know before I, too, am gone one day. None of us is promised more time.

Millie is 11, and we are in the thick of all the pre-teen things…the manic hormonal shifts, the body changes, the attitude. And, I want to make sure I do everything I can possibly do to support her, love her, and share with her what I’ve learned to hopefully lighten her load. Isn’t that what we all try to do as parents? We can get so caught up in “righting the wrongs” of our own childhoods that sometimes, we lose sight of the fact that our children are their own person, with their own struggles and their own challenges. She’s got enough on her plate to deal with without the added pressures of dealing with my childhood shit as well.

I mean, if I’m being honest, most of her “plate” of issues were gifted to her by her dad and me as she took on the collateral damage of our separation, divorce, and the severing of all the things Millie held to be important…to be safe. I wish I could wax poetic about how Millie and I spend so much time cooking together in the kitchen…but that would be a lie. At this point, Millie resents my cooking and my time in the kitchen…part of her blames the kitchen and my becoming a chef for tearing apart the family she knew and loved. Maybe…hopefully…she will come back around to joining me in the kitchen, and maybe…just maybe, she will start to understand and recognize the redemption I have found in this place. Maybe she will experience her own awakening in the kitchen, as I did. She won’t join me there quite yet…but I’ll keep inviting her to, anyway.

What changes when we can pass down actual language instead? To be able to give them the understanding that cravings aren’t malfunctions, that appetites aren’t something to minimize or manage, that our body isn’t the enemy that needs to be disciplined into compliance...to guide them to listen to their bodies and listen to what information their nervous systems are sending out?

What changes when a girl goes through puberty, knowing that what her body is doing has a name and a reason and a list of foods that can help and heal? When Millie’s 23 and depleted, will she remember and actually reach for something warm from the pantry instead of white-knuckling through that shitty feeling? Will she remember the bowl of lentils and the pot of rice, and know…like Nanny Sis knew and like my mom knew and like I know…will she know that her own hands can make those things and heal her own body…one bowl at a time?

This is what I’m working towards…I want to pass on the thrill of knowing how to make what your body is asking for…no recipe…no guide…just the muscle memory passed down from our mothers, grandmothers, and those gone before. I don’t know all the research and the science behind it all, but I’m learning and trying to combine that knowledge with what I already know in my body and in my own hands. The knowing and feeling what food does in my body beyond calories and weight, and the general ambient message that less is better. I’ll keep making the lentils. I’ll keep telling her what’s in them, even when she won’t eat them. One day she will…and she’ll know why it matters before she ever needs to.

I got to the market last Saturday morning, super early, with my tote bag and came home with a coffee stain on my dress…I was clumsily trying to balance my coffee while loading my bag, full to the brim and overflowing into my other hand, and that’s basically the whole spring summed up. Messica at her best.

Since April, I’ve actually managed to make it down to the greenmarket each weekend, scooping up the firsts of the season and looking ahead at what’s to come. This Spring season went by beautifully: ramps and asparagus for weeks, and now a good long run of strawberries, garlic scapes curling at the tip, and then cherries appearing out of nowhere with their hand-lettered signs, and rhubarb making one last dramatic run at everything. I bought more than I could reasonably use, and I managed to use it anyway. This is the spring I finally paid attention all the way through, and I want to do something with that feeling before it gives way to summer next week.

I was finally able to give my fridge the overhaul I’d been putting off for six months, and if you want to know how that went down, that reckoning is here. The short version: the fridge was lying to me about what was actually in it, I was lying to myself about my intentions, and we both got honest with each other. I went to the market after that with a fridge I actually wanted to fill and had a system to do it.

Like the Spring Equinox box back in March, I wanted to catch the transition…the perfect window when one season is ending and the next is beginning, and they find themselves briefly, perfectly in sync. Late spring produce and first summer arrivals were made to last a little longer than the market week they came from…and put into jars before the window closed.

Pre-orders are finally open for the next Summer Solstice Pantry Box! Four beautiful small-batch jars chock full of the best of spring and summer. I hope you try it out for yourself. Like last time, limited to only 15. The spring box sold out in 24-hours, just saying:)

Yes, it’s local NYC pickup again…and YET, this box will have a BONUS southern tour. Next weekend, Yas and I are flying south: family pool time in Blythewood and then a few days in Charleston, eating our way through the city. If you’re in Charlotte, NC or SC and want a box, drop me a note.

The summer solstice is this Sunday…the longest day of the year…and I think that deserves a jar of something. Now, let’s set the table for the weekend…

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Becky Krystal on Boiling Water for Service Journalism from Joy of Cooking
  The hosts review Joy’s soup chapter and keep ending up on the same question: what does “boiling” actually mean, and why does it matter? Then their guest, Becky Krystal from the Washington Post, comes back around to the same question. The distinction between a boil & a simmer is not nothing. The basics are unsexy and also completely load-bearing.

• Stop Looking for the “Right” Way to Show Up from Grey & Gold
  Bryn writes about quitting the search for borrowed clarity: the right framework, the right voice, the right formula, and what it costs to keep waiting for someone else to hand you the map. She makes the case that self-trust gets built by doing the thing before you have permission to, not by accumulating enough information to feel ready. You figure it out by doing it, not by waiting until you’ve figured it out.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The Price of Strawberries
Still riding high from this past Sunday’s essay & the 28-Kitchen tool I launched for you guys…and bc I’m feeling fun & fresh, I decided to make it free for the rest of June!

This piece highlighted the real economics of eating well…grocery store register math, the wellness industry’s costly lies, and the nervous system regulation magic of a $4 pot of lentils. I launched the 28-Day Kitchen companion for the actual work of cooking, wherever you might be in your cycle, week after week.

I’ve heard GREAT things from those of you who have used it…so much so, that I wanted to share it out for free through the end of June. Come try it, tell me what you think, and if it’s useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber when June ends (I’ll keep updating it throughout the year with new, seasonal recipes!).

The 28-Day Kitchen Tool →

THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

These two go together. Read them back to back.

• Deadbeat Eldest Daughter Guide from Couchtyper

  A guide for prioritizing your actual life over the role you were assigned before you were old enough to negotiate the terms. The eldest daughter thing is real & it runs deep: the training that happens when you are the one who was taught to hold things together, manage the room, need nothing, and ask for less. Whether or not you’re an eldest daughter, if you’ve ever felt like you were living inside someone else’s idea of who you should be, this one hits.

• People Pleasing Is a Symptom of Repressed Anger from Heart Led Creates

  The explanation for how we got to the role in the first place. People pleasing is what happens when anger has nowhere safe to go except inward, when saying no feels more dangerous than consenting to things you don’t want. She connects it to self-abandonment and links it to everything the piece above also described, and reading them together makes the whole picture click into place. I found it clarifying and uncomfortable in equal measure.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Every Summer Is a Midlife Crisis (No Matter How Old You Are) from Kate Bowler

  Kate writes about how we find ourselves holding up the year against where we thought we would be by now, against the summers we remember as good, against some imaginary version of our lives that runs on more sunshine and less email. She’s precise about this rather than sad…Summer has a quality of pressure to it, an urgency that tells you time is passing and asks what you’re going to do about that. The solstice is this Sunday, the longest day, the year’s own hinge point, and this is the right time to read this.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

Your Fear of Being Seen Is Costing You Your Success from Anna Morgado
Anna writes about the version of fear that doesn’t announce itself as fear. It comes dressed as perfectionism, as “not being ready yet,” as waiting until the website is better or the photos are better or you are better. She almost didn’t show up at all, and she writes about what it cost her before she figured out that the visibility wasn’t the risk, the invisibility was. I put this one in the Napkin section because it’s the kind of piece that makes you set down whatever you’ve been hiding behind and get back to work. Or at least it did that to me.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

The Summer Solstice Pantry Box is here!

Four handmade pantry items, made in my kitchen using what the late-spring and early-summer greenmarket had to offer. The box is the shifting of the seasons…that special window between spring and summer when everything is at its peak and you want to put it somewhere before it disappears…of all that, wrapped in an adorable little jar.

What’s inside:

• SweetBitter Berry Jam
  Strawberries, Chamomile & Amaro Montenegro w/ Dona “The Field” Tea
  Floral, jammy, bittersweet. The Montenegro gives it that bitter orange and rose aromatics. The chamomile from the tea doubles down with the fresh buds, making the flavor more cohesive the more you eat of it. This jam is for good butter on good bread and also, frankly, for eating with a spoon.

• Scape Artist
  All-Green Garlic Scape Chili Crisp
  Savory, spicy, deeply textural, vivid green all the way through from the chive oil folded in at the end. Green Sichuan peppercorns for floral citrusy heat, white miso for umami and body, garlic scapes fried until the edges are golden. This one goes on eggs, on rice, on noodles, on anything that needs a reason to exist.

• Jewels of June
  Pickles of Rhubarb, Cherries & Chive Blossoms
  The brine turns a deep jewel-toned magenta after 48 hours. Rhubarb pieces and cherry halves packed with chive blossom florets and a tarragon sprig down the inside of the jar. Tart and sweet and a little dramatic about it. The brine is a condiment: into salad dressings, into cocktails, over chèvre, over vanilla ice cream. Don’t waste it.

• Sundown Salt
  Chive Blossom, Lemon & Tarragon Finishing Salt w/Aleppo Pepper
  Pale lavender-gold with purple flecks from the dried chive blossoms. Maldon flakes kept in shards, not crushed. Use it at the table and for finishing, not during cooking. On grilled fish, on soft-boiled eggs, on sliced heirloom tomatoes, on torn bread with good butter. This is the one the zinger needed for all meals.

• Each box also includes: The Sun…an original tarot card designed and painted by Rose Seccareccia and printed by me. The Sun is the card of vitality and warmth and clarity, the feeling of a perfect day when everything is working. It felt right for the season and for the box. A small ceramic spice/herb jar by Sarah Buffaloe. Both lovely and hopefully will make you smile. Seasonal recipes by yours truly for the spring and summer.

$65 per box
*Small-Batch: Only 15 available

📍 NYC local pickup: Drop me a note to arrange
✈️ NC/SC delivery: Yas and I fly down next weekend. If you’re in the area, I’ll bring yours.

Order yours at thefreckledfork.com →

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. This Sunday on The Steady Table: What Our Grandmothers Already Knew. I'll meet you there. ♥

I walked through the farmers’ market at Union Square this past weekend and just watched. The farmers and their tables, the crops doing their best to show up and show off after a long string of difficult weather and a tough growing season...it’s strawberry season in this region, and a pint of those tiny berries is going for $8, a quart is $15. And we’re already bracing for a dismal peach harvest from farms in Jersey after an unseasonably warm spring caused early blooming, and then a bait-and-switch frost came through and killed the crop before it could even get started. For even the most intentional shopper who wants to support local and seasonal AND also actually feed her family, the reality is getting damn near impossible.

Long gone are the days of my $100/week grocery budget, the one I used to stretch across almost two weeks and feed a family of three pretty easily and well enough. Even at the regular grocery store, a head of cauliflower was literally $9 the other day...for ONE HEAD. Don’t @ me about cauliflower, you have to zhuzh it up just to make it edible and it’s NINE DOLLARS. Everything is climbing at once, and most of us are carrying that weight before we’ve even thought about cooking.

The number on the register screen is doing something to our bodies that goes way beyond the math. As that total climbs, as we watch our $100 do very little, doing rapid subtraction in our heads while the line moves behind us and we still don’t have everything we came for...our nervous systems are already ablaze. Our bodies don’t sort threats by category. They read the grocery store math as danger and respond accordingly, which means we get home already carrying a heavy cortisol load, already depleted, before we’ve even touched the stove once.

I remember my first weeks of single motherhood after Jay and I separated, and I moved out. I was making the most money I’d ever made in my adult life, finally doing it as a Head Chef, but as a single mom paying New York City rent and bills on my own, my food budget was almost non-existent. On the weeks I didn’t have Millie, I subsisted on coffee, cereal, and whatever I could eat at the restaurant. But the weeks I had her, I had to make sure there was actual food in the apartment, real food, enough.

The negotiations I had to make at that grocery store each week were brutal. Do I stick with bread, fruit, and some vegetables this week, or can I spring for chicken? Millie needed her Zbars for school and her fruit snacks, but I couldn’t get both on any given week. I was a professional chef who was learning more about food than most people I knew, and there I was...week to week, standing in the checkout line doing the same math we are all being forced to do right now, putting things back, carrying that weight and scarcity mindset home.

We’ve been told, for decades, by an industry that profits directly from this narrative, that the solution to a nervous system running too hot is an expensive one...supplements, turmeric powders, and adaptogens, morning protocols that take thirty minutes and a disposable budget to put it all together. The wellness machine has spent enormous energy convincing us that regulation is something you have to purchase in small jars and packets and subscriptions, and most of us have believed it, because the alternative is a body out of whack.

Here’s what I’ve come to learn working in professional kitchens, from cooking through a long service when there was almost nothing left to give...when I was running on fumes, and it was still my job to feed people: our nervous systems simply can’t tell the difference between an $80 jar of ashwagandha and a well-salted bowl of lentils. What your body is looking for when it’s in alarm mode is metabolic safety...enough food, enough protein, enough warmth, enough fat to carry you through the next few hours. I mean, think about it...that signal has cost less than a cup of coffee for the entire history of human cooking.

The most effective nervous system foods on earth are, almost without exception, the cheapest things in the store.

Here are the ten things I started keeping on hand when my dollar needed to stretch beyond anything I thought possible, and what I still keep now, because it turned out these were the right things all along:

• Lentils are where I start. About $4 a bag and twenty-five minutes on the stove, and they deliver more complete nervous system support than anything in the supplement aisle...B vitamins, iron, protein, and fiber, all in one pot. Your brain burns through B vitamins rapidly under stress, and most of us are running lower than we’d guess. They’re hearty, they rock my face off when tossed in a cold salad with vinegar, they stretch to feed you for days, and they have never once let me down.

• Eggs. I’ve mentioned them in nearly every post in this series because, well…as you all know by now, I’m literally obsessed. They’re around $5 for a dozen, complete with protein and packed with choline (the golden raw material your brain uses to produce its own calming signal). Eggs are life, and if there are eggs, then there’s always a meal in the house.

• Canned sardines. Don’t freak out on me…I know they might sound like a massive, immediate NO, but hear me out. They’re under $3 a can and a bigger hit of omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and protein than almost anything else at that price. Omega-3s are the actual physical building material for your brain cells, and chronic stress depletes them faster than most of us realize. I like to throw them on a skillet to give a little quick sear (1-2min), then mash on toast with a smear of mayo, a sharp line of mustard, and a heavy squeeze of fresh lemon is a complete meal that feels like an internal anchor…and good gracious, they’re delish…try them once.

• Rolled oats run about $5 for a bag that lasts weeks…slow-releasing and loaded with prebiotic fiber that feeds the gut microbiome...which means they support your serotonin production and nervous system stability on a timeline that outlasts most other breakfasts. They hold, and so can you.

• Frozen spinach gets no respect and deserves more. My mom knew something I had to learn the hard way: fresh goes bad before you can use it, turning into green liquid regret in the bottom of the crisper drawer. Frozen is there when you need your magnesium and folate, zero waste, and no expiration anxiety. Magnesium runs low during chronic stress, and most of us aren’t getting enough. Frozen spinach is the most unglamorous solution to that problem, and it works every time.

• Beans…dried when you can, canned when you can’t. A pound of dried beans costs under $3 and makes three or four cans’ worth of chickpeas, black beans, cannellini, whatever’s on sale. The fiber feeds your gut, the protein steadies your blood sugar, and they go in everything...on a sheet pan with olive oil and salt, stirred into rice, smashed onto toast, dropped into broth. For dried: soak them overnight in cold water, drain in the morning, cover with fresh water by about two inches and simmer 45 minutes to an hour until tender but still holding their shape. Make a big batch, portion into containers, keep in the fridge for the week, and you have less sodium and better texture than anything from a can. No bandwidth for that? Canned is completely legitimate...drain and rinse them well and they’re ready in the time it takes to heat the pan. I keep both.

