September Lunch Date

Guys! It’s September, and I love lunch dates, so this post is gonna be just like we’re having lunch together. Sitting outside, maybe? 60 degrees and sunny? Wearing boots and flannels and watching the leaves fall as we eat our tomato soup with whole-grainy grilled cheese croutons?

I like this already.

We have lots to talk about today, because September is basically the best ever, amiright?

Exactly, Sage. Exaaaactly.

Recipes

I totally love summer. Summer is my spirit season. I love to be warm, I love the sun, and if spending every day of my life in the water laying on a flamingo floaty sipping a watermelon smoothie was a career option, you might never see me again.

How-ev-er.

Fall has something on summer that is worth possibly more than the warm-and-sun-and-water combo. Fall is my FOOD SEASON. After months of feeling like cooking shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes ever (summer at its best), I find myself suddenly wanting to stand in front of 15 pots of soup, stirring here and there, in between baking batches of bread to go along with it, and all the better if it takes all day. Dreamy though, right?

Yesterday I had a chance to make the first of my fall cooking dreams come true. It was 60 degrees and sunny, so I left the windows open and put on some nice relaxing music and lit a candle (more on candles in just a second). I was having a hot craving for tomato soup and grilled cheese, so I busted out all the stops to make my favorite homemade tomato soup which includes frying up some little bits of bacon with onions and garlic and carrots and OH MY LANTA, the house! the house smelled amazing: smokey and earthy and crisp, like exactly what fall should smell like.

I love to try new recipes and I am very excited about the new recipe posts that are yet to come this fall. But you guys, don’t you sometimes just want to make your old favorites all over again? Agh. Just totally the best. I am feeling so nostalgic for all my fall foods this year, so here are the favorite fall recipes that are on my meal plan for September:

Crockpot Chicken Wild Rice Soup

Rockin’ 5 Ingredient Sweet Potato Turkey Chili

Detox Crockpot Lentil Soup

Crockpot Red Lentil Curry (happening TODAY in my hizzouse)

Simple Homemade Tomato Soup (note: THE BEST TOMATO SOUP IN THE WORLD, pictured at the beginning of this post with a pile of whole grain grilled cheese croutons)

Creamy Pumpkin Spaghetti with Garlic Kale

Miracle No Knead Bread

Currently Loving

It seems too standard, but we are currently really loving our lake walks. Fall walks are not the same as the warm and well-lit summer walks, but they have a magic all their own. The days are getting colder and shorter – it’s dark by 8pm now, and yesterday I had to wear not one but TWO long sleeved layers. It’s always so strange to me when that finally happens because in the middle of summer you can’t really imagine it ever happening, but then one day, out of the blue, there you are: wearing a sweatshirt with a long sleeved shirt under, and pulling the long edges of your sweatshirt sleeves over your hands to stay warm and wishing you would have worn a hat. LIFE, man. It’s strange.

Also currently loving: CANDLES! Tis the season, right? Here’s my dilemma. I’m trying to clean up my home and beauty situation – like low or no chemicals, toxins, that sort of thing. I’ve made a lot of the easy swaps already – like dryer balls for dryer sheets and Norwex water-only cleaning cloths for bleachy cleaning supplies, but dang Gina, puhhhlease NOT MY CANDLES. I’ve been looking for something that is clean-burning and scented but not overly scented. Like, naturally scented? Is that a thing? Except I’d like it to smell like a pumpkin pie oatmeal cookie cider spice latte. They can naturally scent that, right?

Kidding, sort of. I know some of you are experts about this and I would love your clean candle recs.

On the cooking front, I’m loving our red Lodge Dutch Oven, which I’ve mentioned only about 800 times and is home to all the soups that are happening in this little kitchen. I’m also loving (still, more than a year after buying it) my Saveur cookbook called The New Classics. It’s just the best, you guys. I’ve made so many recipes out of it – at least 30, which is A LOT for me and a cookbook – and they’re all winners. For some reason, I associate this book with fall, and I’m loving it right now.

It’s been so fun this month to be cooking and working together with a real live team for POY content and workshops. This is a picture Alana (video guru) and Krista (our new shoot assistant) working on some videos, like they do. Working with people makes this blogging thing a whole lot more enjoyable, and these two are just phenom. The videos? Have you seen them? All credit to Krista for the hands and Alana for the video wizardry. We have the best girl-power team (+ Bjork, our v important non-girl member) and I’m so very grateful for all the hands – literally – that helps us continue to be able to do what we do. We’re working on a new About page so you can get to know our team even better. Teamwork makes the dream work! ✨ <– file under phrases you will hear when you go on a lunch date with me. You’re welcome.

