Aging, Relationships, Women's Studies

Beneath the Surface

Featuredby Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on Beneath the Surface
Beneath the Surface

Philanthropy, Beauty, Feminism, and the Illusion of Empowerment

Something interesting happened to me recently. On two separate occasions, I was criticized for supposedly not supporting women—each time for an entirely different reason.

The first involved the Cornell Seven case.

I said the men accused of sexual assault deserved fairness, due process, and an examination of the evidence before anyone concluded they were guilty. Apparently, that was enough to make some people question whether I supported women.

The second involved Susan Dell.

I made an unflattering remark about her appearance, saying she looked like a monster who lived under my bed as a child.

Was it unkind? Absolutely. I’ll own that.

But the criticism was that, rather than applauding a woman trying to help children, I was commenting on her face. Once again, the implication was that I wasn’t supporting women.

And that got me thinking.

When did supporting women become synonymous with agreeing with them, defending every choice they make, or withholding criticism simply because they’re women?

Supporting women does not require me to abandon my judgment.

I can believe that a woman alleging sexual assault deserves compassion, a serious investigation, and the opportunity to seek justice while also believing that the accused deserve fairness and due process. Those principles are not mutually exclusive.

Likewise, I can acknowledge that my comment about Susan Dell was unnecessarily harsh while questioning the cultural pressures that encourage women to pursue increasingly dramatic cosmetic alterations.

And I can recognize the generosity of a $6.25 billion charitable pledge while asking difficult questions about the public policy and financial arrangements surrounding it.

None of those positions means I don’t support women.

Genuine respect for women means treating us as fully capable human beings whose ideas, decisions, and actions can be examined critically, just like anyone else’s.

Women deserve equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal respect. That doesn’t mean we require universal agreement or immunity from criticism.

And if feminism is about women’s autonomy, independence, and equality, shouldn’t it also make room for women who think independently, question prevailing narratives, and disagree with one another?

The $6.25 Billion Question

Let’s begin with the Dells’ contribution.

Michael and Susan Dell committed $6.25 billion to provide $250 investment deposits for 25 million American children through the Trump Accounts initiative.

The accounts were established under the 2025 legislation commonly called the One Big Beautiful Bill. Eligible children born between 2025 and 2028 qualify for an initial $1,000 federal contribution. The Dells’ donation primarily extends a smaller benefit to children who were born before that period.

Families can contribute additional money, generally up to $5,000 annually, allowing the investments to grow over time.

And I understand the appeal.

Giving children an early introduction to investing and the potential benefits of compound growth is not inherently a bad idea. For a family with the means to contribute regularly, an account opened during childhood could eventually become a meaningful financial asset.

But here’s where I have questions.

The same legislation that created these investment accounts is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to reduce federal Medicaid spending by approximately $1.2 trillion and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program spending by approximately $211 billion over the 2026–2035 period, compared with the previous spending baseline.

That’s $1.2 trillion less in projected Medicaid spending and $211 billion less in projected food assistance spending over ten years.

Programs that help families meet immediate needs.

And while the Dell contribution is private philanthropy, the federal program it supports exists within that larger set of public policy decisions.

I understand the financial-services industry. It’s my husband’s profession, for goodness’ sake. I understand compounding returns, asset management, and how financial institutions make money.

What I question is the philosophy behind these priorities.

A family with disposable income can contribute thousands of dollars over the years, potentially building a substantial investment balance for a child.

But what about the family that doesn’t have an extra $50 at the end of the month?

What about the mother deciding whether to buy groceries or pay the electric bill?

How is she supposed to contribute to an investment account when she can barely afford the necessities?

It’s like giving someone a brand-new car but no keys.

I have a cleaning lady whose daughter recently had her school pictures taken. The little girl wore a dress three sizes too small because her mother couldn’t afford to buy her a new one.

I keep thinking about that little girl.

She doesn’t need a lecture about compound interest. She needs a dress that fits.

Today.

That doesn’t mean a modest investment in her future is worthless. It means we should be capable of recognizing the difference between helping a child eighteen years from now and helping that child get through this week.

And there are other questions worth asking.

Who administers these accounts? How are financial institutions selected? What fees will eventually be charged? What safeguards exist to ensure the program benefits the children rather than disproportionately rewarding the companies managing their money?

Those aren’t accusations. They’re questions about transparency and accountability.

The Dells may be entirely sincere in their desire to help children build financial security. Their contribution is substantial, and the children receiving it may benefit.

But philanthropy, no matter how generous, does not make the surrounding public policy immune from examination.

And I remain skeptical of any arrangement in which enormous private wealth, political power, and financial institutions intersect.

I don’t trust anyone who makes a deal with the devil.

That’s my personal assessment, not an allegation of wrongdoing.

What I want to understand is why we’re placing so much emphasis on what poor children might accumulate in the future while reducing projected spending on programs their families depend upon in the present.

A child’s future matters. So does the childhood they’re living right now.

The Price of Perfection

Now, back to Susan Dell.

And my admittedly unkind remark about her looking like someone who lived under my bed.

What struck me wasn’t simply that her appearance seemed startling to me. It was the larger question it raised about what we’ve come to accept as normal in the pursuit of youth.

Susan Dell was a beautiful woman. Looking at photographs of her from years ago, I find myself wondering what was so terrible about the prospect of simply growing older.

What’s wrong with gray hair?

What’s wrong with wrinkles?

What’s wrong with a face that reflects the years we’ve lived?

I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could go back in time and show Susan Dell two photographs of herself: one showing how she might have aged naturally, with gray hair, wrinkles, and the familiar features of her younger self, and another showing the face she has today.

If she could have seen those two possibilities side by side, before any decisions were made, which would she have chosen?

I have my doubts that she would have chosen the latter.

But perhaps that’s part of the problem. These transformations don’t necessarily happen overnight. One procedure becomes another, until the face looking back at us in the mirror may be very different from the one we originally hoped to preserve.

And I wonder how many women, given the opportunity to see both destinations before beginning the journey, would choose to grow old naturally instead.

These transformations don’t necessarily happen overnight.

One procedure becomes another. A little adjustment here. A little correction there. What once seemed unusual becomes familiar, and the next alteration doesn’t seem quite so dramatic.

And sometimes, once you’re in, you’re in.

For some people, I wonder whether the pursuit of looking younger can gradually become a pursuit of correcting the results of previous attempts to look younger.

At what point do we stop trying to preserve the face we once had and start chasing a face that never existed?

There’s something almost tragic about the possibility that our efforts to avoid looking different might ultimately make us look more different than natural aging ever would have.

And we’ve built an enormous industry around that fear.

According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, more than 35 million surgical and nonsurgical aesthetic procedures were performed worldwide in 2025. Women accounted for approximately 85% of those procedures.

Think about that.

Millions upon millions of procedures, with women overwhelmingly represented.

And that’s only one measure of an enormous commercial ecosystem that includes cosmetic surgery, injectable treatments, medical spas, anti-aging products, beauty marketing, and countless services promising to correct something about our appearance.

From Botox to boob jobs to butt jobs and everything in between, we’ve normalized the idea that women’s natural faces and bodies are somehow unfinished products.

And I keep asking myself: What exactly are we buying?

Youth? Beauty? Acceptance?

The illusion that we can somehow outrun the inevitable?

We’ve created a culture that relentlessly tells women they’re simply not good enough.

Not young enough.

Not thin enough.

Not beautiful enough.

And there’s always someone waiting to sell us the solution.

Of course, women have the right to make their own decisions about their bodies. I am not suggesting otherwise.

But bodily autonomy doesn’t require us to celebrate every cosmetic trend or pretend that our choices exist independently of cultural pressure.

And at some point, I think women themselves need to examine what we’re participating in.

We can criticize the beauty industry for profiting from our insecurities, and rightly so. But we also need to ask why we continue buying what it’s selling.

Why do we reward the standards that make us feel inadequate?

Why do we normalize altering perfectly healthy faces and bodies to conform to an ideal that seems to change every few years?

And why are we so reluctant to question those decisions for fear of being accused of not supporting women?

I understand why someone might object to my original remark about Susan Dell. It was personal, and it was unkind.

But that doesn’t invalidate the larger discussion.

If we truly believe a woman’s value extends beyond her appearance, why have we created a culture that encourages her to spend so much of her life—and her money—trying to change it?

Our faces tell our stories.

Every line, every expression, every passing year is evidence of a life lived.

I look at women who have allowed themselves to age naturally, and I see character, experience, individuality, and beauty.

I don’t see something that needs correcting.

I am not repulsed by aging. I am repulsed by a culture that teaches women to be repulsed by themselves.

And the contrast with the Dell philanthropy discussion is difficult for me to ignore.

We live in a society where extraordinary wealth can purchase almost anything, including endless attempts to preserve youth, while a mother down the street struggles to buy her daughter a dress that fits.

Different problems. Different circumstances. Different kinds of choices.

But they force me to ask the same underlying question.

Have we lost sight of what actually matters?

Supporting Women Shouldn’t Require Suspending Judgment

Which brings me back to the Cornell Seven.

When I argued that the accused men deserved fairness and due process, I wasn’t dismissing the woman who made the allegations.

I wasn’t suggesting that sexual assault allegations shouldn’t be taken seriously.

I was saying that serious accusations require serious examination.

Evidence matters.

Fairness matters.

The rights of the accuser and the accused matter.

And the presumption of innocence isn’t some technical inconvenience that we should discard whenever an accusation becomes emotionally charged.

I understand why women rally around other women who report sexual assault. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about whether victims are heard, believed enough to receive a proper investigation, and treated with dignity.

But compassion and due process are not opposing principles.

Supporting a person who reports sexual assault does not require us to declare someone else guilty before the evidence has been examined.

Nor does asking questions about the evidence automatically mean we are accusing a complainant of lying.

The Cornell Seven allegations remain contested. I don’t presume to know the ultimate truth of what happened.

That’s precisely why I believe careful examination matters.

And yet, for expressing that position, I was criticized for not supporting women.

Then came the Susan Dell comment.

Different subject. Entirely different stakes.

But once again, I was told that my response demonstrated a failure to support women.

I recognize the distinction between those criticisms. In one instance, people objected to my position on fairness and due process. In the other, they objected to a remark that mocked someone’s appearance.

The second criticism has merit, and I’ve acknowledged it.

But what interests me is how quickly both conversations became questions of loyalty.

Are you supporting women, or aren’t you?

As though feminism were a membership card that could be revoked for asking the wrong question.

I don’t think supporting women means defending everything a woman says, does, believes, purchases, or chooses.

I don’t think it means suspending our ability to evaluate evidence.

And I certainly don’t think it means treating women as so fragile that they must be protected from disagreement.

Women are not empowered by being placed beyond criticism. We’re empowered by being taken seriously.

That means our ideas can be challenged.

Our decisions can be questioned.

Our arguments can be examined.

And we should be able to disagree with one another without turning every disagreement into a referendum on whether someone supports women.

There’s also something worth considering about the role social media plays in all of this.

The beauty industry can turn insecurity into revenue.

