May 9, 2025
A spring recipe, a booklist and an indie bookshop!
So, April happened—real fast. I swear I was just writing about how excited I was for the month ahead, and then bam! A simple outpatient procedure triggered appendicitis and landed me in the hospital. Recovery was quick, thankfully, and I got to celebrate my birthday with friends in Atlanta among good food, cocktails, and multiple desserts as I crept a little closer to the halfway mark of quadragenarian life.
The month also turned around fast: I followed Lee on a few dates while he opened for Pearl Jam. It helped soften the blow of the hospital stay and the impending bill. I had my first real “All Access” backstage experience, complete with (multiple) full dessert tables and a couple of run-ins with White Lotus royalty. I even tested my luck at a slot machine outside Miami: won $80 on my first spin, went back the next day and won $200 more. Don’t worry—I quit while I was ahead. I’ve heard the stories. And I’ve seen my bank account.
For me, May is all about looseness—a kind of emotional thaw. But also, a slowing down in small, welcome ways: longer evenings, more walks, noticing how the light shifts. I’ve been trying (sometimes failing) to wake up earlier, to catch those quiet mornings when the world starts to smell like fresh grass and sunscreen. (Florida, y’all.)
It’s the kind of month that makes space—for starting something new, letting something go, or returning to things I’ve missed. Favorite books. Spring recipes with a Mediterranean lean. The good stuff.
Thing # 1
Grilled Chicken Skewers over Quinoa with Olives and Veggies — A Recipe
This is one of those meals that hits all the right notes—bright, salty, fresh, and satisfying. Think spring on a plate: seasoned, grilled chicken, a mix of fresh veggies, creamy hummus, and olives layered over fluffy quinoa and finished with a lemony vinaigrette. It's perfect for warm evenings when you want something flavorful but not heavy.
Bowl Ingredients
8 to 12 oz boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 cup hot tri-color quinoa, cooked according to package directions
½ red onion, cut for skewering
15 cherry tomatoes, halved
½ of an English cucumber, chopped
A handful of pitted Kalamata olives, halved (we like the kind marinated in cabernet and herbs)
A handful of Castelvetrano green olives, halved
Hummus, for serving
crumbled feta, for serving
Greek Seasoning Ingredients
1 tablespoon oregano, chopped
2 teaspoons of thyme, chopped
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon coarse, kosher salt
1 teaspoon minced garlic or garlic powder
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Mix all ingredients in a bowl and toss with the chicken
Lemon Vinaigrette Ingredients
2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
4 tsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp chopped fresh oregano
kosher salt and black pepper, to taste
Shake all ingredients in a jar with a lid until emulsified. Taste and adjust seasoning.
Grilling Needs
a tightly folded paper towel soaked in olive oil
tongs
Preparation
Cook the quinoa according to package instructions. Set aside and keep warm.
Make the vinaigrette by combining olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh oregano in a small jar with a lid. Shake well and season with salt and pepper to taste.
Prep the chicken: Cut into bite-sized cubes and toss with the Greek seasoning in a mixing bowl until evenly coated.
Skewer the chicken, alternating with red onion slices.
Preheat your grill (gas or charcoal) to about 400°F. When ready to cook, brush the grates clean. Then oil them using tongs and the olive oil–soaked paper towel.
Grill the skewers: Place on the grill and cook until well browned, about 8 minutes. Turn each skewer every 2 minutes so they cook evenly on all sides and the chicken reaches an internal temperature of 155°F. (Close the lid between flips if using a gas grill.)
To Serve
Divide the quinoa between two bowls. Top each with 2 skewers (or slide onions and chicken off the skewer), then arrange cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives around the bowl. Add a generous spoonful of hummus, sprinkle with feta, and drizzle everything with the lemon vinaigrette.
Recipe Link Here
Thing # 2
Books — A Decade of Favorites
I keep a running list of books I’ve read here, though I don’t usually share much about them. I’m not big on rating books—though I’ve done it—because if I don’t like something, I tend to think it just wasn’t meant for me. I’d rather not turn that into a hot take on someone’s hard work. It’s a lot to get a bundle of words down on paper and out into the world.
That said, I do like sharing favorites—especially if someone’s looking for a recommendation. Lately, I’ve been revisiting books from my Top Favorites list (compiled over the past ten years), and I figured it might be time to share a little something about each one. These aren’t reviews, exactly—just a few thoughts from one reader to another. This is not a definitive list. It’s ever evolving. These are just the few that have either been on my mind lately or I’ve recently picked up for a reread.
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Set in the wild, eerie Everglades, Swamplandia! follows Ava Bigtree, a teenage girl struggling to keep her family’s alligator-wrestling theme park afloat after the death of her mother. The book blends magical realism with dark humor as it explores themes of family, loss, and coming of age, all while immersing the reader in a world where the boundary between the fantastical and the real is often blurry. Ava’s quest to find her sister, who has mysteriously disappeared, takes her on a surreal journey, and through it, the novel captures the sense of isolation and strangeness of the Florida swamps.
