Happy Thursday, friends!

I’m writing this from the kitchen, still buzzing from last weekend in Chicago with my girl Sals...a proper city guide is coming soon, I promise. For now, just know: we ate well, we laughed hard, and I also managed to sneak in a fun interview for Between Bowls in between bites of deep dish pizza and a Michelin gem. More on all of that soon.

In the meantime…I officially hit 100 subscribers this week!! One hundred of you dear souls said yes to a Sunday essay and a Thursday list of things I’m loving. I genuinely did not expect to feel as moved by that number as I did. You guys are awesome, and I love you!

Pull up a chair.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• The IFDPA Print Fair opens tonight at the Park Armory & Yas and I will be there for VIP night, champagne in hand, and the first looks at some of the most beautiful printed work being made right now. If you're a New Yorker and you haven't been to this fair before...it's one of those events that reminds you that you live in one of the greatest cities in the world. The whole weekend is stacked with events and tours, but the one I'm most excited about is Saturday morning's studio tour at LES Printshop. Breakfast bites by yours truly. If that's not reason enough to show up, I don't know what to tell you. All the details are right here.

THE UTENSILS

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

• Why I Cook I published this on Sunday, and it's the most honest thing I've written about this second life I'm living. What drove me out of a career I was good at. What pulled me into a kitchen. What I'm still reaching for. If you're new here and want to understand what this whole thing is actually about — start here.

• Mornings with Jess — I've been posting a new reel series on Instagram. Thirty seconds or less. Early mornings, mise en place, the dance before service…before most of New York is even awake. Little glimpses into my world as a private chef. Come find me @thefreckledfork.

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THE VESSELS

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

• Spring Equinox: A Playlist — this is what's been playing in my kitchen at 7am while I'm dancing between the stove and the prep table before the rest of the world has even opened its eyes. Olivia Dean to ease in, SZA and Yaya Bey to find the groove, Tyler and Tame Impala for when the burners are all going, and then Q-Tip, Nas, Ciara and Missy to remind you that you are THAT girl. Hit play. Open a window. Move your body. Spring is here whether you're ready or not.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Your Clout is a Depreciating Asset: Hanna Horvath (I know, right!?) over at Your Brain on Money wrote something I keep returning to. She argues that status has become its own asset class …something you build, invest in, leverage, and watch depreciate in real time. And the kind that actually makes us happy? Being known and respected by the people right in front of us. That’s the one our current system is worst at delivering. As someone actively building in public, this one hit close.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• The Invention of Summer — The latest from Cake Zine and it made me want to throw every window open…except for the fact that it’s still freakin’ 40-degrees this week. It is exactly the antidote to this almost-spring, almost-not energy we're all living in right now. I am literally counting the days until the freakin’ temps are over 65. Come on, big mama!

ONE LAST THING

You are what you love…and more times than not, it’s directly correlated with your WHY. So what’s your why?

See you at the Armory tonight.

xo, Jess

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Before the jewelry company wakes up, before the burners catch and the steam starts rising, I turn on music...these days it’s Lee Moses’ Bad Girl or Lola Young’s Messy on repeat…might give a glimpse to where my head’s at these days, but they’re songs with dirty grit and feeling that move through my bones like sunshine...and then I dance. Right there in the kitchen, alone, apron not even fully tied yet, knife still on the wall, the city still mostly dark outside the window. No one is there, no one needs anything from me. It’s just me and the music and the beautiful quiet of New York mornings before the city wakes up.

And then at the end of it, when the last dish is done and the burners are off, and I’ve handed over the last plate of food, I walk home...forty-sixth street all the way up to seventy-first, twenty-five blocks, music still in my ears, the city moving around me…hurried and alive and completely indifferent to whatever I’m carrying. I just exhale. I breathe and take it all in. One foot in front of the other, moving forward, not performing for anyone, not being anyone’s chef or mother or wife or content creator or brand...just a woman walking through New York, letting the city hold her for a little while.

These are two of the truest moments in my day, and everything in between is negotiated.

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I spent fifteen years in marketing and design before I ever set foot in a professional kitchen...fifteen years of making things look right, sound good, land correctly for someone else’s vision, someone else’s deadline, someone else’s idea of what success looked like on the page. And I was good at it, genuinely good, promoted and trusted and asked over and over to take on more until one day I looked up and realized I had built an entire career out of being useful to other people’s dreams. I couldn’t quite remember the last time I had let myself have one of my own. And I was ready.

I don’t say that with bitterness, I truly learned everything in those years...how to read a room, how to translate chaos into something clear and beautiful, how to make a complicated thing feel simple and a simple thing feel worthy of attention. Those skills live in my hands now when I plate a dish or write an essay or sit down to design something for a client or create a label for a pantry box. None of it was wasted.

But if I’m honest, most of it was performed. That’s just where I was in my journey…still figuring out who I was so I wore mask after mask to be what people wanted or needed. I was deep in the grind of aesthetic labor…the exhausting work of managing my appearance, my tone, and my 'vibe' to fit a corporate brand. I didn’t know how tired I was by the performance of it all until I walked into a professional kitchen for the first time and performance was the last thing they needed. Nobody in that kitchen cared what I looked like or how I presented myself or whether my aesthetic was cohesive. The kitchen crew and my chefs only cared if I could move, if I could do the work, if I could taste, if I could feel the heat of a pan and respond to it before the food suffered. It was the most embodied I had felt in years...maybe ever...and I fell in love with it so fast, so hard.

The first time I cooked for strangers during the pandemic, in borrowed apartments all over while the city held its breath…I cooked in silence, in masks, and with the anonymity of someone who hadn’t earned a reputation quite yet. It was the first time I wasn’t performing…I felt completely, uncomplicatedly myself...it was just me, with my hands and the heat and whatever was in their fridge, trying to make something that would make someone feel taken care of.

There’s a moment I think about a lot...back when I was a sous chef on the rise, still early in my kitchen life, still learning how to carry authority without feeling like I was faking it, and our head chef Eyal Shani came to New York to run a culinary workshop. Chefs flew in from Tel Aviv, Paris, London, Singapore...all with pedigrees and credentials and reputations much greater than my own. And at some point, after the farmers market haul and the cooking demos, Eyal asked us all, one by one, the question...why do you cook?

They each answered with craft, with discipline, with lineage and legacy, with answers that had been ingrained in them from years of interviews, press dinners, or panels.

When my turn came, I didn’t reach for anything crafted or polished...with my limited experience and short time in professional kitchens, I nervously said the only thing on my mind…the only thing I knew for certain: I cook so people feel seen. I cook so people feel known, even just for a moment…so they belong somewhere, even if it’s only for the length of a meal.

I didn’t plan that answer. It wasn’t a brand statement or a mission I’d workshopped or a line I’d been saving for the right moment...it just came out, plain and simple, because I was still trying to figure out what I was even doing in these kitchens. When the room went quiet, I could feel the heat rise to my face, shit…was that the wrong answer?!

My answer was followed by that long silence…and then three small smirks joined by the accepting nods from the chef owners at the front of the room...Eyal, Shahar, Nir. And, from that moment forward, they knew me, they saw me & they knew my name.

I knew, then, in that moment, that’s my why…that’s why I cook. And for the first time, I felt like I belonged there, in those kitchens and in this industry.

That answer is still the spine of everything I’m building today...the Freckled Fork, my Substack, the seasonal pantry boxes…even the morning reels I started making out of boredom…the ones I keep making because there’s something special about standing alone in a kitchen, music on and silliness overflowing that feels more like me than anything else...and then there’s Between Bowls, the interview series I’m currently developing that features simple, real conversations with other female chefs and restaurateurs over bowls of cereal.

The older I get, the more important it is to know your why and to remind yourself of and reference it often as if it were a moral compass or North Star…and as I stretch and throw those proverbial noodles at the wall, I’m realizing more and more that my why is stretching and growing. Beyond just a meal I make for someone, I want people to feel seen, to feel a sense of belonging & inclusivity, also in these substacks, my posts, the interviews, and beyond. I want to do my part to lift the veil and shatter the boxes we all may be inhibited by. I want to interact, in whatever medium, from a place of say-it-like-it-is…I’m afraid of reaching down into the hard and painful parts that are too scary to say out loud…my why? I want anyone I come in contact with, IRL or virtually, to feel seen, known, and that they belong at THIS table.

That’s the table I’m trying to build…everything else is just me figuring out how.

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I think about performance a lot still…especially lately…about how much of what we consume and create and hold ourselves up against is a constructed version of a life rather than the actual life itself.

I want to be careful here because this is exactly where things almost went sideways a few weeks ago when I was about to publish something WAY too judgey about content creators, especially with women, and the social media machine. I’m glad I paused in the draft…in my judgment…because the piece was misguidedly aiming outward, but in reality, I was feeling an overwhelming inward discomfort…about myself.

The ick I felt wasn’t about them; it was the recognition. I’ve been fed a particular kind of post from various content creators, and what I saw wasn’t necessarily wrong or bad…but I felt discomfort…I recognized the performance act I had, too, had participated in for most of my adult life…in different clothes, in different seasons, for different audiences, for different reasons.

And we all fall into this performance trap, male and female alike; we all perform roles we think we should or to meet expectations placed on us from the outside world, from society.

Social psychologists have recently pointed to this phenomenon called Role Congruity Strain. Research shows that we don't just perform our jobs; we perform the identity we think the world requires of us. For women, this typically looks like the empathy trap, and for men, it looks like the stoic provider. Studies show that this constant conformity to external expectations drains our cognitive and emotional resources...meaning we are literally burning out from the performance before we even begin the actual work.

I played and performed so many roles in my life…the good, content wife…the steady one…the marketing director who had it all together…the chef who didn’t crack under pressure…the single mom who showed up even when she was running on three hours of sleep…the woman who was building something beautiful and purposeful…the woman who projected an outward mask of someone who had absolutely, most definitely, had it all figured out already.

They weren’t complete fabrications…there was some truth in each of them, but none were ever quite fully…not wholly…me.

I realize the whole truth of me is the one dancing in the kitchen before anyone arrives. The whole truth walks twenty-five blocks home because she needs the air and movement and twenty minutes of no one needing her to be anything more. The whole truth comes alive every single time she feeds people.

The whole truth of me is filled with complexities and contradictions…fulfilled and exhausted in the same hour, proud and not enough in the same breath, completely certain of my purpose and utterly unsure of my footing or next steps, who completely loves being a mother and also needs space from time to time, a fiercely independent woman who also loves having a partner to share the load with, secure in myself and also anxiously attached and fearful that love will leave me if I don’t keep doing…these things, all at once, always. I’m working on finally, slowly, and reluctantly accepting that it’s okay, I’m okay and I’m not a burden or problem to solve…I’m complex, with many layers, and this is what it actually looks like to be a woman living fully inside her own life…contradictions and all.

And, the guilt…the one that surfaces for me in the quiet moments away…the small, sharp cramp I feel the second I exhale, the second I feel something that might be relief or freedom or just plain rest, and my brain immediately serves up reasons why I shouldn’t be allowed to have it...that guilt is part of it, too. It’s a lie, of course, but it’s one we’ve been taught so thoroughly from the beginning…that women’s value lives in our constant availability and ability to do it all, and to do it with a smile…that even a twenty-five block walk home with music in our ears can feel like something we have to earn or explain or apologize for.

But we have to have those moments…for our sanity, and honestly for the sanity of those around us. There’s nothing wrong with needing a moment that belongs only to us. Accepting that it’s necessary to finally be honest with ourselves and those around us about what it takes to keep showing up.

This is where the thought of Between Bowls came to be.

I didn’t just want to celebrate successful women, though God knows, I do celebrate them...but I selfishly wanted to meet them, share stories, and sit across from these amazing women who are holding all of it at once. I wanted to sit with them and ask them the real questions. Not what’s your concept or your five-year plan. I wanted to dive deeper into what this life actually costs you...what do you do on the days you drop the ball...what do you put on when nobody’s watching and you just need to feel like yourself again.

No pretense, no performance, no highlight reel…just the conversation we all should be having. There’s a release and a freedom felt when women share their struggles, when we remove our armor and show what success actually requires, what it takes, and what we give.

From the women I’ve been so lucky to talk to so far, from the chefs… the leaders…the mothers building businesses out of pure grit...we are all holding so much more complexity than we ever show. We are fulfilled and falling apart. We are confident and also desperate for someone to tell us we’re doing it right. We love our children so ferociously, and also feel guilty for the moments of rest or the feeling of relief we might feel when we have some space. We are proud of what we’ve built and terrified it’s not enough…we are showing up fully and also disappointing someone we love…and we get back up the next morning and try again. We hold all of it, all the time, simultaneously, without even a moment to resolve it all into something neat or manageable or postable.

We don’t need to be fixed or optimized or coached into a cleaner version of ourselves. We need to be witnessed...to be seen, known…even just for the length of a meal or in a conversation or over a bowl of cereal with someone who is also just trying to figure it out.

The why… it’s why I cook, why I write, it’s why I push to find more spaces and places to share the gifts I’ve been given.

It’s why…every single morning, before the city needs a single thing from me, I turn on Lee Moses or Lola Young, or Florence and the Machine, and I dance…and it’s enough.

And today, I’m finally starting to believe it.

I’m writing this from my plane at LGA, boarding pass in hand, coffee in the other, with that distinct giddiness when you’re about to spend an entire weekend with someone who has known you through multiple versions of yourself and loves you anyway.

I’m going to Chicago for the next few days.

It doesn’t happen too often, so I forget…but then quickly remember every time I travel alone. The calming quiet of it…moving through an airport without having to narrate the experience to anyone…just watching…existing inside the noise without being required to respond to it. I sat at my gate for twenty minutes this morning just people-watching and it felt almost indulgent, this small act of being completely anonymous and completely present at the same time. Nobody needed me…nobody asking me anything…I was just a woman at a gate with her coffee, watching the world move by.

My phone has buzzed three times already. Millie, FaceTiming from home, where she and Yas have apparently declared it an official day of movies, video games and playdates. She looked so happy it made my heart warm over in the best way. She doesn’t need me today, neither does he…and that specific freedom…that knowing and confidence that the people you love the most are completely fine, better than fine, and that you can disappear for a weekend while the whole thing holds together without you.

I’m still smiling about it somewhere over Ohio.

My friend Sal has been my ride or die since my Charlotte days…it’s one of my cherished friendships that doesn’t require maintenance or explanation. Despite the amount of time in between our visits, we just pick right back up where we left off. We’re heading to Chicago to explore a city neither of us is familiar…together, and honestly, weather be damned, we are going to have the best time!

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

What I’m reading on the plane:

These have been living in my tabs this week & feel just right for a weekend of unplugging and thinking…

• You’re Not Lazy, You’re Overwhelmed by Meg Josephson. I needed someone to say this out loud…saving it for the flight.

• Who Are You When You’re Not Performing? from Shit You Should Care About. This question has been following me around for weeks and apparently it’s following a lot of us around. Good.

• The Invention of Summer from Cake Zine. Because it’s April and I’m already dreaming about warmth and long evenings.

• The Quiet Self-Sabotage of Thoughtful People from Quiet Growth Chronicles. This one hit a little close to home. Read it and report back.

• Chair Time with Eric Trine from Wrong House. A conversation about making things slowly and intentionally in a world that rewards fast. Exactly what I needed to read before a weekend of doing absolutely nothing productive.

• And Ina Garten dropped a new playlist for summer on her Substack…I will be listening to it while I walk around a city I barely know with my one of my best friends and it will be perfect.

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THE DESSERT PLATE

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

Here’s a little of what’s on our agenda for the long weekend:

• The architecture river cruise is already booked for Friday tomorrow morning, which I’ve been told by approximately EVERYONE is the thing you absolutely cannot skip.

• Second City on Friday night.

• Wrigley Field tour because it’s on Sals’ bucket list and honestly, I’m not mad about it.

• Skyline views from Sears/Willis Tower (if the clouds don’t block it all)

• The Music Box Theatre for the Beyond Chicago film series if we can snag a seat…

And in the moments between it all, a serious amount of eating.

We’re staying at the Millennium Knickerbocker…a 1920s hotel that Al Capone’s brother literally ran, which feels appropriately dramatic for a girls trip. The Martini Bar in the basement has speakeasy energy and we intend to find out for ourselves.

The food list is long and I have feelings about all of it.

Dove’s Luncheonette for the fried chicken and gravy under the Blue Line tracks. Pequod’s for the caramelized crust deep dish that I’ve been told will ruin all other pizza for me. Milly’s Pizza in the Pan if we plan ahead, which they say is one of the best pizzas in the world and only makes 45 pies a day. Ghareeb Nawaz on Devon Ave for late night Pakistani food at $6 a plate. And so much more…

Also very possibly…some vintage shopping in Wicker Park and Pilsen, and a wander through the Bridgeport Art Center which has creative-building-full-of-artists energy that I’m craving.

