The Feminist Kitchen

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The top 10 Substack stories I wrote this year
www.thefeministkitchen.com

The top 10 Substack stories I wrote this year

The Feminist Kitchen got a new look this year, and I'm so glad I made the leap from blog to newsletter.

Addie Broyles
Dec 31, 2021
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The top 10 Substack stories I wrote this year
www.thefeministkitchen.com

I first launched The Feminist Kitchen in 2010, when I had a newborn and a newly found desire to write outside the scope of my newspaper and freelance work.

I wanted to write about travel, feminism and being a millennial mom, and over the next decade, this blog-turned-newsletter became a place where I could write about divorce, co-parenting, death of a grandparent and then death of a parent.

I wrote about dating, discovering new parts of myself in Sweden, Mexico and Spain and integrating new ideas around emergent strategy and healing from codependency into my life at home.

In 2021, I decided to take that blog and turn it into a Substack newsletter, where I could invite readers to support my work and my transition away from a traditional news outlet.

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This wasn’t an easy decision, as you can imagine. Only a fraction of the people who read my work in the Statesman have found their way to Substack, but that number grows each month.

Most important to me as I look back on the year: I’m happy that I found a new way to continue writing stories, essays and articles that felt important and interesting to me. (Plus, I followed my podcast dreams of making a show about my high school experience to celebrate our 20th reunion! “Class Reunion: The Podcast” wrapped up in November.)

Putting words to lived experiences has soothed my soul since I was a teenager, and it is my great honor to continue to do that.

What will 2022 hold? I have some interesting non-writing opportunities that have popped up on my radar in the past few weeks, but The Feminist Kitchen isn’t going anywhere. I published more than 50 posts in the 10 months since launching, so look for new posts each week in the year to come.

I’m thrilled to have you with me on this creative, cathartic journey, and I hope you’ll tell your friends that “Addie is your last name Broyles?” is still putting her work out in the world. (That’s a response I often get/got when people have been reading my stuff for years but haven’t met me in person.)

So, without further ado, here are the top 10 posts from The Feminist Kitchen this year, as determined by page views and percentage of subscribers who read the post.

A profile of my new favorite bookstore:

The Feminist Kitchen
Reverie Books is keeping the dream of South Austin alive and well
Reverie Books opened just in time. Sure, the supply chain is out of whack and a global pandemic has been raging for 18 months, but bookstore owner Thaïs Perkins says a queer, feminist and social justice-centered store couldn’t have happened without all the changes that the coronavirus…
Read more
a year ago · 1 like · Addie Broyles

An interview with the cookbook authors who published my favorite new food book of the year:

The Feminist Kitchen
Meet the Austin food bloggers behind 'Dining with the Dead'
Day of the Dead isn’t merely a holiday. It’s a cultural experience. An annual celebration of ancestors, ancestral healing and what it means to live with grief. When Mariana…
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a year ago · 1 like · Addie Broyles

Some reflections on the unseen burdens of motherhood:

The Feminist Kitchen
The 40 percent Mother's Day tax
This morning, Mother’s Day, Frank was remembering when he was a small business owner and had to set aside something like 40 percent of his photography income to make sure the feds got paid. As I venture toward becoming a small business owner myself, the thought at having to pay 40 percent in taxes is shocking. It turns out that it’s closer to 15 percent…
Read more
2 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Addie Broyles

The February freeze left us stunned. I wrote this piece the week that followed:

The Feminist Kitchen
The awe and the thaw
The horrors of last week’s storm and infrastructure failure in Texas leave me almost speechless. Almost. For the first part of the week, I was without power, shivering most of the time, eating dinner in the dark and then going to bed under a pile of blankets. Frank and I still had running water, though, but when that ran out on Wednesday morning, I decide…
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2 years ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Addie Broyles

My exploration of ancestry and ancestral healing boomed in 2021:

