what I love
and the hallmarks of what make me write
Fall housewarming dinner. photo credit: Crystal Rivera
Family Meals
Bed to Table is about those memorable meals that mean "home" to me. Waking up as a child to the smells of the Thanksgiving dinner my mom had already started cooking while we were all still asleep. Waking up to my husband making coffee and banging around the kitchen to Armenian music. Excitedly shooting out of bed early in the morning to get ready to host family or friends for a meal later that day. And now, being woken up by a toddler calling for Mama before the sun comes up and making her breakfast. These posts are about the holidays and the everydays, the romantic and mundane meals for two three, the big seated dinners with too many of us squeezed around our little table, the moments both big and small that revolve around the sharing of food with the people I love.
Brooklyn Grange farm stand. Long Island City, Queens. photo credit: Crystal Rivera
Seasonal Eating
Good food belongs to a time and a place. Historically, the months we’ve enjoy the most and felt our best are the ones when we would live off the produce from our Brooklyn Grange CSA. As a mostly vegetarian household, our local farm on the roof gave us so much of what we needed that we rarely found ourselves in a grocery store in the summertime. We would treasure our weekend walks through the farm rows, visiting the chickens, and filling our canvas bags with green. The sun had set on our CSA in 2022, so it’s time for us to kindle a new relationship with our local Greenmarkets. These posts are about what we make of these fresh seasonal foods and the occasional pleasures of eating what we grow in our own little garden in Queens.
An open air chaykhana, or teahouse, in Uzbekistan
Travel
The places I love to visit most when I travel are the local food markets and bookstores. I'm married to an experienced world traveler and lover of the roads less taken. He saw the Silk Road in a dream so we traversed Uzbekistan from end to end in taxis, metros, overnight trains, and on camel-back. We visited Armenia, the land of my heritage, and laid flowers at the Genocide memorial monument on the day of its centennial. While I'll never part with my beloved Queens, these posts are about my beautiful experiences straying from home, whether it's visiting my in-laws who temporarily moved to Costa Rica for the pure life or hopping the border to Montreal for a long weekend of bagels, coffee, and market grazing.