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If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: Buy American Bully Mom T-Shirt now This product printed in US America quickly delivery and easy tracking your shipment With multi styles Unisex T-shirt Premium T-Shirt Tank Top Hoodie Sweatshirt Womens T-shirt Long Sleeve near me. AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt Premium Customize Digital Printing design also available multi colors black white blue orange redgrey silver yellow green forest brown multi sizes S M L XL 2XL 3XL 4XL Buy product AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping The title of Nigella Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, is enough to transport even the most beleaguered of home cooks straight back to the early months of lockdown. (Remember when that string of words started to feel less like a daily ritual, and more like a primal scream?) Lawson first began plotting the book many months before the pandemic hit, though, and she remembers its origins a little differently. “All my books have been about where I am in my life, because I don’t see how else one writes,” she says. “Both the title and the project of Cook, Eat, Repeat predate the pandemic, and I had no idea that would become such a pattern. But it’s always been my way of living. If anything, I felt that more people came around to it over the past year.”Even when writing recipes for one, Lawson’s unique balance of warm, lyrical meditations on her endless love for food—alongside tried-and-tested recipes, of course—continues unabated throughout her new book. “I’ve always been someone who’s cooked for myself, but cooking for myself exclusively is a very new experience, and one I’ve really warmed to, actually,” Lawson says. “Although my poor neighbor opposite did need to plow her way through quite a lot during recipe testing.” A note to Lawson’s neighbor: If you’re planning a holiday anytime soon, I volunteer to house sit.In the introduction to the book, Lawson describes this process of cooking, eating, and repeating as the “story of my life.” (A small slice of her story, perhaps, but if you want the more salacious or tabloid-wrung narrative, just use Google.) Yet where Lawson’s previous books have emphasized the joyful rituals of entertaining, say, or the therapeutic qualities of baking, Cook, Eat, Repeat tells a richer and more personal story of the essential rhythms of a life spent in the kitchen. It strikes a new, charming note within her canon of food writing.“If I had to cook every meal for four people day in day out, I might be feeling somewhat differently,” says Lawson. “In terms of just cooking for myself, which took me a while to get into, it’s so easy to just let the structure of a day go. If you’re a home cook, as I am, you’re always chopping or stirring. It’s important for people not to feel that cooking calls upon all these mysterious talents which people feel they don’t have, because it’s really just about responding to the ingredients in front of you.”Lawson’s talents, however, are far from mysterious. While she may still technically be a “home cook,” in the U.K., as a Guardian journalist recently noted, she is pretty much the only person outside of Princess Diana who can be referred to by first name alone to universal recognition. In 1998, Lawson published the book that would make her name, How to Eat. Released within a year of her close friend Nigel Slater’s Real Cooking, together they pioneered (whether by accident or design) a novel and more personable form of food writing in Britain that blended friendly, diaristic meditations on cooking habits with foolproof, unintimidating recipes. It became a sensation, catapulting her from successful food columnist to one of the U.K.’s brightest new literary stars.“I was so astonished I was writing a cookbook in the first place, so I thought it would be a one-off,” Lawson says on whether she ever anticipated How to Eat as the beginning of a 23-year career in food writing. Since then, she’s become not just a household name, but the very definition of a household name. From your grandparents watching afternoon telly in the deepest corners of the shire to an agenda-setting young chef tuning in from central London each week, everybody loves Nigella. It’s an affection that is hard to communicate to those who aren’t British; even harder, one imagines, to be its subject.Is there any sense of relief when it comes to promoting her books abroad, without that added baggage? “Well, no,” Lawson sighs. “Because you get tabloid baggage wherever you go. Although in America, people want to think of me more like an expert, and that slightly unnerves me. I’m a home cook with not a great deal of expertise but quite a lot of experience. However much one says I’m not an expert, people never believe you.”Cook, Eat, Repeat was published in the U.K. last October, followed by the requisite TV show that has accompanied every one of her books since her first on-screen hit, 2001’s Nigella Bites. What makes Lawson’s appeal so enduring, though, is that celebrity is one of the least interesting things about her. Despite her silver-spoon upbringing and her starry, enigmatic charisma—as well as her infamous ability to make even the most basic of cooking techniques feel laden with innuendo—Lawson’s understanding of food, and the way she describes it in print, have always been accessible. It’s an approach she lays out clearly in her ethos for Cook, Eat, Repeat. “If a recipe has been properly tested, the first time you make it, you just do what the recipe says. But the notch-on-the-bedstead approach to cooking doesn’t help people learn how to cook, either,” she notes. “It’s about repeating certain recipes, working out what you like about them and what you says like about them.”More recently, Lawson has been expressing her culinary likes and dislikes via her (now very active) Twitter account; following and retweeting writers she finds interesting, but mostly just replying to pretty much every person that tags her upon posting an image of their latest Nigella special. When I ask her why she takes an hour or two out of her mornings to encourage those cooking her recipes on Twitter, she replies as if the answer is obvious. “It would seem like such an act of extraordinary lack of graciousness not to respond to people who are cooking your own recipes,” she says, firmly. “Also, it just makes me happy.”A friend of mine made a chocolate peanut butter cake from Cook, Eat, Repeat for her mum’s birthday last November, I tell Lawson. Where the original’s multiple tiers were as orderly and elegant as a Bauhaus apartment building, my friend’s looked more like the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster. I read Lawson the response she cheerily replied with: Happy Birthday to your mum from me! “I do think food and writing about food is about connecting with people, though,” she says, after a guilty laugh. “Twitter just takes it up a notch where I can be more direct.”Stranger still is the fact that, for all her universal appeal, Lawson has never shied away from politics; something which would leave many a public food career in the U.K. dead on arrival. Back in 1989, she caused a stir by openly voting Labour and criticizing Thatcher in a column, despite her father’s role as Chancellor in the Tory cabinet. More recently, as Britain’s Labour Party has found itself in a period of stasis due to rudderless leadership, Lawson has used her platform to support causes that matter to her personally. (Perhaps most surprisingly, given the especially toxic and divisive discourse around the issue in Britain, Lawson has shared articles that indicate her support for trans youth to determine the age at which they can begin transitioning.)It’s no accident, then, that a new guard of food writers has forged a genuine, symbiotic relationship with Lawson over Twitter. If there’s a movement to be identified here, its Pied Piper would be the brilliant Jonathan Nunn, whose Vittles newsletter on Substack should be essential reading for any food obsessive. Rebecca May Johnson’s razor-sharp observations on the relationship between cooking, class, and social resistance in Britain have also found a champion in Lawson; as have the meticulously-researched insights into the influence of South Asian immigrants on American food written by Mayukh Sen across the pond. (Meanwhile, Lawson’s reinterpretation—found on page 60 of Cook, Eat, Repeat—of the “anarcho-fabulous” left-wing journalist Ash Sarkar’s fish finger bhorta is probably the most delicious thing you’ll consume all year.)If the pleasure Lawson finds in engaging with a new generation of food writers sounds unusual, that’s because it is. Many other prominent British food writers seem to spontaneously break out in hives as the very thought of their hegemony being threatened. As just one example, The Times’s restaurant critic, Giles Coren, had his burner Twitter account exposed in 2018, which he had used to send various threats to Nunn. Coren was neither fired nor, it seems, even reprimanded, rationalizing his multiple accounts as “exclusively for responding to trolls.”It is refreshing to know that, if Nigella had anything to do with it, the bigotry and snobbishness of the British food establishment would be quickly done away with. “I’ve had quite a few young food writers starting off who I’ve met, and I’ve tried to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of by their publishers or not having to do so many books that it squeezes the joy out of it for them,” she says, resolutely. “My agent Ed Victor who died a couple of years ago—he was American—always used to have a phrase: ‘You’ve got to send the elevator back down.’ I think that’s very important.”When it comes to forging these relationships over social media, and encouraging an authentically diverse—and ultimately more exciting—new frontier for mainstream food writing in Britain, her take is equally philosophical. “Perhaps in the last year, we’ve realized how important connection with other people is, and you don’t always have to be in the same room as them. It doesn’t mean that it’s not real or that it’s shallow. It can be very strong, that connection, when it’s just an exchange on Twitter, say. It might be a slightly odd arena, but my little corner of it is quite cozy, and the people are warm and supportive of each other.”After spending the best part of an hour grilling Lawson, it’s time to ask her possibly the most annoying question of all. In December, a clip from the Cook, Eat, Repeat show saw Lawson prepare mashed potatoes, with the milk having been warmed in the—pause for effect—meekrowavé. It was an affectation delivered with offhand silliness that is, well, just so Nigella. But then it went viral. Yesterday, the intentional mispronunciation was nominated for a BAFTA. I almost feel guilty for bringing it up, given Lawson has described her bafflement at the attention it received, but how, I ask, could I not?After a lengthy pause and a sigh, Lawson says, “Look, I think I’m quite camp.” It is said with a sincerity that is so indescribably camp, I have to tell her nothing has warmed my tiny queer heart more over the past year. At this, she laughs uproariously. “I think some Americans think I’m serious, though? It makes me feel a bit self-conscious now because it was just natural. Mispronouncing words is, for some reason, a family habit. I hadn’t planned to say that and I didn’t even know that that’s what I call it.” How does that playfulness and humor feed into the way she writes? “Sometimes I think it’s a certain laziness in me,” she says. “I carry on because I love doing it. It felt like I took a detour, but then I liked that path so much that I stayed on it.” You are certainly not lazy, I reply. “Maybe laziness isn’t the right word. I always seem to enjoy doing things that frighten me a bit, even though I wouldn’t have admitted to enjoying them. Writing a book is always frightening anyway, so that’s okay. That doesn’t go away. It’s not essentially something new, and yet I couldn’t write a book that I felt was just a book for its own sake. I have to wait until I get an idea that I want to carry on with.”Well then: Cook, Eat, Repeat marks Lawson’s 12th cookbook. Does she already have plans for her 13th? “I’m not very good at counting,” she says, coyly. One senses that she is, in fact, very good at counting. “It just makes the next one quite frightening, though, doesn’t it? I might have to go straight into book 14, come to think of it.” Come to think of it, she probably should. The Michelin star rankings have, more or less, stayed the same since their announcement in 1931. One star? A very good restaurant in its category. Two: Excellent cooking, worth a detour. Three: Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey. Restaurants awarded with the accolade got a little red dot or two next to their name in Michelin’s guide—and most importantly, a sudden burst of life-changing clout. (As famed French chef Paul Bocuse once said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.”)Now, 90 years later, Michelin has added a new designation to its American guide: The Green Star, given for excellence in sustainability. One of its first recipients? New York’s Dan Barber.The famed chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns joins a handful of chefs—including Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters—who hold the accolade. (Michelin debuted it in Europe last year; the pandemic—and resulting shutdown of restaurants everywhere—dramatically slowed the roll-out.) Recipients meet a strict criteria: “To identify these chefs and establishments, our inspectors are mindful of many topics, such as, but not limited to: the products and ingredients used (seasonality, locality, production quality); the composition of the menu; the chef’s ability to raise customer awareness of his or her philosophy; initiatives to reduce and/or recycle food waste, management of the establishment’s non-food resources,” Gwendal Poullennec, International Director of Michelin Guides, tells Vogue.It comes as no surprise to foodies everywhere that this went to Barber. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, set on 300 acres in Hudson Valley, has been a champion of farm-to-table cuisine long before it became a buzzword. The restaurant sources its food from crops and animals raised on its own land, and aims to have little-to-no waste. The complex is also home to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a research center that focuses on regenerative agriculture.Although, it should be noted, Barber isn’t too fond of the term farm-to-table. Why? It implies that chefs and restaurants dictate what, exactly, farmers should grow. Instead he believes it should be the opposite—”The table should service the farm,” he says.Here’s what Barber means: More often than not, farmers base their crops around market demand. This is good for business, yes, but not always great for the land that they’re working: a healthy field comes from a seasonal rotation of crops, or landstock grazing. Yet if every restaurant is demanding asparagus, or strawberries, or whatever fruit or vegetable, the farmer will go to extra lengths to grow them—even if that takes more energy, resources, and depletes the soil.He doesn’t mean to completely knock the concept: serving local cuisine is a great thing—way better than continually importing goods from halfway around the world, racking up carbon emissions in the process. But he’s ready for the next step in this culinary evolution: “It’s time for a paradigm shift,” says Barber. “The farmer grows what his landscape needs him to grow—and the chef does his or her work in orchestrating those ingredients into a balanced menu.”