I took about a thousand pictures in this field bursting with yellow blossoms, set against the blue sky accented with white-and-silver clusters of clouds. Okay, I exaggerate. A bit. It was a few dozen perhaps. But I could have kept going if me and my fellow travelers didn't have yet another great [...]
Yesterday was just one of those days. Mid afternoon I found myself staring out the window into the gray-ish sky, considering the kind of week it had been, the kind of frazzle I felt, the fact that it couldn't be just Wednesday, really?! -- the weekend seemed too far away. I deserved a [...]
A couple of months ago I had been at a late afternoon gathering on the 100-foot level of the Space Needle (celebrating the launch of Check Please!, to be exact) and had a short walk from there to a dinner date downtown. Somewhere around 4th and Denny I saw a few tourists [...]
It doesn't take much to motivate me to hop on the train and head south to Portland. Though some motivations are more pronounced than others. As was the case last week when rock-star butcher Dario Cecchini was in town. Soon as I'd heard word of his pending visit a few months [...]
“So, do you want to maybe go to Germany today?” Anne-Marie asked us. Not your usual breakfast time cconversation but it's one of the benefits of spending time in the Alsace region of France. Taking a brief drive to have lunch in Germany is a fully realistic option. And we [...]
I was heartbroken when I first heard Bruce Naftaly's voicemail message this morning, letting me know that he and his wife and business partner Sara had decided to close Le Gourmand and Sambar in early June. I've been a card-carrying fan of Le Gourmand for many years, and of Sambar [...]
When I was working on Gourmet Game Night and talking with folks about it upon its release, I was a little surprised sometimes at the interpretation of the "game" element. In my head, of course, it was firmly framed around a gathering of friends playing dominoes or poker and wanting [...]
It can be pretty easy today to buy quite good commercial ice creams, whether one of the many regional small-scale producers -- like Snoqualmie from my back yard -- or premium national brands (I don't really love regular Häagen-Dazs, but am a fan of the Five line). I even sampled at the [...]
One fun thing about social media is that you truly just never know what interesting new thing you're going to learn as you scope out your Twitter feed or check new Facebook posts. Here's a little bit of game trivia that I picked up via Twitter this morning: the celebrated American [...]
There are so many reasons that it's been as long as it has since I last sat down to write a post here. I won't bore you with details, aside from the more recent reason that I was out of town for most of December. It was a trip my [...]