The Feminist Kitchen
Motherhood is not an island
I did a thing. A big thing. A couple of big things, actually, but only one am I telling about in today’s newsletter. (Stay tuned next week for details about The Other Thing.) I got a new tattoo. On May 11, which is a very special day in my world. That’s the day my grandmother and my best friend Troy were born…
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2 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Addie Broyles

Frank and I went to Costa Rica in June to celebrate his birthday and the end of my tenure at the Statesman:

The Feminist Kitchen
I don’t want to be a greedy traveler in Costa Rica
Manuel Antonio is considered Costa Rica’s can’t-miss nature park…
Read more
2 years ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Addie Broyles

An ode to my mighty grief healer friend, the ukulele:

The Feminist Kitchen
Two, two chords: Meeting my musical muse
On August 17, 2017, I ordered my first ukulele. It was a 21-inch mahogany soprano from Amazon that set me back about $40. Avery had just started first grade. Julian was 10. Hurricane Harvey hit a few weeks later. I was a year into a difficult romantic relationship, and my dad had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer…
Read more
2 years ago · 4 likes · 6 comments · Addie Broyles

More ancestral healing work, this time over coffee cake:

The Feminist Kitchen
Crying over coffee cake a long way from home
Wisconsin isn’t anywhere near Missouri, but I sure felt home there last week. I was on a press trip to Door County, the peninsula north of Green Bay that’s filled with orchards, artist studios, cheese shops and signs of Scandinavia. The area was heavily logged in the 1800s, mostly by immigrants, who built the area’s first houses and deep water docks, which led to its first hotels and restaurants…
Read more
a year ago · Addie Broyles

A profile of the Central Texas Mycological Society:

The Feminist Kitchen
Chicken of the woods season is coming up. Are you ready?
I’ve been hiking on the Barton Creek Greenbelt since I moved to Austin, but I’d never been on a hike like this. It was late Jul…
Read more
a year ago · Addie Broyles

A story about the history of Clarksville and some of the people who are trying to preserve it:

The Feminist Kitchen
The 2018 article that never ran.
Publishing this story won't change Clarksville’s history, but I want to publish it anyway. Back in 2018, I met Stephanie Lang, who came on our Austin360 podcast, “I Love You So Much,” to talk about a photo exhibit I’d just seen at UT called “Seen and Unseen…
Read more
a year ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Addie Broyles

As promised, thanks to your paid Substack subscriptions, I’ve been making donations to nonprofits that support BIPOC and queer folks all year long. Between these donations and the donations I made on behalf of the students of the Class of 2001 for my 15-episode podcast, “Class Reunion,” I’ve made more charitable contributions during my first year of self-employment than any during my time as a paid staffer.

That wasn’t because I was making more money, but because I felt like it was more important than ever — because of both karma and the pandemic — to consistently contribute to organizations that are doing good work in the community. This final donation of the year is going to the Austin Diaper Bank. Thanks for your support, and I look forward to continuing this practice in the year to come.

Happy New Year!

Here’s to looking back without staring and looking ahead without missing out of the gift of the present. 🥂 ❤️

Addie

P.S. Yes, I’m still doing tarot readings and working with people on their own ancestral healing journeys! Don’t Fear the Death Card is perhaps the most surprising new thing of 2021, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves in 2022. Book a session with me if you’re curious to unlearn everything you thought you knew about tarot. (Booo, fortune telling. Yay, self-reflection!)

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The top 10 Substack stories I wrote this year
www.thefeministkitchen.com
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Kandice
Dec 31, 2021Liked by Addie Broyles

THIS. Is amazing. I am so proud of you! Proud of ALL that you do!

“I’ve made more charitable contributions during my first year of self-employment than any during my time as a paid staffer.

That wasn’t because I was making more money, but because I felt like it was more important than ever — because of both karma and the pandemic — to consistently contribute to organizations that are doing good work in the community.”

Wow! What an inspiration!

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