I’ll soak in as much as I can, trying to unplug and barely check my phone. I’ll be back Sunday night with a full heart, sore face from smiling & laughing way too much, probably some new vintage finds, and hopefully some fun stories to share.

And…we just got a 15min weather delay on the tarmac…so, before I takeoff…

Sunday’s essay is something I’ve been sitting with & rewriting for a hot minute. It started as a piece about women and the algorithm that I almost published and then didn’t, because reading it back I could hear the judgment undertones that wasn’t my intent, nor was it wha I wanted to put out in the world…we have enough judgement, amiright?!

What it became instead is something more honest and thoughful…about the price of admission and content creation, about what my husband Yas teaching me the art of SEO vs. the science of it and why it all sounds exactly like hospitality to me. It’s about what we are slowly, stubbornly trying to build and why.

Stay tuned, turkeys. See you Sunday!

What are you setting out for your weekend?

Much love,

Jess

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Rebecca Branham made candy at Christmas.

Peppermint patties, butterscotch haystacks, chocolate fudge, chocolate peanut butter balls…the kind of cooking that takes all day and leaves the kitchen smelling like butter and sugar and everything good. She’d set up at her kitchen table in Ridgeway, South Carolina, her hands moving through the same motions they’d been doing since before my own mom was little, and we’d all find our way in through her screened door eventually. Drawn by the smell, by the ritual, by her. Nanny Sis, we called her. Everyone did.

She was a seamstress for years, fingers precise and patient, and then she cooked in a school cafeteria, feeding other people’s children the way she fed everyone who sat on her porch swing or walked through her door. She was a devout church-going Southern woman who showed up early and stayed late and always brought something to share. She built community the way other people breathe…automatically, constantly, without making a fuss about it. When my grandfather was alive, that house in Ridgeway was the center of everything. She was the center of everything. Every Sunday, we gathered there.

And then my Papa Grady died in 2006, and we discovered what his generation had quietly done to the women they loved...everything was in his name. The house, the cars, the bank accounts, the utilities. My Nanny Sis had lived a full and devoted life inside that marriage and had absolutely nothing on paper to show she’d even existed in it. She had no credit; her name on none of the accounts. She had been so thoroughly taken care of that she had never been given the chance to take care of herself. This wasn't unusual for their generation. Until 1974, a married woman couldn't even open a line of credit without her husband's signature. The law had spent the better part of a century ensuring that women like my Nanny Sis simply didn't exist on paper, and most of them never knew to question it.

My parents spent months helping her untangle it all, helping her learn, at 75 years old, how to exist in the world on her own. And she did just that. She figured it out and kept going.

And then, slowly, she didn’t.

It started small in the slow way it does...keys lost in a parking lot, a trip to the grocery store where she forgot why she was there. Then came the sleepwalking, the waking up on the back porch in the dark with no memory of how she got there. Days passing without remembering her last shower. The ordinary mechanics of daily life started coming apart at the seams. We tried to make light of it at first, the way families do when something is too heavy to look at directly. I have a photo from Christmas 2016, the two of us making candy together, and I wrote “before this old timers sets in and hides all her recipes from us.” We said it with love…laughing was the only way through.

But eventually, even the laughing couldn’t heal.

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My parents did what all people do when they love someone, and the world hands them no good options. They moved her into their home, they hired a day nurse, and came home every evening after work to take over. My dad helped her out of bed each morning, patient and unhurried, and lowered her into her recliner like she was the most important thing in the room...because to him, she was. He made her a cup of coffee every single day while she waited for her nurse. My mom would dress her mom each morning, and would help her with the bathroom, the deeply intimate and unglamorous parts of caregiving that nobody wants to write about, and eventually, we all may face. They talked to her like she was fully present, because she deserved that, because love doesn’t stop showing up when it stops being recognized or remembered.

My mom and dad were in their late fifties at that time…still working full-time, still showing up for their grandkids, still the ones everyone called when something went wrong. And quietly, without complaint, they were doing all of this for my Nanny Sis as well. My sweet parents haven’t yet had the chance to exhale between chapters in life. They haven’t had a season of just being Sam and Myra without someone needing something from them. They haven’t traveled the way they’ve always wanted to. They haven’t yet had the empty nest they’ve more than earned. They went from raising us to being grandparents to now parenting their own parents, one generation flowing directly into the next with no break, no pause, no moment of just being free.

I watched all of this firsthand during the seven weeks we quarantined with my parents in the spring of 2020, all tucked into their house while the world outside came apart.

Even beyond the caretaking duties of my Nanny Sis, my dad would also drive across town almost every day to pick up his own mother and bring her to his house so she wouldn’t be alone during that terrifying and isolating time. He’d get her settled, drive her back home later, go back the next day, and do it again. Their relationship has never been simple or easy. She wasn’t always there when he needed her, left him to figure out a lot of things on his own when he was far too young to have to. And still, every day, without ceremony, without making her feel the weight of what she’d cost him, he showed up for her. To this day, he still shows up for her.

He gives her the kind of steady, patient care that she hadn’t always given him…not out of obligation and not to prove a point, but because that’s the man he became in spite of everything. Some people, when the time comes to parent their own parents, they choose to do it and show their parents what it should have looked like all along. A demonstration, not punishment…but to show that this is how it should’ve been done…this is who we could have been to each other.

My generation is starting to live this right now. Those of us in our late thirties and forties are watching our parents get older, slower, and with more questionable ailments. They’re getting heartbreaking diagnoses, starting to need more than they’re willing to admit, and most are too stubborn to give the full picture out of protection to us…their children. We are watching the people who built our whole foundation start to need that very same foundation held up for them, but that need is met with the avoidant “oh, it’s nothing” or “it’s no big deal.” Our parents are still working, some are still taking care of their own parents’ declining health, and they shield the whole truth. We are their children, after all…they’ve been protecting us our whole lives.

And all the while, we are here raising our own kids, building or pivoting our careers, and still trying to figure out who we are. It’s now that we start fielding the “we need to talk” phone calls, the “I have news” FaceTimes, conversations about procedures, questionable scans, and what comes next.

Underneath all of that practical stuff is something softer and harder to admit...we find ourselves grieving. Not just our grandparents saying goodbye, but the harsh reality that our parents soon will, too. I can’t even bring myself to that place. My dad and I rarely talk on the phone, he’ll text me or send me Instagram memes…so when I see his name come across my phone, my heart stops for a moment…someone’s died or someone is going to. I have to take a breath before I answer. Most of the time, it ends up being nothing serious…but in the back of my head and now literally every time I talk to my parents or spend time with them, I’m plagued with the reality that as they get older, our time together is less certain.

Because there are still days, if I’m honest, when I need my mom or dad to just be my mom or dad. When something hard happens, I want to call them and have them be fully present and available the way they were when I was younger. And they try…they always try. But, they’re both so exhausted already…and stretched thin…and carrying more than any person should have to carry. Balancing their own long goodbyes with their parents at the same time that they start their own long goodbyes with us. I know that, and I love them for it, and I also grieve the version of my parents that had more left to give.

I think a lot of people my age are sitting with that same quiet grief and not saying it out loud because it sounds ungrateful, because we are adults and we should be past needing to be taken care of. But the truth is, you don’t really ever stop needing your parents to be your parents, and the moment you realize they are too consumed by their own hard seasons to fully show up for yours…there’s a specific kind of loneliness that feels ungrateful and selfish.

Our kids are becoming more independent at the same time our parents are becoming less so, and we are standing in the middle of that shift, trying to hold it all together without letting anyone see how much it hurts.

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Nanny Sis is still with us, though more gone than present. She now lives in a good facility, one that’s committed to making her as comfortable as possible in her final days. My mom FaceTimes me sometimes so I can see her, and I watch her lying in her bed, looking up at the screen with an expression that splits me open every single time. She is reaching…I can see her trying, pulling at something just out of her grasp, working so hard to place a face or find a word or feel safe with the people on the other side of the glass.

I just tell her I love her, and I tell her she’s beautiful.

And she cries. She always tears up. I don’t even know if she knows why. I think possibly the body can still feel love even when the mind has already let it go. I have to believe that, because the alternative is too much to sit with. I know each tear that flows down her face is a memory of who she is and who we are. I just know it…even if she’ll never again find the words to say it.

I find myself wondering whether lying in that bed, unreachable behind her own forgetting, counts as life in the way we mean when we say that word. I don’t have an answer, and I don’t believe there is one. What I do know is that my grandpas were both taken too soon…there was so much left unsaid, so much unresolved…so much life left to live. And now, my parents both have the gift of the long goodbye with their mothers. Exhausting and almost too much to bear…yes, and…they have the chance to do it right, to do it better.

That love leaves a mark that memory simply can’t erase. Somewhere underneath all of it, my Nanny Sis still knows she is loved. And, isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what we all hope for? That at the end, whenever that may be, our parents would know that they are loved, they matter, and their lives were well lived.

My Nanny Sis is the one who taught me that a table is never just a table. You open your door, you make space, and you feed whoever shows up…not because they earned it or deserved it, but because they’re there, they need it…that’s enough of a reason. She taught me that a kitchen is where love gets made real, where you show people they matter…without words…but by the gift of a full plate in front of them. That is my inheritance, her legacy to me, and I carry it into every kitchen I’ve ever worked in.

And Sam and Myra...my mom and dad…they, too, are still teaching me something I’m learning in real time. They are showing me what it looks like to love someone all the way to the end, even when it may be exhausting and heartbreaking and thankless, and there’s no finish line in sight. To make the coffee every morning, to drive across town, to show up not because it’s easy or convenient or because anyone is keeping score, but because that is what love actually looks like…when it stops being a feeling and starts becoming a choice you make every single day.

That is the inheritance they are leaving me, right now, and I’m watching. I'm taking notes, and I'm trying to show them how loved they are, how much they matter, before it's too late.

And I’ll be honest... I worry about them. I watch my parents pour themselves out for everyone around them, for their grandkids, for my Nanny Sis, for my grandmother, for their siblings…for us, still, always for us…and all I want is to be able to pour back into them. I wonder and wait for when it’ll be my turn to show up for them the way they have shown up for everyone else…I wait for when they’ll be ready to let me.

If you’re reading this and you recognize your own parents in mine...call them. Not to ask for something, but just to ask how they are, and then actually wait for the answer. Show up in whatever small way you can before the showing up becomes urgent. Tell them what they’ve taught you while they can still hear it. Because the long goodbye starts earlier than any of us expect, and the things we wish we’d said have a way of outlasting the chance to say them.

My Nanny Sis may not remember any of it, but I will…I will remember all of it.

Millie’s home, and it’s SO nice having her back. We are in full on pre-teen mode, and I swear she grows like a weed…every time I see her after a stretch away, she’s gotten bigger…taller. She’ll be 11 next month, and I simply cannot wrap my head around it.

Spring has FINALLY sprung…70 degrees tomorrow…and I’m already prepped and ready for my Chicago trip next weekend with my girl Sals. I delivered all the equinox boxes this week, and I’m so excited to see how beautifully it all came together. Already thinking and brainstorming for my next box in June for Summer Solstice…preorders will open at the beginning of June. Stay tuned!

Pull up a chair.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• Surviving a World on Fire
  This piece by Jackie Summers hit me right in the chest this week. “Anxiety will have you rushing to arrive at impact before life’s had a chance to become meaning. You do not owe the fire your nervous system. Stay whole at your own speed. Refuse the tempo that wants to reorganize you.” Read that again. Then bookmark it for when you need the reminder.
  

• Why Middle-Aged Restaurants Matter Most
  You know those restaurants that opened with a bang, have been trucking along beautifully, but have fallen off the lists and algorithms because they’re older? Sure, they might have dropped in the rankings, “but in many cases are executing better versions of themselves than they did when they were first finding their place within the resy scroll.” More than 82% of restaurants survive the first year, but only half make it past 5 years. It’s our duty as diners to revisit them and keep them going. This and more in Matt Rodbard’s piece on Substack linked above.
  

THE UTENSILS

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

• Pistachio Tres Leches (Picture above, Recipe below)
  I whipped this up quickly for our family Eid celebration last Friday, and it was so dang good! White cake base with pistachio pudding mixed in, three milks spiked with cardamom, rose water and topped with pistachio whipped cream. Sweet, creamy, just the right amount of nutty.

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THE VESSELS

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

• The Little Bookshop in Bushwick
  Woman-owned and operated, mother/daughter duo, best soup ever…and they’re hosting Poetry by Candlelight this Saturday (and more events each month). This is exactly the energy we need for 2026. Not this other side bullsh*t that’s dominating our news feeds.
  

• The Disappearing Act of Exceptional Women
  Final week of Women’s History Month, and this article about women who were erased, overshadowed, or had their work attributed to men…it’s infuriating and necessary. I had an old boyfriend that told me once that “all girl humor was just recycled boy humor” and I’ve never wanted to knock someone’s teeth out so quickly. So many exceptional women did exceptional things before men, but history forgot them. Worth the read.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Becca Piastrelli on Community
  "You cannot build reciprocal community while running a one-woman show." This piece on over-functioning, child consciousness vs adult consciousness, and truth-telling in community…it's the reminder I needed. "The most radical thing you can do for your community is learn to tell the truth inside the containers you're building."

• Yas on YouTube
  My brilliant husband was interviewed this week on SEO lessons he learned as the former Head of SEO at Omnicom. He was featured on Edward Sturm’s YouTube channel and was so insightful. I'm biased, obviously, but I truly listened to the whole thing more than once, and even I learned a thing or two. Totally worth a listen, and yours truly even gets a little shoutout near the end.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Pistachio Tres Leches for Eid
  I threw this together last Friday for Eid celebrations, and it was a hit. Not traditional, not authentic, just delicious.
  
  The Cake:
  Start with a simple white cake mix (or make from scratch if you’re feeling fancy). Add 3/4 box of pistachio pudding mix (I used Jello brand!) to the batter along with 1 cup raw pistachio (pulsed or blended until fine). Bake according to package directions in a round pan (I made two pans!). Let it cool completely.
  
  The Three Milks:
  Mix together one can evaporated milk, ¾ can of sweetened condensed milk, and about 1 cup almond milk. Add a generous amount of ground cardamom (I used around 2-3 tsp, a dash or two of Kewra or Rose Water, a handful of blended pistachios, and a few drops of green food coloring (optional, but it makes it pretty). Poke holes all over the cooled cake with a fork or skewer, then pour the milk mixture over the top slowly. Let it soak in. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, overnight is better.
  
  The Icing:
  Whip heavy cream until soft peaks form. Add the rest of the pistachio jello mix, a generous pinch of cardamom, and a splash of vanilla. Keep whipping until stiff peaks. Spread over the soaked cake. Top with more crushed pistachios & crushed rose petals or dried edible flower petals.
  
  Serve cold. It’s sweet, it’s creamy, it’s just the right amount of awesomeness, fit for a celebration.

What are you setting out for your weekend?

Much love,

Jess

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Every week during Ramadan, one of Yas’s uncles showed up at our door with dinner.

The two of them took turns, actually, showing up with containers of warm food, carefully packed... biryani and pakoras and chicken roast and kebabs and whatever else had been made that day, enough for all of us. We weren’t fasting, neither of us is religious in that way, and nobody asked us to be. They just included us anyway, because that’s who they are. I would unpack everything, arrange it on a plate, and send a picture as a thank-you, and every single time I felt the same thing settle somewhere deep... we were taken care of. We were part of something I hadn’t expected to be.

I grew up in Blythewood, South Carolina, which is about as far from Ramadan or really any other religion beyond good ole’ Southern Baptist Christianity as a person can get. The world I was raised in was a particular shade of…Black and white. Baptist and Methodist, Catholic and Lutheran, sweet tea and Sunday lunch after church. That was the whole map. I didn’t actually know a single Muslim person growing up. I didn’t know anything about Islam at all, really, until September 11th, 2001, my freshman year of college, when I learned about an entire religion and its people through the worst possible lens, the way so many Americans did.

I look back on that time, and I’m incredibly thankful to have been in a writing class with a particularly jovial and poignant Muslim boy named Mohammed. It was his writings about his childhood and upbringing in Jordan, his stories of his family and history that really helped filter out the barrage of anti-muslim rhetoric coming from the media and surrounding our world at that time. It took years of real exposure and a genuine curiosity about people different from me to unlearn all that had been planted.