Social media platforms can turn outrage, solidarity, and moral certainty into engagement.

That doesn’t mean the emotions are insincere. It means the systems amplifying them may have incentives that have very little to do with truth, justice, or women’s well-being.

And sometimes I wonder whether we’re becoming more concerned with appearing to hold the correct position than with understanding the issue itself.

A charitable pledge is announced. Applaud.

A woman changes her appearance. Celebrate empowerment.

A sexual assault allegation gains public attention. Declare solidarity.

But what happens when someone asks a question?

What happens when the answer is complicated?

What happens when two legitimate principles appear to be in tension?

When did critical thinking become an act of disloyalty?

What Are We Teaching Our Daughters?

And this is where all of these conversations become deeply personal for me.

Because I have daughters.

And at some point, I think women need to reconsider what we’re teaching the next generation to prioritize.

I want my daughters to know they’re beautiful without lip injections, breast implants, or someone else’s definition of perfection.

But more importantly, I want them to understand that their beauty is among the least interesting things about them.

I want them to develop their intellect, their judgment, their curiosity, their independence, and their ability to recognize when something doesn’t feel right.

I want them to understand boundaries, consent, and the importance of thinking critically about the people and situations they encounter.

I want them to recognize manipulation, assess risks, and trust their instincts.

Not because awareness guarantees safety. It doesn’t. And responsibility for sexual violence always belongs to the person who commits it.

But because knowledge, judgment, and the confidence to act on one’s own perceptions are valuable tools throughout life.

I also want my daughters to understand that alcohol and drugs can impair their judgment, diminish their awareness, and leave them vulnerable in situations they might otherwise recognize as dangerous.

I want them to think critically about the environments they enter, the people they surround themselves with, and the consequences of becoming so intoxicated that they can no longer make informed decisions or protect themselves. I want them to recognize their limits, trust their instincts, look out for their friends, and know when it’s time to leave.

And I want them to know they can call me at three o’clock in the morning, from anywhere, without fear of judgment.

Having the right to do something and understanding the risks involved are two entirely different things.

But let me be absolutely clear: being intoxicated does not make someone responsible for being sexually assaulted.

That responsibility belongs entirely to the perpetrator. We can acknowledge that truth while still teaching our daughters the importance of situational awareness, personal responsibility, and sound judgment.

Empowerment isn’t pretending the world is always safe. It’s giving our daughters the knowledge, confidence, and critical-thinking skills to navigate it as safely as possible.

I want them to understand that their minds deserve at least as much attention as their appearances.

And I would much rather raise daughters who know how to question the world than daughters who spend their lives worrying about whether the world finds them attractive or how they might alter themselves to become more flattering to the male gaze.

Their worth is not determined by how desirable they are to men.

They weren’t put on this earth to be visually pleasing to anyone.

And I don’t want them measuring their success by how closely they resemble whatever version of female perfection happens to be fashionable.

I want them to read.

To think.

To challenge assumptions.

To recognize when someone is trying to sell them something, whether it’s a beauty treatment, a financial promise, or a simplistic explanation for a complicated situation.

I want them to understand that they can respect another woman’s choices without feeling obligated to celebrate every choice she makes.

That they can care deeply about someone who reports sexual assault without presuming to know the outcome of an investigation.

That they can appreciate generosity while questioning the public policy surrounding it.

And that they can disagree with other women without somehow betraying their own sex.

Because independent thought is not the enemy of feminism. It should be one of its greatest achievements.

Beneath the Surface

The more I think about these conversations, the more I realize they are connected by something much larger than Susan Dell, the Cornell Seven, or a government investment program.

They’re connected by our willingness—or unwillingness—to look beneath the surface.

A billionaire gives billions to children.

That is a substantial act of generosity. But we can still ask how the program works, what it accomplishes, and how it fits into broader public priorities.

A woman changes her appearance.

That is her right. But we can still question the culture that makes aging seem like a defect and the industries that profit from convincing women they need to be fixed.

A social media movement rallies around a woman alleging sexual assault.

That solidarity can be sincere and important. But we can still insist that justice requires evidence, fairness, and due process.

We should be capable of holding two thoughts at once.

Compassion and skepticism.

Autonomy and accountability.

Solidarity and independent judgment.

None of these are contradictions.

And I think we do women a profound disservice when we suggest otherwise.

Because the problem with a culture that demands unquestioning agreement is that it eventually teaches people to distrust their own judgment.

It teaches them to look outward for permission to believe what they believe.

To accept whatever is presented as compassionate, empowering, or just without examining whether it actually is.

And perhaps most troubling of all, it teaches young women that belonging requires conformity.

I don’t want that for my daughters.

I don’t want them growing up believing their value lies in their appearance, their desirability, their wealth, or their willingness to agree with the loudest voices in the room.

I want them to recognize their own worth without needing it reflected in a mirror, validated by a man, or confirmed by a crowd.

I want them to know that growing older isn’t a failure.

That asking questions isn’t betrayal.

That demanding evidence isn’t cruelty.

And that compassion is not diminished by the exercise of reason.

Real empowerment isn’t something you inject into your lips, purchase in an operating room, receive from a billionaire, or demonstrate with a social media hashtag.

It’s something you cultivate.

Through education. Through self-respect. Through independence. Through the courage to examine what you’re told and decide for yourself whether it’s true.

The most effective way to sell someone a solution is to first convince them they have a problem.

And the most effective way to discourage someone from questioning a narrative is to convince them that asking questions makes them a bad person.

I reject both propositions.

I don’t want to raise daughters who are merely beautiful, agreeable, or admired. I want to raise daughters who are formidable.

Women who know how to think, how to question, how to protect their autonomy, and how to stand by their principles even when doing so is unpopular.

Women who understand that supporting other women does not require surrendering themselves.

And women who know the difference between being told they are empowered and actually possessing the power to think for themselves.

Because the most dangerous thing we can teach our daughters isn’t that the world will judge them. It’s that they must stop questioning the world in order to be accepted by it.

 

Comfort Food, French Cuisine, Vegan

CHARRED CAULIFLOWER À LA TOMATE

Featuredby Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on CHARRED CAULIFLOWER À LA TOMATE
CHARRED CAULIFLOWER À LA TOMATE

Cultured Tomato-Herb Fromage · Cherry Bomb Tomato Confit · Kale-Cashew-Basil Pistou · Chili-Pistachio Tofu Crumble

I went through my refrigerator yesterday morning without much of a plan.

I had a head of cauliflower. A ridiculous number of tomatoes. Some kale, cashew and basil pesto from Trader Joe’s. Tofu. A beautiful tomato-herb fromage from Rebel Cheese. And two different bags of flavored pistachios because, just like the Depeche Mode song, I just can’t get enough.

What came out of that refrigerator clean-out was a deeply charred cauliflower steak with an almost creamy center, sitting in a warm tomato-herb fromage, surrounded by sweet confited and blistered tomatoes, bright green pistou and a crispy chili-pistachio tofu crumble.

Creamy. Charred. Sweet. Acidic. Crunchy. A little spicy.

And somehow, with all of that going on, the cauliflower still owns the plate.

Which is exactly what I wanted.

And the word confit kept popping into my head.

Maybe it was because I’ve been thinking about French technique again.

I had just made my Orange Roughy à la Fenouil, and afterward I kept thinking:

Why shouldn’t I give a vegetable the same treatment?

Not a vegetable pretending to be meat.

Not a side dish relegated to the edge of the plate.

I wanted to take a head of cauliflower and give it the same attention we’d automatically give an expensive cut of meat.

And as I stood there staring into the refrigerator, I started thinking about Julia.

Julia Child—and, importantly, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle—were certainly not afraid of cauliflower. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, they blanch it, sauce it with Mornay, cover it with cheese and breadcrumbs and gratinée it. They also pair cauliflower with fresh tomatoes.

Go back another generation and Escoffier was doing much the same thing in the language of classical French cuisine: cauliflower with cheese, béchamel, browned butter, breadcrumbs and gratin.

So apparently the French figured out a very long time ago that cauliflower and cheese are friends.

What interested me wasn’t recreating any of those dishes.

It was the technique underneath them.

Cook the cauliflower carefully. Control the moisture. Give it richness. Give it texture. Give it enough heat to develop real color. And, perhaps most importantly, don’t treat the vegetable like an afterthought.

My cauliflower steaks with chimichurri are already one of the most downloaded recipes on Kitchen Oracle, so clearly I’m not alone in believing cauliflower deserves a little respect.

But I didn’t want to make those again.

I had all those tomatoes staring at me.

Confit.

There it was again.

So I started borrowing ideas rather than recipes.

The cauliflower would get blanched, dried and deeply seared.

The tomatoes would slowly confit in olive oil and thyme until sweet and barely yielding.

And because the old French cooks would never dream of wasting flavorful fat, I certainly wasn’t going to throw away that tomato oil. It would go straight into the cultured tomato-herb fromage and turn it into the sauce underneath the cauliflower.

The pesto could become something closer to a pistou with olive oil and lemon.

And where Julia or Escoffier might have reached for buttered breadcrumbs, I had tofu and a bag of chili-roasted pistachios.

Fine.

There’s our crunch.

That’s how this recipe happened.

It has old French bones and a very modern refrigerator.

And somewhere between Escoffier, Julia Child and a half-empty container of vegan pesto, I ended up with dinner.

But there was one thing this dish absolutely needed.

A proper crust.

Not lightly browned. Not beige.  Think leather, not office casual.

I wanted that cauliflower deeply caramelized—dark at the edges, nutty and almost sweet, with a tender, nearly creamy center underneath.

And developing a crust isn’t complicated. You need a hot pan, a dry surface, a little fat and enough uninterrupted time for the Maillard reaction to do its thing.

That last part seems to be where we collectively lose our minds.

Because the second food hits a hot skillet, everybody suddenly develops trust issues.

Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to discuss.

KNOW WHEN TO FLIP YOUR FOOD

There is a peculiar thing that happens when otherwise perfectly rational people put food into a hot skillet.

They immediately want to touch it.

Flip it. Peek underneath it. Scoot it two inches to the left. Flip it back. Press on it with a spatula. Maybe flip it again, just in case something important happened in the last twelve seconds.

I don’t know whether it’s fear of burning dinner or simply the deeply human need to feel like we’re actively cooking, but sometimes the best thing you can do at the stove is absolutely nothing.

For a minute.

Because there is another kind of cook.

My husband puts something in a pan and walks away.

Just…leaves.

Eventually he comes back, looks at the blackened underside and announces that it’s “caramelized.”

No, darlin’.

That’s burnt.

There is a difference between leaving food alone and abandoning it.

A good crust requires contact, heat, time—and attention. Much like broiling, you’re working on the clock here. High heat doesn’t give you an enormous margin for error. There is a window where pale becomes golden, golden becomes deeply caramelized and deeply caramelized becomes burnt.

Your job is to catch it somewhere in that beautiful middle.

The trick isn’t to constantly flip your food, and it isn’t to forget about it either. You have to know when to leave it alone and, just as importantly, when to flip it.

