In the words of the great Ani DiFranco,

i used to be a superhero
no one could touch me
not even myself
you are like a phone booth
i somehow stumbled into
and now look at me
i am just like everybody else

I found the discarded head of some kid’s Superman costume on the pavement behind my parked car yesterday. It was so creepy. Deflated and slightly menacing, it reminded me of how it feels in those rare moments when I realize I’ve been acting like I was all tough, but I’m hurt, tired, and confused. Deadpan sarcasm, isolating activities. And how I am loathe to take off the disguise, because it feels powerful to be menacing sometimes.

On the bright side, I’ve been laughing a lot more. I laugh at typos, I laugh when my friends C and L and I take our shirts off and throw them onto the males at a dinner party. I laugh when John Stewart talks about the “avalanche on Bullshit Mountain.” I laugh when Nancy Drew and I concoct various imagined scenarios in which we’re unaccountably mean to our family members. I laugh when my toddler friend, Wild Boo, wears my sunglasses and marches to the beat of House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” I laugh when someone says, “are you applying to more artist residencies to get away from it all?” because, well, I am away from “it” “all” whatever that means. I work with a toddler three days a week and I write the rest of the time. I want to come up with a Grand Plan for the Rest of My Life when I move out of Nancy and Mr. Drew’s house, but right now, I’m sort of having a good time. Sort of. And enjoying time to myself to figure out how to write for me and myself first and foremost. In a beat-up, lonely sort of way. Self care is like medicine, says fellow foodie Helana Brigman. Yep, and the medicine is not always accompanied with a spoonful of sugar. Sometimes it’s just stuff you need and some leftover rhinestones you can glue to your laptop cover.

Nancy Drew makes a mean pot roast. And buffalo bolognese. She works with meat the way I work with lemon, oil, and garlic. She makes hearty, heavy, bone-sticking food, and she uses pots the size of some of my past countertops: macaroni and cheese with five cheeses, pasta with three proteins. Living at Maison Drew is an infusion of blood and muscle.

Today I present to you the first installment of my online interview with Martha Rose Shulman, whose cookbook (one of twenty some she’s written, by the way) Mediterranean Harvest was a gift to myself upon leaving my teaching job.

Like my Studiola experience with Amanda Hesser, the Studiola interview marks the beginning of my familiarity with Shulman’s work, so our conversation reflects a jumping off point, not an intense back and forth.

I found her tapenades, her Spanish red onion, orange and olive salads, the fast and loose produce-strewn soups–all with anecdotal contexts about the particular country, culture, and context in which she found the dish.

It was summertime in New Orleans, so this book provided so many appropriate meals. I found hydration and permission through expansive, translucent broths whisked with herbs, oils, beans, other legumes–everything simmered and connected to each other at different times, so the end result is that you can taste the layers of the process in these dishes. The soups in this book are perfect for southern Louisiana–messy, fragile, particular, sexy, kaleidescopic. And they’re perfect for someone like me, who loves a challenge and who loves to dissect that challenge.