Tomorrow we are throwing a birthday party for our cat, Margarita. She is one year old tomorrow and its been 9 months since she joined our family. I do realize that by sharing these plans with you I risk sounding completely pathetic. You might get images of my Dear Husband and I going completely nuts […]

Love this. There it was, right up on the wall of my hotel room at the W Hotel. Quite profound really. After having given it some thought (there isn’t much to do right now) I realize that we can create ourselves in many ways, not just by choosing what to wear and what to do […]

I just can’t share it with you yet. You see, if I share it with you my mother will see it and then she will make it before I have a chance to make it for her. I really like salmon but stopped making it as it was always, well…always the same. I told my […]

To say I have no fondness for Valentine’s Day is a gross understatement. I loathe it. The whole thing just doesn’t make any sense to me. Its not that I have a problem with the celebration of love, I just see no advantage to singling out a single day for it. Why should adults focus […]

For many food bloggers the photograph of their creation is as important as the sharing of a recipe. Posting a picture is the digital equivalent of presenting a meal to an appreciative family. Comments on your post would then be the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’. As self esteem boosts go, the Holy Grail is winning the […]

I’m new to food blogging. Scratch that. This is not a food blog. I just happen to write a lot about the food I prepare (or have delivered) because, well, I have to eat. And when you think about it, so much of who we are as people is tied to food and what we […]

One of the nicest things about the blogosphere is being able to connect and share with other people. Sometimes even a random comment on someone’s blog leads to a nice surprise. I commented on a post at SippitySup.com and next thing I knew I received a custom recipe for artichoke pasta! Well, it happened again […]

(Note: This blog entry was originally posted at One Box A Week back in July 2009. This was my opening post after signing up for the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. I’m posting it to he front of this blog as I think it reveals a bit of my skeptical thinking pattern — something I […]

I break them. That’s why. Well, I don’t always break them. Sometimes its my husband or, unfortunately one of my dinner guests, but mostly its me. Given that I do that I have a tendency to break them you would think I would decide collecting nice ones wouldn’t be a good thing for me to […]

I gotta hand it to Caitie and Gillian, my jam buddies. They came up with a lot of creative uses for the fig jam we made as gifts for our gift collective. I have just been telling everyone to ‘use it on cheese’ but I am going to have to rethink this. I arrived at […]

Last night we were invited to spend the evening at what is probably the most quintessential Southern California Christmas event: The Newport Harbor Parade of Lights. Its an event that has actually been going on for over 100 years. 100’s of ships and homes along the harbor participate by loading up on festive lights. Caitie […]

Not pretty, is it? I really liked this article on Mintlife Blog. It offers strategic advice on how to divest your life of clutter. In a nutshell, they recommend moving items you don’t use to an “outbox”. An outbox is some shelf, corner of the garage, or a room where you get things out of […]

Can you believe that this is the most coveted kitchen utensil in my mom’s aresenal? Its a birch twig whisk and apparently it is Scandinavian in origin. On Thanksgiving day when I Facebooked about the fact that my brother did not want me to bring anything to dinner I received a lot of congratulatory emails […]

Christmas gift giving in my family is an elaborate dance that culminates in just about everyone getting what they wanted (more or less) while still managing to act completely surprised when opening gifts. There are very few actual surprises which is either good or bad depending on your point of view. We all employ our […]