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It is late afternoon on our last day in Santa Fe, and our reunion suppers with old friends have come to an end. We have packed, tidied our rented casita, and have made one last walk to the downtown plaza. It is 4:30, too late...
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(from The Joys of Cooking: A Love Story, forthcoming with She Writes Press) Prologue: (Kensington, California, 2009) It started with the cookbooks. In January 2009, having been married for six months, I moved with my husband, Bill, from the large house we’d been renting in...
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by Judith Newton My husband Bill and I sit in a wood-beamed, wood-paneled restaurant in Bergen Norway. To Kokker (Two Cooks) is tucked away down a dark and impossibly narrow alley constructed of thick wooden planks from the 16th century, one of the few parts...
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Oh, Hell! What doe mine eyes with grief behold . . . ? John Milton, Paradise Lost I started a garden last spring. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I hired Sara from all edibles to start the garden. She double-dug and amended an eight-by-twenty foot...
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by Judith Newton From The Joys of Cooking: A Love Story On a January morning, a month-and-a-half after my gay ex-husband’s death, I entered his tidy, book-lined study to deal with his effects. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by files and papers I had taken...
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by Judith Newton From The Joys of Cooking: A Love Story Had we but world enough and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime / . . . My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow. — Andrew Marvell, “To...
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by Judith Newton (First published in The Redwood Coast Review, Winter 2012.) In an act of utter haplessness last weekend I scratched my cornea with the tip of an agave and had to lie in a darkened room, which is how I ended up watching...
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by Judith Newton On Thanksgivings, as I wash the bubble of a wine glass or polish the forks from my mother’s wedding silver, I think of my gay ex-husband and am grateful. We lived together for some twenty years, inventing and reinventing what it meant...
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by Judith Newton “Cuisine is the tactile connection we have to breathing history.” Clifford Wright, A Mediterranean Feast I sat with my daughter, Anna, and my husband, Bill, in the Rosebud Restaurant in Atlanta (the city where my daughter is doing graduate work in Public...
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