Too soon and you interrupt the browning. Too late and you’ve crossed the line from caramelization to carbonization.

And you don’t need to keep picking it up to know what’s happening underneath. Use your senses.

Listen to the pan. Smell what’s happening. Watch the edges.

The sound will change as moisture cooks away. The aroma will deepen as browning develops. The edges will begin to tell you what’s happening underneath before you ever pick up the spatula.

Your job isn’t to constantly interfere with the process, and it isn’t to wander off and hope for the best.

Your job is to pay attention without meddling.

So put it in the pan.

Listen to it. Smell it. Watch it.

Have a sip of wine. Do a dish. Wipe down your cutting board.

A clean kitchen is a happy chef.

Just don’t start a load of laundry.

***SIDENOTE: 

MAKE-AHEAD GAME PLAN

I know.

You looked at all those components and thought, Steph, this is a lot of shit for a cauliflower.

And depending on how much time you have, it might be.

But you absolutely do not have to make everything at once.

If I’m making this for dinner, I’ll happily knock out a few components earlier in the day—or even the day before—and leave myself mostly the cauliflower and final assembly when it’s time to eat.

Up to 2 days ahead: Make the tomato confit. Let the tomatoes and their oil cool, cover and refrigerate them together. Bring them toward room temperature before serving. Save every drop of that oil.

Up to 1 day ahead: Make the pistou. Cover and refrigerate it, then bring it to room temperature and give it a stir before plating. If it has tightened up, loosen it with a little olive oil or a few drops of warm water.

Earlier the same day: Make the chili-pistachio tofu crumble. Let it cool completely before storing it. When you’re ready to serve, toss it into a dry skillet for a couple of minutes to wake the crunch back up.

You can also prep the cauliflower ahead: Cut the steaks, blanch them for 3 minutes, dry them thoroughly and refrigerate them uncovered or very loosely covered for several hours. That extra drying time isn’t a problem—in fact, it’s doing you a favor. Just let the cauliflower lose some of its refrigerator chill before it hits the pan.

Wait until serving: Warm and loosen the tomato-herb fromage, blister half the tomatoes, and sear the cauliflower.

That last one matters.

Do not sear the cauliflower ahead of time.

We’ve spent half this recipe talking about crust. We’re not going to create a gorgeous one and then put it in the refrigerator to die.

If you’ve done the other components ahead, dinner becomes remarkably simple: warm the sauce, blister a few tomatoes, re-crisp the crumble and give the cauliflower your full attention.

Then plate the whole beautiful mess and pretend it was effortless.

I won’t tell.

Fish, French Cuisine

Orange Roughy à la Fenouil

Featuredby Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on Orange Roughy à la Fenouil
Orange Roughy à la Fenouil

As a chef, I usually have an image in my mind of what I want to create before I know exactly how I’m going to get there.

This one started almost entirely in color and texture.

I could see white fish against a delicate white sauce—something silky and elegant, almost monochromatic. But I didn’t want delicate to mean boring. I wanted a pop of flavor, some acidity, something fresh and green, and what my friend Heather likes to call “toasty bits” to tie the whole thing together.

Then I started working backward.

A few years ago, I bought a first-edition copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Then I did something Julia probably never anticipated: I started converting recipe after recipe to vegan.

What I discovered was that removing the butter, cream and animal proteins didn’t mean I had to abandon the thing I loved most about French cooking—the technique.

The browning. The braising. Building fond. Deglazing. Reduction. Layering flavor deliberately. Understanding that the liquid left behind in a pan isn’t something to throw away; sometimes it’s the most important ingredient in the entire dish.

Now that I’ve added seafood back into my diet occasionally, I’ve found myself returning to those techniques again.

But I don’t really want to go backward.

I want to take them somewhere else.

And that became Orange Roughy à la Fenouil: pan-seared orange roughy with caramelized braised fennel, red pearl onions and cannellini beans in a lime-miso cashew velouté, finished with pistachio-fennel gremolata.

It begins in France.

It just doesn’t stay there.

The architecture is French: caramelization, braising, fond, reduction, a velouté-inspired sauce and a carefully composed plate.

But it’s French without the heaviness.

Instead of building the sauce around dairy and roux, raw cashews give it body and silkiness. White miso brings Japanese fermentation, salinity and umami—not enough to announce itself, but enough to provide the bass note the sauce needs.

Lime replaces the expected lemon with something brighter and more aromatic. Cannellini brings Mediterranean earthiness. Pistachio brings richness and crunch.

And fennel ties the entire plate together in three forms: caramelized bulb, concentrated braising liquor and fresh frond.

And there are Heather’s toasty bits: the golden crust on the fish, the caramelized edges of the fennel and those roasted pistachios scattered across the top.

That’s the kind of fusion I love.

Not fusion for fusion’s sake. Not piling cuisines together simply because you can.

Each tradition solves a different problem on the plate.

Fennel and fish are the story.
French technique is the grammar.
Cashew is the body.
Miso is the bass note.
Lime is the high note.
Pistachio is the punctuation.

And because every story deserves an ending, I poured a 2025 Domaine Salmon Sancerre from Bué in the Loire Valley.

The Sauvignon Blanc brought acidity against the cashew cream, minerality against the miso and beans, and citrus and herbal notes right back toward the lime and fennel.

So the dish started as an image in my head: white fish, white sauce, something bright, something green and, of course, some toasty bits.

Then it started in France, wandered through Japan and the Mediterranean, passed through the plant-forward kitchen I’ve lived in for the last few years…

…and the Sancerre brought it home.

L’accord mets-vin parfait. 🇫🇷🥂

****This recipe is written in order of operation, because that’s how we actually cook.

We’re starting with the fennel because its braising liquid becomes the backbone of our velouté. While that reduces, we’ll make the gremolata. Then we’ll build the sauce and get everything else ready.

The fish goes into the pan last.

I want it going from pan to plate with that beautiful golden crust intact—not sitting around dying while we’re still fucking around with the sauce.

Education, Mental Health, Psychology

Wait. What?

by Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on Wait. What?
Wait. What?

Last night Avery asked me, “Have you heard about the seven men who drugged and raped a girl at Cornell?”

Since it’s all over social media—and she’s almost 14—I figured it warranted a discussion.

When I referred to the woman as Jane Doe, Avery said, “I thought Jane Doe meant dead people?”

I explained that Jane Doe can be used for an unidentified deceased woman, but it’s also a legal placeholder when a woman’s identity is unknown or intentionally being protected. In this case, it protects the identity of the woman making the allegations.

Then we got into the much bigger conversation.

I explained that allegations this serious should absolutely be taken seriously.

But an allegation is not a verdict.

And right now, the evidence is complicated. New evidence and additional reporting seem to be emerging almost daily.

The Tompkins County District Attorney initially said the six-page sworn statement Jane Doe signed in 2024 described her participation in drug use and sexual activity as voluntary, conscious and consensual and did not allege that she had been drugged against her will or gang raped. That statement was central to the initial decision not to pursue criminal charges.

But now there is another important piece of evidence.

CBS obtained a transcript of Jane Doe’s original November 2024 interview with Cornell University Police—the interview from which that written statement was produced.

And the two apparently do not say exactly the same thing.

According to CBS’s reporting, during that interview Jane Doe distinguished between different portions of the night. She described some of the initial sexual activity as something she was “pretty OK with,” while also describing herself as extremely intoxicated.

She also told the investigator that she was being physically hit very hard.

Later in that same interview, she explicitly told police that she was certain she had been raped.

Here is where I would start asking a lot of questions.

According to the transcript obtained by CBS, the investigator prepared the written statement from that interview, read her account back to her word for word, gave her an opportunity to clarify or correct it, and she reviewed the revised six-page statement the following day before signing it.

Yet the DA says the explicit rape allegation contained in the interview transcript was not in the sworn statement his office received.

He also says his office was never given the full interview transcript.

Why?

Why didn’t that allegation make it into the sworn statement?

Was something omitted while the interview was being converted into a written statement?

Was she afraid to put certain things into a document she had to sign?

Was she under pressure?

Was she still processing what had happened?

Did she understand or characterize parts of the experience differently at different points?

Or is there another explanation entirely?

We don’t know.

And that is precisely why you investigate instead of filling in the blanks with whichever explanation supports what you already believe.

I also explained to Avery what we call contemporaneous evidence—evidence created at or near the time something happened.

CBS has reported on screenshots that a source says show texts exchanged between Jane Doe and one of the defendants two days after the alleged assault. Her attorney confirms that she exchanged texts with this defendant shortly afterward, but he has not authenticated those particular screenshots. He says she was traumatized, in denial and trying to understand what had happened.

That matters.

But so do the messages.

One does not automatically cancel out the other.

And THAT led us into another incredibly important conversation:

Consent.

Consent to one sexual act is not consent to every sexual act that follows.

Consent to one person is not consent to another.

Consent can be withdrawn.

And intoxication can affect someone’s capacity to consent.

Trauma can also affect the way someone remembers, processes or describes an experience afterward.

We also talked about an unfortunate reality for women: sexual behavior is still judged by an enormous double standard. A man with multiple sexual partners may be praised as a stud. A woman making the exact same consensual choices can be humiliated, labeled or slut-shamed.

It isn’t fair.

But pretending that double standard doesn’t exist doesn’t prepare our daughters for the world they actually live in.

So shame by itself doesn’t tell us what happened either.

Shame can accompany sexual assault and trauma.

Shame can also come from being judged for consensual sexual behavior.

People can misremember. People can have fragmented memories. People can process trauma later. People can change how they understand an experience. People can be afraid. People can be mistaken.

And yes, sometimes people lie.

We do not know which of those things, if any, applies here.

Her state of mind matters.

What did she understand was happening at different points that night? What was her level of impairment, if any? Was she frightened, confused, overwhelmed or trying to process events afterward? Did her understanding of what happened change as she remembered or learned additional information?

Those are legitimate questions.

But we cannot answer them for her.

That is why the chronology matters.

What did she say happened? When did she first report it? What did she tell investigators? What appears in the contemporaneous communications? What do witnesses remember? What physical, medical or toxicological evidence exists, if any? What corroborates the various accounts? What contradicts them?

And if there are meaningful differences between an earlier sworn statement and later allegations, those differences deserve examination.

That does not automatically mean she was dishonest.

Trauma, fear, intoxication, confusion, incomplete memory or information learned afterward can affect an account.

But neither should we automatically assume one of those explanations.

We should ask.

And the same standard should apply to everyone else involved.

What did the other people present actually witness?

What did each person know at the time?

Which statements are firsthand?

Which are secondhand?

Which details can be independently corroborated?

Multiple people repeating the same information isn’t necessarily independent corroboration if that information ultimately came from the same source.

Conversely, an inconsistency does not automatically disprove an allegation.

Evidence has to be examined both for where it fits and where it doesn’t.

But there is another question I keep coming back to.

And in some ways, it troubles me even more.

Where were the men willing to say, “Wait. What?”

The civil complaint alleges that a message was sent to a fraternity Snapchat group suggesting that a woman upstairs was sexually available.

If the evidence establishes that men received and understood such a message, I want to know what happened inside that group.

