When we left off, I mentioned that my last night at the Dole Summit culminated in an Iron Chef cook’s challenge. What did this mean, exactly? It meant that we bloggers were divided into six teams, one for three courses of a meal: salad, entree, and dessert. For each of these courses, two teams were cooking off against each other for fifty minutes, using only the five ingredients in a mystery bag, and a number of condiments and foods laid out on a…

Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m back from my visit with my friend, doing my best to settle into a routine in spite of deadlines the that continue to loom. In a mind-clearing yoga class this morning, my teacher shared this parable, or her own version of it. According to WisdomShare, the story goes, A young, successful couple found their dream home. Shortly after purchasing it, the couple sat at their kitchen table to indulge in a delicious breakfast. The wife looked out the window,…

The first half of this past week flew by, a blur of class and reading and clients and work. The second half screeched to a halt with the arrival of a fall cold and a middle ear infection, which forced me to slow down and spend most of yesterday curled up on my sofa. I was supposed to travel to DC today for my cousin’s baby shower, but, with my first set of midterms coming up this week and more travel on the horizon…

It feels fun to be drafting my very first weekend reading post of the new year! Happy Sunday, friends, and I hope the weekend has been good to you. I had a very quiet new year’s celebration on Thursday (Steven and I stayed in) and have spent the weekend working, meditating on 2015, batch cooking for the week ahead, and catching up on recipes from fellow bloggers and reads from around the web. Here are some of the highlights. Recipes My blog theme…

Happy Sunday, everyone. I was happy to see such supportive and thoughtful responses to Alisa’s green recovery story on Friday (and I got a few green recovery submissions over email that night, which is always a big treat). Thank you for sharing your impressions, and if you haven’t read Alisa’s perspective, it’s really thought-provoking and worth exploring. It’s the end of another busy week, and so I took some moments this morning to catch up on health and wellness news, recipes from around the…

It’s the last day of my little mid-rotation fall break. Of course I didn’t do all of the things I wanted to do this week: ambitious home cleaning and organization projects, getting up-to-date on my inbox, etc.. But it was good. I gave myself a lot of empty time. I lay around plenty. I cooked some recipes for the blog. I’m not exactly ready for the pace to pick up again, but I’m ready enough, rested enough. While I was resting, I gave…

Happy Sunday, November, Daylight Savings, and so on–hard to believe we’re another month further into the fall. I’m feeling totally unprepared for the holidays and all of the commotion they create, but for the time being I’m enjoying crisp weather and a true change of seasons. Speaking of seasons, this week I’m linking to Adam McHugh’s lovely meditation on seasons, both external and internal. McHugh argues that external seasons sometimes serve as cues for internal change and flux — the transition to fall,…