Three days ago, I started the Whole30 nutritional reset (which – to my eyes, at least – just seems to be the fancy term for a diet, except in this case there's no calorie-counting or finding weird substitutes for things). For 30 days, there's no dairy, sugar, legumes and grains of any kind, alcohol, processed…

Pardon the delay, dear readers, of my Friday link love, but I couldn't bring myself to post a thing yesterday, not with my heart in my throat at the thought of what was happening in Watertown, just a few minutes down the highway from my father's house. It was all way too close to home…

It was a big week here in our household. A gleaming red Kitchenaid mixer moved in and we are all very taken with it (her?). Even the baby gives it long, dreamy stares every time he passes it. I have a lot up my sleeve with this machine that I can't wait to tell you…

  Just me or did this week fly by? We had delicious little bunnies for Easter, made out of Quark-enriched yeast dough and pearl-sugar sprinkled yeast dough with raisins for eyes. I finally got around to reading Not Becoming My Mother, which just about broke my heart. And Hugo, doing his best to grow his…

Today is a holiday here and the city is quiet, quiet, quiet and feels totally empty. We have a visitor from Puglia in town, so there were sweet olives and fresh braids of mozzarella for lunch and ciambelline di Pasqua coated in thick sugar icing for dessert. It's certainly the coldest Easter I can remember,…

Spring! Wherefore art thou, spring?! Sigh. Inch-thick ice and snow is all that we've got here and a leaden gray sky that hangs there for what seems like time immemorial. But! It is Friday and my husband returns tonight! So there is much rejoicing here nevertheless. Tonight there will be Game of Thrones and homemade…

This week I bought myself striped (!) tulips, made an excursion to the other side of town (also known as Prenzlauer Berg), took 101 photos of Hugo sitting on his own without toppling over (double !!) and started my next home improvement project (but the shade of red is just a smidge too orange in…

When Russ Parsons refers to something as "little slices of heaven", you can bet your bottom dollar that I'll pay attention. But in this case, he wasn't talking about dessert, he was talking about these little three-minute videos that vegetable god Alain Passard started putting online. Because Russ doesn't speak French, he hit the Google…

Resolutions! Are we doing them, people, or do we find them yawningly tedious? I both make resolutions and sort of hate myself while making said resolutions. Because, on one hand, I like taking stock of the past year and thinking about things that I'd like to tweak, change or challenge myself to for the new…

One minute, you're just some lady heading out for a bottle of soy sauce and an evening stroll with your baby in the days before Christmas and the next you're suddenly the proud and somewhat puzzled owner of a pistachio-green Cuckoo rice cooker. True story! The strangest thing about this is that I am, shall…