It's funny, much as I usually abhor ruts and routine, I can be quite the creature of habit sometimes. Which, in the case of visiting the San Juan Islands in the Northwest corner of Washington state, comes in the form of me heading 99.9% of the time to Orcas, dating back to trips [...]
So there I was in Paris for a month earlier this year, living la belle vie, nothing but time to wander, read, eat, write, ponder, drink, consider, explore. It was glorious, as you can imagine. Unseasonably cool and quite wet weather didn't dampen the experience. I made a number of blog [...]
Sure, I got caught up in the groundswell of interest in Downton Abbey after it got so many friends yammering about it in that first season. I dutifully caught up on all the episodes, watching that last season in real-time, able to commiserate and grouse along with them (really? a [...]
I guess it's a twist on turning lemons into lemonade, but in this case it was a matter of turning ginger into ginger syrup. I'd done a photo shoot recently for an ebook project that I'll tell you more about soon. I over-bought some items needed for the recipes, considering that [...]
I can't get this thought out of my head since a reader question last week got me pondering recipes and cooking times: clocks don't know how to cook. I heard from someone who'd seen one of my Salty Snacks recipes in a local newspaper and questioned the time that had [...]
It was our second or third morning in Zurich, in the breakfast room just off the lobby of the hotel where we were staying. A gentleman at a table near me tried to tell the server that the used plate and coffee cup on his table were not his and should be [...]
Our ship docked at Breisach, you can see the usual gangway under water, an additional walkway added for our use. There's nothing at all Viking River Cruises could have done. Lord knows they didn't turn on the rain in the previous couple of months that lead to [...]
And, at the same time, I suppose that begs the question of what it isn't. It hadn't occurred to me that "home cooking" was that tough a concept to define. But this article in this morning's Wall Street Journal got me thinking. And sent me off on a tangent too. The title "The [...]
This picture is one of my favorites from this month's escapade in Paris. It was taken at one of the top pastry/confection shops in Paris, Jacques Genin, which I was very happy to find to be just a matter of blocks from the apartment I rented in the Marais. And [...]
I went a little nuts at the market today. It's Sunday, a prime market day in many neighborhoods around Paris. The closest/best to where I'm staying in the Marais is the Bastille market that spreads north of Place de la Bastille on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. I went to the market [...]