| 23 February 2010
Celebrations don’t always have to be grandiose affairs. One of the nicest holiday dinners I ever had consisted of a simple beef stew with salad and a loaf of homemade bread. The food was delicious, but what made the evening special was the great conversation and laughter shared among good friends.
To me “simple” means either a long, slow and savoury braise or a fast and furious sauté. With the former, dinner goes into the oven and you settle back with a glass of wine. With the latter, your guests come right into the kitchen to help with the preparation. Either way, the focus is on fun and good food, not cooking and cleanup.
| 15 January 2010
Allow me to be the first female on the planet to admit that I shop too much. There, I’ve said it. And now I feel like shopping.
What is it about shopping? Shoe shopping, clothes shopping, lingerie shopping, shopping for bling — I do it all and with the focus and agility of an Olympic athlete. Seriously, I could be a trainer for fledgling shoppers like my granddaughter Paige who didn’t have the word ‘spree’ in her vocabulary until I taught her the absolute exhilaration of using her little arms for showcasing prestigious retail bags.
And now with Internet shopping, the universe is my mall, open 24/7. Bad dream? Boyfriend trouble? Indigestion? No problem. Retail therapy is just a click away.
| 02 December 2009
Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life as a side dish. I’m neither light enough to be the appetizer nor meaty enough to be the entrée — and I’m most definitely not sweet enough to be dessert.
If I were in a sitcom, I’d be the wise-cracking, slightly wacky next door neighbour — Ethel rather than Lucy, Rhoda rather than Mary, Kramer rather than Seinfeld. Slightly plump, rumpled and frazzled, and always funny.
My second banana suspicions were confirmed when I joined community theatre. I was universally cast as the silly sidekick. Either the feisty Ado Annie in Oklahoma, the flittering stripper Tessie Tura in Gypsy and the bowlegged, pipe-smoking Mammy Yokum in Lil Abner. And so it goes.
| 25 November 2009
At the risk of sounding like a modern-day Scrooge, I’ve got to log a few complaints against the holidays.
The fact is there are several parts of the whole holiday hoo-haw that are just plain annoying. Like all those little kids running amok at the mall. Don’t get me wrong, theoretically I like kids. I even have one of my own who provided me with the unexpected bonus of grandkids. But I can send them all home when they get noisy, which is often. Try doing that at the mall.
Another thing I don’t like about the holidays is being invited to see someone’s tree. Honestly, I have never seen a Christmas tree that looked any different from anyone else’s tree, except for my mother’s, which sits in a dusty corner of the basement completely decorated all year long. She doesn’t even bring it upstairs anymore, but she does invite us all over “to see the tree.”