Kate Flaim (Girl Reporter)

There wasn’t much spring here in New Hampshire this year–it’s gone straight to summer, and right now it is 85 degrees. The good news is that we have nice cool nights, much like back home in Oregon, so the sleeping is still good. The birds, however, are not sleeping well–they were up at 4:30 this [...]

Last Thursday we hosted a surprise 30th birthday party for our friend Chris. Preparations involved quite a few weeks of subterfuge by his wife Ann, and we spent several days shopping and cooking before the party, all uner the guise of driving lessons for me. The week before we spent a memorable afternoon making about [...]

For the second night feeding the boys, we grilled burgers and sausage and ate outside. We invited Chris and Ann over to talk marketing with the college kids, and then Brian and Liz came over to play catch and we asked them to stay, too. All 8 of us squeezed around the table on the [...]

I am trying to avoid falling back on pasta for non-company dinners, so last night I tried a recipe from Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, a chinese-inspired eggplant/shallot/ginger mixture to serve with chicken. The shallots get browned for a while, then in goes the eggplant until it’s nice and browned and soft. A bunch [...]

Spring threatened to finally arrive this weekend, hitting us with incredible hot days and lots of sun, but it has already vanished again–today is grey and cool. Between trips to Boston on Friday and Tuesday, and Ben taking a business trip Monday and Tuesday, I feel like we’ve barely been home (or seen each other) [...]

Last Wednesday, two days after the big storms here in the Northeast, our power went out at about 5:20 in the afternoon. A few hours later it was clear we wouldn’t be getting it back until nearly midnight, so, accompanied by the unearthly racket of our neighbor’s obnoxious generator, I went ahead with the stir-fry [...]

Fine, winter. You’ve beaten me. I give up. (Above: The view from my office at 9:50 this morning. April 12. Gah.)

Berries in the snow: Siamese Dried Porcini: The cardinals that live in the trees outside my window: Major snow: My paperwhite: The nutcracker ornament my grandmother sent me–very similar to my favorite ornament growing up, the one I *always* put on the tree: Chef Yossi “Lotion de Chef,” an oil-free lotion designed for cooks. I [...]

As kids my brother and I both read the Little House series until our copies fell apart, and recently I picked up a used copy of Farmer Boy at a library sale and we both reread it. FB was always my favorite because instead of detailing the brutal struggle of pioneer life, it talks about [...]

12/13: We had a slightly last-minute cocktail party for our friends who were still in town by the second week of December. Ben bought a very large quantity of cheese at the Coop, and we still have tons of cashews from an unfortunate bulk-buy this fall. Our friend Nancy (the Foods that Begin with P [...]