The Feminist Kitchen

In place of blogging these past few weeks, I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of work (we’re getting ready to launch a magazine and South by Southwest starts next week), family (Avery is starting to talk and we finally got those holiday thank-you cards in the mail) and me (doing yoga and dabbling in Deepak Chopra’s 21-day meditation to balance the work stress).

But nothing has put things in perspective like this TedX Austin talk from Penny De Los Santos, my food photographer friend who recently moved from Austin to New York. It seems that she’s as in-demand as a motivational speaker these days as a photographer, and you can see why.

I have no idea how she made it through those 12 minutes, which included a description of her last meal with her mother, without even a crack in her voice. (A well-timed hug from one of the boys this week made me a weepy mess, but I guess I was in need of a good cry.)

I hope it inspires you to open your eyes and see the life around you, even if it’s only in your own (overgrown, full of toys and desperately in need of mowing) backyard.

This 25 minutes or less post is my latest attempt to continue to blog in my increasingly crazy life. It’s not exactly original content, but hopefully you’ll enjoy my mom’s original content until I find some time to create more of my own.

So, my mom started a blog.

She’s still trying to find that balance of personal and public, so she hasn’t announced it from way up high on a mountaintop, but the overlap between Feminist Kitchen readers and, say, the parents of kids who go to her school is pretty small, so I think she’d be OK with me telling you all about it here.

Blogging — and by extension, our social media livelihood — is a virtual fishbowl that we all seem to be swimming around in these days, and my mom is pretty good at living in a fishbowl. Ever since she was a kid, as the daughter of the high school principal, the middle sister of two brothers and now the school official married to the town’s up-and-coming real estate star, her life as been on display.

And now that she and my dad are living with my grandmother in the house she’s lived in for 50 years, it’s like she’s in a fishbowl inside a fishbowl.

Back on Pleasant Street is a place for her to explore what it means to be living in that same house, where the land line telephone number is still the same as when she was a child.

Being so brazenly open about somewhat personal matters is still pretty foreign to a person of her age in a place like her town, which is the kind of place where you talk about things, but you don’t really talk about things. (Even without modern communication tools like Facebook and Twitter, that town runs on chatter.) She was apprehensive about not only the new medium, but about bearing her journal-like writing for everyone to see.

But within five posts, you can tell she’s a natural. It’s obvious why she was my first writing mentor. Both she and my dad would help me write papers, but there was something evocative in her own writings that taught me something entirely different than how to use a Thesaurus and have a marketer’s ear for how something sounds. (Thanks for that, too, Dad.)

So far, she’s written an ode to my father’s silver hair and inspirational posts about being brave enough to hunt for new cheese and about going back to school (again) to pursue her professional dreams.

In this most recent post, she writes about family dogs, including my grandmother’s beloved dachshunds and Shiva, the salt and pepper blue heeler we had to give up when Julian was 2. Through those dogs you can get a glimpse of my mom’s corner of the world, a multi-generational household in the middle of America with three very unique individuals and one ailing puppy dog who isn’t a puppy anymore.

If only we could all capture our stories so well.

Have you see the new Weight Watchers commercials with Charles Barkely?

The same people who’ve created a successful campaign with the oh-so-thin Jennifer Hudson are using Barkely to try to reach the simingly untapped market of overweight men wanting to slim down. (Belly fat ads, weird exercise devices and anything Men’s Health touches are the current offerings.)

Barkley talks about his own weight loss, and the commercial ends with the “Lose Like A Man” tagline.

The message: Be a man, lose some weight. And don’t cry like a girl while you’re at it.

What do you think it means to (or what do you think they meant by) “lose like a man”?

For the Feminist Kitchen book club + film series, we’re moving from one Southern writer who happened to write about food to a food writer who happens to be in the South.

Last night’s book club meeting on “The Help” was a huge success. Like any good book club should, we didn’t agree on everything, but we shared opinions and insight about this very controversial book and, hopefully, learned something new about ourselves or the world around us along the way.

To get an idea of what we talked about, check out the book club’s Facebook group, where I posted several videos, including a recent interview on the Colbert Report with Melissa Harris-Perry, the “Sister Citizen” author who is getting ready to start her own show on MSNBC, and a “60 Minutes” clip that profiles several white women who, after seeing the movie or reading the book, reconnected with the African American women who raised them.

(I’ve started channeling more book club-related content into the Facebook group, which you can join by clicking here. It won’t replace book club blog posts here, but it’s easier to quickly share content on Facebook rather than building a completely new post on the website.)

At the end of the meeting, we decided that our next book would be “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life,” by Kim Severson, the New York Times food writer who recently moved off the food beat to move to Atlanta, which is her home base as she travels throughout the South writing more newsy stories for the Times.

Severson is a delight to follow on Twitter, and her book is one of my favorite food books of the past few years. She explains how cooks, from her own mother to celebrities like Alice Waters and Rachael Ray, influenced her both in the kitchen and out of it, and she beautifully weaves those stories in with her own about her struggles with alcohol, coming out to her family and becoming a parent. (Here’s an excerpt of the chapter on Rachael Ray, which you might consider a surprising choice until you read why she picked her.)

Because the second Tuesday of February is Valentine’s Day, let’s plan on meeting at 7 p.m. on Feb. 7, at Thrice Cafe, 909 W. Mary St. See you all there!