One more fun kitchen thing?

WE GOT A TEAL SMEG FRIDGE. ♡ It lives at the studio and it’s so adorable, I can hardly stand it. I know it’s been a looooong time, but we should finally have the finished studio pictures to share with you sometime this month or next! It’s *thisclose* to done. And I haven’t been a perfectionist about it at all. …Promise.

Capsule Wardrobe

It’s that time again!

I sort of half-heartedly capsuled my way through summer, which basically means I wore the same two shorts and three t-shirts for the entire three months of warm weather and it was not amazing.

I am so ready to get my capsule game back on point.

Luckily, I have a renewed energy for things like this in the fall, so we are capsuling once again. Since I started this whole capsule wardrobe situation last fall, I have most of what I need already and I will probably just give it a boost with a new pair of booties or a few new tops.

Do you fashionistas have any recommendations on shops or specific fall boots / scarves / sweaters you are loving? I mostly always shop at the Loft / Lou and Grey, Express, Athleta, and Macy’s every once in a while, but I would love for you to hold my hand and walk me through a virtual mall of expanded options.

Books

Hey, remember audiobooks? They are back, they are cool, and they are LYFE. I listen to audiobooks every day on my 20-minute commute to the studio and I can crush books at an absolutely ridiculous rate – like one per week. YOU GUYS. This is literally life-changing for me.

On the logistical side, I use Audible for paid audiobooks and OverDrive for borrowed – aka free – audiobooks from the library. I keep track of all of my read or want-to-read books like a total Type A Dweeb in a supergreat app called Goodreads.

Current favorite books have been Bloom by Kelle Hampton (cried like a baby basically the whole way through it – so beautiful and incredibly moving) and Present Over Perfect by Shauna Niequist. If you are a human being who lives in the world, I’d highly recommend Present Over Perfect. I think her message is so timely and necessary and literally life-saving for so many of us right now – trading in the hustle for more rest, peace, and life.

Travel Tips Wanted

Alright, last thing I wanted to talk about before we wrap up: WE ARE GOING TO EUROPE! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh! I studied abroad in Spain for a few months during college, but Bjork and I have never been to Europe together and we are so pumped to be headed to Southern France, Switzerland, Munich, and possibly London for a two-week adventure later this fall.

Here’s why I’m mentioning this -> I would LOVE love love your help in planning this trip! What are the must-see things in each of these places? Probably worth mentioning that our time in Southern France is already pretty scheduled out since we’ll be jumping on board a river cruise (?!?!!) for a good portion of that time, but we have a lot of flexibility with the rest of the trip and we know zero things about what to do in each of these places.

What are the must-see cities? Foods to try? Landmarks to hit? You guys never disappoint when it comes to travel info, so I am supes excited to hear back from you on this one.

Also if you have travel tips in general – like, for example, apps that will help us get organized and make sure we don’t miss any trains or boats or flights? – that would be amazing to the max.

umm, hi

Sage has been waiting very patiently right here, right next to me, during this entire post (this is my dog’s actual real life) and now she wants to know – what’s on your mind this September? How are things going in your corner of the world?

I’m a big fan of this lunch date thing. XO

This post contains affiliate links for the stuff we love!

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Traffic and Income Report – July 2016

Hiya! Bjork here.

A quick thanks to those of you that follow along with these reports for your patience on July’s report. It’s coming out later than usual.

For those that don’t follow along with these reports, here’s the deal:

Five-ish years ago we started doing a monthly report that showcased the things that we were learning as we were working on Pinch of Yum. Those first few reports shared the income we were earning. Later on we started to include the expenses as well as screenshots of our Google Analytics account.