I read this right after moving to Florida, not so far from where the story loosely takes place, and the timing made everything feel a little haunted in the best way. The mangroves, the humidity, the neon flora—all of it felt dialed up through Karen Russell’s lens. Her version of Florida is both mythic and grounded, weird and tender. The supernatural elements—ghosts, gators, grief—felt like natural extensions of the landscape. It was a book that made me more alert to my surroundings, like Florida was leaning in and whispering, You think this is strange? Just wait.
Note* There’s a big blow near the end of this one that might make or break this book for you. There are mixed opinions out there. 2021 was a year of some mild grieving, so out of catharsis, distraction, or resonance, it didn’t ruin the book for me.
Link to Purchase
Too Much and Not in the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose
This collection of essays offers a blend of personal musings and cultural critique, with a distinctive, poetic voice. Chew-Bose reflects on her experiences navigating the world as an observer, often feeling caught between the extremes of overstimulation and withdrawal. Through her writing, she touches on everything from the small observations of daily life to the larger questions of belonging. This is one of those books I can pick up, flip to any page, and fall back into it immediately. She writes with this kind of interior clarity that makes me want to underline every other sentence—how our thoughts loop and collide, how our observations collect and harden into taste—it’s just so smart, and strange, and sharp. The way she describes “Nook people” is a favorite—It’s like she’s saying all the quiet, half-formed things I’ve been trying to put into words for years. Her voice is observant, self-aware, and oddly reassuring. This book makes me feel more at home in my head. I love this passage:
“I still love the size of LP records. Their square, tactile bigness. And I still believe that people who buy them and collect them aren't snobs at all, but true blues. A record sleeve is unwieldy. To hold one is to sometimes appear like you're hugging one.”
Link to Purchase
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley
Grief is for People is a powerful and candid exploration of grief, mental health, and the strange terrain of navigating loss. Sloane Crosley’s writing is both raw and darkly humorous as she reflects a burglary and the suicide of someone close to her that intertwine and overlap, while also considering how grief is complicated, personal, and sometimes difficult to articulate. I’ve read this book twice, and I know I’ll read it again. As someone who’s spent most of my life navigating mental health stuff, I’m always drawn to books that go near the subject of suicide—not in a sensational way, but in a way that makes it feel less lonely, more human.
In one of the book’s passages, Crosley writes about people who died before Trump was elected, before the pandemic. And the way we, the ones still here, are stuck with that strange ache of imagining what we might say to them or what they’d say to us if they were still alive. I also do this all the time. I think about Robin Williams—would he have found a way to make it bearable? Would Bourdain have slipped away to some tiny, perfect town in a country we’ve never heard of? David Bowie, Gene Wilder, Leonard Cohen… sometimes I wonder, did you get out just in time?
Link to Purchase
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Priestdaddy is Patricia Lockwood’s memoir about returning to her childhood home—a rectory in the Midwest—after a financial crisis forces her and her husband to move back in with her parents. Her father is, yes, an actual Catholic priest with a wife, a motorcycle, and a penchant for Fox News. The setup alone feels like a fever dream. My dad wasn’t a Catholic priest, but I was raised in religion that didn’t sit right, and that tension feels deeply familiar in these pages.
Lockwood is hilarious, sometimes shocking, often weird, and unmistakably brilliant. Her sentences are these glittering, acrobatic things—she’s not afraid to take up space on the page, and it works. Humor is often born from trauma, and you feel that tension here, but it’s never forced. It’s cathartic. She’s writing through absurdity, not around it.
Link to Purchase
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This book was a door—opened gently, but widely—into a place and a perspective I hadn’t known much about. I didn’t come to it with a personal connection to Nigeria or immigration, but through Adichie’s writing, I found myself immersed in both. Her language is so assured, so clear-eyed and textured, that you feel not just like you're observing the world in the story, but brushing up against it.
There’s a kind of permission in this book—to learn, to be uncomfortable, to notice all the quiet nuances of race and identity that exist even in rooms that pretend to be neutral. Americanah made me look differently at America too—not through a lens of guilt or defensiveness, but with the patient, sharp gaze of someone narrating what she sees. And that’s the gift of this novel: it holds space for both seeing and being seen.
Link to Purchase
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
There are books you read because someone recommends them. And then there are books you read because some version of your life demands it. The Year of Magical Thinking was the latter. I came to it knowing what it was about—grief, loss, the unraveling of logic after death—but I didn’t know how closely it would mirror the strange, off-axis quality of real mourning.
Didion doesn’t write around grief; she walks through it, meticulously, coolly, like she’s trying to find the logic buried inside the chaos. I remember thinking how odd it was that someone could write so clearly about something so devastating. But then, that’s the point. Magical thinking is not a distraction from grief—it’s part of it. The belief that if you just do things right, say the right sentence, wear the right sweater, you can reverse it. You can unhappen the impossible.
Her prose is careful, almost clinical at times, which makes the emotional undertow even more powerful. There’s a sense of unreality that runs through the book, a desire to make sense of things that simply don’t make sense, which resonates so deeply in how we grieve—how we want to keep believing something will turn out the way it should.