College cracked me open the way it’s supposed to...suddenly there were people from everywhere, believing different things, living entirely different lives, and I remember the specific liberating feeling of realizing the world was so much bigger and more full than the one I knew. That there were a hundred ways to love God, or the universe, or whatever you want to call the thing bigger than yourself, and most of them looked remarkably similar from the inside. Community. Service. Gratitude. Feeding people. Showing up for each other. The details were different, but the heartbeat was the same.

My own relationship with Christianity had gotten complicated over the years…I was raised in a small Southern Baptist Church where my parents were Sunday School teachers, and even I was a leader in the youth group very early on. I was raised in a home where asking questions was encouraged, where my parents pushed us to do our own research and develop our own process of thinking before believing anything that was just “told” to us. Our pastor from Oklahoma didn’t particularly like me very much. I challenged him and his sermons on almost a weekly basis, asking him to show me and explain the context around the verses I believed he was cherry-picking to appease his own beliefs and biases. But that’s who I was. I always asked questions and challenged anything that didn’t sit right in my heart. And in my 20s, newly married and deeply entrenched in this cool, “counter-cultural” church in Charlotte…my faith was rocked by the infidelity of leadership, and I was left with wounds instead of healing. I watched people using faith as a tool to divide and exclude rather than gather and love, and then, very personally, years of infertility had tested everything I thought I believed about a God who had a plan. I didn’t leave faith so much as I left the institution of it, the performance of it, the version that had been handed to me by people who used it to feel superior rather than connected. What I found on the other side of all that was strange and true...the further I got from organized religion, the more I actually understood what it was always supposed to be about. Love…radical, inconvenient, show-up-at-your-door-with-food love.

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Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, prayer, and community. For 30 days, observant Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, not eating or drinking during daylight hours...a practice of discipline and deep gratitude and solidarity with those who go hungry not by choice. Iftar is the meal that breaks the fast each evening. Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast, is the culminating celebration on the other side of all of that...a day of joy, of dressing in your finest, gathering with family, giving to those in need, and eating together with full hearts and full tables.

Ramadan also falls this year right alongside Lent, the Christian season of reflection and fasting that leads to Easter. And Passover begins just days later, the Jewish celebration of liberation and renewal. All of us, across different faiths, sitting with the same questions at the same time...what are we grateful for, what are we willing to sacrifice, what does it mean to be free, and how we take care of each other, how we love those different from ourselves, how we show up for the least of these. The calendar keeps trying to show and tell us something we keep refusing to hear.

Yas is not a deeply religious person. He spent a lot of his adult life at a distance from his faith and his culture, the way a lot of second-generation kids do when they’re trying to figure out where they fit in a world that doesn’t always make room for the in-between. But when we started planning our wedding, something shifted in him. He wanted to honor it. He wanted to claim it. We did a full desi wedding celebration, and his Uncle Barry stood up and offered prayers and words from the Quran, and my dad stood up and offered Christian prayers alongside his own words, and the room held all of it without flinching. I stood there between these two men, these two prayers, these two traditions reaching toward the same place, and I thought...this is exactly what it was always supposed to look like. This is the whole point.

I think watching Millie and me fall in love with his family and his culture for the first time has given something back to Yas. There is a real joy in seeing something you grew up taking for granted through the eyes of someone, an outsider, experiencing it fresh. He comes alive at these gatherings in a way that makes me smile every time. It’s like he remembers something he had set down a long time ago and willingly picked it back up.

Last year was my first Eid dinner with his family. I walked in nervous and walked out with henna drying on my hand, Amelia having won the games, leftovers packed up for the next day, and a feeling in my chest that I had been welcomed somewhere I didn’t know I had been missing. This year, I walked in as his wife, as if I belonged, a different thing entirely, and I was so ready for it.

His family is big and warm and loud in the best way, and the food is outrageously delicious...biryani that perfumes the whole house from the moment you walk in the door, chicken roast, dal, pakoras, kebabs, and then the desserts that just keep appearing from somewhere, tray after tray, sweet and cardamom-spiced and gone before you can go back for more. The women are dressed beautifully in their finest shalwar. The kids run the whole house. The elders hold court and everyone goes to them first to offer Eid Mubarak before anything else. It feels, honestly, a lot like every big Southern family gathering I grew up going to...just with different spices, kaftans instead of muumuus, and a different (but same) kind of prayer before the meal.

The thing nobody tells you when you grow up in a small world…when you finally step outside of it, you don’t find as much difference as you find echo. You see and feel the same impulse to gather…the same need to feed everyone who walks through the door…the same desire to mark the sacred moments with the people you love, to slow down once a year and say we made it, we are grateful, we are here together.

Amelia was nervous last year. She watched everything carefully the way she always does, taking it all in before deciding how she felt about it. By the end of the night she had won the kids’ games, had henna drying on her hands, and was asking when we could come back.

She is ten years old and already understands, even if she doesn’t have words for it yet, that there is more than one way to belong somewhere. That love looks different in different houses, gets cooked in different kitchens, and gets prayed in different languages and it is all, underneath, the same thing. Nobody told her one way was right and the others were wrong. She just gets to walk in, be welcomed, and let it land inside her.

I think about the girl I was at her age in Blythewood, with my one small map of the world, and I feel nothing but gratitude that she gets a bigger one. That Eid and Ramadan and Iftar and biryani and pakoras and henna and those prayers will be woven into the story she tells about her childhood, sitting right alongside the church potlucks and Nanny Sis’s Christmas candy, moments around the pool with Nonni and Poppi, beach trips with her cousins in Wilmington, and Sunday mornings in South Carolina.

At a time when the loudest voices keep insisting we are too different, that we should fear what we don’t understand, that we need revenge for past hurts that aren’t even ours, that there isn’t enough room at the table for all of us...I keep coming back to two uncles taking turns showing up at my door every week with warm food. No agenda…no conditions. Just here, eat, you’re family.

And that’s it, that’s the whole argument.

Eid Mubarak to everyone celebrating this Sunday...may your table be full, your heart be full, and the light find you wherever you are. And to those finishing out Lent and heading into Easter, and to those gathering for Passover in the days ahead...the same wish, same light, the same table.

We are all, this week, reaching toward the same thing.

Love and light…kindness and understanding…actual belonging.

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Millie comes home Friday after two weeks at her dad’s, and I cannot wait. The apartment’s pretty quiet without her chaos, but I’ve been counting down, and I miss her adorable (and equally infuriating) mess all the same. This weekend we’re also celebrating Eid with family and friends…delicious food, beautiful people, communal dinner around the table…moments that remind you what matters.

And even though Second Winter showed right back up on schedule after last week’s Fool’s Spring (back to 30-40 degrees, though you won’t catch me with that puffer back on), I’m still holding onto that glimpse of warmth. Spring is coming…renewal is coming…and we’re almost there.

Pull up a chair.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• The Motherhood Penalty
  I know Sunday’s piece may have been a lot…about working motherhood and what we’re actually up against. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and for those of us living it and feeling the weight of it all…well, the data backs it up too: modern workplaces were never designed for mothers, the maternal wall is real, and women in startups face a penalty that men with kids never see. These articles lay it out exactly like I’ve felt it and seen it in my friends’ lives as well…the structural barriers, the bias, the impossible math. These might make you feel less alone and more angry, which honestly might be the point.
  - Forbes: Breaking Down the Maternal Wall
  - Queen’s University: Modern Workplaces Weren’t Designed for Mothers
  - Motherly: The Motherhood Penalty in Startups
  

• Spring Equinox in Chinese Medicine
  Dr. Felice Chan on what the spring equinox means for your body—liver energy, wood element, releasing what no longer serves. I’m into this framework for thinking about seasonal shifts. Spring isn’t just warmer weather, it’s a whole energetic recalibration.

THE UTENSILS

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

• Nigella, my girl.
  Winter and the dryness have done a number on my hair this season. In search of ways to prevent any more thinning or breakage, I’ve turned to my most trusted sources of information…my friends and the interwebs. What am I trying this week? Nigella Seeds…and I just happen to have a fresh batch sourced from my latest trip to SOS Chefs in the East Village. Have any of you tried this? Or do you have other ideas to throw my way? I’ll report back in a few weeks.

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THE VESSELS

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

• Star of Bethlehem (pictured above)
  I bought these green beauties from Trader Joe's last week…totally thought it was just funky greenery for the apartment. Then this week…the week spring is actually coming…the buds started blooming. I was totally surprised because I didn't even know it had flowers (I thought they were leaves), but they do, and they're beautiful. Ornithogalum…also known as the Star of Bethlehem symbolizes hope, purity, new beginnings. The bulbs bloom in spring when the light returns. Feels totally right for this moment…equinox week, one year in business, things opening up that I didn't know were possible. Sometimes you buy weird plants at Trader Joe's, and they teach you something…and other times? They just make you smile.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Anut Cairo Goblets
  Literal glassware this week:) You guys, I discovered Anut Cairo on a random Instagram scroll this week and became immediately obsessed with these Palace Walk wine glasses. Hand-blown in Egypt, gold-rimmed, the kind of glass I want to drink all the things out of…from the mundane to the fancy. They're gorgeous, and I want all of them.

THE NAPKIN

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

• Eid Mubarak
  It’s the end of Ramadan, and even though I don’t personally observe, my family does. We are heading to Eid dinner with family and friends this weekend, and this time, I’m going as Yas’ wife. Last year, I was his girlfriend, navigating the introductions and questions and trying not to mess up the etiquette. This year feels so different, so exciting…this isn’t just his family, they are mine now, too, and I can’t wait to celebrate light and love with our people.
  

• Spring Equinox
  It’s HERE!! Friday, March 20th…after what’s felt like the longest winter EVER, it’s finally spring! …and just so happens to be my dad’s birthday as well! Shoutout to Sam Boulware for ushering in the light and the warmer weather every single year. And me? I’m ushering in the new season by putting the final touches on the first edition of my Spring Equinox pantry boxes…all ten are batched, getting packed up, labeled, and ready to hand off to my lovely friends and supporters who snatched these babies up within the first 24-hours of launching. Spring is here, friends!

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Oscars Night
  What a night. So thrilled for Michael B. Jordan and are you kidding me? Autumn Durald Arkapaw (first female cinematographer to win), what a badass! And yay for my first time playing the prediction markets…full disclosure…I don't like gambling generally because of the addictive and predatory nature of it all, but I liked being able to put $5 on something I'm actually interested in. Kind of like March Madness but for pop culture…and I came away with $50 that night, so there’s that, too:)

What are you setting out for your weekend?

Much love,

Jess

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There’s a story women are handed down early...about what their bodies are for, about how motherhood arrives naturally and inevitably…like how seasons change…and how when it does, something clicks into place that was always meant to be there.

I waited seven years for that to click the way I thought it was supposed to.

Seven years of trying and failing, of watching everyone around me move forward into a life I thought I was supposed to have...baby showers and birth stories and that specific exhaustion in a new mother’s eyes…the one I would have traded anything to feel. My body wasn’t doing the thing bodies were designed to do. Unless you’ve dealt with infertility, you can’t truly know just how quietly and painfully devastating it is to feel broken at a biological level. To grieve something you never had (or will ever have)…to paste on a smile and keep showing up to a world that continues to ask when you’re going to start a family. As if you haven’t been trying…as if the trying isn’t killing your soul…or as if the grief you will continue to carry years later knows your body will never do that thing “it was designed to do.”

At the time, I poured myself into everything else...my little blog, my friendships, my marriage that didn’t quite fit, and a job I was genuinely good at. Marketing director, graphic designer, track coach…mentor to kids who weren’t mine but needed someone anyway. I leaned hard into every maternal instinct I had and aimed it sideways, at the world, at work, at anything that offered to hold the weight of it. I told myself I was fine, and mostly I believed it...until a failed adoption. A birthmother forced to keep the baby she wanted a different life for, at the 11th hour, by a birthfather who showed up out of nowhere just so he could have control of her. And me? I sat with a room full of baby things and an empty crib, weeping. I closed the door to that room and refused to open it for months. And that piece of me that wailed on the floor, she stayed in there behind that door.

Then there was Amelia Rose...just seven days old, placed in my arms in Asheville NC. An adoption that worked. She was my daughter.

I left my job to work part-time from home so that I could be with her because I had waited for so long to become a mother. I wanted to soak up every second, and also I knew that bonding after adoption doesn’t necessarily happen as naturally, as seamlessly as the other. It isn’t automatic or hormonal or guaranteed. We had to build it, the two of us, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Amelia was an amazing baby, and our time together was so special. And yet, it was also the hardest thing I had ever done. Having this tiny human depend on you for its every need, 24-7. There’s an unmatched beauty in that bond, but it’s also the most difficult, exhausting exchange of energies I’ve ever experienced.

I loved and cherished that time with Amelia. I want to say that clearly, before I say everything else. I loved her unconditionally from the very first moment I held her.

And…I also fell apart.

I fell apart in ways no one could see. I walked into motherhood expecting to fold it into who I already was, just add the title and carry on…and instead, it swallowed me whole. My identity of who I was dissolved away…my friends disappeared into their own lives, my husband turned toward the baby and away from me in ways that I never fully recovered from. I tried to hold onto my design career part-time from home, doing the work I used to love during nap windows, feeling inadequate…replaceable…like the world was just quietly moving on without me. At the same time…somewhere in the quiet spaces of those early days…I started watching cooking shows & experimenting in the kitchen during her naps. Something inside me began to stir…something that had nothing to do with motherhood and everything to do with who I was still becoming.

And yet, there was this baby…this perfect, beautiful wailing baby, who needed all of me. And, I gave it. And…it still felt like not enough. That motherly instinct everyone promises you have doesn’t always come in the shape you might expect. No one talks about how love and rage can live in the same body…that sometimes, the version of postpartum that arrives without the birth hormones is still postpartum. It’s real, and it’s worth naming.

There was one particular night I remember so vividly. It was 3am, and I was sleep-deprived past reason, rocking Millie in the dark while she cried those loud, blood-curdling newborn shrills…the ones that feel like a special kind of torture. Nothing I did soothed her, and my body, without my permission, squeezed her tighter to my chest. So tight…not to hurt her, but out of sheer desperation, out of the kind of exhaustion that rearranges your insides. I felt something in that moment I had not felt before…and was probably too ashamed to say out loud…rage or grief or sadness or disappointment…or the specific terror of realizing you are standing at the very edge of yourself. I put her down in her crib, and I let her cry it out for the next few hours. The next day, I called my mom because I knew…I couldn’t keep swallowing it alone.

How could I feel sad or angry or disappointed? I waited so long to become a mother and now I was. What did I have to complain about? Why did I feel all these feelings? Was something else broken inside of me?

What I know now, looking back with the clarity of the ADHD diagnosis I didn’t have then, is that I was dysregulated in ways I couldn’t control or even identify...that my rage wasn’t a character flaw, it was my nervous system doing the best it could with more than it could hold. And even then, somehow we made it.

We found our rhythm eventually, Millie and I, in a strict daily routine that became our anchor. Our time was chunked into walking and playing and learning and eating and then a sacred 45 minutes every afternoon where Millie was in her room, lamp on, books out, alone with herself. It saved us both, honestly. She learned autonomy, and I learned how to exhale. Millie is 10 years old now and still guards that alone time. I think about that often...how one of my greatest parenting wins came directly out of those early days of survival.

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When Millie was almost three, we put her in a Montessori program, and I went back to work part-time. Something in me exhaled differently...the working mother identity fit so naturally for me. It felt like I was coming back to a version of myself I recognized. And a huge part of me felt guilty for that. For parents, there’s an invisible tug-of-war between work and their children. You never quite feel very good at either thing, and are always weighed down by the guilt of having to choose. For single parents, especially, that weight is almost impossible to hold.

After 15yrs in the same career, I wanted to switch it up and cook professionally, and I wanted to do it in New York City. My then-husband and I agreed that with Millie heading into Kindergarten soon, the timing was right. We could do anything for a year, or three to five years tops. I said that sentiment out loud, I said it convincingly, but in my heart of hearts…I knew I wasn’t coming back.

We sold everything…the house, cars, years of collected furniture, all of it. Packed a tiny U-Haul and pointed ourselves toward a new life...and then March 2020 happened…the world shut down, and our drive to New York was rerouted to my parents’ house in South Carolina. We lived in a state of limbo for seven weeks. Ironically, it was a little utopia, while the world around us went into chaos. Amelia became a fish and lived in the swimming pool. My mom & I cooked together and had daily happy hour by the pool while the men worked on renovating the garage, and I got to spend some very sweet moments with my Nanny Sis before dementia stole her away. I loved having that time with my family. And yet…every night, I went to sleep with the quiet dread that if I didn’t leave soon, I would never. That the woman I was trying to become would just…dissolve…back into the life I had already outgrown.

