Hope on a Plate: the Power of Comfort Foods
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.
Bittersweet Spring
Spring is time for feasts and festivals of renewal and rebirth—Easter, Passover, and Iran's Nowruz (literally "
Tea Is Our Wine: Tea and Manners among the Tuareg of the Ténéré
Tea is our wine. We drink it morning and night.
Squirrels in the Walls
Pondering the Enlightenment while defending the castle.
Thriving in New Soil: French Pancakes in Parish
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
Perennial Blooms: on Love the Day after Valentine's Day
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.
Tennis Matched: An Iranian Love Story
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.
Waste Not, Want Not: Grandma Jessie's Secret Ingredient
Food and stories: in the case of my old Jewish relatives, it's impossible to separate the two.
Seeding the Story Vault
I think we tell and hear too few kinds of stories about ourselves...
Hidden Grace and Hot Soup
In our digitally intertwined, always-on lives, one of the more startling windows into another person's day is the
