Origin Stories

are often my favorite kind

I am getting geared up to teach my Buttermilk Biscuit class via Zoom next week. The first of two classes that I will be offering to members of the food + storytelling Facebook group I created several years ago on Christmas Day. But even starting here is getting ahead of myself, so let me first take us way back.

In 2019 I joined what used to be the New York Times Cooking Community on Facebook (NYT dissolved their affiliation in 2021 and it is now called Not The New York Times Cooking Community). It was a colossal group from people across the world, generally subscribed to the NYT cooking app, the rest seems self explanatory. I went there to ask for recommendations for certain recipes, to discuss our favorites, and to obviously connect with folx over food. Before I got pregnant with Maddox, I found out I was very freshly pregnant on July 4th, 2020 (this was actually supposed to be my due date and was born on June 30th. I always felt soft about this fact) and sought recommendations for what people were eating during early pregnancy. I was really sick, like, barely getting out of bed sick, and wrangling a toddler. My very fraught marriage was hanging on by a thread, as it often was for years, and while I was seeking out food recommendations, I was always desperately in search of community. This is where my storytelling evolved as I documented my pregnancy and its short life, sharing photos and recipes of what was keeping me and my family afloat. Giddy with excitement the days I wasn’t tragically sick, and able to cook something I could actually eat, we shared and we bonded over our meals. People became invested, and I became grateful to have a space to feel held, even if figuratively. When I experienced a missed miscarriage on Scarlett’s third birthday at twelve weeks, subsequently experiencing the downfall of our healthcare system, and ended up waiting almost two and a half weeks before my D&C, NYTCC was the first place I tuned to share the news. I was no longer pregnant and was sitting in that. I would be back.

And I did come back.

When I am in the thick of something, or deep in the throes of processing, I oftentimes turn to the kitchen. In the ways I seek creative release or understanding when I write, being in the kitchen allows me to simultaneously distract and think-through. I can use my hands, I can somewhat be on auto-pilot, and being the performer I am, even sometimes to my detriment, I can create something for other people.

I cried and I baked for weeks. Cakes- one for my then-husband’s birthday, an apple cake for the changing of the seasons. Bread, various types of cookies, crostata, roast chickens, sugar pumpkins from my garden, and a million muffins.

When I found out I was pregnant with Maddox at the end of October 2019, I once again shared the news via my first attempt at making biscuits. I realized I had never actually made biscuits before and it seemed like one of those staple-bakes I should know. I used a recipe I am sure was from NYT, and was pleased to find the recipe fairly quick, few ingredients, and not very technical at all. I made my first batch and when I pulled them from the oven, they were no more than half an inch thick. Huh, I thought. These certainly were not the biscuits I had seen in the photos with at least some height.

I turned to NYTCC to hash it out, and let them know I was healing and therefore would be making biscuits until further notice until I was happy with he results. This carried on for weeks- swapping recipes, tips, tricks. Every day I carved out about an hour of time to be in the kitchen, making biscuits on repeat. A somewhat easy commitment to my mental health and low impact on my ability to be there for Scarlett, both physically and emotionally, while grappling with the fact that I was pregnant again. Several times a week I would share my progress with the group and braid in elements of parts of our life and continued to share my biscuit progress. I had come a long way, tweaking recipes and eventually creating my own. I began to understand the necessity of technique versus solely relying on a recipe to achieve certain results. I was tired as you so often are in your first trimester, but I felt inspired and wasn’t nearly as sick as I had previously been. I baked and cooked and prepped. I became close with some of the members I had connected with- sending one another small gifts, keeping our connection, all while allowing food to be the thing that bound us.

This part of the internet, complete with 65K people, was refuge during the lockdown. Clambering for community only increased my time in the kitchen and sharing recipes and stories with strangers. These people watched my pregnancy progress, sent Maddox gifts, and was essential support when everything felt suspended in air. When Maddox was born, my first public sharing was to the cooking group. When I was once again hurled into a downward spiral of feeding issues, combined with the lack of support from my partner and dissolving marriage, it was the group that I shared scenes from my kitchen with combined with the grief I was experiencing. It was them that knew that I had told my then-husband I wanted a divorce. It was those people that first learned that I was to start a cottage bakery in our home as a means to make money while caretaking for an infant and three year old.

