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Welcome to our new Bite-Sized Guides, your guide to destinations near and far for cooks who love food and love to explore the world. Your companion for our first guide, to the Catskills in upstate New York, is Sarah Copeland, cookbook author and mama to two little ones. Here’s why she and her family love their life in the Catskills, and why we think you may enjoy a visit too.

I first came to the Catskills in 2001. I’ll never forget the effect of the landscape as we sped up the Hudson on the Metro North: Everyone seemed to shed their city agenda for a warmer, more relaxed stance.

I was a brand-new New Yorker and, as it was Thanksgiving and I was far from home, I had been invited to spend the holidays with a friend, near his family home in Rhinebeck. We stayed in a big open barn, in a bed laid thick with pillows and quilts. Where I come from, barns were for hay and animals; here, they housed art, treasures, holiday feasts — and me.

That weekend, we gathered and cleaned dozens of wild mushrooms, sweated them with butter and shallots, and tossed them with simmering stock and breadcrumbs (the kind that didn’t come from a bag). We sat by the fire. We played games. We told stories.

There were stories connected to most of the foods we ate, the bowls we ate out of, the land we hiked, the people we met. And there was space, the feeling of room above, beside, and beyond in all directions. Here, there was room to grow, the possibility of new.

For years after, I longed for this feeling, this simple, but magical life. And I wondered, Why weren’t more people living it?

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