On creativity and neurodivergence — Yesterday, I found my three-year-old Joaquin picking up the phone, punching on the numbers, and talking like someone’s on the other end of the line. No, he didn’t call someone. I teared up a bit because, finally, he was role playing. I can’t tell whether it was because of the…

5 themed grazing boards with barely any repeat ingredients — A story I recently posted about making charcuterie boards last Christmas is picking up thousands of reads from Google, and I think I know why. It’s February, the love month. It’s the season again for grazing and wine. Here in Eat and Tell, however, I’ve mostly written about the personal…

Teaching and parenting in a zombie emergency — All of Us Are Dead is a South Korean zombie thriller on Netflix that mostly takes place in a school, with a band of surviving teenage students moving from one classroom to the next (science lab, art room, gym, etc.), dodging and locking out zombie classmates along the way. For…

Wild thoughts during self-imposed isolation — Today is my 14th day of self-isolation since three of us in our house — me, my spouse Francis, and our toddler Joaquin — went down with fever, body ache, headaches, and sniffles. Five days before the three of us had symptoms together, it was our 9-year-old daughter Dione who…

Clues for daytime self-understanding — My dreams tend to be repetitive, and at their most vivid, during eventful, intense moments in my waking life. I’ve learned over time to regard them as clues to deeper feelings I may not be fully acknowledging, especially when my struggles require that I show a bold front. During uncertain…

How I kept my sanity this merry holiday season — I discovered something about myself last month, December 2021, as folks felt like gathering again after two years of pandemic eternity. I’m a chef’s wife who can’t cook. I absolutely have no interest in learning how. I can’t stand the kitchen heat. I’m deathly afraid of knives. And I’ve got…

Barrenness, abundance, and water as life and resource — What if the moon’s Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility — the huge dark spot on the moon’s northern hemisphere, and famously Apollo 11’s landing site — turns out to be a literal sea? The moon’s seas are not actual seas, but barren, lower altitude plains that look like dark…

Memories of a memory — Of all the stories my husband Francis had told me about his childhood, this one struck me the most. The first time I heard the story, we were still dating and I was in college as a creative writing major. One of the courses I was taking up at that…

Updated introduction — Iconfess that I never liked, and never warmed up, to the title I had given this publication. For lack of what would, to my mind, be a better term, I stuck with “Un-niched,” which could mean an uprooting, a dislodging, from a place where one was previously stuck. Come to…