Hey, I’m Kirsten, a domestic demigoddess.
I’m glad you’re here. I’m a writer and editor. I bounce around a lot, but I’m currently receiving my mail in Kentucky, where I am from. I do some wine consulting, I develop recipes, I teach flower classes, I help run my family’s lingerie business, but at heart, I am an omnivorous, insatiable eater.
The idea for this blog came stems from being utterly and completely blindsided by the demise of a long-term relationship. I was living through a pandemic winter in a new city where I knew almost no one. It was my first real winter, just snowing constantly. I was so, so heartbroken, I could barely eat. I lost a quarter of my body weight and looked like a pair of sunken eyeballs attached to an articulated anatomy lab skeleton. Like an off-brand one. Not even a good one. You know roughly five things about me at this point, and one of them is that I love food, so you can imagine how sad I must have been. Very sad.
Now is the part where I tell you my villain origin story.
Some months in to this horrible mess, I went home-home for a family emergency and stopped by Whole Foods to get some dinner to eat in my kitchenette in my extended stay hotel, terribly bleak. I had recently come across a bottle of Moët while I packing up my home and concluded I would have champagne and oysters for dinner, as is my wont. The Jason Segel-circa-I Love You, Man-looking seafood guy is standing there shucking my oysters and he’s being so, so nice to me. My internal monologue is as follows:
“It’s good to be home. Everyone is so nice here. See this guy? Being so nice to me. No reason! He’s just being so, so nice. I wonder why he’s being this nice to me. It’s just nice for someone to be nice— oh, he wants to see me naked.* He is being nice to me because…oh. Oh. OH. Wow, I’m going to be fine. I am way too pretty to be this sad. I am done being sad now.”
I didn’t say my internal monologue was modest.
I call my hype woman, Nikki, from the parking lot and explain to her that I am, in fact, very fun and cool, and that I am not going to die all alone because if nothing else this guy with health insurance and unlimited access to the delicacies of the oceans is here for it. I declare this to be the kickoff of Young Hot Divorcee Summer 2k21. I state my intention to have tour T-shirts made. I am drunk with power.
“Okay, this is all great, but now you have to eat something.”
It occurs to me I am positively ravenous for the first time since Christmas. I have the requisite ingredients for the quintessential “I went to high school with my stepson” dinner (a lemon, a red bikini, a bottle of NV champagne, a dozen oysters, hoop earrings, extreme disinterest in what the men are talking about) and agree I will eat all these in a very, very sexy way.**
“You also need a project.”
She pauses for a beat to pretend she’s thinking of one, which is what she does, but she's ten steps ahead of me, so this pause is really just her rearranging her voice to sound spontaneous and casual.
“Oh, I know! You should cook your way through a famous chef’s entire bibliography. Not Julia Child. Ina Garten’s taken by a very telegenic gay man and let’s be real, don’t play games you can’t win. What about Nigella Lawson? You’ve got the vibe: lots of hair, loud laugh, a penchant for tight clothes, big tits, lots of trauma.”
And now that’s what I’m doing. I’m not going to promise to make every Nigella recipe (I’ll be skipping veal, for example, and some of the Britishier ingredients may prove unobtainable), but this gives me an excuse to have people over, cook for myself like I like myself, and hey, who knows, maybe fall in love with eating again.
*I have never spoken to this man before or after and he may have, in fact, just been nice. He may be happily married to his high school sweetheart or he might be gay or he might have not even realized I was there but I sincerely owe this guy a debt of extreme gratitude for being reasonably pleasant to me for about 45 seconds once because it maybe reset my life.
**Leaning over the stainless steel sink in my hotel room, fully clothed. Animal sounds were made, but not in an erotic way. More like the kind you want to move away from as fast as possible because those things are known carriers of rabies, sweetheart.
Photo credit: Katie Currid, 2021