Happiness comes in many forms.  It could be a cool breeze, a smile from a stranger, a well hit golf ball, hearing “yes” when you expected to hear “no”.  Besides traversing the San Diego Freeway with minimal traffic, for me, happiness comes every Sunday morning as I weave my way through the Hollywood Farmer’s market.  Seeing many of the same people, week after week, builds a sense of community.  You can almost feel the respect paid to the hard-working [...]

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  When the invitation was extended, I thought, “This can’t be true”.  But it was.   Currently, my favorite chef (and cookbook author) is Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli-born British transplant with four eponymous restaurants in London and two cookbooks under his belt.  He was coming to Los Angeles to promote his new vegetarian cookbook, Plenty, and would be cooking, for one night only, at, ironically, Animal on Farifax.   There’s something about being in the presence of a great chef [...]

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It feels like summer.  The days are longer, the nights are mild, and I’m opting for sundresses over jeans.  It smells like summer.  The aromas from a neighbor’s grill waft through my windows, I’m smelling jasmine flowers everywhere and from my fruit bowl, the heady floral scent of the season’s first peaches fills my tiny kitchen.  It looks like summer.  At the farmer’s market, the apricots and cherries are thinning, and in their place, early peaches, nectarines and even some [...]

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Back in April, I boarded an American Airlines plane and jetted off to Paris to help my beautiful and talented friend, CJ, celebrate her triumphant completion of the Paris marathon.  Truth be told, it doesn’t take much arm-twisting to convince me to return to France, but this was a particularly good excuse.   Of course, the shopping was superb (and I have the quintessential “little black dress” to show for it), the buttery croissants addictive, the chocolates extraordinary, the macaron [...]

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  The other day, a very dear friend of mine turned to me and said, “Cindi, your relationship with tomatoes is very complicated.”  Unsure if I should be amused, bemused or insulted by the notion that I carry on relationships with inanimate objects, I dug out my “go-to” phrase from my years as a sales trainer.  “Tell me more about that”, said I, to which he responded, “You seed your cherry tomatoes; unless it’s August or September, and sometimes even [...]

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