We decided to keep going and moved into a quarantined New York in May 2020. With the world shut down, I started blind-emailing restaurants and chefs, and slowly, impossibly, it worked. A private chef first, then a line cook in October 2021, then Sous Chef six months later, then Executive Chef by May 2023. As that new identity caught fire, everything around it started to burn, too.

My marriage had been fraying for years, threadbare in places I had stopped looking at…his quiet disappointment in my pursuit and the weight of feeling like my becoming was an inconvenience to the life he’d signed up for…all became too heavy to keep carrying. I asked for a separation, and a couple of months later, he told me I needed to move into my own apartment. The thing that suffered the most, the casualty I will carry the longest, was my relationship with my daughter.

My ex wouldn’t pay for childcare while I worked nights on the line, so during my 50-hour work week, I saw Millie two days. Two. I had gone from the woman who built her entire early motherhood around being present, available, and almost desperately bonded to her child...to a mother who saw her kid two days a week. I was pursuing the truest version of myself I had ever been and simultaneously looking into the eyes of my daughter…feeling like I was failing her in the most fundamental way imaginable. That kind of torn feels like drowning, not ambition.

And woof…the guilt and shame and pressure of being the one who pushed to uproot your child from everything and everyone she loved…on top of breaking up the family unit that held her so secure and safe in her tiny 5 years of life because of a risky, professional pursuit…well, that shit sticks to you like molasses that never fully wipes clean.

The restaurant industry, my industry, was the place where I eventually found the version of myself I had been looking for my whole life. The industry where only 6% of head chefs are women. Six. I fought my way from zero experience to Executive Chef in under two years in New York City. I did the impossible thing; I was that 6%. And my identity? I was finally mother AND chef. I really thought I could do and be both.

I made $90k, but as we all know too well, in New York City, $90k is more like $40k after taxes, which pays for exactly nothing. And for me, I was a single mother with no partner splitting rent, no family nearby to take a shift, no backup plan for the nights Amelia begged me to stay home, and back-to-back nights of 250 covers on the books and a full line to run. That money disappeared, and the Tetris to make all the pieces fit together didn’t quite work.

I told myself I had a choice. I told myself I was weighing it, turning it over, considering all the angles like a reasonable person would...but deep down, I already knew. There was never a choice. My kid needed me more…end of story.

At the peak of my chef career, in the happiest moment of my professional life, I chose to leave the restaurant. Amelia needed me, and there was no safety net, no supports in place to let me do both. That choice cost me something I still can’t fully name...the rush of the line, the most alive I ever felt, the proof that I could do the impossible, the version of myself I burned everything around me to find. I grieved it…hell, I’m still grieving it.

I’m sitting here on the other side of that time, and I now know this…The system was never built to hold a woman like me. I don’t mean that as a rallying cry, not yet. I mean it the way gravity is a fact, just true and everywhere…something you move through, whether you name it or not. It took me the last few years to accept that it wasn’t a personal failing that I couldn’t make it fit.

It was never going to fit, the fucking architecture was wrong from the start.

The world will tell you this was a scheduling problem, a you-didn’t-plan-well-enough problem...that women who want careers should think about this before they have children, or that women who want children should plan before they build careers, that surely there’s a way to do both if you’re just creative enough, resilient enough, flexible enough.

It’s all a lie dressed up as a personal choice, and I am done pretending otherwise.

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The Freckled Fork was born out of that grief…out of necessity, out of the stubborn refusal to accept that those were my only two options…the truest version of myself or my daughter. I am only in the beginning stages of building this business. My one-year anniversary came and went last week, and I was too busy to notice. The Freckled Fork is still becoming, slower and much less certain than the restaurant ever was…but it’s mine, all the way down.

Millie is watching all of this, too. She is opinionated and stubborn and completely herself, still insisting on her alone time, still surprising me. She is watching me hold all of it at once...watching me do the hard thing, the impossible thing, the thing the numbers say I shouldn’t be able to pull off. She and I have a long way to go in mending and rebuilding what we’ve lost.

I am a mother and a chef, and I am done apologizing for needing to be both. This time, I know it's not just for me...it never was. She's my reason why. It finally clicked.

I spent years not knowing which version of myself was allowed to exist at once. Now I know…they all get to stay.

I hope one day, Amelia will look back at this journey, and feel empowered, feel inspired, and feel supported as she herself sets out to do the impossible things…and every version of herself and who she wants to be will click right into place.

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This week was GLORIOUS. We call it Fool’s Spring up here in NYC (shoutout to 12 Seasons of NYC for naming what we all feel)...but we felt anything but foolish this week as we soaked in the 60+ degree days and sunshine after months of grey. Second Winter is coming back next weekend with stupid 30-40 degrees that no one wants. I went a whole day without wearing my puffer coat…the first time in months…and it was AMAZING. This week’s dose of vitamin D is exactly what I needed to keep going with all the momentum I’ve been feeling lately.

And speaking of momentum…I officially hit one year as The Freckled Fork LLC. March 5th came and went, and you guys…I totally missed it…too busy launching pantry boxes and filming cereal chats and catering and just…doing the dang thing. I feel good…hopeful…and still scared as hell because failure isn’t an option…and excited all at the same time for all the many possibilities. I should celebrate though, right? How should I commemorate this special milestone?

For now, I’m just along for the ride…here’s to hoping this year is more of a cruising-in-a-1979-Bronco-convertible-on-a-sunny-day vs. this rollercoaster of pressure I’ve been on for the past year.

Pull up a chair.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• Homecooked Magazine
  A gorgeous publication I subscribed to last year…one region at a time, deep diving into families, lineage, recipes, and homegrown stories. The most amazing history of food told through the people who’ve been making it for generations. It’s the kind of thing you want on your coffee table, not your digital bookshelf. So beautiful, you need to hold it in your sweet hands and smell the thick matte cardstock.

• Whitney Biennial Preview
  I’m going Saturday morning to check it out with my members pass…it’s the official kick-off to my annual Spring Art season. Looking forward to this and then the IFPDA Print Fair at the Armory in April. Cannot wait.

THE UTENSILS

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

• Shakshuka (Recipe for all subscribers—see below)
  My first post on the Freckled Fork was a poached egg on toast in July of 2018. The second? A simple Shakshuka. Seven years later, coming full circle to the dish that started it all. This is the version I make now…restaurant technique, home kitchen reality, jammy caramelized onions, hand-crushed tomatoes, and a secret dash of cinnamon.

• The One Tool Haley Would Save in a Fire
  An immersion blender. Chef Haley Duren from LongCount was my first guest on my new video series, Between Bowls (more on that below), and she’s right…it’s the workhorse you don’t appreciate until you use it every day. Best affordable option… Turelar Hand Blender. Top performer and comes with chopper, whisk, and beaker. And if you’re okay spending a little more, grab the Braun MultiQuick 5 for the perfect balance of power and comfort.

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THE VESSELS

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

• Between Bowls: Episode 1 with Chef Haley Duren
  I launched my new video series this weekend on International Women’s Day. A casual conversation with different female chefs, sitting down over a bowl of cereal to talk about what we're actually doing in our kitchens and in our lives. Real talk, good bowls, no bullshit.
  
  First up: Chef Haley Duren of LongCount. She's 28, accomplished as hell, and has this beautiful, creative approach to vegetables that makes you rethink what they can be. We had the carrots she talked about in the video (from Halal Farms) and the arancini…so freaking good. Her kitchen and bar work together around fermentation, aging, and seasonal veg. Every wine bottle on their list is over 10 years old, curated from around the world, all priced within reach. Fresh perspective, alive with possibilities, but clear-headed and wise beyond her years. We started with Raisin Bran, and then a great conversation followed. Enjoy & subscribe.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Ella Quittner’s Obsessed with the Best
  Finally got my hands on a copy this week and couldn’t put it down. This book is different…it’s not just recipes, it’s the process. Twenty-four head-to-head tests showing the right way, the wrong way, and all the ways in between. The dang chapter on cabbage, oof. Ella’s in a big cabbage phase (same, honestly, I fucking love cabbage). Wedges seared then braised with tomato paste, butter, ginger until jammy and sweet. Precise without being precious, obsessive without being exhausting. Check out the recipe featured here on Cherry Bombe

• Ramen by Ra
  Had my first experience this week. Haven’t scored a coveted reservation yet, so I went by for Window Service where their delicious Shoyu Broth and amazing Breakfast Baos gave me new life. Window Service is open Wednesday-Sunday, 9am to 3pm. Reservations release on the 1st and 15th at 9am on Resy, so best believe I’ll be shooting my shot come Sunday morning. May the force be with you.

THE NAPKIN

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

• Spring Equinox Pantry Boxes
  I launched the Freckled Fork Spring Equinox Box “Awakening” last week, and it sold out in one day…all ten boxes…gone! I'm SO excited to start batching and cooking this weekend and next week for pickup on March 20th (the spring equinox…and my dad's birthday!).
  
  The next box will be Summer Solstice in May/June celebrating the best of spring-to-summer produce, so stay tuned!

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Chicago in April
  I'm going with my dear friend Sals the first weekend of April. I've only been once for a conference back in the day, didn't get a chance to really explore. This trip is JUST for that…exploration and much-needed reunion with my girl from Charlotte, NC. We are collecting food recs, things to do, etc., so send any suggestions my way!

  Leave a comment

What are you setting out for your weekend?

Much love,

Jess

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She didn’t know if they were hiring, she didn’t even know what position she wanted…she just knew she wanted in and she was done with her current situation. So she made an account, paid the money, found the guy in charge, and sent the message. At midnight.

At 8am the next morning he replied.

That’s Haley Duren. Executive Chef at Long Count in the East Village. Twenty-eight years old. Running a small, but mighty female kitchen with her girl Carmen, and doing the damn thing entirely on her own terms.

I sat down with her last week over Raisin Bran and oat milk for the first episode of Between Bowls and I have not stopped thinking about her story since.

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Because I did the same thing.

Not LinkedIn perse, but the sending of cold emails. Plural. Sent from my time during the pandemic in our small apartment in May of 2020, to every restaurant I could find in New York City, begging someone…anyone…to let me cook in their kitchen. I had zero experience. I had fifteen years of marketing behind me and a whole lot of nerve and approximately nothing else to offer.

The responses I got back were kind versions of absolutely not. We don’t even know if we’re opening again. Good luck, but no. Come back when you have experience. The classic catch-22 of trying to start over at the wrong time in the wrong city in the middle of a global catastrophe.

I kept sending anyway.

Haley kept sending hers anyway, too. Different era, different platform, same audacity, same refusal to wait for someone to hand her an opening. She would need to nudge the door open herself.

That’s what Between Bowls is about.

Not just cereal…well, also cereal. When I was running kitchens I came home every single night after service and poured myself a bowl. Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Reese’s Puffs. Didn’t matter how fancy the food was that day. At midnight all I wanted was cereal and my couch and the specific silence of having nothing left to perform.

That’s when the real conversations happened. When the apron was off, and I was just a person with a spoon.

So that’s the format. Two chefs, a bowl of whatever they grew up eating, and a real conversation. No green rooms. No PR answers. Just the honest stuff about how they got here, how they lead, and what it actually costs to build something in this city.

Haley chose Raisin Bran because her mom wouldn’t let her have the sugary ones. She’s been eating it since she was a kid, and she loves it now. That felt right.

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Today is International Women’s Day, and I want to be honest about what that means to me in the context of food.

It doesn’t mean an Instagram graphic with a pink background, or token highlights of women that so often get overworked and overlooked on any other given day…it can’t just mean a listicle of females to follow.

It should mean Haley Duren paying $65 at midnight because she was done waiting. It’s about her and Carmen running a full-service kitchen…giggling, playing with food, blasting Bad Bunny, and then “Uncle Haley’s” eighties R&B…and doing it without the toxic masculinity that most of us have just accepted as part of the job.

It means Haley standing tableside talking about rainbow carrots from Halal Pasture Farms with so much genuine excitement that people who have never cared about vegetables suddenly care about vegetables.

It means being 28 and already knowing that your legacy is about making space. Not shifting anyone’s dietary choices…not performing wellness…but really giving it her all to make vegan cuisine so undeniably good that the conversation shifts. That the word vegan stops being the first thing people reach for, and the word delicious gets there first.

It means the two of us sitting across from each other over cereal, realizing we had done the exact same thing…refused to wait, refused to be told no, packed up our whole lives and moved toward the thing we wanted even when the timing was terrible, and the odds were not in our favor.

Between Bowls Episode 1 is live on YouTube today.

Go watch it. Then head to Long Count in the East Village to eat Haley’s food. And, don’t forget to tell her Jess says hey.

And if you’re sitting on a cold message you haven’t sent yet…send it. Worst they can say is no. Best case, you end up running a kitchen with zero culinary experience at 40 or, better yet, running a kitchen in New York City at 28.

The $65 and Haley’s audacity to put it all out there…was totally worth it.

Between Bowls is a video series featuring female head chefs across New York City filmed over cereal. New episodes dropping regularly here and on Youtube. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

Also, if you have a female chef that should be on the series, holla at me. I’d love to meet them, and of course, bring their favorite cereal.

I catered a dinner party last month for ten women…art dealers, curators, media. The stakes were high, and the food needed to be visually beautiful, but I also knew these were women eating at 7pm, talking and catching up on the agenda, and they weren’t going to eat a ton.

So I chose to go minimal, but beautiful. For the main event, a study in emerging spring colors: pink radicchio salad with blood oranges, hazelnuts, and thinly sliced fennel, alongside a winter Niçoise—confit tuna that shredded delicate and tender, jammy eggs dyed with beet juice, delicata squash, beets, green beans, olives.

Throughout the dinner, they talked, they ate, they grazed, and at the end of the night, I went home with very few leftovers. My lone leftover salad with tuna was consumed by yours truly out of a Ziploc bag in the Uber on the way home.

That’s abundance. Not waste disguised as generosity, but intention that nourishes.

That’s how it should work…but it doesn’t always, right?

I’ve also worked events where half the food I made…food I sourced, prepped, cooked with care…went into the trash. Sure, it looked better on the table and tasted amazing, but people just grazed; they weren’t eating full plates.

These are the moments when we confuse abundance with excess. We think abundance means towers of food, more than anyone could possibly eat. But that’s performance, not abundance. Real abundance is everyone having enough…food that nourishes, brings people together, gets eaten and appreciated, doesn’t end up in the trash.

And I keep thinking: food’s job is to feed people.

There’s this growing trend in food culture right now…elaborate displays at branded events, ticketed dinner parties with $200+ entry fees (who TF can afford these tickets?!), Instagram-worthy spreads designed more for content than consumption.

And listen, I GET it…I LOVE beautiful food. I worked in restaurants where food was beauty, I’ve always eaten with my eyes, and with my graphic designer background, plating and arranging have always been my thing. I understand the desire to create something visually stunning, to celebrate food as more than just fuel.

But somewhere along the way, we crossed a line from “beautiful food that nourishes” to “beautiful food that performs,” and in a time when restaurants are closing because margins are too tight, when food costs are rising faster than wages, when working people are struggling to afford groceries, we need to take a hard look at what we’re prioritizing.

Because here’s what often happens at these events: people take photos, they nibble, they move on to the next thing. The food sits…and at the end of the night, pounds and pounds of perfectly good food…food that took time and skill and money to create…goes into the trash.

Not because it wasn’t delicious. Because it was designed for display, not for eating.

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The numbers are staggering when you sit with them. The US food service sector generates over 11 million tons of food waste annually, and 80% of food waste in hotels and catering comes from events. Events. The beautiful spreads, the buffets, the elaborate displays that we’ve convinced ourselves are necessary to make an impression.

Food waste accounts for 14% of total expenses in restaurants and catering. That’s not just an environmental issue; that’s money literally going into the garbage.

And this is all happening while the world around us is on fire. Grocery spending jumped from $120 to $170 weekly since 2020, food prices are up 3% year over year, and nearly 48 million Americans are food insecure…14 million children don’t know where their next meal is coming from. We’re starting this year in a war with Iran none of us asked for, beloved restaurants are closing because they can’t make the math work, and the rest of us are hustling just to keep the lights on.

And in the middle of all of this, we’re throwing elaborate dinner parties where half the food goes uneaten.

I want to be clear about something: I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer about fancy parties because I can’t afford a ticket. I’ve catered these events, I’ve BEEN the chef making the beautiful food that gets wasted.

I see the contradiction…chefs struggling to make rent are creating elaborate spreads for people who eat like birds and leave half of it untouched. Food has become content, capital, status…instead of what it’s supposed to be, which is nourishment.

