This blog post was originally published back in 2015, in collaboration with friends Rina and Laura. We were celebrating the 80th birthday of Julie Andrews, star of one of our all-time favorite musicals The Sound of Music. With the sad news of the great Christopher Plummer’s passing today, I thought it would be fitting to…
Category: Movies
Downsizing Thanksgiving
This will be the second year in a row my immediate family has celebrated a very scaled-down Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t remember exactly why we didn’t produce the usual large extended family Thanksgiving get-together last year. I think it was a combination of no one wanting to commit to hosting a big spread, some relatives…
Let the chips fall where they may…so long as they land in cookie dough.
“If the world comes to an end, I’m going to want cookies.” Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It Last weekend I watched the thoroughly enjoyable Palm Springs on Hulu. In the comedy, Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) find themselves stuck together in an escapable “Groundhog’s Day” wedding party scenario. While the tone…
Art of the Wrap…or dumpling traditions
There’s this now famous scene about halfway into the box-office phenomenon that is Crazy Rich Asians (2018) where the obscenely wealthy Young family gather around an ornate dining room table of their matriarch’s impressively vast estate to make dumplings, decked out in stylish designer clothes. The scene is set up so that the elder members,…
Failure IS an option…if you want to make something great.
“You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones. “ –Adam Grant Or you gotta break a few (dozen) eggs to bake a cake–or in my case a few cases. I regularly post pics of food I’ve made on Instagram…almost always of the successes, rarely of the failures. I…
Comic: Hey, Girl! Spoiler Alerts!
If you are planning to watch the movie “The Notebook” and don’t want any spoilers, then you probably shouldn’t read this comic or talk movies with my mom. (Click on the image for a bigger glimpse.)
Halloween…Or Confessions of a Scaredy Cat
I’m an unmitigated scaredy cat when it comes to horror movies and not ashamed to admit it–blame it on a neurotic, overly dramatic, “waiting for the apocalypse” mother and my own active imagination. No doubt many of my friends have hunkered down in front of their television sets with pizzas and big bowls of popcorn for…
Antidote for Weekday Supper Madness
Even for those of us in the food industry who spend the greater part of our lives cooking or baking professionally, when it comes to supper we’re often at a lost just like everyone else. It’s very easy living in a foodie city to succumb to the urge to simply eat out or pick up…
Birthday Girl…or 40 is the new 30.
It took weeks of stealth planning…endless Facebook messaging…multiple revisions…crafty, deliberate misdirections…all in an effort to throw Rina the surprise 40th birthday party she richly deserved. She did not make it easy. We all knew she wanted something special to mark this milestone, but being the suspicious woman that she is, Rina kept her husband, Ken, and…
Blame It on Rio (Olympics)
I’m trying to get into the spirit of watching the Rio Olympics…really I am. I must admit, though, the opening ceremonies left me more than just a little bored–so much so that I ended up switching over to The Great British Bake-Off (hey it was the semi-finals!) about an hour into the broadcast. Maybe it…