It’s the birthday of author Maria Lorena Moore, better known as Lorrie Moore, born in 1957 in Glen Falls, NY. While her literary output has been relatively modest, her short stories and novels can be at once devastatingly funny and moving. At 19 Moore won a fiction contest at Seventeen magazine, resulting in her first [...]
It’s the birthday of two California-born authors born seventy-six years apart, Jack London and Walter Mosley. London (real name John Griffith Chaney) was born in San Francisco in 1876 and is perhaps best known for his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Mosley was born in Los Angeles in 1952 [...]
It’s the birthday of the great philosopher, psychologist, and thinker William James, born in 1842 in New York, NY, brother to novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. His father was a wealthy Swedenborgian theologian, highly restless and intellectual, and his children received a quirky, irregular, trans-Atlantic education. James got a degree in medicine from [...]
This is hands down our favorite summer dessert. The first time I made it, we inhaled the whole thing, then looked around and said, "Where'd it go?" So I made a second one that same day. It's super easy, so why not? Serve it warm with vanilla ice cream for [...]
Have I mentioned that these recipes are in no particular order? Because if they were, this recipe would probably be #1. At some point in the past decade, I found myself at a well-known Italian chain restaurant (but not the one you're thinking of), looking at my plate and thinking, "Meh. I could have done [...]
If you've read my novel, Starting from Scratch, you may recall that Olivia's mother, Vivian, wrote a popular cooking newsletter, "Cooking with Vivian." And if you and I are friends, you may know that long before I wrote that novel, I had a little cooking newsletter myself: "Cooking with the Insecure Chef." It was quite different from [...]