These reports started as out as a public experiment to see if it was possible to build a food blog into a business. We continue to write these reports each month for a few reasons:

1. We’re huge believers in building value over time. When it comes to these reports we believe the greatest value isn’t in a single report, but in the culmination of the past five years and the story those cumulative posts tell about building something slowly and consistently for a long period of time. We’ll never be on the cover of Fast Company, but if Slow Company started a publication we might have a chance. Good work + every day + constant improvement. We hope this long-term mindset encourages you to continue working on your thing, whatever that might be.
2. These reports are an ongoing case study that we tie into Food Blogger Pro, our membership site for people building food related business online. Knowing that we do these reports once a month encourages us to continue learning, testing, building, and growing, in part so we can report back on that progress here, in part so we can continue to grow the business in general, and in part so we can teach about what we learn on Food Blogger Pro.
3. I love the internet. <— That sounds a bit generic, but I’m perpetually fascinated by what is possible online. It’s amazing. Amazing. We can connect with people all around the world, create movements, impact thinking, build businesses, laugh, cry, learn… These monthly reports are an outward expression of my fascination with the internet, and the process of writing these each month gives me a chance to hop on my imaginary-human-carrying-mind-controled-drone and fly up to 50,000 feet to see what’s happening with online businesses, both for us as well as others.

So that’s the dealio with these reports. I hope you find them helpful! Let’s jump in…

Income

• AdThrive – $26,918.85
• Sponsored Content – $11,800.00
• Tasty Food Photography Workshops – $11,555
• Bluehost – $4,715 –> this income comes from a page where we show people how to start a food blog in three easy steps.
• Amazon Associates – $2,611.42
• Tasty Food Photography – $2,112.65
• Swoop – $1,835.17
• Federated Media – $1,469.16
• Gourmet Ads – $903.50
• sovrn – $616.40
• How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook – $340.00
• Genesis Theme – $288.87
• Elegant Themes – $257.50
• Go Sugar Free Course – $99.75
• ActiveCampaign – $61.17
• Thesis Theme – $65.01
• AWeber – $23.40
• Yellow Hammer Media – $4.87

Expenses

• Justworks and Contractors – $18,009.88
• Studio Costs – $3,890.98
• Food Expenses – $1,664.18
• Travel – $1,164.11
• eBook Affiliates – $567.25
• PayPal Transaction Percentage – $425.26
• ActiveCampaign – $415.00
• EventBrite – $308.77
• Miscellaneous Software and Apps – $95.96
• Adobe Creative Cloud – $107.43
• LeadPages – $67.00
• Zapier – $50.00
• Amazon S3 and Cloudfront – $34.70
• PayPal Website Payments Pro – $30.00
• E-Junkie – $28.00
• QuickBooks – $26.95
• Shoeboxed – $29.95
• Hotjar – $29.00
• GitHub – $25.00
• CloudFlare – $20.00
• SumoMe – $20.00
• VaultPress – $20.00
• Pingdom – $14.95
• Backupify – $12.00
• Buffer – $10.00
• Link In Profile – $9.99
• CrashPlan – $9.99
• BoardBooster – $5.00

Traffic Totals

Below are some Google Analytics screenshots from the month of July 2016.

Traffic Overview

Top Ten Traffic Sources

Mobile vs. Desktop vs. Tablet

What’s Important and Hiring

Do you ever feel like everything is important?

Social media, blog posts, photography, accounting, time with friends, time with family, sleep, unplugging from your phone, responding quickly to emails, meditating, hustling, etc, etc, etc…

One of the ways that we’ve found success is by not doing all the important things. We’ve done our best to find just a few things that are important and focus in on those.

For Lindsay that was photography, good recipes, and consistently posting.

For me that was keeping things running behind the scenes with Pinch of Yum while building out related but new businesses (see Food Blogger Pro and Nutrifox).

We focused in on these things for many years knowing that we were missing out on other important things, like building a following on certain social media sites, producing videos, or attending networking events.

I’m convinced that deciding what you’re not working on is one of the most important considerations for entrepreneurs.

But your decision to not work on something doesn’t have to be permanent. It’s more like pressing pause, or to use a food analogy, putting that idea in the freezer to come back to at another time.

When is that “another time” when you’ll come back to that idea?

1. When you finish with a current project.
   or
2. When you can afford to hire someone to help.

We’ve been unfreezing some ideas with Pinch of Yum recently, as we’re starting to focus in on some things that are really important but weren’t focus items. Video, for instance, was always on our “important but not our focus list.” This summer we unfroze that idea and recently (last week) brought on Alana (welcome Alana!) as an official POY team member. Alana is also an FBP Expert, so if you’re an FBP member and you have any video related questions be sure to post those on the forum.