• Rice. I always have it. A big bag costs almost nothing and it’s the base of more meals than I could count...the first thing I reach for when there’s nothing else to build from. Brown rice for the B vitamins and fiber when I have the 25 minutes, white rice when I need something faster and more forgiving. Either way, it steadies blood sugar, feeds the gut microbiome, and sits on the stove (or in my handy dandy rice cooker) without demanding anything from you.

• Sweet potatoes run about $1 each and they’re complex carbohydrates that break down slowly and hold blood sugar steady for hours...every crash you prevent is one less cortisol surge landing on a system already working overtime. They’re grounding in a way other foods just can’t do…there’s a reason almost every generation reaches for them during hard seasons.

• Olive oil. A heavy, golden pour of it over almost any humble plate of food tells your gut that the situation is improving. Buy the biggest bottle you can find at your price point and use it to finish, to make sauces and vinaigrettes, to zhuzh it up without restraint.

• Miso paste costs about $5, and a single container lasts for months in the back of your fridge. It’s fermented, and one of the fastest ways I know to signal to your nervous system that the emergency is over. A spoonful dissolved in hot water with a pat of butter hits the back of the throat in a way that is immediately, unmistakably calming. It goes in dressings, in rice, in sauces, or really in anything that needs depth.

• Dark chocolate, 70% or higher. One or two squares is all you need...magnesium and plant compounds that help your brain produce GABA, your nervous system’s actual chill-out signal. I keep a bar in my freezer specifically for those weeks…you know the ones.

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When there’s truly nothing left in me, I’m making a rice bowl...whatever rice I have, freshly made or reheated leftovers, egg cracked in and soft-scrambled right in the pan with it or fried and put on top, whatever vegetables are around. Ten minutes, a complete meal, and it always hits.

Or a quesadilla, cheese with whatever meat or vegetables I have, folded and pressed until crispy. Sometimes it’s just cheese, and honestly, that’s fine...or I’ll smash an avocado over a bowl of tortilla chips and throw together a quick pico from whatever tomato and onion situation I have on hand with a squeeze of lime and some cheese on top. This is my go-to in a pinch.

Or a breakfast burrito...softly scrambled eggs, beans or veggies mixed in, cheese, and a swipe of mayo on the tortilla before you roll it, which is the step most people skip and really shouldn’t. Warm it in the pan to press the seams. One pan, five-ish minutes, done.

None of this is nervous system medicine in the clinical sense necessarily, but all of it is warm, real, and made from things you probably already have on hand, and that’s the magic.

I launched the 28-Day Kitchen Guide last week, and I’ve already heard from a lot of you. I should have said this from the start: don’t open it at 7 pm when you’re already depleted…that’s completely the wrong moment.

Open it on a Sunday morning or afternoon (like today!), enter your current cycle day, and let it do all the math for you...the same calculations and negotiations I used to run in those grocery lines, except now it’s already done before you get there. It locks into where you are in your cycle and gives you the exact meals for the week…breakfasts, lunches, and dinners…all built from a simple pantry like the one laid out above. Your meal plan, your grocery list, less stress. All good things and for only $5.

You can also just hit print…there’s a button that strips it down to a clean, simple layout you can actually hold in your hands. Take that piece of paper and slap it on your refrigerator with a strip of blue painter’s tape, and let the paper handle the decisions this week.

I built it because I think we all could use some assistance these days. I know we are all capable of googling or ai-ing (is that what it’s called?) for recipes, but this tool takes it a step further…giving you recipes and meal ideas that I can vouch for, that are built to assist you (and give you the why) on your phase and cycle. It came to life from all those single-mom supermarket lines I used to stand in, doing the bread-or-chicken math, carrying the weight of all those decisions. I built it so you don’t have to carry that alone…it’s exclusive for paid subscribers at $5 a month, and it’ll be updated regularly with new, seasonal recipes.

At the end of the day, our nervous systems really can’t tell the difference between an expensive rescue protocol and a bowl of something warm, eaten sitting down, at your own table. Our bodies are running one evaluation…is there food…is there enough…is there somewhere to land?

The dumpster fire is real, and it’s loud, and I know it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere. But for the price of a bag of lentils, you can give your body enough of a break to keep going. A little planning, a lot of grace for yourself, and the right things already in your pantry...that’s the whole survival kit. I mean, the reality is, we’ve probably been doing it longer than we even know.

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The costumes are back safely in their garment bags, and Millie is at her dad’s for the next couple of weeks.

Broadway Dance Center’s end-of-year showcase was this past Sunday, and Millie was amazing on stage. Simply beautiful ballet performance and a goofy jazz number, both SO representative of the spectrum of awesome of our girl. All the dancers were amazing, but when the contemporary group hit the stage, the entire room was in awe. These kids were dancing their truth...full bodies, nothing held back, the type of dance you feel in your chest even from twenty rows back. It was extraordinary and totally something I think Millie NEEDS in her life…that’s the therapy I want her to experience. Hell, maybe I want to experience it, too…(looks up adult summer dance classes…)

Millie has been all ballet and buns since her early days in Charlotte and then in New York at BDC in 2020. She turned to me at the end of it all and said she DEFINITELY wants to do contemporary next semester. Needless to say, I already had it in my BDC cart before we even left the building.

There are these small but incredible moments where you watch your kid see a thing she wants and just...asks for it. No secondhand embarrassment, no wondering if she’s good enough, no surveying the room first. She saw something she wanted and moved toward it…ugh, I want to be more like her when I grow up.

After the show, she headed to her dad’s until graduation, and Yas and I had the apartment to ourselves. We used this time to make spectacularly lazy and leisurely decisions, seeing multiple movies in the span of days. In particular, Masters of the Universe this past Monday night. I will explain more fully below, but suffice it to say: we came home and put on the 1987 version to cleanse our minds of the trash they call a remake, and I have never been more grateful that the ‘87 version still streams.

We are counting down until Yas, Millie, and I head south in a few weeks to visit family in SC. We will drop Millie off for her annual week at Camp Nonni & Poppi’s, and then Yas and I will escape for a few days in Charleston…just the two of us. He’s never been, and I cannot wait to show him one of my favorite southern cities (and former home!). Chubbys and R Kitchen are already locked on the schedule. If you have a hidden gem we simply CANNOT miss, let me know!

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Now, let’s set the table for the weekend…

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Masters of the Universe (2026)
  In what was supposed to be a modern version of the mythology I grew up with, but as it were…this film was abysmal. I was hoping for a retelling of the 1987 story with actual stakes and actual heart. What we got was He-Man played as someone who was dumb as bricks…there were jokes where gravity should’ve been, and a plot that seemed ashamed of its own source material. We came straight home, put on the original, and immediately felt better. I spent years watching this film as a child and loved it so much…save yourself the money and the 2 hours of life wasted …stick to the 80s:)

• The Conundrum of Cook or Get Off the Pot from Tamar Adler
  About designing a dream kitchen and freezing completely at the blank slate of choices. Her answer: start with one heavy, impractical, beautiful object you already love (a stone sink from Craigslist, a Viking stove from a late-night auction) and let the kitchen grow from there. Start with the life you already have in motion and let the design catch up to it. She also writes about her borrowed and inherited kitchens over the years and what they all had in common, and I loved that part most. The whole piece is an argument for constraints as the most generous place to start.

• Every Blooming Thing from Large Hope
  Jes Scoville pulls a Clarissa Pinkola Estes quote that’s hanging out in my mind this week…“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul…shines like gold in dark times.” She writes about going up a canyon and literally trying to notice every blooming thing...trying to light herself from the inside out when the outside is too much. Read this one ideally somewhere outside. I needed this.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The 28-Day Kitchen…FOR YOU!

If Crying in the Walk-In landed for you this past Sunday, I have built a tool this week for what comes next. The Freckled Fork 28-Day Kitchen resource is live this week, and paid subscribers get first access. I’ve been working on this for a bit, and it’s meant to be something you actually return to, week after week, as the cycle moves, and will get updated seasonally!

This month’s recipes are late spring/summer forward, and for each phase, you get a list of foods to use and which to avoid. I’ll update it each month with new recipes and pairings, so for only $5/month for recipes that you can use and help on your journey of regulations and balance? I think it’s a steal <3

THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

I’m totally knee-deep in the hormones and histamine rabbit hole over here…it’s all SO connected…

• The Shared Biology of MCAS, Histamine, (h)EDS, POTS, Endometriosis, PMDD, Neurodivergence, CPTSD, Chronic Pain, and Lipedema from Amanda Panacea
  I know that title is CRAZY long…but read this piece when you have a moment. If you’ve ever carried a collection of symptoms that didn’t seem to belong together, that doctors kept treating as separate and unrelated, this piece will feel like someone finally sat down and mapped all the wires running through the same wall. Amanda draws the shared biological thread underneath conditions that appear together far more frequently than medicine has historically been willing to acknowledge. This is the one that’ll make you feel less like something is wrong with you and more like you’ve just been working with incomplete information all along.

• Why Do Women Respond to the Same Hormone Fluctuations Differently? from Liminal Medicine
  Sara, RN goes deep on histamine, GABA receptor sensitivity, PMDD, and perimenopausal AUDHD, and why two women with the exact same hormone panel can be living in completely different bodies. What she argues is that the whole “hormone balance” conversation has been starting in the wrong place...the hormones matter, absolutely, but so does the terrain they’re landing in. The gut, the GABA receptors, the accumulated histamine load...all of it shapes the outcome before the hormones even arrive. Pair this one with the piece above and give yourself a couple hours.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Nostalgia, You Sneaky Thing from Kate Bowler
  Kate names the science behind something I’ve been feeling for weeks now. There’s a thing researchers call the “reminiscence bump”...the songs you loved between ages fourteen and twenty-two. They are the ones that become anchors for your sense of who you are for the rest of your life. The music might not have actually peaked in that window, but YOU did. You were forming, and those songs were there when it was happening, and they carry the shape of who you were becoming.

  She builds this into a summer practice around nostalgia, using it as a way of remembering who you still are. She also asks readers to share: what song takes you straight back to summer at seventeen the second you hear it? Mine is already cued up in the playlist. You know the one.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

When You Stop Chasing Potential — In Jobs, Men, and Versions of Yourself
from A Tiny Bit of Advice

Jenae Green made her vision board smaller this year...fewer images, more commitment. And then she wrote about the pattern underneath it: falling in love with what something could be, what someone might become, what version of yourself you keep planning to eventually build...and then staying. In the job that overpromised, waiting on the dynamic that kept underdelivering, eyes still on the same board year after year, giving every big scary thing a revised deadline instead of a real one.

“Stop donating your potential to things that aren’t ready for it,“ she writes. “The energy you extend to jobs that overpromise, relationships that underdeliver, and versions of yourself you keep drafting but never build…redirect it. It was always yours.”

Taking things at face value isn’t pessimism…it’s self-respect…and sometimes the most honest thing you can do for yourself is just believe what’s actually in front of you.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

The Summer Solstice Pantry Box opens for pre-orders NEXT WEEK.

Everything I love most about this exact moment in the season, all in one adorable box (or bag or something, let’s see what it all fits in!). I’ve been testing various market finds and pairings for the past couple of weeks and there are some combos in here that will hopefully make you smile…BIG.

Full recipe notes and a printed recipe book in this one, along with another custom artwork card by my dear friend Rose and handmade pottery pieces by the ever-talented Sarah Buffaloe.

If you want to get in on the goodness, stay tuned for the order list...this is a SUPER small batch – only 15 available – and last time, they sold out in less than 24 hours. And for my people in the south, I’ll be in SC from June 26th-July 4th, so I could bring your goodies down with me! Huzzah!

The Knicks won Game 4 last night by ONE POINT.
OG with the tip-in…I watched the last 5 min. from my phone in the dark when we were supposed to be sleeping…and I’m not even a sports person. I have been on record with "yay, go team" as my entire relationship to organized athletics for most of my adult life. And yet. This city has done something to me…to all of us…and I think we are all fully, completely, embarrassingly invested in this team right now. The energy in New York when the Knicks are in a playoff run is something I cannot explain to anyone who doesn't live here...it's in the subway, it's in the bodegas, it's in the way strangers make eye contact on the street when something just happened. The whole city is rooting for the same thing at the same time and it feels absolutely electric to be here for it. I'm a Knicks fan now. I said what I said. GO. KNICKS.

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. This Sunday on The Steady Table: What You're Actually Hungry For...Your body isn't failing you…it's filing a report. I'll meet you there. ♥

Everything feels TOO BIG…hormones…emotions…thoughts…waistline…the list goes on. That thing your partner said three days ago lingers heavy…that work situation that’s fine is suddenly, this week, unbearable. The craving for chocolate or salt or bread or all three at 10pm staring at you like an old bill you forgot about on the counter. It all seems TOO MUCH and TOO overwhelming.

I’ve tried to warn Yas and Millie ahead of time…but to be honest, whenever I feel those BIG feelings and am aware enough to warn them, it’s already too late…I’m mid-freakout over the DANG drawers and cabinet doors being left open AGAIN after 2 of the 3 ADHD’ers in my household have left the room.

You wake up on day three of this particular stretch and think: maybe this is just who I am now. Less patient…more irritable…less chill…maybe, I’m just a person who can’t handle things now.

But you guys…that’s not entirely true…the reality is as we get older, our nervous systems tend to operate closer to the edge and with genuinely depleted resources. We know all the quick fixes or ways to smooth our rough edges…but really the choice about WHAT to eat during that week might just be the single highest-impact decision and change we could actually make. So what would it look like for us to start with our food? What are the best, highest-impact foods we can eat during those particular phases of our cycles that will support balance over chaos?

I honestly had ZERO clue about the correlation of it all throughout the majority of my adult life. Mid-40s seems like a good a time as ever to learn some new shit…so let’s go. I may not have had the words or scientific backing to “know what I know” but along the way, my body totally gave me some clues…I just needed to pay attention. What I understood, beyond words, was that some weeks…all I wanted was sushi…and a salad with a sharp, citrusy vinaigrette that made my teeth sing…oh, and raw vegetables and fresh fruit and generally the lightest, crispiest thing on the menu. And then, two weeks later, this same body put eggs on literally anything in front of it. An egg on rice. An egg on toast. An egg on the leftovers from two days ago I’d avoided until I put an egg on them and suddenly they were dinner. Oh…and Cheez-Its...not sweets, not anything smooth or creamy, but only things that were savory, salty and crunchy. Okay, and maybe a mini Snickers ice cream bar at 11pm because the chocolate…texture…the crunch and the sweetness all felt like a necessity than a choice.

I thought I just had weird food moods…but a closer look revealed it was all a little more connection than that. Turns out, these cravings are part of my cycle.

Once I became a chef, I spent years reading other people’s bodies. It’s the job in a way...a chef calibrates constantly, the way a good host reads the table, noticing who walked in depleted and who walks in fine, who needs something warm and who needs something light. I got pretty dang good at reading people, at paying attention. Earlier this spring, I started building one of my meal prep client’s weekly menus around where she is in her cycle, and it’s been really interesting to watch these theories at work in real time. My other “test subject” has been myself…and here I am, re-learning and adapting my own operating manual in my 40s, the same way I learned everything else...standing off to the side, paying attention, taking notes.

Most nervous system advice is written for a body running on a 24-hour clock. Wake, cortisol spike, coffee, work, eat, wind down, sleep, repeat. The entire wellness machine is built on that loop…morning routines, evening routines, circadian this, blue-light that. Blah blah blah.

