Who’d have guessed that the place to find a killer spritz cookie recipe would be inside a cemetery?

But that’s just where Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s cookie recipe lives, etched in stone at her final resting place at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

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When archivist Rosie Grant, who was was completing an internship at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., learned about this recipe on a gravestone back in 2021, she decided to bake the cookies and share a video of the experience on her TikTok account, @ghostlyarchives. Comments poured in, and she learned that there were gravestone recipes scattered across the U.S.

So began her quest to cook the recipes and learn the stories of the people behind them — a project that eventually yielded an entire 40-recipe cookbook. Grant’s book is more than a cookbook copying over these recipes etched in stone, however. It also explores the intersections of food, legacy and memory, while providing background information and missing details to enable anyone to cook these recipes at home.

We recently caught up with her to learn more about her brand-new cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes” (Harvest, $26), which came out Oct. 7.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

“To Die For” cookbook author Rosie Grant is the creator behind @GhostlyArchive, a TikTok account she started while an intern at Congressional Cemetery. After finding and cooking a recipe she found on a tombstone, she kept discovering more recipes and made a cookbook out of the collection. (Courtesy of Jill Petracek)

Q: What inspires someone to put a recipe on their gravestone?

A: A lot of modern gravestones are very personalized. Maybe 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago, there would be one carver who would make a bunch of templated stones, and then just add someone’s name and dates. It was pretty standardized. Nowadays, it’s a blank slate that you get to fill in based on what was important to you. That might be a recipe, a music quote or even a call number to someone’s book in the library or a reference to their dogs. In a lot of cases shared in the book, these people were home cooks. They hosted the holidays. They loved food. There are a lot of central community figures, the ones who would do the volunteer event, host Christmas or Thanksgiving or make people’s special birthday treats. They used food to show love and celebrate other people.

Q: Were most of the recipe gravestones you found modern?

A: Pretty modern. The oldest one is from a gentleman, Joe Sheridan. He is attributed with inventing Irish coffee. The story goes that Joe was in Ireland, and this plane came in with a bunch of travelers. He was basically the airport chef, and it was raining. All the passengers were cold, and they asked Joe to make something to warm them up. So he made them his hangover cure, Irish coffee.

Joseph Sheridan, known for popularizing Irish coffee in the U.S., was a chef at the Foynes Airport in Ireland in the 1940s who introduced a plane full of stranded passengers to his hangover cure. Word spread to travel writer Stanton Delaplane, then the team at Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco, who worked with Sheridan to perfect the recipe. (Courtesy of Jill Petracek)

There was a travel and food writer named Stan Delaplane, who, when he went back to New York, wrote about the Irish coffee, and it became this whole thing. In San Francisco, the Buena Vista Cafe heard about it. They flew Joe to San Francisco, and he basically re-created it with the restaurant owner and with Stan. And now the Buena Vista is considered the birthplace of Irish coffee. He’s buried in Oakland, and his gravestone says he gave the gift to his world, his Irish coffee recipe. And so he doesn’t even have the recipe written on it, but I got permission from the Buena Vista Cafe to include it.

“To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” by Rosie Grant (Harvest, $26) showcases 40 recipes carved into gravestones, and tells the stories of the people behind them. (Courtesy of Harvest)

Q: You went and visited all of these gravestones and interviewed family members. What were some of the things you learned while doing this research?

A: The first recipe I just thought was a one-off. But it was during the pandemic, so I thought I would try to make it, because, why not?  So I cooked it, and I posted about the process, and things kind of exploded overnight. People were sending all these messages, asking lots of questions, thinking through what they would put on their gravestone if they had a recipe, or even talking about people in their lives who had passed away and the recipes that they cooked to remember them.

After I learned there were others, I made a big Google doc and map, and I started pinning where these folks are buried. I used Find a Grave, which is like the Wikipedia of gravestones and obituaries. The obituary listed out their next of kin, so from there, I would reach out to friends and family. I would send them a note. Sometimes I would just contact as many people as I could find. I would get email addresses that bounced, or in one case, I messaged this one woman on Facebook every six months for two years and later learned she’d been dead for four years.

