09.3.2012 
I'm a couple of days late, but here's what I loved most about the hot month of August.
1. Grate a tomato, rub bread with garlic, and eat. Do it before the season's over.
2. The Everygirl is a practical and stylish website I'm really enjoying.
3. Giddy when this new cookbook arrived.
4. Tried some new restaurants this month. Celebrated Julia Child here and all around seasonal fare here.
5. Shirts for recovering English majors.
08.31.2012 
My friend Sara wrote a cookbook. It's beautiful, thoughtful, and full of the kind of recipes you've come to rely on from her blog, Sprouted Kitchen. I read it cover to cover the day it arrived, and have since gone back to revisit all the pages I added post-it notes to. You might want to bookmark this recipe for the first cold snap, because it will be here sooner than we realize.
Andrew and I went to the Hollywood Bowl last weekend (it never really feels like summer until I've done that). We enjoyed a picnic in the grass (grilled pepper, onion and goat cheese sandwiches + white bean and zucchini salad + macaroons from Bouchon + a crisp Sauvignon blanc), then found our seats and cozied up to the smoky voice of Diana Krall.
I made Sara's smoky red lentil soup the next day, and Andrew went on a hilarious diatribe about how he doesn't really like soup. But wait. It gets better. (And just for the record, he approved everything I'm about to say, and even suggested that I tell Sara about how this conversation went down.)
08.21.2012 
Molded in the cold earth, potatoes sprout up when we need them, the moist dirt still flecked on its skin until scrubbed away. And there's nothing wrong with the fact that potatoes have been historically associated with peasants and rural-dwellers, poverty, and hunger. All the best meals begin humbly, don't they?
Potatoes live a hard, wrenching existence, but a purposeful one. The potato is a mighty workhorse, that much is certain. Versatile. Reliable. It offers the kind of stick-to-your-ribs meal that has enabled human survival.
My goodness, that all sounds dreary. Let's move to the poem, shall we?
08.13.2012 
Do you ever have one of those moments when you wake up, let your thoughts go, and wonder how you arrived where you're currently sitting? I do. Not often, but every six months or so I might be driving down Santa Monica Boulevard or wine tasting or just reading a book on my lunch break, and there it is. How did I get here? The answer is usually very practical. You quit your job, packed a U-Haul, got another job, etc. Yes, that's how I got here, physically. but there's another side to our journey, and this poem is working on uncovering it.
That's where we find our speaker. In the kitchen, craving "a sandwich in the moonlight," and hungry for far more than a meal.
08.7.2012 
You knew this one was coming, right?
Perhaps one of the most analyzed modern poems, "This is Just to Say" leaves great room for interpretation. Critics have assumed everything from uselessness, to regret, to sexual frustration as key themes. Critics not only debate its meaning, but whether the poem is a poem at all. Some claim it was a note scribbled on a napkin left for his wife to find, others question its poetic backbone because, aside from all the lines looking the same aesthetically, the compilation of words is void of discernable metrical form.
Welcome to the world of poetic analysis.
I hope you'll allow me to take you as far away from this world as possible.
