Category Archives: Occupy

I wasn’t ever hungry as a child

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Daniel and Hannah
No person should go hungry, period. When it is a child, it is even more heartbreaking. Here in the U.S., 50 million people don’t have enough to eat. 16 million of them are children: that’s 1 in 4 kids who don’t know where their next meal will come from. I’m honored to donate this post as part of Food Bloggers Against Hunger; my hope with today’s action is that we will raise awareness about food insecurity and hunger in the United States, while sharing some ideas about what you can do to help.  Continue reading →

Here comes the sun

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bitter orangesWhen I read Luisa’s post on seville orange marmalade, her description of the tantalizing aroma in her apartment as the oranges cooked down took me straight back to December: orange peel candying on the stove and a house that smelled bright, sunny, freshly picked. Orange is one of my very favorite smells: citrus in general has a good showing in that category, but oranges take the winning spot over most anything, most days. It has been said a million times, but it is truth: oranges smell like sunshine would smell, if it only could.  Continue reading →

California love

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l and j at beachThe Friday after Valentine’s Day felt like being in some sort of sweet golden dream: the coast was sunny and blue-skied, the air was warm, and it felt exactly like a place where you’d never find the dance floor empty. While I know our dear friends and family in San Diego get this every day, we do not. Up here we pride ourselves on our rugged coasts: rocky and cliff-edged, fog-banked and moody. But on Friday, this place was in the most beautiful mood.

Which was good, because the guys and I were nursing a serious sugar hangover. We all needed to get outside.

Continue reading →

I think we can

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new year's day

I’m not really a resolution person, you know? For me, change happens slowly. Plus, I don’t do so well when asked to evaluate myself all at once in a rush of anxiety in the middle of winter after passing through the stresses (good and bad) of all that year-end festiveness. And then there’s the word itself - resolution. It sounds sort of … congressional (read: ineffective?), sort of … over and done. If change is in order, let’s make it an active sort of change, full of energy and momentum and life. 

new year's day

And then Jacob said, “Mommy, can we have a New Year’s Revolution?”

A revolution? A revolution. Indeed. I think we can.  Continue reading →

The ones we have

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My passion is for food that is indigenous to the New World … Instead of inventing new food traditions, or copying Europe’s verbatim, I’m more interested in looking at the ones we have. ~ Steve Sando, owner of Rancho Gordo

black calypso beans

A while back I mentioned that I was reading a book about beans. This may not seem like the most scintillating reading material, but I was quite keen on it. We eat a lot of beans. What I did not expect to find in a bean book, even a bean book from so delightful a source as Napa’s Rancho Gordo, was a sprawling love letter. An ode to beans – and also a profound devotional to our collective, geographic culinary heritage. Continue reading →

Let’s do this

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candy striped figs

While our family and friends have been braving the dark after the storm, we have been thinking of them and sending all we can: thoughts, prayers, donations to the Red Cross. We carry forward, we send our love. Press on, east coasters.

Meanwhile, this week I have received a handful of emails from people asking me about my opinion on California’s Proposition 37. This is strange and flattering because I am not an expert on anything relevant, and it is surprising because I can’t believe anyone would question my stance on this one. It makes me think that maybe it’s not obvious to folks exactly what is at stake here – I feel worried that all the money being pumped into muddying the waters might actually be working. In case anyone out there still wonders where I stand on this one, let me quote Dave Murphy: “California is ground zero in the effort to reclaim our food and our planet from out of control corporations that want to deny us the right to know what’s in our food.” 

I am all for reclaiming our food, and our planet. I am a yes on 37. Or more accurately I am a YES, YES, YES.  Continue reading →