Every time I go on “vacation” I feel like a jackhammer pummels the buttresses of my known world and shakes loose the filaments that fetter my identity to Seattle, my career, and the choices I have made in life that make me who I am. I put “vacation” in quotes because I can’t remember the last time I had a real one. Every time I hitch a ride in a plane, train or automobile of late, the agenda eclipses the pleasure.

Is the camera battery charged and the memory card depleted of photos of goat cheese dappled by midsummer light? Because god forbid I should forget to photograph every wind turbine and plate of chili along the way in case I choose to feature something. Are the business cards packed? Did I secure the coveted reservation at the newest restaurant in LA and have I invited the correct coterie to join me? Should I change my middle name to Networking? Isn’t the high-profile chef who just got the glowing New York Times review going to be on the cruise? MUST make it a point to share a cocktail or ten with him one evening. Read more

Pizza. It is a thing beloved by millions of people across the globe, if not billions. It is something that inspires joy, lust, loathe, litigation, and fisticuffs. We all have our own personal journey with pizza; mine started at age five at Keystone Pizza in Mountain Home, Idaho.

Back then (in the olden days) the Chuck E Cheese craze had yet to sweep the nation and kids’ birthday parties were still hosted in backyards in the summer and independent pizza parlors in the winter. Since my parents so fortuitously conceived me in early spring, I have the great pleasure of sharing a birth week with Jesus. There should be a three-month moratorium on sex during spring just so no one will have a chance of being born around the same time as the dude in the leather sandals. I mean, he gets a party that people all over the planet celebrate, so how great can a Podunk pizza hoedown in a postage stamp-sized town be in comparison?

Nevertheless, I made do with what I had, and so found myself and ten of my closest Montessori friends wreaking havoc on pizza and piñatas on December 22, 1982. By then I was vegetarian, so I stuck with cheese and managed passable five-year-old pretension at the pepperoni-lovers of the bunch. Thinking back, I developed my eccentricities a young age, as I also remember secreting red velvet pants into my backpack to put on under my dresses once I got to school. Read more

The freedom of blog writing is often oppressive. You can say whatever you want; it’s your stage from which to project the deepest catacombs of your soul. That’s a lot of pressure when all you want to do is convey the succulent fortitude of a perfectly-stuffed breast of duck. But really, would you be splaying that Moulard for all the world to see if it weren’t for the events of your past conspiring together to make you who you are today?

Some of you may know that I lived on half of Noah’s Ark when I was wee. My father, with visions of Laura Ingalls dancing (not pole-dancing, barn-dancing) in his head, moved my mixed-marriage bi-racial family from Southern California to the Ozarks of Idaho when I was young. In order to complete his coterie of characters, he decided animals were in order. After all, when you have ten acres and you’ve deprived your children of friends, surf, sand, tacos, and all things that come with a SoCal childhood, the least you can do is provide them with the amusement of animalia. Read more