Welcome to Scott’s birthday week! What does birthday week mean at our house? Well, it means that the family member of honor gets to pick the food for the week. It also means the honoree gets to pick TV at night and generally make reasonable requests. An example of a request that would not be…
Seabiscuit: Excellent Sleeper
For some reason, I get extraordinary joy when I learn about creatures that like sleep as much as I do. I really really like sleep. So imagine my extreme happiness when I read this excerpt from Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand (page 38 in my edition, with introduction before this about how the average horse sleeps…
Tomato Soup Love
A long, long time ago, I lived in Texas. One of the many benefits of living in Texas is that you have easy access to the La Madeleine restaurant chain. A chain of restaurants might seem like a lame thing to miss, but it is much less lame if you’ve actually eaten at a La…
The Cinque Terre (Vacation Part 3)
Our next stop after a few days in Lugano was the Cinque Terre–Riomaggiore specifically. Never heard of it? Well, the Cinque Terre is a national park area in Italy that surrounds some villages along the coast. I used to think that a couple of the villages were only accessible by foot. After hiking there and…
Lovely Lugano (Vacation Part 2)
After we met our rental steed and drove through a few alps, we stopped for a day and a half in my favorite town of all–Lugano, Switzerland. That’s my favorite tree-lined lakeside walk. With my favorite red benches. Those colors are amazing. Nothing but sunshine, lake, and Lugano-ness there. And once you’ve soaked that all in…
Welcome to Switzerland!
Doesn’t this picture look like a ridiculous made-up rest stop from a movie? That was our first “Man, that was a long flight” stop on our vacation adventure, complete with my favorite Swiss beverage–sparkling apple juice. I think that picture captures Switzerland fairly well. Everything is neat and tidy and ridiculously good-looking. This was our…
Simple Italy: Prosciutto and Melon two ways
We did some more “nostalgic eating” yesterday. This time we chose prosciutto and melon to take us back to Italy. Lucky us, we had a fresh cantaloupe from the garden, so it became a pretty cheap and easy appetizer for a Sunday night. (Note: We do not normally make appetizers for ourselves, but it was…
Small, but valuable. 