(This, he points out, is not the most revolutionary idea: “What I just said is how cuisine has worked since the beginning of agriculture.”)So what does he think of his new Michelin star? He’s honored, naturally. ”It’s a nice reminder of the work that we’ve done for many years.” But he also dreams that eventually the distinction won’t be necessary, and being a great chef and a sustainable chef will be one in the same—even if it means foregoing lobster on your menu when you’re in a landlocked country, eliminating endless Russian caviar when you’re an American restaurant, or cutting the several cuts of steak. (Meat and dairy farming account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.) “My hope would be that there’s a merging of green stars and regular stars,” he says. “What if they coalesced so that, in order to be at the highest altitude of cooking, these sustainable gastronomical concepts had to be part of the show?”That may not actually be a pipe dream. Just this week, three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park announced that they are reopening with an entirely plant-based tasting menu. (“We have always operated with sensitivity to the impact we have on our surroundings, but it was becoming ever clearer that the current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways,” chef Daniel Humm said in a statement. )Barber hopes that kind of thinking gains momentum. This month, the Blue Hill space will host a chef-in-residence program to bring more culinary minds into the fold, with pit master Bryan Furman taking the helm on May 12. As Barber puts it, “we have a real opportunity to think right now with the consciousness to change course.” On the day I started miscarrying my first baby, my mom cooked Loobia Polo for lunch. It was a bright August day, the sun beaming through the window of my front room as I sat on the couch, disorientated and weary. I tossed the unopened mail from my agent to one side. A contract for a new cookbook, normally an occasion for celebration, now felt like an irrelevant distraction. I lay down and rested my cheek against a cushion as scents from my childhood floated in from the kitchen. Braised lamb, rich and earthy, stewed with cumin and cinnamon. The floral, citrus notes from saffron, its scarlet stems ground in a mortar and pestle, and left to steep in a cup of hot water. Sweet, nutty, vapor floating off steaming basmati. I heard the sizzle of melting butter and the clanging of pots and spoons as my mom layered cubes of potatoes and strips of green beans into the rice. When I was growing up, this classic Persian one-pot meal was our family’s equivalent of homemade apple pie. It was as comforting as it was familiar, a meal that smelled like a mother’s warm embrace. But I wasn’t going to be a mother. Not this time. I ate three mouthfuls, then crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep.Two weeks later I boarded a plane heading to Athens, Greece. I had a book to write and deadlines to meet. Flavors to explore and textures to salivate over. I had people to meet, to cook alongside, to interview. I had recipes to write and travels stories to pen. I only had one problem: I couldn’t recognize the food I was eating.Some people turn to comfort eating during times of stress but my hunger completely vanishes when I go through emotional turmoil—a challenge I now realized had become an occupational hazard. The flavors of my grief were different to the flavors I was used to. They didn’t dance on my tongue, they trespassed on my body. As I began my research, I made unwelcome discoveries. Shards of damp filo pastry from a diamond of pistachio baklava stuck uncomfortably to the roof of my mouth. Cold, congealed rice pudding wobbled menacingly on my spoon. Dry pieces of under seasoned and overcooked chicken souvlaki got stuck between my teeth. The pungency of goat butter pasta made me gag. I ate almond cookies that were too dry, washed down with coffee that was too strong. Grief had changed my appetite, punishing me in places that used to offer me pleasure. I walked the streets of Athens with large sunglasses on my face to hide the bags under my eyes, a throbbing in my temples and a tightness in my chest. My steps felt heavy and cumbersome, as if I was walking through sticky honey.With the benefit of hindsight, I know now what I didn’t know then, that the first weeks after a miscarriage are as messy as they are disorientating, with hormone crashes confusing your body and your psyche oscillating between emotions as it adjusts to a new and unexpected reality. One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage but it’s still so rarely spoken about, shrouded in guilt, secrecy, fear, failure and shame. How could I express to others the connection a mother feels with an unborn child? Why didn’t people realize I wasn’t just mourning the loss of this being, but an entire imagined future together. Why didn’t anyone understand I hadn’t just lost a baby, I’d lost a part of myself.But still, I was in Athens, a privileged Westerner, here to research a book on migration and the refugee crisis. Who was I to even think about loss? I spent my days interviewing people whose circumstances were so much more challenging than mine, who had lost so much more than I could ever imagine. I swallowed down my grief, for what place was there for it, really, as I stood in a refugee camp with women, men, and children from Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen and Myanmar, people who had fled war and violence, persecution and poverty. I listened to their stories of courage and determination. I bit my lip when they asked if I had children. I learned that personal loss makes you more sensitive to the loss of others, as several people guessed what had happened anyway during the time we spent together chopping onions or peeling tomatoes. I was reminded that when you share food with others, you can’t help but share a little piece of yourself. As we cooked and talked and listened and ate, these strangers became friends, and our mealtimes became an opportunity to distract and forget. A chance to put the worst behind us. Slowly, grief’s clench on my stomach began to loosen.I continued researching the book, following the refugees’ journey to Turkey, traveling by boat as they had done, over the narrow stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. In Istanbul, I walked the streets in search of my appetite, losing myself to the city’s winding alleyways, majestic skylines, and endless cups of tart sour cherry juice. I snacked on stuffed mussels, eaten in front of a street cart, watching the vendor squeeze a wedge of lemon on each shell. I ate tubs of nohutlu pilavı, a buttery chickpea rice, that left my lips soft and covered with a light slick of grease. I chewed on mackerel sandwiches, grilled on the promenades that line the Bosporus and washed them down with şalgam, a salty fermented turnip drink. I ordered bowls of kelle paça soup, made from slowly simmered sheep’s head and trotters, and sipped the rich, meaty broth as if it was medicine. I gained five pounds and flew home feeling nourished. A month later, when two pink lines appeared on a stick in my bathroom, we went out to a Turkish restaurant to celebrate.My grief was silenced by the thumping roar of a heartbeat booming out of the sonographer’s wand. It was drowned out by my laughter as I watched a tiny being wriggle on an ultrasound screen. It was extinguished as I pondered baby names out loud and then scribbled them into notepads. I replaced my sadness with jubilation instead.I started reorganizing work commitments and making lists of essential tasks that needed finishing before I went on maternity leave. The research trips to Greece and Turkey had given me ample material, but there was one more section needed for the book to work—a trip to Cyprus, the contested and divided island, which would bring the two communities, Greek and Turkish, together. Landing at Nicosia airport, I felt energized and alive. This time around, meals were easy. I was eating for two, after all. I learned how to make halloumi cheese from a Cypriot grandmother, using fresh milk from the goats in her village. We grated the salty, squeaky cheese and mixed it with dried spearmint, ready to stuff into small squares of ravioli. It tasted like a fresh summer breeze. I ordered extra portions of loukanika, richly spiced sausages flavored with red wine, orange zest, and fennel seeds and joyously mopped up their claret juices with flatbreads. I folded squares of mushroom börek and kneaded loaves of olive bread, delighting at the cool softness of the plump dough between my fingers. I avoided coffee and happily turned down glasses of wine. I swam in the sea during the breaks between our interviews, having quiet conversations with my lower belly about how proud I was that we were going on an adventure together. That this was our time. Later, the doctor would tell me that the baby’s heart likely stopped beating sometime during the week I was in Cyprus.The texture of my grief changed after my second miscarriage. It became more ragged. More visceral. Full of sharp edges that poked me in unexpected places. As the contractions intensified, I began to feel nauseous, the color draining from my face, my skin turning clammy. I alternated between the bathroom and the bed, squatting in the bathtub, willing for it all to be over. Finally, after what felt like hours, a sharp stabbing pain ran across my abdomen. I hauled myself onto the toilet just seconds before I felt something move through me, splashing loudly as it dropped into the water below. I slowly, cautiously, pivoted myself round to peer into the toilet bowl. My eyes flicked around the mess of blood, membranes and… I panicked, slammed the toilet flusher and slid onto the bathroom floor, holding my head in my hands.The next day, my Mom cooked Loobia Polo. Had she forgotten she’d made it last time? My grief made me cranky, and I was irrationally infuriated and incensed. I didn’t want there to be an accidental “tradition” for us to do every time I had a miscarriage. I silently hate-ate it until a piece of unchewed lamb got stuck in my throat and I almost choked. I put down my fork. I’m not hungry, I said, pushing the plate away.The following week the photographer who had accompanied me on the Cyprus trip sent me a link to the photos he had taken of our time there. There were frames of me smiling in an olive grove. (I could see I had the glow.) A picture of me holding a plate of freshly cut watermelon. (Had the baby died yet?) Here I was by the sea, tucking into crisp rings of fried calamari. (Did this poison the baby? Was it my fault?) I clicked through each photo, silently asking myself: Was the baby alive in this photo? Or was it dead? Alive. Or dead. Dead or alive. I slammed the laptop shut and called my editor. I couldn’t work on this book anymore. I needed a break.Months passed. I traveled to Thailand. To Ireland. To New York. I started smoking. I stopped smoking. I drank neat vodka over cubes of frozen ice. I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat from nightmares. I stopped cooking Mediterranean food. I ate ramen instead.One morning I woke to a familiar pressure on my bladder. I needed to pee again. I sighed. It had been the third time that night. Annoyed at my lack of sleep I plodded to the bathroom where it suddenly dawned on me what was happening. But I went to the pharmacy and bought three different tests to be sure.As my internal world began its now familiar transformation, the external world started changing too. A new virus was ravaging the globe, waging a war around us, driving us all indoors. I embraced the banality of lockdown, secretly enjoying the opportunity to retreat from the external world, and grateful that despite the calamity outside, our home felt safe and nurturing. I began leaning into the Mediterranean culinary traditions I had learned on my trips, making batches of homemade yogurt, wrapped in a towel and balanced on a radiator. I pickled cauliflower and turnips in lacto-ferments, turning them fluorescent yellow with turmeric and simmered batches of sour cherry jam which I smothered on toast with salted butter. I avoided crowds at the supermarkets and visited my local Turkish grocery stores instead, buying vine leaves for stuffing with tomato and mint flecked rice. I became obsessed with the rule of three, third times a charm, three is a magic number, third time lucky. I had to believe this in order to stay sane. I rejoiced at morning sickness, something I’d never had before, the queasiness a sign that this pregnancy was real. Happily, I started recipe testing for my book again, fighting my nausea as I scrubbed barnacles off mussels, roasted legs of lamb and sautéed batches of shrimp. Maybe I had been too foolish to stop. These recipes offered comfort and solace, and surely that was what the world needed during a global pandemic? I pounded minced beef with my hands, relishing the meditative quality of rolling them into meatballs. I chopped fresh cilantro, parsley and dill leaves for salads, inhaling deeply as I sliced, as if by breathing their aroma I could be imbued with their brightness. I whisked egg whites for meringues that I served with cream whipped with rose water, savoring the taste of blooming flowers, of sweetness, of life. One morning as I was getting dressed, I glanced down and saw a trickle of bright red blood run down my left leg. I crumpled onto the floor and howled.After the operation I stumbled out of the hospital in a daze. My partner was waiting outside the gates, the rules of the pandemic keeping him a safe distance from the tragedies unfolding inside the wards. I joked to him that twins would have been a handful anyway. He didn’t laugh. When we got home, I asked for beans on toast for dinner. He toasted pieces of sourdough, smothered them in butter and piled on the canned beans, so sweet and so salty, before finishing them with a cloud of grated cheddar cheese. We ate in exhausted silence and then fell asleep, limbs intertwined, on the living room sofa. I didn’t know it then, but it was to be one of our last moments of pure togetherness, for in the months that followed we each retreated, worn down by the cumulative years of anxiety, stress and sadness. It seemed we’d left too much grief settle in the pot of our relationship. It had gone rancid.After he moved out, I waited for my grief to kill my appetite again. But… somehow… it didn’t. It was as if my grief had cracked me wide open this time, exposing my rawness, my desires, my cravings. Suddenly, I was ravenous. As I ate, I began to set a place at the table for my grief. Accept it was a guest in my house and so I should at least be polite. I offered it drinks and snacks. I listened to its worries. I took away its wine glass if it started to get too rowdy. Sometimes we fought, sometimes we negotiated, other times we just sat in silence. Eventually we just learnt to be in the same room without shouting over each other. I started presenting it with different questions, tired of existing in the roller coaster of my own suffering. Instead of “why me?” I asked, “what next?”I turned on my laptop and stared at the words I’d drafted over the last year and the images of my trips through the Eastern Mediterranean. I thought back to the strangers who had invited me into their homes to talk about displacement; the chefs who had fed me in their restaurants as we discussed what belonging meant in a fractured world; the doctors, teachers, musicians and poets I spoke to in blustery refugee camps who honored me with the stories of their survival and their aspirations for the future. Tentatively, I started to write.I began to notice that while my grief had robbed me of my innocence, it had served me something more useful instead—a plate piled high with resilience. I let go of the fairy-tale and began to see that in life there are no last chances, just different strategies. I found some optimism in the dusty corners of a fertility clinic and added that to my dish. I sprinkled through some patience and stirred through some forgiveness. I invited hope to join us at the table.Hope smelled like warm bread baking in an oven, it tasted like a scoop of pistachio ice cream enjoyed on a hot summer’s day, it felt like a bowl of roasted pumpkin soup eaten by a roaring fire. I stopped seeing my grief as a curse and started acknowledging it as an opportunity. A chance to experience more deeply, speak more freely, see more sharply, feel more profoundly and eat more voraciously. Perhaps, my grief hadn’t actually stolen my appetite at all, it had simply added more flavors to my bowl.Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus (W.W.Norton) by Yasmin Khan is out on May 4th 2021. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Material Type: 35% Cotton – 65% Polyester Soft material feels great on your skin and very light Features pronounced sleeve cuffs, prominent waistband hem and kangaroo pocket fringes Taped neck and shoulders for comfort and style Print: Dye-sublimation printing, colors won’t fade or peel Wash Care: Recommendation Wash it by hand in below 30-degree water, hang to dry in shade, prohibit bleaching, Low Iron if Necessary Vist our store at: Visit Myshirtone now This product belong to hung3 The World Famous Grill Master Of Work Grilling And Chilling T-shirts Black If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: Buy American Bully Mom T-Shirt now This product printed in US America quickly delivery and easy tracking your shipment With multi styles Unisex T-shirt Premium T-Shirt Tank Top Hoodie Sweatshirt Womens T-shirt Long Sleeve near me. AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt Premium Customize Digital Printing design also available multi colors black white blue orange redgrey silver yellow green forest brown multi sizes S M L XL 2XL 3XL 4XL Buy product AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping The title of Nigella Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, is enough to transport even the most beleaguered of home cooks straight back to the early months of lockdown. (Remember when that string of words started to feel less like a daily ritual, and more like a primal scream?) Lawson first began plotting the book many months before the pandemic hit, though, and she remembers its origins a little differently. “All my books have been about where I am in my life, because I don’t see how else one writes,” she says. “Both the title and the project of Cook, Eat, Repeat predate the pandemic, and I had no idea that would become such a pattern. But it’s always been my way of living. If anything, I felt that more people came around to it over the past year.”Even when writing recipes for one, Lawson’s unique balance of warm, lyrical meditations on her endless love for food—alongside tried-and-tested recipes, of course—continues unabated throughout her new book. “I’ve always been someone who’s cooked for myself, but cooking for myself exclusively is a very new experience, and one I’ve really warmed to, actually,” Lawson says. “Although my poor neighbor opposite did need to plow her way through quite a lot during recipe testing.” A note to Lawson’s neighbor: If you’re planning a holiday anytime soon, I volunteer to house sit.In the introduction to the book, Lawson describes this process of cooking, eating, and repeating as the “story of my life.” (A small slice of her story, perhaps, but if you want the more salacious or tabloid-wrung narrative, just use Google.) Yet where Lawson’s previous books have emphasized the joyful rituals of entertaining, say, or the therapeutic qualities of baking, Cook, Eat, Repeat tells a richer and more personal story of the essential rhythms of a life spent in the kitchen. It strikes a new, charming note within her canon of food writing.“If I had to cook every meal for four people day in day out, I might be feeling somewhat differently,” says Lawson. “In terms of just cooking for myself, which took me a while to get into, it’s so easy to just let the structure of a day go. If you’re a home cook, as I am, you’re always chopping or stirring. It’s important for people not to feel that cooking calls upon all these mysterious talents which people feel they don’t have, because it’s really just about responding to the ingredients in front of you.”Lawson’s talents, however, are far from mysterious. While she may still technically be a “home cook,” in the U.K., as a Guardian journalist recently noted, she is pretty much the only person outside of Princess Diana who can be referred to by first name alone to universal recognition. In 1998, Lawson published the book that would make her name, How to Eat. Released within a year of her close friend Nigel Slater’s Real Cooking, together they pioneered (whether by accident or design) a novel and more personable form of food writing in Britain that blended friendly, diaristic meditations on cooking habits with foolproof, unintimidating recipes. It became a sensation, catapulting her from successful food columnist to one of the U.K.’s brightest new literary stars.“I was so astonished I was writing a cookbook in the first place, so I thought it would be a one-off,” Lawson says on whether she ever anticipated How to Eat as the beginning of a 23-year career in food writing. Since then, she’s become not just a household name, but the very definition of a household name. From your grandparents watching afternoon telly in the deepest corners of the shire to an agenda-setting young chef tuning in from central London each week, everybody loves Nigella. It’s an affection that is hard to communicate to those who aren’t British; even harder, one imagines, to be its subject.Is there any sense of relief when it comes to promoting her books abroad, without that added baggage? “Well, no,” Lawson sighs. “Because you get tabloid baggage wherever you go. Although in America, people want to think of me more like an expert, and that slightly unnerves me. I’m a home cook with not a great deal of expertise but quite a lot of experience. However much one says I’m not an expert, people never believe you.”Cook, Eat, Repeat was published in the U.K. last October, followed by the requisite TV show that has accompanied every one of her books since her first on-screen hit, 2001’s Nigella Bites. What makes Lawson’s appeal so enduring, though, is that celebrity is one of the least interesting things about her. Despite her silver-spoon upbringing and her starry, enigmatic charisma—as well as her infamous ability to make even the most basic of cooking techniques feel laden with innuendo—Lawson’s understanding of food, and the way she describes it in print, have always been accessible. It’s an approach she lays out clearly in her ethos for Cook, Eat, Repeat. “If a recipe has been properly tested, the first time you make it, you just do what the recipe says. But the notch-on-the-bedstead approach to cooking doesn’t help people learn how to cook, either,” she notes. “It’s about repeating certain recipes, working out what you like about them and what you says like about them.”More recently, Lawson has been expressing her culinary likes and dislikes via her (now very active) Twitter account; following and retweeting writers she finds interesting, but mostly just replying to pretty much every person that tags her upon posting an image of their latest Nigella special. When I ask her why she takes an hour or two out of her mornings to encourage those cooking her recipes on Twitter, she replies as if the answer is obvious. “It would seem like such an act of extraordinary lack of graciousness not to respond to people who are cooking your own recipes,” she says, firmly. “Also, it just makes me happy.”A friend of mine made a chocolate peanut butter cake from Cook, Eat, Repeat for her mum’s birthday last November, I tell Lawson. Where the original’s multiple tiers were as orderly and elegant as a Bauhaus apartment building, my friend’s looked more like the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster. I read Lawson the response she cheerily replied with: Happy Birthday to your mum from me! “I do think food and writing about food is about connecting with people, though,” she says, after a guilty laugh. “Twitter just takes it up a notch where I can be more direct.”Stranger still is the fact that, for all her universal appeal, Lawson has never shied away from politics; something which would leave many a public food career in the U.K. dead on arrival. Back in 1989, she caused a stir by openly voting Labour and criticizing Thatcher in a column, despite her father’s role as Chancellor in the Tory cabinet. More recently, as Britain’s Labour Party has found itself in a period of stasis due to rudderless leadership, Lawson has used her platform to support causes that matter to her personally. (Perhaps most surprisingly, given the especially toxic and divisive discourse around the issue in Britain, Lawson has shared articles that indicate her support for trans youth to determine the age at which they can begin transitioning.)It’s no accident, then, that a new guard of food writers has forged a genuine, symbiotic relationship with Lawson over Twitter. If there’s a movement to be identified here, its Pied Piper would be the brilliant Jonathan Nunn, whose Vittles newsletter on Substack should be essential reading for any food obsessive. Rebecca May Johnson’s razor-sharp observations on the relationship between cooking, class, and social resistance in Britain have also found a champion in Lawson; as have the meticulously-researched insights into the influence of South Asian immigrants on American food written by Mayukh Sen across the pond. (Meanwhile, Lawson’s reinterpretation—found on page 60 of Cook, Eat, Repeat—of the “anarcho-fabulous” left-wing journalist Ash Sarkar’s fish finger bhorta is probably the most delicious thing you’ll consume all year.)If the pleasure Lawson finds in engaging with a new generation of food writers sounds unusual, that’s because it is. Many other prominent British food writers seem to spontaneously break out in hives as the very thought of their hegemony being threatened. As just one example, The Times’s restaurant critic, Giles Coren, had his burner Twitter account exposed in 2018, which he had used to send various threats to Nunn. Coren was neither fired nor, it seems, even reprimanded, rationalizing his multiple accounts as “exclusively for responding to trolls.”It is refreshing to know that, if Nigella had anything to do with it, the bigotry and snobbishness of the British food establishment would be quickly done away with. “I’ve had quite a few young food writers starting off who I’ve met, and I’ve tried to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of by their publishers or not having to do so many books that it squeezes the joy out of it for them,” she says, resolutely. “My agent Ed Victor who died a couple of years ago—he was American—always used to have a phrase: ‘You’ve got to send the elevator back down.’ I think that’s very important.”When it comes to forging these relationships over social media, and encouraging an authentically diverse—and ultimately more exciting—new frontier for mainstream food writing in Britain, her take is equally philosophical. “Perhaps in the last year, we’ve realized how important connection with other people is, and you don’t always have to be in the same room as them. It doesn’t mean that it’s not real or that it’s shallow. It can be very strong, that connection, when it’s just an exchange on Twitter, say. It might be a slightly odd arena, but my little corner of it is quite cozy, and the people are warm and supportive of each other.”After spending the best part of an hour grilling Lawson, it’s time to ask her possibly the most annoying question of all. In December, a clip from the Cook, Eat, Repeat show saw Lawson prepare mashed potatoes, with the milk having been warmed in the—pause for effect—meekrowavé. It was an affectation delivered with offhand silliness that is, well, just so Nigella. But then it went viral. Yesterday, the intentional mispronunciation was nominated for a BAFTA. I almost feel guilty for bringing it up, given Lawson has described her bafflement at the attention it received, but how, I ask, could I not?After a lengthy pause and a sigh, Lawson says, “Look, I think I’m quite camp.” It is said with a sincerity that is so indescribably camp, I have to tell her nothing has warmed my tiny queer heart more over the past year. At this, she laughs uproariously. “I think some Americans think I’m serious, though? It makes me feel a bit self-conscious now because it was just natural. Mispronouncing words is, for some reason, a family habit. I hadn’t planned to say that and I didn’t even know that that’s what I call it.” How does that playfulness and humor feed into the way she writes? “Sometimes I think it’s a certain laziness in me,” she says. “I carry on because I love doing it. It felt like I took a detour, but then I liked that path so much that I stayed on it.” You are certainly not lazy, I reply. “Maybe laziness isn’t the right word. I always seem to enjoy doing things that frighten me a bit, even though I wouldn’t have admitted to enjoying them. Writing a book is always frightening anyway, so that’s okay. That doesn’t go away. It’s not essentially something new, and yet I couldn’t write a book that I felt was just a book for its own sake. I have to wait until I get an idea that I want to carry on with.”Well then: Cook, Eat, Repeat marks Lawson’s 12th cookbook. Does she already have plans for her 13th? “I’m not very good at counting,” she says, coyly. One senses that she is, in fact, very good at counting. “It just makes the next one quite frightening, though, doesn’t it? I might have to go straight into book 14, come to think of it.” Come to think of it, she probably should. The Michelin star rankings have, more or less, stayed the same since their announcement in 1931. One star? A very good restaurant in its category. Two: Excellent cooking, worth a detour. Three: Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey. Restaurants awarded with the accolade got a little red dot or two next to their name in Michelin’s guide—and most importantly, a sudden burst of life-changing clout. (As famed French chef Paul Bocuse once said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.”)Now, 90 years later, Michelin has added a new designation to its American guide: The Green Star, given for excellence in sustainability. One of its first recipients? New York’s Dan Barber.The famed chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns joins a handful of chefs—including Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters—who hold the accolade. (Michelin debuted it in Europe last year; the pandemic—and resulting shutdown of restaurants everywhere—dramatically slowed the roll-out.) Recipients meet a strict criteria: “To identify these chefs and establishments, our inspectors are mindful of many topics, such as, but not limited to: the products and ingredients used (seasonality, locality, production quality); the composition of the menu; the chef’s ability to raise customer awareness of his or her philosophy; initiatives to reduce and/or recycle food waste, management of the establishment’s non-food resources,” Gwendal Poullennec, International Director of Michelin Guides, tells Vogue.It comes as no surprise to foodies everywhere that this went to Barber. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, set on 300 acres in Hudson Valley, has been a champion of farm-to-table cuisine long before it became a buzzword. The restaurant sources its food from crops and animals raised on its own land, and aims to have little-to-no waste. The complex is also home to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a research center that focuses on regenerative agriculture.Although, it should be noted, Barber isn’t too fond of the term farm-to-table. Why? It implies that chefs and restaurants dictate what, exactly, farmers should grow. Instead he believes it should be the opposite—”The table should service the farm,” he says.Here’s what Barber means: More often than not, farmers base their crops around market demand. This is good for business, yes, but not always great for the land that they’re working: a healthy field comes from a seasonal rotation of crops, or landstock grazing. Yet if every restaurant is demanding asparagus, or strawberries, or whatever fruit or vegetable, the farmer will go to extra lengths to grow them—even if that takes more energy, resources, and depletes the soil.He doesn’t mean to completely knock the concept: serving local cuisine is a great thing—way better than continually importing goods from halfway around the world, racking up carbon emissions in the process. But he’s ready for the next step in this culinary evolution: “It’s time for a paradigm shift,” says Barber. “The farmer grows what his landscape needs him to grow—and the chef does his or her work in orchestrating those ingredients into a balanced menu.”