Did anyone stop and ask what that meant?

Did anyone ask whether she knew what was being said about her?

Whether she had agreed to it?

Whether she was capable of consenting?

Whether she was okay?

And if somebody recognized that something might be wrong, did he say anything?

That question exists independently of determining which men, if any, ultimately bear criminal responsibility.

Because there is something very human happening underneath all of this.

There is a concept in social psychology called the bystander effect. When other people are present, responsibility can become diffused.

Someone else will handle it.

Someone else knows more than I do.

Nobody else seems alarmed.

Maybe I’m overreacting.

If everybody else is going along with it, maybe it’s fine.

Sometimes what a group desperately needs is one person willing to interrupt that consensus.

Wait. What are we doing?

There may be an even older tension underneath the bystander effect: the tension between the atavistic and the altruistic.

Atavistic behavior pulls us backward—toward instinct, dominance, tribal loyalty, self-preservation, conformity and the safety of the group.

Altruism asks something harder of us.

It asks us to recognize another person’s humanity even when doing so is inconvenient, uncomfortable or socially costly.

Groups can amplify the atavistic.

When everyone around us appears comfortable with something, our threshold for questioning it can begin to move. Responsibility diffuses. Behavior becomes normalized.

And the question quietly changes from:

“Is this right?”

to:

“Is anyone else objecting?”

Those are not the same question.

The altruistic person interrupts that process.

He risks being the difficult one.

The humorless one.

The one who ruins the night.

The one whose friends tell him to relax.

And he says it anyway:

Wait. What?

At what point does another human being’s vulnerability become more important than belonging to the group?

That question made me think about Kitty Genovese.

Kitty Genovese was murdered in Queens in 1964, and her death became one of the most famous stories in American social psychology.

For decades, many of us were taught some version of the same horrifying story: 38 people witnessed a woman being murdered, heard her cries for help and did nothing.

Her murder helped inspire research into what became known as the bystander effect.

But there is another reason Kitty Genovese belongs in this conversation.

The story most of us learned about her wasn’t entirely accurate.

Later examinations substantially challenged the famous account that 38 people simply watched her murder and refused to intervene. Some people could not see what was happening. Some did not understand the severity of what they were witnessing. And there is evidence that people did attempt to intervene or summon help.

That doesn’t make what happened to Kitty Genovese any less horrific.

But think about the irony.

One of the most famous stories we tell about groupthink also became an example of what can happen when a compelling narrative is repeated so often that people stop examining the evidence beneath it.

And THAT is precisely why I am unwilling to do the same thing here.

I thought about another case, too: Rolling Stone’s infamous UVA story, A Rape on Campus.

Not because the cases are the same.

They are not.

And we currently have no basis to conclude that Jane Doe fabricated her allegations.

I thought about UVA because it demonstrated the consequences of abandoning verification when an allegation is so disturbing that people become afraid to question it. Rolling Stone’s story ultimately collapsed under scrutiny and was retracted after serious failures in reporting and fact-checking.

The damage went in more than one direction.

People who were accused or implicated suffered consequences.

And legitimate survivors suffered too, because a spectacularly failed story gave people another reason to be skeptical the next time a woman came forward.

But the opposite mistake can be devastating as well.

A truthful victim can be dismissed because her account isn’t perfectly linear, because her behavior afterward doesn’t conform to somebody else’s expectations, because she initially consented to something else, or because trauma affected the way she understood or reported what happened.

That is why we examine the facts.

Not because we automatically distrust women.

Not because we automatically trust men.

Because the consequences of getting it wrong—in either direction—are enormous.

There may ultimately be evidence establishing that crimes occurred here. If criminal guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, those responsible should be held accountable under the law for every crime proved.

There may also be evidence that changes our understanding of some or all of the allegations.

We don’t know yet.

And saying we don’t know has somehow become confused with refusing to believe victims.

It isn’t.

It means recognizing the difference between compassion and conclusion.

And I explained something else to Avery that matters enormously:

Due process belongs to all of us.

An accusation deserves serious investigation.

Evidence deserves serious scrutiny.

And in a criminal prosecution, the accused are presumed innocent unless guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

We don’t get to begin with a conclusion and work backward.

That is why we investigate.

That is why contemporaneous evidence matters.

That is why discrepancies matter.

That is why corroboration matters.

That is why the accused are allowed to answer allegations against them.

And that is why an allegation—even a horrifying one—is not itself proof of guilt.

Taking an alleged victim seriously and withholding judgment are not contradictory positions.

So I am willing to keep reading.

I’m willing to change my understanding when new evidence warrants it.

I’m willing to ask uncomfortable questions of every account—including the ones that support what I might already believe.

What I’m not willing to do is fill gaps in the evidence with certainty simply because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable.

And THAT was really the lesson I wanted Avery to understand.

She doesn’t have to decide what happened because social media already has.

If somebody brings it up at school, she is perfectly capable of saying:

“I don’t know what happened. That’s what the investigation and the law are for.”

Take allegations seriously.

Understand consent.

Examine the evidence.

Respect due process.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

But I hope there is another lesson here, too—one that has nothing to do with courts, prosecutors or standards of proof.

If you’re ever standing in a room where everyone else seems willing to go along with something that doesn’t feel right, don’t assume their silence means it is right.

Don’t wait for somebody else to object.

Don’t surrender your own moral judgment to the group.

Be willing to be uncomfortable.

Be willing to be unpopular.

Be willing to be the person who says:

Wait. Does she know about this?

Did she agree to this?

Is she okay?

What are we doing?

Because civilization isn’t demonstrated by having no primitive impulses.

It is demonstrated by what we do when those impulses collide with another person’s humanity.

Sometimes doing the right thing begins long before anyone knows whether a crime has occurred.

Sometimes altruism isn’t heroic at all.

Sometimes it’s simply one human being refusing to go along.

Psychology, Spirituality, Things That Got Out of Hand

An Errant Voice Text and an Entire Universe

Featuredby Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on An Errant Voice Text and an Entire Universe
An Errant Voice Text and an Entire Universe

For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that I take a lot of twists and turns.

I think that’s part of being a writer.

You see the world a little differently. Something catches your attention—a moment, an image, a sentence, a question—and suddenly it becomes something else entirely.

A dream about Justin Timberlake turns into a 325 page Southern Gothic novel.

A food documentary turns into a ten-year blog.

And an errant voice text turns into an entire universe.

I did not set out to create Tarot Headquarters.

There was no plan.

No outline.

No carefully constructed fictional world.

There wasn’t even supposed to be a Gary.

I was doing what I’ve done for decades: reading tarot, talking through a spread, and using voice-to-text because apparently typing had become too much of a commitment.

Then voice-to-text misunderstood me.

Somewhere in the translation, a tarot card became a person.

His name was Gary.

And Gary was the Ten of Swords.

That should have been the end of it.

It was not.

Gary developed a personality.

Then he got a job.

For reasons nobody—including Gary—can adequately explain, he works in the Kitchen.

He makes coffee. He feeds people after emotional disasters. And he is fiercely protective of the beignets.

The Ten of Swords traditionally represents endings, collapse, exhaustion, betrayal, rock bottom, and those particularly delightful moments when life appears to have stabbed you ten separate times and then left you lying face down in the dirt.

But once Gary existed, I started seeing something else in the card.

Not a different meaning.

A person inside the meaning.

Gary was the person who showed up after everything fell apart.

He didn’t need you to pretend you were fine.

He understood that sometimes the ending really was awful.

But he also understood that eventually somebody needed to make coffee.

And that made me wonder:

What if tarot were easier to understand if the cards were people?

That question changed everything.

Because once Gary existed, apparently he needed coworkers.

The King of Swords became Charles Bentley: intelligent, controlled, relentlessly logical, and increasingly irritated that nobody else seemed particularly interested in following procedure.

The Knight of Wands became Rocco, a man who has never encountered a boundary he couldn’t enthusiastically misunderstand.

The Seven of Wands became Perry, defender of people, principles, and occasionally hills upon which nobody actually asked him to die.

The Nine of Swords became Sean from Risk Management, who identifies everything that could possibly go wrong, organizes it by probability, cross-references it with several things that have gone wrong previously, and then worries about all of them simultaneously.

His reports have tabs.

Miranda arrived with possibilities.

Donna arrived carrying absolutely everything.

Veronica brought the truth.

Linda brought grief.

Luci brought community.

And before I quite understood what was happening, Gary’s kitchen had become part of an entire building.

There is a place that exists somewhere in the vast, expansive space of the universal collective unconscious called Tarot Headquarters.

 

Tarot Headquarters exists somewhere between the shuffle and the draw.

This is not a metaphor.

Carl Jung probably had theories about where it is.

The Akashic Records certainly know.

Google Maps does not.

On Mondays, the building may have seven floors.

On Thursdays, it may have nine.

The elevator has eleven buttons.

There are departments.

There are meetings.

There is an Incoming Reading Display.

There are unauthorized personnel.

There are reports with tabs.

There are beignets.

And absolutely nobody appears to be in charge of Human Resources.

The strangest—and most wonderful—part is that somewhere along the way, Tarot Headquarters took on a life of its own.

Characters began developing personalities before I had completely decided what those personalities were.

Departments appeared.

Relationships formed.

Running jokes developed.

People started walking into scenes where they weren’t supposed to be.

Rocco, in particular, developed a troubling awareness and I could not physically stop him.

Eventually, I stopped asking:

What should happen next?

And started asking:

What would these people actually do?

That’s when I realized there was something much bigger underneath the joke.

Tarot has always been about people.

I’ve been reading tarot for decades, and one of the things that has always fascinated me is that the cards aren’t simply definitions to memorize.

They’re patterns.

Archetypes.

Emotional states.

Human behaviors.

They’re the person who can’t stop worrying.

The person standing at the crossroads.

The person carrying everybody else’s problems.

The person defending a boundary.

The person staring at seven possibilities and becoming completely incapable of choosing one.

The person who needs the truth.

The person who doesn’t want the truth.

The person grieving what was lost.

The person who finally understands that it’s time to leave.

We’ve met these people.

Sometimes we’ve been these people.

And suddenly Tarot Headquarters became a way of exploring that.

Not by changing tarot’s traditional meanings or stripping away the history and symbolism that make the cards extraordinary.

Quite the opposite.

I wanted to take those meanings and let them get up from the table.

Let them become human.

Let them have personalities, jobs, friendships, arguments, questionable coping mechanisms, coffee mugs, office politics, existential crises, and occasionally very poor judgment.

In other words:

Let them become us.

And now there are seventeen of them.

Gary. Rocco. Charles. Perry. Sean. Miranda. Milo. Hank. Amy. Wanda. Luci. Linda. Victor. Veronica. Barry. Roberta. Donna.

So far.

I have learned not to make promises about staffing at Tarot Headquarters.

The Major Arcana haven’t even properly arrived yet.

God help us all.

What started as an errant voice text has become part fiction, part tarot education, part psychology, part workplace comedy, and part exploration of the strange and wonderful ways human beings make meaning from their lives.

