Compromise Cake Excerpt: Chapter 1. Marquerite’s Desire
My mother is by my side as I roll out a piecrust in my southern California kitchen, instructing me with an authority and enthusiasm she rarely displayed in her life. I don’t make piecrust often, but when I do she is always there, at least in my imagination… more>
Compromise Cake Excerpt: Chapter 2. Compromise Cake
When I discovered the index card for Compromise Cake, brown with age and handwritten, my first thought was whether my mother ever baked it. And if so, did she ever eat a piece? The woman I knew was an uncompromising character. This cake was not part of her limited cake-baking repertoire by the time I came along, baby number four. In the years following my parents’ divorce, she gave up most efforts to get along with anybody, abandoning the relationships she’d once enjoyed with neighbors, childhood friends, her family, and even her children…more>
Entertaining Disasters Excerpt: Chapter 2. Chronic Culinary Fatigue Syndrome
In my previous life as a hostess I did dinner parties on a regular basis, despite the fact that each episode left me a shredded wreck. For months afterward I suffered facial tics and blurred vision and felt stupid, my mind gooey as marmalade, with a shocking loss of energy requiring…
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Entertaining Disasters Excerpt: Chapter 11.
Garlic Makes Us Interesting
Recipes. I once followed them exactly, blindly, putting my faith in the author, known or not. I collected them freely, like rubber bands or those little cards with extra buttons and yarn that come with every piece of clothing you buy, believing fully that I would someday get around to…
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Anywhere But Here Syndrome (Salon.com) I am gutting a fresh anchovy in a kitchen in Umbria as if my happiness depends upon it. And it does.
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I Want My HGTV! (Salon.com) I’m addicted to cable television’s Home and Garden TV. Ever since HGTV joined our local lineup, I’ve been mesmerized by this encyclopedic video shelter magazine with its steady stream of design chat, remodeling rambles and how-to tips.
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American Idle (Salon.com) The stage doors have shut and it’s too late to leave. Wolf howls and simian screams ring out in response to the warm-up guy’s plea for noise. Now he wants us to do the wave. The audience waiting for the live West Coast broadcast of “American Idol” is all too eager to comply.
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Some Assembly Required:
Ikea Meatballs for the Do-It-Yourselfer (Los Angeles Times Magazine) Between soul-satisfying spoonfuls of ribollita at a sophisticated Florentine trattoria, I confessed to the charming Swedish couple we’d been seated with that I was a fan of Ikea meatballs. “But of course,” beamed the husband, head of a major Swedish muffler company.
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Living on Fruitcake Time (Los Angeles Times Magazine) It was early November and I was feeling positively Medieval, listening to Anonymous 4 singing the music of Hildigard von Bingen from their 11,000 Virgins album as I chopped pecans for fruitcake. With more than a month before Christmas there was still time to make my annual mèlange of fruits (candied, yes, but extra heavy on the dried kind for zip and tang), nuts, molasses, butter and brandy baked into a fragrant, terrazzo-like loaf.
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Eat ‘Em and Weep (Los Angeles Times Magazine) Sufferin’ synchronicity! I’m talking to the nation’s leading authority on tears and crying, William H. Frey, II, and he’s telling me about the almond cookies he’s only been able to find in Siena, Italy: “They were soft and chewy, they were the best cookies I’ve ever had in my life!”
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Delivering Pie in the Sky (Los Angeles Times Magazine) The only time I ever shipped a suspicious package through the mail was when I shipped a lemon meringue pie to a writer friend. I owed him a favor and promised a pie, but when he kept canceling the drop off date…
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Ripe Time For Tuscany (Los Angeles Times Sunday Travel) Fall in the region of Tuscany is a time of gracious fecundity, when vineyards are heavy with black fruit, figs fall from the trees, and the forests are filled with porcini mushrooms the size of throw pillows.
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A Gates Notebook (Coagula) My response to the orange splash across the morning New York Times was “not another Gates shot.” Relief came with the discovery it was flames from a car bomb in Beirut.