(This, he points out, is not the most revolutionary idea: “What I just said is how cuisine has worked since the beginning of agriculture.”)So what does he think of his new Michelin star? He’s honored, naturally. ”It’s a nice reminder of the work that we’ve done for many years.” But he also dreams that eventually the distinction won’t be necessary, and being a great chef and a sustainable chef will be one in the same—even if it means foregoing lobster on your menu when you’re in a landlocked country, eliminating endless Russian caviar when you’re an American restaurant, or cutting the several cuts of steak. (Meat and dairy farming account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.) “My hope would be that there’s a merging of green stars and regular stars,” he says. “What if they coalesced so that, in order to be at the highest altitude of cooking, these sustainable gastronomical concepts had to be part of the show?”That may not actually be a pipe dream. Just this week, three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park announced that they are reopening with an entirely plant-based tasting menu. (“We have always operated with sensitivity to the impact we have on our surroundings, but it was becoming ever clearer that the current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways,” chef Daniel Humm said in a statement. )Barber hopes that kind of thinking gains momentum. This month, the Blue Hill space will host a chef-in-residence program to bring more culinary minds into the fold, with pit master Bryan Furman taking the helm on May 12. As Barber puts it, “we have a real opportunity to think right now with the consciousness to change course.” On the day I started miscarrying my first baby, my mom cooked Loobia Polo for lunch. It was a bright August day, the sun beaming through the window of my front room as I sat on the couch, disorientated and weary. I tossed the unopened mail from my agent to one side. A contract for a new cookbook, normally an occasion for celebration, now felt like an irrelevant distraction. I lay down and rested my cheek against a cushion as scents from my childhood floated in from the kitchen. Braised lamb, rich and earthy, stewed with cumin and cinnamon. The floral, citrus notes from saffron, its scarlet stems ground in a mortar and pestle, and left to steep in a cup of hot water. Sweet, nutty, vapor floating off steaming basmati. I heard the sizzle of melting butter and the clanging of pots and spoons as my mom layered cubes of potatoes and strips of green beans into the rice. When I was growing up, this classic Persian one-pot meal was our family’s equivalent of homemade apple pie. It was as comforting as it was familiar, a meal that smelled like a mother’s warm embrace. But I wasn’t going to be a mother. Not this time. I ate three mouthfuls, then crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep.Two weeks later I boarded a plane heading to Athens, Greece. I had a book to write and deadlines to meet. Flavors to explore and textures to salivate over. I had people to meet, to cook alongside, to interview. I had recipes to write and travels stories to pen. I only had one problem: I couldn’t recognize the food I was eating.Some people turn to comfort eating during times of stress but my hunger completely vanishes when I go through emotional turmoil—a challenge I now realized had become an occupational hazard. The flavors of my grief were different to the flavors I was used to. They didn’t dance on my tongue, they trespassed on my body. As I began my research, I made unwelcome discoveries. Shards of damp filo pastry from a diamond of pistachio baklava stuck uncomfortably to the roof of my mouth. Cold, congealed rice pudding wobbled menacingly on my spoon. Dry pieces of under seasoned and overcooked chicken souvlaki got stuck between my teeth. The pungency of goat butter pasta made me gag. I ate almond cookies that were too dry, washed down with coffee that was too strong. Grief had changed my appetite, punishing me in places that used to offer me pleasure. I walked the streets of Athens with large sunglasses on my face to hide the bags under my eyes, a throbbing in my temples and a tightness in my chest. My steps felt heavy and cumbersome, as if I was walking through sticky honey.With the benefit of hindsight, I know now what I didn’t know then, that the first weeks after a miscarriage are as messy as they are disorientating, with hormone crashes confusing your body and your psyche oscillating between emotions as it adjusts to a new and unexpected reality. One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage but it’s still so rarely spoken about, shrouded in guilt, secrecy, fear, failure and shame. How could I express to others the connection a mother feels with an unborn child? Why didn’t people realize I wasn’t just mourning the loss of this being, but an entire imagined future together. Why didn’t anyone understand I hadn’t just lost a baby, I’d lost a part of myself.But still, I was in Athens, a privileged Westerner, here to research a book on migration and the refugee crisis. Who was I to even think about loss? I spent my days interviewing people whose circumstances were so much more challenging than mine, who had lost so much more than I could ever imagine. I swallowed down my grief, for what place was there for it, really, as I stood in a refugee camp with women, men, and children from Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen and Myanmar, people who had fled war and violence, persecution and poverty. I listened to their stories of courage and determination. I bit my lip when they asked if I had children. I learned that personal loss makes you more sensitive to the loss of others, as several people guessed what had happened anyway during the time we spent together chopping onions or peeling tomatoes. I was reminded that when you share food with others, you can’t help but share a little piece of yourself. As we cooked and talked and listened and ate, these strangers became friends, and our mealtimes became an opportunity to distract and forget. A chance to put the worst behind us. Slowly, grief’s clench on my stomach began to loosen.I continued researching the book, following the refugees’ journey to Turkey, traveling by boat as they had done, over the narrow stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. In Istanbul, I walked the streets in search of my appetite, losing myself to the city’s winding alleyways, majestic skylines, and endless cups of tart sour cherry juice. I snacked on stuffed mussels, eaten in front of a street cart, watching the vendor squeeze a wedge of lemon on each shell. I ate tubs of nohutlu pilavı, a buttery chickpea rice, that left my lips soft and covered with a light slick of grease. I chewed on mackerel sandwiches, grilled on the promenades that line the Bosporus and washed them down with şalgam, a salty fermented turnip drink. I ordered bowls of kelle paça soup, made from slowly simmered sheep’s head and trotters, and sipped the rich, meaty broth as if it was medicine. I gained five pounds and flew home feeling nourished. A month later, when two pink lines appeared on a stick in my bathroom, we went out to a Turkish restaurant to celebrate.My grief was silenced by the thumping roar of a heartbeat booming out of the sonographer’s wand. It was drowned out by my laughter as I watched a tiny being wriggle on an ultrasound screen. It was extinguished as I pondered baby names out loud and then scribbled them into notepads. I replaced my sadness with jubilation instead.I started reorganizing work commitments and making lists of essential tasks that needed finishing before I went on maternity leave. The research trips to Greece and Turkey had given me ample material, but there was one more section needed for the book to work—a trip to Cyprus, the contested and divided island, which would bring the two communities, Greek and Turkish, together. Landing at Nicosia airport, I felt energized and alive. This time around, meals were easy. I was eating for two, after all. I learned how to make halloumi cheese from a Cypriot grandmother, using fresh milk from the goats in her village. We grated the salty, squeaky cheese and mixed it with dried spearmint, ready to stuff into small squares of ravioli. It tasted like a fresh summer breeze. I ordered extra portions of loukanika, richly spiced sausages flavored with red wine, orange zest, and fennel seeds and joyously mopped up their claret juices with flatbreads. I folded squares of mushroom börek and kneaded loaves of olive bread, delighting at the cool softness of the plump dough between my fingers. I avoided coffee and happily turned down glasses of wine. I swam in the sea during the breaks between our interviews, having quiet conversations with my lower belly about how proud I was that we were going on an adventure together. That this was our time. Later, the doctor would tell me that the baby’s heart likely stopped beating sometime during the week I was in Cyprus.The texture of my grief changed after my second miscarriage. It became more ragged. More visceral. Full of sharp edges that poked me in unexpected places. As the contractions intensified, I began to feel nauseous, the color draining from my face, my skin turning clammy. I alternated between the bathroom and the bed, squatting in the bathtub, willing for it all to be over. Finally, after what felt like hours, a sharp stabbing pain ran across my abdomen. I hauled myself onto the toilet just seconds before I felt something move through me, splashing loudly as it dropped into the water below. I slowly, cautiously, pivoted myself round to peer into the toilet bowl. My eyes flicked around the mess of blood, membranes and… I panicked, slammed the toilet flusher and slid onto the bathroom floor, holding my head in my hands.The next day, my Mom cooked Loobia Polo. Had she forgotten she’d made it last time? My grief made me cranky, and I was irrationally infuriated and incensed. I didn’t want there to be an accidental “tradition” for us to do every time I had a miscarriage. I silently hate-ate it until a piece of unchewed lamb got stuck in my throat and I almost choked. I put down my fork. I’m not hungry, I said, pushing the plate away.The following week the photographer who had accompanied me on the Cyprus trip sent me a link to the photos he had taken of our time there. There were frames of me smiling in an olive grove. (I could see I had the glow.) A picture of me holding a plate of freshly cut watermelon. (Had the baby died yet?) Here I was by the sea, tucking into crisp rings of fried calamari. (Did this poison the baby? Was it my fault?) I clicked through each photo, silently asking myself: Was the baby alive in this photo? Or was it dead? Alive. Or dead. Dead or alive. I slammed the laptop shut and called my editor. I couldn’t work on this book anymore. I needed a break.Months passed. I traveled to Thailand. To Ireland. To New York. I started smoking. I stopped smoking. I drank neat vodka over cubes of frozen ice. I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat from nightmares. I stopped cooking Mediterranean food. I ate ramen instead.One morning I woke to a familiar pressure on my bladder. I needed to pee again. I sighed. It had been the third time that night. Annoyed at my lack of sleep I plodded to the bathroom where it suddenly dawned on me what was happening. But I went to the pharmacy and bought three different tests to be sure.As my internal world began its now familiar transformation, the external world started changing too. A new virus was ravaging the globe, waging a war around us, driving us all indoors. I embraced the banality of lockdown, secretly enjoying the opportunity to retreat from the external world, and grateful that despite the calamity outside, our home felt safe and nurturing. I began leaning into the Mediterranean culinary traditions I had learned on my trips, making batches of homemade yogurt, wrapped in a towel and balanced on a radiator. I pickled cauliflower and turnips in lacto-ferments, turning them fluorescent yellow with turmeric and simmered batches of sour cherry jam which I smothered on toast with salted butter. I avoided crowds at the supermarkets and visited my local Turkish grocery stores instead, buying vine leaves for stuffing with tomato and mint flecked rice. I became obsessed with the rule of three, third times a charm, three is a magic number, third time lucky. I had to believe this in order to stay sane. I rejoiced at morning sickness, something I’d never had before, the queasiness a sign that this pregnancy was real. Happily, I started recipe testing for my book again, fighting my nausea as I scrubbed barnacles off mussels, roasted legs of lamb and sautéed batches of shrimp. Maybe I had been too foolish to stop. These recipes offered comfort and solace, and surely that was what the world needed during a global pandemic? I pounded minced beef with my hands, relishing the meditative quality of rolling them into meatballs. I chopped fresh cilantro, parsley and dill leaves for salads, inhaling deeply as I sliced, as if by breathing their aroma I could be imbued with their brightness. I whisked egg whites for meringues that I served with cream whipped with rose water, savoring the taste of blooming flowers, of sweetness, of life. One morning as I was getting dressed, I glanced down and saw a trickle of bright red blood run down my left leg. I crumpled onto the floor and howled.After the operation I stumbled out of the hospital in a daze. My partner was waiting outside the gates, the rules of the pandemic keeping him a safe distance from the tragedies unfolding inside the wards. I joked to him that twins would have been a handful anyway. He didn’t laugh. When we got home, I asked for beans on toast for dinner. He toasted pieces of sourdough, smothered them in butter and piled on the canned beans, so sweet and so salty, before finishing them with a cloud of grated cheddar cheese. We ate in exhausted silence and then fell asleep, limbs intertwined, on the living room sofa. I didn’t know it then, but it was to be one of our last moments of pure togetherness, for in the months that followed we each retreated, worn down by the cumulative years of anxiety, stress and sadness. It seemed we’d left too much grief settle in the pot of our relationship. It had gone rancid.After he moved out, I waited for my grief to kill my appetite again. But… somehow… it didn’t. It was as if my grief had cracked me wide open this time, exposing my rawness, my desires, my cravings. Suddenly, I was ravenous. As I ate, I began to set a place at the table for my grief. Accept it was a guest in my house and so I should at least be polite. I offered it drinks and snacks. I listened to its worries. I took away its wine glass if it started to get too rowdy. Sometimes we fought, sometimes we negotiated, other times we just sat in silence. Eventually we just learnt to be in the same room without shouting over each other. I started presenting it with different questions, tired of existing in the roller coaster of my own suffering. Instead of “why me?” I asked, “what next?”I turned on my laptop and stared at the words I’d drafted over the last year and the images of my trips through the Eastern Mediterranean. I thought back to the strangers who had invited me into their homes to talk about displacement; the chefs who had fed me in their restaurants as we discussed what belonging meant in a fractured world; the doctors, teachers, musicians and poets I spoke to in blustery refugee camps who honored me with the stories of their survival and their aspirations for the future. Tentatively, I started to write.I began to notice that while my grief had robbed me of my innocence, it had served me something more useful instead—a plate piled high with resilience. I let go of the fairy-tale and began to see that in life there are no last chances, just different strategies. I found some optimism in the dusty corners of a fertility clinic and added that to my dish. I sprinkled through some patience and stirred through some forgiveness. I invited hope to join us at the table.Hope smelled like warm bread baking in an oven, it tasted like a scoop of pistachio ice cream enjoyed on a hot summer’s day, it felt like a bowl of roasted pumpkin soup eaten by a roaring fire. I stopped seeing my grief as a curse and started acknowledging it as an opportunity. A chance to experience more deeply, speak more freely, see more sharply, feel more profoundly and eat more voraciously. Perhaps, my grief hadn’t actually stolen my appetite at all, it had simply added more flavors to my bowl.Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus (W.W.Norton) by Yasmin Khan is out on May 4th 2021. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Material Type: 35% Cotton – 65% Polyester Soft material feels great on your skin and very light Features pronounced sleeve cuffs, prominent waistband hem and kangaroo pocket fringes Taped neck and shoulders for comfort and style Print: Dye-sublimation printing, colors won’t fade or peel Wash Care: Recommendation Wash it by hand in below 30-degree water, hang to dry in shade, prohibit bleaching, Low Iron if Necessary Vist our store at: Visit Myshirtone now This product belong to hung3
