I’ll say Grace

I’ll Say Grace

(a love letter to food)

Never an expert decision-maker, I loved making one choice: my birthday dinner. I don't remember exactly when the tradition started, but on our birthdays, we got to choose the meal. My siblings did the same. Most years, I requested pasta, and one year, I paired it with my then-favorite side- raw carrots. So, much to my grandmother's dismay, everyone was forced to eat raw carrots because they were my favorite food and, as I explained to her and my mom, it was my day—a middle-child Aries, slightly tyrannical. I loved making the decision and, I guess, subconsciously loved making everyone else experience my favorite things, too. My early days of Kennymucks, I suppose. I liked what I liked, and I told everyone.

As I mentioned on my About page when I first started this back in 2023, food was my family’s favorite way to bond. Whether it was getting creative with family dinner—baked potato night, gourmet hot dogs during COVID—or driving hours to try the restaurant my dad had recently designed, food really was the epitome of our family time. No phones, each of us describing the best and worst parts of our days, sometimes involving less-fun dinner drama, like my sister being fed green vegetables, smoothie-style, after refusing to eat them. I, in turn, was forced to sit at the table until my cold, overly salted eggs were eaten because unless I started getting protein, I was no longer permitted to be a vegetarian. There were ups and downs, arguments, tears of laughter, and I loved it.

As an athlete growing up, food was nourishment. Food was energy. And while my mom is what I’ll christen a tomato mom, and I didn’t enjoy a real Pop-Tart until college, I’m grateful for my love of healthy food and my distaste for soda and artificial sweeteners. I’m better for it. But by college, I had no more sports, and no more parents making sure we had a full cup of milk and vegetables before dessert. Instead, I found myself inhaling three bowls of pasta every night in the dining hall. I’m going to blame this on my first week of college, when I mistook pollock nuggets for chicken and was scarred for life. My meals consisted mostly of carbs, which I deemed safe in this new communal dining experience. It was no longer my dad’s smoked ribs or my mom’s Crock-Pot meals, but full baguettes, waffle fries, and alcohol. The freshman fifteen is a rite of passage, and I checked the box.

Somewhere along the way, food got complicated. I blame Chloe Ting, COVID, toxic relationships—anything but myself, I guess—but what started as the seemingly universal desire to lose the freshman fifteen turned into a much longer, much less fun relationship with food. That’s an essay for another day.

Somehow, years later, I’ve found my way back to enjoying bowls of pasta- this time with the right protein and fiber. And, in part, I have Kennymucks to thank for that.

Post-college, during my reinvention period—the settling down, the big-girl job and the seemingly official end of “finstas”—I wanted somewhere to showcase something. Lately, my camera roll had been mostly food. When I wasn’t at work, I was exploring local towns, cities, and, mostly, restaurants. I was rediscovering my love for all things food, establishing a balance between an unforced fitness routine and a new love for sweet treats. Partly because of my relationship at the time, nothing’s quite like watching a man and his metabolism to make you both love and hate things like Sunday sauce, daily popcorn, and chicken-tender nights. I started cooking more, almost as much as I was dining out, and posting it all on an Instagram account.

Now, this is not the success story of a now-viral food channel. The 100-follower count has remained impressively consistent over the last three years, but the content has shifted tremendously. I’m not displaying my cooking much anymore, although ironically, I’m doing more of that than eating out these days. Instead, when I do go out, I write about it and post it. Kennymucks now has a website blog, and it's become my true passion project that somehow came out of all of this. I had found the fun in food again, and apparently, I really liked telling other people about it—even when they couldn’t physically be at the table.

I turned it into a side hustle, writing for the food publication CTbites, where I could share that love with a bigger audience of foodies. And despite long work hours, somehow my favorite day-off activity became more work: writing. When I didn’t have restaurant content due and Kennymucks was taking a hiatus (whether because of my limited work-life balance or simply my bank account), I ended up writing about everything else.

Growing up, I could never keep a diary. I couldn’t help but write as if someone else were reading it, which left me embarrassed and tearing up over every journal that ever existed. Enter Substack, where there is quite literally an audience—but an audience of strangers—which somehow makes it easier this time around. Now, I’m letting out a lifetime’s worth of diary entries. 

My siblings used to tease me about having a college degree in English; they loved making fun of me for spending money to “learn a language we already speak.” But I loved it. Maybe not learning the phonetic alphabet—but getting lost in a book, writing, the way words can reach people, connect us, make me want to be somewhere or someone. Short stories like Cathedral, novels like The Nightingale, my friends’ Substack posts, my grandmother’s essay-style text messages—I want it all. I want to read it, and I want to write it.

The restaurant content isn’t going anywhere, and neither is my love for food, but maybe Kennymucks was never meant to stay a food blog exclusively. Maybe it was simply my way back into writing. Food gave me something to talk about, but then I realized I had more to say.

Everything and nothing has changed since the pasta-and-raw-carrot days—I still like what I like, and I still want to tell everyone about it. Follow along here, or over on Substack- I’m just happy to have you at the table.