Most of the time, I guess that framework is fine...maybe sometimes, even useful. But if you have a hormonal cycle, you’re not only living on this 24-hour loop…you’re living on TWO clocks at once. We have the daily one mentioned above…and then also, a second…it’s a slower one, roughly 28 days (give or take) and she only gets mentioned in a negative, blame-game sort of way…the one we like to blame for mood swings and weight gain. She actually has a name: the infradian rhythm. Essentially, that’s just a fancy term for any biological rhythm that lasts longer than a day...and yet, my girls, this is the one that has been quietly (or not so quietly) running the show your entire life, beginning in your preteens.

In real terms: our stress threshold, our nutritional needs, and our body’s baseline reactivity ebb and flow from week-to-week. The good news? It’s literally a measurable, hormonal, trackable thing. Eating the same way on day 4 of your cycle as you do on day 24 is like trying to wear the same sweater from January in July and wondering why you’re effing sweating all over. Your biology has changed seasons; your plate has to change with it.

It’s different from the current wellness trend of cycle syncing that we’ve probably all seen on the socials. It’s not another color-coded app, a seed rotation protocol, or even a $40 moon journal. I have nothing against moon journals or apps...okay, I have a little something against downloading any more dang apps...but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I really wanted to understand this part of our body’s biology that somehow never made it in the “body” curriculum in middle school. Estrogen and progesterone are not just reproductive hormones...they’re neuroactive steroids. They literally change how reactive our brains are, how much stress we can absorb before we tip over, how much fuel we burn, what our guts can comfortably digest. The operating conditions of our nervous systems change each week with each cycle. We got one awkward health class video in fifth grade and then decades of silence and guesswork. It’s almost as if someone or something didn’t WANT us to know more or understand the true inner workings of our bodies or systems…I’ll let you mull that one over a bit…

So, let’s add some addendums to our body’s user manual…a little closer look and plan for the 4 very different phases of our cycles.

Days 1–5: The Menstrual Phase. (Our monthly winter…)

During this phase, estrogen and progesterone are both at their lowest point of the month. The hormonal noise goes quiet, and interestingly, some women even report feeling an unusual sense of clarity on these days. Notice I didn’t say energy…I said clarity. The body is doing heavy physical work, but the signal-to-noise ratio in our heads is strangely clear.

Our assignment during this period (pun heavily intended) is to rest, and for my women in the back…that’s an actual assignment, not a reward you have to earn first. Your body is literally shedding blood and iron, so it needs iron-rich, warming, anti-inflammatory food to make it through. This time is begging you for slow, uncomplicated things. Soups, stews, braises, a pot of dal. It’s the time for letting the pot do all the work and you can just stand near it and maybe stir a little, occasionally, like a supervisor.

One thing to know is that not all iron is the same. The iron in animal foods, red meat especially, is called heme iron, and your body absorbs somewhere between 15 and 35% of it. However, plant iron (spinach, lentils, beans) is non-heme, and absorption can run as low as 2 to 20% depending on what you eat it with. Don’t immediately abandon the lentils just yet…it’s just asking you to be strategic: pair plant iron with vitamin C (a squeeze of lemon or add some bell peppers), or put a modest piece of beef next to a pile of spinach and let them work together like they want to. Seared beef over wilted greens during your period is not indulgence, it’s replenishment.

A little Freckled Fork Plate for this cycle: A simple pan-seared piece of beef or lamb over wilted garlicky spinach or swiss chard. Season it well, let it come to room temp before you put it on the pan, cook it to your preference (mine is med-rare like the good lord intended), eat it with those lightly wilted, garlicky greens alongside. Under fifteen minutes and it does more iron-replacement work than almost anything else you could eat that night.

Days 6–13: The Follicular Phase (Our monthly season of bloom…Spring)

Our estrogen starts to climb during this phase, and with it, everything else seems to lift. Our energy builds, our ability to handle stress increases...the same email that would have wrecked you a few days ago is now just an email that barely makes a dent in your psyche. Our nervous systems are measurably more resilient in this window, and if you pay attention, you can really feel it. This is the week for me that salads (all the salads) actually sound like indulgence.

Feed that lift. Lighter food works SO well in this phase...think fresh things, green things, lean proteins, sprouted things. This is also when fermented foods shine brightest and have the highest bang-for-our-buck…the kimchi and kefir and pickled things we talked about last week. Our gut is more receptive, our energy climbs, and the psychobiotics from the fermented things get to do their work on our systems when they finally have bandwidth to deal. This is the week to try that new recipe you flagged a couple weeks ago…the week to take risks and have fun in the kitchen. Spring is for experiments, for growth, afterall.

For me, this is when I crave ALL the sushi. Raw fish and fresh rice and that brightness and lightness that doesn’t weigh down anything. This is when I want the HUGE ass salad with a sharp, citrus vinaigrette that my follicular-phase specifically craves. My body is telling me my digestion systems are firing on all cylinders, estrogen is doing its job, and I can handle lighter things…and they’ll actually satisfy me.

This is the week to schedule the hard conversation you’ve been putting off, start the project you’ve been circling, host the dinner with friends. Your nervous system has the bandwidth during this phase, so use it.

A little Freckled Fork Plate for this cycle: Kimchi fried rice with a fried egg. Kimchi is the psychobiotic superstar from last week’s post, and follicular phase is when your microbiome is most receptive to fermented input as your estrogen rises. Day-old rice, a big spoonful of kimchi sizzled in sesame oil, a perfect crispy-egg fried egg gently slid right on top. Soy sauce and chili oil and a drizzle of Kewpie to finish. Ten minutes, under $5, your gut will love you forever.

Days 14–17: Ovulation (Literally, Hot Girl Summer)

I’ll keep this one brief, because honestly, she do be short.
And, I think we all LIVE for this one.

This is the part of our cycles where we FEEL too hot to trot. These are the days we tap into our buried gumption and confidence to wear that sassy, not-sure-we-can-pull-this-off outfit. These 3-4 days? We can rock that shit and we know it.

It’s PEAK estrogen, peak resilience, the easiest phase in our bodies, for most of us. We can literally eat whatever sounds good, say yes to ALL the things…this is the time to shine, to spend your energy out loud. Cook for people, sit at long tables, stay an hour later than you planned. Our nervous systems have their full safety net of support under it right now, take full advantage of it.

A tiny ahem…or warning, however…this time is S H O R T. Seemingly shorter than the others with the luteal phase anxiously waiting in the wings to rain on your parade. So if you’ve been under-eating or under-sleeping in preparation for your own imagined peak performance, you will feel that ISH heavily on or around day 18. Fair warning…tread lightly.

A little Freckled Fork Plate for this cycle: Lamb chops or a good steak or grilled fish with blistered cherry tomatoes and fresh herbs. You have the energy and appetite for a real dinner during this time. Season generously, sear in a very hot pan, let it rest. Scatter cherry tomatoes in the same pan after the meat comes out, let them blister in the fat, pour them over everything with fresh herbs and a squeeze of lemon. Eat it at an actual table, phone nowhere near, have that fancy beverage, too, and even some dessert. You deserve the full experience this week.

Days 18–28: The Luteal Phase (The Long FALL…I mean…autumn)

This one here…this is where we’re spending the rest of the post, because this stretch is among the longest in our cycle, and ironically enough, it’s the one wellness culture has either ignored or weaponized…and it’s where most of us have decided there’s just something wrong with us.

Nothing is wrong with you.

After ovulation, progesterone rises...it runs warm and sedating, and our core body temperature rises and rises. Progesterone breaks down into a neuroactive steroid called allopregnanolone, (don’t you DARE ask me how to say that out loud) basically it’s a steroid that has the same calming effect on your brain as a glass of wine or Xanax. It is, functionally, your body’s own brake pedal. In these last days of the luteal phase, progesterone and ALLO-roid (the only way I can pronounce or even remember it) go hand-in-hand, JUMPING off a dang cliff like star-crossed lovers they are. The brake pedal goes soft. The baseline smoke alarm in our brain becomes hyper-reactive because the chemical cushioning that held the alarm in check is suddenly GONE. Basically, our ability to handle stress drops dramatically.

The superhero ability to handle stress like a boss in follicular and ovulatory phases suddenly DROPS sharply. Things that didn’t bother you three weeks ago bother you now…BIG time. This is a hormonal shift, not a flaw in your character, ladies.

For me, this shift was clearest those nights on the line in the restaurant. Some weeks, the stress of running service was SO exciting. Needing to re-plate a dish over and over to get it exactly right was a challenge, a learning experience…honestly, the part of the job I was there for.

And yet…there were other nights…same job, same kitchen…and my chef would look at the plate I put up at the pass, suck his teeth the way he did when he wasn’t happy, and say, without anger or yelling, just matter-of-factly: do it again. Those nights, my capacity to handle feedback was non-existent…my eyes would fill with tears and I would make up some quick excuse to go grab something from the walk-in before anyone noticed. I’d stand in the cold for a minute…cry quietly for another and then quickly wipe my eyes before I returned to the line. Those shifts, I KNEW. I didn’t have the words or the research or the science to make sense of my overwhelming feelings then, so I just chalked it up to something being wrong with me instead of something being right. I totally misunderstood my body’s gift to fully do it’s thing…I was the one in the way.

Talk about misunderstanding…I had no idea that our metabolism actually increases in this luteal phase. Research consistently measures it...the body literally runs hotter in this phase, and it burns more fuel, too…like a few hundred calories more each day. Your body is doing more work, so it needs more food. The late-cycle hunger when you claw for anything in reach isn’t the battle cry of a failing discipline, it’s our body sending us signals that we keep missing. PMS is NOT a weakness, it’s simply the part of our cycles where our nervous systems are operating TOO close to the cliff. Of course it feels different…it is different.

I don’t know about you, but during this super fun time, my cravings include eggs…on literally everything. I’ll put an egg on rice, on leftovers I’d been avoiding all week, on toast, on chips, whatever…eggs on everything. The message my body is sending? It’s asking for complete protein and choline (the neurotransmitter building block we learned last week)...and this body has apparently decided that eggs are the most efficient delivery vehicle.

And, then there’s the Cheez-Its, chips & salsa and really any other salty, crunchy things. These cravings are my adrenal glands signaling that they need the sodium they’re burning through as they work overtime to manage my stress responses.

The mini Snickers ice cream bars at 11pm…that’s my body craving magnesium (the chocolate) wrapped in a blood sugar request (the sugar and fat) wrapped in a texture craving the calming effect of crunching on peanuts. I’m not losing the plot here…these are all examples of how my body has been working overtime to file very specific requests, and in reality, the requests make complete scientific sense.

So, what does this look like for you, specifically, in the kitchen?

Magnesium-rich food. Leafy greens, dark chocolate, pumpkin seeds, avocado.
The research on OTC magnesium supplements is genuinely mixed...some studies show real improvement, especially for the anxiety component, others show less. But magnesium-rich real foods naturally contain fiber, good fat & folate. All good things.

Complex carbohydrates and root vegetables. Sweet potatoes, squash, oats, fresh bread. Steady carbs keep blood sugar from spiking and crashing…and, every crash you can prevent is one less cortisol surge landing on your nervous system that’s probably forgotten how to use the brakes during this phase.

Protein at every meal. Not the astronomically high protein-influencer amounts...I’m talk about like a normal person amount…every time. It’s the most reliable way to keep blood sugar stable…and stable blood sugar is exactly the kind of balance that the nervous system can REALLY feel and make use of.

I know most of us are trying our best, but sometimes, instead of helping, we are ACTIVELY making things worse for ourselves. Restricting food, skipping meals, unsupervised intermittent fasting or even treating our cravings as the enemy. These tactics all bring guilt and shame and do more damage than assistance. Our brains read these food scarcity tactics as survival threats. They can’t tell the difference between a famine and a wellness cleanse, and they’ll respond with the very anxiety and irritability that we’re attempting to discipline our way out of. We cannot punish our bodies into feeling safe…it’s impossible. Life is hard enough, we don’t need our bodies engaging in a full-on revolt against us.

A little Freckled Fork Plate for this cycle: Braised chicken thighs with oranges, fennel, sweet potato and greens. Dark meat for the zinc…for the iron…and honestly, for the staying power. Sear/brown four bone-in thighs skin-side down until golden, soften a diced onion and garlic in the fat, add a cubed sweet potato, a squeeze and some slices of orange, and a splash of apple cider vinegar and a cup of chicken broth. Nestle the chicken back on top and braise covered on low heat for 25 minutes. Add two big handfuls of greens (your choice) at the end and let them wilt. Salt, lemon & another squeeze of orange, done. One pan, under $10 for four servings, reheats perfectly for a couple days after (and you know…always good the next day with an egg on top).

Our cycles have ruled almost our entire lives as women, from our preteen years until the ‘pause...and it’s something so present, so relentless, and we’ve treated it as an inconvenience rather than a communication system. What if we considered these cycles through a different lens...as something our bodies were designed to do. As if the signs and shifts each week weren’t holding us prisoner to our hormones, but in fact, they’re our hormones acting as partners…being helpers and communicators for what our body needs to fully and wholly function. What if we just learned to listen to them instead of despise and blame them? What if we actually listened to their suggestions the way we’d listen to that of a therapist or a doctor…including them in our health journeys for balance?

The mini Snickers at 11pm wasn’t a loss of control...the tears in the walk-in wasn’t a weakness...both were signals from my body telling me something real, in the most direct language it had. I just didn’t know how to listen.

Figure out where you are in your cycle, and start there. Once you know what week your body is in, the kitchen starts making a different kind of sense.

So, what’s going on this week for you? What’s YOUR body going through this week, and what does it need to support its good work?

A note for the dudes in the room…you guys, YOU have one too. This isn’t just a lady thing. Men, you may not bleed every month, but you CERTAINLY have mental, emotional and hormonal shifts that work like clockwork…on a cycle each day, even each month. You guys have a clear testosterone cycle that peaks in the early morning and drops throughout the day, which is why the version of you who picks a fight at 9pm isn’t quite the same animal as the one who got up early to make your wife coffee at 7am. You guys have your rhythm, your ups and downs…and food, my friends, is necessary in aiding your body’s functionality just the same. The magnesium, the protein, the complex carbohydrates, the warm grounding food...these aren’t just for the ladies, these are for you too! A depleted nervous system is a depleted nervous system, and doesn’t discriminate by gender…and for you guys, as well, the kitchen is the first place to address it, at any age, at any hormonal stage.

And for my ladies who have already cleared the menopause hurdle, you guys are navigating a similar but different kind of shifting ground. In peri and in full-blown menopause, estrogen becomes very unpredictable before it ultimately drops permanently. The typical symptoms of hot flashes, disrupted sleep, brain fog, manic anxiety, etc., are all signs and signals from your nervous system as it’s grasping for straws trying to deal and adapt to the unpredictability of that estrogen loss, and then slowly to a new lower baseline. The phase-based eating mentioned above still applies as best as you can track it. When in doubt, stick to the core four…magnesium, fiber, complex carbohydrates and protein, incorporating each in every meal. These will support your body’s ability to deal and manage the threshold regardless of where you are in the cycle. Even when the cycle completely stops, your correlating nutritional needs don’t just disappear, you’re just losing the connection with your signals. Those fermented foods and complex starches should become your best friends. They provide phytoestrogens…plant compounds that gently bind to your body's empty estrogen receptors, and trick the nervous system into feeling stabilized while your gut microbiome rebuilds from the ground up. Protein at every meal becomes even more important as the estrogen that was previously protecting your muscle mass disappears, and it’s then up to protein to help carry more of that load.

Happy cycles and happy cooking, turkeys!

xo, Jess

The bobby pins are sorted…the tights are laid flat & we are officially in the season of the large Mary Poppins-esque tote bag, the bun that’s begging to be perfect & the last few weeks before everything changes.

Broadway Dance Center’s end-of-year showcase is this weekend...a culmination of Millie’s weekly dance classes since last August. Costumes and buns and the particular organized hair-pulling chaos of getting a newly-hormonal eleven-year-old “stage-ready”. She’s danced at BDC since we first came to the city back in 2020, and I truly LOVE watching this child dance…the way she clicks in and does the damn thing, it’s really empowering. This year’s performance is hitting differently knowing it’s the last one before she’s officially a middle schooler.