If you love this shirt, please click on the link to buy it now: Buy American Bully Mom T-Shirt now This product printed in US America quickly delivery and easy tracking your shipment With multi styles Unisex T-shirt Premium T-Shirt Tank Top Hoodie Sweatshirt Womens T-shirt Long Sleeve near me. AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt Premium Customize Digital Printing design also available multi colors black white blue orange redgrey silver yellow green forest brown multi sizes S M L XL 2XL 3XL 4XL Buy product AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping The title of Nigella Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, is enough to transport even the most beleaguered of home cooks straight back to the early months of lockdown. (Remember when that string of words started to feel less like a daily ritual, and more like a primal scream?) Lawson first began plotting the book many months before the pandemic hit, though, and she remembers its origins a little differently. “All my books have been about where I am in my life, because I don’t see how else one writes,” she says. “Both the title and the project of Cook, Eat, Repeat predate the pandemic, and I had no idea that would become such a pattern. But it’s always been my way of living. If anything, I felt that more people came around to it over the past year.”Even when writing recipes for one, Lawson’s unique balance of warm, lyrical meditations on her endless love for food—alongside tried-and-tested recipes, of course—continues unabated throughout her new book. “I’ve always been someone who’s cooked for myself, but cooking for myself exclusively is a very new experience, and one I’ve really warmed to, actually,” Lawson says. “Although my poor neighbor opposite did need to plow her way through quite a lot during recipe testing.” A note to Lawson’s neighbor: If you’re planning a holiday anytime soon, I volunteer to house sit.In the introduction to the book, Lawson describes this process of cooking, eating, and repeating as the “story of my life.” (A small slice of her story, perhaps, but if you want the more salacious or tabloid-wrung narrative, just use Google.) Yet where Lawson’s previous books have emphasized the joyful rituals of entertaining, say, or the therapeutic qualities of baking, Cook, Eat, Repeat tells a richer and more personal story of the essential rhythms of a life spent in the kitchen. It strikes a new, charming note within her canon of food writing.“If I had to cook every meal for four people day in day out, I might be feeling somewhat differently,” says Lawson. “In terms of just cooking for myself, which took me a while to get into, it’s so easy to just let the structure of a day go. If you’re a home cook, as I am, you’re always chopping or stirring. It’s important for people not to feel that cooking calls upon all these mysterious talents which people feel they don’t have, because it’s really just about responding to the ingredients in front of you.”Lawson’s talents, however, are far from mysterious. While she may still technically be a “home cook,” in the U.K., as a Guardian journalist recently noted, she is pretty much the only person outside of Princess Diana who can be referred to by first name alone to universal recognition. In 1998, Lawson published the book that would make her name, How to Eat. Released within a year of her close friend Nigel Slater’s Real Cooking, together they pioneered (whether by accident or design) a novel and more personable form of food writing in Britain that blended friendly, diaristic meditations on cooking habits with foolproof, unintimidating recipes. It became a sensation, catapulting her from successful food columnist to one of the U.K.’s brightest new literary stars.“I was so astonished I was writing a cookbook in the first place, so I thought it would be a one-off,” Lawson says on whether she ever anticipated How to Eat as the beginning of a 23-year career in food writing. Since then, she’s become not just a household name, but the very definition of a household name. From your grandparents watching afternoon telly in the deepest corners of the shire to an agenda-setting young chef tuning in from central London each week, everybody loves Nigella. It’s an affection that is hard to communicate to those who aren’t British; even harder, one imagines, to be its subject.Is there any sense of relief when it comes to promoting her books abroad, without that added baggage? “Well, no,” Lawson sighs. “Because you get tabloid baggage wherever you go. Although in America, people want to think of me more like an expert, and that slightly unnerves me. I’m a home cook with not a great deal of expertise but quite a lot of experience. However much one says I’m not an expert, people never believe you.”Cook, Eat, Repeat was published in the U.K. last October, followed by the requisite TV show that has accompanied every one of her books since her first on-screen hit, 2001’s Nigella Bites. What makes Lawson’s appeal so enduring, though, is that celebrity is one of the least interesting things about her. Despite her silver-spoon upbringing and her starry, enigmatic charisma—as well as her infamous ability to make even the most basic of cooking techniques feel laden with innuendo—Lawson’s understanding of food, and the way she describes it in print, have always been accessible. It’s an approach she lays out clearly in her ethos for Cook, Eat, Repeat. “If a recipe has been properly tested, the first time you make it, you just do what the recipe says. But the notch-on-the-bedstead approach to cooking doesn’t help people learn how to cook, either,” she notes. “It’s about repeating certain recipes, working out what you like about them and what you says like about them.”More recently, Lawson has been expressing her culinary likes and dislikes via her (now very active) Twitter account; following and retweeting writers she finds interesting, but mostly just replying to pretty much every person that tags her upon posting an image of their latest Nigella special. When I ask her why she takes an hour or two out of her mornings to encourage those cooking her recipes on Twitter, she replies as if the answer is obvious. “It would seem like such an act of extraordinary lack of graciousness not to respond to people who are cooking your own recipes,” she says, firmly. “Also, it just makes me happy.”A friend of mine made a chocolate peanut butter cake from Cook, Eat, Repeat for her mum’s birthday last November, I tell Lawson. Where the original’s multiple tiers were as orderly and elegant as a Bauhaus apartment building, my friend’s looked more like the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster. I read Lawson the response she cheerily replied with: Happy Birthday to your mum from me! “I do think food and writing about food is about connecting with people, though,” she says, after a guilty laugh. “Twitter just takes it up a notch where I can be more direct.”Stranger still is the fact that, for all her universal appeal, Lawson has never shied away from politics; something which would leave many a public food career in the U.K. dead on arrival. Back in 1989, she caused a stir by openly voting Labour and criticizing Thatcher in a column, despite her father’s role as Chancellor in the Tory cabinet. More recently, as Britain’s Labour Party has found itself in a period of stasis due to rudderless leadership, Lawson has used her platform to support causes that matter to her personally. (Perhaps most surprisingly, given the especially toxic and divisive discourse around the issue in Britain, Lawson has shared articles that indicate her support for trans youth to determine the age at which they can begin transitioning.)It’s no accident, then, that a new guard of food writers has forged a genuine, symbiotic relationship with Lawson over Twitter. If there’s a movement to be identified here, its Pied Piper would be the brilliant Jonathan Nunn, whose Vittles newsletter on Substack should be essential reading for any food obsessive. Rebecca May Johnson’s razor-sharp observations on the relationship between cooking, class, and social resistance in Britain have also found a champion in Lawson; as have the meticulously-researched insights into the influence of South Asian immigrants on American food written by Mayukh Sen across the pond. (Meanwhile, Lawson’s reinterpretation—found on page 60 of Cook, Eat, Repeat—of the “anarcho-fabulous” left-wing journalist Ash Sarkar’s fish finger bhorta is probably the most delicious thing you’ll consume all year.)If the pleasure Lawson finds in engaging with a new generation of food writers sounds unusual, that’s because it is. Many other prominent British food writers seem to spontaneously break out in hives as the very thought of their hegemony being threatened. As just one example, The Times’s restaurant critic, Giles Coren, had his burner Twitter account exposed in 2018, which he had used to send various threats to Nunn. Coren was neither fired nor, it seems, even reprimanded, rationalizing his multiple accounts as “exclusively for responding to trolls.”It is refreshing to know that, if Nigella had anything to do with it, the bigotry and snobbishness of the British food establishment would be quickly done away with. “I’ve had quite a few young food writers starting off who I’ve met, and I’ve tried to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of by their publishers or not having to do so many books that it squeezes the joy out of it for them,” she says, resolutely. “My agent Ed Victor who died a couple of years ago—he was American—always used to have a phrase: ‘You’ve got to send the elevator back down.’ I think that’s very important.”When it comes to forging these relationships over social media, and encouraging an authentically diverse—and ultimately more exciting—new frontier for mainstream food writing in Britain, her take is equally philosophical. “Perhaps in the last year, we’ve realized how important connection with other people is, and you don’t always have to be in the same room as them. It doesn’t mean that it’s not real or that it’s shallow. It can be very strong, that connection, when it’s just an exchange on Twitter, say. It might be a slightly odd arena, but my little corner of it is quite cozy, and the people are warm and supportive of each other.”After spending the best part of an hour grilling Lawson, it’s time to ask her possibly the most annoying question of all. In December, a clip from the Cook, Eat, Repeat show saw Lawson prepare mashed potatoes, with the milk having been warmed in the—pause for effect—meekrowavé. It was an affectation delivered with offhand silliness that is, well, just so Nigella. But then it went viral. Yesterday, the intentional mispronunciation was nominated for a BAFTA. I almost feel guilty for bringing it up, given Lawson has described her bafflement at the attention it received, but how, I ask, could I not?After a lengthy pause and a sigh, Lawson says, “Look, I think I’m quite camp.” It is said with a sincerity that is so indescribably camp, I have to tell her nothing has warmed my tiny queer heart more over the past year. At this, she laughs uproariously. “I think some Americans think I’m serious, though? It makes me feel a bit self-conscious now because it was just natural. Mispronouncing words is, for some reason, a family habit. I hadn’t planned to say that and I didn’t even know that that’s what I call it.” How does that playfulness and humor feed into the way she writes? “Sometimes I think it’s a certain laziness in me,” she says. “I carry on because I love doing it. It felt like I took a detour, but then I liked that path so much that I stayed on it.” You are certainly not lazy, I reply. “Maybe laziness isn’t the right word. I always seem to enjoy doing things that frighten me a bit, even though I wouldn’t have admitted to enjoying them. Writing a book is always frightening anyway, so that’s okay. That doesn’t go away. It’s not essentially something new, and yet I couldn’t write a book that I felt was just a book for its own sake. I have to wait until I get an idea that I want to carry on with.”Well then: Cook, Eat, Repeat marks Lawson’s 12th cookbook. Does she already have plans for her 13th? “I’m not very good at counting,” she says, coyly. One senses that she is, in fact, very good at counting. “It just makes the next one quite frightening, though, doesn’t it? I might have to go straight into book 14, come to think of it.” Come to think of it, she probably should. The Michelin star rankings have, more or less, stayed the same since their announcement in 1931. One star? A very good restaurant in its category. Two: Excellent cooking, worth a detour. Three: Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey. Restaurants awarded with the accolade got a little red dot or two next to their name in Michelin’s guide—and most importantly, a sudden burst of life-changing clout. (As famed French chef Paul Bocuse once said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.”)Now, 90 years later, Michelin has added a new designation to its American guide: The Green Star, given for excellence in sustainability. One of its first recipients? New York’s Dan Barber.The famed chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns joins a handful of chefs—including Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters—who hold the accolade. (Michelin debuted it in Europe last year; the pandemic—and resulting shutdown of restaurants everywhere—dramatically slowed the roll-out.) Recipients meet a strict criteria: “To identify these chefs and establishments, our inspectors are mindful of many topics, such as, but not limited to: the products and ingredients used (seasonality, locality, production quality); the composition of the menu; the chef’s ability to raise customer awareness of his or her philosophy; initiatives to reduce and/or recycle food waste, management of the establishment’s non-food resources,” Gwendal Poullennec, International Director of Michelin Guides, tells Vogue.It comes as no surprise to foodies everywhere that this went to Barber. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, set on 300 acres in Hudson Valley, has been a champion of farm-to-table cuisine long before it became a buzzword. The restaurant sources its food from crops and animals raised on its own land, and aims to have little-to-no waste. The complex is also home to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a research center that focuses on regenerative agriculture.Although, it should be noted, Barber isn’t too fond of the term farm-to-table. Why? It implies that chefs and restaurants dictate what, exactly, farmers should grow. Instead he believes it should be the opposite—”The table should service the farm,” he says.Here’s what Barber means: More often than not, farmers base their crops around market demand. This is good for business, yes, but not always great for the land that they’re working: a healthy field comes from a seasonal rotation of crops, or landstock grazing. Yet if every restaurant is demanding asparagus, or strawberries, or whatever fruit or vegetable, the farmer will go to extra lengths to grow them—even if that takes more energy, resources, and depletes the soil.He doesn’t mean to completely knock the concept: serving local cuisine is a great thing—way better than continually importing goods from halfway around the world, racking up carbon emissions in the process. But he’s ready for the next step in this culinary evolution: “It’s time for a paradigm shift,” says Barber. “The farmer grows what his landscape needs him to grow—and the chef does his or her work in orchestrating those ingredients into a balanced menu.”