Many years ago, my husband became friends with Senator John McCain. He worked for him on his presidential campaign, and has always admired the Senator’s independent and principled stands in the Senate. Earlier this week we gave a dinner in his honor, and I wanted to make the meal as straightforward as the honoree. Dinner was built around Senator McCain’s favorite two foods, hot dogs and chocolate. This gave me the perfect opportunity to put together a menu of easy […]
My Grandmother Svec was a formidable cook. She could size up the day’s larder at a glance, start lunch and dinner for twenty, then spend the day in the vineyards clipping grapes, before returning ahead of us to get the food on the table. The best part of her cooking was her baking. She was a master of the flaky or yeasty fruit-filled concoctions that are a Czech trademark, and she baked in such quantity that it all seemed to […]
Bess Abell was Lyndon Johnson’s Social Secretary. The daughter of Earle Clements, a man who served Kentucky as both its governor and senator, she has lived her entire life around politics, and is currently the dean of the former social secretaries sorority. I love being around Bess. In addition to having some of the best social secretary stories of all time, she is a gifted raconteur, and always draws roars of laughter with her tales of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was […]
I keep a list of food holidays on my desk, both because it’s inspiration for this blog, and because it gives me an excuse to make something like a chocolate milkshake in the middle of the day for no apparent reason. Today is National Chocolate Milkshake Day, as you probably surmise. After I take food photos, which is a bit of a frantic process when it involves something melty like ice cream or a cocktail, the food remains, waiting to […]
If I ever write a children’s book, I’m going to call it Vineyard Tales. I have so many happy memories from growing up on a grape farm, and now that we’ve come to grape-picking season, they rise in my mind like the syrupy fragrance of ripe Concord grapes. Every fall when the grapes were ripe, I would race out to the vineyards after school. The weather was still sunny, but you could feel autumn coming in the crisp breeze that […]
