The elegance of water.
Water both scares and excites me. Unlike my husband who can’t stay away from the stuff, I have a healthy respect for it due to a. being a not-so-strong swimmer and b. two almost drowning incidents on the sea shore. I grew up on the water, some of my earliest memories are of the smell [...]
Happy happy.
(Spiced conifer infused apple tart with a bonus tea recipe to boot!) As I write this, Los Angeles is [relatively] quiet, the afternoon winter sunlight is streaming through the windows, through the incense smoke that clouds the air, onto my legs which are half covered by a very fat cat (actual fat cat, not metaphoric [...]
Stress, sleeplessness, and stolen moments
(what’s been happening lately, plus a very brief motivational speech) Stress tolerance is not my forte. Between work, home and running a business in the lead-up to holiday season, I’m turning into a frayed knot. Prioritizing, to-do lists, more to-do lists, priority to-do lists, and putting the rest off till January are all my friends. As [...]
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 [...]
Moroccan mallow salad
If I were to have a robot self, I would describe it something like this: A satellite dish, with roots, and a nuclear reactor in the middle, plus two hands and a body with which to express the product of said reaction. And when it comes to writing, I feel like one has to have [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
The loveliest sprout
I can’t believe I’m doing this to you. I mean, I hate sprouts. Really truly think they smell like socks and dirt and they make you fart to boot. It’s all Jamie’s fault. We were getting our weekly shopping and he saw brussels sprouts and started jumping up and down with excitement. Anybody who gets [...]
The loveliest parsnip
I went to a Burns supper a few weeks ago. I told my friend Gareth about it a few nights ago and he asked me what the hell a Burns supper was. I laughed, because I assumed that he was joking. But he wasn’t. When you grow up in Scotland, you just assume that people [...]
