And then came the emails, like rain after a drought.

A trickle here, another there. The trickles merged into a stream, into a dancing cascade that eventually poured into a river.

“Where are you?” you said.

“Are you well?” “What’s happened?” “I hope you’re still cooking.” “Please tell us you and your family are well and happy.”

“What are you doing now?”

And, the one that finally pulled me back.

“We miss you.”

The truth is, I missed all of you, too. More than I can say.

So, I am back, and this post is going to help us all catch up, and the next posts will be about my kitchen experiments.

First–where am I?

I’m still in Athens, Ohio, living with the locavores and loving every minute of it. (Well, maybe not every minute. The crazy derecho storm and power outage during the heatwave was less than charming, but lots of people had it worse than my family, so I’m grateful. And yes, I have my power back. Else, I’d not be writing this post!)

Am I well?

Yes. I am quite well. As longtime readers might remember, I had chronic pain issues for years, and then was diagnosed with a Vitamin D deficiency. That has been mediated with liberal applications of oral supplementation, but then I started having weird neurological symptoms. Tingling and buzzing in hands and feet. Really weird migraines that felt like cascading needles over my head and shoulders. My new GP, whom I absolutely adore, sent me to a neurologist to have that sorted out. Turns out I’m severely low in Vitamin B12, which is probably a genetic thing. So, now I have a shot every two weeks and low and behold the neurological symptoms are gone.

And I feel healthier than I have in years.

Zak is doing well. He did cut his hair off, so now he looks probably ten years younger. Not quite sure how that works, but he’s happy and cute and healthy.

And Morganna is doing well. She’s on the saute station and grill station at a local restaurant: Zoe Fine Dining. She loves it. She took some time off from Ohio University, but she may be returning to finish her history degree in the fall. We’ll see. No need to rush things.

And Kat. Oh, she’s growing and is a joy to us all. She sings all the time–is always making up songs about everything she is doing or seeing or experiencing. She’s going into first grade in the fall, and she’s reading, writing, spelling, doing math and drawing beautifully. I can’t begin to explain how proud I am of her and how much I enjoy helping her grow up.

What happened?

Lots of stuff. The weird neurological things, I got tired of photographing dinner before I ate it and was burned out on writing.

Oh, and I started a new project. More on that in a moment.

Yes, I’m still cooking. I could never give up on cooking. Though, with a five year old, it’s sometimes hard to keep making up new recipes. Kids like their favorite foods and are not as tolerant of Mom having to cook up three to five new recipes a week when they’d really just like their matzo ball soup or spaghetti and meatballs or penne alla pesto or ma po tofu, thank you very much. But yes, I am cooking, and have started some really fun experiments in fermentation in the kitchen.

Yes, I intend to share those experiments with you.

So yes, we’re all well and happy, and so now we come to the final question:

What are you doing now?

What am I doing?

Well, I’m making a documentary.

A feature length documentary.

On the local food economy of Athens, Ohio.

It’s called “Hand to Mouth: The Athens, Ohio Local Food Movement.” And it’s going to be big.

My dearest friends are working on it with me. I’m producing and writing. Dan Trout–lots of you older readers will remember him as the one who eats whole cheesecakes at a sitting, until I defeated him with one of my cheesecakes–he’s writing, directing and is the cinematographer. Heather Irwin, who has evolved into a fairly fearless experimenter in the kitchen, is our sound technician. And Zak is doing the soundtrack–and is doing an amazing job at it, too.

On Wednesday, Dan and I are presenting a twenty minute chunk of the film at the Real Food, Real Local, Real Good Conference here in Athens.

We still have a few interviews to do and some b-roll footage to shoot, and then we go into post-production–writing the script and editing. After it’s done, we’re going to take it out on the sustainability conference and film festival circuit, and we hope to find a distributor. We want to get it in theaters, and get it seen as far and wide as possible.

But that’s a ways away. We still have to finish it.

So that’s what’s been up in my world.

I’m glad to be back.

Look for more posts on the film, but also some new recipes, and ideas on gardening, maybe a few essays and some documentation of my forays into fermentation and other food preservation methods.

Thanks for writing to me and asking about us all and most of all:

Thanks for being patient.

I may post a picture or two if I have time, but if not–I’ll be back around the 16th. Until then, happy cooking.

Dan here, as if Barbara has any luck at all, she’s asleep by now.

Sorry about the delay.  I’ll let Barbara fill you in on the details as she sees fit tomorrow, but just to let you know where we went for a few days there…

We got hacked.

Someone had inserted some nasty code into the site and was using our server space and our bandwidth for a phishing scam.

Barbara and I became aware of this on June 9th, and shortly thereafterward, Dreamhost took our domain offline.

We’re back up and running now, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the bugs out of the system, (though I am going to be a little more vigilant over the next few days.)

I am pleased to say that I know WHEN the compromise took place, and the time between the phishing scam going live and being shut down was only a matter of hours.  

Other commitments prevented me from fixing the problem and bringing us back online until today. I apologise for the inconvenience.

I am forwarding the material I have collected to the security firm that informed us of the breech so they can track down the culprits.

We return you now to your regularly scheduled Culinary Goddess, who had a post that she was all excited to share before this mess occured.

I’m going to bed….

Well, early in the morning today, Zak, Kat and I are on the road, heading toward a gathering of his family in Boston which he has entitled, “Mayday, Mayday, It’s the Kramers!”

We’ll be gone all weekend and driving back on Monday, so look for a Meatless Monday post on Tuesday. I figured that would be nice and confusing.

And, to keep everyone company while waiting patiently for me to return, I leave you the first luna moth of the season, whom Kat and found resting by our front door two afternoons ago.

