Nicole Gulotta's Blog

There’s a Lebanese shop in my town that’s part restaurant and part grocery store, and it’s become a reliable option for lunch these days. If I’m out running errands, I like to stop in for a plate of hummus, warm pita, and a couple of the sides that look good that day, like fattoush salad or stuffed grape leaves.

More often than not, I take a walk through the aisles and pick out something to bring home, like salty feta cheese, tender dates, orange blossom water, or pine nuts. They also sell large co...

Welcome to Cook the Book , an occasional series where I cook my way through books I love and explore how poetry surfaces in the kitchen. This post contains affiliate links, so if you click through and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission.

This blog post could very well be titled Instant Pot: A Love Story, because in the course of a year my adoration of this machine has grown by leaps and bounds. It wasn’t love at first sight though …

The first thing we should clear up about the Inst...

Ever since I read a poem and realized I could make a recipe out of it—back in 2012—I also realized that when they’re used as a literary tool, ingredients go deep. They rustle up memories, make stories relatable, provide beautiful imagery, and stir our appetites. When poets use food masterfully, it tends to serve a purpose beyond our plate, and moves us into emotional territory that might not be comfortable at first, but essential nonetheless. This is that kind of a poem.

Betsy Sholl is a for...

Welcome to Cook the Book, an occasional series where I cook my way through books I love and explore how poetry surfaces in the kitchen. This post contains affiliate links, so if you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission.

Since this is a new series, I’ll explain how I landed here. When I started EatThisPoem.com in 2012, it was very structured: here’s a poem, here’s some commentary, here’s a recipe to go with it. I still love the format and will be blogging like th...

Something happened. Well, a lot of things, and today I’m going to tell you about them. I’ve been wanting to get back here for a while, always hoping I’d stumble across the words one day and find just the right recipe and poetry pairings to share. I wanted to return to how things used to be. But I can’t go on pretending that will happen. Oh, I’ll be back here alright, but there’s no sense in ignoring that eight months have gone by since my last blog post, and we can just jump right back in wi...

The problem with Italian cookbooks is they make me pine for Italy. (See my infatuation with Rome from two summers ago.) July marked fourteen years since I've been back, so when I began reading page after page about tomatoes and chestnuts and garlic in Guilia Scarpaleggia's From the Markets of Tuscany, my heart simply burst before I was even halfway through. The antidote, of course, is heading into the kitchen. 

Giulia and I first became acquainted through blogging. (She even wrote a dreamy Li...

In Santa Barbara they're called sundowners—hot, aggressive winds that kick up after the sun goes down and make the coastal landscape feel like a dry, inland desert. At dinner Friday night, in a restaurant without air conditioning, I sweated through my linen dress while sipping white wine and eating grilled salmon, peach and burrata salad, and baked Alaska. 

We quickly got to talking about all the meals we've shared in this dining room, and I couldn't help share how special it felt to return,...

Back in January I shared the photo of a gold letterpressed drawing of two pears on Instagram. They were sketched by Cat Grishaver, the illustrator and designer who took the words I wrote and turned them into a living, breathing book. This permanent piece of art is one of the ways I've chosen to mark this sweet milestone because, as predicted, publishing a book is indeed a season. It's worth relishing and devoting ourselves to, but then, like autumn leaves turning from green to crimson, they...

Every book has two stories. There's the book itself—the physical thing you hold featuring a table of contents, recipe headnotes, stories, and instructions. But this book, a cookbook, is not just made up of the title, subtitle, and description on the back cover. Those are the fancy parts and finished pieces, and the the culmination of a dream.

I'm always interested in the second story, the one that might never be told publicly, and it's often a tale of transformation—what the author learns alo...

Citrus has always been a gift of winter—colorful, tart, sweet, bursting globes to brighten cold, dark days. I'm partial to Meyer lemons when I can find them because they're more sweet than tart, and beg to be baked with, and while reading a new poetry collection from Judith Waller Carroll, I was transported to the kitchen more than once.  

Many of her poems explore our internal lives and coming to terms with change, like becoming an empty nester, aging, and pausing to remember something so sm...