If someone presents you midway through your meal with a sweet cream flavored ice cream enveloped with wild flowers, cilantro and other herbs, you’d take pause.  You’d reach down to the pit of your basic ice cream knowledge (well formed for us Americans) and take pause.  Because you know chocolate well.  Many a passionate night you’ve spent together.  And vanilla goes without saying; it brings on a whole new meaning to nuts and sauces, sprinkles and maraschino cherries; basically anything with horrifying numerical dyes that linger in our system for seven years. There are even others ice cream flavors on the standard list: coffee (for die-hard, strong personalities like my seven-year old son), strawberry (for a touch of delicate whimsy), and rum raisin, (for drunken decadence and in my case, nostalgia as it was my mother’s favorite flavor).  But this? …Read on

It’s silly I know but I can’t get rid of what’s left of my first blender.  Its base sits timidly in the shelf of my garage pantry (the glass top having cracked years before), accumulating dust and accompanied by assorted missing socks, loose change brought back from my husband’s trips from Slovenia and Mexico and Venezuela, and, even though I occasionally become inspired to clean that pantry top so that I can view its plastic wood surface for a day or two and feel a sense of restored order (I know it won’t last, I know my family can’t bare to see its empty space and it will inevitably be cluttered by discarded Bakugan balls and marbles and matches) the Oster blender base always stays and oversees this small cemetery of forgotten items.

I approach it every once and a while …Read on

I have to start with the chair, because it was green, so bright green, and it greeted me with such gusto and verve as I entered my Greenbrier room and began acclimating to the hyperactive wallpaper (which I obviously had the chair as hostesses to) somehow reassuring me that the week I would spend there would end up being one filled with learning and good food and it would all begin with this rolling fit of laughter as I got to know and love this green chair, my green chair that I’d sorely miss.

I went to the Greenbrier Inn last week to attend the Symposium for Professional Food Writers.  I had been chosen as a finalist for the James Peterson Food Writing Passion Scholarship and arrived with every arrogant intention of  launching my career into high gear.  But …Read on

I could say if I just look at the slope of her nose (ever so slight with a generous finish) I’d recognize that it is exactly like mine and unmistakably connect us but I know what you are thinking: there is so much more to a face, so many more crevices and cracks to throw you off course. You’d say the eyes, the chin, even the hair. And I’d agree, one cannot gage another by merely the slope of the nose but in this case it really is all it took.  Because when she turned and I saw her profile, I saw myself in her; ten, maybe fifteen years earlier I was there, only with different colored hair and different colored eyes but still me and I knew right then and there, that even though we never crossed …Read on

Every holiday season they seem to sneak past my culinary radar and invade the shelves of my well-groomed pantry, usually sitting next to the rosemary chocolate and the cans of Portuguese olive oil.  I sigh in disbelief when I see them; their creative metamorphosis amazes me every time.  After all, they are only reconstituted marshmallows, which is reconstituted sugar, but no matter what holiday, be it Halloween, Valentine’s Day, or Easter, there is a Peeps for the occasion and every single one of them enters my household.

I justify my insensitivity with this sugary fluff as a cultural deficit.  I grew up in Venezuela, where Peeps are non—existent.  Instead, I hoarded bars of Carleton (a thin crispy wafer doused in dark Venezuelan chocolate) and guzzled down bottles upon bottles of Frescolita, the local soft drink that boasts a neon red color …Read on