Well, I usually make this salad with octupuses. (Look for the little red Matiz Gallego boxes of tinned octupus and sauté them in olive oil.) Instead of octupus, yesterday I found beautiful local squid at the market that I battered in a 1:1 mix of flour and beer, fried in a shallow pan of olive [...]

With only a vague idea of what Saturday might bring, I made a speck sandwich (this is the beautiful La Quercia Speck Americano you may be able to find near you) after yoga and waited for my wonderful friend Margaret and her family to arrive. Another stop in downtown Santa Cruz for our friend Stephanie [...]

These are marionberries, and below are olallieberries. See the difference? It’s difficult. The olallieberries are slightly longer. (And the family tree of berry cultivars is fascinating, if you’re into that kind of thing.) I wanted to wait until after the July holidays of American and French independence before posting about my favorite summer dessert that [...]

Last night was another magical Thursday summer salon at Fairy-Tale Farm in Santa Cruz, and the crafts table was soon crowded with feather artists and those skilled in the ways of pink fur. Margaret’s daughter Zsa Zsa (wearing a pink dress that matched her zebra jacket) showed us her flower clip creation, and I noticed [...]

Even more beautiful than big, bright dahlias (that apparently the Aztecs ate—but the flowers are not the food subject for this post), my sister Kassandra came to visit this past weekend, and we made roasted portobello sandwiches with homemade aioli, cut cherry tomatoes, and rocket on local bread rolls while we spilled secrets, as sisters [...]