Here we are: a rare, quiet afternoon with blocks strewn all over the living room floor, leftover coconut rice and cucumber salad for lunch, and the front yard strewn with fall leaves. I’m behind on business bookkeeping and was going to try to borrow a neighbor’s lawnmower to mow our…

In just a little over one month, I’ll be sending off the manuscript for the cookbook and breathing a huge sigh of relief. Now, at this very moment, I’m rifling through a desk full of notes, revisions, to-do lists, ingredient conversions, and word-count spreadsheets.

We arrived in New Jersey late one morning last month in a little red rental car. We’d just come from a meandering drive from my mom’s cabin in upstate New York, dotted with many stops in small towns to visit houses from Sam’s childhood.