The families have all been so lovely. It’s a fine tightrope to talk to people who have lost someone, and I wanted to be thoughtful about what they wanted. Some people just wanted to communicate via email or Instagram messenger because it hurt to talk about.

I also had to test the recipes. Usually, the first time, I would make it extremely wrong, reading it directly from the gravestone. And then I would do more research. I would meet with the families, and in some cases, cook with them. I would learn the tools that they would use.

Q: Some of the recipes were incomplete?

A: Yeah. I mean, an epitaph only has so much space. Most of these recipes are pretty simple. It’s not a lasagna or something that would take four gravestones to write out. But in some cases, the families got creative. So with Naomi, they didn’t put the instructions. They just put the ingredients to her spritz cookies. Another family had a handwritten recipe card lasered onto a woman’s gravestone, and they knew all the background details of how she would make her chicken soup. I, as a stranger, had to work with them to get the full recipe, and then that would be what ended up in the cookbook.

Q: Is it usually the person who dies or the surviving relatives who decide on the gravestone recipe?

A: It’s about half and half. In some cases, it was the relatives of the person who had passed away, trying to memorialize someone who was, in a lot of cases, larger than life and very giving. Sharing a recipe does more than just communicate, ‘She loved baking,’ or ‘She was a great host.’ It shares the tools for someone else to now partake in this tradition. It’s such an embodiment of who each of these people was.

Three of the recipes in the book are actually from women who are still alive. One is a woman named Peggy who lives in Arkansas. Her husband had passed away, and they were putting up their gravestone together, since they share a marker. On his side was his hobbies and things that he liked. Asking herself, ‘What do I want to be remembered for?’ for her side of the marker, she was like, ‘I’m really darn proud of my cookie recipe.’

When I met with her and cooked with her, all of these people showed up. I thought it would be for the novelty of some random TikToker making cookies. But they told me, ‘No, we heard Peggy’s making cookies. We drop everything when we know she’s making these cookies.’

In Ferndale, California, Christine and her husband are doing pre-planning and have already purchased and engraved their gravestones in a beautiful cemetery. His says, ‘I should have listened to my wife.’ And hers says, ‘Yeah, look where we ended up.’ Her carrot cake recipe is on the back.

Q: How has this project changed how you reflect on death?

A: My parents are both ghost tour guides. We talk about cemeteries all the time, and we love a good ghost story. But when it came to the actual death side of things, I hadn’t been aware of the death-positive movement, the idea that it’s healthy to talk about death, loss and our own mortality.

Where do you look for the people you’ve lost? There’s still so much of them with you, and it shows up in a lot of really joyful ways. For me, it’s been a very positive side to something that I personally found really scary.

Q: Anything else?

A: If anyone knows of any interesting gravestones, I’m always all ears.

Gravestone recipes from ‘To Die For’

Rosie Grant’s Clam Linguine
Joe Sheridan’s Irish Coffee
Annabell’s Snickerdoodles

Details: Follow Rosie Grant on TikTok at @ghostlyarchive and Instagram at @ghostly.archive. Her cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes” (Harvest, $26) is out Oct. 7.

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

The federal government shutdown is forcing a reckoning for two remote health care programs because they automatically expired Oct. 1.

The telehealth and in-home hospital care programs were both temporary — but increasingly popular — options for Medicare recipients. They allowed doctors and hospitals to bill Medicare for telehealth appointments and in-home visits from nurses to provide care that is generally only available in hospitals.

The shutdown has prevented Congress from extending them.

More than 4 million Medicare beneficiaries used telehealth services in the first half of the year, according to Brown University’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research.

As of last fall, 366 hospitals had participated in the hospital-at-home program, serving 31,000 patients, according to a federal report. The program, officially called Acute Hospital Care at Home, allows patients who would otherwise be hospitalized to get inpatient care at home with a combination of nurse visits, monitoring equipment and remote doctor visits.

