Empowering Others and Oneself

And more on my James Beard Media Award nomination!

Hello lovelies! I’m thrilled to share that on Wednesday I received a James Beard Media Award nomination in the “Personal Essay with Recipes” category for my Food52 essay: In My 40th Year, I Finally Made Pita Bread. I’m so grateful for this honor and to each of you for your support!

Last week I returned from a wonderful, soul-filling, whirlwind trip to NYC, where I attended Cherry Bombe Jubilee (a conference for women in food), met up with my editors and publishing folks, caught up with friends from all chapters of my former NYC life, from fashion to writing to lifestyle and food media. In the days that followed, the word ‘empower’ kept echoing in my mind and it inspired this newsletter’s mini word essay, below.

Be sure to scroll down for my latest guest TV segment on WDBJ7 Here @ Home and a round-up of some of my fave bites and sips from my NYC trip.

Sita’s pita bread for Food52 | Credit: Ty Mecham

EMPOWER: give (someone) the authority or power to do something. Make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights. (Source: Oxford Languages)

Lately I’ve found myself in empowering company: among 700 women at Cherry Bombe Jubilee, where I met entrepreneurs, recipe developers, writers, cookbook authors, chefs, food business owners, and other food industry professionals, each emboldened to believe in themselves and inspired to lift others up too.

I am awestruck by the talented and thoughtful friends in my life, and was thrilled to reconnect with so many of them during my NYC visit: a marketing agency executive, a PR firm owner and podcast host, a boutique CPG supply chain business founder, a fashion designer, a veteran publishing exec, an image consultant and stylist, a wellness entrepreneur, a mom of twins navigating working motherhood like a boss, a publication founder, a cookbook author and a food writer, to name a few. If it’s true that our lives are defined, at least in part, by the company we keep, I’m in beautiful, intentional, and inspiring company.

Empowerment is about lifting others up, but it’s also about buoying your self-belief: to have faith that you are enough and to know that what you say and do matters. This really hit home for me on Wednesday when I received the news that I was nominated for a James Beard Media Award in the category of “Personal Essay with Recipes” category for my Food52 essay: In My 40th Year, I Finally Made Pita Bread. I nominated myself and completed the application, thinking it was a long shot, but knowing that I was extremely proud of this particular piece of writing. I’m incredibly grateful to the industry friend who facilitated the introduction to the editors at Food52 (how fitting that she was the one who alerted me to my nomination!), to the editors who spoke with me by phone and workshopped my pitch, and helped crystallize the story I was trying to tell. It’s a testament to the generosity of this industry and what it’s like to have someone else not only believe in you, but empower you to bring your whole self to the page and to the world.

I know my Sita would be so proud of me and I am grateful to have this connection to my family history and legacy through something as elemental as bread. I truly believe that my purpose is to serve others with my words, so it’s extra meaningful to know that my words resonated with readers. And extra special to receive recognition from my peers, friends, family, industry, and the James Beard Foundation for such a personal story. As if that weren’t enough, I’m in truly esteemed company: congratulations to my fellow nominees Lan Samantha Chang for “Coming to America: How One Family Preserved Their Culinary Traditions After Moving to the Midwest in the 1960s” (Food & Wine), and to Diep Tran for “Dog S#!t Dacquoise” (Food & Wine), an essay I remember reading and re-reading when I bought the magazine at the airport last December.

To cap it all off, it’s an amazing feeling to have that extra boost of validation as I go into the next phase of my memoir process (querying agents! more revisions!) and lean into its themes of food and identity, knowing that there is an audience who is eager to read.

Memoir Updates

I’m feeling the need to scratch the itch of returning to my manuscript, but I promised myself I’d take the whole month of April off. I hope that coming to the page with fresh eyes and butterflies in my stomach will start me off on the right foot as I rework my first 10 pages and query letter. I’m also planning to submit a piece to the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, which is open to writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. To my fellow unpublished authors, entries are due May 15 and guidelines can be found here.

I returned from my NYC trip to a lush landscape with azaleas and iris in full bloom.

