This weekend, high off Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and our scrumptious meals of late, I told Dan that I was this close to becoming a local food evangelist.
And, well, what do you know? The Times beat me to it.
The connection between what I put in my body, the land around me and the miracle of things [...]

Living out in small-town America with only your husband and dog as pals, you sometimes forget how great it is to have good friends around. Though I’m far from the world’s most sociable person — I probably require quite a bit more down time than average — I do in fact love to have friends [...]

One afternoon while we were living in Arizona, I was napping and Dan was in the kitchen in the beginning steps of making an apple pie. This is a pretty typical set-up for our weekend: me, sleeping off the black storm cloud, Dan whipping up something delicious in the kitchen. I’d just faded off into [...]

Back when I was doing veggie duty at the cafe in Brooklyn, one of my favorite tasks was making the day’s soup. If I got into the cafe early enough, I’d have an hour or two to myself to chop the aromatics and get everything in the pot and simmering away nicely before people starting [...]

A couple of weekends ago we went to visit some new friends in Plainfield, MA. If you’ve never been there (and I have to guess that certainly you haven’t), it’s the country, the real country, passing-cows-in-pastures country. By way of directions, our friends said, Take a left at the church. We’re down a ways, with [...]

As you can probably imagine, my 3x/week, 3-mile trail running routine promptly came to a halt in June when I moved cross country. Sigh.
To get back into shape, I thought I’d start with the couch-to-5K plan, somewhere in the middle (I didn’t think I was exactly at couch-level), with the goal of training for a [...]

It’s a complete no-no, I think, if you’re ever to keep your sanity working a nine-to-five job: eating at your desk. I renounced it while plugging away as a corporate worker bee, and it was for the best. (Maybe too much so, as I’d developed a habit of also taking breaks mid-morning and late in [...]

You should have seen the bag of tomatoes we foisted on the poor market fellow. It must have weighed at least six pounds. I hope it weighed at least six pounds, because it was expensive. Heirloom tomatoes: so delicious, so pricey.
So when I got home yesterday afternoon, and examined our market purchases, it seemed the [...]

Summer, all the way.
We started the day with breakfast at the Blue Benn, an old school diner car in Bennington, VT. I love old diners, but they so rarely offer things I’d actually want to eat. The Blue Benn is different. Sure, they serve the traditional diner fare–omelettes, pancakes, sausage, bacon, biscuits–but it’s all extremely [...]

Exactly a year ago, I woke up in north-central Arizona, where I’d make my home for the next ten months. My eyes were swollen; one of my cats had died in the airport the day before. We hadn’t even left New York. Now I was in my partner’s parents’ house, on the campus of a [...]