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DIY Marbled Cards

I tried marbelizing paper once. It was a delicate, messy, drippy experience. This is not that. It's quick and satisfying, okay it's a bit messy, but it's so much easier. The step by step instructions are here. The two main ingredients, apart from the cards, are: old school foamy shaving cream and food coloring. You can blend multiple colors or keep it simple. I used the red because it ends up looking like roses. It's kind of a magical process.…

Baked Fairy Tale Eggplant Fries

I only heard about Fairy Tale Eggplant for the first time three weeks ago, so when these pretty little veggies turned up in my Blue Apron order (I've been cooking two meals a week from this home delivery service — it's like taking a cooking class and the results are delicious), I was excited to turn them into something good to eat. Cut each eggplant into 1/4 inch wedges length-ways and dip into a bowl containing two beaten eggs, let the excess egg drip…

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Favorite Places – Staplehouse, Atlanta

Bon Appetit Magazine Atlanta is our new second home. It’s Hollywood’s new second home too, well one of them. It’s up there with Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver as the biggest hubs of TV production in North America. My husband, Alan, has begun work on the CW’s Dynasty reboot and to celebrate, we somehow managed to get a Saturday night table on the patio at Staplehouse, voted by Bon Appetit magazine as the hottest new restaurant in the USA…

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Hidden Urban Orchard

My husband just had a big birthday. He is impossible to buy gifts for, so I took a different approach this year. We both miss our fruit trees and veggie gardens from the houses we've lived in in the past. We inherited mature palm and eucalyptus trees, and hedges at our current house, which is great, but there is very little space or even soil available for any more trees or even herbs to be planted. The solution was to…

Slow Cooker Osso Buco

Osso Buco is one of my favorite winter dishes. It's a Milanese dish which literally translates to "bone with a hole." Usually made using cross-cut veal shanks, I've also made it with beef shanks. If you can't find this cut at the supermarket, you may need to special order it. I promise you it's worth it! This dish is absolutely delicious and all the better when it's cold outside. After seasoning the meat and dredging it with flour, it needs…

Wrap it!

Los Angeles is having a real winter this year! Not compared with the plummeting temperatures and snow blanketing a lot of the country, but we're wearing coats and boots! Inspired by the cozy, wintery weather, I'm wrapping my Christmas gifts with a woodsy style. I discovered this rustic wooden boards wrapping paper at a craft store. I'm wrapping each gift with jute string. I'm making it look roughly tied, and winding it a couple of times around the present. I've…

DIY Modern Fall Wreath

I have been re-using these simple square craft-store wire frames for almost a year now (see previous wreaths here: Spring, Holiday, succulent). They have been a great little investment! For my Fall wreaths, I used thin green florists' wire (which I had left over from last year's Christmas wreath) and simply tieded small branches of dried yellow maple leaves evenly around the frame. I used one bunch of these supermarket-bought decorations for each frame. They also sold a deep burgundy…

DIY Black & White hand painted cards

Black and white has been big in interior design for the past year or so. These one-of-a-kind greeting cards play off this modern, cool trend. They're striking, easy to create, and gorgeous to receive. I had some card stock left over from a previous project but you can buy plain white cards and envelopes from any craft store. My hubby, Alan, has been taking painting classes and kindly gave me a tube of black acrylic paint and his brushes to…

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Favorite places – Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles

The Hollywood Bowl is L.A. It took me a few years to discover it. Now, summer in L.A. isn't complete for me without at least one night sitting under the stars in a Terrace Box (if I'm lucky) with three friends, sipping wine surrounded by 17,000 other Angeleans. We're a music-loving community gathering in what was once a natural amphitheater called Daisy Dell. And we're doing what locals have done since that first concert circa.1920 when two women with a piano, performed on…

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Orchids – keep them flowering!

How often have you thrown out pretty potted orchids the minute they stop flowering? Or, like me, you put them out of sight, forgetting to even water them until they die completely. When I was staying with my friends Denni and Moira in San Francisco last month, I was given a lesson in how to keep these most beautiful of flowering plants alive and flowering, year after year. They are actually pretty low maintenance. These plants are natural tree-huggers. They don't like…