"What do I do with the parsley?"

Annie & Alison Newsletter #30

Oh hey there, reader. It’s been a while. And by a while, I mean two years? 

I’m sitting in a cozy apartment in Roma Norte, Mexico City. Slow jazz playing on the loud speakers behind me. Looking out at a wall of windows in my living room, the view mostly obstructed by vibrant green leaves. This is the first time I’ve sat still and written something that wasn’t an email or a pitch deck in a very long time. I feel out of practice. 

On January 27, 2022, I published my final recipe review for the Annie & Alison project. Something I often doubted I’d be able to do. After 12 months of cooking and writing, I completed my goal with a small bowl of “Spicy Giant, Crunchy Corn” and closed my copy of Nothing Fancy with thankful, tired hands. 

What I didn’t do was write a final newsletter. I planned on it, believe me! I thought I would close out that chapter with a manifesto of a Substack post, thanking my readers, who are mostly my friends and family, plus some magical strangers on the internet who somehow found themselves here (and curiously continue to do so). I thought I’d toss out a few takeaways from the project, some final tips on the last recipes, maybe recommend show or two. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I ate a bowl of spicy corn nuts with my husband and went to bed. 

Two weeks before the project ended, my grandmother passed away. She was 93 years old and lived a beautiful, steadfast life. She left with no regrets. Given the proximity with which we lived, I had the honor of sitting next to her in her final hours. In those pandemic days, only one visitor was allowed per patient in the ER. Amidst the beeping of the heart rate monitor and the whirring of the oxygen mask, I paced back and forth across the room as I read her the Psalms in the King James Version, her favorite. Rilke’s Book of Hours came in handy, “God speaks to each one of us as he makes us, then walks with us slowly out of the night…” I sang hymns just loud enough so she might hear them. I don’t know if she heard them. 

My parents flew out to Chicago a few days later to make funeral arrangements, followed by my brother and sister several days after. We buried her within the week in the plot of land where my grandfather and his parents are also buried in Irving Park. It was below freezing, the ground - muddy, tears stung my face. Her funeral service consisted of the six of us standing in a tight circle next to her gravesite, cladden in our winter coats, reading pieces we’d each written to commemorate the woman she was. We read aloud 20 of her favorite Bible verses, each of which she’d written in tidy cursive on separate flash cards. She reviewed those flashcards every morning for over 20 years. Cemetery groundskeepers stood off in the distance, watching us. 

I betcha didn’t think you’d be reading an essay about my grandmother passing away, now did you? Well neither did I, if I’m being honest. 

I guess, what I’m trying to say is, the reason I didn’t write a final newsletter is because I was tired. I missed her. You probably know that feeling, the hole that’s left when someone you love is gone. I still miss her, though I’m more used to the gap she left. 

So why am writing this now, two years later? Maybe part of it is I feel like I owe my few subscribers a final conclusion. Or maybe I could use the therapeutic act of putting a digital pen to paper and letting my thoughts flow free, without needing to make it client-facing. 

Whatever the reason, I have to say, it feels good. I’m reminded that just because you haven’t done something you love in a long time, doesn’t mean it’s not still yours to do. 

In other news, over the past two years, I have been delighted by small reminders of those Annie & Alison days. Once every other month or so, an internet stranger will leave a nice comment on one of my recipe blog posts. These comments arrive in my inbox at the most random times. Like this one that had me actively stifling laughter during a Zoom work meeting: 

It’s a garnish, Barb. Don’t overthink it!

Or this one, that arrived on a Tuesday in February 2024:

Thank you, Hilary! (By the way, that “Overnight Foccacia, Tonight” recipe essay that I wrote is one of my favorites from the whole project, if you’re curious.)

I still cook Alison Roman recipes on a very regular basis. If anything, her recipes are full of nostalgia for me. I sometimes even reference my own blog to remind myself what adjustments I made or lessons I learned. I frequent my NYT Cooking App, as well as Melissa Clark’s Dinner and Ali Slagle’s I Dream of Dinner. But I don’t have a ton of time for cooking on the whole - I travel a lot for work now.

I still look for any reason I can to talk about Alison’s recipes, and love when I stumble into another fan of her’s in the wild. I made friends with someone in an airport security line last week because she was wearing an Alison Roman t-shirt. Just yesterday, someone I was in community theater with in FOURTH GRADE, and hadn’t spoken to since, contacted me on Facebook and said she’d found my blog. It took a while before she recognized me as that girl in the production of Peter Pan we did when were 10 years old. Now, she’s living in Boston and finishing up her residency in Pediatric Medicine. I’m going to try to see her when I’m there for work at the end of the summer.

I’m grateful, that’s all I can say. Thanks to you, reader, for being along for the journey.

It’s the beginning of summer, which means it’s the perfect time for an All-Out Alison meal I like to call “All in the Details” - perfect for a night on the deck, or a day after visiting the Farmer’s Market. Go ahead, give it a try.

Until I’m back in my kitchen again, I’ll be enjoying food on the road, like this fantastic dinner from Taqueria Orinoco in Mexico City.

Keep doing that thing that makes you feel alive.

xo,

Annie