After the show, she heads to her dad’s for the next few weeks until graduation. I always have BIG feelings when she leaves….ones like sadness, absence, etc., and yet...I also feel some feelings…the ones I guess you’re not really supposed to say out loud, but…

I have genuinely come to LOVE having a split/custody co-parenting schedule.

Equal time, set weeks, clean handoffs. It was so hard at first...I don’t think I have the words for how hard in that first season fresh off of our divorce…those were the weeks when the apartment went quiet and I spiraled into deep depression and guilt and shame. But somewhere in the years since, this time has become something else entirely.

The weeks Millie is with her dad are the weeks that we reset. Yas and I get to go on dates...we are AMC A-List members so movies are basically a weekly “after work” hang for us. The laundry gets done, the apartment gets deep-cleaned, Millie’s room gets decontaminated…and my nervous system gets to exhale in a way that feels impossible when I’m in full-on mom mode. And when she comes back, we all come back better. She comes back to us having had full quality time with her dad and Emily. And, Yas and I come back to her fully reset and rejuvenated. Quality over quantity isn’t only something people say. For us, it’s genuinely just how this works.

I know many of you are in it, or dreading it, or just entering it. It gets different…not necessarily easier or best in every way, but different in some really good ways.

Before she goes, though...WE DANCE.

Come set the table.

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Tom Colicchio is closing Craft.
  25 YEARS…Easily one of the most quietly influential restaurants this city has ever had...the restaurant that made component cooking a conversation, that shaped how a generation of cooks thought about ingredients…restraint…letting things be what they are. When a place like Craft closes, it’s worth sitting with what it’s actually telling us. The economics of dining in this city are genuinely brutal right now, and when titans with 25 years of earned reputation, awards, etc., decide they’re done, that’s not just a restaurant closing. That’s a signal…what does it mean? It deserves more than a news item and a sad Instagram post.

• Men’s Weaponized Bad Moods from Bad Woman
  This one I sent to three people before I even finished reading it. The way it names what it’s naming...mood as a weapon, silence as a punishment, walking on eggshells as the intended result...it’s so precisely said. Read it, share it with the person you’re thinking of right now.

  

• There Is No Way You Knew All This by Anna Lena van Iersel
  She makes illustrated recipes...hand-lettered titles, painted kitchen objects, collaged newspaper backgrounds, ingredients rendered like small paintings on a page. I found her a few weeks ago and I am an absolute fan-girl of her work. The torta di ceci piece last week was a chef’s kiss. If you believe food is its own kind of visual act (I do), you need to check her out.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

Çilbır: Turkish Poached Eggs

Turkish eggs and I are having a moment. This one is in regular rotation in my kitchen and it should be in yours, too.

Poach your eggs (here’s my reel on getting a perfect poach every time). Mix plain Greek yogurt or labneh with a half clove of microplaned-garlic, salt and white pepper until smooth. In a small pan, melt butter over medium heat, pull it off the heat, and add a generous pinch of red chili flakes, the remaining half clove of garlic microplaned right in, and thinly sliced scallions. Let it sit for a minute...the residual heat does the work.

Spoon the yogurt onto your plate, nestle the eggs on top, and pour the chili butter over everything. Serve with a thick slab of grilled sourdough or toasted pita. Top with more scallions and herbs. It’s good…don’t be freaked out by the hot eggs in yogurt thing…it’s REALLY good, and you might just surprise your tastebuds…for the better!

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Histamine is Trying to Get Our Attention from Liminal Medicine
  This piece connected a lot of dots for me, especially right now as I'm deep in research for Sunday's Steady Table on hormones and food. The body keeps talking...histamine, inflammation, all of it...and most of us have been taught to mute the signal instead of reading it. Worth a slow read, especially if you've been dismissing symptoms as just stress or just getting older.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Amy Poehler’s Good Hangs
  I listened to two this week...last week’s Lena Dunham episode and then Tom Holland this week...and both times I ended up completely charmed and also a little emotional when you realize you just genuinely like a person. Good Hangs isn’t just good, it’s GREAT. Listen to it on a walk or while you’re cooking or while you’re driving to pick someone up from somewhere. It will make the time feel like a gift.

• The Knicks won Game 1 last night! I am not a sports person in the traditional sense...my relationship with sports is mostly “yay, go team”...but there is something about this city when the Knicks are winning that makes living here ELECTRIC. New York City in a playoff moment is its own experience. I’m here for it. Yay, sports. Go Knicks.

• Are you SCREAMING w/Millie’s playlist yet?
  Save it and share it…sing it with someone, loudly. It has the BEST energy for these warm days and there is something very good for the nervous system about just opening your mouth and screaming along to Alanis in your kitchen.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

Our Authentic Self??
This section is slowly transforming to “the truth bombs my therapist dropped on me this week” so in staying on trend…let’s keep going.

I had a couple not-so-great social interactions over the past couple of weeks and some were eerily reminiscent of the awfully lonely and isolated ones that shaped my early childhood. Each time, I felt a wave of feelings that were SO nostalgic and familiar in the worst ways. I was talking through these and my therapist stopped me for a minute to ask… “When you go into those social settings, would you say that you are being your authentic self? Or are you putting on the version of yourself that you think will be the most accepted in that situation?”

My jaw dropped. I was literally about to spill out with “of course, especially when I don’t know anyone there I try to be my truest self, my most authentic self…” but then a knot got caught in my throat…nope…as a recovering chronic people-pleaser, I totally put on the most amenable version of myself that I think will be the most pleasing to the people there…and when I do that, I’m actually betraying my true self, I’m selling a different version and that’s why I leave those events feeling so depleted, so underwhelmed and so disappointed.

What will it look like (for you and for me) if we stay true to ourselves, what we like/dislike, who we really are, what we really care about, etc., and not try to fit the mold of whatever is the trend du jour?

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler
I started listening to this on Spotify this week and I am absolutely eating up every word. Her voice, her philosophy, the way she writes about cooking as something intuitive and generous and already within you...now I completely understand why my closest friends have been recommending this book to me for months now. If you've been sleeping on it too, this is your sign. Start it this weekend.

The Freckled Fork Summer Solstice Pantry Box is in full-on prep mode this weekend, and I am SO ready to tell you what's in it. Next week I'll share the full contents but here's your preview: rhubarb, green garlic, cherries & chive blossoms. A few of my very favorite spring things, all in one place. Stay tuned.

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. This Sunday on The Steady Table: The 28-Day Kitchen...your hormonal cycle and food, and why what you eat…and when…matters more than you may realize. I'll meet you there. ♥

I wasn’t trying to…I hadn’t found a new routine or cleanse or regimen. I lost 33 pounds because my body, under the specific and relentless pressure of that particular season of my life, simply stopped holding onto things…stopped functioning. I was quite literally running on fumes.

I had become Head Chef at North Miznon in Manhattan. I was running the show… 100+ covers a night, six services and 80-hours in a typical week…and I was fighting to feel normal, but every single one of those hours held a version of me who was performing competence while quietly coming apart at the seams in the background. I had moved out into my own apartment, I was paying bills on my own, and trying to figure out how to be a mother on a shared custody schedule that only allowed me to see my daughter 2 days/week. I walked everywhere…to clear my head, to move my body…I was climbing three or four times a week…I was trying to meditate, or trying to shut off the chaos in my brain for five seconds, and in the effort of trying… I felt like I was even failing at that.

My eating situation was routine at this point: eggs at noon when I came in for service prep and family meal at 4pm…which I mostly missed because I was doing inventory or rolling pasta ahead of service. I’d pick at whatever was left and call it eating. Each night, I would run the line of 10 cooks and a service for 100+ people for the next several hours…then walk home somewhere around 1-2am, and finally, if I was awake enough, I’d find myself standing over the sink eating a bowl of cereal before I passed out from exhaustion.

Layered underneath all of it, constantly, was the noise. The particular, relentless, not yet diagnosed ADHD-flavored noise of a brain that never once stopped running. I’ve often described it as loud…every thought was literally yelling…and there were no connected trains of thought…they were merely disconnected train cars (thoughts) that would crash into each other at any given moment, taking me off course. Did I make the right call? Is she okay? Am I enough of a mother if I can’t be there? What does this text from my ex mean? Is this the rest of my life now? Why do I feel so alone?

And in the midst of all of that…I started dating again, which added its own exciting but terrifying layer of what-ifs to the existing pile. I was 40yrs. old with a daughter and a career that kept me away from both of them more than I was willing to admit...and underneath, I was trying to figure out how to be a person who…um, dated?

I was trying to be interesting and appealing and relaxed when I was none of those things. Who would want this? was the question I asked myself constantly. I had only been with one person my entire life, my ex-husband, and navigating the idea of a sex life from basically scratch, at 40, as a chef who smelled like a kitchen most of the time, brought its own soundtrack of anxiety and self-interrogation that ran underneath everything else.

So…my nervous system was, to put it professionally, completely cooked.

And my gut knew it before I did.

The chronic stress brochure leaves out a lot...eventually, over time, your body stops whispering and starts screaming. And for me, it screamed in the most inconvenient and unglamorous way possible. Any time I ate something, anything at all, my gut rejected it. Almost immediately…like, sorry not sorry for the TMI, but that sh*t literally ran right through me…every single time.

Apparently, what was happening to me is called sympathetic gastric inhibition and stress-induced hypermotility. When we find ourselves in chronic sympathetic (first gear) overdrive, the brain triggers the release of a chemical called Corticotropin-Releasing Factor (CRF). This hormone binds to receptors in your gut, which literally causes your stomach to stop moving…which is why I couldn’t stomach family meal at 4pm…and it simultaneously accelerated the motility of the colon.

My body was in such a constant state of alarm that it had essentially decided digestion was a luxury it simply couldn’t afford. I was physically shedding weight because my digestive tract was evacuating rather than absorbing…at the end of the day, I was starving in the middle of plenty.

I watched the number on the scale go down over just a few short months…from 155 to 140 to 130 to 122. And you know? I kind of liked it…for a while. My wobbly bits smoothed out, and my clothes finally began to fit comfortably. I caught my reflection and thought oh, okay, I still recognize her. But I also knew, somewhere underneath, this look was not the same as being “well”…being healthy. My body at 5’5” with hips from my mama and a Boulware Badonk I was born with…this body I know is only truly at its healthiest somewhere around 135 to 140lbs. At that point, I was significantly south of that and shrinking…my gut was in open revolt, and no amount of liking my new reflection was going to change what I knew was happening.

I needed to heal my gut…so I did what a budding chef and food-loving person does…I cooked my way back to life.

I kefir’d my way back to being able to stomach dairy again. I kimchi’d and sauerkraut’d my way into a new digestive existence. I ate sourdough because bread is literally life, and I refuse to believe otherwise. I pre- and pro-biotic’d until things started moving the way things are supposed to, and my body started holding onto food the way a body does when it finally reaches second gear…rest and digest mode vs. the fight or flight mode…the one I had been stuck in for months.

It started to work…slowly, then all at once. I came back to myself, my weight began to rise back to stable levels, the color came back to my cheeks…even some wobbly bits showed back up…and this time, I loved them. My gut finally started to quiet down, and I filed the whole experience away as: yikes, that was rough, fermented things helped, let’s move on.

What I didn’t fully realize then, and what I’m only beginning to understand now, years later and several rabbit holes deeper into research, is that I didn’t just heal my gut, I had rebuilt my nervous system from the inside out.

Your gut is not just a digestive organ, it’s your second brain…literally.

Apparently, there are over 100 million neurons in our gastrointestinal tract, more than are in our spinal cord, and they form what is called the enteric nervous system (ENS). This system operates almost entirely on its own, independently of your head-brain upstairs. This system has its own thinking, processing, its own ways to communicate, and it has been doing all of this long before anyone even noticed.

The main line of communication between your gut and your brain is the vagus nerve I mentioned last week. It’s the longest nerve in your body, running from your brainstem through your throat. About 90% of the signals running on the vagus nerve travel gut to brain…upwards, not the other way around.

Scientists have recently discovered specialized cells in the gut lining called neuropod cells. These cells form a direct, lightning-fast link with the vagus nerve. These cells taste what you eat, and in milliseconds, they flash a message directly to your brain…meaning your gut is literally and actively sending instructions to your nervous system.

When my gut was in open revolt in my UWS apartment at 2 am over a bowl of cereal, it wasn’t just a digestion problem…it was my nervous system…it was my gut telling my brain, loudly, urgently, that something was very wrong. We aren’t safe, we cannot digest this right now.

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And serotonin…it’s important, too…it’s the messaging about our mood, if we are feeling okay or if we are totally out of balance when we’re depressed. About 90% of the serotonin in our bodies is produced in our guts (not our brains). When chronic stress effs up our digestive systems, our bodies will literally route blood and energy away from digestion and toward survival. In survival mode, our stomach suffers, our mood suffers, our ability to feel regulated and balanced…our capacity to not completely fall apart over something so very small.

I lost 33 pounds and thought it was just a stress response…but underneath, my serotonin supply chain was completely shutting down. My body was losing the very thing it needed to tell itself that things were okay…that I was safe…that it could rest.

The kimchi knew...the kefir knew…the sourdough especially…stubborn and fermented and alive, it also knew, too.

What they were doing, what I was doing by eating them, intuitively, the way a chef reaches for what feels right…whether I totally understood the science or not in that moment…I was building a wall of psychobiotics. I think that word sounds so badass…it’s like an army of bacteria and fermentations that have the power to directly change your brain chemistry. A study out of Stanford Medicine showed that a diet high in fermented foods dramatically increases microbiome diversity and actively reduces the inflammatory proteins in the brain that typically drive anxiety and racing thoughts.

When your microbiome is fed and functional, your nervous system has backup. When it’s depleted, by chronic stress, by not eating, by cereal at 2 am as the sole nutritional provider, everything suffers.

No one truly knew that any of this was happening to me during the divorce. I was hundreds of miles away from my family, my safety net, and my best friends in the city, who were dealing with their own chaos. Sure, they noticed the weight loss, but like me, they thought it was just stress…or, also like me, probably thought I looked better in my slimmer state. Nobody said: hey, by the way, the stress you’re under is actively dismantling your dang nervous system. That nervous system is the one responsible for your mood, your digestion, and your ability to feel safe in your own body. I clawed my way back to stable…I believe because of the things I had learned while becoming a chef…that, and…I trusted my hands when my brain had given up.

I’m back, and sure, my weight still fluctuates…the difference now is that I know…I know to listen to my gut. I go back to what I learned during this time…I know now that stress, age, movement, and exercise all matter so much, and now…I know, too, that so do the things that can bring our gut back to stability…fermented food, protein, fiber…oh, the fiber is SO good. Food is fuel, and these things are JUST as important as the movement we give our bodies…more so, even.

Next week…in my meal prep and in my own home, I’ve been looking more into how hormonal cycles change what your gut needs every single week of the month…the infradian nourishment schedule and why eating the same way on day 4 and on day 24 is working against everything your body is trying to do. Let’s call it the 28-Day Kitchen…and let’s figure it out together, next Sunday.

For now, try to add one fermented thing to your week. Something alive…tangy…real. A spoonful of miso dissolved in hot water…a spoon of kimchi alongside eggs, rice, chicken, whatever…a small glass of kefir. Your gut might be trying to tell you something, and I think it’s worth it to start listening.

xo,
Jess

I made myself a cup of coffee this week and actually sat still enough to drink it while it was hot. It was that moment I knew things were shifting.

The catering gigs wrapped up, and I’ve got a nice little quiet stretch before the next round of events, and I’ve just been...existing in our apartment at a normal pace...catching up on sleep, cooking things I actually want to eat, watching Millie be eleven in real time and feeling something that feels like overwhelm…but in the very best way.

