Like a lizard
(A day trip with mesquite granola, with polenta and coconut and all kinds of good things.) If you were to visit California at any time of year, my friends, this should be it. The air is warmer, the nights are still cool, greenery is shooting up at a rapid pace. Road trips are riddled with ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaahhh’ pointing at one tree or another awash in spring... Read More
Holy smoke
Lately, I’ve been too restless to get anything useful done. In my mind there are these lists of things to do. Newsletters and website updates and blog posts and dealing with traffic tickets (*cough*) and parking tickets (*cough*) and returning phonecalls. I think it’s the coming spring; I want to be outside so much that all this other stuff makes my brain short-circuit.... Read More
Crying over smoked milk
This post is being submitted to the Wild Things roundup over at Hunger and Thirst. If you [still] haven’t checked it out, please do! Few things are as evocative as smoke. It’s primal. We humans have been using smoke since we started using fire. Which, if you think about it, was a long long time ago. It’s magic stuff– stuff that gets into your lungs and into... Read More
A New Day’s resolution, and abhyanga.
As I said, these last couple of posts went up the wrong way around. Nonetheless, Happy New Year, lovely readers. Here are some photos from our Christmas week out in the desert. I’m not really one for New Years resolutions- for the past year or so I’ve been practicing something I’ve come to dub ‘New Day’s resolutions’. As in, why the hell wait... Read More
Black [tea] and white [fir] cake
Today marks the shortest day of the year, where the sun, our source of warmth and light, is furthest from us. Living in a city, in the modern world, with electricity and lights and all kinds of noises blocking out the silence, it’s easy to forget that we still live in bodies that have cycles, on a planet that has cycles. Years ago, before all of that stuff existed, as the... Read More
Eggnog. In a mug.
(on the warming magic & merits of cinnamon) For a week we experimented with keeping the heating on all the time. It was nearing 40 degrees in Los Angeles and living in Southern California for any length of time does something to your temperature tolerance. That is, it destroys it. But having the heating on all the time didn’t work. Not one bit. We’d both wake up... Read More
Kitchen herbalism
(a little bit of magic goes a long way) Waking up before dawn makes me happy. Lately, I’ll put some fuzzy socks on because it’s cold, and will pad downstairs quietly, while the cat weaves her way around my feet. I’ll brew a cup of California Mountain Tea (a blend of rose petals, white sage, black sage and wild mint), add some cream and honey, and then wrap myself... Read More
Dia de los muertos
I turned 30 last week. If you haven’t had a big birthday roll around in the middle of the week, I highly recommend you try it: you get a party the weekend before, a dinner out the day of, and then those who couldn’t make it to the party will take you out the weekend after, making it a birth-week instead of a birth-day! Almost fifteen years ago, I went to Nogales for... Read More
Rose and cardamom mava cakes
When it gets hot like this, I can’t help but think of India. Where every dusty afternoon I’d retreat to my little room and fling the windows open and the fan on, while Pushpa looked at me disapprovingly for wasting electricity. Truth be told, it was my least favourite time of day. Because everybody else was taking a nap, but I couldn’t nap because of the heat.... Read More
Tomato tart
Have you ever tried camping in California in the summer without a reservation? I don’t know if this applies to the rest of the country too, but people here book campsites a year in advance. One whole year. I have a hard time booking plane tickets one MONTH in advance, so when Lu and I headed up the coast last weekend, it was without a campsite reservation. Which turned out... Read More
