Welcome back to at , a recurring series where I chat with creative women I admire about their current loves—and the small, meaningful things shaping their lives right now.

After our so-called “baby-led weaning” era (read: chaos disguised as autonomy), I found myself in the parenting equivalent of a culinary free fall—trying to feed Lily something vaguely nutritious, ideally tasty, and meltdown-proof, all before she turned into a pumpkin at 5:15pm. Enter

, a refreshingly gentle and genuinely useful newsletter-slash-lifeline co-authored by (with Greta Caruso), filled with low-lift, high-reward recipes for feeding small people (and big ones too).

Fanny’s approach to food and family cooking is everything I aspire to be in the kitchen: seasonal, unfussy, quietly thoughtful. Which makes sense, considering she grew up with Alice Waters as her mother —the chef, activist, and founder of Chez Panisse who was instrumental in shaping the farm-to-table movement. That sensibility—slow, nourishing, reverent without being precious—runs all through Fanny’s work.

Naturally, I wanted to hear more. So I asked Fanny to share her current obsessions, the weeknight dinner she makes on autopilot, and what motherhood has taught her about creativity, care, and cutting cucumbers very slowly with a toddler.

Getting back into the swing of seeing art shows and doing studio visits — I took a long break from reviewing (I have a PhD in art history and have worked as a critic for years) when I had my daughter, but I really miss spending time with the fruits of other humans’ creative labor. I consider it an antidote to the unhinged world of geopolitics; to be reminded that we are an innately creative — not merely destructive — species. Not the same as a yoga practice, lol (which I should also resume), but nonetheless a balm for the soul.

A simple green salad is really the thing that makes me think of my mom — it’s what we both always crave, so much so that I’m writing a second book devoted entirely to salad. But the runner up, for sure, is what we call, appropriately, “Coming Home Pasta.”

This ‘Dinner in a Flash’ post is a very helpful cheat sheet, but pasta is something I always lean on when I’m tight on time and lacking inspiration. Our go-to is a broccoli pasta, for which I finely dice broccoli and use my ridiculously effective garlic press whose name is too silly to repeat here, sautée it all quickly in olive oil, and toss it with lupini bean-enhanced protein-rich Brami pasta, a quick grating of Parm and lemon zest, and chopped parsley, if I have some around.

Meal planning to me means going to a market or grocery store (or ordering groceries) and seeing what looks good and then cooking accordingly. But I do often make big batches of things to help make putting meals on the table, or packing a lunchbox, easier over the course of multiple days. Some of the things I batch prepare and depend on most, in no particular order: lentil soup, date bars, overnight oats, lasagna, meatballs, salad dressing, roasted sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, chicken soup, a pile of braised dark greens, a big ol’ pot of beans or chickpeas.

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I always include my daughter in little prep tasks, even if it slows me down a bit. She loves shelling beans or English peas when we get them fresh at the market, and snapping the ends off of asparagus, and she’s OBSESSED with making tortillas. I buy dry masa harina from Alma Semillera, mix up a dough with warm water, put my daughter in her genius Piccalio tower, and she rolls the balls of dough and then flattens them out in a tortilla press all by herself. She’s only 2.5 but she’s a total whiz. Kids are almost always capable of doing more sophisticated tasks than we think they can handle, and I have to perpetually remind myself of that fact. She loves to cut things with her little children’s Opinel knife (which I supervise like a hawk), so I involve her in cutting berries or cucumbers or carrots for her lunchbox too.

Good olive oil (see below), good rice vinegar, Brami pasta, whole wheat pasta, canned tomatoes, canned coconut milk, rolled oats, almond flour, date syrup, garlic (does garlic count?!), farro, red quinoa, white basmati rice.

One of my favorites is Seka Hills — I buy their olive oil in these massive jugs and decant it into a little pitcher from Great Jones. I also love my father’s Tuscan style organic olive oil, grown on our family’s property in Sonoma.

It all started with the idea of making a few beautiful, timeless garments with my friend Mariah Nielson, all of them based on vintage silhouettes. It was SO FUN, but also we were totally out of our depths traipsing into the world of fashion—Mariah is a design historian and curator and I’m an art historian by training—we had no idea what we were doing.

So, gradually, we began to incorporate design objects made in collaboration with our artist and designer friends, and over time it became a functional design brand with a focus on kitchen and dining pieces. Permanent Collection is coming up on ten years in 2026!

A LOADED question! But I think the most important ingredient is love, a cliché as that sounds. My advice is just to No kid can ever hear it too much.

My mom used to slip me notes in my lunchbox or backpack, or in cards randomly throughout the year, or at birthdays, that said that I was the best thing that had ever happened to her in her life. And even though she was also obsessed with her work and very devoted to her activism, I always really felt that she was being genuine, because it was, in fact, backed up with action.

To learn the names of all the flowers, of all the trees, to see and name and notice nature as a way both of communing with it, but also respecting it. To love the natural world. To, quite literally, stop and smell the flowers.

I had no f*cking CLUE how much of a sacrifice it is. You basically immolate your former self so that you can be reborn as the servant of a new little human being. Sounds dramatic—and unpleasant?—and it is painful, but you come out the other side as a wildly expanded, newly-dimensionalized person. Now you are responsible for yourself and the totality of someone else’s experience.

In that respect, you are never truly alone once you cross the rubicon. You could be on a business trip 10,000 miles away from your child and still not be alone. It’s wild. But it’s also beautiful—out of thin air (and a bunch of cells) you create a new, wholly original person for whom you will experience a quality of love that never existed up to that point.

I love the Cub Street Diet column on The Green Spoon, where a parent shares in detail what and how they’re feeding their kid(s) and family. It helps me feel less alone that some nights I’m making Annie’s Mac & Cheese and dumping frozen peas into a pot and calling that dinner. What’s been a takeaway for you after having done a bunch of these interviews?

That we’re all just doing as much and as good as we humanly can in this absolutely crazy world and that we are neither alone, nor failing. In short, that it’s gonna be okay!

Thank you so much, Fanny! You can follow along @fannysinger and subscribe to her newsletter,

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Books & Book Club

Welcome back to Bookmarked, a recurring column here at Downtime where I chat with authors and bookish people I admire about their favorite reads, creative rituals, and more. Today’s installment is a juicy one—and a little on the longer side—so feel free to click the title above to read it in full on the web. x

This is the Friday post at Downtime, a feel-good weekly roundup of recommendations and delightful distractions. Today’s issue is a guest edition. If the email cuts off, you can view it on the web.