And somewhere in the middle of all that ridiculousness, it became something I genuinely love.

My first episode is now written and published.

So if you’ve ever pulled a tarot card, stared at it for a moment, and thought:

What the hell is this trying to tell me?

Come meet the people who work there.

You may understand the cards a little differently afterward.

You may understand yourself differently, too.

Or you may simply discover why Charles Bentley would very much like someone to explain to Rocco that “You’re not in the spread” is a complete sentence.

Rocco remains unconvinced.

Welcome to Tarot Headquarters.

Same people. Deeper meaning. Same dysfunction.

→ Visit Tarot Headquarters and read Episode One:
https://www.tarotheadquarters.com

Episode Two:

Missing Hope

Coming soon.

Because apparently one episode was never going to contain these people.

And somewhere inside Tarot Headquarters, Hope is missing.

This seems like a problem.

Sean has already started a report.

Mexican, Spanish

Farm to Table, by Way of Mexico

Featuredby Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on Farm to Table, by Way of Mexico
Farm to Table, by Way of Mexico

Farm to Table, by Way of Mexico

There is a chef in St. Louis named Gerard Craft.

If you’ve eaten in this city with any degree of seriousness over the last twenty years, chances are you’ve eaten his food—or eaten food influenced by him.

I have.

I’ve been eating at Craft’s restaurants since Niche, the little Benton Park restaurant he opened in 2005 when he was only 25. I followed his cooking through its many incarnations—Taste, Brasserie, Pastaria, Porano, Sardella, Cinder House, Bowood and beyond. I watched restaurants open, close, transform and sometimes disappear altogether.

And in the process, I watched a young chef become one of the people who fundamentally changed the way St. Louis thought about food.

Through all of it, there is one thing I have always loved about Gerard Craft’s cooking:

He lets food taste like food.

That sounds ridiculously simple.

It isn’t.

There can be tremendous technique behind one of his plates—fermentation, preservation, handmade pasta, live fire, impeccable sourcing and a dozen decisions made before an ingredient ever reaches the diner.

But the technique isn’t the point.

The ingredient is.

A tomato gets to taste like a tomato. A vegetable doesn’t require twelve components and a pair of tweezers to justify its existence on a plate. Craft can do extraordinarily complicated things with food. What I’ve always admired is that he doesn’t seem compelled to prove it with every bite.

The chef does the work.

Then he gets out of the food’s way.

Craft won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2015 for Niche, becoming the first Missouri chef to receive the honor. And then, remarkably, he closed the restaurant that had made his name.

Not because Niche had failed.

Because it hadn’t.

After nearly eleven years, Craft closed Niche while it was still successful and critically acclaimed. There is something I have always respected about that decision. Sometimes evolution means having enough confidence to stop doing something extraordinarily well and ask yourself what comes next.

Then came COVID.

Restaurants changed. Chefs changed.

We changed.

Craft’s restaurants were hit along with the rest of an industry suddenly facing circumstances none of us had ever experienced. Restaurants closed temporarily, concepts changed, and the definition of what it meant to feed people had to be reconsidered almost overnight.

And still, as St. Louis dining emerged into something different, I kept eating at Craft’s restaurants.

Because underneath all those incarnations, I kept finding the same philosophy that had drawn me to his cooking in the first place:

Start with something good. Respect it. Understand exactly what you’re doing to it.

And don’t screw with it just to prove that you can.

Which brings me to El Molino del Sureste.

Oh. My. God.

Chef Alex Henry Montes De Oca was born in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and spent part of his childhood there. His path as a chef eventually brought him through Gerard Craft’s kitchens before he developed a culinary language entirely his own. In 2026, Henry was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest.

I knew about the acclaim when we went to dinner.

What I hadn’t put together was the Gerard Craft connection.

But something about the food felt familiar almost immediately.

Not the flavors.

Not the cuisine.

Not the plating.

The philosophy.

We sat at the bar at El Molino, which looks directly into the kitchen. For a chef like me, there may be no better seat in a restaurant.

Watching another chef work at their craft is like being handed a backstage pass at a concert. You get to see the rhythm, the timing, the concentration, the economy of movement. You watch the hundred tiny decisions that disappear by the time the finished plate reaches the dining room.

And then I saw what Alex Henry was working with.

A 36-inch flat-top griddle and a two-burner induction cooktop.

That’s essentially the stage.

I sat just a few feet away and watched extraordinary food come out of a workspace simpler than some home kitchens.

No enormous exhibition kitchen. No culinary theater. No flames shooting toward the ceiling for Instagram.

Just a chef, heat, ingredients and an extraordinary amount of intention.

Alex himself was kind, appreciative and almost shy when I complimented his food. There was no swagger coming from behind that bar. No sense that we were supposed to be impressed by how difficult any of it was.

The confidence was on the plate.

And nowhere was that clearer to me than in the Pescado al Papadzul.

The pescado of the day was red snapper, served with pipián de papadzul, a rich, earthy sauce made from ground pumpkin seeds; salsa frita, a deeply flavored cooked tomato and chile sauce; pescarrones, crispy fish similar in spirit to chicharrón; briny trout roe; and fresh herbs. My husband paired it with a Spanish Albariño, whose bright acidity, citrus and minerality cut beautifully through the richness of the fish and pumpkin-seed sauce.

What fascinated me was the thought given not simply to flavor, but to texture.

The trout roe provided those tiny bursts of briny salinity. The pescarrones did something completely different: they brought a crisp, savory bite against the tender snapper and silky sauces.

It would have been easy for all those flavors to simply blend into one another. Instead, Henry gave your palate something to move through: tender fish, creamy pipián, bursting roe, crisp pescarrones, fresh herbs.

Every component had a job.

That is the kind of detail that tells me how a chef thinks.

The crunch wasn’t there because the plate needed another garnish. The roe wasn’t there because roe looks impressive on a menu. One provided texture. The other provided salinity. The sauces brought richness, earthiness, acidity and depth. The herbs brought freshness.

Every element contributed something specific to the bite.

And that is a very different thing from making food fussy.

In fact, I think it’s the opposite.

Fussy food asks you to notice the chef. Intentional food asks you to notice the food.

El Molino itself begins with perhaps the most elemental ingredient imaginable:

Corn.

The restaurant’s namesake is an actual molino—a mill. Locally grown corn is nixtamalized and ground in-house into fresh masa for tortillas, tostadas, tamales, sopes and other preparations grounded in centuries of Mexican culinary tradition.

Think about that.

Missouri-grown corn. Ancient Mexican technique.

Farm to table, by way of Mexico.

And that, to me, is what makes Henry’s cooking so interesting.

This isn’t Mexican food transported wholesale to Missouri, nor is it Missouri food dressed up as Mexican.

It is a chef understanding both where he comes from and where he is.

There were beautiful sauces. Acid. Chiles. Herbs. Smoke. Fresh masa. Seafood. Vegetables that were still allowed to taste like vegetables.

There was plenty happening on those plates.

It simply never felt fussy.

Restraint should never be confused with simplicity. In fact, restraint may require considerably more confidence.

You have to understand technique thoroughly enough that you no longer need to demonstrate it. You have to trust an ingredient enough to let it remain recognizable. And you have to know exactly when you’ve done enough.

A locally grown ear of corn doesn’t have to become unrecognizable to become extraordinary.

A beautiful piece of snapper doesn’t need to disappear beneath the chef’s ego.

Sometimes the most sophisticated thing a chef can do is know when to leave the damn thing alone.

And then I learned that Alex Henry had worked under Gerard Craft.

I laughed.

Of course he did.

Because I hadn’t recognized Gerard Craft’s food in Alex Henry’s cooking.

I had recognized something far more interesting.

I recognized the lesson.

Do the work.

Know your ingredients.

Master your technique.

Respect where the food came from.

Think about what every element contributes to the bite.

And then have enough confidence to get the hell out of its way.

That may be one of the most beautiful things about mentorship in a kitchen.

A great chef doesn’t teach the next generation to reproduce his food.

He teaches them how to see food.

Eventually, the student decides what he wants to say with it.

Alex Henry clearly has.

Make no mistake: this food is his. It comes from his family, his memories, the Yucatán, the ingredients available to him in Missouri and the culinary voice he has developed for himself.

But sitting at that bar, watching him create it all on thirty-six inches of griddle and two burners, I could see the lineage.

Not imitation.

Inheritance.

Gerard Craft found his language in Missouri.

Alex Henry is speaking Yucatán with a Missouri accent.

And perhaps the highest compliment I can give him is this:

With all the thought, technique and painstaking detail that went into that dinner, I never once felt as though Alex Henry was trying to show me how talented he is.

He was too busy showing me what the food could do.

And holy shit.

It did.

Mental Health, Psychology, Relationships

Compassion Learns Where the Fence Goes

Featuredby Stephanie BoschLeave a Comment on Compassion Learns Where the Fence Goes
Compassion Learns Where the Fence Goes

Last week,  I was let go from my job.

I was numb.

And then I cried for four or five hours.

Not necessarily because I wasn’t going to be the Catering Manager anymore. Not because I couldn’t imagine my life without the job. The truth is, I had written my resignation letter on June 6 and held onto it for nearly three months.

I think I cried because what happened didn’t align with what I was told had happened.

And that mattered to me.

It still does.

I am deeply attuned to timing—to endings and beginnings, to the strange ways life tells us when something has run its course. I’ve learned to pay attention when something inside me starts whispering that a season is changing.

Sometimes I listen.

Sometimes, apparently, I need a little assistance.

Maybe that’s part of what happened here.

I knew in June that something wasn’t right. I knew it strongly enough to sit down and write a resignation letter.

But I didn’t send it.

I stayed.

I stayed because the problem was never Gateway.

The problem was Goddess.

I loved Gateway. I loved the work, the people, the pace, the production, the insanity of it. I loved walking into a building where three studios might be operating simultaneously and nearly 900 plates could move through the dining room in a day. I loved solving problems. I loved the relationships I built there. I loved discovering that I could walk into that kind of environment and not only survive it, but lead inside it.

So I ignored the letter sitting there.

Maybe that’s another thing I’ve learned.

Sometimes you know when it’s time to leave long before you’re willing to go.

You feel it. You write the letter. You put the truth on paper.

And then you stay.

You stay because there are still people you love. Because there are things you’re learning. Because there are pieces of the experience you’re not ready to surrender. You stay because you keep hoping something will change. Because maybe if you try harder, communicate better, give a little more, forgive one more thing, it will finally become what you keep believing it could be.

But there comes a point when staying in something that continually hurts you begins to hurt you more than leaving ever could.

And I believe life has a way of dealing with that.

Call it the universe. Call it God. Call it circumstance. Call it whatever you want.

I believe there are times when we know we’re supposed to leave something and refuse to do it ourselves, so eventually the decision gets made for us.

And sometimes it isn’t gentle.

Sometimes the door doesn’t quietly open and invite you to walk through it.

Sometimes it slams behind you.

Sometimes the ending is painful and humiliating and final precisely because you kept finding reasons to stay through every quieter opportunity you had to leave.

Maybe that’s what happened to me.