The programs have their roots in the pandemic, when doctors and hospitals wanted to keep patients safe from the risks of travel and hospital stays. Both are for Medicare recipients, generally people over 65 or who are disabled. But since many private insurers follow federal guidelines, some physicians have stopped booking telemedicine appointments for non-Medicare patients, rather than risk a change in insurance coverage.

Alexis Wynn, who is in her mid-30s and covered by private insurance through her employer, tried to switch an in-person doctor appointment in Pennsylvania to a video visit last week. The office told her that “all telemedicine is uncovered by insurance as of Oct. 1” — so she had to cancel the routine appointment.

“It was just a follow-up appointment to make sure the dosing of my medication was still accurate, nothing that was pertinent to being face-to-face,” Wynn said. Her health insurance company later told her it still covered telehealth visits.

There have been other reports of insurers turning down non-Medicare telehealth appointments, said Alexis Apple, director of federal affairs for the American Telemedicine Association, a trade group.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” Apple said. “I’m not really sure what’s happening, but it’s unfortunate and very scary. There’s so much uncertainty out there now, and we see insurance payers start to pull back.”

Both telehealth and home hospital services can be a lifeline for older people, especially in rural areas, where residents may struggle to travel long distances for health care in person.

“In rural America, it’s often telemedicine or no medicine at all,” said Dr. David Newman, chief medical officer of virtual care at Sanford Health in South Dakota, in a September statement supporting congressional action to make Medicare telehealth permanent. Bipartisan bills that would have allowed telehealth to continue stalled in committee earlier this year in the Senate and House.

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There’s an exception for telehealth rural residents — but only if they travel to a brick-and-mortar health care facility to get the remote health care service.

“The patients have to go to a clinic to receive that telehealth visit from a provider in a different location,” Apple said. “It kind of defeats the purpose.”

According to the Brown University report, California had the highest rate of Medicare telehealth usage in the first six months of this year, with 26% of beneficiaries using at least one telehealth appointment, followed by 23% in Massachusetts and 21% in Hawaii.

There’s no reason for non-Medicare insurers to stop covering any telehealth visits during the shutdown, and even most Medicare Advantage programs will continue to cover telehealth, according to Tina Stow, a spokesperson for AHIP, a health industry trade association.

Nevertheless, at least some health care centers are refusing to take new telehealth appointments or are converting existing ones to office visits.

“This is causing a lot of confusion. We are still working with our members who are insurers and providers to get a gauge on what folks are doing — because at this point reports we’ve seen seem to suggest it is company by company, provider by provider,” said Sean Brown, a spokesperson for the Health Leadership Council, representing CEOs of health care firms and insurers.

The hospital-at-home program serves a smaller number of patients but its pause has caused more disruption: The federal government required patients to be discharged from the program or transferred to a brick-and-mortar hospital by Oct.1.

The Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic had 30 patients in the program in Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin — all of whom either had to be released from the program or sent to brick-and-mortar hospitals. One of Mayo’s hospitals in Florida was already over capacity and had no room for transfers, according to reporting by Becker’s Hospital Review.

In Massachusetts, which requires commercial insurers to follow Medicare guidelines, all insured patients had to leave the program. Mass General Brigham, which operates many hospitals in the state, has rejiggered its plans to create more home care without relying on the hospital-at-home program, according to the Becker’s report.

Congress was unable to avert a shutdown by late September, and some individual providers and patients were caught unawares.

Nurses on social media discussed losing home-care jobs or being reassigned overnight when the hospital-at-home program closed Oct. 1. They worried about patients being taken away from children at home, or placed in hallway beds at overcrowded emergency rooms because of the abrupt change.

“Management scheduled a random call this morning with a super vague title. Then drop the bomb on us,” wrote one poster in Texas. “So no job. Perfect!”

In a direct message, the poster, who didn’t want their name used for fear of getting in trouble at their hospital, told Stateline, “This obviously wasn’t ideal for the patients. One of them had four children and now could no longer be home with them. Some didn’t even get to have a bed in the hospital because there were none available and had to stay in the ER in a hallway bed.”

