🎁 The Birthday Knife 🔪

Community Voices X Pen Parentis - a delightful birthday story for you by Taylor Hobbs

Today we’re bringing you an essay from our Community Voices - authentic stories relating to families and food. Taylor Hobbs shares a story about her daughter’s request for a real knife as a birthday present when she’s still a toddler, and how that reflects the bigger values their family shares of connecting and nurturing each other through food. Follow her on IG @taylorhobbsauthor

Small Bites:

📚 Pick up Taylor’s novels on Bookshop.org: Sonder Village and Cloaked. If you like Taylor’s writing as much as we do, we know you’ll love these books

🔪 From The Birthday Knife story: Opinel Le Petit Chef Complete 3 Piece Kitchen Set (it comes in 3 colors!)

🔪 *SPECIAL* for our One Potato family: FREE Knife Skills for Kids video from our friends at Kids Cook Real Food!

👨‍🍳 Purchase the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse so your kids can learn how to cook and not simply follow a recipe - give them the life skills to not only survive, but thrive

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - paid subscribers have access to the full archive of Recipes and Specials Interviews and Community Voices for $5/month or $45/year.

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Pen Parentis, a national nonprofit that helps writers stay on creative track after having kids, is proud to sponsor Community Voices X Pen Parentis. Check out their annual Writing Fellowship for New Parents, free monthly Literary Salons, and Cycle of Support that includes membership, mentorship and accountability meetups. More info at writerparentannex.com

You don’t have to be a member of Pen Parentis to share your story - send us a DM or email hello @ onepotato.com if you’re interested in sharing 🥔

Want to share a Tiny Food Story under 100 words? If submitting a full-length Community Voices Special feels intimidating, we’re collecting Tiny Food Stories from the One Potato Community on a rolling basis. These are reader-submitted stories about the love of food and family, 100 words or less. Click the button below to submit.

The Birthday Knife

By Taylor Hobbs

Just before she turned three, I asked my daughter what she wanted for her birthday.

“A knife,” she demanded, with a cheeky gleam in her eye.

Fervently hoping this was not a response to her baby brother’s recent arrival, I kept my tone neutral and asked, “Oh really? A knife?”

“Yes, a real one. Not a Play-Doh one.”

“A metal one.” Am I going to have to sleep with one eye open?