I had already written the resignation letter.

I already knew.

And I stayed anyway.

Maybe the universe didn’t take something away from me.

Maybe it finally removed me from something I couldn’t bring myself to leave.

That doesn’t make the way it happened hurt less.

But it changes what I think the pain means.

Maybe I wasn’t wrong to stay as long as I did. Had I left on June 6, I would have missed people and experiences I wouldn’t trade now simply because I dislike the way the story eventually ended.

Maybe I needed to stay long enough to get what I came there to learn.

But maybe I also needed to learn that once the lesson is over, staying doesn’t earn you extra credit.

Sometimes it just makes the exit harder.

And when I wouldn’t close the door myself, it closed for me.

Not gracefully.

Certainly not the way I would have chosen.

But completely.

And maybe that’s the lesson underneath all the others:

When something continually breaks you, leaving isn’t failure. Sometimes leaving is the boundary you should have drawn long before the universe drew it for you.

So after four or five hours of crying, I eventually found myself asking a different question.

Not Why did this happen to me?

But:

What was I supposed to learn from it?

And maybe the lesson wasn’t simply that shit rolls downhill.

Maybe Gateway was never just about Gateway.

There are places we enter believing we’re there to do a job, and only later realize we were there to learn something about ourselves.

Gateway became a classroom in competence, leadership, power, loyalty, communication, boundaries—and ultimately, letting go.

I learned the work there.

Not theoretically.

I learned it by doing it.

I learned how to walk into chaos and start organizing it. I learned how to make decisions when there wasn’t time to deliberate endlessly. I learned how to solve problems before anyone had time to ask whether they could be solved. I learned how to take care of people while still getting the job done.

And perhaps most importantly, I learned that I was good at it.

Sometimes, if you’re extraordinarily fortunate, the work also puts a teacher in your path.

That summer, mine was Colette VanLoon.

Colette doesn’t work for Goddess.

She works for Paul McCartney.

She has spent four decades in the entertainment industry and has been Paul’s backstage coordinator for eighteen years. In my world, that’s about as close to rock ‘n’ roll royalty as it gets.

She hadn’t planned on spending her summer at Gateway. She came in to help Goddess because her sister, Kim, works there.

And somehow, through that strange intersection of timing and circumstance, I got six weeks working beside her.

Six weeks of mentorship from someone with forty years of experience doing this work at the highest level.

You cannot learn that from a book.

You cannot read your way into forty years of knowing what happens backstage when the stakes are high. There is no textbook for the instinct that comes from decades of walking into rooms, reading them correctly and knowing what needs to happen next.

I got to watch it.

I got to ask questions.

I got to learn from it.

And Colette gave me something beyond the mechanics of the work.

She had the benefit of coming into the environment with decades of experience behind her and seeing it through a lens I simply didn’t have yet. Her perspective gave context to things I had already been noticing and feeling for myself.

She didn’t create my concerns.

Remember, the resignation letter was already sitting there.

But sometimes the most important thing a mentor gives you isn’t an answer.

It’s a lens.

Colette helped me trust what I was already seeing.

The illusion was no more.

There is something almost poetic about the fact that one of the greatest gifts Goddess gave me was bringing Colette VanLoon into my life.

For six weeks, I got an education I could never have bought.

And I’ll carry that one with me.

I also learned something about the kind of leader I never want to become.

I experienced a style of management that, from my perspective, relied heavily on fear and intimidation.

The problem with intimidation is that it only works when the person on the receiving end is willing to be intimidated.

I am not intimidated.

I’m not easily frightened by titles, authority, raised voices, posturing or someone else’s need to establish dominance. Unless you’re a serial killer holding me captive in your house of horrors, I’m probably not going to be afraid of you.

But underneath the joke is something I believe deeply:

Intimidation is not leadership.

There is a difference between having authority and needing someone else to feel small in order to prove you have it. There is a difference between commanding respect and demanding submission.

Fear can produce compliance.

Intimidation can produce silence.

Neither one produces trust.

And this summer taught me something else about what happens when you begin using your voice.

You can express yourself calmly. You can take accountability for your own part. You can say, Here’s what I could have done differently, and here’s what I need to be different going forward.

People respond to that in very different ways.

Some people hear you.

They may not agree with everything you say, but they recognize that you’re speaking in good faith. Sometimes they even appreciate it. They adjust their behavior. The relationship gets better because honesty has created room for mutual respect.

And then there are people who double down.

Your calmness doesn’t calm them. Your accountability isn’t met with accountability of their own. Your boundary isn’t received as information about how to work with you.

It’s experienced as a challenge.

That taught me something important:

You can communicate a boundary respectfully. You cannot control whether someone receives it respectfully.

And another person’s reaction to your boundary doesn’t automatically mean the boundary was wrong.

Sometimes healthy communication improves a relationship.

Sometimes it reveals one.

There was another lesson in all of this about loyalty.

I originally hired a staff of fifteen.

By the end, I was the last one standing.

I don’t say that as some declaration of martyrdom. Hospitality has turnover. People leave. Circumstances change. Seasons are hard.

But one particular experience stayed with me.

An employee walked out in the middle of a shift. Her departure left six uncovered shifts behind, and the responsibility for figuring out how to staff them landed with me.

And we did it.

My staff rallied in a way I will never forget.

People canceled doctor’s appointments. They came in on scheduled days off. They rearranged their lives. Some worked sixteen-hour days. I covered shifts myself.

Together, we filled every hole and kept things moving.

I was incredibly proud of them.

Later, the employee who had walked out was rehired because she was needed to work dressing rooms.

There was no conversation with the people who had absorbed the consequences of her leaving. There was no acknowledgment of what they had sacrificed to keep things running.

Not even a simple thank you.

Two of my employees quit after she was brought back.

That stayed with me.

Not because I believe every management decision requires consensus. It doesn’t. Leadership sometimes means making decisions people won’t like.

But leadership also means understanding that decisions communicate something.

My staff didn’t need a parade.

They needed to know that what they had done mattered.

They needed to be seen.

Never ask people for extraordinary loyalty and then treat that loyalty as ordinary.

People remember whether you noticed.

They remember whether you thanked them.

They remember whether you stood up for them after they stood up for you.

If my people show up for me, I will show up for them.

If they carry something heavy, I will notice.

If they give more than the job requires, I will never behave as though I was simply entitled to it.

And when they save my ass?

I’ll say thank you.

Every single fucking time.

And somewhere in all of that, I had to acknowledge something about my own loyalty, too.

I gave a lot to this job.

I missed vacation. I came in on my days off. I showed up with thirty minutes’ notice when I was needed. I was often the last person there at the end of the day.

I stayed when staying cost me something.

And I don’t believe any of that entitled me to special treatment. I understood the job I had accepted. I understood that leadership sometimes means being the person who shows up when nobody else can.

But there is a difference between expecting someone to do their job and treating their willingness to continually go beyond it as though it costs them nothing.

Sometimes all I needed was:

Thanks for coming in. I know this was your day off.

Or:

Thanks for staying. I know you had somewhere else to be.

Hell, once it could have been:

I know you had tickets to see Brandi Carlile at Madison Square Garden. I know what you gave up to be here. Thank you.

That’s it.

Not a bonus. Not an award. Not a parade.

Just recognition that there was a human being on the other side of the job description.

Because people will do extraordinary things for work they care about and people they care about.

But extraordinary effort should never become so expected that nobody remembers to say thank you.

That experience changed the way I think about leadership, too.

Never become so accustomed to someone’s dedication that you stop recognizing it as a choice.

Because God, did I learn something about carrying things this summer.

Responsibility. Expectations. Other people’s problems. The needs of my staff. The demands of production. The things that needed to happen because somebody had to make them happen.

There is pride in knowing you can carry a tremendous amount.

There is wisdom in knowing when to put it down.

Being capable of carrying something does not mean it was ever yours to carry.

And maybe this is where the lesson reaches beyond work.

I’m tired of giving and giving and giving and getting almost nothing back.

I’m tired of being the person who stays longer, tries harder, forgives more, carries more and keeps believing that if I just show up one more time, give one more chance or prove myself one more way, eventually someone will understand what I’m worth.

I’m tired of people recognizing my value only after I’m gone.

And maybe most of all, I’m tired of staying in places I already know are toxic because some part of me still believes I can love them into becoming something different.

Or that if I work hard enough, give enough or become indispensable enough, I can somehow earn the treatment I should never have had to earn in the first place.

That’s a hard thing to admit.

Because there is something noble about loyalty.

There is something beautiful about perseverance.

There is something admirable about being the person who doesn’t give up easily.

Until there isn’t.

Sometimes staying isn’t loyalty.

Sometimes it’s abandoning yourself in order to prove your worth to people who have already demonstrated that they don’t know what to do with it.

And I don’t want to do that anymore.

I don’t want to keep auditioning for a place in rooms where I’ve already proven I belong.

I don’t want my absence to be the thing that finally makes someone understand what my presence was worth.

I don’t want to keep pouring myself into people, relationships, jobs or situations that require me to become depleted before I finally give myself permission to leave.

Maybe that’s the fence.

Not a wall around my heart.

Not becoming cynical. Not withholding love. Not keeping score every time I do something for another human being.

Just finally understanding that reciprocity matters.

That being generous doesn’t require being endlessly available.

That compassion doesn’t require self-abandonment.

That loyalty doesn’t mean staying indefinitely.

And that knowing my worth means I have to stop repeatedly placing it in the hands of people who require me to prove it.

I don’t need to give less.

I need to become more discerning about where I give.

Because I don’t want to become someone who loves less deeply because I’ve been hurt.

I want to become someone who finally understands that loving deeply includes me, too.

This was also the first time in my life I’ve ever been let go from a position.

That was new.

But if I’m being truthful, I wasn’t entirely surprised.

For some time, I had felt the temperature changing.

I felt increasing pressure after I began pushing back—after I started questioning decisions, challenging things I believed needed to be challenged, and speaking up when I found myself dealing with the consequences of decisions I hadn’t made.

There were times when I felt I was cleaning up messes I hadn’t created.

Eventually, I stopped doing that quietly.

I pushed back.

I asked questions.

I challenged authority when I believed authority needed to be challenged.

And I understood that doing so might have consequences.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened when I was let go.

I have always understood that people make decisions I may not agree with. Businesses make decisions. Managers make decisions. Sometimes those decisions mean you lose your job. I can accept that.

What I had a much harder time accepting was being given an explanation that I did not believe was true.

Maybe that sounds naïve, but I genuinely never believed someone would look me in the eye at one of the most vulnerable moments of my life and tell me something untrue simply because saying it made the situation easier for them—or because it would make the ending hurt more for me.

And it did hurt.

Not because I believed what was said.

Because I couldn’t understand why it needed to be said at all.

Being fired was enough.

There was no reason to make me question my value on the way out the door.

There is a difference between being difficult and being unwilling to make someone else’s difficulty invisible.

I don’t know what role my willingness to push back ultimately played in the decision to let me go.

But I do know this:

I can live with losing a job because I spoke up.