(This, he points out, is not the most revolutionary idea: “What I just said is how cuisine has worked since the beginning of agriculture.”)So what does he think of his new Michelin star? He’s honored, naturally. ”It’s a nice reminder of the work that we’ve done for many years.” But he also dreams that eventually the distinction won’t be necessary, and being a great chef and a sustainable chef will be one in the same—even if it means foregoing lobster on your menu when you’re in a landlocked country, eliminating endless Russian caviar when you’re an American restaurant, or cutting the several cuts of steak. (Meat and dairy farming account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.) “My hope would be that there’s a merging of green stars and regular stars,” he says. “What if they coalesced so that, in order to be at the highest altitude of cooking, these sustainable gastronomical concepts had to be part of the show?”That may not actually be a pipe dream. Just this week, three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park announced that they are reopening with an entirely plant-based tasting menu. (“We have always operated with sensitivity to the impact we have on our surroundings, but it was becoming ever clearer that the current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways,” chef Daniel Humm said in a statement. )Barber hopes that kind of thinking gains momentum. This month, the Blue Hill space will host a chef-in-residence program to bring more culinary minds into the fold, with pit master Bryan Furman taking the helm on May 12. As Barber puts it, “we have a real opportunity to think right now with the consciousness to change course.” On the day I started miscarrying my first baby, my mom cooked Loobia Polo for lunch. It was a bright August day, the sun beaming through the window of my front room as I sat on the couch, disorientated and weary. I tossed the unopened mail from my agent to one side. A contract for a new cookbook, normally an occasion for celebration, now felt like an irrelevant distraction. I lay down and rested my cheek against a cushion as scents from my childhood floated in from the kitchen. Braised lamb, rich and earthy, stewed with cumin and cinnamon. The floral, citrus notes from saffron, its scarlet stems ground in a mortar and pestle, and left to steep in a cup of hot water. Sweet, nutty, vapor floating off steaming basmati. I heard the sizzle of melting butter and the clanging of pots and spoons as my mom layered cubes of potatoes and strips of green beans into the rice. When I was growing up, this classic Persian one-pot meal was our family’s equivalent of homemade apple pie. It was as comforting as it was familiar, a meal that smelled like a mother’s warm embrace. But I wasn’t going to be a mother. Not this time. I ate three mouthfuls, then crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep.Two weeks later I boarded a plane heading to Athens, Greece. I had a book to write and deadlines to meet. Flavors to explore and textures to salivate over. I had people to meet, to cook alongside, to interview. I had recipes to write and travels stories to pen. I only had one problem: I couldn’t recognize the food I was eating.Some people turn to comfort eating during times of stress but my hunger completely vanishes when I go through emotional turmoil—a challenge I now realized had become an occupational hazard. The flavors of my grief were different to the flavors I was used to. They didn’t dance on my tongue, they trespassed on my body. As I began my research, I made unwelcome discoveries. Shards of damp filo pastry from a diamond of pistachio baklava stuck uncomfortably to the roof of my mouth. Cold, congealed rice pudding wobbled menacingly on my spoon. Dry pieces of under seasoned and overcooked chicken souvlaki got stuck between my teeth. The pungency of goat butter pasta made me gag. I ate almond cookies that were too dry, washed down with coffee that was too strong. Grief had changed my appetite, punishing me in places that used to offer me pleasure. I walked the streets of Athens with large sunglasses on my face to hide the bags under my eyes, a throbbing in my temples and a tightness in my chest. My steps felt heavy and cumbersome, as if I was walking through sticky honey.With the benefit of hindsight, I know now what I didn’t know then, that the first weeks after a miscarriage are as messy as they are disorientating, with hormone crashes confusing your body and your psyche oscillating between emotions as it adjusts to a new and unexpected reality. One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage but it’s still so rarely spoken about, shrouded in guilt, secrecy, fear, failure and shame. How could I express to others the connection a mother feels with an unborn child? Why didn’t people realize I wasn’t just mourning the loss of this being, but an entire imagined future together. Why didn’t anyone understand I hadn’t just lost a baby, I’d lost a part of myself.But still, I was in Athens, a privileged Westerner, here to research a book on migration and the refugee crisis. Who was I to even think about loss? I spent my days interviewing people whose circumstances were so much more challenging than mine, who had lost so much more than I could ever imagine. I swallowed down my grief, for what place was there for it, really, as I stood in a refugee camp with women, men, and children from Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen and Myanmar, people who had fled war and violence, persecution and poverty. I listened to their stories of courage and determination. I bit my lip when they asked if I had children. I learned that personal loss makes you more sensitive to the loss of others, as several people guessed what had happened anyway during the time we spent together chopping onions or peeling tomatoes. I was reminded that when you share food with others, you can’t help but share a little piece of yourself. As we cooked and talked and listened and ate, these strangers became friends, and our mealtimes became an opportunity to distract and forget. A chance to put the worst behind us. Slowly, grief’s clench on my stomach began to loosen.I continued researching the book, following the refugees’ journey to Turkey, traveling by boat as they had done, over the narrow stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. In Istanbul, I walked the streets in search of my appetite, losing myself to the city’s winding alleyways, majestic skylines, and endless cups of tart sour cherry juice. I snacked on stuffed mussels, eaten in front of a street cart, watching the vendor squeeze a wedge of lemon on each shell. I ate tubs of nohutlu pilavı, a buttery chickpea rice, that left my lips soft and covered with a light slick of grease. I chewed on mackerel sandwiches, grilled on the promenades that line the Bosporus and washed them down with şalgam, a salty fermented turnip drink. I ordered bowls of kelle paça soup, made from slowly simmered sheep’s head and trotters, and sipped the rich, meaty broth as if it was medicine. I gained five pounds and flew home feeling nourished. A month later, when two pink lines appeared on a stick in my bathroom, we went out to a Turkish restaurant to celebrate.My grief was silenced by the thumping roar of a heartbeat booming out of the sonographer’s wand. It was drowned out by my laughter as I watched a tiny being wriggle on an ultrasound screen. It was extinguished as I pondered baby names out loud and then scribbled them into notepads. I replaced my sadness with jubilation instead.I started reorganizing work commitments and making lists of essential tasks that needed finishing before I went on maternity leave. The research trips to Greece and Turkey had given me ample material, but there was one more section needed for the book to work—a trip to Cyprus, the contested and divided island, which would bring the two communities, Greek and Turkish, together. Landing at Nicosia airport, I felt energized and alive. This time around, meals were easy. I was eating for two, after all. I learned how to make halloumi cheese from a Cypriot grandmother, using fresh milk from the goats in her village. We grated the salty, squeaky cheese and mixed it with dried spearmint, ready to stuff into small squares of ravioli. It tasted like a fresh summer breeze. I ordered extra portions of loukanika, richly spiced sausages flavored with red wine, orange zest, and fennel seeds and joyously mopped up their claret juices with flatbreads. I folded squares of mushroom börek and kneaded loaves of olive bread, delighting at the cool softness of the plump dough between my fingers. I avoided coffee and happily turned down glasses of wine. I swam in the sea during the breaks between our interviews, having quiet conversations with my lower belly about how proud I was that we were going on an adventure together. That this was our time. Later, the doctor would tell me that the baby’s heart likely stopped beating sometime during the week I was in Cyprus.The texture of my grief changed after my second miscarriage. It became more ragged. More visceral. Full of sharp edges that poked me in unexpected places. As the contractions intensified, I began to feel nauseous, the color draining from my face, my skin turning clammy. I alternated between the bathroom and the bed, squatting in the bathtub, willing for it all to be over. Finally, after what felt like hours, a sharp stabbing pain ran across my abdomen. I hauled myself onto the toilet just seconds before I felt something move through me, splashing loudly as it dropped into the water below. I slowly, cautiously, pivoted myself round to peer into the toilet bowl. My eyes flicked around the mess of blood, membranes and… I panicked, slammed the toilet flusher and slid onto the bathroom floor, holding my head in my hands.The next day, my Mom cooked Loobia Polo. Had she forgotten she’d made it last time? My grief made me cranky, and I was irrationally infuriated and incensed. I didn’t want there to be an accidental “tradition” for us to do every time I had a miscarriage. I silently hate-ate it until a piece of unchewed lamb got stuck in my throat and I almost choked. I put down my fork. I’m not hungry, I said, pushing the plate away.The following week the photographer who had accompanied me on the Cyprus trip sent me a link to the photos he had taken of our time there. There were frames of me smiling in an olive grove. (I could see I had the glow.) A picture of me holding a plate of freshly cut watermelon. (Had the baby died yet?) Here I was by the sea, tucking into crisp rings of fried calamari. (Did this poison the baby? Was it my fault?) I clicked through each photo, silently asking myself: Was the baby alive in this photo? Or was it dead? Alive. Or dead. Dead or alive. I slammed the laptop shut and called my editor. I couldn’t work on this book anymore. I needed a break.Months passed. I traveled to Thailand. To Ireland. To New York. I started smoking. I stopped smoking. I drank neat vodka over cubes of frozen ice. I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat from nightmares. I stopped cooking Mediterranean food. I ate ramen instead.One morning I woke to a familiar pressure on my bladder. I needed to pee again. I sighed. It had been the third time that night. Annoyed at my lack of sleep I plodded to the bathroom where it suddenly dawned on me what was happening. But I went to the pharmacy and bought three different tests to be sure.As my internal world began its now familiar transformation, the external world started changing too. A new virus was ravaging the globe, waging a war around us, driving us all indoors. I embraced the banality of lockdown, secretly enjoying the opportunity to retreat from the external world, and grateful that despite the calamity outside, our home felt safe and nurturing. I began leaning into the Mediterranean culinary traditions I had learned on my trips, making batches of homemade yogurt, wrapped in a towel and balanced on a radiator. I pickled cauliflower and turnips in lacto-ferments, turning them fluorescent yellow with turmeric and simmered batches of sour cherry jam which I smothered on toast with salted butter. I avoided crowds at the supermarkets and visited my local Turkish grocery stores instead, buying vine leaves for stuffing with tomato and mint flecked rice. I became obsessed with the rule of three, third times a charm, three is a magic number, third time lucky. I had to believe this in order to stay sane. I rejoiced at morning sickness, something I’d never had before, the queasiness a sign that this pregnancy was real. Happily, I started recipe testing for my book again, fighting my nausea as I scrubbed barnacles off mussels, roasted legs of lamb and sautéed batches of shrimp. Maybe I had been too foolish to stop. These recipes offered comfort and solace, and surely that was what the world needed during a global pandemic? I pounded minced beef with my hands, relishing the meditative quality of rolling them into meatballs. I chopped fresh cilantro, parsley and dill leaves for salads, inhaling deeply as I sliced, as if by breathing their aroma I could be imbued with their brightness. I whisked egg whites for meringues that I served with cream whipped with rose water, savoring the taste of blooming flowers, of sweetness, of life. One morning as I was getting dressed, I glanced down and saw a trickle of bright red blood run down my left leg. I crumpled onto the floor and howled.After the operation I stumbled out of the hospital in a daze. My partner was waiting outside the gates, the rules of the pandemic keeping him a safe distance from the tragedies unfolding inside the wards. I joked to him that twins would have been a handful anyway. He didn’t laugh. When we got home, I asked for beans on toast for dinner. He toasted pieces of sourdough, smothered them in butter and piled on the canned beans, so sweet and so salty, before finishing them with a cloud of grated cheddar cheese. We ate in exhausted silence and then fell asleep, limbs intertwined, on the living room sofa. I didn’t know it then, but it was to be one of our last moments of pure togetherness, for in the months that followed we each retreated, worn down by the cumulative years of anxiety, stress and sadness. It seemed we’d left too much grief settle in the pot of our relationship. It had gone rancid.After he moved out, I waited for my grief to kill my appetite again. But… somehow… it didn’t. It was as if my grief had cracked me wide open this time, exposing my rawness, my desires, my cravings. Suddenly, I was ravenous. As I ate, I began to set a place at the table for my grief. Accept it was a guest in my house and so I should at least be polite. I offered it drinks and snacks. I listened to its worries. I took away its wine glass if it started to get too rowdy. Sometimes we fought, sometimes we negotiated, other times we just sat in silence. Eventually we just learnt to be in the same room without shouting over each other. I started presenting it with different questions, tired of existing in the roller coaster of my own suffering. Instead of “why me?” I asked, “what next?”I turned on my laptop and stared at the words I’d drafted over the last year and the images of my trips through the Eastern Mediterranean. I thought back to the strangers who had invited me into their homes to talk about displacement; the chefs who had fed me in their restaurants as we discussed what belonging meant in a fractured world; the doctors, teachers, musicians and poets I spoke to in blustery refugee camps who honored me with the stories of their survival and their aspirations for the future. Tentatively, I started to write.I began to notice that while my grief had robbed me of my innocence, it had served me something more useful instead—a plate piled high with resilience. I let go of the fairy-tale and began to see that in life there are no last chances, just different strategies. I found some optimism in the dusty corners of a fertility clinic and added that to my dish. I sprinkled through some patience and stirred through some forgiveness. I invited hope to join us at the table.Hope smelled like warm bread baking in an oven, it tasted like a scoop of pistachio ice cream enjoyed on a hot summer’s day, it felt like a bowl of roasted pumpkin soup eaten by a roaring fire. I stopped seeing my grief as a curse and started acknowledging it as an opportunity. A chance to experience more deeply, speak more freely, see more sharply, feel more profoundly and eat more voraciously. Perhaps, my grief hadn’t actually stolen my appetite at all, it had simply added more flavors to my bowl.Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus (W.W.Norton) by Yasmin Khan is out on May 4th 2021. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. 