Your first book "Farm Lunch" wove together the concept of food and ecology as well as taste and style. Can you touch on what we can expect from "___" is a breakfast food and what inspired you to create it? 

I consider the new book an extension of Farm Lunch. (or a prelude? Since breakfast typically precedes lunch...) and both projects share an origin point: my experience farming and the personal rituals and little beliefs I developed around cooking and eating while growing my own food. Farm Lunch is heavier on the overall practical guidance (recipe formulas and a framework for how to approach cooking) but it contains very few "actual" recipes. The new book is heavier on the concept/question of what makes a meal a personal ritual and does include several fully developed recipes. 

I wrote the breakfast book when I was in the midst of a particularly intense farming season and a major life shift, so I was thinking a lot about the meaning of rituals and habits in everyday life at the time: ones to hang onto, ones to let fossilize into memories. I was also waking up before sunrise every morning (hello farming), which makes you deeply appreciate that time of day. Early AM is such an otherwordly, crystalline, spooky half night/half day fever dream kind of time. Plus, I really do love breakfast in all of its iterations. 

Your recipes and writing style have a softness and ease to them - words like "glug of olive oil" are used instead of precise measurements. Can you speak to your intention behind keeping things loose and more by feel or intuition in the kitchen? 

I've been thinking a lot about how poems and recipes have so much in common. Both generally rely on some kind of internal, technical structure, but they are as much about tone, mood, inspiration, and interpretation as they are about technique. The best poems haunt you and follow you and sink in, and your understanding of them -- sometimes even your memory of them -- evolves over time. The best recipes should function similarly, I think. I'm more interested in recipes that just make you want to get up and cook. If I write a recipe for a pasta dish and all you remember is that its a pasta dish with a glug of olive oil, but you make and love some version of that regularly, I'm happy. Also, glug is a precise measurement in my world :)