One late afternoon my daughter and I fell into a little café in Walton Street in London, looking for a cup of tea and something sweet to give us the energy to push on through one of our “lists of things we have to do while we’re here.” There’s something about travel that gets the adrenaline humming – maybe it’s knowing you might never come this way again, so you don’t want to miss a thing. We were already falling […]
Summer comes early in Washington, DC. By late April we need air conditioning, and any thought of outdoor parties has to be put away until the fall, unless you manage to spontaneously catch a rare cool night. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t summer parties here, though it helps if they involve alcohol and light clothing as distractions. Washington was built on a swamp; in fact, British diplomats who served here in the 19th century were given extra pay for […]
No matter how you spell it – crozetti, corzetti, curzetti – this northern Italian pasta is delightful. I was walking through Georgetown one day and saw that a new shop called Via Umbria had opened up. I thought it was an Italian kitchenware shop, but it turned out to be so much more. There was beautiful Italian food to eat there or take away, a wine room with a generous tasting going on, and lots of great Italian pastas – […]
There’s a wonderful Greek restaurant in Malibu called Taverna Tony’s, where they serve an addictive dip with warm pita bread that’s so good we barely have room left to eat all the Greek deliciousness that follows. I always say to the waiters, “What’s in this stuff?” – like there’s some secret ingredient that explains why we – and everyone at the tables around us – are scraping the bowl and licking our fingers. The friendly waiters patiently reel off the […]
When I was a kid, we had a big strawberry patch that needed to be picked clean every June, beginning just as school was out for the summer. My brother and I hated that patch. When the fruit was ready, we’d spend long mornings bent over in the hot sun picking berries – itchy, sweaty, back-breaking work – which my parents then gave away to friends and neighbors. One especially hot summer when the season was over, the straw that […]