Like with anything good comes the ugly. The backlash I received from some folx for over-sharing or using the group as a “blog” when it was to be about food. My initial response is that it was about food, that two things could exist together, both storytelling and food. More importantly, wasn’t that somewhat the point?

The pivot

I began posting less and less in NYTCC. While the support was still overwhelming, it became too much to field the messages and comments from folx that weren’t interested in the storytelling aspect, and I became too tired to push back.

I asked for a divorce at the beginning of October, 2020.

By the 20th I had a loose business plan and an LLC formed.

By the third week in November, I had transformed my biscuit recipe into a micro-bakery, Butter Moon Bake Co, and hosted a bake-sale literally on my front lawn and sold out in two hours. I made hundreds of pieces while the babies slept, froze them, and then baked them in the morning prior to folx picking up. This became my business model- caretaking for my babies during the day, working at night, and finishing off in the morning.

I moved out with the support of so many of those same people from the New York Times Cooking Community on December 23rd, 2020. A literal stranger, one that didn’t often publicly engage, but watched from the sidelines, messaged me saying she wanted to help me out with my business getting started. She gave me a loan, has been an angel in regards to my pay-back deadline, and if it wasn’t for her, in all the ways that it was so hard to move out and work and caretake, it would’ve been lightyears more challenging if it wasn’t for her.

I think about her everyday.

On December 25th, 2020 I created my own Facebook group, Feed Me a Story. I was settling in to our new apartment in the city and without my children on Christmas Day. I walked for miles in the cold in between manic bursts of unpacking what little we had. I wanted a group similar to what NYTCC had been for me but different and I very explicitly laid out what to expect.

Storytelling will be at the forefront. Food is inherently political and will be treated as such. No discussions of dieting or intentional wight-loss would be allowed. Keep it about food, but give us glimpses into the rest if you like.

And here we are. Next to the birth of my children and how Anaya swept into my life on a random Wednesday in March when I was quite literally at one of the lowest points in my life, this is my favorite origin story.

The story of how food and storytelling crept into every part of my life. I wrote a food-centric memoir. I hosted food-centric podcasts. I still create and share recipes, and it was a little foray into making biscuits, doing something with my hands to quell my grief, that landed me building a business out of the very thing I seemingly failed at the first time.

Here we are, just about three years later, and these biscuits have been written about in newspapers and magazines, championed locally and across the country, have made me cry, have made me exceedingly excited, offered me the opportunity to somewhat slow-roll into becoming a single parent, became a gig, and will now be a class.

The first two classes I’m teaching will be in real time. I’m no stranger to teaching or leading workshops but admittedly technology makes me anxious, and so there’s that element that I am working through and literally “practicing” leading up to the class itself. At the end of the month I will be recording a more structured class (thanks to the encouragement and help of our gorgeous friend-family in LA) that will live on my website for people to purchase, available to the public, not just members of FMAS, with the hope of occasionally offering live/Zoom classes in the future.

What a ride it has been. When the time draws closer for the release of the class (paired with the BMBC biscuit recipe!!) to the public, I will be extending a discount code for my paid Substack readers. This work is hard but it is my favorite work and I wouldn’t be able to do it without your support.

I mean that.

What’s your favorite origin story? Shall I make this a series?

Biggest, and I mean biggest love,

AT

Currently reading: Nothing right now which I hate and I have so many in the queue. If I’m being honest, the holiday last week combined with a wonky kid-schedule, a sick partner, and upcoming class has left very little in terms of capacity for anything extra

Currently listening to: LoFi instrumental beats. Did you look at your Spotify wrapped for 2023? What a vibe.

Currently cooking: I made a ragu barely scented with orange zest at the end (trust me), and I’ll put together a recipe for y’all for next week.