Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes | 
pickI happened to read this right as our first real table was delivered for our new home. This meditation on gathering around the table and making your home a place where you can host the people you love with warmth and honesty and not make it a perform was perfectly timed.
“We don‘t learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. Love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right.”
pick⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️quarantine is not the best time to read this book. Niequist‘s premise is about the beauty & joy of gathering together, feeding people, and all sorts of things that aren‘t allowed during a pandemic 😩I loved her ideas, though. She clearly has a lot of money & privilege, and that comes though in the stories she tells, but I don‘t think it takes away from her main points. And if you enjoy memoirs & celebrating food, this is a great read.
pickThis one fell under "something uplifting". I fell in love with the way Shauna writes so effortlessly about her life around the table.
I don't really cook but some of these recipes might tempt me.?
#nonfiction2019
pickI loved this book. Warm, loving and honest. She‘s privileged no doubt but extends it in warm spiritual hospitality. I felt like I was sitting at that table with her.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
#nonfiction #cookbook #essays #spirituality #recommendedreading
One of the things I am thankful for these last few years is the Litsy community. I have received a bunch of cards over Christmas and for my birthday. Also a very welcome but surprising delivery from @TheBookHippie turned up the other day. Thank you so much everyone! You have definitely made my day. 😁
Do bear with me for a while whilst I make up some cards to send to each of you.
#jb
pickMy dear friend is an audiobook fan. I wasn't so sure for myself until she sent me "Bread and Wine" on CD. I loved listening to it and loved the story itself. The author is a pleasure to listen to. The way she speaks of her friends and family gathering around the table almost makes me want to throw a dinner party. Almost.
This is me proving to my friend that I had received her gift. Lol.
pickI‘m a self-proclaimed introvert but hospitality is something that‘s important to me. I would love to be at a place where we had a different family over for dinner once every week. I believe it‘s how God intended us to live in community.
#ReadingResolutions Female Author
pickMy favorite type of nonfiction is hands down the food memoir. This one had me highlighting quotes and entire sections — and I rarely write in books!
Day 7: Memoir Monday
#ReadingResolutions
pickGreat easy read with good reminders about how to open our lives and subsequently our hearts to others to create meaningful relationships in life. Ps. The chicken chili recipe in this book is delicious
so-soEhn..I think this could have been better than it was. Which is not to say that it was bad but it did not meet my expectations.
pickI loved reading this book! It reads a little bit like a novel and a little bit like a cookbook, a perfect combination! I thought I would be sharing this book in my little free libraries when I finished however, I now have so many pages marked to try the recipes that it's going to be shelved with my cook books 😊 Wonderfully inspiring ♥️📚📖😊
#twentybooksofsummer
pickFinally finished this book, I LOVED this book. I read it slow and cooked from this book!
I will be sharing this with my people!
Because of this book I'm having a little moment tonight. ❤️
I loved this section on running. Totally made me cry thinking about my marathon training!
This book is perfect
pickI loved the recipes and her call to entertain our friends and family more, no matter the condition of your house. She is a strong Christian so that is an element that may turn some off, but I found it refreshing to have someone who was so comfortable sharing her story.
I thought about staying in bed today. And then decided nope. Instead I'm gonna:
1. Meet with my women's group - a bunch of women in all seasons of life from 20 to 80 who encourage and support each other. If you don't have one of these - find one or start one 😀
2. Pick up holds from library
3. Lunch with the hubs with carbs and wine
4. Take Bitsy for a long walk and get lost in audiobook
5. Read
6. Pick a non-profit and fill out volunteer app 😽
Books that made me hungry. #somethingforseptember #septphotochallenge #Day18
pickFabulous book!! This was the first Shauna Neiquist book I have read and won't be my last. I love hosting friends and family and gathering around the table to break bread and I enjoyed the author's stories about times she has done the same. The recipes are such a wonderful bonus and complement to the stories.
"The heart of hospitality is creating space for these moments, protecting that fragile bubble of vulnerability and truth and love. It's all too rare that we tell the people we love exactly why we love them-what they bring to our lives, why our lives are richer because they're in it." "Focus on making people comfortable, on creating a space protected from the rush and chaos of daily life, a space full of laughter and safety and soul."
It's not, actually, strictly, about food for me. It's about what happens when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one another's faces, listen to one another's stories.
“I love the table. I love food,what it means,what it does and how it feels in my hands. And that might be healthy, and it might be a reaction to a world that would love me more if I starved myself, and it‘s probably always going to be a mix of the two. In any case, it‘s morning and I‘m hungry. And I‘m thinking about dinner, not just tonight, but the next night and the next. There are two kinds of people and I‘m tired of pretending I‘m the other.”
