As you're reading this, I'm probably in my little Volkswagon driving five hours North to visit Jean. Remember Jean? She's my dear friend who, exactly one year ago, was hit by a car and killed while crossing the street in Brooklyn. I remember what I was wearing and doing and feeling the second I heard the news. I'll never forget that sleepless night--looking back, I know I was completely in shock and the realization would only slowly sink in. Still today, every single time I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge I think of Jean. I'm not really sure why except maybe because of how much she loved the city and how she wanted to move here someday, have a family and settle down.

Summer. Barbecues, road trips, flip-flops, rope swings, a new swimsuit, homemade popsicles or rides with the windows down and feet out the window. Reading outside. Doing just about everything outside. Gardening. Sprinklers. The list could go on. Lately I’ve been thinking about the time when summer actually felt like an eternity. Remember that? The days right before you or your friends had a car and you came up with impossibly creative ways to pass the time--perhaps feeling bored and tortured, not realizing how you’d look back on those listless, empty afternoons with nostalgia and longing. During those summer days, the above list would look quite different: making chocolate chip cookie dough and eating it straight out of the bowl. On the roof. In our underwear. Or walking downtown barefoot with my best friend Kristin to buy fried rice from the one and only decent Chinese restaurant in our small town. We'd wear cut-offs and put on lots of fruity lip gloss and hope to be noticed. We’d spend hours making mix tapes and sneak bottles of Zima and clove cigarettes into the garage for a smashing afternoon of pure daydreaming. The Cure. The Flaming Lips. Sublime. Tori Amos. Kristin and I would sneak out at night and traipse around the park with boys much too old for us. Those were the days. How little we knew and how much we thought we knew. But such is adolescence.  I don't really miss that. The one thing I do miss is the cadence of the days, the way they literally folded into one another into a beautiful, long swath of months we called summer.

It strikes me as very odd that I've never written about ice cream here. This is because it's my very favorite food of all time. I won't admit how frequently I eat ice cream each week--hopefully family members will practice restraint with their comments on this particular post. But really, ice cream makes me very happy. Growing up, Bon Boniere was our little local ice cream shop downtown. Sometimes when I'd get home from school, my mom would promise that if I was lucky, maybe my dad would feel like going out for a cone later. Then the obsessing would begin: M & M or Bubblegum? It was like my mantra as the Brady Bunch wrapped up and dinner time grew near. I'd hear my dad pull up the driveway and know that I should give him a few minutes to put down his briefcase before I bombarded him with the all-important question of the evening: can we go?

When I worked at Two Hands Paperie in Boulder, CO–a lovely little paper store on West Pearl St.–the owner, Diana Phillips, used to have a bowl of matchbooks on her desk. When I’d sit talking to her about the shop or how business was going, I’d…

We all have memories of foods that remind us of Summer. For me, it's Log Cabin ice cream. My family has been coming to the same little funky cabin in Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe for almost thirty years--beginning soon after I was born. When we lived in Eureka, the drive was much longer than it is now (a quick jaunt from the Bay Area); we'd load up the car with blow up rafts, word puzzles, and juice boxes and head on out. Although we'd only go up in the Summer and the Winter, I can't think of a place that has been more of a constant in my life. This from the girl who moved into three different apartments during the three years I lived in Boston. I feel like I always have a box packed. Things have changed, for sure. When my parents got divorced, my dad got the house. So a place that was so much about my mom isn't any longer. We don't hear the late night sound of her sneaking out to the casino ; we don't look out onto the pier to see her perched on the edge with a floppy hat and a fashion magazine. The lake levels fluctuate, neighbors come and go, restaurants change ownership...but Log Cabin's always there. In a world where things change by the microsecond, I love that I can come back to Tahoe, walk through the dilapidated motel with bats, drug deals, and screechy electrical wires, over to The Log Cabin to see the same menu that I did when I was four, fourteen, twenty-four. I realize you don't get a good sense of each sundae with this photo, but as a kid this is pretty much how it looked. A big board with lots of words, colorful swirly's and zig-zags, and endless opportunity.

The Sebastopol Gravenstein Fair was this past weekend. I had a few food adventures planned in the city, but Craig, Linnea, and I decided a little jaunt up North might be fun. It's been strangely cool in the mornings and evenings here; the light is even starting to change. I've been in denial that Fall is looming. The Gravenstein Fair, I figured, would be a nice way to come to terms with this fact. When I was going to graduate school in Boston, I couldn't wait for Fall. The leaves turned overnight (I kid you not), the air was crisp without being frigid, and there seemed to always be a good reason to make soup. One of my favorite things to do was go apple picking out on an old family farm in New Hampshire. They gave you special apple picking bags with super sturdy handles, and you could buy provisions at the little country store to have a picnic out in the orchards: honeys, apple butter, farm-fresh eggs, apple chutneys, and homemade apple breads. I miss that. But I was thinking the Gravenstein Fair might be similar: paper cups full of cider, bales of hay, maybe pick some apples. Instead, I found something very different. I realized quickly that, amidst the Thai BBQ and corndogs, there wasn't going to be any apple picking. I really had to hunt for cider. And people were walking around with carnival toys and huge, furry hats. But the more I excused the fact that I'd had the wrong idea of what the festival would hold, it was actually a nice afternoon. We saw a restored tractor exhibit, ate doughy apple fritters, and tried Grandma's Fried Apple Rings (apple rings, lightly battered and fried, and dusted with powdered sugar by none other than Grandma herself):