Eat. Drink. Live.
Suzie and Joe’s annual New Year’s Day Open House. We’ve covered this extensively over the years, and I’m pleased by that — because this year, they’ve announced it will no longer be annual!
An annual tradition to see the tree on New Year’s Day, continued. Though this year, we did not get up super-early and get there first thing in the morning. We slept in a bit, and got there around noon. Skaters! […]
A little coffee in the morning… … then a family trip to see “Mary Poppins” at the movies. No photos from there, but we did have lunch at Yard House afterward. Not that bad!
Joe and Suzie hosted year’s annual reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” Now, you may recall that Joe and Suzie also host a New Year’s Day Open House, and they spend days preparing for it. So, they did the […]
A festive salad for a winter ‘s day. It takes advantage of the so-sweet Texas grapefruit we love to have around the holidays — and the blood oranges and Cara Cara oranges that are so good this time of year. […]
Steve and Jessie hosted a lovely brunch for the neighborhood to toast the new year together. A lovely way to end the old, with delicious food and lovely company.
After the present opening chaos, we took a nice walk, did a few chores around the house, and had our traditional tamale supper. Merry Christmas!
Christmas morning for a seven-year-old! We slept til 9 (go Sammy!) and opened gifts by the fire. Sam got: a LOL doll, a Beanie Boo, a joke book, Squishmallows, binoculars, an Electromagnetic toy kit, a rocket toy kit, a LOT […]
We celebrated in the traditional way, by attending the early Christmas Eve service and dining at Sondra and Leigh’s afterward. We had oysters — Pemaquids, this time, from a great mail-order company we just discovered called Real Oyster Cult — […]
When you don’t do carbs, but you want something like mashed potatoes to go with your big holiday meal. Or just your roast chicken. This recipe is super-easy, and very, very rich. There is more butter in this than I […]
This is one hell of a big piece of meat. And it ain’t cheap. But every now and again, it’s really nice to do something really extravagant. And the roast keeps on giving: we’ll have leftovers and make broth for […]
A lovely combination of of arugula with walnuts and gorgonzola, topped pomegranate, this salad was inspired by one I’ve had at the wine bar Spuntino in Clifton, New Jersey. It’s a good salad to serve at Christmas because it’s red […]
We haven’t been doing it religiously (see what I did there?), but we tried this month to keep up with Advent prayers and lighting the wreath before dinner each evening. Today was the Fourth Sunday and we lit the pink […]
A walk downtown, to the library and with a stop at Hickory Dickory Dock, the most Christmas-y store ever.
Dave and the sports team at NorthJersey.com did a cool thing this season: they took it on the road. Dave and the beat writers for the Jets and Giants set up a Facebook live show from Redd’s, a sports bar […]
Had a fun Saturday at the house, making a gingerbread house and doing a 300-piece puzzle. it was nice to have this kind of down time during the holiday season. Very relaxing.
When the grapefruit arrives from Harlingen, Texas, in the Valley, as they say, our thoughts turn immediately to our favorite Christmastime cocktail, the Salty Dog. We’ve shared the recipe before — here it is: Salty Dog recipe — so this […]
A holiday lunch at Porta — and a goodbye to our food editor Susan, who is (happily!) retiring. Food was terrific. Company was lovely. We will miss Susan.
This year, for the winter party at Sam’s school, the children were asked to do a project that represents their holiday traditions. Sam chose cutting down our Christmas tree (a long-standing SCF tradition that dates back to 2017). We came […]
Lucky us! Greg scored a new couch at the Design Within Reach Employee sale. We have loved our old “Gucci” couch — so dubbed by our guests because it is so luxuriously comfortable — and it has served us well […]
Like last year, Sam was a sheep for our annual Grace Church School Christmas Pageant. She makes an excellent “Baa!”
Reading the stories in the Advent calendar, eating oysters, drinking bubbly. Hard to think of a better way to spend a Saturday night.
Some photos from the rehearsal for the Christmas Pageant.
Another super meal at Viaggio in Wayne. I can never not get the breasola, and it lived up to past billings. But the new star of the show was the calamari. Oh, this calamari! The photo does not do it […]
As a way to share holiday traditions, the second grade was asked to make a project. It could be a movie, a story, a painting, a diorama, anything. Sam chose to make a triptych. The center is our Christmas tree. […]
The church school and the Brownie troop went caroling at the Nyack Manor Nursing Home. It brought a lot of joy to the seniors there.
Julia Child will tell you: The key to a really good roast chicken is butter. For these, I softened butter and spread it under the skin of the breast and thigh, then nestled some herbs in there, too. To get […]
A big day at church today. I took the camel from the Christmas pageant home for repairs. Then brought it back at 4 p.m. for the Messiah Sing. I sat with the altos and did the best I could. More […]
Jessica and Ken did it again. A winner of a party to kick off the holiday season. A little embarrassing to have such crappy photos when visiting a photographer’s house, but what are you going to do?
My husband, Greg, and I are co-founders of SCF, which chronicles what we eat, drink and grow as we raise our daughter on a tiny plot of land in the Lower Hudson Valley.
