Sabbath Peanut Loaf, Turning 60, and Squandered Dreams

As I sat on my front-porch hammock, coffee in hand and sun on my face, I started thinking about this week’s cooking project: Sabbath Peanut Loaf.

I had all the emotions surrounding this week. I tried to push the word Sabbath back down into my PTSD childhood-memory folder and objectively look at the ingredients.

It called for actual peanuts—not peanut butter—which, to me, was a good sign. Peanut butter can hide a multitude of sins. Actual peanuts, however, feel like a more honest commitment. They are either going to work in a loaf, or they are not. There is no creamy peanut-butter middle ground to rescue things.

What I don’t understand is why this recipe isn’t called Sabbath Carrot Loaf instead. There is one whole pound of boiled carrots and only one cup of ground peanuts in this loaf. One pound. That is a lot of carrots to be carrying around under the name Peanut Loaf. It feels a little like calling a pot roast “Parsley Dinner” because you put some parsley on top.

This recipe, from 1910, is credited to Eva Kerr. Eva Kerr was an RN, married to George T. Kerr, and the two were missionaries on the Gold Coast of West Africa from 1893 to 1897. When Eva was making this Sabbath Peanut Loaf, she was using a wood stove, so the directions simply say, “Bake in greased pan with water bath. Keep oven from getting too hot.”

That’s it.

No temperature. No baking time. No “insert a toothpick and see if it comes out clean.” Just keep the oven from getting too hot, which is the kind of advice that is both extremely vague and somehow deeply stressful. Also, there are no eggs in this loaf. I’m not entirely sure if that was because eggs were considered unsafe, too expensive, unavailable, or simply not part of the recipe. But I can tell you that when you are standing in your kitchen in 2026, holding a bowl of boiled carrots, ground peanuts, and whatever else a 1910 cookbook believes belongs in a loaf, eggs start to seem like they may have been worth considering.

As I mixed everything together, I started thinking about this blog and why I stopped writing regularly. Part of it was my MCI. The other part was that I felt like only a handful of people read what I wrote. Years ago, I wrote about another blogger who simply stopped writing because no one read what she wrote. She posted a picture of a little baby with the words “The End” on its diaper. My post didn’t really have anything to do with not writing on the blog anymore and more and more about empty nests. But every time I think about stopping, I see that little baby in my mind. You can read that post here. At the time, I understood her. I probably even felt a little sad for her. Now I understand her in a different way.

My Google Analytics tells me that only a small number of people read what I write. Even though, on some level, I convinced myself that numbers did not matter, I knew the truth. I wanted the numbers to matter in my favor. I wanted someone to discover my blog, share it with everyone they knew, and declare that I was the funniest person on the internet who had somehow managed to turn old recipes and minor emotional spirals into a career. My dream of going viral—or even having my silly little book sell millions of copies—was just that: a pipe dream.

I have a day job as a contract administrator for a booking agency. It certainly is not my dream job. As a little girl, I did not dream of sending out deal memos and contracts or fighting with a difficult building in Mobile, Alabama. No one asks a six-year-old what she wants to be when she grows up and expects her to say, “I would like to spend my days explaining contract language to people who do not want to read it.”

My dream was to open a bakery and coffee shop.

That was my only dream.

I never dreamed of the perfect wedding, climbing Mount Everest, becoming a CEO, or owning a vacation home somewhere with ocean views. I wasn’t a goal-oriented dreamer. I was more your average daydreamer.

I am always having conversations in my head about nothing, really, but the conversations are constant. I worry about my children, my husband, and now my niece, who seems to think camping alone is perfectly safe. I think about friends, past and present, and wonder how they are and what is going on in their lives. I think about friends I no longer talk to because we lost touch, and now it feels weird to reach out and explain why—because there is no real answer to that question.

So once again, I am struggling with my purpose. Do we even get to have a purpose at almost 60?

In February, I will “celebrate” a birthday for an age I once considered reserved for really old people. But now that I am nearing that age, I do not feel like a really old person. I feel like a semi-achy, oldish person who needs reading glasses and occasionally makes a noise when standing up. Maybe I squandered my purpose and dream days. Maybe now my life is about making questionable recipes once a week, worrying about whether I am a good friend, and making sure I am a present and good wife and mother.

Maybe that is enough. Maybe it has to be.

Maybe this is just a season, and it will pass like it usually does. But for now, I feel a little like I am floundering, and this cookbook project is just a distraction.

Not even a delicious distraction.

In the end, the Sabbath Peanut Loaf mirrored my mood: blah, a little dry, and lacking anything exciting.

Still, I ate it. Which, come to think of it, may be as close to purpose as I can get this week.