Julie’s collection of essays yet to be published

Sometimes, contrary to the way life looks on Instagram, things are just a mess. Sometimes you have unexpected visitors and the best you can come up with is a mayonnaise sandwich (and no, not on artisan bread). Sometimes your cake turns out to be bafflingly terrible. Sometimes you have a laundry pile that takes 17 years to get to the bottom of. Sometimes your kids go off the rails and you just didn’t see it coming. Sometimes our beloved ones die way too soon.

If we’re honest, a lot of life is like that. The pandemic has managed to make almost everyone’s life like that. It’s been something of a leveler, disrupting even the most well-organized and serenely ordered lives, and maybe even lending them a sense of grief, confusion, or despair. That’s most certainly how my life is, but I didn’t need a pandemic to create those conditions. I have always lived in a state of disorder and confusion, in my home, and especially in my head.

Home Stewing: On Making Being a Mess in the Kitchen is a collection of personal essays linked by food, recipes, and cooking. The essays span my earliest attempts at cooking (in which I nearly burned my grade school down) to my efforts to instill some wisp of a fragment of cooking skills in my children before they left the nest. They explore the role of cooking and recipes in an ordinary life–but one that is characterized by perhaps an excessive amount of anxiety. The kitchen, for me, is the locus of making a mess, and being a mess. And somehow, from the kitchen emerges sustenance for family and friends, traditions to pass on or create, and joy to share, as well as the occasional well-timed batch of scones.