There’s a class divide in food culture we don’t talk about enough. The same week I see Instagram posts from $200 ticketed dinners, I’m watching working families skip meals because groceries are too expensive, restaurants I love close because they can’t make the numbers work. And I keep coming back to the same question: what are we actually celebrating when we celebrate food?

This isn’t about shaming people who love beautiful food or who host or attend these events. It’s about asking ourselves: can we make it beautiful AND responsible? Can we honor food by actually eating it?

Food waste and efficiency have been a huge part of my philosophy as a chef…in restaurants, as a private chef, and in my own home. When I’m in charge of purchasing ingredients, I’m really fucking good at monitoring food in and out, calculating portion sizes, and reallocating food and ingredients in a sustainable, creative way throughout an event, meal, or dinner party.

It’s not only about buying less, but it’s also about USING everything.

Vegetable scraps become stock, cheese ends enrich pasta, overripe fruit becomes compote. Bread ends want to be croutons or panzanella. Protein trimmings go into stocks or rillettes. When we work a little more intentionally, nothing gets wasted because we understand that food takes effort to grow…to source…to prepare. And, to just throw it away, dishonors all of that work.

Zero-waste cooking doesn’t mean deprivation or making things less beautiful…it’s about RESPECT. For the ingredients, the labor producing them, the people who will eat them, the people who CAN’T eat them.

This is what sustainable abundance looks like. Not “more than we need,” but “enough for everyone.” Not food piled high for the photo, but food that feeds and nourishes and connects. Abundance that’s rooted in care, not in performance.

You can make an abundant, gorgeous spread that also gets eaten...you can still create “magazine-worthy” food that doesn’t end up in the trash…it just requires intention.

When I design an event, I ask: How many people are actually coming, and how much will they actually eat? Can I make this beautiful without making it EXCESSIVE? What will I do with leftovers before the event even starts? Is this food designed to be eaten, or just photographed?

Those questions change everything.

Dana Cowin, the former Editor-in-Chief of Food & Wine, talks about ‘pleasure without waste’ through her Progressive Hedonist movement…the idea that we can have beautiful, indulgent, joyful food experiences without being wasteful. That’s the shift I’m talking about. Not just making sustainability a selling point, but also making it the baseline.

I know asking for change is hard when people are drowning…I’m constantly “in the weeds” myself. Event planners need Instagram moments, caterers are bidding competitively, hosts want parties that look impressive. And chefs? We’re just trying to keep working in an industry that’s bleeding us dry.

But I also know that we’re at a breaking point. Food insecurity rose to 16% in November 2025. People need an additional $22.37 per person per week just to cover their food needs—a national shortfall of $32 billion.

Meanwhile, we waste 60 million tons of food annually…40% of our food supply, worth $218 billion, equivalent to 130 billion meals.

Access to food is a basic human right…not just across the world, but in our own neighborhoods and communities. Food’s job, and our job as people who work with food, is to feed people.

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I’m not asking people to stop hosting beautiful events or stop celebrating food. I’m asking us—food professionals, event planners, hosts, attendees—to recommit to something fundamental, to redefine what abundance actually means.

Make it beautiful AND make sure it gets eaten. Design for abundance AND plan for what happens to leftovers. Celebrate food as art AND honor it as nourishment. True abundance isn’t measured by how much food is on the table, it’s measured by how many people are fed, how many souls are nourished, how little ends up wasted.

Imagine if every chef, caterer, and event planner built waste reduction into their creative process from the start. Imagine if we measured the success of an event not just by how it looked, but by how little ended up in the trash, by how full and satisfied people felt.

We can get there, we just have to decide that sustainable abundance…the kind that feeds everyone, wastes nothing, and honors food…matters more than the performance of excess.

And this isn’t just for chefs and caterers and food professionals…this is actually for all of us.

I’ve cleaned out countless refrigerators and pantries in my professional organizing days. Science experiments in the back, pantry items still sealed months later, multiple jars of the same thing. We buy and buy out of scarcity…like if we stock up enough, we’ll finally feel secure…but it goes bad, unused, wasted.

If you cook at home, you already know this in your bones. Our grandparents lived through real scarcity; they knew how to stretch a rotisserie chicken across three meals, turn wilted greens into soup, make Sunday’s roast become Monday’s tacos and Wednesday’s fried rice. And when we aren’t hiding behind “busyness,” we know how to do this, too.

That’s abundance too…the kind of cooking that honors food, stretches a dollar, feeds your family without waste. You don’t need to be a professional. You just need to see food as precious, worth using fully. Buy what you’ll actually eat, use what you buy, compost what you can’t, share the excess, cook with intention. At our wedding, we fed 100 people an elaborate Southern Bangladeshi fusion feast over two days…and made sure every scrap went home in To Go boxes with our guests. Zero waste, maximum celebration.

The stakes are just as high in your kitchen as they are at a $200 ticketed dinner party. Because every bit of food that doesn’t get wasted is food that fulfilled its purpose, food that nourished someone, food that didn’t end up in a landfill while people in your own neighborhood go hungry.

We all have a role to play in redefining abundance. Whether you’re plating for ten art dealers or feeding your family on a Tuesday night, the question is the same: is this food going to feed people, or is it just for show?

I became a chef because I love feeding people. It wasn’t about impressing them (though I love when it does!), or performing for them, it was about feeding them. Feeding their hearts, their souls and their bellies.

And in a world where food costs are rising, restaurants are closing, 48 million Americans don’t have reliable access to food, and we’re waking up to news of wars and layoffs and economic uncertainty every single day, we can’t justify creating food that doesn’t get eaten anymore.

So here’s what I’m committing to: Every event I cater, every meal I cook, I’m going to ask—is this food going to feed people, or just look good on a table? How can I be a good steward and pay it forward? I’m inviting you, whether you’re a chef, an event planner, a host, or someone who loves beautiful food, to ask yourself the same thing.

Because food’s job is to feed people.

And we owe it to the food, to the people who grew it, to the people who will eat it, to the people who CAN’T eat it, and to ourselves to make sure it does its job. That’s how we turn performance back into nourishment.

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But this week, I’m setting a different kind of table. Yesterday was the big reveal! I’m finally sharing what I’ve been working on in my kitchen for the last few weeks. All those ingredient photos…the beets…the blood oranges…the Campari bottle lying on its side next to a fennel bulb at 11am on a Saturday morning…it’s all coming together.

Pull up a chair, this one’s pretty cool.

THE CENTERPIECE

(the thing in the middle of the table that everything else orbits around)

This is it.

The Spring Equinox Pantry Box.

I’m also calling it, The Awakening Box. Because as the season shifts, the light is finally coming back, and the white of winter is giving way to the colors of spring. It’s take to WAKE UP, friends!

And your pantry? Perhaps, it’s also still stuck in 2025…same jar of marinara or same bottle of vinaigrette, same spices whose expiration date is so worn off, they had to be from 2020…(or maybe even before…looking at you, mom <3).

Here’s what I know after 15 years in and out of the kitchen, from my own home to restaurants: you most likely already know how to cook…even just the basics. You can roast a chicken…you can boil pasta…you can fry an egg, toss a salad, etc. The part that stops you or gives you the most stress is probably what goes on top. The sauce…the dressing…the dip…the glaze. The accoutrement that turns mundane Tuesday night meal into something you actually sit down for and enjoy!

That part takes time, it does take a little more technique, it takes an intentionally-stocked spice cabinet…and well, the nerve to trust your instincts.

So, this box is me, offering to do the hard part. A little Freckled Fork for your home!

Six handcrafted sauces & accoutrements to welcome the spring and to give your meals some new life:

🌿 Beet & Walnut Romesco, kissed with smoked paprika

🌿 Preserved Lemon Aioli, hugged by harissa

🌿 Roasted Parsnip & Cider Vinaigrette, whirled with whole grain mustard

🌿 Cara Cara Campari Jam, cuddled by cardamom & vanilla

🌿 Citrus Za’atar Salt, marbled with Meyer lemon, blood orange & Aleppo

🌿 Blood Orange & Fennel Compound Butter, folded by fresh ground pepper

All small-batch, handmade & all from what’s peak right now…blood oranges, beets, Cara Caras, parsnips, fennel, meyer lemons…the works!

You bring the chicken, the pasta, the vegetables, and let me help with the wow.

$65 early bird pricing through March 14th.
Only 10 boxes available.

Pickup: Friday, March 20 (First day of Spring, the equinox & my dad’s birthday!)
Upper West Side, Manhattan

This is not a restock. When the season turns, so does the menu.

Pre-order Here

THE VESSELS

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

I didn’t make this box alone.

My super talented friend & artist Rose Seccareccia hand-painted the customized Equinox card tucked inside every box. And the one with the magic hands, Sarah Buffaloe, a potter friend in DC, moulded these gorgeous sage-green ceramic candle holders especially for these boxes. And I’m here, too, in my kitchen, roasting beets and zesting blood oranges until my hands are stained.

Three women • Three crafts • Three sets of hands

A custom recipe booklet.
A hand-painted card.
A handmade ceramic candle holder.
Every piece crafted by a woman’s hands.

Light the candle, pull the card, open a jar.
That’s your equinox.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• The equinox is March 20. That’s two weeks away. The exact moment when day and night are equal…when everything tips toward the light. I can’t think of a better reason to mark it with something made by hand, made with love.

• Blood oranges are almost done. If you see them at your market this week, grab them. Slice them over a salad with fennel…an glug of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and flaky salt. That’s it…that’s the recipe, give it a long kiss goodbye until next winter.

THE UTENSILS

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

I’m in production mode, so my kitchen is a beautiful disaster. But here’s what’s getting the most use:

• My mortar and pestle…for the za’atar blend and cardamom. There’s something about grinding spices by hand that no food processor can replicate; the oils just release differently. You can feel when it’s done.

• Plugra butter…82% butterfat, European-style goodness. If you’re making compound butter, the quality of your butter is the whole game. This is the one I’m loving these days.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Recently? I’ve been known to sip a little Campari, soda with a twist of those blood orange peels while I test batches of the marmalade…all in the name of “research,”obviously. The bitter and the sweet, highly recommend.

THE NAPKIN

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

This is my reset this week: I’m letting the box be imperfect.

Ten boxes…not a hundred.

I’m not aiming for the moon here, just a small-batch of carefully crafted goodies to share the best of the season’s switcharoo.

Ten boxes, made by hand, for ten people who want something seasonal and real in their pantry. That’s enough for right now, and I’m feeling it…the permission to start small is the permission to start at all.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

Sarah’s candle holders are arriving in NYC any day now and I plan to line them all up on my kitchen counter with candles in them and just looked at them for a minute. Twelve sage-green ceramic holders, each one slightly different because that’s what happens when a human makes something by hand.

I am SO excited about these…not simply because of the candle holders, but because this box is becoming a real, physical, hold-it-in-your-hands sort of thing. It started as an idea at 2am and now there will be candle holders on my counter, lining up perfectly beside these empty jars waiting to be filled.

That’s the sweet stuff.

Thinking about this week…

The equinox is about balance. Equal light, equal dark…the moment before everything tips, and I keep thinking about how cooking is like that. It’s the balance between doing too much and not enough…between a sauce being underseasoned and one that’s pure perfection…between holding on to winter and letting spring in.

I’m choosing spring, lean into it with me. 🌱

Pre-Order Here

The Freckled Fork · Setting the Table · Every Thursday
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This weekend has been a nightmare news cycle. I literally want to run away with my family and live in a faraway land, away from the noise and chaos.

But here we are…our country waking to a potential war with Iran, debts that cloud potential, friends’ parents being diagnosed with cancer, layoffs happening everywhere, businesses closing, and the math isn’t adding up for anyone.

The world feels like it’s on fire, and everyone I know is scrambling…pivoting careers, pivoting plans, pivoting expectations of what life was supposed to look like. Some people are pivoting because they want to, because they saw an opportunity, or because they finally got brave enough to chase the dream. Those pivots look good on LinkedIn and Instagram…they come with applause and “you’re so brave” comments. I know, I once got those comments, too.

But these days? Most of us are pivoting because we literally HAVE TO…because the job disappeared, the industry collapsed, rent and living expenses rose too high, the business closed, the body gave out. We’re pivoting because staying where we were wasn’t an option anymore, and survival required reinvention, whether we were ready for it or not.

And here I am, 42 years old, ADHD, hormonally chaotic, hustling harder than I ever have, and I’m exhausted. And I keep thinking:

How many times can you pivot before you’re just spinning?

I’ve pivoted before, and honestly, I’m pretty okay at it, actually…maybe too okay.

From 2020 to 2022, I burned down the life I knew and started over. I left my first marriage, left Charlotte for New York, left my marketing career, and taught myself to cook. I went from zero experience to line cook to sous chef to executive chef in a year. It was the kind of pivot that gets recognized, that gets written about.

I thought: this is it, this is who I’m supposed to be…

And for a while, it really was. The 80-hour work weeks, the adrenaline, the constant proof of competence…I loved it. I was building something, I was GOOD at something, I had found my thing.

Yes, and the math stopped mathing.

I was an Executive Chef of a restaurant in New York City, living my dreams. Yes, and…here’s what no one tells you: dreams don’t always pay for childcare, don’t account for being a single mom with no family nearby to help, and don’t care that you’re really good at what you do when the salary doesn’t quite cover life.

So I had to choose: the restaurant or Amelia.

There was no choice. I had to pivot, again.

It was then that I learned something new about pivots. They aren’t all created equal…there’s a difference between the ones you choose and the ones that choose you.

When you choose to pivot, when you actually have the space and the resources and the safety net to say “I’m going to try something new,” that’s truly empowering. You need discernment to see when something isn’t working, flexibility to imagine something different, awareness to know yourself well enough to know what you need, and openness to let that new thing in. Those are essential, and they make those kinds of pivots possible.

But when you’re forced to pivot…when circumstances are out of your control, when the restaurant closes, when a toxic boss makes it impossible to stay, when the numbers stop working, and you have no choice but to start over…well, those kinds of pivots hit differently. You still need all those other things, the discernment, flexibility, awareness, openness. Still, you need them while you’re drowning, while the bills are due, and you can’t afford to take the time to figure out what you actually want because survival doesn’t wait for clarity.

I chose to move to New York, chose to leave my first marriage, and chose to become a chef. Those pivots were hard, but they were mine, and they were thoughtful.

The rest? They didn’t have the luxury of a thoughtful planning sesh; they were survival moves.

I left the restaurant and took a series of jobs that I thought were smarter moves…a cafe job with culinary consulting on the side or the restaurant that offered extreme flexibility of schedule. Both jobs had lower stakes, better hours, and a lot more flexibility for Millie…or so I thought. Except one had a toxic owner and the other had books that didn’t add up so they had to close. Both times, I had just traded one kind of unsustainable for another. So, I HAD to pivot, yet again. I was back to square one.

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This time last year, actually almost exactly one year to the day, I leaned into the discomfort and the uncertainty and created The Freckled Fork, LLC. I had no brilliant business plan or clear path to profitability, but after exhausting all of my connections, nothing else fit what I needed. I needed flexibility and autonomy…I needed something that could accommodate Millie’s schedule, my manic ADHD brain, and all with the glaring reality that I had no safety net.

There’s freedom in being your own boss and owning your own business. Yes, and the ugly truth is this: if I don’t work, I don’t make money…and if I don’t make money, I can’t pay for our life. And, that’s what keeps me up at night. That and my days feel so routine and monotonous. No matter how much I love what I do, the pressure of HAVING to do it to survive…well, there’s no relief.

I can’t afford to be sick…headaches be damned, colds don’t count, even a light flu is a risk I have to take when it’s a choice between working or a $0-day when bills are due.

And all the while, Yas is knee-deep in job applications and navigating this clusterf*%k of a job market right now. I’m the sole income for our family, throwing proverbial (and literal) spaghetti noodles at the wall…promoting and marketing myself for catering gigs, private chef services, this Substack and web content, side hustles, and more. I’m a multi-hyphenate because I have to be. None of them pays enough on their own, so I can't afford to say no to anything.

You guys, I’m running on fumes.

Yes, I'm overwhelmed and burned out and stressed. AND I love what I'm doing. I love feeding people, I love writing again, I love being creative and finding new ways to help others. I am a walking bundle of contradictions. Yes, and.

When I’m actually cooking for someone, when I’m creating a meal that nourishes them, when I’m connecting people through food and stories…that’s when I remember why I’m doing this at all.

The Freckled Fork isn’t just a hustle to keep the lights on…it’s the thing I’ve been building toward my whole life without knowing it. It’s using everything I learned in my lives before this one and everything I learned in restaurants, but doing it on my terms, for people I actually want to feed, in ways that feel true to who I am.