Isn’t he a beauty? I think luna moths are even prettier than most butterflies….

Have a good weekend!

It’s funny.

When I first went back to writing this blog, I really believed I was fine. Everything was fine, I was fine, the world was fine, and all was well.

But, you know, that wasn’t really the case. Which is why I went quiet again–I wasn’t quite ready to become a public figure of sorts just yet, but I was too stubborn to recognize that fact. Therapy had brought me a long way, but post traumatic stress disorder has a way of creeping up on a person and biting her firmly in the (mental) butt, and that is what happened to me. I had ignored the fact that a VERY significant anniversary was coming up–one that played an important role in the development of my wonderful PTSD experience.

It happened back in January. That anniversary. Twenty years since I left an abusive husband, starting a chain of events that culminated in losing most of my birth family, and my beloved infant daughter.

Said daughter, named Morganna, is now twenty-one, and is exceeding every expectation she ever had for herself. Not only has she lived with me or here in town on her own for the past six years, she has done amazingly well in college, and has risen through the ranks in the kitchen at one of the couple of fine dining restaurants here, and she loves it. She has matured, grown and dealt with her own trauma, and is, I am happy to say, contented and happy.

Not only that, she’s beautiful and talented and is a daughter I cannot help but be proud of. Not just for her accomplishments–not just for what she does, but for who she is. And I love her more than words can say, just as I always did all those terrible years we lived apart.

I’m not saying all of this so readers will pity me–far from it–it’s just that in order to go back to writing about food–which I very much want to do–I kind of had to get this mess off of my chest. I kind of had to speak truth to power, as it were, in large part, because of how I had written the stories in this blog for so long.

I never lied–I just ignored a lot of truths about my past, my family, and my life. I had repressed the terrible truths so tightly that, while I knew they existed, I was certain that those facts and feelings from the past could never affect me.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Repression doesn’t work that way. It’s a useful psychological tool to get through trauma while it’s happening, but it is no long term solution for dealing with pain, anger and fear. But, because my mental health had been called into question during the divorce and had been used to bludgeon me into giving up during the custody dispute (it was only one weapon in the arsenal that was used by my parents, my ex-husband and his family to get me to give up and let them have Morganna), I had never felt safe doing anything BUT repress my emotions and memories of these traumatic events.

It wasn’t until Morganna’s twenty-first birthday that the last of the mental walls came crashing down and I could finally do the last, hardest bits of repair to my psyche, and I could finally let my guard down and admit that yes, dammit, I did have emotions, and some of them are negative and they are there for a VERY good bunch of reasons!

So, this winter, I went down into the underworld, and confronted the shades that live there. I confronted the bare facts about my childhood, which was not always as sunny as I have generally portrayed it–in fact–there was violence and abuse. I confronted the dysfunctional family heritage that was passed down to me through generations, and once again reiterated my refusal to pass it along to my daughters. I confronted my part in choosing bad relationships in the past–and forgave myself.

But most of all, I confronted my own shadow-self.

The one that was filled with rage, fear and hatred.

And I decided to love her. Not to reject her, because the truth is this–she was angry and afraid and filled with hate for many good reasons. She had been hurt time and time again by those who were supposed to love and protect her, and her anger was justified. She had to stand by and watch her helpless daughter be hurt time and again, all the while fearing for both her own life and her child’s, as well as her beloved husband’s.

That shadow lady who lives in my psyche isn’t just a mindless fury, filled with poison and terror–she’s there to help me. Well, now that I’ve embraced her, she’s my helpmate and friend. When I repressed her, she went out of her way to get my attention by various means, up to and including using physical pain and illness.

Once I started listening to her story, our story, well, no, MY story, it all started to come together. My shadow isn’t evil. She just wants to protect me and my daughters, my husband and my family. And she’s got the wits, instincts and sense to do that.

So, I’m glad to have her around.

All winter she and I sat and talked while the entire household suffered with typical cold-weather illnesses, flu, pneumonia, bronchitis, and norovirus. And as the long, cold nights began to shorten and the light of the sun painted the frigid Ohio sky a paler shade of grey as it brightened, I began to feel stronger again.

Stronger and more purposeful.

The days lengthened, and the snow finally stopped falling. The sun began to shine. And I saw a way out of the darkness and began my ascent.

When I emerged, the first snow crocus were beginning to bloom and the canopy-like leaves of the black hellebore had begun to unfurl. The wrens were singing and the goldfinches had begun to put on their sunnier summer plumage.

I was alive again, and whole, for I had embraced my shadow-lady and brought her out of the underworld with me. And like Persephone, I was filled with joy to be in the world again.

The natural world has been a balm to my heart and soul. Tending the flower garden Kat and I have worked on for years and watching the bulbs she and I planted in the fall blossom has made me remember all that is good in this world, even as tragedy close to home and far away has reminded me that life is, indeed, suffering.

So, I’m back. And I have lots to write about. Recipes, yes, of course. And essays, yeah, those will be there, too. I can’t help but climb a soapbox every now and then and the world seems to be intent on riling my sense of justice these days. And book reviews, yes.

And, of course, stories. Everyone loves a good story, and since I am a natural born talespinner, there will be those too.

But there will be more. I’ll be chronicling the evolution of our family garden plot in the West Side Community Garden here in Athens. Zak, Morganna, Kat and I finally got off our duffs and decided to actually eat the most local food of all–food that we have grown with our own hands and hearts.

So, look for posts about what goes into a garden and what comes out. How-tos on every aspect of gardening and farming I can tell about along with interviews from other gardeners and real live farmers who can impart way more wisdom than I can.

So, here I am.

Finally.

Ready, willing and able to plant some seeds, and help the future grow, and hopefully prosper.