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AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt Premium Customize Digital Printing design also available multi colors black white blue orange redgrey silver yellow green forest brown multi sizes S M L XL 2XL 3XL 4XL Buy product AliensDesignTshirt Kansas City Chiefs And Kansas City Royals Heart T-shirt You can gift it for mom dad papa mommy daddy mama boyfriend girlfriend grandpa grandma grandfather grandmother husband wife family teacher Its also casual enough to wear for working out shopping running jogging hiking biking or hanging out with friends Unique design personalized design for Valentines day St Patricks day Mothers day Fathers day Birthday More info 53 oz ? pre-shrunk cotton Double-needle stitched neckline bottom hem and sleeves Quarter turned Seven-eighths inch seamless collar Shoulder-to-shoulder taping The title of Nigella Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, is enough to transport even the most beleaguered of home cooks straight back to the early months of lockdown. (Remember when that string of words started to feel less like a daily ritual, and more like a primal scream?) Lawson first began plotting the book many months before the pandemic hit, though, and she remembers its origins a little differently. “All my books have been about where I am in my life, because I don’t see how else one writes,” she says. “Both the title and the project of Cook, Eat, Repeat predate the pandemic, and I had no idea that would become such a pattern. But it’s always been my way of living. If anything, I felt that more people came around to it over the past year.”Even when writing recipes for one, Lawson’s unique balance of warm, lyrical meditations on her endless love for food—alongside tried-and-tested recipes, of course—continues unabated throughout her new book. “I’ve always been someone who’s cooked for myself, but cooking for myself exclusively is a very new experience, and one I’ve really warmed to, actually,” Lawson says. “Although my poor neighbor opposite did need to plow her way through quite a lot during recipe testing.” A note to Lawson’s neighbor: If you’re planning a holiday anytime soon, I volunteer to house sit.In the introduction to the book, Lawson describes this process of cooking, eating, and repeating as the “story of my life.” (A small slice of her story, perhaps, but if you want the more salacious or tabloid-wrung narrative, just use Google.) Yet where Lawson’s previous books have emphasized the joyful rituals of entertaining, say, or the therapeutic qualities of baking, Cook, Eat, Repeat tells a richer and more personal story of the essential rhythms of a life spent in the kitchen. It strikes a new, charming note within her canon of food writing.“If I had to cook every meal for four people day in day out, I might be feeling somewhat differently,” says Lawson. “In terms of just cooking for myself, which took me a while to get into, it’s so easy to just let the structure of a day go. If you’re a home cook, as I am, you’re always chopping or stirring. It’s important for people not to feel that cooking calls upon all these mysterious talents which people feel they don’t have, because it’s really just about responding to the ingredients in front of you.”Lawson’s talents, however, are far from mysterious. While she may still technically be a “home cook,” in the U.K., as a Guardian journalist recently noted, she is pretty much the only person outside of Princess Diana who can be referred to by first name alone to universal recognition. In 1998, Lawson published the book that would make her name, How to Eat. Released within a year of her close friend Nigel Slater’s Real Cooking, together they pioneered (whether by accident or design) a novel and more personable form of food writing in Britain that blended friendly, diaristic meditations on cooking habits with foolproof, unintimidating recipes. It became a sensation, catapulting her from successful food columnist to one of the U.K.’s brightest new literary stars.“I was so astonished I was writing a cookbook in the first place, so I thought it would be a one-off,” Lawson says on whether she ever anticipated How to Eat as the beginning of a 23-year career in food writing. Since then, she’s become not just a household name, but the very definition of a household name. From your grandparents watching afternoon telly in the deepest corners of the shire to an agenda-setting young chef tuning in from central London each week, everybody loves Nigella. It’s an affection that is hard to communicate to those who aren’t British; even harder, one imagines, to be its subject.Is there any sense of relief when it comes to promoting her books abroad, without that added baggage? “Well, no,” Lawson sighs. “Because you get tabloid baggage wherever you go. Although in America, people want to think of me more like an expert, and that slightly unnerves me. I’m a home cook with not a great deal of expertise but quite a lot of experience. However much one says I’m not an expert, people never believe you.”Cook, Eat, Repeat was published in the U.K. last October, followed by the requisite TV show that has accompanied every one of her books since her first on-screen hit, 2001’s Nigella Bites. What makes Lawson’s appeal so enduring, though, is that celebrity is one of the least interesting things about her. Despite her silver-spoon upbringing and her starry, enigmatic charisma—as well as her infamous ability to make even the most basic of cooking techniques feel laden with innuendo—Lawson’s understanding of food, and the way she describes it in print, have always been accessible. It’s an approach she lays out clearly in her ethos for Cook, Eat, Repeat. “If a recipe has been properly tested, the first time you make it, you just do what the recipe says. But the notch-on-the-bedstead approach to cooking doesn’t help people learn how to cook, either,” she notes. “It’s about repeating certain recipes, working out what you like about them and what you says like about them.”More recently, Lawson has been expressing her culinary likes and dislikes via her (now very active) Twitter account; following and retweeting writers she finds interesting, but mostly just replying to pretty much every person that tags her upon posting an image of their latest Nigella special. When I ask her why she takes an hour or two out of her mornings to encourage those cooking her recipes on Twitter, she replies as if the answer is obvious. “It would seem like such an act of extraordinary lack of graciousness not to respond to people who are cooking your own recipes,” she says, firmly. “Also, it just makes me happy.”A friend of mine made a chocolate peanut butter cake from Cook, Eat, Repeat for her mum’s birthday last November, I tell Lawson. Where the original’s multiple tiers were as orderly and elegant as a Bauhaus apartment building, my friend’s looked more like the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster. I read Lawson the response she cheerily replied with: Happy Birthday to your mum from me! “I do think food and writing about food is about connecting with people, though,” she says, after a guilty laugh. “Twitter just takes it up a notch where I can be more direct.”Stranger still is the fact that, for all her universal appeal, Lawson has never shied away from politics; something which would leave many a public food career in the U.K. dead on arrival. Back in 1989, she caused a stir by openly voting Labour and criticizing Thatcher in a column, despite her father’s role as Chancellor in the Tory cabinet. More recently, as Britain’s Labour Party has found itself in a period of stasis due to rudderless leadership, Lawson has used her platform to support causes that matter to her personally. (Perhaps most surprisingly, given the especially toxic and divisive discourse around the issue in Britain, Lawson has shared articles that indicate her support for trans youth to determine the age at which they can begin transitioning.)It’s no accident, then, that a new guard of food writers has forged a genuine, symbiotic relationship with Lawson over Twitter. If there’s a movement to be identified here, its Pied Piper would be the brilliant Jonathan Nunn, whose Vittles newsletter on Substack should be essential reading for any food obsessive. Rebecca May Johnson’s razor-sharp observations on the relationship between cooking, class, and social resistance in Britain have also found a champion in Lawson; as have the meticulously-researched insights into the influence of South Asian immigrants on American food written by Mayukh Sen across the pond. (Meanwhile, Lawson’s reinterpretation—found on page 60 of Cook, Eat, Repeat—of the “anarcho-fabulous” left-wing journalist Ash Sarkar’s fish finger bhorta is probably the most delicious thing you’ll consume all year.)If the pleasure Lawson finds in engaging with a new generation of food writers sounds unusual, that’s because it is. Many other prominent British food writers seem to spontaneously break out in hives as the very thought of their hegemony being threatened. As just one example, The Times’s restaurant critic, Giles Coren, had his burner Twitter account exposed in 2018, which he had used to send various threats to Nunn. Coren was neither fired nor, it seems, even reprimanded, rationalizing his multiple accounts as “exclusively for responding to trolls.”It is refreshing to know that, if Nigella had anything to do with it, the bigotry and snobbishness of the British food establishment would be quickly done away with. “I’ve had quite a few young food writers starting off who I’ve met, and I’ve tried to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of by their publishers or not having to do so many books that it squeezes the joy out of it for them,” she says, resolutely. “My agent Ed Victor who died a couple of years ago—he was American—always used to have a phrase: ‘You’ve got to send the elevator back down.’ I think that’s very important.”When it comes to forging these relationships over social media, and encouraging an authentically diverse—and ultimately more exciting—new frontier for mainstream food writing in Britain, her take is equally philosophical. “Perhaps in the last year, we’ve realized how important connection with other people is, and you don’t always have to be in the same room as them. It doesn’t mean that it’s not real or that it’s shallow. It can be very strong, that connection, when it’s just an exchange on Twitter, say. It might be a slightly odd arena, but my little corner of it is quite cozy, and the people are warm and supportive of each other.”After spending the best part of an hour grilling Lawson, it’s time to ask her possibly the most annoying question of all. In December, a clip from the Cook, Eat, Repeat show saw Lawson prepare mashed potatoes, with the milk having been warmed in the—pause for effect—meekrowavé. It was an affectation delivered with offhand silliness that is, well, just so Nigella. But then it went viral. Yesterday, the intentional mispronunciation was nominated for a BAFTA. I almost feel guilty for bringing it up, given Lawson has described her bafflement at the attention it received, but how, I ask, could I not?After a lengthy pause and a sigh, Lawson says, “Look, I think I’m quite camp.” It is said with a sincerity that is so indescribably camp, I have to tell her nothing has warmed my tiny queer heart more over the past year. At this, she laughs uproariously. “I think some Americans think I’m serious, though? It makes me feel a bit self-conscious now because it was just natural. Mispronouncing words is, for some reason, a family habit. I hadn’t planned to say that and I didn’t even know that that’s what I call it.” How does that playfulness and humor feed into the way she writes? “Sometimes I think it’s a certain laziness in me,” she says. “I carry on because I love doing it. It felt like I took a detour, but then I liked that path so much that I stayed on it.” You are certainly not lazy, I reply. “Maybe laziness isn’t the right word. I always seem to enjoy doing things that frighten me a bit, even though I wouldn’t have admitted to enjoying them. Writing a book is always frightening anyway, so that’s okay. That doesn’t go away. It’s not essentially something new, and yet I couldn’t write a book that I felt was just a book for its own sake. I have to wait until I get an idea that I want to carry on with.”Well then: Cook, Eat, Repeat marks Lawson’s 12th cookbook. Does she already have plans for her 13th? “I’m not very good at counting,” she says, coyly. One senses that she is, in fact, very good at counting. “It just makes the next one quite frightening, though, doesn’t it? I might have to go straight into book 14, come to think of it.” Come to think of it, she probably should. The Michelin star rankings have, more or less, stayed the same since their announcement in 1931. One star? A very good restaurant in its category. Two: Excellent cooking, worth a detour. Three: Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey. Restaurants awarded with the accolade got a little red dot or two next to their name in Michelin’s guide—and most importantly, a sudden burst of life-changing clout. (As famed French chef Paul Bocuse once said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.”)Now, 90 years later, Michelin has added a new designation to its American guide: The Green Star, given for excellence in sustainability. One of its first recipients? New York’s Dan Barber.The famed chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns joins a handful of chefs—including Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters—who hold the accolade. (Michelin debuted it in Europe last year; the pandemic—and resulting shutdown of restaurants everywhere—dramatically slowed the roll-out.) Recipients meet a strict criteria: “To identify these chefs and establishments, our inspectors are mindful of many topics, such as, but not limited to: the products and ingredients used (seasonality, locality, production quality); the composition of the menu; the chef’s ability to raise customer awareness of his or her philosophy; initiatives to reduce and/or recycle food waste, management of the establishment’s non-food resources,” Gwendal Poullennec, International Director of Michelin Guides, tells Vogue.It comes as no surprise to foodies everywhere that this went to Barber. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, set on 300 acres in Hudson Valley, has been a champion of farm-to-table cuisine long before it became a buzzword. The restaurant sources its food from crops and animals raised on its own land, and aims to have little-to-no waste. The complex is also home to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a research center that focuses on regenerative agriculture.Although, it should be noted, Barber isn’t too fond of the term farm-to-table. Why? It implies that chefs and restaurants dictate what, exactly, farmers should grow. Instead he believes it should be the opposite—”The table should service the farm,” he says.Here’s what Barber means: More often than not, farmers base their crops around market demand. This is good for business, yes, but not always great for the land that they’re working: a healthy field comes from a seasonal rotation of crops, or landstock grazing. Yet if every restaurant is demanding asparagus, or strawberries, or whatever fruit or vegetable, the farmer will go to extra lengths to grow them—even if that takes more energy, resources, and depletes the soil.He doesn’t mean to completely knock the concept: serving local cuisine is a great thing—way better than continually importing goods from halfway around the world, racking up carbon emissions in the process. But he’s ready for the next step in this culinary evolution: “It’s time for a paradigm shift,” says Barber. “The farmer grows what his landscape needs him to grow—and the chef does his or her work in orchestrating those ingredients into a balanced menu.”