My reason for mentioning this is to encourage you to not try and do everything, even if some of those things that you’re not doing are really important. What you don’t do is just as important as what you do, and not doing important things is, ironically, an important part of building a business. When you have the time (or the budget to hire) you can come back to those ideas and unfreeze them.

Data Deep Dive with Food Blogger Pro

This is for all you data nerds and/or people interested in membership sites.

Here’s the quick back story:

Food Blogger Pro runs on a CMS called ExpressionEngine, and we use an open source add-on called membrr to power the membership components of the site.

The membrr add-on was built by a developer named Brock Ferguson. Brock recently started an analytics consulting company called Strong with two other super-smart-PhD-probably-good-at-math-and-chess co-founders. If you have an online business, especially one that focuses on recurring payments, I’d recommend you get in touch with them. I’m sure that Strong will find some interesting and actionable information, as you’ll see below with the case study they did for Food Blogger Pro.

The content is a bit more advanced than the usual advice we share here on these reports, but it’s a great example of some of the important data that you need to track (and tweak) as your business grows. I’m going to pass it off to Jacob Dink, one of the team members at Strong Analytics, to talk about what they found when they dug into FBP’s analytics.

Digging into FBP’s Data with Strong Analytics

Understanding the lifetime value of your customers is essential. This is especially true for businesses with recurring customers, where the bulk of the revenue doesn’t come from one-time purchases, but instead from a slow trickle over a customer’s lifetime.

In a healthy business, the amount of money earned per customer is greater than the amount of money spent acquiring each customer. So if you want to know whether your business is healthy (and how healthy it is), one important thing you need to do is calculate lifetime-value, calculate customer-acquisition-costs, and make sure the first is bigger than the second (factoring in the time value of money). Calculating the second is pretty easy: customer-acquisition costs are generally one-time costs that are right up-front.

But customer-lifetime value is a lot harder to get a handle on then you might think at first. This is the revenue you’ll get from a customer over their entire lifetime. But most of your customers haven’t finished their “lifetimes” yet: you (hopefully) have lots of current customers! For any current customer, the amount of revenue they’ve brought in so far is necessarily an under-estimate of the amount of revenue they’ll bring in over their entire lifetime. So you can’t just tally up how much money you’ve made from your customers if you want to estimate lifetime value— you’ll necessarily underestimate, and it’s difficult to assess by how much.

Many business rely on a quick and simple calculation you might find if you search for “customer lifetime value.” However, this method makes a lot of assumptions about the lifecycle of your customers — assumptions we didn’t feel comfortable making about FBP’s customers.

That’s why Strong Analytics took an approach grounded in statistical models, which ended up having some great advantages and providing some interesting insights.

Advantages

First, what are some of the advantages of Strong’s model-based approach to LTV over the usual way? The usual way is pretty simple, you just calculate your monthly revenue-per-customer, and divide it by your month-to-month churn rate. However, this formula makes a lot of assumptions about the customer life-cycle. The main assumption made here is that a customer has the same probability of cancelling their account no matter how long they’ve been with your company.

This assumption can easily be wrong. Maybe lots of customers sign up initially, but are only really interested in using the product once and so quickly churn; while customers who have stuck around for a year are the type of people who use the product repeatedly and are unlikely to churn. Or things could be reversed: perhaps almost all customers feel like they get something useful out of the product in the first year, but after that they generally find that they’ve exhausted its usefulness.

We were concerned that, if either of these two possibilities were right, Bjork would be getting the wrong number for the LTV for FBP customers. But we also wanted to know which of these two possibilities was right. On its surface Food Blogger Pro is a platform for members to watch videos learning how to get their website off the ground. But Bjork communicated to us that he wants it to be more than that: members should feel like the website provides perpetual value through the forums, through tutorials on maintaining (not just launching) your food blog, and so on. They don’t want customers to just watch videos for a few months then leave. The conventional way of calculating churn and LTV didn’t let us understand the customer-life-cycle as well as we wanted to.

