California is SO big that sometimes I forget about the areas to the furthest North and South of the state. Way up, almost at the Oregon border, is the 14,000 foot high Mount Shasta, surrounded by miles and miles of forest. Rob, Nicole and I drove up on Friday night for a weekend of skiing,…

Your wedding season requests keep coming! Laura recently wrote in for help dressing for  a wedding at San Francisco’s City Hall:  I’ve been reading your blog forever and never had a thing to write in about until now! I’m 34, have two kids (4 and a 7 month old nursing baby) and am going to…

It’s early in the planning stages, but it looks like Rob and I will be in Europe for five weeks this summer! He has a business meeting in Barcelona in mid-May and another in Geneva in mid-June – so we’re hoping to stay “on the continent” for the four weeks in between and maybe dash…

A four-foot-tall pink jellyfish chandelier…three courses of delicious seafood…one ridiculous plastic crab hat…nothing less would do for the birthday celebration of my great friend Margaret!  The night’s menu included Spanish and Moroccan flavors – two of her favorite places to travel. Enchantment Under the Sea Menu  Castelvetrano olives Black rice tabouli salad with cranberry bean…

Newsies opened last night with SHN at the Orpheum in San Francisco! Our awesome friends Greg and Kevin gave us tickets to come along with them as a belated birthday present.  In case your memory of the 1992 movie starring Christian Bale is rusty – the show is about a bunch of extremely energetic starving street…

Literally the minute the luncheon ended on Saturday, our friends Bill and Leslie arrived from Tahoe to visit for the rest of the weekend. It felt like a “changing of the guards.” After an afternoon run-around in the park down the street, we decided to have an evening adventure with a few things that little…

The second week of February is a really good one in San Francisco. Not only do we have Valentine’s Day but the city is also bustling with Chinese New Year celebrations and there’s usually a heat-wave around this time that makes it feel so summery. I hosted a luncheon last Saturday for a group of…

Wedding season is almost here! Those save-the-date cards are arriving in mailboxes and creating wardrobe havoc all across the country. Weddings can be so tough to dress for: no black, no white, no red. If you want to wear pants instead of defaulting to a dress, it is even harder. Catherine wrote in recently with…

Black rice lends a dark elegance to this super simple, super healthy salad. It made for a quick lunch on Monday, but could see serving this at a spring luncheon party topped with a beautiful piece of broiled salmon. Black rice salad with beet greens, nuts and olives Four servings, 35 minutes 1 cup black…

I only decided to have this dinner party at about 10:00 in the morning the day of. I had one friend coming in town to stay for the week, another friend coming to visit for dinner from Santa Cruz, Rob was in NYC on business and I had a lot of things to say about…