About my writing
Hi. My name is Joan Wilder….
As a freelance journalist, I’ve written hundreds of pieces that run the gamut from the hardest of hard news stories—fires, kidnappings, politics—to the most narrative of non-fiction features: travel stories, essays, and profiles. My work has appeared in many magazines and daily newspapers, including the Boston Globe (I wrote for the paper weekly for more than a decade), and the Patriot Ledger, where I was a regular contributor with a beat for many years. I wrote The Dish, a food column for Boston.com and reviewed hundreds of Boston-area restaurants for regional sections of the Boston Globe for many years (until the pandemic put an end to that). I’ve ghostwritten books and authored many other types of pieces: grants, press releases, book proposals, corporate newsletters, website copy, reference book histories, and narrative biographies. I’m the author of the tiny book Help for Women with ADHD: My Simple Strategies for Conquering Chaos.
About food and me
A while ago, I found the best balsamic vinegar at Trader Joe’s for cheap. Because it costs three times less than my previous favorite balsamic, I bought eight bottles.
Some people cherish their Manolo Blahniks, cars, and diamonds, but I treasure food. Oh, I love beautiful things, but the fact that they can’t be eaten puts them lower on my list of life’s riches.
A well-stocked kitchen, on the other hand, makes me feel like a wealthy woman.
In the overall human experience, I see eating as the cherry on top because it’s something we have to do and yet there’s so much pleasure involved. (Think if eating took effort, like exercising!) And – big and – you get to do it every day. (If you’re blessed like we are.)
I love all kinds and styles of food.
I learned to cook watching my Italian mother in the kitchen – always a vegetable with coarsely chopped garlic and olive oil. Always a salad, too, often with frisee, escarole, and dandelions picked from the yard in spring. I learned to know good produce from my father whose first business was a “fine fruits and vegetables” store.
I’ve always been able to pull a meal together out of whatever’s on hand – a form of the “cuisine of necessity” a term that food writer Ike Lorenzo coined that means a lot to me.
But despite all this–and my history of having cooked quasi-professionally a couple times– I can never remember what to make for dinner! So, this will be a good place to help me with that inexplicable forgetfulness.
When I eat something – often a blueberry or my morning coffee – I can’t help but feel into the road each food took to get to me. Thank you, cow, for the milk. Thank you, people on a distant hillside, for the coffee. Thank you, farmers, for the precious berries. Each one.