The stress is real. The exhaustion is real. Yes, and, so is the fulfillment when I pull off a dinner party and watch strangers become friends over a shared table. So is the joy when someone tastes something I made and their whole face changes. So is the pride when I look at what I’ve built from nothing and think: this is mine.

At the end of the day, I’m not doing this just to survive, I’m doing this because feeding people, connecting people, creating space for them to be human together…that’s my actual work. That’s the thing I can’t NOT do, even when it’s hard.

The math might not math…but the meaning does.

All of this is going on while my ADHD brain is screaming for me to start paying attention, and my hormones are doing whatever the f%*k they do in your early 40s that makes everything feel impossible.

I read The Cut’s piece last week about late-in-life ADHD and hormonal chaos, and I wanted to cry because FINALLY someone was naming it…the lack of research, the growing number of women being diagnosed late in life, the brain fog, the emotional dysregulation, the collapse of our executive functioning, the way everything feels like too much all at once.

ADHD makes it so hard to keep all the plates spinning, the hormones make everything feel more urgent and overwhelming, and I can’t afford to break down because even if I do…the bills don’t stop, the rent doesn’t pause, and we still need to eat.

So, I keep going, hoping at the very least that some or even one of these noodles actually stick to the wall.

And you know what? Women have been doing this shit forever.

My mom does it still. All of my grandmas did it. Women hustle, wear multiple hats, spin multiple plates their entire lives…mostly behind the scenes, mostly invisible, always expected. Yes, and we are ALL exhausted.

I watched my mother work a full-time job, manage a household, teach Sunday School classes, and raise 3 kids with my dad…she made it look easy. It wasn’t easy, though; she was just good at hiding the strain (most of the time). She was good at showing up and moving forward, even when she was exhausted. She was good at making it work because, honestly, there were no other options.

I look around at the women in my orbit…the creators, the business owners, the mothers, the multi-hyphenates…and they’re all busting their ass, making it work, building beautiful things. And they’ll be the first to tell you how f%*king hard it is, how overdue they are for a vacation or, at the very least…a nap. We’re all just trying to keep the lights on while refusing to lose ourselves in the process.

Recently, I keep asking myself: why does it have to be so hard? What are we chasing? Who are we chasing for? Who said this was normal?

All this hustle, all this pivoting…doesn’t it all feel unsustainable? I don’t know how much longer we can pretend it’s not.

On top of all of this, I’m also trying to get this whole marriage thing right this time.

In my first, I performed, I people-pleased, I made myself small. I’m not doing that this time. I’m trying to be honest, to ask for what I need, to trust that I am enough. But I’m also terrified, because what if all this pressure breaks me?

Yas is searching, the tech industry is bleeding, and jobs that used to exist just don’t anymore. He’s carrying me emotionally, he’s doing what he can, and he’s carrying his own guilt and baggage from this ongoing search. It’s all getting SO heavy for both of us, and there’s so little room for light.

Here’s what I also know: this marriage is different…Yas really does see me. He doesn’t need me to perform or people-please or make myself small. He loves me as I am (for the most part), not as the version I think I’m supposed to be.

That’s worth fighting for, even when the pressure is crushing, even when the bills are piling up, even when we’re both exhausted and scared. I don’t want the financial stress to break us. I know that what we’re building together is a beautiful partnership…one where we can thrive, where we can pivot, where we can trust it’ll all work out in the end.

Yes, I’m terrified, and I’m also holding on to something beautiful, something real.

Then there’s everything else…the dumpster fire surrounding us. We awoke to our country bombing Iran, provoking a war none of us want. Family members in the hospital, friends’ parents getting cancer diagnoses, more layoffs, restaurants closing, everyone drowning in their own version of “the hustle is too hard.”

Moments like these are when I want to run away with my family and disappear to some faraway country. Somewhere, I can cook for people I love without worrying about revenue streams, where time moves slowly, and life is just simpler. But that’s a fantasy I can’t afford to have.

Yes, I’m here in our current reality, and I have to pivot again and again and again…hoping that eventually something becomes profitable, or at the very least, they manage to make ends meet.

I don’t have a neat ending for this one. I don’t have a lesson learned, a breakthrough, or a silver lining. Yes, and. I’m here, tired and overwhelmed, in the middle of it all, trying to figure out how to feed my family and feed my soul and love my husband and keep the lights on and not lose myself in the process. Yes, and.

How many times can you pivot before you’re literally just spinning?

I don’t know yet.

Yes, and I know this: I’m not spinning aimlessly. I’m building something that matters, even when it’s hard. I’m feeding people, connecting people, creating work that’s actually mine…the math might not make sense right now, but I’m certainly not giving up on what it all means.

So yeah…I don’t know yet…but I’m about to find out how many times you can pivot before you break.

Yes, and…finally build something strong enough to hold myself and those I love.

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Every Thursday, I’m setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things and whatever else caught my eye this week. It’s the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just some sweet-ass possibilities.

The city got buried in 20+ inches of snow this week. I’m done. SOOOOO over it…Millie is even over it; she didn’t even go sledding! We are O-V-E-R…over the cold, over risking our lives with every slip on the ice, over the grey slush that’s already piled up waist-high on every corner. I’m looking for the light wherever I can find it…in a seasonal old fashioned latte at Black Press, in Ella Quittner’s obsessive curiosity about cooking techniques, in a simmering pot of pozole verde that smells like everything will be okay.

This week’s table is about what’s keeping me going when winter refuses to quit: comfort food that actually comforts, the economics that make restaurant dreams feel impossible (I keep dreaming anyway), Purim cookies from my favorite pastry queen, and the reminder that spring is coming whether February likes it or not.

Pull up a chair.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• The Math Doesn’t Work: Ham El-Waylly
  How long did someone’s dream survive before the city swallowed it whole? The average is three to five years, and most never make their money back. The window for actual profit…3-5% on a genuinely good month…is so narrow that a single bad week of weather (or the last month of snowy weekends) can wipe out even the best of them (or oldest of them).
  
  I feel this so personally…so deeply…so discouragingly. A recurring dream of mine is to one day own my own little Freckled Fork spot in NYC where people could come literally sit at my table. But the math doesn’t math quite yet (or ever!). So we pivot…we put those dreams on delay for the grim reality…we do the Substack, the podcast, the private chefing…we diversify and hustle in all the multi-hyphenate ways in the face of ever-increasing expenses JUST TO MAKE ENDS MEET.

(Here’s to the hustlers…those of us doing the private dinners, catering, all the extras, etc…Trying to build something sustainable on our own terms, even if it doesn’t look like what we dreamed.)

THE UTENSILS

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

• Quick Chicken Pozole Verde
  What’s saving me lately: a big pot of pozole verde on the stove, apartment smelling like tomatillos and cilantro, something I can make on the weekend and eat all week. Bright, warming, substantial…the kind of bowl that makes you feel taken care of even when you’re the one doing the cooking.
  
  Here’s my sneaky, simple one…AND yes, there’s a version of this where you actually cook the chicken from scratch, you roast the tomatillos, etc…save that version for when you have some hours to devote…this weekend? I have none:) So yes, this is my no-recipe-dirty-dirty version:
  
  Grab a rotisserie chicken and shred it (but first, pull that skin off and throw it in the air fryer to crisp up for toppings at the end). Toss the shredded chicken in a pot with a jar of Trader Joe’s salsa verde (or your salsa verde of choice), a can of green chile tomatillos, a diced jalapeño if you want more heat, some cumin, and salt. Mix it all together, then add 2-3 cups of chicken stock. Season to taste…to YOUR liking. Let it simmer so all the flavors get friendly, 15-20 minutes. Longer is better. Add more stock if you want it brothier. When you’re almost done, squeeze in 2-3 limes and stir.
  
  To serve: spoon some hominy (drained from the can…or if you can’t find it, canned chickpeas work nicely here) into a bowl, ladle the broth over top, and finish with fresh cilantro, more lime, thinly sliced radishes, avocado chunks or slices, jalapeños, those crispy chicken skin bits, whatever you want. Shredded cabbage is also nice for a topping if you want to get a little crazy:)

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THE VESSELS

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

• The Light by Jo Sexton
  Words I need after getting buried in snow this week. Jo’s writing found me at the right moment and her words are the light I needed to help pull me from the cold.

• Ella Quittner’s: Obsessed with the Best
  Her book launched this week, and I’m so excited! I’ve followed Ella on Instagram for years…her curiosity makes us all better cooks. She’s spent literal years trying different techniques for the same dish, documenting everything, being thorough in a way that’s obsessive but never precious. Her work reminds me why I love cooking in the first place…there’s always more to learn, always another way to see something you thought you knew, and there’s always rules to break.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• The Old Fashioned Latte at Black Press
  I get it as a flat white. It’s the perfect amount of orange, a little molasses & ALL the goodness. Orange and espresso belong together…forever and ever…amen. This drink is getting me through the longest February in history.

THE NAPKIN

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

• Has Somebody Checked on Delroy and Michael B?
  My dear friend Dartinia’s poignant piece this week about the N-word being used and literally aired on TV for all to see (& hear) against Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, despite being on a delay. Why didn’t they edit it out? Why did they let it stand? Raw and real, it’s always important to read the words of those whose lives are different than our own…with a different set of rules…protections… guardrails than others get to inherently have.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Julie’s Hamantashen Cookies
  My favorite pastry queen is selling Purim cookies – 8 cuties for $18 – order by phone, local NYC pickup only. Julie’s pastries are the real deal…flaky, buttery, made with her amazing hands that make you taste the difference. Nutella, DF Nutella (Kosher) & Apricot filling available. IYKYK…DM me for her number.

• Spring is coming…
  You guys, I have some REALLY fun things in the works. Like SUPER fun. Equinox…winter giving way to the new life of spring…laughs shared over bowls of cereal…and more. Stay tuned…

How are you digging out of the snow this weekend?!

Much love,

Jess

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Sgt. Sushi is a small lanky kitten, only one-year-old, but has had the emotional intelligence of an aged grief counselor since day one. He’s the therapy cat we didn’t know we needed. Yas lost both of his beloved cats within a year of when we first met, and he was already masking a depression I didn’t quite know how to hold.

I got Sushi for Yas in January 2025, right before we decided to move in together. Within hours, this tiny gray-black-and-white fur baby imprinted on Yas, dubbed him “his person,” and that stinker hasn’t left his side since. They truly are inseparable. Sushi curls up on Yas’s lap while he works, follows him from room to room, meows at him when he’s decided Yas needs to wake up. Sushi’s favorite spot is on Yas’ shoulder, paws hanging over like the baby he is, and Yas just needs to carry him from room to room...just...like...that.

It’s the kind of devotion that doesn’t need to be explained or proven; it’s just powerful.

Watching them together each day, I realized I can learn a lot from that tiny kitten. I’m learning that love doesn’t have to perform to be real.

Yas is AuDHD (that’s Autistic/ADHD for those in the back), which means he is very literal, black and white, and very systems-oriented. His heart beats for optimization, for smarter-not-harder, for efficiencies. He’s an SEO guy who thinks in algorithms and patterns. At times, he fixates, he gets triggered by loud noises, he loops, and can’t snap out of it.

I was recently diagnosed ADHD with a little sidecar of anxiety, which for me means yes, I’m high-functioning on the outside but scattered on the inside. I’m notorious for starting projects I never finish, getting paralyzed and stuck in the list-making part, never making it past the pen on the paper. I’ve described my thoughts as loose train cars with no connection…there is no train of thought, they’re just thoughts that crash into each other from time to time, yelling at me when I’m stressed. I’m intuitive, observant, a visual processor, and a little emotionally manic when I get triggered. I think out loud, I need to explain things four different ways to make sure my point is made, and I need external structure and validation because my internal world is chaos.

Together, we’re a study in contrasts and overlaps. I love systems and routines, while he loves the idea of systems and routines. He leaves cabinet doors open and a trail of whatever he’s been into, but I leave ADHD piles of randomness everywhere. When he cleans, he hyperfocuses and will scrub a pan until it’s back to new, meanwhile, I literally hate cleaning but really love for things to have a place. He likes to clean, I like to organize, and neither of us actually maintains either. We both only see what’s in front of our faces…out of sight equals out of mind, object permanence? I don’t know her. Yet in all the chaos, we can still both recall the exact random pile that one specific piece of paper is in when we need it.

Our apartment is controlled chaos. ADHD piles, half-finished projects, Sgt. Peppers (our other raccoon-sized king cat from Blythewood, SC) knocking things off counters, Sushi trailing behind Yas like a tiny shadow. It’s messy, and it’s ours.

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The kitchen is my domain, and he’s happy to relinquish. Yas doesn’t really cook…he’s made me steak exactly once, and I made the sides, and it was beautiful and rare and special because of that.

But he loves everything I make…even the ridiculous stuff. Like the one time I took one of his leftover triple cheeseburgers, cut the cheese/patty/cheese combo into strips, fried it up like bacon, and made toast with “burger bacon” and a fried egg. He’s told people about it for months after…he was blown away.

He loves everything I make for him equally. He’s so grateful, so appreciative. On the nights I’m too tired to cook after a long day in the kitchen, he orders takeout, knowing exactly what would nourish me back to life.

We don’t really cook together, but he’s always there to load the dishes afterwards, to help me relax, to rub my feet when I’m done. He doesn’t need to be in the kitchen with me to take care of me.

That’s partnership, too.

We are in our first year of marriage, learning each other as we go. We recently got into an argument where I said something I immediately regretted: “I don’t feel like you support me.”

The moment it came out of my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. Yas is the most supportive partner I’ve ever had. He assists me with catering when I need help, he gets Millie to school every morning when I’m already at work in the kitchen, he checks in with me genuinely every day, asking how my day was, and he talks so kindly and lovingly about me with others, lifting me up constantly.

So why did I say it? As we retreated to our corners of the ring until another time, I sat with what I said, I dug in, and tried to figure out why I said it.

It wasn’t really about him not supporting me; it was that I was clamoring for proof in that moment.

In a super embarrassing realization, I felt sad that Yas didn’t heart my Instagram stories. Somewhere deep inside, I was upset he didn’t post more about our wedding in October. Why didn’t he publicly perform his love for me the way I perform mine?

When I realized that’s what I was actually upset about, I felt shame immediately. Yas doesn’t even really “do” social media, and I was asking him to prove his love in a language he doesn’t speak because I didn’t trust that it was real without the performance.

I asked myself: Where did this come from? How did I get this way?

And I remembered there was probably a time in my life where I knew what I needed to feel supported, where I explicitly asked for it and was promptly told that it was unfair, or too much, or wrong of me to ask. I remember getting into arguments about love languages…about how there’s the love language we use to communicate love versus the love language we receive love with…and being told that “just wasn’t them” and they could only give the way they could.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to stop asking… to make myself smaller…to accept what I was given and be grateful for it, even when it left me empty.

And now, freaking A…I’m with someone who does support me, who actually shows up, who loves me without asking anything of me…and I’m so conditioned to not trust it that I’m looking for proof in all the wrong places.

I’m in the middle of dismantling walls I’ve built for years, and this one is a doozy.

Where’s the line between asking for what you need versus being content with what someone is able to give…and not faulting them for that?

How much of our need for validation should be put onto one person in the name of partnership, and how much should we take responsibility for ourselves?

Are those needs even real needs, or should we be intrinsically validated?

I’ve spent so many years people-pleasing and longing for external validation to feel worthy that I stopped trusting my inner voice when she said, “you’re enough.“ I could list out all the things I felt good about myself and be okay in that moment, but as soon as I finished said list, I would need someone else to validate those things in order for them to be really real.

With Yas, our neurodivergent love is one that’s intertwined. We both have triggers, we both have pasts, we have baggage, and all that comes with being humans building something new.

We are dealing with those things tucked away in our “closets”...the past relationships, the old wounds, the ways we’ve been hurt before. However, in the name of what’s right in front of our faces, we can keep that hurt from bleeding into our present.

And what’s there is our immense love and satisfaction with each other, just as we are, without needing the other person to explicitly validate it.

Object permanence is a motherfucker for ADHD brains.

Out of sight, out of mind. We forget what’s in the drawer until we need it, and then we remember exactly which random pile it’s in. For the sake of this metaphor, we forget those past hurts and baggage in our mental closets until it unfortunately seeps out...and it’s up to us to recognize it when it happens and not to falsely attribute it to the person who doesn’t deserve it.

But maybe there’s a gift in that closet…the baggage, the old scripts, the ways I’ve learned not to trust love…I can deal with those things, but keep them in their place. By keeping them there while I deal with them, and not letting them crash out into spaces they don’t belong…maybe I can finally start seeing what’s actually in front of me.

And what’s there…is Yas, my beautifully neurodivergent husband, my partner.

At the core, I know Yas. He’s AuDHD. And he literally loves me to the fucking moon.

