My friend Pilar has just opened an empanada shop with her husband Juan on Washington Avenue (right next to Lincoln Road) in Miami’s South Beach called Half Moon Empanadas.

The food is as satisfying as the great typefaces in the logo, and Pilar tells me everything is made in the restaurant:

My favorite is the [...]

Skirting the storms about the magic cottage this morning, I began thinking about seasons in Miami.

Humming Nico’s “The Fairest of the Seasons” (on last.fm here), I thought about how difficult it is to measure time when the leaves are always green.
Other leaves near the magic cottage have small tears, holes, but these have [...]

Were I to be scrupulously honest, I suppose I might admit this is less a salad and more a deconstructed guacamole.
But as I’m not so inclined, this recipe is a light dressing, a sharp uppermost layer for soft, green flesh encrusted with red salt that sparkles like garnets on top of the fruit Jenne [...]

My beautiful friend Jenne drove with me to the end of the world today–or, at least, what felt like the end of the world as the road ended and we got out to look around.

She smiled as we heard the sounds of things uncivilized approaching…

and an ATV trio rumbled past in their mudded glory. [...]

In late morning, the light through rippled glass dances, lines appear for a moment and reappear, reminding me that we only see the parts of light filtered into wavelengths we can comprehend. And the rest? Whimsy just out of sight…

Most mornings, I pause briefly to admire the leaves of a plant just outside the magic cottage–some are green with red veins, some red with green veins.

As though woven by chlorophyll artists, I noticed the slight tears and small holes in many of the leaves the other day. Perhaps part of the tropical storm [...]

My younger sister Kassandra (she’s the youngest of the three of us) is an incredible, fierce dancer who just moved from San Francisco, where she was training with Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and posing in front of walls of graffiti. (Stunning, isn’t she?)

I’ve just freshened her personal site kassandrataylor.com;

you’ll see new Flickr images, [...]

The wild winds of Tropical Storm Fay are whipping around the magic cottage today.
So we’re making my favorite breakfast food, pancakes, with crispy edges (more edges in HD version here):

Recipe: 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt. Stir. Crack one egg in middle, add 1 cup buttermilk. Stir. Drop [...]

As we wait out a tropical storm in Miami, I am thinking of a sky loom rather than the looming sky, inspired by this part of Anthony Doerr’s breathtaking, brief piece in this summer’s Granta:
Salmon, wildebeest, locusts. Storks, swifts, snow geese. What if the torrents of animals migrating past us every year left behind traces [...]

My good friend Antony, who lives in Sydney, just reminded me of this great clip with New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo.
My favorite part is the supermarché aisle sequence, and it strikes me that many of my beautiful American readers may be in [...]