“What matters is that one of the ways we grow up is by declaring what we love.”
“The extra pounds didn‘t matter, as I look back, but the shame that came with those extra pounds was like an infectious disease. That‘s what I remember. So these days my mind & my heart are focused less on the pounds and more on what it means to live without shame, to exchange that heavy and corrosive self-loathing for courage and freedom and gratitude. Some days I do just that, some days I don‘t, and that seems to be just exactly how life is.”
“I used to think the goal was to get over things-to deal with them once and for all, to snap an issue closed like slamming a locker door, washing my hands of it forever and always. What I know after all these years is that there are some things you don‘t get over, some things you just make friends with at a certain point, because they‘ve been following you around like a stray dog for years.”
“Part of being a Christian means practicing grace in all sorts of big and small and daily ways, and my body gives me the opportunity to demonstrate grace, to make peace with imperfection every time I see myself in the mirror. On my best days, I practice grace and patience with myself, knowing that I can‘t extend grace and patience if I haven‘t tasted it.”
“I‘m learning to practice gratitude for a healthy body, even if it‘s rounder than I‘d like it to be. I‘m learning to take up all the space I need, literally and figuratively, even though we live in a world that wants women to be tiny and quiet. To feed one‘s body, to admit ones hunger, to look one‘s appetite straight in the eye without fear or shame-this is controversial work in our culture.”
“I‘ve always wanted to be thinner, and I‘ve always loved to eat, and I felt betrayed by my appetites. Why couldn‘t I be one of those people who forget to eat? Or who can‘t eat a bite when she‘s stressed or sad, I eat like a truffle pig, hoping the great mouthfuls of food will make me feel tethered to something, grounded, safe. And I eat when I‘m happy too-when the table is full of people I love, when we‘re celebrating.”
"A woman who still longs to be skinny and never is, and who still, from time to time, throws all her pants on the floor and glares at them like enemies. After all these years, the heaviest thing isn‘t the number on the scale but the weight of shame I‘ve carried all these years-too big, too big, too big.”
“I have always been on the round side of average, sometimes the very round side and sometimes just a little round. I was a round-faced chubby baby, a little girl with soft, puffy cheeks, a teenager who longed to be skinny and never was, who routinely threw all her pants on the floor and glared at them like enemies."
“It‘s about the table, and about all the other places we find ourselves eating. It‘s about a spirit of quality of living that rises up when we offer one another life itself, in the form of dinner or soup or breakfast, or bread and wine.”
“When you eat, I want you to think of God, of the holiness of hands that feed us, of the provision we are given every time we eat. When you eat bread and you drink wine, I want you to think about the body and the blood every time, not just when the bread and wine show up in church, but when they show up anywhere-on a picnic table or a hardwood floor or a beach.”
"But I do want you to love what you eat, and to share food with people you love, and to gather people together, for frozen pizza or filet mignon, because I think the gathering is of great significance.”
“I‘m not a stickler about nutrition or a purist about organics, although I care about those things. I‘m learning about them little by little, and living them step-by-step, meal-by-meal. I‘m not a vegan and I don‘t eat low-carb, and I don‘t want you to change the way you eat, necessarily."
“I believe it‘s the way I was made, and I believe it matters. For many years, I didn‘t let it matter, for a whole constellation of reasons, but part of becoming yourself, in a deeply spiritual way, is finding the words to tell the truth about what it is you really love.”
“I believe God is here among us, present and working. I believe all of life is shot through with God‘s presence, and that part of the gift of walking with Him is seeing his fingerprints in all sorts of unexpected ways.”
"It happens when we enter the joy and the sorrow of the people we love, and we join together at the table to feed one another and be fed, and while it‘s not strictly about food, it doesn‘t happen without it. Food is the starting point, the common ground, the thing to hold and handle, the currency we offer to one another.”
"It happens when we leave the office and get a sitter and skip our workouts every so often to celebrate a birthday or an accomplishment or a wedding or a birth, when we break out of the normal clockwork of daily life and pop the champagne on a cold, gray, Wednesday for no other reason than the fact that the faces we love are gathered around our table."
“It‘s not, actually, strictly, about food for me. It‘s about what happens when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one another‘s faces, listen to one another‘s stories."
"I love the sounds and smells and textures of life at the table, hands passing bowls and forks clinking against plates and bread being torn and the rhythm and energy of feeding and being fed.”
“What‘s becoming clearer and clearer to me is that the most sacred moments, the ones in which I feel God‘s presence most profoundly, when I feel the goodness of the world most arrestingly, take place at the table. The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people and serving what I‘ve made with my own hands , comes together as more than the sum of their parts."
"It‘s about food and it‘s not. It‘s about life, which is to say it‘s about everything.”
