I Left My Heart in Piaggine

If you’ve read my blurb on this blog’s About Us page, you know that I went to Italy on vacation in August 2007. It was one of the highlights of my life. I travelled with my Aunt. She was actually the one who had the idea in the first place. Through her genealogical research about [...]

Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Picky Eaters*

 
I had to laugh when I came across Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater by Matthew Amster-Burton, because for no explicable reason, I sometimes say to myself “I’m a hungry monkey.” Usually when I’m hungry. I also connected to the book because I consider myself a recovering picky eater. It wasn’t [...]

Magical Fruit

If ever a food were magical, it would be the beloved bean.  I grew up eating refried beans almost every day and have never gotten sick of them.   
Did you know that beans are actually seeds?  According to the gorgeous, fun-fact-filled book 100 Health-Boosting Foods: Facts and Recipes for Super Health, not only are beans [...]

Serendipity

There are lots of things that I love about working in a library, but one of my favorite things has to be the serendipity factor– finding books that you didn’t even know that you were looking for.  Whenever I’m not quite sure what to read next I know that if I spend 15 minutes walking around [...]

peace, love, and food, of course

While the wind whipped through Pittsburgh last week, I got to watch and listen to it from a beautiful retreat center out in the middle of nowhere.  It was a lovely few days, filled with meditation, contemplation and prayer.  Now I’m back, rejuvenated and inspired…  to revisit my vegetarian past.  I’m telling you, the food [...]

Being broke ain’t no joke

In these fickle times it seems far-fetched to feel fine about finances and one’s fiscal future. Gas prices are high. The stock market is tanking. Economists on the news sound more hysterical every day. It might be time to begin thinking about making lifestyle changes. Now unless you are [...]

Big Day in Film, Comics, Sports, Poetry, Cooking, Music, Graphic Novels, Literature etc.

So, where, oh, where, do all these ideas for blog posts come from anyway, you might ask?
Well, when you work for an institution that nominally acts as a portal of all human knowledge, how hard can it really be? I thought I might talk about what I’m reading currently, a volume of poetry and [...]

Happy Bastille Day!

Today in France everyone will be celebrating Bastille Day (or le quatorze julliet, as they would say there), which commemorates the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and is often considered to be the beginning of modern France.  As a francophile and French literature major, I always try to celebrate Bastille Day myself (even if that [...]

Cupcakes Are a Girl’s (or Your) Best Friend

If I had to choose, a cupcake would indeed be my best friend.  I’d take one (or two or three) over a diamond any day. They are little, cute and oh so delicious.  Capturing everything a cake should and wants to be by existing as the perfect individual size portion, ensuring an adequate amount of [...]

What a difference a day makes…

Every day’s a special day to someone, for some reason. Many authors, including Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, have used the chronological framework of one “normal” day to capture the incandescent moments that make up even the most ordinary of lives. Clarissa throws a party. Leopold goes for a walk. And yet, under the surface [...]