Published Articles & Media Appearances

Interested in seeing what I’ve written or spoken about lately? Here are few highlights:

• Dine al fresco at Restaurants in the Roanoke Valley

  For Roanoke lifestyle TV show Here @ Home on WDBJ7, I shared some of my favorite family-friendly restaurants for outdoor dining in Roanoke, plus what to order at each. Highlights include the Cubano at Food Hut, shave ice and hot dog happy hour at Hang 10, the Matty Patty at Crystal Spring Grocery, and nachos and smoked wings at Treehouse Tavern. Thanks to host Natalie Faunce and the whole team for having me back and making me feel so welcome!

  

  As you can see, I take my food very seriously—but this was such a fun segment and made me excited for outdoor dining all over again!

• Here Are 4 New Roanoke Food Trucks You Need To Try

  My latest for the Roanoke Rambler has prompted lots of positive feedback from both readers and subjects, which makes me so happy! We have a thriving and diverse food scene here in Roanoke, and the recent food truck renaissance is a big part of that. Highlights include juicy, smoky pork souvlaki from KEFI: Greek Food with Passion, flaky beef and cheese empanadas (side of yucca fries is non-negotiable), quesabirria tacos from Las Tapatías Taco Truck and Catering, and jackfruit BBQ tacos and French crêpes from Giggles the Bus.

  

  The Puerto Rican beef and cheese empanada from Empanada Nirvana is fashioned after owner Nelson Pantoja’s great-great-grandmother’s recipe.

• REVIEW: The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home by S.L. Wisenberg

  For Hippocampus Magazine, I reviewed S.L. Wisenberg’s latest work. It was such a treat to read, and as I said in my review, her prose inspires me to be a better writer. This line from the essay “Separate Vacations,” has stuck with me: “But the writing is part of the equation; as much as it catalogs the vicissitudes of my distress, it pulls my feelings from me, or pulls me toward them, illuminates my internal train ride through unknown landscapes.”

Books, Bites & Beverages

• Books: I am smitten with Shari Bayer’s Chefwise: Life Lessons from Leading Chefs Around the World, a fantastic quote book with industry anecdotes and life advice from top chefs from around the world. And I’m thrilled that I got to celebrate Shari’s book and catch up with her over a stellar dessert tasting at Lysée. Shari is a longtime friend (we met through the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance when I was first looking to get into food writing) and embodies what it means to be an empowered woman who embraces her ambition, dreams, and passions. More on her book soon, but it’s out now in the UK/Worldwide and out in the U.S. May 3, 2023. Add it to your summer reading list or gift it to your favorite foodie or new grad!

  

• Bites: Oh, this was a tough one this week! Between researching Roanoke food trucks and outdoor dining, and spending five days in NYC, I was spoiled for choice and tasty eats. I settled on a gallery of my top nine eats in NYC:

  • Row 1: Olive All’Ascolana (fried green olives with pork sausage) from Via Carota, the V.I.C., or Very Important Chocolate Cake (with black pepper caramel!) from Lysée, and espárrago blanco (white asparagus with truffle espuma, capers and quail egg) at Txikito (one of my fave dinners of the trip).

  • Row 2: The devil’s food cake for two with a side of mint ice cream at Claude (another stunning supper among friends), a dim sum feast at Royal Queen in Flushing with my brother, sister-in-law, and her parents, and the orange pistachio croissant from Librae Bakery (pop-up at Pop Up Grocer).

  • Row 3: Margherita pizza at L'Antica Pizzeria Da Michele (though the scene stealer was the carciofi salad with Castelvetrano shaved artichokes, pistachios, and Pecorino Romano), a lovely composed salad of endive, whipped tofu, macadamia, and mandarin at Rule of Thirds, and whipped feta with za’atar at Mina’s at MOMA PS1, a special inspired by Jumana Manna’s film, Foragers, which chronicles the gathering of wild za’atar.

    

    

    

    NYC Memorable Bites - April 2023

• Beverages: NYC also delivered on the beverage front, and since I couldn’t pick one, here’s a mini round-up of my favorite sips from the trip:

  • Clockwise from upper left: a coquito latte at 787 Coffee Co., Amabuki "Ginno Kurenai" junmai rosé sake at Rule of Thirds (that’s my lovely friend Annalisa, with whom I go way back to our fashion industry days!), a garden rose dark chocolate mocha from Maman, and an Americano at Via Carota.

    

    

    NYC Memorable Sips - April 2023