The team at Strong Analytics took an alternative approach that dives deeper into the customer-lifecycle. Some key findings:

• The month-to-month probability of a cancellation for a typical member of Food Blogger Pro increases over their lifetime. Members are less likely to cancel early in their membership, and more likely to cancel later in their membership.
• This trend has become more pronounced since Food Blogger Pro first started. Early-adopters of Food Blogger Pro had a pretty steady lifecycle: members who had just started had the same churn-rate as members who had been around for over a year. However, members who have signed up in the past two years have had a more uneven pattern: these members tend to stick with their subscriptions more loyally in the early months of their membership, but then they cancel more freely later on. This means that there is opportunity for Food Blogger Pro to retain members longer by finding out what long-term members find most valuable and delivering it to them more effectively.
• A Model that captures these variations does a better job of capturing revenue from customers. We tracked the revenue and churn data starting last summer, and used both the traditional, quick-and-easy metric to calculate LTV, as well as the model-based approach from Strong. Each approach gave us a “guess” for how much revenue we should expect from the (then) current customers. A year later, we can compare the results — that is, we can compare this ‘guess’ to the actual revenue from these customers after a year:
• We can see that the model-based approach does a much better job of predicting the actual revenue. The conventional calculation applies the same churn-rate to all customers, regardless of their stage in their life-cycle, or when they signed up. In contrast, Strong’s model takes into consideration the life-cycle-stage of each customer in order to estimate how much more time (and value) we should expect from their membership on an individual basis.

Insights

The nice thing about our model-based approach is that we were able to look at how different attributes of FBP members — usage-patterns, demographic information — affected their lifecycle and their lifetime value. Any data we collected could be placed in the statistical model, and the influence of these factors could be estimated. Some key insights:

• Older users tended to stay with FBP longer. For every decade of age, LTV increased by $18. (This information was only available if members entered their age in the profile area.)
• Users have the option of filling in extra profile information, such as their interests, website, and occupation. Filling in this information corresponded to an increase of $47 dollars of LTV, compared to those who didn’t.
• Users who posted in the forums tended to stick around much longer. For every single post per month, there was increase in LTV of $59!

Taken together, these findings suggest that the social and community components of FBP are extremely important. These are actionable insights. They suggest that searching for ways to boost community engagement could be a fruitful strategy for improving customer-retention. And while the effect of age is smaller, it’s definitely something to think about as FBP explores different acquisition sources and marketing strategies.

The nice thing about these results is that they tell us not just what matters for customer-retention and value, but by how much these things matter. This can help guide not just FBP’s current marketing budget, but can also help define a strategy and budget for future growth and expansion. Bjork and the FBP team can estimate just how much more they should expect to get per customer if we get a new cohort of customers who virtually always fill in their profile information; and this helps define an upper bound for how much FBP should spend on pursuing this acquisition source.

Bjork’s Thoughts on Strong’s Results

Mind blowing data!

A few thoughts:

Chickens, Eggs, and Value

It’s hard to know for sure whether some of the user behavior results are the chicken or the egg. For instance, we don’t know for sure if people stick around longer because they post, or if people that post are individuals that naturally stick around longer.

In a way it doesn’t matter though, because we know that people that engage with the community are receiving more value. While the results from Strong are numbers based, in essence what they are doing is shining a light on the things that are most valuable and important.

And if we know that people that are engaging with the community are receiving more value then we should do everything we can to build on that by making the community elements on Food Blogger Pro a frictionless and enjoyable experience.

What do we do now?

So now that we have these insights what do we do?

I have two big action items that I plan on moving forward with:

1. The first action item for us is obvious. We need to continue to find ways to make the community forum a rich and enjoyable experience for members. This means continuing to update and improve the design and functionality of the forum.
2. The second action item we can do is encourage users to fill out their profile information when they become a member of Food Blogger Pro. We use Intercom to communicate with members, and we’re currently looking into ways that we can hook Intercom into the FBP database and send a custom message to members that don’t yet have their profile information filled out.

A big thank you to Jacob, Brock and Jacob at Strong Analytics for helping us to uncover this info and for sharing about it the post today.

Because of you

It’s because of you that this thing we call Pinch of Yum can exist as it does today. Thank you so much for making these recipes, leaving comments with your love and feedback, and sharing this food around the table with your families and friends.

Every month we donate a portion of the income earned on the blog a cause that we believe in. As some of you maybe know, Lindsay’s grandma Joan recently passed away. She was a loyal POY reader, an incredible musician, and an even more incredible person.

Lindsay’s family is starting a music scholarship in their hometown of Worthington, MN, which we’ll be contributing to on behalf of the Pinch of Yum community and readers. Thanks for being a part of this journey we’re on. We appreciate you and are so thankful to be able to do what we do.

