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Father's Day weekend is fast approaching, which means we're halfway through June, and I'm worried that I've become a jaded queer person when I realize I haven't yet wished readers of this recipe column a Happy Pride Day.
In truth, I don't pin my pride on a specific month, parade, party, or event. I'm grateful to be a queer person who gets to live with pride every day, regardless of the date. I try my best not to take this everyday, public pride for granted.
I'd love to talk a bit more about my pride and joy, but if you're just wondering what to make for dinner, I have the recipe for you: a bowl of seasoned chicken, lots of fresh, colorful veggies, and a few other flavor enhancers. It's a simple, incredibly delicious recipe that you can easily adapt with ingredients you have at home.
Get the recipe: Chicken, Feta, Olive and Tomato Rice Bowl
Returning to Pride: “In some ways, queerness saved my life,” writer and professor Ocean Vuong said in conversation with writer Brian Washington in 2020. He continued: “We often see queerness as deprivation, but looking back at my own life, I see that queerness forced me to innovate differently, to pave a different path. It made me curious, it made me question.” [if] “It's not enough for me, because there's nothing here for me.”
My spouse, Grace, had this quote framed and hanging in the home office we share. I look at it almost every day. We built a home that celebrates queerness and embraces all of the alternative paths Vuong talks about. Our home is queer not just because of the art on the walls, but because of who we are as people who live there. Ours is a queer family, but that's not just about our marriage, our gender identity and expression, or our sexuality. It's about how we live our lives every day. Grace and I both approach things through a queer lens.
Grace is a questioner, a researcher, someone who doesn't hesitate to pause rather than simply go along with the status quo. Of the many gifts that being married to Grace has given me, her regular reminder that pausing is a choice is one of the most important. Grace reminds me again and again that life is richer when we don't simply choose the first option available to us.
I like queering almost everything, looking at things from a different perspective and questioning whether the standard is the only possibility. This could be something as simple as writing a recipe and asking yourself if there is another way to make something, or it could be taking a big life decision like a career and being willing to build stability for yourself if it means you can carve your own path. For me, this approach is not about replacing one thing with another; it's about scalability. When it comes to choosing this or that, I'm always interested in the “and.” Whatever it is, that's why you're a fun person to order food with at a restaurant.
That means I'm not a parade person. I'm more of an “everyday” queer than a “special occasion” queer. (“Where do all the quiet gays go?” Hannah Gadsby asked.)
That goes for my cooking, too. I'm much more interested in the foods that sustain everyday life than the fancy meals. I'm into dishes like this rice bowl, with lots of chicken flavored with garlic powder and oregano, tart with sumac and vinegar, and just a touch sweet with a spoonful of honey. You can put the chicken in a pita sandwich, or, as I suggest, serve it over rice with lots of no-cook toppings like feta cheese, cucumber, olives, and marinated tomatoes. It's a quintessential rainbow flag dinner that can be eaten anytime, because in our kitchen, pride is every day.
Get the recipe: Chicken, Feta, Olive and Tomato Rice Bowl
