Martha Stewart and the luxury of imperfection

I watched the documentary, and then I watched it again, and then I felt a lot of conflicting feelings.

Lately: I’ve spent the week gearing up for an early Thanksgiving with my family, who are coming in town this weekend. I won’t see them on the actual holiday, so I’m using this as an excuse to bake and cook and fire up the smoker one last time before the weather turns. (Is the weather ever going to turn?) … It seems like everyone is actually quitting Twitter this week, and Bluesky looks like a decent alternative. It feels a bit like Twitter in 2015, though I have less of an appetite for indignant outrage than I once did, which is probably good for everyone involved. If you’re on Bluesky and want to hear from me, my profile is linked here. … I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating: This newsletter marks a first. I’m paywalling an essay I put a lot of time and thought into, because as a full-time freelancer, I’d like to turn this newsletter into a bit more of an income stream. (Milk, cows, words, subscriptions, ya know?) So if you saw the subject line and were like, damn, I want to hear what she has to say — well, scroll on down and enter your email and a credit card, and all of Grazing will unfold before your very eyes.

Martha Stewart and the luxury of imperfection

In the months before to my wedding, I gave in to a number of domestic compulsions that had been backed into the recesses of my consciousness for years, just waiting to claw and gnash and sweet-talk their way out. The event itself was all pomp and no circumstance: in a restaurant, without a formal ceremony, buffet dinner, jam-packed dance floor. But even so, there I was in the lead-up, clicking through the 180th page of porcelain platters on an antiques site, searching for the perfect, slightly mismatched collection. I needed something to serve the cakes (and brownies, and Italian almond cookies) I was planning to bake myself. And then, of course, there were the collective days (weeks?) I spent experimenting with those cakes, three of them, and the 30 minutes I spent staring at the Whole Foods flower display the morning the wedding, agonizing over which to buy to decorate the desserts that had come to define my entire identity.

why I made my own wedding cake

“You don’t have to go full Martha Stewart,” my mom told me (and told me again, and again) in the lead-up, deploying the same line of critique she’d used when I was in elementary school and another mother brought an over-the-top birthday dessert, or if a family member sent an elaborately wrapped Christmas gift. “Going Martha Stewart” was the ultimate compliment-cum-derision in our household: Yes, it’s beautiful/delicious/wonderful, but did you really need to put in all that time and effort?