Parkland Health System in Dallas started tapering off its hospital-at-home program in September because of the impending shutdown, and the last patients were discharged from the program by Sept. 30 without returning to the hospital, spokesperson Wendi Hawthorne said.

“We are hopeful that Congress will renew this innovative model of care in the future,” Hawthorne said.

Likewise, OSF Healthcare in Peoria, Illinois, had started to wind down its hospital-at-home program “to avoid needing to return multiple patients to a very crowded facility,” said Jennifer Junis, president of OSF OnCall, which handles home hospital care.

There were only three patients in the program Sept. 30, all of whom were ready to be discharged without returning to the hospital, Junis said. Since the program’s start in 2020, it has helped 980 patients with home care through OSF’s Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria.

“It is unfortunate that we will not be able to benefit by treating qualifying patients at home, where they are most comfortable and recover faster,” Junis said. “Our digital hospital program has allowed us to free up beds for our sickest patients who need them most.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By JAMEY KEATEN and SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press

GENEVA (AP) — Heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, soaring to a level not seen in human civilization and “turbo-charging” the Earth’s climate and causing more extreme weather, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.

The World Meteorological Organization said in its latest bulletin on greenhouse gases, an annual study released ahead of the U.N.’s annual climate conference, that C02 growth rates have now tripled since the 1960s, and reached levels not seen in at least 800,000 years.

Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, alongside more wildfires, have helped fan a “vicious climate cycle,” and people and industries continue to spew heat-trapping gases while the planet’s oceans and forests lose their ability to absorb them, the WMO report said.

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The Geneva-based agency said the increase in the global average concentration of carbon dioxide from 2023 to 2024 amounted to the highest annual level of any one-year span since measurements began in 1957. Growth rates of CO2 have accelerated from an annual average increase of 2.4 parts per million per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020, to 3.5 ppm from 2023 to 2024, WMO said.

“The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett in a statement. “Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare called the new data “alarming and worrying.”

Even though fossil fuel emissions were “relatively flat” last year, he said, the report appeared to show an accelerating increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, “signaling a positive feedback from burning forests and warming oceans driven by record global temperatures.”

“Let there be no mistake, this is a very clear warning sign that the world is heading into an extremely dangerous state — and this is driven by the continued expansion of fossil fuel development, globally,” Hare said. “I’m beginning to feel that this points to a slow-moving climate catastrophe unfolding in front of us.”

WMO called on policymakers to take more steps to help reduce emissions.

While several governments have been pushing for further use of hydrocarbons like coal, oil and gas for energy production, some businesses and local governments have been mobilizing to fight global warming.

Still, Hare said very few countries have made new climate commitments to come “anywhere near dealing with the gravity of the climate crisis.”

The increase in 2024 is setting the planet on track for more long-term temperature increase, WMO said. It noted that concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide — other greenhouse gases caused by human activity — have also hit record levels.

The report was bound to raise new doubts on the world’s ability to hit the goal laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord of keeping the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

United Nations climate chief, Simon Stiell, has said the Earth is now on track for 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit).

Meanwhile, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s global data for this year through June reveals that carbon dioxide rates are still rising at one of the highest rates on record, yet not quite as high as from 2023 to 2024.

The agency’s monthly data for the long-running Hawaii monitoring location for 2025 through August also showed CO2 rates are still increasing, but not as much as between 2023-2024.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

San Mateo County social worker Aldo Quintero and his wife, Liza, make respectable salaries in their government jobs, but in a region with a median home price of $1.4 million and a county where the figure reaches $2.2 million, a home for the couple and their two kids in the community they serve was out of reach.

For years, Quintero commuted an hour-plus across the Bay from Hayward, and though they later found a small rental in the San Mateo County town of Belmont, their pay wasn’t enough for them to afford a home of their own.

“Even as I got raises and better-paying jobs, it’s like I couldn’t catch up to where prices were,” said Quintero, who earns $144,000 not including benefits.