I would have had a much harder time living with myself if I had learned to stay quiet.

That’s one reason an inquiry is underway, and I’m willing to let the facts establish what happened rather than pretend I know every conversation that occurred behind closed doors.

But I know my own experience.

I know when I began feeling the pressure.

I know when the dynamic changed.

And I would rather live with the consequences of having spoken up than keep a position by becoming someone who doesn’t.

I can learn diplomacy.

I can learn when to choose my battles.

I can even learn that sometimes being right isn’t the same thing as being effective.

But I will never learn to confuse silence with professionalism.

There is still an inquiry underway into what happened at the end, and I intend to see it through.

Not because I want my job back.

I don’t.

What I was subsequently told had happened does not align with what I experienced.

There is a discrepancy there, and I intend to understand it.

If the record is wrong, I intend to correct it.

Because this isn’t about winning.

It’s about integrity.

Mine.

There are things I can walk away from.

A job is one of them.

A title.

A paycheck.

An organization.

Even a place I genuinely loved working.

But my integrity, my work ethic and my heart are different.

Those are mine.

And if you call those things into question, I will fight you to the end of the fucking earth for them.

This isn’t a fight to get something back.

It’s a fight to set the record straight.

Sometimes boundaries aren’t about walking away quietly.

Sometimes integrity requires you to stand exactly where you are and say:

No. That is not an accurate account of what happened, and I will not allow someone else’s version of events to become the unquestioned record simply because it came from higher up the organizational chart.

I can hold compassion for the people involved and still demand accountability.

Those things aren’t contradictions.

And there is one fence in particular I know now:

You may take my position. You do not get to take my character with it.

I’ve been through the fucking thing now.

I know where the sharp edges are.

That’s not bitterness.

That’s experience.

There is a kind of compassion that exists before you’ve been tested, and another kind that exists afterward.

The first believes that caring deeply will somehow be enough.

The second understands that caring deeply without boundaries can get you chewed alive.

Compassion learns where the fence goes.

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

You can learn competence, authority and leadership without surrendering your heart and compassion.

You can become stronger without becoming harder.

You can understand hierarchy without worshipping it.

You can recognize politics without becoming political.

You can learn how power works without allowing power to become the thing that defines you.

You can forgive without volunteering for the same lesson twice.

And you can love something while acknowledging that something within it wasn’t right.

I don’t want to leave this experience carrying resentment.

I’ve carried enough.

Something doesn’t have to end well for it to have been worth something.

I can be deeply disappointed by how something ended without rewriting everything that came before it.

Both things can be true.

I can wish the ending had been different.

And I can remain profoundly grateful that I was there.

Because I still love Gateway.

I love the people there, and I will miss some of them deeply.

I also know that some of those relationships won’t end simply because my employment did. There are people I expect to stay in contact with, friendships I hope to carry long after this summer becomes a story about something that happened once.

Because those people were there.

They saw me.

They watched me work.

They saw my dedication, my compassion and my leadership. They saw the long days, the problems solved and the people cared for. They saw who I was when things were going beautifully and, perhaps more importantly, who I was when they weren’t.

So I’m not worried about what the people who actually worked beside me know about my character.

I know what I brought into that building.

And I know there are people inside it who know, too.

That’s one of the reasons I refuse to let the way this ended rewrite the summer that came before it.

I can be angry about the ending and still love the place.

I can challenge what happened and still be grateful for what happened there.

I can leave without pretending I never belonged.

A job can end without every relationship inside it ending with it.

And some of the people I met at Gateway are people I very much hope to carry with me.

I’ve done a lot of things in my life.

I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of being able to do almost everything I’ve ever really wanted to do, and I don’t take that for granted. I’ve reinvented myself more than once. I’ve walked into rooms where I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and figured it out.

And I leave this summer feeling as though I somehow accumulated ten years of experience in a single season.

Some of it was exhilarating.

Some of it was exhausting.

Some of it was beautiful.

Some of it hurt like hell.

I’ll take all of it.

I’ll take the lesson and move on.

I was offered a position as a tour caterer this fall.

It was an incredible opportunity, and I was genuinely honored to be asked.

But even as the offer was being made, somewhere in the back of my mind I already knew I wasn’t going to take it.

Touring would mean being gone for a month at a time, sometimes longer.

And I knew I couldn’t do that.

My children still need me.

Maybe they don’t need me in all the ways they did when they were little. That’s the strange evolution of motherhood. The job changes constantly, but it doesn’t simply disappear because your children get older.

At the end of the day, before the career, before the adventure, before the money and before whatever impressive thing I might be able to put on a résumé:

I take care of my people.

That’s who I am.

I spent twenty years as a stay-at-home mother.

I wouldn’t trade those years.

But now I want something that belongs to me, too.

My independence and autonomy are deeply important to me.

I want my own work.

My own money.

My own path.

My own name on something I built.

I don’t have to choose between being a mother and being ambitious.

I have to decide what kind of ambition fits the life I actually want.

And then my daughter reminded me what that life looks like.

When I told Avery what had happened at Gateway, her response caught me completely off guard.

“Oh, thank God.”

I laughed.

But I don’t think I fully understood until that moment how much my being gone had affected her.

I had spent the summer measuring the cost in sixteen-hour days, exhaustion, staffing problems and everything else that comes with trying to keep a complicated operation moving.

I hadn’t stopped to consider that someone else had been keeping track of those hours, too.

My daughter.

That night, Avery curled up next to me on the couch.

She gave me back rubs.

We snuggled together and watched a movie.

Nothing remarkable happened.

A

And somehow, after the summer I’d just had, it felt remarkable.

There were no radios going off.

No staffing problems to solve.

Nobody needed me in another studio.

Nobody was asking me to carry one more thing.

My daughter just wanted her mom.

And her mom was home.

I couldn’t have asked for a better Band-Aid.

But there was something else in that moment, too.

I want to be the kind of mother—and the kind of woman—who can look her daughter in the eyes and know that I lived in a way I would be proud to see her live someday.

I want her to know that being honorable still matters.

That honesty matters.

That integrity matters.

That sometimes doing what you believe is right will cost you something.

And that the cost doesn’t make it wrong.

If my daughter ever finds herself in a room where staying quiet would be easier, I want her to have seen a woman who was willing to speak.

If she ever has to choose between protecting her position and protecting her integrity, I hope she remembers which one her mother chose.

There will be other opportunities.

Other kitchens.

Other projects.

Other doors I haven’t even imagined yet.

But there will never be another season of my children’s lives exactly like this one.

My career can wait for another opportunity. Their lives won’t wait for me to come home.

And perhaps there is another reason I’m supposed to be home this fall.

I finished my novel just before I started working at Gateway.

Then Gateway happened.

For the next several months, the book waited.

Now I think it deserves what I couldn’t give it this summer.

My time.

My editor loves it.

She believes it could do well.

I guess we’re going to find out.

Because of all the things I’ve been fortunate enough to do in my life, at the end of the day, I think my heart has always belonged to writing.

Because writing has always been more than something I love to do.

It’s how I understand things.

When something happens that I can’t quite make sense of, I write my way through it. I put the pieces on the page and move them around until I can see the shape of what happened—and, more importantly, what it meant to me.

Writing gives me distance without requiring me to disconnect.

It lets me feel something completely and still step far enough outside of it to ask better questions.

In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing here.

Last week, I cried for hours.

Today, I wrote.

And somewhere between the first sentence and this one, the story changed.

I didn’t get my job back.

I didn’t get all the answers.

Nothing about yesterday became untrue.

I just gained perspective.

Maybe that’s what writing has always done for me.

It doesn’t change what happened.

It changes the distance from which I can see it.

And sometimes that’s enough to finally understand where the fence goes.

So this fall, I’m going to write.

I’m going to send the queries.

I’ll take the rejections if they come.

And I’ll keep sending them anyway.

I’ll give this book its chance.

And I’ll give myself mine.

Gateway taught me that I can do hard things.

Goddess taught me that being capable of carrying something doesn’t mean it was ever mine to carry.

Colette taught me to pay attention.

My staff taught me what loyalty looks like.

My children reminded me where home is.

And somewhere in all of it, I learned what kind of leader I want to be—and what kind I never want to become.

Tell the truth.

Put down the weight.

Rest.

Take the lesson with you.

I’ve been through the fucking thing now.

I know where the sharp edges are.

I know what isn’t mine to carry.

I know where the fence goes.

For twenty years, I gave my time to raising the people I love most.

Now I’m ready for some time that belongs to me, too.

Not instead of them.

Alongside them.

And I know exactly what I want to do with it.

I want to write.

Mindfulness, Sacred Appetite

There Are No Accidents

Featuredby Stephanie Bosch1 Comment on There Are No Accidents
There Are No Accidents

For the last several days, something has been bothering me.

Food.

More specifically, the amount of perfectly good food I have had to throw away at the end of the night.

Working in catering, there is inevitably waste. You plan for people who don’t show up. You prepare enough because running out isn’t an option. And at the end of service, sometimes you find yourself standing over trays of beautiful food knowing exactly where they’re headed.

The trash.

We’ve worked with charities at Gateway before, and we’ve made efforts to donate what we can, but it has always been hit or miss. Inconsistent. And lately, throwing away good food has started to genuinely wear on me.

Because I know better.

I know there are people not very far from the building where I work who are hungry.

Maybe this bothers me so deeply because somewhere in me, I remember what an empty refrigerator looks like.

When I was a little girl, my parents divorced, and for a while things were hard. I remember opening our refrigerator one day and seeing almost nothing inside. There were condiments—ketchup, mustard—and I think some butter. That was it.

For about six months, my mother had to accept federal assistance to help us get through that time.

I was five years old, and I loved milk. I remember being so excited when I learned that a social worker was going to bring us some. In my five-year-old mind, I knew exactly what milk looked like and exactly what I was waiting for.

Then she arrived with milk in a box.

And I cried.

It’s such a small memory, but I have carried it all these years. A child doesn’t understand federal assistance or divorce or why a refrigerator that once had food in it suddenly doesn’t. A child only understands that she wants milk and that somehow even the milk doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s part of why I became a chef.

Maybe somewhere inside me, I have always needed to feed people. And when I say feed, I mean something much larger than putting food on a plate.

To feed someone is to nourish them.

To provide for them.

To care for them.

There is something inside me that is cared for, too, when I know someone else has been taken care of. Knowing that someone is fed, that for at least this moment they have enough, satisfies some deep need in me that I don’t think I fully understood until now.

Maybe that’s why it is so difficult for me to throw good food away. Maybe it’s why helping people who don’t have enough has never felt abstract to me. I know what it is to be a child who opens a refrigerator and doesn’t find food there.

And I was given an extraordinary gift in the middle of all of that: my grandmother taught me how to cook.

She gave me more than recipes. She taught me what you can do with food. You can take what you have and make something from it. You can put a plate in front of someone and, without saying a word, tell them: I see you. You matter. I want you to be nourished.

Perhaps becoming a chef was never only about loving food.

Perhaps it was always, in some small way, about making sure the refrigerator wasn’t empty.

