About a Kind Life in Letters
Our Kind Kitchen is a newsletter dedicated to feeding ourselves, our family, and our friends with kindness.
Everyone is included at our table.
You’re welcome here. Come sit a spell.
If you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll get boundless recipes for foods you can make ahead or throw together to feed yourself and your people on a Tuesday night when everyone is hungry. (Or, hungry grumpy & on the verge of melting down.)
You’re also going to get recommendations for snacks, cookbooks, outrageously good writing from people we read, songs we can’t get out of our heads, snippets of movies from the 80s that we quote to each other, and odd but interesting food ideas from reels on Instagram that Dan has collected in a folder called Mmmmmm.
In other words, we share with you what makes us feel OH HELL YES.
Would you like some pie?
For years we wrote cookbooks that thousands of people have told us they love. We loved making these cookbooks. We’re still proud of winning the James Beard award for this one, Gluten-Free Girl Every Day.
We stopped writing cookbooks in 2018. Why? A plethora of reasons, really.
For one, Dan descended into years of clinical depression, only made worse by COVID lockdowns and the death of his father. For 4 years, we lost each other and ourselves. If you’re the partner of someone with clinical depression, you know how hard life can be. If you’re someone with clinical depression, your life is even harder. This wasn’t a time for producing cookbooks.
Also, I started to notice something. Those COVID lockdown years were rough — that’s underplaying it; this time will have effects on us all for decades — but they did yield something for our family. Spending so much time together, I got to see my people, all the time. I began to realize that Dan might be on the spectrum. And my kids certainly had neurospicy qualities too.
I have ADHD and complexPTSD, so I could see them with kindness. All I wanted is for everyone in our family to understand their brains, their glorious, particular brains. Everyone in our family is diagnosed with multiple acronyms. Dan is both autistic and an ADHDer, dyslexic, and recovering from doubting himself after a lifetime of masking.
And it turns out that grief expresses itself fairly differently in autistic folks. This is why his food tasted off, for years.
A couple of years ago, we turned toward each other. I was never going to leave him. I wanted him to heal. Two years of curious questions, therapy, medication, and cooking in the kitchen again has made a world of difference. We’re back to being each other’s best friends.
We’re back.
This newsletter — and all of the food in it — comes from all of this. We’re not pretending anymore. No more shoving food to the other side of the table to make a staged, perfected food photo. (We did that for years on our food blog, Gluten-Free Girl.) No more making food we think might go viral or at least draw in people who are gluten-free.
This is us. Real food made by joyful imperfectionists, which we eat and feed to our people.
And we’d love to share that food with you.
What kind of food might you expect here? Take a look at this turkey burger.
Dan and I came up with the idea for this burger while we shared milkshakes at Luna Park Café in West Seattle, for lunch.
(We lived on a rural island called Vashon for 15 years, and we loved those years, but we’ve moved back to Seattle. So glad we have.)
I’d seen a turkey burger on someone else’s newsletter. We should make a really good turkey burger, I told him.
He took a sip of his vegan vanilla milkshake. (Dan doesn’t digest dairy easily. I can’t eat gluten.) “It’s hard to make turkey burgers taste juicy. They always feel a little dull to me.”
“Yeah, but that’s why we should try it! Come on — you love a challenge.”
So we bandied about ideas for ingredients that would add juiciness to the burger, umami, maybe a little sweet, something smoky. I wrote down some words on the notes app on my phone. We finished our milkshakes and drove to pick up our youngest from school.
Having Dan fully himself again has brought the return of our goofy, half-sentence, excited conversations about what we could create together. God, I love this.
5 days later, we went back to it. “How about these for dinner tonight?” I asked him.
“Sure, let’s do it. Let’s play.”
These are the best damned turkey burgers I’ve ever eaten. Dan especially enjoyed watching our youngest kiddo — who has only 8 foods they will reliably eat — take a bite, then turn to us and say, “These are good.”
And then Deej ate the entire burger, without stopping. “Mom, this isn’t turkey, is it? I don’t like turkey at all. But I like this.”
So now we have 9 foods they’ll eat!
This is the kind of food we’re making and sharing with you here.
Why subscribe?
You’ll get every newsletter we make sent to your inbox, twice a week. If you’re a free subscriber, you’ll receive something juicy, a little tease of the recipe. Once a month, you’ll receive the entire newsletter and recipe.
Why become a paid subscriber?
If you become a paid subscriber (only $5 a month/$50 for the year), you’ll receive all the brief essays and recipes, plus the weekly chats I engage in on the Substack app for paid subscribers.
Whenever you want, you can come back for more at the Substack site for this newsletter, and find the food you might want to eat at the recipe index.
We have some other features planned for paid subscribers. Stay tuned for that news.
Plus, by subscribing, you are supporting our work and allowing us to do what we love, for you.
Who am I?
Hello there! I'm Shauna James Ahern. I'm passionate about helping neurospicy Gen X women learn to say YES to themselves. This food newsletter is part of that work.
I’m also a food writer, a memoirist, and a cookbook author. The work I have done with my husband Dan, who was a chef for 30 years, has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Food Network, Food52, and Bon Appetit. My memoir, ENOUGH, was lauded by The Washington Post and Brené Brown.
Really, though, I’m an impassioned weirdo who loves to write, read, make food with my husband, laugh with my kids, ride my bike along the beach trail near our home, watch genius movies and talk about them, share food with friends, and mostly stay at home with my family. I’m a gregarious introvert. If you see me give a speech or lead a workshop, I will be thrilled to see you and want to hear your story. Afterward, I will be at home with my husband and kids, eating food like what we feature here, and cuddled up with a good book on the couch.
I really love doing this work. And I’d love to meet you here.
Questions? Feel free to email me at: shaunamahern@gmail.com
(Since I’m sometimes clueless about how to write things like this in a standard way, I based this about page on the structure Jenny Rosenstrach used for her about page at Dinner: A Love Story. You really might want to think about subscribing to her newsletter too. It’s great.)