She graduates from fifth grade in a few weeks. I can’t fully explain what that means to me, but you know I’ll try to anyway.

Millie started kindergarten in New York City in September 2020. The world was in the middle of pandemic-everything, school was hybrid, and she went some days and stayed home other days, and her teacher was a little square on a screen, and she was five years old, and she just...kept going. I think about that time a lot…the absolute audacity of being five in 2020 in New York City, showing up in a mask with a backpack, not fully understanding any of it, and just freakin’ going.

In the five years since, her dad and I separated and then divorced. We each moved twice. We both got remarried within the same year, and Millie’s parental unit grew from two to four almost overnight. Two households, two rooms to keep track of her things, two very different versions of Sunday morning. She navigated all of that while she was eight, nine, ten years old.

She struggled to read for longer than was comfortable...it didn’t really click until third or fourth grade...and I watched her working twice as hard as everyone else for half the result and I could see it wearing on her in ways she had no words for (or would never speak them out loud to us). Then came her ADHD/Anxiety diagnosis in third grade…followed by an IEP where things started to click and her school actually showed up in ways I wasn’t sure they would. When the support finally matched how her brain was actually working, she began to take off.

In the margins of all of that: ballet, baking classes, photography class. Two school musicals...Matilda and then Charlie Brown. Girls on the Run. Broadway Dance Center every year. Therapy. A talent show with her best friend this spring. Her first little boyfriend. She grew approximately two feet and somehow, in the middle of all of it, became a whole person.

She is so sharp. One of the funniest people I know, which I am taking at least partial credit for. She is silly and goofy (that’s probably what I should actually take credit for) and fierce and stubborn in exactly the right proportions for everything she’s been asked to handle. She has come through situations that would level most adults and has emerged with more curiosity and resilience than I had at twice her age.

Middle school isn’t ready…I am genuinely not ready.
Millie, however, is SO ready it’s almost annoying.

Come set the table for the weekend…ours will likely be covered with mood boards and shopping lists as she puts together her “LEWK” for graduation day.

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• A Sunday Reset for Feral Women Who... from The City Apartment Diaries
  "Feral women who" is the entire energy, and you KNOW if you KNOW. Read this one on Sunday morning before the week starts its very specific nonsense.
  

• Is Community the Newest Side Hustle? from Still Unlearning
  I've touched on this before, and I'll keep touching on it: the way we've turned every human need into a product worth monetizing deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Good questions being asked here.
  

• Momentum Loop Theory: Step Into a Loop from Midnight Crumbs
  Hannah again, because she keeps writing exactly the thing I need right when I need it. Small actions build loops…loops build momentum, and I have been leaning into this and my own momentum loop all week.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The Fridge Check-In
I heard from so many of you after The Fridge is Lying to You. Your messes, your guilt, your photos, your stories...I loved every single one and I want to keep it going. We are in this together and knowing that is genuinely what makes it better.

The one-minute audit: did you do it? Did you open the door, look at what was actually in there, and throw something away...even just the guilt? Because that is the whole exercise…it’s not to have a totally cleaned fridge (although YAY if you got that far!)…it’s the throwing away of the guilt that we are here for. If you threw that away this week, you did the work.

Tell me how it went. I mean it, I really want to know.

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Table for One: New York City from A Tiny Bit of Advice
  I credit New York City with bringing me back to myself. The gumption, the independence, the most ALIVE energy of a city that has absolutely no patience for nonsense and somehow also makes room for everything you are...I'm 7 years in, and I feel it more now than I did in year one. This piece put language to exactly that. Read it if NYC has ever done anything for you, or if you're still waiting for it to.
  

• Between Wanting, Uncertainty, and Possibility from Kindred Mothering
  "I used to seek worthiness by doing, accumulating, and achieving. While I'm still human and deeply entrenched in this societal depiction of worth, I have chosen another way." That hit me square between the eyes, and I keep re-reading it this week.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Have you listened to our playlist yet?
Millie and I have been singing it loudly and proudly all week and I would LOVE for you to join us. Save it and share it…sing it with someone, loudly. It has the BEST energy for these warm days and there is something very good for the nervous system about just opening your mouth and screaming along to Alanis in your kitchen. Trust me on this one…get loud.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

Expectations from a Wounded Place
Okay, so this is more of a thought-share…a thing my therapist said this week that I wanted to put in your hands.

I have very high expectations...of myself, of the people I love, of the people I’m around. Most of the time, the people in my life have no idea these expectations exist, let alone that I’m quietly keeping score when they don’t meet them. Virgo red flag? Yes, maybe. I’m working on it.

But what really caught me by the ponytail this week...my therapist said: “Expectations aren’t necessarily bad or good. It’s where they’re coming from that often tells you more. Are your expectations coming from a wounded place, or are they coming from a healed place?”

I literally laughed out loud and raised my hand. My expectations, especially the ones I hold for myself, are coming from a very wounded place…they have been since the wounds took shape. I have held myself to a standard that a hurt version of me set a long time ago and called it discipline.

So in the same motion as throwing the guilt out of the fridge, I’m doing a one-minute audit on my expectations. Which ones only ever produce disappointment? Which ones were set by a version of me who needed to earn everything to feel like she was worth anything?

Those I’m setting down…and you know? I already feel lighter…less anxious and less angry. Baby steps, I guess?

Two audits this week: the fridge & the expectations. Both asking the same question underneath: what are you holding onto that’s only making things heavier? What can you actually set down right now without waiting for the perfect moment to do it?

You don’t have to understand it all…or resolve it with a bow tied neatly on top…you just have to notice what’s there...and give yourself permission to let some of it go.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

The Big List of Whimsical Artists by Lauren Sands
Whimsy is the word of the moment, and this piece dives into it, head first.

“When we follow a whim, we’re being playful with our personal curriculum. It’s not about learning the right thing in the right way. There is something loose and organic about chasing whims that leaves room for magic. Rigor and fun can coexist when you take your curiosity seriously. It just needs time and air.” Being deeply curious is the most fundamentally whimsical act there is.

What whim are you following this week?

Happy Thursday, turkeys! Be kind to yourselves out there!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. This Sunday on The Steady Table: Your Gut Already Knows...what a divorce, a 33-pound weight loss & a whole lot of kimchi taught me. I'll meet you there. ♥

I’m writing this to you from inside my very own disaster zone.

The state of my refrigerator right now is ridiculous (pictured above) and absolutely doesn’t even remotely resemble the food storage of a woman (and a professional chef ) who has it all figured out, or better yet, does this for a living. You see the aftermath of four back-to-back catering gigs, and a refrigerator that looks like a yard sale of half-thoughts. There’s a container of congealed oil marinating god knows what (maybe smoked olives?), three different kinds of onions in varying states of not-onion-anymore, and somewhere in there are foil-wrapped science experiments at this point.

I literally have three different types of mustard (I can’t explain this to you, I just can’t). A container of berries I bought on Sunday, that is, as of this morning, is rapidly becoming another thing. Everything is packed to the brim, everything vaguely chaotic, and every single time I open that door, my jaw tightens just a little bit more.

I am in the thick of it, and I know something needs to change. Yas and Millie are literally terrified to open the fridge for fear of something falling out or launching itself at them. Yes, I’m a professional chef and not to mention, a former professional organizer…I KNOW the right way to exist, the right systems to implement, the why behind the need for a tidy kitchen. But just because I KNOW doesn’t mean I DO. So why can’t I DO? That’s what I’m working through…that and fixing my fridge situation that looks like a storage unit where someone once cooked.

I was diagnosed with ADHD late last year, right after I turned 42.

My late diagnosis of ADHD felt like a door I’d been pushing against my whole life that had finally just...swung open. The room on the other side was relief, mostly, but I also experienced a huge wave of exhausted fury that it took me this long to get the freakin’ thing open. Turns out I’m not lazy, or full of excuses. I’m not broken at basic adulting, I DO know these things…with ADHD, my brain runs on what they call an interest-based nervous system. That’s the clinical way of saying I can cook a 12-course dinner for 20 people, but I will absolutely lose a pound of chicken thighs to the back of my own refrigerator because the moment it leaves my sightline, it stops existing. Out of sight is literally, neurologically, out of mind. I am a professional chef who regularly loses ingredients in her own fridge-abyss…so there.

Why the Fridge Breaks Us

What happens at the end of the day...whether you have a diagnosis or not, whether you’re a chef or have never once made a meal plan in your life...is that your brain is just done. It’s overloaded…quiet, cumulative…done. Your prefrontal cortex (the part that sorts through information, makes choices, keeps impulses in check) has been running since the moment you woke up. These small tasks, small decisions, and maybe some big important ones too, but all are relentless with our minds.

What do I wear to work today? What does this email mean? Is this an emergency, or does it just feel like one? When did I last drink water? Do I really have to take all 20 of these supplements this morning just to feel normal? I really hate swallowing these mega pills. Did I remember that thing I needed to do? What needs to happen first?

An entire day with these thoughts, the invasive and running dialogue in our heads all dang day, and by now it’s 7 pm, you’re standing in front of the open fridge, and that part of your brain is running on absolute fumes of whatever you started the day with.

When we open the door, our brains see a wall of noise instead of seeing dinner possibilities. The stacked containers and whatever’s been shoved in front of whatever else is back there, all of it asking to be sorted…evaluated…decided about. Our brains, which have been deciding things all day and are fatigued, route us to the easiest thing available…even if that easy thing is a bowl of cereal over the sink…again.

Last week, I mentioned our sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) gears that our bodies shift between all day. The allostatic load is the running tab our bodies have been keeping for years, all the times we’ve braced ourselves…adjusted and accounted for the gap between what we need and what we get. It’s the physiological wear and tear on our bodies where we find ourselves cracked and broken from the chronic exposure to stress. Our nervous systems are stuck in that sympathetic first gear, and no $80 adaptogen powder is going to out-supplement a body that doesn’t feel safe.

So…the reality is…the fridge isn’t a storage problem, it’s a stress response. The spinach you put in the drawer last Wednesday? If you’re like me, once that drawer closed, that spinach literally ceased to exist in our brains. We didn’t “forget about it”…it was never there. That wilted spinach isn’t evidence that we’re disorganized or failing…it’s evidence that our nervous systems have been running too hot for too long. When we’re stuck in fight-or-flight, our brains literally cannot prioritize what doesn’t seem urgent.

Combine that with a nervous system that’s already over capacity, and you have a well-oiled guilt and shame machine. That big box hums in the corner and whispers, every time you open it, you tried and failed, and you’re still trying & you’re still failing.

I am here to tell you…that fridge is lying to you.

(I definitely just said that in my best Brian Fellows-voice…iykyk)

These refrigerator failings are NOT evidence of a flawed character, it’s all clear evidence that your body has been on high alert for so long that it literally has NO bandwidth for vegetables.

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I have spent years cleaning out my mom’s fridge every time I visit. She doesn’t ask, but she knows it’s one of the first things I’ll do…especially when I go for a snack and an avalanche of leftovers tumbles out. When I’m there, I can feel what that fridge is carrying, so it’s a small service I can do for her without having to say too much about it (notwithstanding the occasional witty jabs at her ability to grow aliens in there).

For a long time, I thought I understood the problem. If she would just change her shopping habits, buy a little less, stay on top of things...she’d feel better. I’d sort everything, put it in order, and leave with the quiet satisfaction that I fixed something for her. But I didn’t…it was just a temporary band-aid. What I missed was that no system can hold tightly when the nervous system underneath it is struggling.

She wasn’t drowning in her fridge because of a lack of discipline or neglecting to rotate the produce. Her body was running on a low-grade dysregulation that made every small thing feel like too much, and the fridge was just where that showed up most visibly. Whatever organization I left behind fell apart within a day or two, not because she didn’t want to maintain it...but because we had only treated the surface. The root issue was still there, somewhere underneath it all.

Now, when I go through her fridge, I’m not trying to fix anything; I just do it. Every time there’s this shift...like something loosening, something she’s been carrying getting set down for a minute. She looks lighter, and the air in the kitchen changes. That small act of service, of love, reaches her in a way that the organizing ever did. I’m not asking her to change immediately or be different from who she is right now…I’m just saying: I see you, I’ve got this…come and sit, let’s eat.

We’re all carrying some version of this…the organized fridge will follow when the person living with it starts being tended to.

———

What Restaurant Kitchens Taught Me

In a professional kitchen, the refrigerator does not get to be mysterious.

There is a system called FIFO (First In, First Out), and it’s one of the least glamorous but most useful things I’ve carried from restaurant life into the rest of my existence. Every kitchen I’ve ever worked in runs on it…it’s embarrassingly simple: the thing that came in first gets used first…new stuff goes behind the old. That and…ALWAYS label and date everything when it arrives or when it’s made. FIFO’s two best friends are masking tape and a Sharpie. The older things live in front, the newer things live behind, and the decision of what to use next has been made for you before you even open the door.

The reason it exists isn’t that restaurant chefs are more organized than everyone else. It’s because food cost and food waste are NO JOKE. At the end of a long service, when everyone is exhausted, running on fumes, and the kitchen still has to be broken down…nobody has the bandwidth to investigate expiration dates. The system does the thinking, so the people don’t have to. You open the walk-in, the oldest thing is in front, you use it, and you move on.

Our home fridges have no system; we have mystery boxes or science experiments in place of food, and the thing that permeates the most (beyond the rancid smell of said mystery box) is the guilt and shame that you wasted money and didn’t use those items before they went bad. The yogurt from last week and the one you just bought look identical, so you grab the newer one without realizing it. The chicken you meant to use on Tuesday gets pushed further back by Wednesday’s groceries. The spinach migrates to the very back of the crisper drawer where, as we said earlier, it ceases to exist. None of this is about being a disorganized person...we simply do not have a system in place that can run on autopilot when our brains have already checked out.

So here’s where I’m starting this weekend…three simple things because these days, I can only handle doing the smallest possible intervention with the most return.

Tape and a Sharpie by the Fridge
Date on anything you open, anything you cook, anything you transfer into a container. Not the expiration date...the date you opened or made it. It literally takes 2 seconds and will save you from doing calendar math at 10 pm…the label does that for you.

FIFO, for reals.
Once a week, before new groceries come in, rotate. Older items move to the front, and new things go behind. If something has been so far back for so long that it’s now unrecognizable, it gets trashed.

A Priority Shelf/Bin
This is for the things that HAVE to be used first. That’s their home, and every time you open the door, you see that shelf first, and the decision is already made. You’re not starting from chaos at 7pm...you’ve have a front-and-center sight line of things that need to be used first for dinner.

Giving ourselves a little organization is the first step to helping our nervous systems shift into that second gear, where we can try to catch our breath.

______

A few years ago, I worked with my friend Laurie and her organizing company, Simplicity Organizers, in Charlotte, NC. I only worked a few shifts while I had a toddler-sized Millie at home, but I learned so much from those amazing women. To take such a cluttered mess and transform it into a systematic organized space, they gave the gift of freedom from stuff, and it was beautiful work.

The impressive part, the real work, was mental and emotional. As organizers, these women knew the clutter wasn’t a character flaw; it went deeper than that. They never organized for the client. Instead, their process involved hands-on work where they would counsel, model, and walk each client through the process of going through the cluttered areas and setting up systems that would help them not return to that overwhelmed state in the future. And, every time, they did it with grace…with kindness…and with patience.

I remember the ways of Simplicity, and even now, in my super-busy, overwhelmed state of mind (and by consequence, SO cluttered), I remember their practical, approachable methods. Simplicity taught me…you don’t start with the problem, you start with what’s still there. So let’s start with what’s still there…in our fridge.

I’m not talking about a visit-container-store-first kind of project…seriously, tuck that credit card back and bail on that Amazon cart you’ve already filled with over-priced plastic containers. This isn’t even a Sunday-afternoon-soundtrack-of-shame. This exercise starts with a very easy, one-minute audit…three questions so that we can maybe rest easier. While FIFO gives us the ongoing maintenance…this one-minute audit gives us the reset button when things get away from us.