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Thomas Kinkade Laughs Last (Coagula) The Thomas Kinkade candy-colored cottage and garden-covered lamp in the bedroom Jeffrey Vallance created for the California State University Fullerton show Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth, made me think of Bill Viola. It was a fight or flight self-preservation thing, like holding garlic up to a vampire.
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Is Mah Jong The Best Art in L.A.’s Chinatown? (Coagula) I knew the manager of the Mah Jong Parlor wouldn’t call. Installation art never calls. At least not on the phone. That’s one of the things I like about it.
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Drawing Conclusions (Coagula) “Startling moments of awareness,” Agnes Martin wrote, “are never forgotten.” After immersing myself in the recent MOCA exhibit The Art of Richard Tuttle and subsequently touring the Getty’s Defining Modernity: European Drawings 1800-1900, I realized each show had provided me with at least one startling moment of awareness.
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Vija Celmins; A Drawing Retrospective (Coagula) Vija Celmins wishes to be removed from her art. The Latvian born reductionist has obsessively stripped her work down to its most essential elements.
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California Story (Cooking Light) Maybe it was the day I spent soaring in a hot air balloon over the silver grey artichoke fields of Castroville. Maybe it was a meal in a Napa restaurant with a mesclun salad picked that morning from a nearby field and a glass of Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon that tasted unmistakably of the valley’s iron-rich volcanic soil.
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Three Fattening Days at Greystone (Underground Wine Journal) Standing in the 15,000 square foot teaching kitchens of the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone at Napa dressed in white toque and lab coat, I felt like a professional chef. Cookbook author and Italian food expert Nancy Harmon Jenkins was showing me how to moosh anchovies for tagliatelle di San Giuseppe, St. Joseph’s Day pasta.
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Valley of the Dollars (Travel & Liesure) The theme of this year’s Silicon Valley Charity Ball is as pregnant with possibilities as the region it celebrates. So perhaps it’s appropriate that just a few months prior to the April 17 event, Paulette Beemiller, one of the organizers, was a still sketchy on the details.
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All The President’s Friends (West Magazine) For the life of me I didn’t know how I had got on the guest list for “The All Star Party for Dutch Reagan.” The letter of invitation had come on Frank Sinatra’s personal stationery.
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The Strip (Rain City Review) The static wind whips dust into steel wool as Leda drives Highway 15 through the Cajon Pass. Orange haze the color of an abandoned birthstone melts at the foot of the mountains, a sticky residue of autumn wildfires surging to the west. On the radio, reports of threatened propane tanks. Not good enough. The certainty of destruction is what Leda needs, not the mere promise.
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Ed Peterson: Native Plant Seed Collector Ed Peterson was born and raised in Hollywood, an anomaly in this city of transplants, and one of the gentlest souls I have ever met. I profiled him for the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1988 when he was 82 and did this short video profile in 1993 when he was 87. Ed celebrated his 100th birthday in April of 2004 with a sleep-on-the ground camping trip and a well-attended birthday party in a park above Pasadena. He was blind by that time but his mind was still in tact, and he could be found in the assisted living facility in Hollywood where he moved at age 96 listening to the recorded essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His passing later that year was noted with obituaries in both the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.
Call of the Natives: Gathering Wildflower Seeds in the Mountains and Deserts, Ed Peterson Preserves Southern California’s Plant Heritage The October morning is near the end of the seed-collecting season in what has been a very dry year, Ed Peterson warns in his high, sprightly voice. The 82 year-old retired gardener for the Los Angeles
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Ed Peterson: Native Pursuits (© Well-Intended Productions, 1993)
Go seed collecting with Ed, age 87, and hear him confess “I feel quite young in many ways…Sometimes I go out on my walk in the morning, especially in this cool weather and I feel almost like jumping.” His personal philosophy, not surprisingly, was “look to the future and keep moving.”
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The State of the Heart: One Man’s Journey From Death to Life
San Diego State University custodian and heart transplant patient, Larry Minniear, who I profiled for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine cover story in March 1988, lived a full and active after-transplant life, continuing to work for SDSU as late as June 2006, until succumbing to kidney failure brought on by anti-rejection drugs in December, 2007.
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