While there are many, many reasons we love our newest apartment- generous size, great location, beautiful kitchen, etc. etc.- there’s one feature we’ve come to value above all, and that is ~central air conditioning~. In the 12 years since we moved away from the Deep South, this is the first time we’ve had this luxury, and friends, it has been a total game changer. I don’t think I fully realized how much of a difference it made until last week, when Minneapolis had an unseasonable heat wave that put temps in the upper 90s for a full week, and I…

Hello from here, over a year into this weird pandemic life. I should specify that “here” means—once again!—a different apartment than the last time we checked in! In addition to all the public health weirdness of 2020, some serious voodoo went down in our old building, and our residence there culminated in a fire in the unit next door to ours, which sent us packing our bags and boxes in record time. The upshot is that we now live in an apartment that is WAY too nice for us (y’all, it has TWO bathrooms!!), which happens to be a five-minute…

Quick note– I’ve been writing this post for a couple weeks, and already the first paragraph has not aged particularly well– “content” is not exactly how I’m feeling in a city that was literally on fire a few days ago, and is still reeling now. I’m not prepared to unpack all that in a blog post about food, but it seems weird to just barrel ahead as if everything were fine. My heart is with everyone experiencing injustice anywhere, and I sincerely hope that the craziness of these times signals a real turning point and a better world to come.  This past…

As I mentioned last week, Alex and I moved to Minneapolis in late July, after TEN YEARS in Boston. When I arrived in Boston in the summer of 2009—having never been responsible for paying rent and bills before, never lived without a car before, never tried to balance work and school before, etc.—I figured I’d be there for the two years it would take to get my Masters’ and then hightail it out of there. Things didn’t go as planned, in pretty much any sense, but I must say, they did turn out better than expected. Ten years isn’t that…

Well, if there’s any better moment than this to resurrect (for the hundredth time) a dead and dying food blog, I don’t know what it is. Like most everyone else in the world, I’m self-isolating in response to the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe, which has left me with more time on my hands than I’m used to. I’m fortunate to have a job that can be done (more or less) from home, and Alex is no longer working as a freelancer, so we’re doing all right in the grand scheme of things. I also feel pretty lucky to be…

In general, I like to think of myself as a laid back, go-with-the-flow kind of person. I tend not to let things get under my skin, and I try not to hang on to annoyances and grievances. Alex is the same way, which adds up to a harmonious home life for both of us. That said, there are certain things that, without fail, get our respective goats. In Alex’s case: graffiti, litter, and people who drive in the dark or the rain without their headlights on. (I’ve often joked that Alex should have his own brief television spot called “Y’know What…

Oh, hi there! Long time no see. How’s things? I know Easter was a couple months ago at this point, and you’re probably over it. You’ve probably been over it for weeks. But I am still dreaming about my Easter dinner, and I just needed to pop in and talk about it for a minute. It was an unusual Easter in the Nishibun household; whereas Holy Week is normally a non-stop marathon of rehearsals and services for Alex (and a slightly less laborious marathon of tagging along for me), this year found Alex spending the week in the UK with…

Every few months, I think seriously about cancelling my food magazine subscriptions. I still get a little jolt every time I open the mailbox and see those beautiful glossy covers, but lately, I find that I have less and less motivation to move beyond the covers and read the contents. Plenty has been said about the current state of food media– the big publications are all producing the same content; they’re all starry-eyed over celebrity chefs; they all cater almost exclusively to wealthy-ish mostly-white young people in Brooklyn, San Francisco, or other appropriately hip locations; and so on. I certainly…