Unlike the images all over the internet today… most of the naked “art” I remember growing up involved delicately placed fig leaves. My home town of Palos Verdes Estates even had a statue of a naked King Neptune standing in the middle of Malaga Cove Plaza, who, by the time I was old enough to […]
It has been more than three years since my wife and I uprooted our southern California family and plopped them down in the Midwest. It’s been good. Our girls are both blossoming here. The change of seasons is enchanting. The abundance of space is liberating. Yet, as our eldest likes to remind us, it’s not […]
I once had a love affair with caramel. Plunging into the romance with the recklessness only a child would dare, I stuffed my mouth with the sticky goop until my cheeks bulged out and savored the sweet buttery taste even as I worked frantically to get the thick strands unstuck from my teeth. (Sigh.) I […]
Coconut is not really a children’s flavor. It was definitely my least favorite flavor growing and I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Whenever a parent brought a box of donuts to a childrens event, a morning baseball game or a pre-dawn field trip to the tide pools, the last one left in the box […]
For some reason pears do not like me. I’ve always been fond of these sweeter cousins of the apple, but they tend to keep their distance. What I mean is that I never seem to get them at the right time. They’re either really hard when I buy them or so ripe they have to […]
I’ve always enjoyed the smell of coffee. I haven’t always enjoyed the taste. That came more slowly. My dad was the only coffee drinker in my family. My mom, being a canuck, drank tea. The only nod my mom made toward the coffee drinkers of the world, which didn’t include any of us at the […]
In a writing class I’ve been taking, the instructor told us that there were only a limited number of stories out there. Writers rework them, reset them, recast them and reimagine them. But it’s essentially the same handful of plots that get retold over and over and over again. (Sounds a bit like this blog.) […]
Years ago, my brother told me he didn’t like soups that had fruit in them because he thought they confused the taste buds. At the time I smiled, nodded and cringed as I thought about the pepper and pear soup I had just made him as a Christmas present. Yet I understood what he meant. […]
It’s hot out there. Big surprise, right? Temperatures are supposed to be around a hundred degrees in the middle of the summer. Not that I’m complaining. I’m from California, so you won’t see me getting out of the kitchen any time soon. It’s just that there are suddenly all these brown lawns all over the […]
