I’m reading a new memoir called “The Reading Promise.” The book recounts an agreement made between a father and his nine-year-old daughter to read together every night for 100 nights. I’m not very far into the book yet, so I don’t know how easy it was for them to reach that first goal but , after they […]

To be honest I don’t remember the first food I ever made. It might have been a batch of Charlie Brown’s brownies from the Peanuts cookbook. That recipe stands out because I made it wrong the first time. I failed to mix the dry ingredients thoroughly enough and wound up with tiny, hardened, white clum […]

Our freezer didn’t hold a lot of different flavors of ice cream when I was a kid. I remember a stretch when we went through a lot of Neapolitan—the Italian tricolor of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate—but most of the time it was just vanilla. Part of the reason for this was that my dad is […]

Daylight savings time was still a month from being over, and that was fine by me. I needed all the savings I could muster. Things had been a bit busy at the Soup Blog household of late with extra work and afterschool activities stretching each hour as thin as it could get. I needed a […]

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 […]

Now that I’m almost into my dotage—it will begin as soon as my kids realize what an old fool I am—I can start talking about the good old days. Remember when ice cream just cost a nickel a scoop? It’s hard to imagine in this day of Ben & Jerry’s, Oberweis and Cold Stone Creamery […]

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 […]