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.

First–I want to thank all of you not only for sending emails and posting comments of concern here after I dropped off the face of the Internet again. You all have and still do mean a great deal to me–having so many friendly readers and a community of folks who post incisive, interesting comments that spark discussion is like having a huge extended family that spans the globe. The joy I have taken from writing with you–because I do think of this blog as a collaborative effort–you ask questions, start discussions, suggest topics–has been a huge part of my life for over five years, and I will never, ever forget it. The love I have felt from all of you has buoyed me up on many a dark day or even darker night when despair has threatened to cast a pall that even the sun cannot lift.

But, the truth is this–I cannot write Tigers & Strawberries anymore.

Not because i don’t love my readers, and not because I don’t love food.

It’s because of this–I am tired of lying. Or, rather, I am tired of not telling the whole truth. The truth should not be a burden, it should be a lodestar to our lives, but in my case, it had become something of which I was ashamed, so I avoided it.

The simple truth is this–the way I have portrayed my childhood and experiences on this blog, while true, only show a part of the experiences that make up my existence. Yes, my grandparents had a farm, and yes, I grew up learning all of the food-growing and preparing skills that people commonly learned in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yes, I loved my grandparents and they loved me. Yes, the story about my father and the cow is 100 percent true, and yes, I went to culinary school and was a caterer, and was a chef and all of that. Everything I have written here is true.

But, I ignored the other half of my truth. I ignored the fact that I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional family situation which continued until my mid-twenties, one which continued to affect my life deeply until a few months ago when I started intensive therapy to deal with all of the rage, fear and horror I had repressed that had to do with this background.

Having a really good therapist listen to the other side of things, to the darkness that lay hidden in my heart and mind which poisoned my very body with ill-health and which threatened my life, cracked open the walls I had built around myself, and made me look objectively at how I had molded myself and contorted my true personality in order to not only repress that truth, but also to conform to what my family, and later, everyone else, expected of me.

When light poured through the cracks in the wall and illuminated my understanding of my past, present and future, I realized that I didn’t really know myself anymore. I had been so busy crafting a personality of perfection, a woman who was in strict control of her emotions, whose childhood and early adulthood had been scrubbed of all unpleasantness (it isn’t that I forgot the unpleasantness, I simply ignored it and never spoke of it to anyone) that I lost sight of the genuine person who I had been trying to protect behind that carefully crafted facade.

Unfortunately, I am now trying to figure out who and what I am! And because so much of Tigers & Strawberries is tied up with that image of a farm girl who had a nearly idyllic life in the country, I find I cannot keep writing here.

And, frankly, I’m kind of tired of taking pictures of every dinner I make! Sometimes, I just want to cook and eat, and that is okay.

But, truly–I do miss you all. And I want to keep writing, but I just cannot keep writing only about food. I just can’t right now.

So, it is time to stop writing here and start writing somewhere else.

I will keep T&S up and active here so folks can still get the recipes, and post comments asking questions. I will still monitor the site for questions and answer them when I see them. I still want folks to be able to use this site as a great cooking resource, because the truth is, I am proud of what i have created here and I don’t want it to disappear.

I am going to start a new blog, probably on Blogger, which is not my first choice of venue, but which is convenient. It will be a much more general blog, though, you know me, there will be recipes and pictures of food! We can’t get around that! But the topics I write about will range from ruminations of fiction writing, news on various projects I am working on (yes, including books, hopefully), my adventures with fabric, news on how the Kat is growing and tales of the adventures of various members of my household. There will probably also be tales that are from the darker, sadder part of my life, because, well, that truth deserves to be told. There is no way to appreciate light if we ignore the darkness.

So, I will post one more time here to give a link to the new blog, which is likely to be called, “Summoning the Muse,” because that is what I am trying to do. I am trying to find my inner self, the one who is full of inspiration and courage, the one who has kept me alive all of these years. She’s been waiting a very long time to get out and see the sun, and I think she deserves a chance to stretch her wings and tell her tale for a bit.

Thank you all again. I can never, ever articulate how much all of you have meant to me. I hope that some of you at least follow my new adventures in the new blog, but I understand very much that many of you only really want to read about cooking. For those of you, I wish you all a fond and loving farewell.

For the others–thanks for coming along with me into uncharted territory.

I appreciate the company,