What’s still good?
Open the door and look… what can you actually still use? A jar of olives, half an onion, eggs, a wedge of cheese, that miso paste you bought (thank you, past self), butter, etc. These are the wins, and honestly, there’s probably more there than you think. By physically putting your hand on these items and organizing them, you are pulling the food back into existence in your brain. Take this moment to also label things that need it…it’s a simple kindness to your future self.

What needs to be used today?
Not later on, but today. The half-onion…the opened can of tomatoes…the herbs that have one good day left. They get an immediate job…not to be complicated by a recipe…these items just need to do the work of being food, nourishment. The onion is going in a pan tonight, with whatever else…start there.

What makes you feel guilty or mad every time you see it?
These are the ones that inflict fear in Yas and Millie…the things that are stacked precariously, anonymously just waiting for an unsuspecting but firm pull of the door. These are the containers of leftovers from ten days ago…the mystery liquid in a jar… that random thing wrapped in foil that you’ve been avoiding eye contact. Throw that shit away now, without hesitation. There’s no guilt-tax here…there’s no “but I spent money on it” stress, no narrating the loss. Just throw it out.

When you throw it out, go ahead and toss away the guilt that goes with it. It’s important to free yourself from the shame of paying too much for something and then letting it go to waste. We should not be prisoners to the clutter in our homes, much less in our refrigerators. In the wise words of En Vogue…Free your mind, and the rest will follow.

There’s relief in looking inside and not being judged, not being reminded of seventeen small failures, and that relief is a parasympathetic moment. That’s your nervous system finally taking its hand off the gas and switching into second gear.

Your one-minute audit requires less time than it takes to scroll through one round of Instagram where you’re inundated by the algorithm trying to romanticize our wellness routines…trying to convince us to hop on whatever supplement bandwagon they're peddling.

Let’s choose freedom here…free your mind from any other plans or compulsion to buy any other quick fixes, and let’s just do the next best thing right at this very moment. Throw it away.

Small Shifts, Small Pivots

These shifts, over time, will have the biggest impact. When you veer off course or find yourself stressed and back to a packed fridge…it’s okay, because these shifts don’t require a full triage, they only ask for a small restart, a small pivot to help reset. I told my therapist this week that I’m already SO overwhelmed and weighed down by the weight of my own expectations…I’m desperate for these shifts to be simple and small…easy lifts that don’t require many brain cells because, well, I have none to spare.

These small shifts aren’t some new protocol or regimen; they’re just a few things I’ve been paying attention to in my own kitchen and my own body. The best part? None of them requires an extra Trader Joe’s run (especially since mine is closed for renovations for the entire summer…I see you 72nd st).

One Warm Thing…every day
Not necessarily a full meal, but maybe just a bowl of broth or a mug of miso? Better yet, do that cup of bone broth with a swirl of butter and salt…SAY LESS. Anything warm, in a bowl or a mug, will help your body recognize it as care and not medicine. Your gut and your brain are connected by a nerve called the vagus nerve, which is basically the main communication line your body uses to decide whether it’s safe or not. When something warm, savory, or fermented hits the back of the throat, your vagus nerve celebrates.

Protein Before 10am
From my limited understanding, there’s a cortisol spike in our first hour after waking. Our body does this on purpose…the cortisol awakening response…and it’s how we get from horizontal to functional. But, without protein to stabilize that cortisol response, that spike crashes by mid-morning, and your blood sugar goes with it, and then you are chasing it for the rest of the day. As soon as I crossed over the 40yr-old-threshold…protein entered the main chat…in my inbox, at my doctor’s appointments, on my socials. And no, I’m not talking about the chalky-powdered drink kind of way because kill me now…I can’t and won’t.

When we’re in a constant state of stress, especially through restless nights of sleep, our cortisol is already elevated, our glucose is already volatile, and our bodies are desperate for something stable to build on. That’s the jelly bean grab at 11:30 am, the potato chip spiral at 3 pm, or the 10 pm cereal. The morning cortisol spike and our response to it sets the tone for the day…start with two eggs..some greek yogurt…a piece of leftover whatever. This dose of protein first thing gives our nervous systems the message that food is coming, and it’s coming in a form that our bodies can actually use.

The Meal You Know by Heart
We all have one…it’s the thing you could make in the dark, half-asleep, that needs no recipe or decision, just the muscle memory of having done it a hundred times. If you don’t have one, building one is the first step…just one dish you can cook from nothing. For me, it’s eggs…fried, poached, or soft scrambled on toast with some sort of chili crisp mayo situation. When everything is loud, and you have to feed yourself anyway, this is the meal that gets you to the table without further overloading your system. ADHD friends, this is especially for you. The fewer decisions between I am hungry and actually eating food, the less your nervous system has to do. Pick yours and cook it until your hands know how to do it without you.

Sit Down to Eat…Even Once
I know…in the hustle, more times than not, we find ourselves eating on-the-go or even standing at the counter while scrolling, and okay, that’s just what it is. But once a day...try to sit down to eat a meal, even for ten minutes. Standing up or moving while eating keeps your body in a low-grade stress posture (shoulders braced, jaw tight, already preparing for the next thing) and your nervous system reads that posture as information. It doesn’t fully shift into rest-and-digest mode (gear 2) because your body thinks you’re still in the middle of something. Ten minutes in a chair, the act of sitting down tells your nervous system that you’re stopping…it tells that vagus nerve, connecting your gut to your brain, to chill the EFF out. It says “we have time for this,” and your body’s digestive system responds appropriately.

Throw Away the Guilt AND the Bad Food
It’s that important…so, I’m saying it again. Yes, food waste is a huge global issue and one that is SO important for us to play our part in combating. And, yet…you’re only hurting yourself as you allow food to continue to rot in your fridge while you’re stuck feeling guilty for the waste. We need a larger reset on our nervous systems, and it starts with these small steps, these small pivots. When you open the fridge and see the spinach that quietly expired in the crisper drawer...just realize, your nervous system bought it during a moment of calm…when you were briefly in gear 2…briefly imagining a version of the week with more time in it. That was your body trying to take care of you…it just happened to run out of runway before the week came to an end.

The guilt is a LARGE part of what’s making us sick, not the food. Compost the guilt, the food can follow if it needs to…but the guilt goes first. And next time, label and implement your little FIFO steps and maybe…just maybe…there won’t be as much waste the next time, and that small step in the right direction is a HUGE step to giving us the balance and regulation we so desperately need.

What to Make Tonight
Eggs…Because they’re my favorite and well, we’re starting here, and we’re starting simple.

Are they trending again? Who cares? I am of the philosophy that almost everything can be made better by putting an egg on it (and quite possibly the title of my memoir). Eggs were the very first thing I actually learned to cook on my own at the stove when I was in middle school. But beyond the hype…the nostalgia…the general obsessiveness from me, eggs are SO great because they actually also provide protein, fat, B vitamins & choline (a nutrient your brain uses to make acetylcholine & one of the main calming signals in your parasympathetic nervous system). Eat the eggs, these are the brakes, Kurtis Blow.

Simplest dinner when the fridge is testing you…heat olive oil or butter in a pan until it moves and shimmers. Pull forward whatever came to the front of your FIFO shelf...whatever vegetable, whatever greens, whatever odds and ends needed to go today. Salt them, season them, get sassy with them. Let ‘em cook without fussing for five/ish minutes. Make a well or two, crack the eggs in, lid on, low heat, three minutes. Toast underneath, or reheated leftover rice if you have it, or nothing if you don’t.

In total, like 10-12 minutes and less than $4, and is collectively doing the good lord’s work on your nervous system and regulating your body to a place of balance…which is more than I can say for the contents of that takeout bag on your counter that you may or may not have grabbed in a drive-through or from the hands of an UberEats courier…I’m not going to call it out, but we both know it’s there. (I have it, too. We do not need to discuss it.)

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Next week we go deeper into why your body wants what it wants when it’s running on empty...and why those cravings are not random or weak or evidence of anything except a nervous system that is trying, very specifically, to tell you something. Let’s figure out how to actually hear it instead of just pushing through it.

For now...tape and a Sharpie, three things to the front. You know what to do. It’s not glamorous, and it’s certainly not photogenic, and it doesn’t help the wellness culture sell you more. But it is...quietly, slowly...how our nervous systems begin to learn to take its foot off the gas.

Your fridge is lying to you…let’s change that.

xoxo,

Jess

I drove back from the Catskills Sunday afternoon with the windows cracked and a cooler bag full of leftovers, smelling like fresh sourdough loaves and schnitzel and something I can only describe as three women who cooked their hearts out...and I had maybe four hours before I needed to be back in another kitchen. One in Midtown, another in Flatiron. Different art, different city, same energy.

Somewhere in the middle of all that driving and pivoting I was dealing with family news that weighed heavily, and I’ve been trying to find space to hold it all together.

The pop-up at Café Mutsi was exactly what it was supposed to be. Two days, three chefs, one kitchen in Andes. Nicole was my first boss in this city...she’s seen every version of me as a chef, every pivot, every moment I didn’t know what I was building but kept building anyway. Yas and I even got engaged at Café Mutsi last year. Her first opening weekend, Millie and I worked in that very kitchen together...Millie on dishes, me wherever I was needed. Now Mutsi is two, and I was back as a chef, cooking my food alongside hers and Maria’s. The chow-chow was good. The weekend was better. Come see what it looked like.

Then I came home and dove headfirst into work…daily private chef grind at the jewelry company in Midtown and then down to Flatiron and into D’Aquino Monaco for an opening I was genuinely moved by. The show featured woven textile works by my dear friend Rose Seccareccia (one of the most quietly powerful artists I know), ceramics by the extraordinary Linda Sormin, and the Wash Line Story Project…I was totally not emotionally prepared to witness all this greatness and it’s all still lingering with me. Wils assisted me and I built a menu I’m genuinely proud of...a grazing experience in three chapters across the space, designed to sit in conversation with the work on the walls. Food as its own kind of visual act. More on that below.

Last week handed us some hard news…my uncle passed. My mom is grieving and I’m here, far from her, watching her try to hold it all while her mom, my Nanny Sis, was also in the hospital recovering from a fall the very same week. My mom is strong but she is still not getting the rest or relief she needs to really hold all of this herself. I wrote that piece Sunday about the nervous system keeping score and now I’m watching someone I love doing exactly what I was describing, carrying too much with no room to set any of it down. Not because she won’t…but because she literally can’t. The table between us feels very long right now.

But you know…spring is finally here in NYC…the sun is out and it is HOT. The city is finally sunny and warm and actually means it for the first time in months. I walked home through the park and fell back in love with New York the way you only can in May, when the green is so green and the air is so thick with possibility. I didn’t even have my headphones in, I just walked.

I’m trying to figure out how to hold all of it at the same time this week…and you might be, too. Come set the table.

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• The Chronic Experience of Ambient Overwhelm by Hannah Bay
  Opening the cupboard to grab something for dinner and ending up standing there for five minutes while your brain quietly starts listing everything the week is about to ask of you. Hannah has named this feeling exactly and it lives in me. “A state of chronic, low-level stress caused by the constant background noise of contemporary life.” Not one big thing. Just the permanent, low hum of too much. This one is doing real work right now, especially alongside Sunday’s piece about the nervous system. Read it slowly.
  

• From Controlling My Body to Belonging to Myself by Angelie Wallace
  How we absorb the stories handed to us about our bodies before we’re old enough to question them, and the long, slow work of coming home to yourself. Oof…it’s good.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

A Pressed Garden: the D’Aquino Monaco menu
I want you to have this. The show at D’Aquino Monaco asked for food that could live alongside the art rather than just fuel the room, and so we built a grazing menu in three chapters, one table per chapter, across the full space.

• Chapter I…The Wash:

  • “Linen” Cured Fluke with radish, coconut broth & gochujang vinaigrette

  • Beet and Radish Carpaccio Crostini with honey lemon goat cheese

• Chapter II…The Stitch:

  • The Pentimento Vertical Canvas spread with whipped feta, heirloom tomatoes, basil, micro greens & focaccia

  • Mortadella “Silk” Mosaic with burrata, Castelvetrano olives, marinated artichokes, roasted pistachios & mint pesto

• Chapter III…The Vessel:

  • Shattered “Porcelain” of broken meringue, vanilla mascarpone, balsamic-macerated berries & lemon curd

  • Dark Chocolate Kintsugi Shards with raspberry & gold powder

Wils, thank you for your hands and your steadiness and the whole thing.

• Ramps: a mild dissent
  Everyone in every kitchen and on every food account has been losing their minds about ramps for the past few weeks, and I’ll just say it out loud: they’re just okay. Punchy and funky and genuinely fun for about two days before the window closes and they’ve turned into something significantly less charming.
  
  The season is so short that by the time I’ve thought about what to actually do with them, they’re already at the back of the fridge looking accusatory. Green garlic does nearly everything a ramp does and stays around long enough to actually cook with. If you’re ready to move on, there are more interesting things in the market right now.

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Joyful, Porous by Kate Bowler
  Kate’s conversation with Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, on longing and joy and staying open when life keeps closing doors. He called it “warm humility”...the particular spiritual quality of people who let the world get to them without being wrecked by it. I’ve been sitting with that word all week, thinking about my mom, thinking about what it costs to stay porous when everything in you wants to seal up and get through it.
  

• The Wash Line Story Project
  I went to this show assuming I was just there to provide the food and left thinking about what I experienced for the last two days. Take a look at what they’re building, it matters…it’s so very special.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

The walk home from my Sutton Place meal prep yesterday. The windows cracked for my long drive home on Sunday…then today, walking through the park, no headphones, just the green, the flowers, and my purest love for NYC in the spring. That’s the whole glass this week. Sometimes the refreshment is just a route you take slowly when you don't have to be anywhere anytime soon.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

Grief doesn’t schedule itself, but neither does gratitude. Sometimes, ironically, they just show up in the same week, the same hour, and honestly, it’s not necessarily our job to sort them out or decide which one is appropriate to feel. Both can hold the same space, at the same time, and neither requires immediate resolution.

This week, let’s just let whatever we are carrying right now be complicated and messy…let’s give up the need to tie it up in a pretty bow.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• The TWEEN Girl SQUAD Playlist
  Millie is home this week, and we've already re-dyed her hair Wendy's Girl red, which I fully support. The other day I was working in the office and heard a familiar song start up from the living room...Millie on the couch with a snack, lightly singing along. I jumped out of my chair SO fast…ran in and belted the whole chorus at full volume with her! She is deep into female rockers right now, music you can scream and dance to, and in that moment, I saw my own eleven-year-old self so clearly...sitting in my room, collaging, singing as loudly as I could to Alanis, Fiona, Traci, and anyone else who understood exactly what it felt like to have a lot of feelings and nowhere to put them. This playlist is for the ladies. A little 90s flashback, and a few of Millie's current top picks. Scream along and release your inner tween this weekend.

• The Mutsi Weekend in Full
  Last weekend was the perfect entry into this beautiful spring season! The weather was gorgeous, and the kitchen was alive with the most fierce femme energy. Spanakopita, chow-chow, deviled eggs, lamb manti, okra…three chefs…the Catskills in May. The reel is here if you want a peek at the fun! Follow @cafemutsi...there will definitely be a next time, and I promise you it will be worth it.

Happy Thursday, turkeys! Be gentle with yourselves out there…let’s ROCK it out!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Sunday: The Steady Table continues...we're opening the fridge. The real one. The one with the good intentions and the guilt and three jars of something you bought during a phase. I'll meet you there. ♥

I spent the last week checking in with my friends…in particular, the ones who are moms….because, well, the post-Mother's Day check-in is a necessity these days.