When I see him in the morning before work and kiss him before going to sleep at night, I know without a doubt that he loves me. I know that I love him, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

And finally…I give it and myself a rest. I can actually exist and be myself in that love. I can stop asking myself…and stop asking him…to constantly prove it. I can just know.

It’s not the love I thought of when I was little. It’s not the traditional marriage where I perform and submit under his leadership because he’s the “man of the house”. It’s not the co-existence I preached I wanted when I was fresh off divorce…when I was terrified of being undervalued again.

It’s a partnership. A true partnership, messy and real and full of ADHD piles and open cabinet doors and two cats who love unconditionally. It’s a man who scrubs pans until they shine and a woman who’s learning, slowly, to trust that she’s enough.

Sushi doesn’t ask Yas to prove his love; he just curls up on his chest and purrs.

I’m learning each day from that tiny fur ball…that love doesn’t have to be proven to be real. It just has to be there.

And it is.

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Every Thursday, I’m setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things and whatever else caught my eye this week. It’s the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just some sweet-ass possibilities.

This week hit me like a freight train. On the heels of the long weekend where I helped cater a 25-person Valentine’s soirée, I’m also catering a private dinner for my best friend Marie tonight (on top of my regular private chef work). I’m excited about this winter-to-spring menu tonight though, it’s giving pink radicchio, bright kumquats, blood oranges, a little Niçoise action…all the colors that help make February feel less bleak. AND I’ve got a couple REALLY exciting projects in the works…the first I’m prepping tomorrow, and the only hint I’ll give for that one is…CEREAL. Stay tuned for awesomeness, friends.

Yo, Fire Horse year! Transformation, intensity, the kind of energy that makes you feel EVERYTHING all at once. And you guys, I’m already feeling it. All the irons I’ve got in the fire are great & exciting, but with my ADHD in full effect, I am stressed, moving 100-miles-a-minute…and I’ve already snapped at Yas once this week. :)

So today’s “table” is about nervous system regulation, checking your aura, remembering why facials are essential infrastructure, and some great obscure food writing that makes life worth living.

Pull up a chair, there’s always space for you at the table. Enjoy!

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

THE GRAZING PLATE (quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• The Mother Frequency - Why the Fire Horse Year Hits Mothers Hardest
  This is about Fire Horse year…transformation, intensity, and how mothers, in particular, are feeling EVERY bit of it. If you’ve been more reactive than usual, this might be why.

• WrongHouse Issue 6 - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Butter
  Lila’s publication just dropped Issue 6 yesterday and this butter essay is my JAM. Obscure, buttery and exactly the kind of deep dive into mundane brilliance that I live for. WrongHouse never misses.

• Chinese Medicine Doctor’s Guide for Fire Snake Year
  Practical guidance for navigating this year’s specific energy. Wood element, liver health, releasing what no longer serves. Yes to all of it.

THE UTENSILS

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

• Slow Braised Lamb BBQ
  I made this for my friend Rose’s annual Pink & Red Valentine’s dinner this past weekend. Stupid-easy and the kind of food that makes people feel loved. Served best on grits (duh!), but it also shines on rice, cornbread, pita, or straight from the pan standing over the stove at midnight. You do you. Recipe details available for my lovely paid subscribers😘 Click to Upgrade.

THE VESSELS

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

• Consistency Tips for Women
  Building routines (I LOVE a routine) that actually stick without burning yourself out in the process. For those of us who start strong, but fizzle by day three.

• The Broke Girl’s Guide to Nervous System Regulation
  Practical, non-froo-froo ways to calm down when you’re stressed and snapping at people you love (sorry, babe!) Free, accessible, might actually work.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Magic Jewelry - Aura Photos
  My little spot, tucked away between Canal & Centre Streets. I’ve been getting readings here for years and they’re SPOT ON every single time. It’s my favorite way to check in on what I’m actually putting out in the world versus what I think I’m putting out. They photograph your aura, and a specialist walks you through what it means. It’s part therapy, part mirror, all truth.

• My Secret…JS Beauty
  I’m done gatekeeping my facial place. I stumbled on this last year when I was brave enough to buy a Groupon to an unknown spot and found a GEM. I bought a package and have the most glorious facials throughout the entire year last year & just re-upped for this year. One of the best investments of my adult life.

THE NAPKIN

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

• This Week: A Collective Reset
  Monday was genuinely insane. An annular solar eclipse (Ring of Fire), a New Moon in Aquarius, the start of Chinese New Year, Ramadan beginning Tuesday, and Lent ALL starting this week. Across entirely different cultures, religions, and cosmological systems…all about the same thing: renewal, intention, discipline, forward movement.
  
  It’s a collective permission slip to shed what no longer serves and decide what moves forward with you. Whether you observe any of these traditions or not, the sky performed the metaphor…the rest depends on what you choose to carry.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Save the Date: Whitney Biennial 2025
  Opens March 20th. One of the most anticipated contemporary art events of the year. Previews and member events begin March 6th.

• LES Printshop Classes & Workshops
  The Lower East Side printmaking studio has been around since 1968 and is one of the coolest organizations around (Yes, I’m totally biased bc my best friend runs it, but still…she’s awesome, so it has to be). Screen printing, risograph, letterpress…all the hands-on, analog creative outlets your overstimulated brain needs. Also happens to be the venue for tonight’s private dinner. Let’s GO!

What are you setting out for the weekend?!

It’s actually Amelia’s therapist who saw it first.

We were in a follow-up meeting last week about Millie…about tools she needs before middle school, about managing her ADHD, about helping her express what she keeps bottled up inside. My ten-year-old holds everything in until she can’t anymore, until she acts out, until she stabs a pencil into a classmate’s hand because she doesn’t know how else to let the pressure out.

Dr. Sarah and I talked about my hopes for Amelia, my dreams for her, what I want her to learn that I never did. And then she said something that lifted the veil, just ever so slightly.

“You know, Jess, I see your joy. I see your happiness. And I see your love for Amelia and your family. I see you trying to carry it all, managing so much.” I nodded, waiting.

“And I also see that there’s a quiet rage...a rage inside of you. A quiet rage that needs to get out.”

I was speechless. I felt completely seen in that moment and almost burst into tears…because she was right. And because I realized she wasn’t just talking about me, she was giving me insight into what Millie is probably going through too. The rage we’re both carrying, the rage we were both taught to bury.

I just saw a post about Saturn moving into Aries on February 13th, bringing a major shift for us Virgos. It said: “You’ve been holding more than you admit...carrying responsibilities that were never meant to be yours alone...not because help wasn’t there...you chose control, self-reliance, survival. But now you’re being asked: was it strength or protection?”

This week, I realized that I’ve been carrying everything alone for so long that vulnerability feels unnatural, asking for help feels like failure, sharing the weight feels like weakness. But when the post asked: “What have you been carrying alone?” I immediately knew: the rage…the one I’ve been carrying alone my entire life.

Here’s the thing: Dr. Sarah isn’t even my therapist; she’s Amelia’s. My own therapist has been helping me dismantle years of people-pleasing, helping me understand my ADHD after 42 years of not knowing why I am the way I am. We’ve been working on it for a couple of months now…the patterns, the masking, the constant need to be useful, to be good, to be enough.

But when Amelia’s therapist named my rage, it all suddenly clicked. She wasn’t asking me, she wasn’t probing, she wasn’t trying to help me process it…she just saw it. And seeing it, being seen…hit differently.

It verified everything I already knew deep inside…that my people-pleasing isn’t kindness, it’s armor. My overfunctioning isn’t competence, it’s control. My relentless helpfulness isn’t generosity, it’s a way to stay necessary, so I don’t have to risk being wanted just for who I am (or even worse, rejected for it).

My therapist has been helping me understand that my ADHD brain doesn’t process rejection like neurotypical brains do. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria means I’ve spent my entire life scanning for signs that I’m too much, not enough, failing, disappointing. I’ve built an entire personality around preventing rejection before it can happen.

Now, I’m finally understanding that underneath those things, my quiet rage connects them all. I perform so you won’t reject me. I bury the rage so you won’t leave me. I carry everything alone, so I’m seen as valuable, capable, and so I can’t be hurt.

But Dr. Sarah saw my rage…she named it and brought it to light. That’s when I realized all this work I’ve been doing in therapy isn’t just about understanding my ADHD or learning better coping strategies, it’s about dismantling the lie I’ve been living, the lie that says if I’m good enough, helpful enough, joyful enough, productive enough…I’ll finally be safe, I’ll finally be accepted.

But I’m not safe…I’m exhausted. I’m overwhelmed and my quiet rage has been trying to tell me that for the past 40 years.

I was maybe eight or nine, sitting at the kitchen table with my math homework, struggling. Numbers didn’t come naturally to me…mental math, fast facts, equations that I was supposed to just “know” because “they just do x, y, and z.” My undiagnosed ADHD brain couldn’t hold onto abstract rules without understanding why.

I asked my dad to help me. He tried to explain it, but I didn’t get it. So, he explained it again, differently. But I still didn’t get it. I started crying, and he got frustrated…not because he was cruel, but because to him, I was so bright, so capable…but crying was a sign of me giving up, taking the easy way out.

I somehow got through my homework…I passed and made it through school. But that moment did something to my mind. I learned that my emotions brought frustration, that struggling meant I wasn’t trying hard enough, that crying was giving up, and that I was simply too much. I’ve battled that feeling…of being too much…ever since.

I don’t blame my dad. I have grace for him. I mean, honestly, my parents had me in their twenties, and my dad was dealing with his own identity crisis after losing his father to cancer at 47. They struggled to make ends meet, worked hard, and busted ass. They were doing their best with what they had. But you know, I never actually gave that same grace to myself…I just carried shame and guilt and the belief that something was wrong with me.

That feeling has lingered inside me through college, through marriage, through jobs, through divorce, through being a mother, and now into this new marriage and this new phase of parenthood. I buttoned up those fears of failing and fears of mediocrity, tried to use them as motivation instead of feeling them. I pushed them down, learned to mask uncomfortable emotions because they made people frustrated with me, or meant I was giving up.

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Throughout my twenties and thirties, I filled journals with self-improvement lists, affirmations about letting go of negativity, prayers asking God to make me less moody, less reactive, less much. I treated my feelings like weeds to be pulled, obstacles to productivity and authenticity, character flaws to overcome through enough discipline and prayer and lists. I genuinely believed that if I could just get my emotions under control, I’d finally be the person everyone needed me to be.

I learned to shift and shape myself, to give people the version they needed, abandoning the version I truly was. I betrayed myself, and secretly wished and hoped that someone—anyone—would just see me, the real me, and be okay with that. And not just be okay with it, but actually want that version…to see it, to appreciate it, to not need me to change.

I felt like my emotions were a problem, that my rage was a sin, that my struggle was weakness, that I was too much. So I made myself less. I made myself small…buttoned it up, pushed it down, performed, and made myself more palatable. And the rage went underground.

It wasn’t just self-abandonment, though; it was lying.

Not malicious lying, but the withholding, avoidance kind. I withheld the pieces of me that might be too much or not acceptable. I masked, I curated, I gave the version of myself that I thought was needed.

And here’s what’s not great about this…beyond the obvious…sometimes it actually does get to be too much…the mask slips, and the rage leaks out. And when it does, it’s not just about the one thing…it gets lumped in with all the baggage, the whole history behind it, the years of holding it in, and the exhaustion of performance. And the person I’m raging at has to shoulder not just the one problem on the surface, but the entire weight of everything I never said. That’s not fair to them or to myself.

And now I’m with someone who is AuDHD, someone who needs black-and-white clarity, explicit explanations, no masking. And here I am, 42 years old and recently diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety, finally in therapy to deal with the root of all this. I have a daughter who’s struggling with her own identity, trying to find her place in her ten-year-old world before middle school and all the stress that brings.

I’m learning that the rage isn’t the real problem; it’s the burial of it. I’m learning that Amelia’s pencil-stabbing isn’t about her being “bad”…it’s about her carrying something she doesn’t have words for yet, just like I did, just like I still do sometimes.

I’m learning that being with Yas…someone who needs explicit honesty, who can’t read my mind, who needs me to say what I actually mean…is begging me to stop withholding, to stop omitting, to stop performing and to just be real. He says that he wants that, that he wants me, and I know this…I just need to figure out a way to actually trust him with the real me.

Here I am, today, in the thick of it…learning that strength isn’t proven by suffering alone…learning that I don’t have to carry everything to be worthy…and that I don’t have to overfunction to be loved. Was it strength or protection? I think for me…it was protection, and I don’t need it anymore.

I don’t know what to do with the rage quite yet. I don’t know how to feel it without drowning in it, how to express it without making it someone else’s problem, or how to be honest without feeling like I’m too much. But I know I can’t bury it anymore…for Amelia’s sake, for Yas…or especially, for myself.

Dr. Sarah said there’s quiet rage inside me that needs to get out, and she’s right. Maybe the first step isn’t figuring out how to express it perfectly, maybe the first step is just admitting it’s there.

I’m a Virgo with firstborn, overachiever energy who’s been carrying everything alone for so long that vulnerability feels unnatural.

I’m an ADHD woman who learned that my emotions can make people frustrated.

I’m an eldest daughter, a recovering southern Christian girl who was taught that rage is uncouth, unacceptable.

I’m a mother watching her daughter carry the same quiet, misunderstood fury I’ve carried my whole life.

What happens if I put it all down?

I don’t have the answer yet…but, I do know the rage is there, and it won’t go anywhere until I allow it to come to the surface.

Maybe it’s time to stop being “good”. Maybe, it’s time to learn how to be angry and to grow from it…to shed these layers of protection, these walls, to actually live a life where I’m honest with the people around me and…more importantly…honest with myself.

It’s time to trust that it’s not actually too much, that I’m not actually too much, that there’s space for me, the real me.

And, she’s okay.

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Thursdays are for setting the table…the pause before the chaos, when you decide what kind of experience you’re creating. What goes where…what gets highlighted…what makes people feel taken care of before they even sit down. So here’s what I’m setting out this week. Pull up a chair.

We’re halfway through February, and I’m still thawing out from this never-ending winter freeze. But I’m also ready for a reset…not the performative kind, the real kind. Before spring arrives, it’s time to start wiping away what’s not working and making space for what actually matters. Like building something small, that might be just for me.

Turns out, that’s what this week’s table setting is about: tools to start fresh, people worth celebrating, and the sweet stuff that needs no justification.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• February by Jo Sexton – Some quiet prose to break up the incessant noise on our feeds. Epstein, Trump, conspiracies, and all the overwhelming things that make me want to pull my hair out.

• Neurodivergent-affirming Ways to Reduce Work Stress – Taking all the notes.

THE UTENSILS

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

• 2025 was the year I finally got into investing. Super small potatoes, but it’s something. Women statistically live longer than men and are projected to control two-thirds of America’s wealth by 2030. Building wealth that isn’t dependent on anyone else or your day job is the name of the game. Time to start playing, ladies. A few places to get started:

  • She’s on the Money

  • Women, Money & Heralding a New Consciousness

  • You Don’t Have an Income Problem, You Have a Wealth Strategy Problem

  • Where & How to Invest

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THE VESSELS

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

• Buoy your belief in your own creative pursuits – Profile of Sally Moore, an incredible artist in Charlotte. Fun fact: we grew up together in the tiny town of Blythewood, SC…the only two girls on our co-ed basketball team in 4th & 5th grade. Truly beautiful interview by Delaney Lundquist of Tremont Home.

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THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Music is essential for me in the kitchen, and I'm constantly looking to keep things fresh. For that, I go to my longtime source: Ryan Hollingsworth, a dear friend from our scene kid/emo days at the University of South Carolina.
  
  He's curated some of my favorite compilations for years…and I’m thrilled to drop his latest ‘Good Medicine 47: Be My Baby’ today!! ANDDDDD…for a little extra goodness, scroll down to read my interview with Ryan, where he talks the method behind the madness. Enjoy!

THE NAPKIN

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

• Grab a little Valentine for yourself or your love this Saturday, February 14th. First-come, first-serve. Beautiful bouquets and espresso beverages in adorable coffee carriers from two of my favorite Upper West Side neighbors: Iris & the Bee and Black Press

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• It’s been months in the making, but my friend Chef Nadav Greenberg finally opened his newest concept, Or’esh, with Catch Hospitality Group. I got a sneak peek a couple weeks ago—lucky enough to try the first few dishes right from the pass (my favorite place to stand). First week of service is underway, and reviews are already glowing. Obviously :)

• The perfect Galentine’s Day event: Grab your girls and head to Shopify in Soho for Cherry Bomb’s Bombsquad Bazaar this Friday, February 13th. Speakers, book signings, and more from Padma Lakshmi, Natasha Pickowicz, and more. I’ll be stopping by Friday—holla if you’ll be there!