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Miracle No-Knead Bread

The Hardest Times

“This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us.” – Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet

To be honest, I never know if I should write posts like this. You know, just because its a food blog and this post is not about food and sometimes those what-do-people-actually-want-to-read-about? kind of questions cloud my decision making. But the weird thing about life is that the hardest times come for everyone. Whether it’s you reading this blog, or me writing this blog, or the elderly man who sits on the same bench by the lake everyday, or a regular A-list Hollywood celebrity – we all experience loss and death and pain. And maybe, hopefully, there is comfort in knowing that this is a shared experience. We are not alone in this. I am not alone in this.

Last Monday night, in the middle of the night, I woke to my phone ringing. It was my uncle, giving me the middle-of-the-night news that is never good news – in this case, that my grandma had unexpectedly passed away. My grandma. No, No, No. Hadn’t it just been a few days ago that we were sitting with my grandma, talking about Pinterest and recipes and the latest Shauna Niequist book? No. This can’t be real.

It came too soon. My grandma was not that old. She was not sick. She lived a full life, yes. But unlike the extended and prepared goodbyes of long-term illness or hospice, it all happened so fast and we were zero percent ready to say goodbye. In just a blink, she was gone.

Following on the heels of my grandma’s passing, the Jacob Wetterling news broke. We cried and turned on our porch lights and looked down the street to see our neighbors doing the same.

And as if the world weren’t already heavy enough, soon after that, we learned that a vibrant 21-year-old man named Rene Dreiling, an alumni of the orphanage where we worked in the Philippines and a friend of my siblings, had lost his life while hiking solo in the Grand Tetons. And we cried again for this young life, this spark, gone too soon.

How. Why. No, no, no. Can’t even breathe – it just hurts everywhere right now.

This week, between the tears and the hugs and the moments of big, heavy sadness, the shared meals with extended relatives and the poring over pictures and hand-written recipes and memory books, the lighting of porch lights for Jacob and the prayers for Rene’s family, the feeling like I could never possibly get up off the couch and do any sort of work or normal life thing ever again, I’ve been holding tightly to this belief and this hope that God doesn’t cause our pain, but instead redeems all of it and will someday set the world right. SET THE WORLD RIGHT. As our pastor Greg Boyd says, God is always unequivocally on the side of life.

And if not for this tiny sliver of end-of-the-rope faith, I really do not think I would’ve been able to get out of bed this morning.

Sometimes I like to think of this blog like a mirror. In sharing about myself and my life and my current struggles, my hope is that I am holding up a mirror so that any of you out there who are walking a similar journey right now see yourself and your story and your emotions reflected here. I mean, I really don’t hope that you’re in pain. Please, no. I hope you’re in a joyful and abundant season of life. But because of the humanness of this experience, I do hope that you can look in and say – yes, I know that feeling. I’ve been there, too. And in that, a little spark of human-to-human connection is made, and the connections, I think, help to outweigh the overwhelming sadness. For me, and maybe also for you.

I had the honor of speaking at my grandma’s funeral on Sunday. Here’s what I wanted the world to know:

In Memory of My Grandma

When I think of my grandma, the first image that comes to mind is her happy, punctuated laugh. If you’ve known my Grandma for any length of time, you probably know the laugh I’m talking about – it starts with the slightest pause and a knowing smile and it lands with a loud “HA” as she throws her head back and leans into the joy of the moment.

When I think of my grandma, I also think of food. Admittedly, maybe this is because I have somewhat of an obsession with food and cooking and recipes, and I guess in that way maybe my grandma and I were very similar. There are so many memories I have with my grandma that hold a lot of significance to me, and it’s the specific foods we shared and the feelings I had in these moments around the table that really anchor each of my memories most vividly.

Breakfast Conversations

Grandma’s breakfasts were simple and delicious. Growing up, a visiting breakfast with grandma was never complete without a batch of her famous Overnight Caramel Rolls (although I think if she were here today, she’d want me to make sure you all knew how easy they were – something Grandma insisted about all her recipes). A smart grandchild would always wake up just a little earlier than their siblings and cousins to run into the kitchen and snag one of the extra-sticky middle pieces. We’d go back for extra finger swipes of the sticky caramel sauce from the bottom of the pan while grandma would refill mugs with 8’oclock hazelnut coffee or freshly squeezed orange juice and ask us intently about every detail of our lives. And I mean EVERY DETAIL. I’m not talking about knowing what sports we played or what we did for work. She knew the first and last names of our friends, which cities we’d been traveling to that month, the books we’d been reading and what we liked about them, where we liked to go for coffee, and the color and style of our prom dresses. My grandma was deeply curious and interested in the details of our day-to-day lives and she never stopped asking thoughtful questions.