And honestly? What they replied with wasn’t a regurgitation of the soft-lit-matching-outfit-brunch photos that were all over socials. Nah, these texts were filled with the unpolished, unedited reality of the day. For most, the day came and mostly went like any other Sunday, except possibly with the addition of flowers on the counter from a last-minute grocery run and maybe a card the kids were semi-forced to sign. Beyond that, nothing seemed to change from the normal…because, well…lunch still needed to happen, someone still needed to be at some sports practice somewhere, and the ship still needed someone to sail it. These moms… even still, were the ones to do all of that, the ones who continued orchestrating life as they always had.

A lot of them said some version of the same thing: I don’t even know why I expected anything different.

The sentiment…the exhaustion…their thinly-veiled disappointment lingered with me. Beyond the reality of unmet expectations, it all tells me how these women are currently living their lives. Braced…already adjusting…already accounting for the gap between what they need and what they’re going to get…and as women, we are all burying it deep down so we can JUST KEEP MOVING.

Come to find out…that gap has a name…it’s actually a real thing scientists study, called allostatic load. And despite our best efforts to hide it and forget it, our bodies have actually been keeping a running tab on it all, for years.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about nervous systems and regulation. My therapist and I have been working on my awareness of my own body…what it’s feeling, where it’s feeling it, and how to release & regulate in a healthy way (instead of slamming doors or screaming the way I might be tempted to in my moments of disregulation).

I want to share a little of what I’m learning, but what I’m NOT going to do…I will NOT tell you to do more.

I will avoid suggesting a supplement or a morning routine or a thirty-day reset or anything that requires time and money that we don’t have…or anything that adds one more thing to the list of ways we’re apparently already falling short.

Let’s be honest, friends…in this economy, the grocery store receipt is its own catalyst of trauma. If the ‘healing food’ you’re being compelled or encouraged to buy makes your stomach knot up when the grand total pops up on the screen, it’s not actually healing you, is it?! It’s just another bill your nervous system, and your budget (does anyone really even follow a budget anymore?!) have to figure out how to pay.

Most wellness content is honestly just the same stress, but this time, it’s wearing a pretty linen cross-back apron with beautiful, freshly picked flowers and nicely curated vignettes of food on the countertop. And…I just…cannot. My countertops currently have last week’s tupperware that never made it into the cabinet, along with various water bottles, a stack of bills “that I’ll get to later,” and a remote that goes to something….somewhere. That’s my vignette:)

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I’ve been learning about nervous system regulation these days…not because I have this newfound curiosity…but more out of the very real-life necessity to “get my shit together so that I don’t have a mental breakdown under the weight of all the plates I’m juggling...and freak out on all the people in my orbit.” Anyone else??

I want to know what’s actually happening in my body…in our bodies…when we’re running the way most of us are running. What’s the real reason our jaws won’t unclench, or why doesn’t sleep actually seem to restore us these days, or why is the blankety-blank fridge full of expired good intentions AGAIN? You know the ones…the kale you were definitely going to use or the yogurt that’s now taken on a furry layer of the latest science experiment…all those things, coupled with the sheer exhaustion and guilt we feel as we stand in front of that very refrigerator at the end of the day…feeling vaguely (sometimes loudly) accused by everything in it.

That fridge isn’t evidence of our failures…it’s actually evidence that our nervous systems have been on high alert for so long they can barely remember what it feels like to not be. Fight or flight, baby.

Here’s the science part, real quick. Our nervous systems run on two gears…one is the gas pedal (the sympathetic branch): the part that handles stress, threat, urgency, the thing that needs to happen right now. It’s the one that’s got our heart rate up, muscles ready, brain scanning for problems.

The other is the brakes (the parasympathetic branch): rest, digestion, repair, the part of you that can actually receive nourishment and process it and use it to restore something. A healthy system moves fluidly between the two…but the reality is…most of us, right now, are stuck…stuck in first gear.

It’s not because we are weak or failing at life…it’s that we’ve been pedaling for a long time without any opportunity to stop.

The wellness space seems to avoid these realities and instead wants to reduce it all down to the beautiful one-pill fixes or the golden elixir that heals all, for the low price of $300 per bottle. What the actual what?!

We simply cannot out-supplement a nervous system that doesn’t feel safe. We cannot green-juice our way out of a body that thinks it’s still in the middle of an emotional war zone. The $80 adaptogen powder does NOT know that we’re the ones still keeping the whole operation running. But…our bodies do…our bodies know it ALL. It sees us holding on, staying alert, craving whatever can deliver the fastest hit of energy or relief… especially in the moments we cannot afford to slow down.

And, the safety our bodies are actually starving for? It’s called metabolic safety…and I want it. I’m wondering…is there a correlation between how food…especially when eaten at a table…and in a body that finally feels unwatched…can be one of the most direct paths to nervous system regulation.

That craving for sugar at 3 pm isn’t weakness…the quick grab for salty potato chips isn’t necessarily a junk food addiction, either. The fact that salmon sounded good at the grocery store, and now it’s Thursday, and it’s dying a slow death in your fridge while you’re eating a bowl of cereal over the sink. Are these all character flaws or signs of our weak-wills at work? I think the answer is no. I think, in fact, that these are actually the very REAL signs of our bodies making triage decisions with whatever they can. When our nervous systems are stuck on the gas pedal…on high alert, our brains are burning through glucose like a house on fire. Our nervous systems aren’t looking for salads; they’re looking for survival. They want the sugar because it’s the fastest way to keep the lights on for another hour.

As I’ve been learning about my own nervous system, I’ve been paying more attention to the actual signals my body is sending. I’ve taken note of what’s going on inside when I reach for that handful of jelly beans around 11:30 am, or that bowl of BBQ potato chips at 3 pm (I LOVE chips. The end.)…or why I need that bowl of cereal at 10pm. What is it about those times of the day? What’s my body going through? My nervous system apparently was feeling something or trying to tell me something an hour earlier, but I ignored it, and by those times, it’s done trying to give me signs…it’s straight up fatigued and reaching for those quick fixes.

Being a chef, I obviously have a love-love-love relationship with food. Food is fuel, food is healing, food is nourishment and medicine, food is JOY for me. I’ve cooked in so many different rooms and spaces…homes, restaurant kitchens, corporate kitchens, private spaces, catering events, etc.

I’ve witnessed what food can do…the nourishment, the way it pulls people together, what it builds. And at the same time, I’ve also seen what it can do in a room where something warm, made with care and intention, is eaten while sitting around a table. I’ve watched what that kind of meal can actually do to change the temperature of a body…where it lands in the body, the way a deep exhale does.

I used to think that was just good cooking. But the more I’m learning, the more I’m discovering that there’s actual science behind it as well. Long before I even knew what the vagus nerve was, I knew the sound of those tables finally breathing. I knew that the smell of onions browning in butter does something to a clenched jaw that a pill simply cannot.

Come learn with me as I start exploring how important food actually is for our nervous systems. This isn’t the wellness angle, folks…it’s the one that belongs in the kitchen.

What can we eat when nothing sounds good? Or how the humble, ‘poor people’ food our grandmothers made…the pot of lentils, the slow-cooked greens, the starches that stick to your ribs…how those might just be the original nervous system medicine. Why is it that our bodies want what they want at different times of the month and what to do about it…maybe in ways that don’t require hiring a nutritionist, paying $10k to attend a wellness retreat that literally boasts eating meals around a table and offering you free time to read a book by a pool…or by becoming an investor in the latest bottle of liquid gold collagen.

Let’s figure out how a bowl of lentils cooked right might just do more for our stress responses than most things being sold as quick-fix solutions…or maybe how just sitting down to eat, even for ten minutes, is one of the cheapest and most underused tools any of us has.

The table is life-giving infrastructure. I’m diving in and hope you’ll join me over the next few weeks as we figure out why feeding ourselves well is not indulgence…it’s the foundation, the literal thing that makes everything else possible.

Next week, I’m going to tackle the fridge…mine and yours. You know the one…the one filled with good intentions and guilt. Let’s talk about what’s actually worth keeping, what to cook when you have nothing, and what your body needs right now, in this specific season, more than anything trending on TikTok.

For today, I’ll just say this: whatever your Sunday looked like last week or today… whatever got left undone or unrecognized or half-finished, your body was there for all of it. She was taking notes…doing the work…and honestly, she deserves better than that bowl of cereal over the sink.

Nobody brought you a plate…not on Mother’s Day, not on the average Tuesday, not at the end of the longest week. So this is me, saying…let’s figure out how to bring one to ourselves…and to each other.

Let’s figure out how to move on to second gear.

xoxo,

Jess

By the time you read this, I’m probably already in the car.

Tomorrow is the pop-up at Café Mutsi in Andes, and I have been in full prep mode all week...roasting chicken skins for deviled eggs, getting my okra dish dialed in with buttermilk ranch, and finishing a batch of southern chow-chow that I’ve been working on and that I am genuinely very proud of. Three women, one kitchen, two days, and a whole lot of female energy in the Catskills. Come find us if you can get up there…it’s going to be a good one.

This one is super special too...Nicole was my first boss in New York City, back when I was working at Meal Prep Chef and figuring out what being a chef in this city even meant. She’s been there for every single version of me since...every pivot, every reinvention, every moment I wasn’t sure what I was building but kept building anyway. And this time last year, Yas and I got engaged at Café Mutsi. And for Mutsi’s opening day and then first birthday a year later, Millie and I worked in that kitchen together...Millie on dishes, me wherever I was needed, both of us watching Nicole’s dream take shape around us.

Mutsi just turned two. It has grown into something feisty and real and entirely its own thing. It’s quite beautiful to see the best creative work when someone refuses to let it be anything other than exactly what they envisioned. To be back in that kitchen this weekend as a co-chef, cooking my food alongside Nicole’s and Maria’s...it’s the full circle moment that only makes sense in retrospect.

Southern freckles, Mediterranean badass, Nordic simplicity. This Friday & Saturday, May 15 + 16. Come experience the beauty of the Catskills…one plate at a time!

For this upcoming Sunday, I've been deep in research and thinking this week about the connection between food and nervous system regulation...what we eat, how we eat, and the way our food systems are quietly woven into our ability to feel safe, steady, and present in our own bodies. I upped my therapy sessions to weekly, and since then, I've been learning to actually listen to what my body is telling me when it's dysregulated. All of this is colliding with very real concerns about supply chains, local sourcing, and what it means to feed yourself and your family intentionally when the world feels uncertain. It might just become multiple essays…more in a few days.

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• We’re Not Supposed to Live Like This by Julia Christina
  This one has been on my mind all week…everything I’ve been working through in therapy, everything I’ve been noticing about how my body holds stress and signals dysregulation...it’s in here. Read it slowly.

• First Quarter, First Impressions by Nik Snacks
  Honest and specific…this is the kind of food writing I love the most. It’s a good one to sit and read with your weekend coffee. I’ll give it another gander with mine, for sure.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

A little Summer Solstice Pantry Box…coming your way soon!
I started pickling rhubarb this week, and that must mean it's almost time. The Freckled Fork Summer Solstice Pantry Box debuts later this month...a tight, curated drop of things I've been making and testing, small batch, only 15 available this round, complete with another adorable ceramic piece by Sarah Buffaloe. If you want your name on the list, shoot me a text or DM. First come, first serve:) More info soon!

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Roots Before Petals: The Expensive Truth About Building Something Real by Jackie Summers
  What does it actually cost to build from the foundation up? Before anything blooms, before anyone notices, in the long quiet season of just doing the work.
  “A dandelion bursting through concrete is not pluck. It is a seed finding a crack, enough moisture, sunlight, stored fuel, and room to stabilize a stem before the next insult. Concrete didn’t disappear. The flower did not heal the sidewalk. Hostility did not end. It simply failed at total containment.” UGH. So freaking good.

• Groceries, Restaurants and Policy by Andrew Zimmern
  With everything happening right now...supply chain disruptions, the news cycle, the creeping anxiety about where our food actually comes from...this piece is essential. Zimmern on the real stakes of food policy for the people who grow it, cook it, and serve it. Read it and then go find your local farmer, ASAP.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Mother's Day, the way I actually wanted it

A long time ago, I figured out that waiting for other people to celebrate me the way I wanted to be celebrated was a reliable path to disappointment. So on the heels of my first divorce, I took matters into my own hands (bc they were the only ones I could control:). This Mother's Day, Millie and I did a full bakery tour of Manhattan, and it was exactly right. Every single bite. Watch the Reel, hopefully it’ll make you smile and better yet, inspire you to get out and try your own little progressive tour to stop at a couple spots “on your list”.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

Your nervous system is keeping score even when you’re not.

This week, notice one moment when your body signals something before your brain catches up...a tightening in the chest, a held breath, a sudden need to scroll.

Don’t rush to fix it…just notice it…and write it down if you can.
That’s the whole assignment...for now.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

Café Mutsi Pop-Up • May 15 + 16 • Andes, NY
Southern chow-chow meets Mediterranean Chicken Milanese, deviled eggs with pickled ramps & roasted chicken skins, whole trout stuffed to the gills with herbs, spanakopita, okra with buttermilk ranch & the biggest kabocha buns you’ve ever seen! Three women chefs, two days, the gorgeous Catskills. If you're anywhere near Andes this weekend, come to the table. Follow @cafemutsi for all the details.

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Newest essay in the works for Sunday…nervous system, food, and what it means to actually take care of yourself in a world that makes it very hard…to actually feed yourself in a life that doesn’t seem to stop for you. I'll meet you there. ♥

I remember the email.

It showed up like any other one...buried between a promo code and some shipping notification for something I absolutely don’t remember ordering, and right there in the subject line, cheerful as anything: “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Maybe someone, somewhere, thought it was a good idea to send to an entire email list without stopping to consider that some of the women opening that email were not, in fact, mothers, and were very much in the thick of grieving that very thing, quietly, privately, on their own.

Infertility is one of the quietest and loneliest griefs there is, something you carry in your body, silently, while the world just keeps sending emails and throwing baby showers and asking when it’s your turn, as if your turn is something that just hasn’t come yet rather than something your body has been refusing for years.

For years...and I mean YEARS...I wanted something my body wouldn’t give me. On the outside I labeled it as just unexplained infertility, but inside, silently and painfully, it all felt like more evidence of something fundamentally wrong with me. I mean…women are designed for this, right? Or so I told myself. We are literally the only humans on earth who can create life, and if my body won’t do it, what does that say about me? Am I even fully a woman if the one thing women are built to do is the one thing I cannot?

I know how that sounds…ridiculously over-simplified. I also know that knowing how it sounds doesn’t actually stop you from feeling it at 3am.

Mother’s Day was the hardest...not because I begrudged anyone their day of celebration, because I really didn’t. I genuinely love the mothers in my life. I showed up for every baby shower and meant every card I signed…I held their babies and felt real joy...and also knew I would completely fall apart in the car on the way back home. That grief has a very specific texture: loving people through an experience you want so desperately for yourself.

Joy and grief share the same room, both of them real…and both of them mine.

That pain was real…I still feel it with everything inside of me. It’s a constant tug-o-war between my inherent positivity and cup-overflowing with joy and contentment with my life as it is vs. the cynical and painful feelings of unworthiness or brokenness.

I’ve had some pretty intensive therapy sessions since January, and the result is that I’ve been sitting with a lot of different questions lately. I’ve been reframing my thoughts, my assumptions, my why…And the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about those early days of wanting to be a mother, and my infertility journey as a whole…I’ve been thinking about the hurt I carried…and wondering if it had to hurt quite this much?

There’s a path, and some of you know this all too well...maybe in a church bulletin or a holiday dinner conversation or just the general ambient pressure of being a woman in a place that has opinions about what you should do with your body. Graduate, get a job, find a partner, get married, have kids, in that order, in that timeline, the whole conveyor belt of acceptable adulthood predestined as if someone decided the sequence and forgot to tell you it was optional. In the South where I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, that path wasn’t a suggestion…it was THE measure of your success…your worth…your having it all. And in the evangelical South where I grew up, the church reinforces every rung of it, because family is sacred and motherhood is a calling and your body, apparently, is purposeful.

