In 2012 I had (among many other things) a love of food, two small kids and a memoir I was trying to write about a father I had lost who liked to eat.

I also had the suspect knowledge that sometimes writers could get the attention of readers and publishing bigwigs by keeping an interesting blog project going. I thought, I have a blog! I have three or four readers! Why shouldn’t it be my work that Oprah’s minions find as they trawl the internet 24-7 seeking the next best-selling title for her book club?

Dream big, Sheila.

So, I cooked (heh) up the idea of Food You Don’t Know What to Do With, in which readers would participate in prompting my writing and cooking. It went like this:

I am planning a new, weekly column here called Food You Don’t Know What To Do With, in which you, my readers, suggest foods that perplex you, stump you, terrify you, intrigue but evade you, and I write about them, offering some background, history, photos, tangential-but-hopefully-engaging musings and, most importantly, some actual suggestions on how to approach them in the kitchen! 

Each week I would put all the foods into a blue mixing bowl on slips of paper (I’m Gen-X. We’re analog as hell.) and have one of my kids pick: kale, zucchini, beets, saffron. Then, I’d cook. Then, I’d write. It was great fun and guess what?

We’re bringing it back!

Only this time, I’m going to have a sous-chef: my son, Rudy! Rudy who I write about in All Things Edible as having inherited my father’s adventurous palate and my love of cooking as connection. Rudy, who had his own cooking project not long ago, for which I was his very willing sous-chef.

We’re planning two posts per month, and we’re going to draw from my world and (hopefully!) from his. I’ll cook and he’ll help. Then he’ll cook and I’ll help. We’ll have posts you can read, videos you can watch and, most importantly, recipes you can make with your new-found confidence. Now you’ll know what to do!

So, if you’d like to participate–and we hope you will!–you can either drop a comment below or reach out on any social media post this appears on to me, Rudy or CLASH with the food you don’t know what to do with and we will pick randomly from something that looks like this:

Deadline to submit for our first post will be July 16, but we’ll take your food stuffs anytime for future posts.

Thanks, friends, for giving me something to do with my kid. He’s an awesome kid. I like him a lot.

PREORDER ALL THINGS EDIBLE, RANDOM AND ODD HERE

Coming November, 2023 from CLASH Books

Through lyrical and intimate personal essays, All Things Edible, Random and Odd delivers a portrait not just of a father who died, but of a daughter who kept living. 

Sheila Squillante’s heartfelt and humorous essays introduce us to a father—a 1980s businessman and early adopter of the term “foodie”—and a daughter’s complicated grief. It also moves beyond that grief, to embrace the intricacies and delights of how life grows from it. 

Food remains central throughout the collection with essays that serve up a menu (and sometimes recipes!) of Hawaiian beach seaweed, turtle soup, and fermented Icelandic shark. Nostalgia clashes with reality, through stories connecting memories to taste.

With poetic prose, Squillante expresses the complexities of unresolved relationships, the importance of shared experiences, and how family and food make us who we are.