food

Palaces and Puppet Shows

Palaces and Puppet Shows

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

One of the things we love about living in Amsterdam is visiting the city centre. While Amsterdam is famous for its multitude of, shall we say, earthly delights, there are also plenty of wonderful family-friendly activities here. Shortly after we arrived, we bought ourselves the Museumkaart, a card that allows you to get into most of Amsterdam’s museums and other historical sites like the Anne Frank House for free.

Our first couple of times using the cards at the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum were somewhat less than successful, due to a combination of crowds, long lines, and insufficient parental ingenuity.… Read more

Thanksgiving in Florida, 2014

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

We’re kind of foodies at our house, so Thanksgiving is generally a gala affair. (See Last Year’s Menu and the Even More Dramatic Year Before) However, I’ve noticed that since I started working full time, I have less and less of a desire to spend my entire day off cooking when it’s a holiday. Go figure. Tony has even less of a desire to cook a big Thanksgiving, possibly due to the fact that nearly all of the everyday cooking at our house currently falls to him.

So this year we’ve decided to pare down Thanksgiving a bit. No, make that a lot.… Read more

Thanksgiving Menu – Florida (Take Two)

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

pumpkin cheesecake

Believe it or not, real life besides books has been going on too. Last week the CEO at the company where I work said he was not opening the office on Friday, so everyone would be “working from home” (his quotation marks, not mine). I was pretty excited to have a whole Thanksgiving weekend with the family.

Our Thanksgiving menu for this year was a little less ambitious than last year’s Thanksgiving menu, considering the fact that I work full time and Tony, while he is more organized than I ever was about everyday meals, has no interest in presiding over an elaborate, three-day cooking project.… Read more

French Women, Tigana, Catching Fire, Mountains of Madness, and Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes, and PleasureFrench Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes, and Pleasure by Mireille Guiliano
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this one up for free, and it’s been sitting in my bathroom for the past month, so I’ve leafed through most of it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read the book that put Guiliano on the bestseller list, French Women Don’t Get Fat, although I was aware of its basic premise. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone really being able to take her seriously. Giuliano’s tone is supercilious at best. Her constant exaggerated descriptions of her own self-control (the chocolates she didn’t eat, the half of a banana she saved for later, etc.)… Read more

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, The Host, Prague Winter, Shakespeare in Italy, and Seven Daughters of Eve

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Let’s talk books! The good, the pedantic, and Stephenie Meyer’s already-made-into-a-movie foray into science fiction.

Animal, Vegetable, MiracleAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Three stars, because this book can only be described as uneven. On the one hand, I was absolutely fascinated by the Kingsolver family’s adventures in producing most of their own food for an entire year. Probably because I already had my own fantasies about moving to a farm and subsisting on my own heirloom vegetables and heritage farm animals. I loved the recipes and seasonal menus, as well as the practical information on homesteading, including hilarious accounts of things like mushroom hunting, using a year’s bounty of zucchini, and breeding turkeys.… Read more

The Joys of a Liquid Diet

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

As I mentioned in my last post, I had jaw surgery two and a half weeks ago. No, I don’t really want to talk about it, since thinking about what my surgeon was doing while I was out still makes me queasy (if you’re absolutely dying to know, you can look up orthognathic surgery on Wikipedia and learn all the gory details. There, I just taught you a new word). Nor did I take pictures of myself after the surgery, when I looked like a cross between a gigantic chipmunk and a basset hound. Because some things are just better left to the imagination.… Read more

Thanksgiving–the day after

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Soooo . . . I was really dying to write this post, but then I decided not to because I figured nobody would really be interested in yet another post about what I ate for Thanksgiving. But then Michelle (through whom I am vicariously living in Umbria) asked me how it all turned out, and I figured, as I usually do, that if one person is saying it then there must be at least ten or twenty of you thinking the same thing. Right? So here’s a little rundown on how all those Thanksgiving recipes actually worked out for us.… Read more

Thanksgiving Menu – Florida

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

It’s that time of year when I have an excuse to get the kitchen really messy. We have a family tradition of spending the whole of Thanksgiving Day cooking together. For normal everyday cooking I tend to make the same 20-or-so recipes over and over, although every time we move I change things up to reflect which ingredients are cheap and easy to find where we live. But for Thanksgiving, I like to try new recipes every year.

I’ve come a long way from our first Thanksgiving as a little family, in which my freshman sister Hannah arrived just in time to prevent me from sticking the turkey in the oven completely unseasoned and with the giblets still inside their plastic bag in one of the mysterious cavities.… Read more

What do sugar gliders eat?

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I know you’ve all been dying to read another post about my darling new pets. At any rate, I’ve been dying to write a post about them. Unfortunately, I have yet to get some really awesome photos that are truly worthy of their adorableness. So in the meantime, I’ll tell you about my exploits as an amateur zookeeper.

In the exotic pet world, diet for sugar gliders is a contentious topic with potentially serious implications. One of the most common hazards for pet sugar gliders (right up there with drowning in toilets and accidents with other pets) is calcium deficiency, which can cause paralysis and even death.… Read more

Paris, His Dark Materials, Phineas Finn, and Food

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Paris in Love: A MemoirParis in Love: A Memoir by Eloisa James

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I am a sucker for expat memoirs. So I picked up this one as a matter of course, without even glancing inside the cover. Maybe I should have looked a little closer.

As an author, Eloisa James’ normal genre is romance novels. But I don’t think even that explains the bizarre format of this book. It is, I kid you not, a compilation of her Facebook status updates for the year she spent in Paris. This means that the entire book consists of disjointed 5-10 line paragraphs.… Read more