After my obsession with rain, yesterday, there turned out not to be any. By afternoon it was a lovely, fluffy-clouds-in-blue-sky kind of day. Post-breakfast we headed over to the Place Maubert market. On Saturdays there’s a vendor there specializing in products from the south of France and  I try to stock up on my supply…

Greetings on this warm and wet Paris morning.  Looks like we’ll have a lot of rain on this visit but today, at least, it is light and drizzly, the temperature is heading to 50, and the daft birds outside our window have a lot to sing about. So do I, though my brain still has…

I’ve had a couple of things in mind to write about but we are leaving for Paris this evening and time is tight, so I’ll jam them into a single (long) post. Paris for Valentine’s Day! Tonight we head to Paris for our annual Valentine’s Day visit. Usually we go for a weekend, but schedules…

I am not great at taking pictures in restaurants. For one thing, the lighting is usually poor and I rarely bring my good camera with me so there is lots of camera shake. Probably more damaging, though, I am so interested in each new course that appears that I have dug my fork into it…

Thanks to everyone who has sent nice notes about my mom. She’s doing better than we thought – they downgraded (upgraded?) her diagnosis from Stage III to Stage I lung cancer (for those of you fortunate enough not to be fluent in cancer-speak, this is a good thing) and we are hopeful that surgery can…

So I am not the only one reveling in the white, refined foods that match the pale winter landscape. I’d like to think that my recent binges on raclette, macaroni and cheese, pasta with butter and parmesan, and (am I really going to admit this on a food blog?) tuna noodle casserole are just due…

Despite the fact that I’ve been at this since early spring, I haven’t quite got the knack of blogging yet. I still wait for the right topic and, even more paralyzing, the best photo, and try to organize and polish the posts as if they were newspaper columns, instead of just letting them fly and…

We are in northern Florida for the holidays — Apalachicola, to be precise, on the gulf coast of the Panhandle.  We have a funky little cottage here — 1940s vintage and not in great shape, but we’ve covered a multitude of sins with paint.  Lime green, melon, periwinkle, aqua, yellow — get the picture?  If…

We lost our beautiful Zoë girl yesterday morning – the kidney disease finally wore her out and her back legs wouldn’t get her up any more. What that dog has taught me from first to last about gusto and fun and sheer hedonistic delight is nobody’s business. I hope I can bring half the zest…

The third issue of Bloom (a Bloomington city  magazine I do some writing for) is out and they’ve got the web site up and running with lots of the magazine’s content online. There is some of my stuff on the site here and here.  (These are pdf files and kind of slow loading, at least…

It’s a peculiar start to Thanksgiving, to be sitting here on the coast of north Cornwall, looking through my window at the choppy whitecaps of the Camel estuary. Ominous white clouds scud across the blustery blue of the sky, but I heard a local say this morning that it is too breezy for rain. In…

  Again sorry for the silence. Election time is the silly season for political scientists, and things have been rocking around here. I haven’t forgotten my truffle tale, but before any more time gets away from me I wanted to report on the gorgeous meal we had in Alba at Osteria Lalibera, where the food…