Thinking about this week: What creative thing have you been telling yourself you'll "get back to eventually"? What if eventually was this weekend?

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THE ENCORE

(a little something extra)

My dear friend Ryan Hollingsworth is the curator behind the amazing playlists I have on constant rotation in my kitchen, and I am thrilled he JUST dropped Good Medicine: Volume 47, Be My Baby, and so I wanted to give you the backstory on his two decades of curating genius:

Jess: Ryan! We’ve known each other for a very long time now and I’m a huge fan of your mixes, all the way back to our college years at South Carolina. Tell our readers a little about yourself and how you got started.

Ryan: My wife Ashley and I are Creative Directors in Charlotte, NC. We’ve been married for 16 years and we have two boys – Oliver and Charlie – who love baseball, 90’s pro wrestling, and the idea of getting a dog. I’ve loved music ever since my parents made the poor decision of letting me join Columbia House in elementary school. 9 CDs for a penny...and then the rest of my childhood life savings to fulfill my required purchases after that.

Jess: YO! I remember that deal with Columbia House! So, is that when you started making playlists back in the day?

Ryan: I’ve always loved making playlists and collecting songs I loved into one place – I used to tape songs onto cassettes from the radio or from my favorite albums. I burned my first CD from songs off on Napster in 1999, and I never looked back. I made playlists all throughout college – I’d design, print out cover art, and give them to friends. I made my first Good Medicine mix back in 2010…I collected songs, designed the artwork, and hosted the MP3s on my blog. Once Spotify came around, it got a lot easier to make and share them. In the heyday, I’d make a new Good Medicine every other month, typically around different seasons. It’s definitely slowed down more over the years, but I still try to make a couple every year.

Jess: I love that! I totally used to tape the Top 10 Countdown on WNOK each night. Hahaha…So tell me more about how you landed on “Good Medicine” for the playlist name?

Ryan: It comes from a Proverb I came across years ago – “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” I think good music does a lot for the heart.

Jess: Absolutely…I’m writing that down as a reminder, for sure…what a great name. Your mixes really do that and have done that for me over the years. I look forward to them each season, especially because they always expose me to different artists and bands I have never heard of. How do you find them all?

Ryan: It used to be way harder – I picked up compilation CDs from music stores or magazines, and I followed a bunch of different music blogs that would post new bands or songs, and I’d collect my favorites until I had enough to make a new mix. Spotify definitely made it a lot easier to go down the rabbit hole of bands you like, and ones that you may like because of that, and so on. The biggest issue now is getting outside of the algorithm they feed you and stumbling onto something new.

Jess: Yes! That dang algorithm keeps me in a 90s or 2010’s hip hop loop all the dang time. It’s hard to break out! One last thing…what do you hope people take away from listening to your mixes?

Ryan: I’ve always loved the idea of giving people a soundtrack to their seasons and memories – songs that are fun to listen to, whether you’re with friends or driving home alone in the car at night. I believe music is such a powerful, sensory thing – and while I’ve never been much of a musician outside of a short-lived high school punk band, I’ve always loved giving people songs that remind me why I love music.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today, and I’m SUPER pumped to promote your latest that JUST DROPPED! Run, don’t walk, people…Good Medicine: Volume 47, Be My Baby!

Enjoy friends, and THANK YOU, Ryan!!

Happy Weekend of LOVE, turkeys!

XOXO

-Jess

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I know, I know…it’s ridiculous to write a whole essay about coffee. But sometimes something as mundane and basic-bitch as an oat cappuccino can somehow truly hit above its weight.

There’s this thing about coffee…it carries meaning we don’t always acknowledge. A basic search of “ode to coffee” found a slew of articles, poems, and songs that all wax poetic about the status, the ritual, and the identity. The difference between someone who grabs Dunkin’ on the way to work and someone who waits in line at a specialty shop for an $8 cappuccino says something, whether we want it to or not. Coffee is everything and nothing…glamorous and completely ordinary. It somehow holds all these contradictions at once. I see myself in that. (and maybe you do, too.)

For me, I’m realizing this particular cup has been the throughline of my reclamation journey…a supporting character that has witnessed every transformative moment in my story for the past five years. It has been SO much more than just the chemical reaction between coffee grounds and water. So much more.

I moved to NYC from Charlotte, NC, right as the world shut down in 2020. With the city eerily silent and essentially closed, I would go for solo walks around the neighborhood to clear my head and wrestle with the inevitable “what ifs” and incessant doom-worrying. One day that June, I stumbled into Black Press…the smell of perfectly balanced espresso luring me in like a true siren (not that other green one that keeps missing the mark). And I didn’t know it then, but from that day forward, Black Press would become a lighthouse for me in the storm I didn’t see coming.

The espresso at Black Press is special; they use Partners out of Brooklyn, and that espresso consistently hits all the right notes…rich and deep and bitter and bright…with a depth that makes you feel something other than warmth or a rush. When it hits right, you realize, it’s not just caffeine. It might just be life-changing…totally sounds absurd to say out loud, but completely, absolutely true.

Black Press was where I met Jess 2.0…this newest next iteration of myself, the version who would learn that she actually existed apart from the things she did, the roles she performed, the person she *thought* she was supposed to be. That first oat cappuccino grounded me when fear screamed louder than any possibility. The foam sat perfectly on top, thick and velvety, sweet from the oat milk. It felt like a hug…like real comfort, without trying too hard. The espresso underneath was bold enough to cut through but didn’t overwhelm…it was just bitter enough in all the right ways. It showed me this wasn’t JUST coffee…this was more.

Quarantined and cramped in a one-bedroom apartment with Jay and Millie, it all felt impossibly small. And there I was, drowning in guilt…the guilt that it was ME who pushed to uproot our entire family to NYC for my dream, only to be met with isolation in a tiny space where we could barely breathe. The rejection emails piled up. The silence from restaurants I’d applied to grew deafening. My attempts to convince chefs to give me a chance despite having zero experience because I “felt in my bones that I would be good” disappeared into the abyss. I mean, to be fair, they had no clue if their restaurants would ever reopen at that point.

I was stuck in this middle place between who I’d been and who I was trying to become, and Black Press became the place I would escape to. I wasn’t necessarily running from my family (not every time, at least), but I was running from the mental loop of self-doubt and second-guessing that threatened to swallow me whole.

But here…the baristas knew me by name. Even in those early pandemic days, they knew my face (above the mask), they knew my order, they knew ME. Which seemed impossible in a city of a bajillion people, but I know that’s how communities are built, small and intentional. That belonging, that seeing and knowing—it resonated and helped me build my own philosophy of feeding people, of creating space where someone feels recognized, where they matter.

Share The Table Between: Musings from The Freckled Fork

Once the world started reopening, I would grab countless coffees after dropping Millie off at school with school moms. I would meet my best friend Marie (my no.1 since our college days in SC) and the girls in our pandemic pod early mornings, excited to actually be going to work. These women became my safety net when I needed it.

Black Press kept me warm that next February, when I schlepped through the snow to tour 15+ apartments on the Upper West Side. I finally found a gem, a 1-bedroom with an office and a beautiful backyard, a rarity in the city. We landed on West 74th, exactly one block away from Black Press (not entirely an accident).

With my warm, familiar cappuccino in hand, I walked across the park to assist Zikki with a random catering gig that September. This wasn’t just any gig; this was the one that would give me a lifeline and my first foot in the door as she invited me to interview for a line cook opening at her restaurant.

It gave me the liquid courage I needed before my interview that next week with Chef Victor and GM Itamar at North Miznon. It was the cup that leveled my head and my nervous heart on my first day on the line. It held me every anxious morning after, as I busted my ass and moved from line cook to sous chef to head chef in less than a year.

By then, my order had evolved, and my life as I knew it started to unravel. My cappuccinos became flat whites…less velvet and more microfoam that blended seamlessly with the espresso, creating this silky texture that coated my insides. The sweetness dialed back significantly, the espresso pushed forward, bolder and brighter. It tasted like a woman who was finally starting to take herself more seriously, who knew what she wanted and who no longer felt like she had to apologize for it. Bolder and brighter.

I grabbed a life-altering cup of coffee before a very difficult conversation with Jay that fall, the one where we decided to separate and end our 16-year marriage. It was that same cup that Marie brought to me when not just my life was crumbling around me, but my bones were as well. It was that year on my birthday that I broke my leg at the restaurant…and for the next 3 months, I was homebound…sleeping on the couch, reeling from my marriage ending, and SUPER depressed as my swift kitchen rise came to a screeching halt.

That next February, I bought a round of coffees for my fellow line cooks who helped me pack the U-Haul and move into my first apartment by myself once the separation was official. It was a moment of strength in the middle of my unraveling.

Over one of those coffees, sitting and making my weekly to-do lists, I was hit on and asked out for my first date since my 16-year marriage had dissolved. My dating era…something most people have in their twenties…started in my late 30s at a table by the very window that first showed me who I really was.

In the thick of my chef life, I was working 80-hour weeks and fighting for scraps of time with Millie as we clunkily navigated co-parenting. I'd pick her up from Jay in the mornings just to get 20 minutes with her before school. I’d bring her to Black Press for hot chocolate, trying to make it count. And it was over one of those cups that the whisper came, bold but quiet, saying I needed to walk away from the job I loved and choose a different path for the sake of my daughter and my limited time with her.

My flat whites eventually graduated to red eyes at this point, when I needed something stronger. A shot of espresso dumped into drip coffee…no milk, no fluff, just pure function. Bitter as hell, unforgiving, the kind of coffee that tastes like determination and exhaustion in equal measure. A true sign and mirror of what my insides looked like.

I had a red eye in hand on my last day at the restaurant when I feared all that I had accomplished and worked for, all that momentum I had built up…would just…fucking…disappear.

I had Black Press in hand on the train to the West Village on my first day as head chef & consultant for a few cafes. I just needed something warm and cozy for my fragility, to calm my second-guessing. I truly thought I’d found a unicorn, the perfect-on-paper gig that fit my new single-mother schedule needs.

It was there over a particularly frothy flat white when I realized the job was nothing more than thinly veiled abuse of power…a boss using her single-motherhood and toxic girl-boss vibes as a weapon against her employees, me included. The coffee gave me the courage to resign after only six months.

I had Black Press in hand as I walked to another coffee shop (ironic, yes, I know) to meet Yas for our first date in August 2024. A new beginning that changed everything.

We got flat whites on the way to the airport for a 10-day yoga retreat in Oaxaca with my dear friend Lauren…something I’d always wanted to do but never gave myself permission to. Oaxaca was where I finally got clarity on who I wanted to be and where I wanted to head next.

My walk grew a little further from Black Press, 3 blocks from our apartment with my now husband, Yas. It was that same cozy corner by the window where I sat to brainstorm and dream of what The Freckled Fork could be if it were my sole focus, my only job, and all it could become.

These days, I STILL get my weekly flat whites there…on my way to pick Millie up from school, to take her to dance, to therapy, to wherever she needs to go because my schedule is now my own and I finally found freedom in that.

This is the Jess 2.0 I’ve been rebuilding and rediscovering, once my “prescribed burn” had finally simmered and the ashes began to settle. This version feels the most like the me I was always supposed to be. And this coffee from this tiny coffee shop on the Upper West Side…it STILL roots me, it STILL grounds me, and it STILL makes me feel at home…in my body and in this city I now claim as my own.

I know how this sounds…it’s absurd to give this much meaning to something so ordinary. But in the moments when I felt empty and scared and lonely…so fucking lonely…it was the warm hug I needed, the bright spot in the darkest parts and hardest moments of my entire life.

It’s just a cup of coffee,

but it changed my life.

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Every Thursday, I’m setting the table for your weekend…a collection of reads, recipes, tools, and whatever else caught my attention this week. It’s the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want to create…Not a to-do list (bc we aren’t doing those anymore, right?!). Just possibilities, just good…fun…thoughtful, possibilities.

February it already hitting differently this year. We’re in the dead of winter, but the light is shifting…I can already see the earlier sunrises, later sunsets, and those first hints that we’re moving toward something new. Historically, February was the Roman month of purification (Februa), the time to cleanse before spring planting. Astrologically, we’re in Aquarius season…revolutionary energy, breaking patterns, doing things differently.

Which feels about right for where I am (and maybe you, too?). I was diagnosed with ADHD last fall, and I’ve spent the past few months trying to figure out how to finally take charge of my executive functioning issues after 42 years of apparently doing things the hard way. Turns out, becoming a chef actually helped me navigate those issues in ways I didn’t realize in real time.

Mise en place…everything in its place…isn’t just a cooking technique, I’ve realized. It was an external system that held my ADHD brain when my internal systems failed – prepping, organizing, creating structure before the chaos of service. It saved me in the kitchen. These days, I’m trying to figure out how to apply it to all the other areas of my life.

So here’s what I’m setting out this week.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

ADDitude Magazine - Menopause & ADHD Survey
83% of women experienced ADHD symptoms for the first time in their 40s & 50s. Average age of diagnosis: 43. Half called menopause the period when “ADHD had the greatest overall impact on their lives.” If you’re in your 40s, wondering why everything suddenly feels harder…this might be why.

Women and AI: I have a theory…women’s slower adoption of AI isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Research shows men use AI tools 25% more than women. But what if women are being more strategic about when AI supports our work versus when it does the work for us? Men are moving fast. Women are moving thoughtfully. And I’d bet on thoughtful over fast any day. We might take longer to adopt it, but once we do, we will surely outperform…right, ladies?!

Stanford Social Innovation Review - The AI Gender Gap Paradox
On holding “fierce ambivalence”...using AI to empower yourself while demanding better standards. The concept of passionately holding two contradictory truths at once feels very February, very Aquarius, very right now.

THE UTENSILS

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

Subscriber Exclusive: Southern Citrus Pickled Shrimp Recipe
Cold-weather citrus meets Southern hospitality. Bright, punchy, and somehow tastes like the sun found you in February. Serve it on plantain chips and pretend you’re hosting, even if it’s just you.

Microplane Zester
I use this thing every day. For real, every day. Fresh Parmesan that actually melts, lemon zest that doesn’t taste like pith, garlic that disappears into a sauce instead of sitting there in sad little chunks. It’s $15. Get the sharp one, not the cheap knockoff that’ll shred your knuckles instead of the cheese. Replace it when it gets dull.

THE VESSELS

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

Medium - “The Quiet Rage” by Amani Green
“My hands clenched around my coffee mug, my teeth pressed tight...I realized then that this quiet rage I had carried for decades—shaped by every subtle dismissal, every ‘don’t be so sensitive,’ every expectation that a woman must be agreeable—was no longer willing to be silent.” For anyone who’s ever been told to smile more, be nicer, calm down.

The Midst - “People pleasing is blocking who you really are”
“In midlife, many women start to feel the toll of people-pleasing. You’ve spent years saying yes at work, smoothing things over in relationships. Somewhere along the way, your boundaries got fuzzy. Your needs got quieter.” On recovering from Good Girl Syndrome. Raises hand

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Sunshinery is hosting a book talk on this one in February, and it’s the perfect midlife antidote. 1940s NYC theater world, a woman looking back on her youth with “pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure).” About discovering you don’t have to be a good girl to be a good person. Goes down like champagne…Gilbert’s own words.

Lunar New Year Sound Ritual at Sage + Sound
Later this Month: Tuesday, February 17th, 7:30-9pm. Set intentions during the New Moon with journaling, guided breathwork, and a 90-minute sound journey (gongs, singing bowls, chimes). Maybe we need a guide to show us how to turn inward before we can move forward. $75.

THE NAPKIN

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

“Work Clean” by Dan Charnas
How mise en place translates outside the kitchen. The best chefs spend more time preparing than cooking…I learned this early on. Ten minutes of thoughtful, clean prep can save hours of chaos. And outside of the kitchen, this can be applied as well…your desk is your station, your tasks are ingredients, your workflow is the line.

Monthly Micro-Resets
February’s a weird month…short, dark, caught between winter and spring. Instead of massive overhauls, I’m trying weekly 20-minute check-ins: What worked this week? What didn’t? I refer to my brain dump list I started last week…and re-evaluate. Small wins build momentum…I think.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

First Saturdays at Brooklyn Museum (Feb 7)
Free…Music…DJs…Performances…This is art that makes you feel something. It’s the kind of event where you remember why you live in New York in the first place.

Soft Launch into Chaos - Spotify
I put together this soundtrack this week to help me get my shit together while also simultaneously falling apart. Give it a listen when you need a guide for the chaos of the day, maybe it’ll even help you enjoy it a little.

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