(This, he points out, is not the most revolutionary idea: “What I just said is how cuisine has worked since the beginning of agriculture.”)So what does he think of his new Michelin star? He’s honored, naturally. ”It’s a nice reminder of the work that we’ve done for many years.” But he also dreams that eventually the distinction won’t be necessary, and being a great chef and a sustainable chef will be one in the same—even if it means foregoing lobster on your menu when you’re in a landlocked country, eliminating endless Russian caviar when you’re an American restaurant, or cutting the several cuts of steak. (Meat and dairy farming account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.) “My hope would be that there’s a merging of green stars and regular stars,” he says. “What if they coalesced so that, in order to be at the highest altitude of cooking, these sustainable gastronomical concepts had to be part of the show?”That may not actually be a pipe dream. Just this week, three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park announced that they are reopening with an entirely plant-based tasting menu. (“We have always operated with sensitivity to the impact we have on our surroundings, but it was becoming ever clearer that the current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways,” chef Daniel Humm said in a statement. )Barber hopes that kind of thinking gains momentum. This month, the Blue Hill space will host a chef-in-residence program to bring more culinary minds into the fold, with pit master Bryan Furman taking the helm on May 12. As Barber puts it, “we have a real opportunity to think right now with the consciousness to change course.” On the day I started miscarrying my first baby, my mom cooked Loobia Polo for lunch. It was a bright August day, the sun beaming through the window of my front room as I sat on the couch, disorientated and weary. I tossed the unopened mail from my agent to one side. A contract for a new cookbook, normally an occasion for celebration, now felt like an irrelevant distraction. I lay down and rested my cheek against a cushion as scents from my childhood floated in from the kitchen. Braised lamb, rich and earthy, stewed with cumin and cinnamon. The floral, citrus notes from saffron, its scarlet stems ground in a mortar and pestle, and left to steep in a cup of hot water. Sweet, nutty, vapor floating off steaming basmati. I heard the sizzle of melting butter and the clanging of pots and spoons as my mom layered cubes of potatoes and strips of green beans into the rice. When I was growing up, this classic Persian one-pot meal was our family’s equivalent of homemade apple pie. It was as comforting as it was familiar, a meal that smelled like a mother’s warm embrace. But I wasn’t going to be a mother. Not this time. I ate three mouthfuls, then crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep.Two weeks later I boarded a plane heading to Athens, Greece. I had a book to write and deadlines to meet. Flavors to explore and textures to salivate over. I had people to meet, to cook alongside, to interview. I had recipes to write and travels stories to pen. I only had one problem: I couldn’t recognize the food I was eating.Some people turn to comfort eating during times of stress but my hunger completely vanishes when I go through emotional turmoil—a challenge I now realized had become an occupational hazard. The flavors of my grief were different to the flavors I was used to. They didn’t dance on my tongue, they trespassed on my body. As I began my research, I made unwelcome discoveries. Shards of damp filo pastry from a diamond of pistachio baklava stuck uncomfortably to the roof of my mouth. Cold, congealed rice pudding wobbled menacingly on my spoon. Dry pieces of under seasoned and overcooked chicken souvlaki got stuck between my teeth. The pungency of goat butter pasta made me gag. I ate almond cookies that were too dry, washed down with coffee that was too strong. Grief had changed my appetite, punishing me in places that used to offer me pleasure. I walked the streets of Athens with large sunglasses on my face to hide the bags under my eyes, a throbbing in my temples and a tightness in my chest. My steps felt heavy and cumbersome, as if I was walking through sticky honey.With the benefit of hindsight, I know now what I didn’t know then, that the first weeks after a miscarriage are as messy as they are disorientating, with hormone crashes confusing your body and your psyche oscillating between emotions as it adjusts to a new and unexpected reality. One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage but it’s still so rarely spoken about, shrouded in guilt, secrecy, fear, failure and shame. How could I express to others the connection a mother feels with an unborn child? Why didn’t people realize I wasn’t just mourning the loss of this being, but an entire imagined future together. Why didn’t anyone understand I hadn’t just lost a baby, I’d lost a part of myself.But still, I was in Athens, a privileged Westerner, here to research a book on migration and the refugee crisis. Who was I to even think about loss? I spent my days interviewing people whose circumstances were so much more challenging than mine, who had lost so much more than I could ever imagine. I swallowed down my grief, for what place was there for it, really, as I stood in a refugee camp with women, men, and children from Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen and Myanmar, people who had fled war and violence, persecution and poverty. I listened to their stories of courage and determination. I bit my lip when they asked if I had children. I learned that personal loss makes you more sensitive to the loss of others, as several people guessed what had happened anyway during the time we spent together chopping onions or peeling tomatoes. I was reminded that when you share food with others, you can’t help but share a little piece of yourself. As we cooked and talked and listened and ate, these strangers became friends, and our mealtimes became an opportunity to distract and forget. A chance to put the worst behind us. Slowly, grief’s clench on my stomach began to loosen.I continued researching the book, following the refugees’ journey to Turkey, traveling by boat as they had done, over the narrow stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. In Istanbul, I walked the streets in search of my appetite, losing myself to the city’s winding alleyways, majestic skylines, and endless cups of tart sour cherry juice. I snacked on stuffed mussels, eaten in front of a street cart, watching the vendor squeeze a wedge of lemon on each shell. I ate tubs of nohutlu pilavı, a buttery chickpea rice, that left my lips soft and covered with a light slick of grease. I chewed on mackerel sandwiches, grilled on the promenades that line the Bosporus and washed them down with şalgam, a salty fermented turnip drink. I ordered bowls of kelle paça soup, made from slowly simmered sheep’s head and trotters, and sipped the rich, meaty broth as if it was medicine. I gained five pounds and flew home feeling nourished. A month later, when two pink lines appeared on a stick in my bathroom, we went out to a Turkish restaurant to celebrate.My grief was silenced by the thumping roar of a heartbeat booming out of the sonographer’s wand. It was drowned out by my laughter as I watched a tiny being wriggle on an ultrasound screen. It was extinguished as I pondered baby names out loud and then scribbled them into notepads. I replaced my sadness with jubilation instead.I started reorganizing work commitments and making lists of essential tasks that needed finishing before I went on maternity leave. The research trips to Greece and Turkey had given me ample material, but there was one more section needed for the book to work—a trip to Cyprus, the contested and divided island, which would bring the two communities, Greek and Turkish, together. Landing at Nicosia airport, I felt energized and alive. This time around, meals were easy. I was eating for two, after all. I learned how to make halloumi cheese from a Cypriot grandmother, using fresh milk from the goats in her village. We grated the salty, squeaky cheese and mixed it with dried spearmint, ready to stuff into small squares of ravioli. It tasted like a fresh summer breeze. I ordered extra portions of loukanika, richly spiced sausages flavored with red wine, orange zest, and fennel seeds and joyously mopped up their claret juices with flatbreads. I folded squares of mushroom börek and kneaded loaves of olive bread, delighting at the cool softness of the plump dough between my fingers. I avoided coffee and happily turned down glasses of wine. I swam in the sea during the breaks between our interviews, having quiet conversations with my lower belly about how proud I was that we were going on an adventure together. That this was our time. Later, the doctor would tell me that the baby’s heart likely stopped beating sometime during the week I was in Cyprus.The texture of my grief changed after my second miscarriage. It became more ragged. More visceral. Full of sharp edges that poked me in unexpected places. As the contractions intensified, I began to feel nauseous, the color draining from my face, my skin turning clammy. I alternated between the bathroom and the bed, squatting in the bathtub, willing for it all to be over. Finally, after what felt like hours, a sharp stabbing pain ran across my abdomen. I hauled myself onto the toilet just seconds before I felt something move through me, splashing loudly as it dropped into the water below. I slowly, cautiously, pivoted myself round to peer into the toilet bowl. My eyes flicked around the mess of blood, membranes and… I panicked, slammed the toilet flusher and slid onto the bathroom floor, holding my head in my hands.The next day, my Mom cooked Loobia Polo. Had she forgotten she’d made it last time? My grief made me cranky, and I was irrationally infuriated and incensed. I didn’t want there to be an accidental “tradition” for us to do every time I had a miscarriage. I silently hate-ate it until a piece of unchewed lamb got stuck in my throat and I almost choked. I put down my fork. I’m not hungry, I said, pushing the plate away.The following week the photographer who had accompanied me on the Cyprus trip sent me a link to the photos he had taken of our time there. There were frames of me smiling in an olive grove. (I could see I had the glow.) A picture of me holding a plate of freshly cut watermelon. (Had the baby died yet?) Here I was by the sea, tucking into crisp rings of fried calamari. (Did this poison the baby? Was it my fault?) I clicked through each photo, silently asking myself: Was the baby alive in this photo? Or was it dead? Alive. Or dead. Dead or alive. I slammed the laptop shut and called my editor. I couldn’t work on this book anymore. I needed a break.Months passed. I traveled to Thailand. To Ireland. To New York. I started smoking. I stopped smoking. I drank neat vodka over cubes of frozen ice. I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat from nightmares. I stopped cooking Mediterranean food. I ate ramen instead.One morning I woke to a familiar pressure on my bladder. I needed to pee again. I sighed. It had been the third time that night. Annoyed at my lack of sleep I plodded to the bathroom where it suddenly dawned on me what was happening. But I went to the pharmacy and bought three different tests to be sure.As my internal world began its now familiar transformation, the external world started changing too. A new virus was ravaging the globe, waging a war around us, driving us all indoors. I embraced the banality of lockdown, secretly enjoying the opportunity to retreat from the external world, and grateful that despite the calamity outside, our home felt safe and nurturing. I began leaning into the Mediterranean culinary traditions I had learned on my trips, making batches of homemade yogurt, wrapped in a towel and balanced on a radiator. I pickled cauliflower and turnips in lacto-ferments, turning them fluorescent yellow with turmeric and simmered batches of sour cherry jam which I smothered on toast with salted butter. I avoided crowds at the supermarkets and visited my local Turkish grocery stores instead, buying vine leaves for stuffing with tomato and mint flecked rice. I became obsessed with the rule of three, third times a charm, three is a magic number, third time lucky. I had to believe this in order to stay sane. I rejoiced at morning sickness, something I’d never had before, the queasiness a sign that this pregnancy was real. Happily, I started recipe testing for my book again, fighting my nausea as I scrubbed barnacles off mussels, roasted legs of lamb and sautéed batches of shrimp. Maybe I had been too foolish to stop. These recipes offered comfort and solace, and surely that was what the world needed during a global pandemic? I pounded minced beef with my hands, relishing the meditative quality of rolling them into meatballs. I chopped fresh cilantro, parsley and dill leaves for salads, inhaling deeply as I sliced, as if by breathing their aroma I could be imbued with their brightness. I whisked egg whites for meringues that I served with cream whipped with rose water, savoring the taste of blooming flowers, of sweetness, of life. One morning as I was getting dressed, I glanced down and saw a trickle of bright red blood run down my left leg. I crumpled onto the floor and howled.After the operation I stumbled out of the hospital in a daze. My partner was waiting outside the gates, the rules of the pandemic keeping him a safe distance from the tragedies unfolding inside the wards. I joked to him that twins would have been a handful anyway. He didn’t laugh. When we got home, I asked for beans on toast for dinner. He toasted pieces of sourdough, smothered them in butter and piled on the canned beans, so sweet and so salty, before finishing them with a cloud of grated cheddar cheese. We ate in exhausted silence and then fell asleep, limbs intertwined, on the living room sofa. I didn’t know it then, but it was to be one of our last moments of pure togetherness, for in the months that followed we each retreated, worn down by the cumulative years of anxiety, stress and sadness. It seemed we’d left too much grief settle in the pot of our relationship. It had gone rancid.After he moved out, I waited for my grief to kill my appetite again. But… somehow… it didn’t. It was as if my grief had cracked me wide open this time, exposing my rawness, my desires, my cravings. Suddenly, I was ravenous. As I ate, I began to set a place at the table for my grief. Accept it was a guest in my house and so I should at least be polite. I offered it drinks and snacks. I listened to its worries. I took away its wine glass if it started to get too rowdy. Sometimes we fought, sometimes we negotiated, other times we just sat in silence. Eventually we just learnt to be in the same room without shouting over each other. I started presenting it with different questions, tired of existing in the roller coaster of my own suffering. Instead of “why me?” I asked, “what next?”I turned on my laptop and stared at the words I’d drafted over the last year and the images of my trips through the Eastern Mediterranean. I thought back to the strangers who had invited me into their homes to talk about displacement; the chefs who had fed me in their restaurants as we discussed what belonging meant in a fractured world; the doctors, teachers, musicians and poets I spoke to in blustery refugee camps who honored me with the stories of their survival and their aspirations for the future. Tentatively, I started to write.I began to notice that while my grief had robbed me of my innocence, it had served me something more useful instead—a plate piled high with resilience. I let go of the fairy-tale and began to see that in life there are no last chances, just different strategies. I found some optimism in the dusty corners of a fertility clinic and added that to my dish. I sprinkled through some patience and stirred through some forgiveness. I invited hope to join us at the table.Hope smelled like warm bread baking in an oven, it tasted like a scoop of pistachio ice cream enjoyed on a hot summer’s day, it felt like a bowl of roasted pumpkin soup eaten by a roaring fire. I stopped seeing my grief as a curse and started acknowledging it as an opportunity. A chance to experience more deeply, speak more freely, see more sharply, feel more profoundly and eat more voraciously. Perhaps, my grief hadn’t actually stolen my appetite at all, it had simply added more flavors to my bowl.Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus (W.W.Norton) by Yasmin Khan is out on May 4th 2021. Product detail for this product: Fashion field involves the best minds to carefully craft the design. The t-shirt industry is a very competitive field and involves many risks. The cost per t-shirt varies proportionally to the total quantity of t-shirts. We are manufacturing exceptional-quality t-shirts at a very competitive price. We use only the best DTG printers available to produce the finest-quality images possible that won’t wash out of the shirts. Custom orders are always welcome. We can customize all of our designs to your needs! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), PayPal, or prepayment by Check, Money Order, or Bank Wire. For schools, universities, and government organizations, we accept purchase orders and prepayment by check Material Type: 35% Cotton – 65% Polyester Soft material feels great on your skin and very light Features pronounced sleeve cuffs, prominent waistband hem and kangaroo pocket fringes Taped neck and shoulders for comfort and style Print: Dye-sublimation printing, colors won’t fade or peel Wash Care: Recommendation Wash it by hand in below 30-degree water, hang to dry in shade, prohibit bleaching, Low Iron if Necessary Vist our store at: Visit Myshirtone now This product belong to hung3
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