Welcome to Em Cookery

Image shows shadowed trees, and birds known as a grackles flying overhead, also shadowed. It’s a dark blue in hue, and the subjects are shadowed, black. — Migrating grackles swirling overhead at dusk.

Hello and welcome to Em Cookery! A digital cooking garden exploring food and the joy of eating through a silly, sensual, and sexy, queer lens. I’m so happy to have you here.

As I write this first letter, it finds me watching a teeny piece of fluff drift steadily before my eyes and out of sight…

There it goes...

How does it find you? Are you well, have you eaten yet? If you haven’t thought about what you will eat this evening, maybe take a sec?

If it doesn’t find you quite okie, I’m afraid I’m in the same boat. This newsletter begins during a time of ongoing, deep unease. It’s been a mess, I’ve been a mess. Still, it’s my hope that this piece of digital mail will bring you a little joy wherever it does find you.

But first: what is this place? What’s this project? Who… am I?

I’m Em, a softened creative of many dimensions and disciplines, exploring all things food through some writing, photography, and design. The newsletter before you is an extension of my new cooking garden, Em’s, and it will be my way to share all things from it!

I started making Em Cookery very suddenly; one October morning, I woke up and many of my ideas that’d been forming over the past year plus came together and started to make sense. It was early fall in Manhattan, my pup Juni Mimi-Rose Roneous was as cute as ever, and my creativity for the first time in years had personal purpose. A small little thing I don’t take for granted, and that I’d struggled to [re] find for years (a story for another time). Two months later, I’d worked on that spark enough to publish it to the world as v1.0, and that was that! It was amazing! But also like… not quite complete yet.

And it probably never will be!

Which is a good thing.

So why now? The TLDR is that I haven’t shared my work or myself online in some time, in the midst of gender (chaos), chaos (generally), and tremendous life change (read: everywhere). For some time now however, I’ve felt compelled to share myself and work, and I was patiently waiting, dare I say simmering away, with ideas until they came to, and… here we are.

Image shows three people high up in an apartment building. One in a red shirt is handing the one in a green shirt, across the apartment way, a serving of tea. The third person looks over the person in red, observing happily. — Me reaching out to you with the humble offering that is this digital letter. Found via Are.na, credit unknown.

So what can you expect?

This newsletter is part of the bigger project that I call Em’s - that’s the website - and will be one easy way to keep up with it on a roughly monthly basis.

Each newsletter will ~include:

A brief letter like this one
A section with recent recipes and posts from Em’s
Along with a section/collection of things I’m enjoying in some way from the food world, from memes to deep reads to organizations

Ultimately, I hope this project writ-large will be a way for me to explore it all, with you.

Food is the open-ended answer to many of life’s questions for me; we’ll see what grows.

If you’d like to support my website and indeed this newsletter, there’s three easy ways to do so. The first: you can simply tap that subscribe button below (lol). Thanks:) Secondly, you can share this or something from the site with someone. Easy peezy. Eventually, you’ll also be able to become a paid subscriber of the newsletter to support this b. Thirdly, I’ll be publishing my visual work for print and purchase! That’s on the way, but look out for it on the site soon.

As the website and project grows perhaps so too will this newsletter. But for now, this is what we have going on, y’all!

For questions, comments, project ideas, or even to hire a bish, please get in touch at: hi@em-cookery.com

With so much love,
Em

Cookery roundups

A simple, textured close-up image of dino kale. It’s green and its veins a light sickly yellow. — It’s kale

Recipes

Blog, aka diary

Savoring

FruitCard Odyssey: a fruity personality quiz that my friend Lan sent me. (I’m a dragonfruit…)
Behind the beauty of orchids, centuries of violence; a worthy read that I enjoyed, having recently spent time among a collection of orchids
Garden Variety Dykes, an Are.na channel I recently followed and love

And a quote:

I realized I would miss the smallest things in life. I just had a friend visiting me in the country over the weekend - she put them in a bowl and every time I passed by I would smell these oranges and I finally stopped in my tracks and stuck my whole head in the bowl, smelling those oranges, and I said to her, "You know, when I'm dead, this is what I'll miss." They reminded me of the oranges of my childhood, when one orange would perfume the whole room and it was the most amazing thing. It was like having a very small sun that had a scent in the room with you. And it's as basic as that. The scent of an orange, the feel of the breeze, how water feels when you get in it when it's really cold in a creek. Whatever madness is going on in the world that seems impossible, there's also the orange and the stream and the breeze.
– Alice Walker, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel.

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March 1, 2025, 7:19 p.m.