Link to Purchase
Mubai Scranton New York by Tamara Shopsin
In Mubai Scranton New York, Tamara Shopsin reflects on her life through a series of vignettes tied to each city: Mumbai, Scranton, and New York. With an offbeat and deeply personal narrative, Shopsin explores her family’s history with the iconic Shopsin’s restaurant in New York, alongside her own experiences growing up surrounded by food, creativity, and a complex family dynamic. The book touches on themes of belonging, identity, and the unpredictability of life, while also delving into Shopsin’s health challenges, including a brain tumor diagnosis. There’s a quiet weirdness to how she sees the world that made me feel like I was flipping through someone’s sketchbook. Since reading this years ago, I have always wished we could be friends.
Link to Purchase
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter, is a raw and honest look at her journey as a chef, restaurateur, and woman. The book blends stories from Hamilton’s childhood, family dynamics, and her rise in the culinary world, offering readers a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant business. This book found me at the perfect time—when I needed something rich, not just in flavor but in feeling. She writes about food and life with a kind of stunned reverence that feels entirely earned. There are so many passages where she describes eating and cooking with this feverish clarity, and none of it feels performative.
We sat and stared out at the ocean, not really speaking, which is effortless at a dramatic ocean in the off-season. He unpacked from his bag several sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil that he had made himself. He had used prosciutto and arugula and good bread from Le Pain Quotidien. And then he had dressed the sandwiches with olive oil from his own orchards in Puglia.
“This is your own olive oil?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, your own olive oil?”
“Eh” —he shrugged— “it’s mine. We grow it.”
I sat eating my sandwich, deep in my coat and sweater, thinking the oil tasted very good, buttery and acidic at the same time, but wishing there was more meat and maybe a smear of cool waxy butter also. I love the perfection of three fats together—butter, olive oil, and the white fat from prosciutto or lardo.
“These could use one more slice of meat, maybe.”
He was silent.
“And maybe a little sweet butter.”
And he has made them that way ever since.
A favorite passage. Also, a favorite sandwich recipe, despite being born from a critique of a picnic lunch made with care and thoughtfulness.
She’s not always soft or easy to root for. There’s this low-simmering frustration that runs under the surface—she clearly has little patience for other people’s nonsense, and sometimes it almost borders on contempt. But she always pulls it back with her sharp self-awareness, her honesty, and this scrappy, unpolished work ethic that makes you respect her even when she’s not trying to be likable. And she’s just such a keen observer. Even when she’s being a little salty, she never stops being interesting.
Link to Purchase
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
I don’t totally know why I love this book so much—it’s the only Iris Murdoch I’ve read, but it kept me weirdly entertained from beginning to end. On the surface, it’s about a retired theater director, Charles Arrowby, who moves to a crumbling house by the sea to write his memoirs and live out his days in self-imposed solitude. Of course, that doesn’t happen. Instead, he becomes completely consumed with the memory of his first love, who just so happens to live nearby. Things spiral. Dramatically.
Charles is kind of insufferable—narcissistic, obsessive, deluded—but in a way that feels intentional and, strangely, compelling. His voice is so self-important it loops back around to being funny, and you start to realize the real engine of the novel is watching him unravel under the weight of his own ego. It’s a story about memory, obsession, and the lies we tell ourselves to make the past feel safer or more romantic. And the sea—always there, looming, indifferent—is like a character in itself.
This book was a slow burn, in the best way—more philosophical soap opera than quiet seaside meditation, and I loved that about it.
Link to Purchase
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
Migrations is about a woman named Franny who decides to chase the last known flock of Arctic terns as they make their (maybe final?) migration from the Arctic to Antarctica. Sounds niche, but trust—it’s about so much more. Climate grief, personal loss, messy love, and the kind of quiet ache that builds as the story unfolds. The writing is lyrical and wild and windswept (kind of like Franny), and it made me want to go outside and look at the ocean.
Link to Purchase
Apologies in advance for any heavy or sad suggestions. I love an easy story or a beach read but I am specifically focusing on books that resonated over time and stuck with me long after finishing.
Thing # 3
Dale Zine — A Bookshop
Tucked into the Miami Design District at 50 NE 40th St, Dale Zine is part bookstore, part gallery, and entirely a vibe. What started in 2009 as a DIY zine collab has since grown into a beloved hub for Miami’s indie art scene.
Inside, you’ll find a curated mix of art books, zines, prints, and merch—most of it from independent creators. But Dale Zine is more than a store; it’s a gathering spot. They host workshops, pop-ups, and even run a mobile bookstore out of a converted kei truck that cruises through Miami bringing art and ideas to different neighborhoods.
Open every day, Dale Zine is a place that aligns with my deep love of printed materials.
That’s it for this week’s dispatch of Things on Friday.
My air conditioning has been broken for months. The part is on backorder, and now it's caught in a tariff blackhole, so it’s a lovely 80 degrees inside. It’s like a sauna in here—thinking straight is a challenge, let me tell you.
Thanks for reading, and here’s hoping you’ll stick around for more future Things!
Signing off from where the sunshine's great, but the AC is a little less reliable
— Staci
loved this staci and sorry about the appendicitis! i hope you're in full recovery