Adventures in joyful living
I became my godmother Angie’s principal helper in the last years of her life. Among the minor emergencies that required my attention, maintaining the caramel stock was always high-priority. A caramel or two (or five, maybe?) was her nightly indulgence till the day she passed. I never really had a particular thing for caramels until […]
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Hello, everyone. Happy Friday, happy spring, happy Cinco de Mayo, happy Coronation weekend. Just letting you know that Bernadette of Bernadette’s New Classic Recipe graciously invited me to pen a post appropriate for Mother’s Day, which in the US is the second Sunday in May. I’ve written about my mother many times, but this one […]
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Note to my much appreciated readers: This is the third post in my grand hotel series; the first were Wentworth-by-the-Sea and The Omni Mt. Washington. My idea of a near perfect North American odyssey would be a season—it doesn’t matter which—spent wandering from one of the continent’s grand old historic hotels to another, drinking in […]
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Now that the colorful glow of Christmas has been packed away, these cold, dark January days can be hard to take—unless, of course, you have your own Enzo to coax you out of bed in time to catch the early morning sky. Not the brightest sunrise, this one—all subtle blues, grays, and lavender, with just […]
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Summer is flying by, as it always seems to. Here in the US Mid-Atlantic, in the last few weeks we’ve had many hot, steamy days and extended periods of heavy rain, a weather pattern that seems more typical of South Florida. The upside is that everything in the garden is lush and colorful, especially the […]
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I woke to this early AM text: I’m supposed to be brining the bird right now. Know what I’m doing? Playing solitaire on the computer! What’s wrong with me? Apart from a good chuckle, that text reassured me (as I did its author), that I’m not the only one who bogs down in the hoopla […]
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It’s a great thing that so many young cooks are taking up the “fresh and from scratch” cause. Some of the best recipes and tips I’ve found in food blogs have come from folks with far less “kitchen history” than my own. All that being said, I can’t for the life of me understand why […]
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It’s fall, and I’m back to making bread. I know I’m like a repeating decimal when it comes to the joys of home-baked bread, but few activities in the kitchen give me as much pleasure. l love the pungent smell of yeasty dough bubbling under the light at the back of the stove as much […]
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I’ve been erratic about writing these last few months. That tendency, to be erratic, is probably one reason why I’m never likely to write the Great American Novel. Serious writers, in my experience, are highly disciplined and highly routinized—and that’s never been quite my cup of tea. First of all, I probably ate too much ice […]
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Hot, sticky days fracture my attention span and–quite frankly–make me flat-out lazy. I hate that feeling. Today I decided that I absolutely MUST get something done. So that I don’t feel like a complete slug, I’m going to recount just about everything I did today. I. Fed Miss Pup. 2. Walked Miss Pup. 3. Went […]
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It’s always been my nemesis. Every few months or so, for years and years, I have taken everything out of it and discarded what’s outlived its usefulness or gone the route of what-could-I-possibly-have-been-thinking. I have meticulously cleaned out the drawer and the organizer and carefully put everything back in a tidy, logical way. Each clean-out […]
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When I volunteer to “bring something,” my contribution is invariably an “old chestnut” whose outcome is never subject to question. For July 4th, a chocolate cake seemed the logical all-American choice. Given a miserable heat wave and the three loads of wash in progress, you’d think I would simply have thrown together my go-to, never […]
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Hashtag Retired 