I started this blog in August of 2005 on a whim. Never could I have expected it to become such an important part of my life, both personally and professionally. In fact, for the first few years of blogging, I kept my identity here firmly hidden because I was sure the blog would remain nothing more than a little passion project. It is nearly impossible to remember what online life was really like in those days, but I'll always treasure the feeling of utter bliss of discovery and kinship I stumbled upon when I started blogging and found an entire community of like-minded people right on the oth ..read more

Good morning! Have I ever told you about the time I interviewed to work in the test kitchen at Martha Stewart Living, back in the fall/winter of 2000/2001? I had recently left Paris behind me and was hoping to get a job in publishing in New York. My sights were set on book publishing, but I couldn't resist applying to this magazine job anyway (Martha Stewart! The magazine! The test kitchen!). I interviewed at a lot of places in that period, many that I don't even remember anymore, but bits and pieces of this interview have stuck with me all these years later. The desk in the test kitchen ..read more

Let me set the scene for you. It is 5:16 pm on Monday evening. It is very dark out. I am still wearing my pajama top under my sweater, because I never got around to showering today. The boys had to stay home from school and Kita today and you know how these things go. Mom's personal hygiene is always the first to go unless Mom insists on showering, everyone else be damned, and sometimes that small indulgence ("indulgence") is just a hill too far. (Is that the right metaphor? I'm tired.) (Also, "Mom"? Sigh.) The boys are watching a movie. They watched a movie yesterday too. And the day before ..read more

Well, remember how I said that I was still trying to figure out my way back to the kitchen on August 23rd? It's November 8th and I'm just barely getting there! September and October were mostly about survival. We ate a lot of Abendbrot and fish sticks and pasta and salad. I avoided the kitchen as much as I could. Happily, though, I did have one very big cooking revelation, which was discovering this method for juicy chicken schnitzel, in which you marinate pounded chicken in a creamy bath of mustard and mayonnaise before breading and frying it.  If you had told my eight-year-old self! My ..read more

Hello, hello! I am sitting at my dining table eating a cold blueberry pancake leftover from yesterday's celebratory breakfast. Celebratory because it marked the end of an unexpected quarantine triggered by the fact that we sat very close to someone infected with Covid-19 on one of our flights home from Italy two weeks ago and the boys, being unvaccinated, were therefore classified as close contacts. Wait. Two weeks? That makes me laugh. Italy feels like it was months ago. Something about being stuck indoors with two little boys who very much would rather be in Kita and school will make 11 day ..read more

Hello darlings! We are in Italy, which you probably - if you follow me on Instagram - already know. The boys and I arrived a week ago. It has been filthy hot and we have been doing the usual things: going to the beach, attempting to play badminton in the shade without collapsing from heat stroke, buying our weight in tomatoes and peaches from the market. Yesterday afternoon, while we were visiting a friend's baby rabbits and talking about the fox that stole her rooster a few weeks ago, a cold front finally came in. Last night we were able to sleep under coverlets again and not wake up with da ..read more

Berlin public schools let out for summer last week and the city emptied out almost immediately. The streets feel empty and quiet now, parking spots abound, rush hour is muted, the air is thick with the scent of the blossoming linden trees. The smell, heavily floral and intoxicating, hangs in our apartment too, the windows yanked open day after day in the hopes of catching a faint breeze. Hugo's school closes for summer tomorrow and next week the boys and I leave for Italy, where the heat has already scorched the grass yellow and my mother awaits us.  I am desperate to be there, itching w ..read more

Hello, good people! It is a beautiful June day. I am drinking a glass of Apfelschorle (which is the German term for when you mix fizzy mineral water with apple juice) and it is being cooled by the most beautiful ice cubes that I make using this mold, bringing me untold amounts of joy each time I pop out a perfectly beveled little cube. Mercury is retrograde until the end of the month and thus we have been gnashing our teeth for a week straight about all the various things that have gone haywire (to name only a few: broken brake lights on one car, a busted tire on another, a child who insisted ..read more

A few days after arriving back in Berlin, I was sent a huge crate of produce by Fresh Fruit Germany. Every single piece of produce was in perfect condition and with so much flavor! It was the perfect welcome back to my kitchen after nearly four weeks away. Cooking my way through the crate was so much more fun than first picking out a recipe, then going grocery shopping, then getting started in the kitchen. Instead, I had to quickly come up with ways to use up all the eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, lettuce, potatoes and leeks (just to name a few) that were in peak condition and wouldn't last l ..read more

I have been feeling a little...fragile as of late. For example, this obituary made me cry. This book that I finished last night left me with the most sickening case of existential dread. I went into the boys' room this morning for a morning snuggle, but one boy was happily reading in his top bunk and the other was far too busy setting up Playmobil knights for something as silly as snuggling, so I had to start my day snuggle-less. Who cares, right? Reader, the heartache, I tell you. Sometimes I don't think I'll ever be prepared for the heartbreak of them growing up. The sun has come out in ful ..read more