Recipes & Reflections on Latino Food & Culture
I appreciate Thanksgiving for the way in which the holiday brings together friends and family and reminds us to give thanks for each other and the goodness in life. But I still often think about how Thanksgiving came about and the ways in which it misrepresents the relationship between America's first colonizers and its native people. (See our post about the origins of Thanksgiving here.) … [Read more...]
Guest contributor, Maggie Asfahani Hajj, is a writer based in El Paso, Texas. She spends her free time working as a personal chef, chauffeur, therapist and activities director to her lovely ten year-old twin girls. Here she writes about growing up on the Southwest border as an Arab-American and how an interplay of cultures often manifested at the family table. Photos by Maggie Asfahani Hajj. … [Read more...]
I get nervous on election days. I eat. I drink. I bake bread. … [Read more...]
I have lived seven Novembers without him and somehow survived them in different ways. We knew that November 2005 could be the last with our son, Alex. He was about to deploy to a raging battleground in Iraq for the second time. Our hearts were heavy and so he asked that we celebrate Thanksgiving twice, once on the Thursday and again on Friday. So we did. We went around the table articulating our thanks for special things in our lives. When it came to Alex, he looked at us and thanked us for having been his parents and loving him as we did. Then he left, and we would never again be blessed with seeing this child, this man, whom we loved so much. We would never see him grow old, become a father, raise children and teach us things only our children can teach us. Our lives would change dramatically. … [Read more...]
Fall is at its peak here in the mid-Atlantic. Autumn leaves are falling, each shimmering leaf a memory of the last year, bringing on a melancholy I wear like comfortable pajamas on lazy fall mornings. I look out the window with my hands wrapped around my coffee cup and think, We are the product of all the autumns we've lived. We are hopefully wiser and stronger, more capable of understanding the mysteries of life, more able to withstand the coming winter. … [Read more...]
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