Last Christmas my family was all together and we were catching up on what we’d been up to. My theio (uncle) Niko was telling us about the chantarelles he’d been foraging for in the fall, and said that if I was around next autumn...

I was recently prompted to write about why I cook, and it took me a good amount of introspection to answer that question. I love to cook for a lot of reasons, but I think what drives me to the kitchen most frequently is...

Nothing makes me feel quite at peace with the cool weather as much as curling up with a hot cup of tea and a good book. And when I threw a tea-flavored donut into the mix, the cold hardwood floor and icy faucet water...

I hope you all had a lovely Halloween. Since this was me and Jeremy’s first Halloween as husband and wife, we were Frankenstein and the bride of Frankenstien, and am am sad to report that even with my hair I still didn’t even come...

When the weather starts to get chilly in southern California, I know that it must be getting truly cold in the rest of the country. And there’s nothing that takes the edge off of the cool, biting weather like a gooey, toasty, steaming hot...

Around mid-October, I begin to pine for the vibrant colors of the Oregon autumn, and look wistfully out the window at the relatively brownish landscape I’m surrounded by here in North Hollywood. This year, we decided to pop out of town for a weekend...

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get to go on a local farm tour at the Tutti Frutti organic farmstead near Santa Barbara, California. Tutti Frutti is owned and operated by Chris Cadwell, an organic farmer whose mainstays are heirloom tomatoes...

Sometimes Jeremy has to travel for work, and while I miss him while he’s gone, it gives me a lot of extra time to catch up on all the baking I’ve been daydreaming about (like making these cupcakes), and I’m able to give the...

Autumn is my favorite time for soup. I know winter is the coldest and most soup-oriented, but I love the flavors of fall and squash soups are pretty much the tastiest thing ever. The origin of this particular soup goes back a couple weeks,...

Fall is my favorite season for many reasons. Back home in Oregon, the leaves turn vibrant shades of red, orange, and gold. The air has an edge to it, a clean crispness that’s strikingly dry considering the amount of moisture in the air. The...

I’ve always been a lover of sushi, this is in part due to the abundance of fresh salmon in the Pacific northwest and the large number of Japanese immigrants, which resulted in an abundance of really good and really affordable sushi places around the...

I’ve spent the past few weeks going through everything in our house in a bit of a reverse fall-cleaning frenzy. It all began when we came home with the wedding presents and I realized we had absolutely nowhere to put them, and since we...