Bread and Stories
Maybe because I travel so seldom and strange things happen when I do, every road trip feels like a revelatory reminder: whatever else we are, we are a country in which people help strangers.
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, housed and fed three generations of her family—shored up the walls and filled the pantry with her words—and she did it with fierce determination and ironic wit.
Bread and Stories
It's been a while since you heard from Bread and Stories...I think about this space daily, but free time has been hard to carve out from workaday life. As a freelancer with two separate areas of consulting, sometimes I have to keep many balls in the air
Bread and Stories
My wife Greta is viscerally wracked by the sight of a snake. Any snake, garden-beneficent or not. Her rectum spasms and her heart lunges into her throat as if to block the scream that could alert the snake to her bite-worthy presence. She screams anyway and flees. Unless
Bread and Stories
It sizzled the moment it touched the iron, filling the little kitchen with the smell of salt-cured pork and hardwood smoke. I was probably no more than six or seven years old, but I already knew what came next. Thicknin' gravy.
Bread and Stories
Reminiscing about his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, my friend Larry said, "Back then, everything was possible." That wistful statement resonated far beyond its context. Back then—however far back you want to plant that bright flag of possibility in your or the nation's history—
Bread and Stories
A chance to cheer on —and cheer up — a remarkable family.
Stories to feed the spirit.
Reminiscing about his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, my friend Larry said, "Back then, everything was possible." That wistful statement resonated far beyond its context. Back then—however far back you want to plant that bright flag of possibility in your or the nation's history—
A chance to cheer on —and cheer up — a remarkable family.
“Beware of first-hand ideas!”
It's such an odd little word: short but drawn out, comical yet faintly sinister.
I had craved the warming spices of the chai, but someone smiling at me with genuine warmth was the comfort I truly needed. In a world that often feels numbingly cold, comfort food and human community are both essential sources of warmth, and they are best served together.
Spring is time for feasts and festivals of renewal and rebirth—Easter, Passover, and Iran's Nowruz (literally "new day")—but this year it was hard to get into the spirit. I don't know if my friends in Iran are OK. Their internet is down,
Tea is our wine. We drink it morning and night.
Pondering the Enlightenment while defending the castle.
French Pancakes: we ate them all the time as children, generally for dinner, mostly in winter. Standing at the stove of our Southern home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
I was sitting here thinking about the kinds of love—how no matter what the movies try to sell us, nobody can make it on eros alone.
I told a version of these friends' love story for Valentine's Day two years ago. They are always the first people I think of when trouble boils over within Iran and between Iran and the U.S. It seems like a good time to retell their story...and to share Solmaz's world-famous walnut cookie recipe.
Food and stories: in the case of my old Jewish relatives, it's impossible to separate the two.