Each year, the Quinteros entered a program sponsored by the county for its employees — a lottery awarding 20 loans of up to $100,000 toward the purchase of a home in San Mateo County. In 2023, they won. Along with the loan, they scraped together their savings plus money from their family to put in an offer of $780,000 for a two-bedroom, one-bath condo in Foster City, just a 10-minute drive from work and their children’s school.

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“We got used to these hour-long commutes, and now that we don’t have to do that, it’s such a privilege,” Quintero said. “We have so much more time to spend on other things.”

Employee housing stipends have long been a feature of high-paying jobs in the corporate world, but the middle-income workers educating children, repairing roads and working in hospitals often must look far from where they work to find a home they can afford to rent, let alone buy.

To give their employees a fighting chance in the housing market, some local governments, universities and hospitals are offering down payment assistance as an employee benefit. These loans can be an opportunity for social workers, city planners and teachers to put down roots in the communities where they work — rather than having to choose between punishing commutes from the exurbs or leaving the Bay Area altogether, to afford a home.

“Down payment assistance allows middle-income families to be part of the wealth building of the community,” said Julie Mahowald, CFO of Housing Trust Silicon Valley, a nonprofit that provides down payment assistance to low-income households in Alameda and Contra Costa County. “People aren’t as transient, they’re not driving as far, and they’re not coming to work exhausted.”

Aldo Quintero with his wife Liza and children Isabella, 10 and Mateo, 13, at their home in San Mateo, Calif., on Monday, April 7, 2025. Quintero is an employee of San Mateo County who was able to use the county’s help to afford a down payment on a home. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

For those without access to a loan from the “Bank of Mom and Dad,” stocks to cash out or lottery winnings, it can take years to save up for a down payment in the Bay Area. For a traditional 20% down payment on a median-priced home of $1.4 million, a family would need $280,000, plus more for closing costs. Even with that, payments on a fixed-rate 30-year mortgage at the current average of 6.34% would still cost $6,800 a month, plus property taxes. By increasing the down payment amount, a mortgage can become somewhat more manageable.

For employers, helping their workers find stable housing is also a matter of retention. In San Mateo County, commute time is among the top reasons workers cite for leaving.

“It’s exponentially harder to find employees to move to this area because of the high cost of living — or even to commute, because of traffic,” said Mike Callagy, San Mateo County Executive. “As a large employer in the county, we have to be creative in finding ways to incentivize people to move here.”

Most loans come with low interest rates that need not be paid back until the property is sold or the employee leaves. Some down-payment programs are catered to certain types of employees. Educators in San Francisco can apply to get a loan of up to $500,000. Kaiser Permanente offers up to $250,000 to newly-hired physicians. And union-affiliated employees in Sonoma County can apply for up to $100,000 toward a home in the county.

Many Bay Area universities have long offered a housing stipend to incoming faculty, which functions as a sign-on bonus, rather than a loan. At UC Berkeley, new professors typically receive around $88,900, but can go up to $150,000 in special circumstances. At Stanford, professors are eligible for up to $200,000 in housing assistance, paid out over 12 years. The benefit does not need to be repaid, but it is taxed.

Some economic research has questioned whether homebuyer assistance, by just infusing more money into a housing market with tight supply, actually counterproductively increases housing prices. But Ben Harris, vice president of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, said that too few people are likely taking advantage of down payment assistance to significantly increase prices locally, and their impact is also diluted when the supply of homes increases.

“It’s not an either-or situation,” Harris said. “You can expand the supply of homes while also subsidizing the purchase of them.”

Some local governments are doing just that. This year, teachers began moving into a 135-unit rental complex built by the San Francisco Unified School District and Mercy Housing in the Outer Sunset, as well as a 110-unit teacher housing project, The Acacia, in Palo Alto.

For the Quinteros, though, homeownership has offered more stability than renting. They moved with their two young kids three times in the past decade — moves that were especially disruptive for their youngest daughter, who has autism.

“It’s really nice to have a place where she feels secure,” Quintero said, “and to know we’re not going to have to move to another home or school.”