She loved to hear about others’ lives and stories, but when it came to her own life, I’ve always known my grandma to be a very private person. So a few years ago, it would again be at the breakfast table over coffee, caramel rolls, and an Arizona sunrise, that my grandma would allow me to be the curious one as she shared some quiet reflections with me about losing their daughter, Susan. She got out Susan’s pink photo book and pointed out pictures of Susan in dress up clothes, or sitting at the piano, or blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, always with a big smile on her face. She told me sweet and funny stories about her little girl’s personality, interests, and quirks, and I wish so badly that I had every word of that conversation recorded. I will miss breakfasts with Grandma – not just for the caramel rolls, but for the meaningful conversations that came along with them.

Christmas Traditions

If Grandma’s food and tradition and love were to all be perfectly packed in to one day of the year, that day would be Christmas. My earliest Christmas memories are rich with the smell of grandma’s homemade lefse being spread with butter and sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon, and grandma running around the small Worthington kitchen in a red Christmas apron. I can hear the stories and the songs, the bells on the tree, and the laughter pouring out from that old folding table in the back also lovingly known as the “kids’ table”, where, away from the supervision of the adults, Jenny, Melissa, Kristin, and I would load obscene amounts of butter onto our third helping of grandma’s already buttery dinner rolls. I can feel the cold wind as we made our way out the door to church, and then a familiar glowing warmth as we’d see Grandma up in the front of the church, beckoning us down next to her, where she’d sit her little granddaughters on the bench and give us all the smile and nod, which, to our great wonder, meant we could press a few keys on the organ as people filed out of the church.

An Open Heart

Food was not only a way for grandma to serve others – it provided some real-life examples for us to experience what I would call her Open Heartedness. She loved to learn and think and try new ways of doing things in life, and that could often be seen in a tangible way through food.

When my siblings were adopted, during one of their first visits to Arizona, my grandma asked them what kind of foods they liked. After not getting much information out of them, she took matters into her own hands and found a recipe online for biko, a sticky rice dessert made with coconut milk and brown sugar that is popular in the Philippines. I’m pretty sure she had no idea what she was doing, but that wasn’t about to stop her from getting some Filipino food up in that Arizona house. She made that biko with Roselyn’s help that day, and in doing so, she expressed her open heart not only for my siblings but for the country where they were born.

Three years ago, my grandma and grandpa invited my husband Bjork and I to attend a play with them at the Guthrie called Clybourne Park. We knew nothing about this play, but we knew a good meal was part of the deal, and we weren’t about to pass that up. So after sharing grilled salmon and cobb salads and introducing Grandma to quinoa and edamame at the Good Earth, we took our seats in the back of the Guthrie and watched as the actors’ performance tackled hard issues surrounding racism and prejudice and gentrification in probably the most provocative and moving theater production that I’ve ever seen. Here’s the thing I keep thinking as I reflect on that day: I’m pretty sure most grandmas do not eat quinoa or edamame, or invite their grandchildren to the theater, but beyond that, I’m even more sure that they don’t usually take their grandchildren to plays like the edgy, tense, and thoughtful Clybourne Park. I am so grateful that my grandma was not afraid of the new, the challenging, the deep thinking side of life, whether that meant trying quinoa and edamame and biko for the first time, or gently encouraging her grandchildren to engage in conversations about race. This is my Grandma’s open heart.

Grandma was steadfast in her devotion to Jesus, and she embraced those who were different front her with an open heart and gentle spirit that was, at its core, Christ-like. I think I speak for all of the grandchildren when I say that she is someone who showed us how to live and love well.

Grandma, you are one of a kind. We loved you and we liked you. We’ll miss you forever.

Friends, here’s what I think you should do today: call your grandmas and your dads and your moms and your kids, and just check in and see how their day was. Oh, the glory of a normal day. ♡

“Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.” – Mary Jean Irion

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