bits of wisdom

how we travel

When I was sixteen, my aunt took me on a road trip. We started at her purple Victorian in the Richmond District in San Francisco and drove east through California to Mono Lake in the Sierra Nevadas. We drove south from there, winding through Yosemite and following the mountains down until we got to ...

I've been thinking a lot about Patience Gray lately, and her book Honey From a Weed. I talked about her with Joe Yonan a bit on this week's episode of The Splendid Table, and every time someone asks me about who I'm reading, her name keeps coming up. I think it's because I see her writing about the ...

I am a fan of second projects. All through these last few years that I've been working on my own little second project, there's been a phenomenon that's come to my attention. No one tells you about it the first time around, but it seems to hit a whole lot of people who have the good fortune to get ...

First... Kristin in Franklin County, you won the Fire Cider! Just tell me where to send the goods. And thank you to everyone who entered. Last week, I had the great fortune to spend a week at one of my new favorite places, the Spruceton Inn. It was a really great week. I got loads done and came ...

I want to tell you a little bit about Freida. I've never had a dog, and I've never really wanted one. I like cats because they're soft and beautiful and independent and smell faintly of hay. But over the last few years, I started to change without even realizing it. I'd ask people on the ...

If I were here to give you a tip (tip being the choice over recipe, which is the other thing that makes me useful here), it would be this: Now is the time to light candles. Every day. This past week where I am, we fell back in time, and the world got dark. I love this part of the year. I love ...

I finally sat down and read all the pieces people have sent to me and the ones I've flagged as they show up in my never-ending "feed". It seems, on the whole, to be an attempt at an honest conversation about home cooking, although I don't think we're quite there yet. I've got responses and ...

When I was little, I went to a place I remember in my mind as Peace Camp. The camp director was the brother of a friend of my mother's, and she worked out some deal to get me out of her hair for the summer. My first year, I was seven, the youngest camper there. For four whole weeks, I hollered ...

The other night, I was chopping onions. I've been doing this a lot lately, as I'm in the middle of final tests of all sorts of recipes for my next book that are no possible way seasonal. We may be surrounded by corn and tomatoes and peaches, but we're eating soup and lamb shanks and pumpkin pie. ...

I'm a week away from a deadline. It's not THE deadline, but it's a big one nonetheless- big enough to have me up when it's dark and still writing when it gets dark again. At the heart of this, I love what I'm doing, but still, part of me looks out the window at the world and the garden and the birds ...

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how we travel

jess's kale and pomegranate salad

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until the sun comes back

why I love/hate/have to cook

August 6

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