So when my body didn’t cooperate, I didn’t just feel sad about it...I felt like I had failed a test I didn’t even have time to prepare for. I mean, a test implies a score-keeper and a standard…a standard that implies someone decided what the right answer would be…and I’m pretty sure that someone wasn’t me.

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I emailed my friend a few days ago…one of my closest friends who has been in New York City for over 10 years now. She and her husband don’t have kids and don’t really ever talk about it. I emailed her to see if she would share her feelings about Mother’s Day. With my questions ready and my narrative already half-formed, I assumed I would find something recognizable in her experience…that I would see some similar version of my own grief, my own defense, or my complicated relationship with a choice that wasn’t entirely up to me.

But, she didn’t reply to my email, she called me instead.

She told me, gently and graciously, that my questions were leading her somewhere she’d never actually been. That she actually had NOT spent her life defending her childless choice or even grieving some parallel life she didn’t take...it just wasn’t her reality. She had aunts and uncles who didn’t have kids, her family never made it a measure of anyone’s value. Conversely to my experience, she didn’t grow up in the church. She moved from the South in her twenties and built her whole adult life in a city where nobody tracks your reproductive timeline like it’s a scoreboard. That weight I carried...the one I thought was a shared weight and experience...had not landed on her the same way or even at all.

She didn’t feel the mold, which meant she never felt the cost of not being able to fit it. So, she politely declined to answer the questions because they were leading her to a place that didn’t quite resonate or fit her experience. I love her for her words…for her honesty…and I love her for the way that she tore through my assumptions and helped me reframe and reconsider the whole dang thing. I sat with all her insight and what she shared for a long time after we hung up.

The thing I still think about, the question that still makes me fidget with discomfort is…Would I have even called it infertility if I’d grown up somewhere else?

If I’d been in New York in my twenties, working on my career and living in a place that didn’t measure a woman’s worth in reproductive milestones...would my body’s inability to conceive have felt like failure? Or would it have felt like...just information…just a true thing about my body that wasn’t necessarily a verdict of my worth…just merely a condition of my body in that moment rather than an indictment of my womanhood as a whole.

Would I have gotten married as young as I did if nobody was keeping quiet score? Would I have spent those years feeling fundamentally broken, or would I have spent them living my life without the constant low hum of not being enough?

I genuinely don’t know, but reconsidering it all is doing a LOT of unraveling…a lot of reframing all the things I thought I knew and felt.

All things considered…I do know the grief I carried each Mother’s Day wasn’t made of just one thing. Some of it was a real and honest loss...the pregnancy I would never have. That grief is real…it’s mine…it existed and I still carry it even today. But some of it…some of that grief, I’m realizing…was borrowed…and maybe was inherited from a place, a region, maybe even a religion, or a culture that handed down a very specific definition of womanhood and measurement.

Finally, after years of infertility, I did become a mother.

I became a mother through adoption, and Millie is mine in every way that matters and even in ways I don’t even have words for. I wouldn’t trade her or our story for anything. And yet…if I’m being honest, there is always a ghost of the other thing lingering...the wondering, the quiet curiosity if my body will ever decide to start working…the manic “checking” process (IYKYK) if I’m even a day or two late.

I’m learning that I’m allowed to hold both of those things at once…the fullness of the love I already have and the realness of the loss I carry. I’m also learning, slowly, to tell the difference between grief that is actually mine and grief that was assigned to me…between mourning something I genuinely lost and performing a loss that society expected me to perform.

Knowing the difference between the two…matters like hell.

In the middle of all that grief, all that reframing, all that slow and painful unlearning...a single thought keeps filling my mind and my heart, and it continues to lift me now.

I was never actually alone in it.

I have been mothered my entire life…ferociously…specifically…and by women who showed up in every chapter and held me in ways I didn’t always know I needed. Some of them were mothers in the way the world counts it, and some of them never had children or never wanted any, and every single one of them was and is a mother to me.

My own mother first, obviously, because she is the best and I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it...she worked full time and raised three kids with my dad and they busted their asses to give us every opportunity and the space to grow without hovering over every inch of it, and I am so deeply proud to be hers.

And then there’s Linda Branham from my early church days, who kept up with me and my life and let us come swim at her pool and have a place to breathe. She genuinely cared about who I was becoming as a person and not just who I was at the moment. She still keeps up with me virtually all these years later and is rooting for every single thing I’m building now...she is a mother to me.

My friend Nicole Verrone, who had small children of her own at the time but whose arms, whose strong and steady arms, held me and so many other twenty-somethings wading through the beginning days of adulthood. She was one of the first people to hold all of me…sitting at a table over a meal. She provided the table and made sure everyone had a seat, had time and space to just be, and had a heart big enough and ears open enough to hear whatever was weighing us down. She writes the most beautiful poetry and calls us her little birds…she is a mother to me.

And Tachi and Linda...sisters, two of the most remarkable women I’ve ever had the privilege of being loved by...Tachi, a former teacher with the most inspiring passion for flowers and monarch butterflies and herbs and castles and cooking. She stood shoulder to shoulder with me in a cooking class with thirty years of age between us and not a single inch of distance in spirit. She mothered me through my early days of infertility by painting me peaceful watercolor prints and showing up with tiny pottery pieces. Tachi was my very first paid Substack subscriber and has been by me every step of my adult life...and her sister Linda, mother to one of my dearest friends Massie. Linda gave the gift of her porch swing and a bottle of wine (or two) after a hard day of work. She has a way of grabbing your arm and pulling you in for the kind of hug where you could lift your feet off the ground and just float because she has completely, entirely got you. They are mothers to me.

My friend Laurie Martin, beautifully sarcastic with the most genuine heart of any woman I’ve ever known, who says the thing you’re not supposed to say but gets away with it because you know her heart is pure and her curiosity comes from wanting real connection. She walked with me through infertility, we were part of a support group we affectionately called the Infertile Myrtles, and she wrote me a journal about the kind of mother she knew I already was, even without kids, and the mother she knew I would grow into. Laurie’s hope and faith held me up on the days I had none of my own. She is the one who drops everything to bring someone dinner, who sees someone in need and rallies, who pulls people together and makes them feel genuinely seen. She mothered me the way she now mothers her three kids and the way she’s mothered everyone who’s walked through her door or battled her in ping pong. She is a mother to me.

And my girl Sals, wise beyond her years in ways that have always quietly stunned me...we met when she was in her twenties and I was in my thirties but she has always mothered me, she’s taught me that laughter is the best medicine and that rest is not laziness and that standing up for yourself is non-negotiable. She taught me that things are just things but when they carry a story or a meaning, they are worth more than gold. Sals taught me that your word is currency, and if it has no value then you have nothing. She’s a mother to me.

My dear Nicole Godshall, more accurately my sister from another mister but the first actual mother in my adult friend group…joy explosion…and she has always been exactly that. Nicole taught me the value of fun and the fundamentals of gathering people, and how to make a beautiful spread of food out of whatever’s left in the refrigerator. She is the busy little bee in the background making sure everything is available for whoever needs it, and she is a mother to me.

And Marie, my best friend since freshman year of college, the only teenager I ever knew who wore Merle Norman makeup and was therefore always, clearly, operating on a completely different level than the rest of us. She is a caretaker in every sense of the word, a provider in more ways than should be humanly possible. She has organized, celebrated and marked every occasion. She has cried and screamed and laughed me through every chapter from our college days through first marriages and first divorces…through infertility and first kids and big moves…and through second marriages and beyond. Marie is the one who shows up at your door with your coffee order memorized because she knows you need it...that and a hug, and that is genuinely everything, and she is a mother to me.

Then there are the women who mothered me without ever knowing my name...Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Erykah Badu, Jewel, Florence and the Machine, Adele and Amy Winehouse, Rihanna and Sade and Lauryn Hill and Cleo Sol…even motherfucking Missy Elliott. Their words carried me, lifted me, and wrapped me in strength that finds you at 16 with the volume maxed out in a parking lot somewhere, or in moments when you can’t explain why you’re crying, or when a song comes on, and suddenly you remember who you really are. They gave language to the things I felt inside. They showed me that women can be complicated and angry and tender and fearless and broken and whole…sometimes in the same song, sometimes in the same breath. They mothered me, too.

And Heather, Sarah, Renee, Olga, Nicole, Nancy, Emily, Sally, Marie, Sara, Michelle, Olivia, Catherine, Rachel, Erica, Gloria, Jennifer, Tammy, Sis, Donna, Patsy, Megan, Ashley, Carol, Katie, Anna, Alyssa, Maggie, Wendy, Sherita, Jen, Kim, Chris, Caroline, Kristin, Tania, Nadia, Rifat, Nimi, Joy, Selena, Char, Christine, Lila, Leah, Allison, Amy, Vanessa, Lara, Tiffany, Lorean, Virginie, Lisa, Collette, Lauren, Yasmin, Cami, Kayla, Brenna, Brooke, Bri, April, Camille, Mika, Bracken, Rose, Christie, Angela, Monica, Zikki, Grace, Courtney, Ria, Kari, Lindsay, Leslie, Kriska, Diane, Blair, Haley, Sandra, Emma, Amelia, Julie, Mai, Erin, Phyllis, Gaby, Robin, Ruth, Martha, Chloe, Greer, Katrina, Hannah, Jess, Susan, Melissa, Zenovia, Kasey, Carr, Iris, Louise, Roxanna, Julia, Karina, Kat, Kelly, Mahrina, Kristina, Shannon, Tracy, Lia, Lilla, Ellie, Livi, Mary Kate, Memme, Kate, Molly, Liz, Kara, Meredith, Michelle, Muna, Lucy, Paige, Patty, Krystle, Mary Ruth, Lori, Rebecca, Rosa, Margaret, Molly, Alexis, Isabela, Jean...all of you and more. You mothered me.

It’s Mother’s Day today, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t dread it the way I used to...not because everything is resolved or healed, because it’s not. I feel love and joy for my daughter, for my family, for all the women who have mothered me. And now, I feel gratitude for the clarity I’m getting…understanding which feelings actually belong to me and trying to let go of the ones that don’t.

If you’re reading this and today is complicated, in any direction, for any reason, I see you. For the women who wanted children and couldn’t have them…the ones who chose differently and are exhausted from explaining themselves…the women who are mothers and yet, still feel like something is missing…the ones who are somewhere in the middle, still figuring out what this day even means for them. For the women who would give anything for one more day with their mother taken too soon…or the ones whose relationship with their mother or with their children is complicated and messy and painful. I see all of you, every last one.

If any part of the grief you’re carrying feels like it doesn’t quite fit or feels like it was handed to you by someone else’s measurement or expectations...you’re allowed to hand it back. You don’t have to keep hauling that shit around like it’s yours.

Happy Mother’s Day, friends.

xoxo,

Jess

I went back to climbing this week.

A throwback…and MY back doesn’t QUITE look like that anymore…

Seven months…off the wall. Seven months of slowly, quietly, without even fully realizing it, letting go of most of the things I had built around myself to stay regulated. I like to think about it like scaffolding. These self-case rituals are the scaffolding that support and encourage my growth upward, but aren’t necessarily built into the structure. My scaffolding included climbing 2-3x/week…walks around the city…monthly deep tissue massages & realignment…facials at my Chinatown spot (I have a package that lasts me all year!)…even something as simple as grabbing my afternoon flat whites from Black Press….all the small, private rituals that didn’t feel like much, but I absolutely depended on them. I’ve been SO busy building other things...The Freckled Fork (getting intentional about what it can be and what I actually want it to become), showing up for Millie in the ways she needs right now, being present for Yas. And in the midst of all that building, I let my scaffolding fall away…leaving me unsteady.

I tend to store tension in my chest, in my throat, in my shoulders. I wrote about it in The Quiet Rage...the way women learn to carry things in their bodies instead of putting them down. For me, climbing has been the one thing that physically forces it out. Climbing isn’t just another gym commitment… it's not a wellness trend or even something I’m half-assing on a Tuesday. Since 2022, it’s been a necessity…in every sense of the word. When I’m on the wall, I’m not thinking about anything else beyond solving the problem in front of me. With everything I have, with literally my entire body and all my strength, I’m hyper-focused and with every push and pull, my body is realigning…along with my mind and my heart. I mean…all that rage has to GO somewhere.

Millie’s felt the unsteadiness…the absence of my wholeness. Yas has definitely felt and experienced the unbalanced version of me…and I’ve felt it in ways I don’t love admitting.

So I’m back…on the wall, I’m walking home from work (getting back to those 15K+ steps/day), and I’m working to reinstall the other parts of my scaffolding as well, slowly and intentionally. It turns out there’s a difference in climbing walls vs. building & hiding behind them. I’ve been doing the latter for seven months, but it’s the former that gives me life.

I’m sure there’s a journal entry or an essay in there somewhere...but for now, I just needed to go back. So, I did.

Since we're on the subject of Millie...Mother's Day is Sunday, and if you haven’t read last week’s post My Daughter Doesn't Trust Me …it’s a real one. It’s the hard but necessary work of raising a kid with intention and with truth, no matter how rude it might feel. For this Sunday, I'm bringing you something new...I spent years grieving something my body wouldn't give me. But this time, my reflections on this day are taking a different turn,

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• You Cannot Carry Every Version of Yourself by Ode to a Poet
  I read this at exactly the right time last week. Something about giving yourself permission to put down the person you used to be...not as a loss, but as a necessary act of moving.

• When You've Outgrown Your Old Life by A Tini Bit of Advice
  This one pairs with the one above, from February, but it still resonates and holds true. They're basically a two-part permission slip.

• Menstrual Cycle Self-Care: Your Body Needs Week to Week on The Good Trade
  I love that women are getting more intentional about this...finally moving away from the idea that we should be the same person every single week of the month. We're not. This framework for thinking about the cycle as four different seasons is genuinely useful.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

• Why Making Someone Their Favorite Food Is an Act of Love by Food Stories Told
  This is exactly the kind of piece I want everyone to read and then go cook something for someone they love without making a big deal about it. The whole thesis of what I try to do with The Freckled Fork.

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Motherhood Makes You Disappear by Life with Ryan
  This one…especially this week, especially with Mother’s Day coming, especially with everything I wrote above about. It’s not easy to read, but it’s important.

• I Didn’t Burn Out Because I Failed by Myleik Teele
  Myleik again…she keeps showing up in my feed with exactly what I need to hear. This one was an eye-opener after seven months of quietly dismantling everything that was keeping me upright.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

But if you listened to them…does it count?
For the girl who didn’t actually finish reading one book last year, it’s already May, and I’ve devoured FIVE…count ‘em….FIVE whole books so far this year…All because of the accessibility of Spotify audiobooks. So far this year, I’ve read The Book of Alchemy, Awake: A Memoir, Famesick (just finished last week, LOVED.), Next of Kin (this one was a hard copy, bc I love GH) and then Obsessed with the Best (technically a cookbook, but we all know I read these cover to cover like the trashy romance novels they are for the gourmands of the world)…and I’m almost done with Extra Sauce (also hard copy bc I just couldn’t help myself). Audiobooks while I cook and while I walk? Groundbreaking.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

What did you let go of this winter that was actually keeping you sane?

Not what you gave up because it wasn’t working. The things you let go because life got loud and they were quiet, and quiet things are easy to deprioritize.

Name it and then figure out how to get it back.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

A Women’s Kitchen Takeover at Café Mutsi • May 15 + 16.
Three Women Chefs, two days, one kitchen, a table you definitely want a seat at… Southern freckles meets Mediterranean badass meets Nordic simplicity. Details coming soon via @cafemutsi…follow them so you don't miss the info when it drops…and totally worth the trip to the Catskills next weekend…if I do say so myself:)

Thinking About This Week…

Stop building walls & hiding behind them…go climb them instead!

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. The Mother’s Day essay drops Sunday morning…if this day is complicated for you, in any direction, I wrote it for you, too. Thanks for being here and for sharing this little table with me ♥.