Tag: Rick Bayless

Mercado FlorPalace of the Blue Butterfly | Episode 14. If you live in California, you’re bound to have some little grocery store that looks like the one on the right. This is my top mercadito for all the special things I need for Mexican cooking, tamarindo, nopales, all kinds of dried chiles and those lovely little dried hibiscus flowers called flores de jamaica.

After a cold rainy spring, summer is finally here in the Sierras, and I’m going to give you a great recipe for a drink called agua de jamaica, the perfect tart/sweet refreshment for sipping on hot, dry days with a book in your hand and the fan turning back and forth as you read.

The first time I had agua de jamaica was in Oaxaca. We’d been roaming the markets in the sweltering spring heat. I was looking for an all white huipil and falda from Mitla—the one that Lili . . .

Raymond Chandler Book CoverPalace of the Blue Butterfly | Episode 13. I don’t know where you’ll be when you read this, but I’m going hiking, and, if we can finish all the chores around here, we’re planning to car camp. Yes, by a river. I just want to be sitting on a rock, reading a book, listening to the rush of a waterfall as it tumbles over granite into a blue-green pool.

What am I reading? Well, it’s almost summer, and since the book group just hefted Anna Karenina, mentally and physically (Best. Novel. Ever.), we’re reading something lighter, or maybe darker—-Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. But hey—look at what the critics say about it.

“Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the 20th century. He wrote like an angel.” Literary Times

It’ll be a great read on a rock in the sun or by the . . .

I’ve thrown open all the windows. The hyacinths are in full glory in the window boxes, and when the breeze blows, the scent fills the house.

When that happens, I simply have to stop what I’m doing and just inhale.

Even though my pots of Tulipa Abba are in splendid bloom on the porch, it can still get cold at night. Soup is a great way to . . .