best marinade (for life)

On Feb 16, I attended Cookbooks, Cocktails and Cupcakes, a life-changing event.

"Life changing".

To some, those words may carry a lot of dazzle and flash. To me, life changing' = much inconvenient effort that yielded enormous returns that can't be calculated in $. What happened that night was so magical, that to deconstruct it step-by-step turns it into a manual, a how-to, it sucks the poetry out of life, and I'm not doing that, ever.

What I will tell you is that Jodi Lastman is a community-building maven. Her and I go back almost a decade via writing-social media-motherhood, and we're both on the same page when it comes to honesty: we use it, whether people like it or not.

Jodi's got T-O-N-S of friends, and the ones I've met are solid. The kind of people you can't help but fall in love with because they are sooo passionate and generous. They're culinary tourism experts, food activists, they write incredible food blogs, they publish out-of-the-box magazine, they run bakeries in west Toronto, they run independent bookstores (that takes huge _ _ _ _ _), they run bakeries in east Toronto, they self-publish books, they're fundraisers, and they do so much more(!!!) ~ and the glue that binds them, us, is that they showed up.

Remember that great Woody Allen quote about success:
Eighty percent of success is showing up


I almost didn't go,
because of babysitting issues,
because my husband always has to work late,
because I hadn't rehearsed my Cupcakes for Haiti cookbook story,
because it's such a long streetcar ride across the entire city.
But something was pulling me there.
As I took the streetcar back home I knew what that thing was, it was the energy of my tribe, the one that stands behind, next to, onto its people.

Thank you Jodi and everyone that night who shared, clapped, and celebrated together. Honoured to be a Woman in Food.