And tonight, the universe did something interesting.

One of our runners came up to me.

“Are you the catering manager?”

I told him I was.

He hesitated.

Then he asked if I would ever be interested in donating our leftover food.

He works with an organization called All Hands On Deck: STL, an all-volunteer nonprofit whose philosophy can be summed up in one word:

S.H.A.R.E.

Share Health And Resources Equitably.

They rescue food that might otherwise be discarded and redistribute it through free grocery shares and pop-ups throughout St. Louis, particularly in communities where access to nutritious food and other resources can be difficult. Their work extends beyond food, too—connecting people with resources, supporting community health and working toward stronger, more sustainable neighborhoods.

As he was telling me all of this, I could hardly believe the timing.

“Yes,” I said.

Absolutely yes.

And suddenly the food I had been worrying about throwing away wasn’t going into the trash.

It was going to people.

The Question He Almost Didn’t Ask

He stayed late tonight to help me pack everything.

And he was grateful.

But so was I.

Maybe even more so.

Because somewhere along the way, while we were packing containers and standing around the kitchen after everyone else had gone, the conversation stopped being about food.

We started talking about spirituality.

About the natural world.

About what God actually is.

About what happens when human beings take something sacred and build institutions around it.

We talked about Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass, a book we both dearly love—a book that, in many ways, is about reciprocity. About understanding that our relationship with the earth, and ultimately with one another, was never meant to be transactional.

We are supposed to receive.

And we are supposed to give back.

At some point, I asked him about his tattoo. Then I showed him mine—Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra of compassion, rising out of a lotus. He showed me his in return: a lotus, too, but with the sword of knowledge rising from its center.

There was something quietly beautiful about that exchange, two lotuses carrying two different ideas that were not really so different at all—compassion and wisdom, the heart and the knowing.

He also had the Lakota words Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ—“all my relations”—an acknowledgment that the boundaries we draw between ourselves and the rest of the living world are not as absolute as we pretend: people, animals, plants, trees, earth.

All related.

All belonging to one another in some way.

And maybe that was why the conversation felt so familiar to me.

I had been telling him what I have come to believe—that while we are here, we are supposed to help. To ease suffering when we can. To stand beside those who cannot stand entirely on their own.

Christianity calls us to care for the least among us; Buddhism asks us to cultivate compassion for all sentient beings. And there we were, talking about these things while carrying pieces of the same philosophy permanently on our skin.

Different traditions, different symbols, different roads perhaps—but beneath them, the same quiet recognition: none of us is here alone.

At some point in the conversation, he said something so simple that I knew immediately I was going to borrow it:

“I get Jesus. I don’t get the church.”

Exactly.

There is something profound in separating the sacred from the structures we’ve constructed around it.

Maybe God is much bigger than religion.

Maybe God is generosity.

Maybe God is reciprocity.

Maybe God is the instinct that tells us food should feed someone instead of filling a dumpster.

Maybe God is the little voice that tells a man to ask a question he almost didn’t ask.

There Are No Accidents

Before he left, he invited me to join the Native Women’s Care Circle for a water blessing along the Mississippi River next Sunday.

I’m going.

Afterward, I learned that this wasn’t simply a small local gathering. The Native Women’s Care Circle is a grassroots, matriarchal, Indigenous-led prayer group devoted to the health and welfare of Native families and communities and to stewardship of the land and water.

The St. Louis circle is part of a much larger tradition of weekly prayer along the Mississippi inspired by the Nibi Water Walks.

Years ago, Ojibwe elder Sharon Day called upon people along the river—from its beginnings in Minnesota toward its journey south—to gather on Sunday mornings and continue praying for the healing of the water.

Here near St. Louis, Native women have been gathering along the Mississippi for years to do exactly that.

I asked Terry what time I should be there. He explained the timing to me as “Indian time.”

“Whatever time you get there, but around 9:00 AM.”

I loved that immediately.

He also began explaining what I will experience. You don’t simply walk down to the Mississippi and take water from it. You approach the water as something living and sacred. You ask permission to receive some of it.

A small amount is gathered into a vessel—traditionally, copper vessels are used in the Nibi water-walking tradition—and the water is held in prayer before ultimately being returned to the river.

There is something about that that already moves me deeply: you ask the water.

Not because the water belongs to us, but because we belong to a world made possible by it.

There is another Indigenous teaching Terry shared with me that I keep thinking about: water has memory. I don’t mean that as a scientific claim, but in the spiritual sense in which water is understood as more than an inert resource.

In Ojibwe teachings, nibi—water—is regarded as a sacred, living and moving being, something that carries stories and connection. In the Nibi Water Walk tradition, water gathered at the beginning of a journey is carried in a copper vessel and ultimately returned downstream, in part as a way of reminding the river of its original state.

I find that idea extraordinarily beautiful. The Mississippi flowing past St. Louis has already traveled through countless places and lives before it reaches us, carrying the story of the land with it.

And long after it passes us, it keeps going. If water carries memory, then standing beside the river in prayer feels less like speaking to an object and more like entering an ancient conversation already in progress.

We spend so much of our lives taking from the earth without asking anything. We turn on faucets. We divert rivers. We consume and discard. We behave as though nature is a collection of resources placed here for our convenience.

And here is a ceremony that begins with an entirely different premise.

Ask first.

Very Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Receive with gratitude.

Offer something back.

I’m so looking forward to standing beside the Mississippi next Sunday and participating in that prayer.

And as I drove home tonight, I kept thinking about how strangely these things happen.

For days, throwing away food had been bothering me.

Not intellectually.

It was bothering my heart.

I wanted another answer. I just didn’t know what that answer was yet.

And then someone walked into my dining room.

Someone I might otherwise have known only as one of the runners working in the building.

He asked me a question.

And he told me later that he almost didn’t.

That part stays with me.

Because how many moments in our lives hinge on something that small?

A question we almost didn’t ask.

A phone call we almost didn’t make.

A person we almost didn’t introduce ourselves to.

A door we almost didn’t walk through.

We tend to imagine that the important moments of our lives will announce themselves. That there will be some unmistakable sign telling us, Pay attention. This matters.

Usually there isn’t.

Usually it’s just someone standing in a dining room saying:

“Are you the catering manager?”

Tomorrow Morning

Tomorrow morning at 11:30, All Hands On Deck will hold a pop-up in the city.

And tonight, instead of throwing away perfectly good food, we packed it.

Tomorrow someone will pick it up.

Someone will bring it home.

Someone will eat it.

Maybe someone will feed their children with it.

Food that was headed for a dumpster will instead become nourishment.

And hopefully this isn’t a one-time donation.

We exchanged information. We talked about what we could do going forward. And for the first time since this started bothering me, I feel like there may finally be a relationship that allows us to consistently move surplus food out of our kitchen and into the hands of people who can use it.

That alone would have made tonight extraordinary.

But I think I received something else, too.

I met a kind soul.

I had one of those unexpected conversations that reminds me there are still people wandering around this world asking the same questions I am—about spirituality, purpose, nature, service and what we’re supposed to be doing with the short amount of time we’re given here.

Perhaps that’s why tonight doesn’t feel accidental.

I don’t know exactly what I believe about the invisible forces moving through this world. I’ve become increasingly comfortable admitting that I don’t need to know.

But I believe in paying attention.

I believe in synchronicity.

I believe there are moments when something we’ve been carrying quietly meets an answer coming toward us from a direction we never thought to look.

And I believe sometimes grace is much less dramatic than we’ve been taught to expect.

Sometimes grace doesn’t part the sea.

Sometimes it doesn’t arrive accompanied by thunder or revelation.

Sometimes grace is a man who almost doesn’t ask a question.

Sometimes it’s two people talking about God in an empty dining room.

Sometimes it’s an invitation to sit beside water.

And sometimes it’s simply taking something that would have been thrown away and putting it into the hands of someone who needs it.

Maybe there are accidents in the universe.

But tonight didn’t feel like one.

Mental Health, Psychology, Relationships

Sometimes Imitation Isn’t Flattery: Sometimes It’s Hunger

Featuredby Stephanie Bosch
Sometimes Imitation Isn’t Flattery: Sometimes It’s Hunger

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Brunch, Summer Recipes

Peaches, Pickles & Pistachios

Featuredby Stephanie Bosch
Peaches, Pickles & Pistachios

My Mediterranean summer began with a simple intention: to slow down and savor life through beauty, pleasure, and, of course, good food.

Summer, to me, means no alarm clocks—just warm sun, open water, and days allowed to unfold at their own pace.

It is the season of effortlessness: lingering mornings, sun-ripened food, and the freedom to be fully present.

Perhaps that is my version of la dolce vita—not extravagance, but the luxury of time and the pleasure of simply being.

The Italians call it la dolce vita—“the sweet life.” It’s the art of recognizing pleasure in the everyday: a long meal, a ripe tomato, an afternoon in the sun, or a table surrounded by good friends and good wine. It isn’t about extravagance. It’s about being fully present for the beauty already around you.

Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita gave the phrase its enduring glamour through its dreamlike vision of postwar Rome. And then there was Anita Ekberg—impossibly chic, statuesque, and luminous in that black strapless gown, wading through the Trevi Fountain as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Anita Ekberg via The Guardian

That is the essence I’m trying to capture: effortlessness. Beauty that isn’t forced or overly arranged, but simply a way of being. Ekberg didn’t appear to be performing glamour; she inhabited it. Sensual, unapologetic, and completely present in the pleasure of the moment.

That same philosophy follows me everywhere, especially when I travel. I love discovering restaurants that reflect a place so vividly—whether through tradition, creativity, or both. I’m always thinking about how I can carry those ideas home and reinterpret them in my own kitchen.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing recipes inspired by some of my favorite restaurant experiences, along with a Southwestern-inspired four-course dinner I’m hosting for a few neighbors. There’s plenty of deliciousness ahead.

For now, we’re staying in the Mediterranean—at the sun-kissed peak of summer.

This brunch began with a JUST Egg omelette filled with creamy vegan feta and fresh chives, then topped with tender sautéed asparagus, dill and basil flowers from my patio garden, and minced dill-pickle pistachios.

The contrast is everything. The crunch of those salty, briny pistachios against the tender asparagus and soft, creamy omelette is unreal. Finished with lemon juice and cracked black pepper, it’s bright, citrusy, herbaceous, and perfectly balanced.

Then there’s the toast.

Ripe heirloom tomatoes and homegrown peaches melt beautifully into one another—juicy, sweet, tart, and just acidic enough to keep things lively.

Fresh mint and edible basil flowers from my patio garden ties it all together, while vegan ricotta adds creaminess, texture, and a gentle neutrality against the crisp edges and tender center of lightly toasted artisan sourdough.

A drizzle of hot agave brings one final spark of warmth and sweetness.

The heirlooms were locally grown, though my garden tomato plant is doing absolute gangbusters. With any luck, the next version will come straight from my own backyard.

Nourishing, vibrant, beautiful, and deeply satisfying—this is summer, layered. Nothing fussy or overworked. Just sun-ripened ingredients allowed to be exactly what they are.

La dolce vita, brought home.