Food • 

Here is my ideal January soup. It’s the one I come back to, again and again, in the blur of my post-holiday malaise when my body craves fresh and wholesome things, but my heart dwells on the richness of…

Lately

  • Life • 

    December 5, 2012: My 25th birthday. A and I spread an old comforter on the grass in Alamo Square park and stretch our bodies into the waning sunlight. We feel the gentle crunch of fallen leaves underneath us as we lay down, padded by the layer of polyester fill and…

  • Books • 

    I’m always surprised by how much certain books shape my memories. For instance, I cannot imagine my family trip to France this year without The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. It’s as if the four main characters ate croissants by the fountain in The Tuileries and watched the sun set over…

  • Life • 

    My daughter has just learned the word, twinkle. She whispers Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in my ear at night, when I carry her upstairs to her bath, pleased with herself that she knows all the lyrics. On our way to preschool, I put on one of my favorite songs by…

ABOUT ME

I ask big questions and complain about how the laundry is never finished. Sometimes in the same sentence. Welcome.

I’m Renae. I’m a writer, a mom, and above all, an observer. I like to pause on the things that move me, to dwell on my experiences. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.

More Articles
  • Life • 

    Every afternoon, when it’s hot enough (and it always is), my daughter spends a few hours running around our backyard naked. She has an inflatable pool that looks like the cross-section of a watermelon: pink-red interior, bright green sides. We fill it up with the hose. She skips through it,…

  • Life • 

    Last night, I made lasagna. Not because Los Angeles in May warrants the consumption of cozy, crunchy-cornered dishes with cheese that stretches. It was seventy-five degrees yesterday.  I made it because the choreography lives in my hands. The familiar rhythm of gathering the ingredients, making an assembly line of tomato…

  • Life • 

    One of my favorite things about Paris is l’apéro, that sacred moment when the day winds down and people stop for pre-dinner drinks and bites. The tradition is so the opposite of what I’ve trained myself to do at the end of my day: push harder, get just a little…

  • Books • 

    Being a stay-at-home mom isn’t working for the protagonist of Rachel Yoder’s novel, Nightbitch. She feels “stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones…” But she suspects something is truly off when she finds “a patch of course, black hair sprouting…

  • Food • 

    Lately, I’m averaging one frittata per week. I forgot about them for a little while and then decided to make one when I had a lone, sad leek and some wilted kale I was about to toss. That reminded me: when you make a really delicious frittata, it’s basically the…

  • Food • 

    I make this sauce about once a week, on nights when the chaos of my day bleeds into the evening, when all I want to do is close my eyes and open them to find dinner on the table. It does require some prep in the form of grating carrots…

  • Food • 

    I’m sure you’ve read about my love for dried white beans. But I hold plenty of room in my heart for the canned variety, too. They’re my secret weapon on nights when dinner time catches up with me before I catch my breath from the day. Give me one 15-ounce…

  • Food • 

    When I step back from the messy, imperfect everyday-ness of it, I think about cooking as a way to turn the mundane into something sacred. Nothing exemplifies this more than dried beans.  Given some love and the slowed-down hours of a Sunday morning, they become a ritual. They offer that…

  • Books • 

    The 32-year old protagonist of Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts, Nina, has a lot going for her: good friendships, a stable family life, and a new flat—paid for by her dream career as a food writer and cookbook author. But being in her thirties also makes Nina aware of what she doesn’t…