The pendulum has been swinging between spring and summer in our neck of the woods. With no air-conditioning in our half-century old house and temperatures rising last week, I had to pull our very old electric fan out of storage. This is a fan from my husband’s childhood, a contemporary of our home. Rather […]
Sun-Dried Tomato Dip
January 6, 2013 by 33 Comments
My husband and I are beginning to feel like restaurant jinxes. Over the last few years we have discovered a few restaurants in our area only to see them close their doors a couple of years or even just a few months after deeming the eateries current favorites. We don’t have a very good […]
Caprese Salad with Fig Balsamic Dressing
August 26, 2012 by 29 Comments
If there is one type of dish that makes me miss not growing tomatoes this year it would be a salad. A bowl of pasta tossed in a simple tomato-based sauce is a close second, but I can usually come up with easy substitutes like capers, olives or anchovies to add substance to pasta […]
Pasta alla Carbonara
March 5, 2012 by 58 Comments
The summer before my freshman year in high school, my family moved out of San Francisco and to a neighboring town a few miles away. This meant that I spent my first year in a new school trying to find my place in a sea of new faces. I was extremely shy which severely […]
The Glorious Pasta of Italy: A Book Review
December 18, 2011 by 13 Comments
Many of you might already know how much I love to eat pasta. I can eat it each day of the week and not tire of it. Were I to be asked what my last meal would be, pasta would most certainly be in the equation. So when the good people of Cooks & Books […]
Purple Sweet Potato Gnocchi
June 13, 2011 by 33 Comments
When I was 11 or 12, my mother deemed me old enough to make quick visits to the grocery store on my own. We lived in San Francisco at the time, on a dead end street where all the families knew each other. The neighborhood market was within view from our front door so […]
Yountville: Wine Country Weekend
March 14, 2011 by 35 Comments
While I was in college in the early 1990s, I made frequent visits to Napa Valley–not to drink wine but to eat. Whenever our class schedules would permit, my partner-in-crime (aka best friend) and I would take to the scenic wine country road and spend the afternoon catching up about our school and […]
Fresh Starts
December 31, 2010 by 36 Comments
Perhaps you and I are alike. You live life guided by a set of rules or priorities ranging from silly to serious. You skip or trudge along depending on present circumstances; at times you are more proactive about those rules and most others you find yourself just reacting, not really in control. You eke […]
