Culinary Adventures with Camilla

If there was ever any doubt that I adore books, you need only look at my Foodie Reads Challenges  - past and present . I published posts about 36 books in 2016, 38 in 2017; already this year, I've blogged over a dozen.  And these are just the ones that have a food component or inspire me to create a dish. I read all the time and I read books. Real books. I don't have a kindle or any other kind of ebook reader. R does and it certainly helps when we go on trips - he brings that device and the rest of us haul a tote full of heavy books. Still, I am a book-gal. Sadly, we don't have many brick and mortar bookstores on the Monterey Peninsula any more. Whenever we head up to the Bay Area, bookstores are always on our list of places to stop. When The Friends of the Marina Library opened their Friends' Community Bookstore at the end of last year, I put it on my 'to-do' list. So, when D and I had some free time this past weekend, we drove to Marina ...

I just wrote this for the WE Cooperative CSA newsletter, but wanted to share it with my blog readers as well: Food Thoughts From My Nightstand  [linked to WE Cooperative] I read voraciously. My nightstand looks like the leaning tower of Pisa. No joke. Reading settles my mind and gets me ready for sleep. But it also invigorates me, stretching my mind and presenting me with new ideas. I guess I should specify that I read a lot of non-fiction. Most of the time, the volumes are food-centric. I love anything by Mark Kurlansky, who has written tomes about salt, cod, oysters, and a fascinating portrait of food in America before we had interstate highways. And I just finished two books about bees and honey while I wrapped up an article about local beekeepers. But it's my latest arrival that I wanted to share with you. I recently cracked the cover on Mark Bittman's  Eat Vegan Before 6:00 . Having been a fan of Bittman's for awhile now, I probably would have bought it a...

Though I am not big on New Year's resolutions, I did make one this year: read more. I've had a life-long love affair with books - for anyone that has ever helped me move, they can vouch for this fact - but once I had kids, I stopped reading for myself. It took years for there to be a book on my nightstand that wasn't a board book or one with more pictures than words. Seriously. Now that both boys read on their own, I miss curling up under their covers, a mass of arms and legs wrapped around mine while I try to hold a book where they can both glimpse at the pages. But I am grateful that I can now whittle down the mountain of books I have on my nightstand. I rarely read novels. Mostly natural history. Some historical fiction. But this year I found a Sustainable Food Book Club , or at least I found their reading list. I had already read two of the books on there; and I owned several of them. Remember that Everest of pages? So, I decided that was the perfect list to get ...