Ah, youth. They say it’s wasted on the young, and I guess if I weren’t still (kind of) one of the whippersnappers that cliché undermines, I would be inclined to agree. Youth—a song of bill-less, tax-less, job-less naïveté sustained by pizza, French fries, and candy. When long division is the bane of one’s existence, imaginary [...]
It’s a pretty dull life out here, being an unemployed college graduate shacking up with the parents. Sure, I’m catching up on reruns of shows like Home Improvement and Reba, but it’s getting harder to find quality television to suit my needs. Thankfully I’ll be out of here in a few weeks. When I’m home [...]
Procreation is a topic supercharged with biology, emotions, politics, and religion even though it is one of the most natural, everyday things. People often say that creation lends meaning to their own lives, that it fills them with a previously unknown depth of love. The start of something from nothing, the fusion of two into [...]
Halloween was always a bittersweet holiday for me. I loved dressing up, trick-or-treating, and, more importantly, filling a pillowcase with enough candy to erode my entire skull. (I would still be going now, at the hoary age of 22, but even when I was 15 people were asking, “Aren’t you too old for this?” Is [...]
You know how families have those classic recipes, the ones that are passed down through generations? Maybe there’s a grandmother that made Apple Pie That Brought the Family Together, and then she taught her daughter how to make it and that woman taught her daughter and it becomes the family legacy with ‘secret ingredients’ and [...]
In 2006, I spent 5 weeks in Florence, Italy for a film program. My best friend Rachel and I had signed up together, and Team Relish (as we called ourselves) took the film school by storm. One hot, bright Saturday, we spent the whole mid-July morning and then some filming Rachel’s film, which required a [...]
The weekend is kind of like a three-course meal: appetizer, entrée, dessert; Friday, Saturday, Sunday (Sundae! Haha!….sorry). Even though dessert is one of the greatest things around, it’s got a lot of stigma—buttery, sugary, calorie-laden. So many, though they enjoy dessert, come to dread what comes after it—the guilt. Sunday gets a similar rap; sure, [...]
My culinary childhood was not a pretty one. I wasn’t an “eat whatever you put in front of her” child. I smothered the limited things I would eat in Paul Newman’s salad dressing or ketchup. The list of things I wouldn’t eat was pretty broad: eggs, seafood, any baked good except for bread and donuts, [...]