My Favorite Summer Salads

Ironically, fresh local lettuce is harder to come by in the heat of summer than in spring and fall—lettuce prefers cooler temperatures. Yet, there is no better food to fix on a hot night, when you don’t want to heat up the house with cooking. Here are two of my favorite summer salads that you can eat as a full meal. And they’re highly flexible, so you can adapt them to your own family’s taste.

Greek Salad

Ingredients:

1 head romaine lettuce (or… more

Reading For Pleasure: My Top 5 Favorite Authors

By now, most people know I’m a lover of romance novels. I’ve been trying for years to break down some of the stigma and erase the shame. The truth is, I need romance novels to survive, and if they didn’t exist, I would have to invent them. The very reasons I need them all year round is what makes them so great for summer vacation beach reading: They take you away from your daily reality, they erase whatever little niggling annoyances are bouncing around your brain, and in the end they… more

Tags: Top 10 List

Living Proof of the American Mediterranean Diet

My in-laws, Rita and Louie Cinquino, are both 88, and have been happily married for more than 65 years. That’s happy with a little h. They annoy the heck out of each other, and complain about each other behind their backs all the time, but after 65 years they are like a fine-tuned machine, even if lots of the parts don’t work. He can’t walk, but he can still drive. She’s never been able to drive but she sure can cook. So can he, actually.

The sad fact is they are finding it harder… more

The Summer That Never Was…

My 12-year-old daughter keeps begging me to go back-to-school shopping, and I tell her she may not ask again for at least two weeks…but then that’s only a week before school starts. ARRRRGGGHHHHH! I feel like summer never even started!

Between the constant rain and cool weather (there wasn’t one single night where I lay in bed too hot to think and in need of a cold shower—that’s a happy feeling, trust me) and having been so busy that I never even got to my favorite plant nurseries… more

Is It True That People Don’t Cook Anymore?

A recent story by Michael Pollan in the New York Times magazine implied that the problem with Americans is that we actually don’t cook anymore—we just watch it on TV. He blamed it on the usual suspects, including our disconnection from where our food comes from, the corrupting influence of television, and a food industry that conspires to make us dependent on their processed products.

But then I thought about my own life and cooking arc, and can’t I help but wonder if there is… more