[Guinness chocolate cake, with Guinness, March 2008.]
Otherwise known as “amateur night” by certain parties, St. Patrick’s Day to me is soda bread, Altan, Joyce’s Ulysses, which I attempt to battle through every few years or so (it never quite works; I think I need an explanatory text alongside), and — of course — Guinness.
Ages ago [...]

[View from Squaw Valley, March 2008.]
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. - John Muir
Sunday afternoon I perched atop a [...]

My parents used to live in Colorado — Boulder, to be exact — and I like to think if some trick of fate had gone differently, I would have been born there, instead of along the Pacific. How different life could have been! I might be snowboarding down the Rockies this very second; [...]

Maybe it’s the broccoli soup recipes floating around lately, or the fact that last weekend wore me out (in a good way, but still), and this week was no slouch, either, but all I wanted to do this weekend was sleep in, and then make broccoli soup. On Saturday, I did both of [...]

[Weekend lunch, January 2008.]
When I have just a bit of bread with olive oil, or hummus, I always think of my friend Simon, because he is a bread-lover in the extreme. Last spring, when he and his wife came to visit me and I took them up to Armstrong Woods, we stopped for sandwiches [...]