Is this turning into a baking blog? I really don’t know.

At some point during the years I’ve been blogging, I’ve fantasized about having a baking or food blog, and then having said blog land me a book deal a la Julie & Julia, but there’s just too many things I love in life to narrow it down. Maybe someday when I grow up.

Back to food. You are looking at a white chocolate raspberry cheesecake with chocolate graham cracker crust made for two dear friends on their coinciding birthday.

Cheesecakes aren’t my favorite thing to eat (blasphemy) but people seem to love them. They’re just too rich for me – one bite and I feel full, but I have no qualms about baking them. You see that raspberry sauce on top? Made from scratch.

Nothing gave me greater pleasure than being able to swirl those raspberry blobs into hearts, especially after a long and tiring day.

And because I am going to have some long and tiring days ahead of me in the next few weeks, I wont be baking or writing here – but when it’s over, I’ll have a lot to share. Perhaps in the meantime I can finally nail down a niche for this lovely space of mine. Until then, au revoir.

Here’s to new beginnings.

I like to bake. I guess that’s obvious if you’ve been reading for a while now, but it’s not necessarily because I love sweets (and don’t get me wrong, I do).

It is truly the best form of therapy, especially if you do late in the evening, watching The Nanny while trying to mix your batter and then subsequently fill the house with intoxicating baking smells at 2 a.m.

It’s glorious and I will tell you why.

Because you can go through the worst day in the world, a day that doesn’t make sense, a day that makes you cry, makes you wish you could dig your head in a hole because nothing is going right and people are annoying and you wish you could transport them all to a barren island so they can just revel in their annoying-ness and then hopefully die off and then you can come home, get together a few ingredients, mix them together and know at the end of the day, that if you follow the directions and put some love into it, you will have made something good, and that’s enough to make everything in the world seem better.

Honest.

That’s the same reason why I love to write, although I would compare journalism more to making macarons or boston cream pie than to your regular muffin.  It’s grueling, you’ll want to give up, but if you keep pushing on you realize that when it’s finished, you are beaming from ear to ear. And that’s the type of fire you need to have, whether you’re reporting or baking, or just even living really.

Creating new things to eat or read is all I need to melt away all the stress in my life. At least until it appears again, anyway.

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.” – William F. Buckley, Jr.

Welcome to the new and improved Writepudding.com. I needed a change, and so here we are.

Summer is almost here, but Los Angeles is suffering from some serious June Gloom, but I don’t mind because I love cold weather.  In fact, I hate summer in Los Angeles a lot. It’s disgusting, especially if you have to spend time cooped up in a car on a never ending freeway like I do.

I don’t think I’d be satisfied with any city’s summer unless I was in the South of France, on a boat, wearing nautical clothes and sipping on some champagne.  But since that’s not likely to occur any time in my near future, Los Angeles it is.

Woohoo.

All in all, it’s not that bad, because L.A. has some of the best summer events around, especially concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, where you can watch your favorite musicians play to the stars while you have a picnic at your seat. Then of course there are the festivals and while I’ve discovered many amazing festivals in my editing work, including the Cotton Pickin’ Fair in Gay, Ga. and the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in Linville, N.C., L.A has some great ones, including the Watermelon Festival, featured in these photos I took for LAist last year.

Once inside, you’ll more like you’re in the Southeast than Los Angeles, and that’s not a bad thing.

See more here

Nearly six months have gone by and I still haven’t posted photos of London or Paris. Shame on me. Does it count that the photo above of our feet was taken in London?

I have a feeling that I haven’t because it’s too painful, because it’s a reminder at the latest time in my life when everything felt ok, even if it was just for two weeks. The hustle and bustle of Portobello Road on a Saturday morning, the mulled cider I thought I could drink fully, the anticipation of watching Celebrity Big Brother after a day exploring a city that feels like a second home – all those wonderful memories stirring in my mind again would do more harm than good, and to be frank, I can’t afford that right now.

There are wonderful experiences and important people that I miss and an emotional outburst would not end well, let me tell you.

So I’m keeping my swirling visions of the underground and the patisseries private just for a little bit longer.

And while I have more material to accumulate in this humble space than just my travels, there is a road block preventing me from sharing it all. Perhaps it’s all too raw, or blurry. The thoughts in my head loop around like long strands of DNA and separating them from each other can be quite the challenge. It seems these are all tasks which require concentration and energy, two things I’m running low on.

the sounds of silence prevail, at least for now.

When I traveled to London, Dublin and Paris earlier this year, taking photos of people actually reading newspapers became sort of an obsession for me. As a young journalist who was thrust out of school a little over three years ago into a melting media market that bled jobs daily, life became uncertain and depressing and well, worrisome.

I felt as though the dreams I had been building upon since middle school of becoming a writer were falling through the cracks – and that I would never get them back. I never could be a Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, writing about worldly problems and changing the world in the process. I could never be a Ben Badikian, an editor at the Washington Post who came into possession of The Pentagon Papers. I would never be in that atmosphere. That excitement, that time.

I could never write for the Los Angeles Times or Atlantic Monthly or the dozen other publications which I cherished more than life itself.

And while now, I have resolved my fear and am more in the “I can” rather than the “I can’t” box, the possibility of not fulfilling my passions is still a frightening concept. I know I have what it takes to write for the L.A. Times and the NY Times and whatever else. I just know it. It’s the one thing in my life that I am completely, 100 percent sure of. When I get there, I don’t know. But I will get there.

In the meantime, I found comfort knowing that there were still people who actually read newspapers, even if it was overseas. There are papers everywhere you go in London. On the tube, in cafes, on the street – it’s really a reading culture, and as someone from Los Angeles which suffers more from a “tv culture,” it made me feel at home.

The world of media is changing right in front of our eyes and it’s amazing to be in the middle of this revolution. I am excited to see what the future holds for journalism, but for now, I revel in the fact that somewhere in the world, someone cares.

Hard to believe half the year is almost over, when it feels like it was Dec. 31,2009 just a few weeks ago. Six more months and I’ll be reveling in all the gingerbread and tinsel the holidays have to offer, but before I get ahead of myself, here are some photos from the first half of my 2010 taken with my iPhone.

London, Selfridges and Spooning with Rosie apparently.

Ireland, M&S and Tate Modern

Henry, Liberace at Amoeba Records and beautiful Swiss chard at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market

Waterfalls, hiking and big glasses.

I don’t mean to go on about lemons two posts in a row, but something miraculous took place between my last post and today – that is, I found some gigantic lemons in the nether regions of my tree.

No, really.

GIGANTIC.

The lemon on your left is from the same tree and is normal size. The one(s) on your right? Let’s just say I had to catch my breath after carrying them inside.

As soon as I cut them off, the branch they were weighing down snapped upright back to normal position again. That was the easy part. After washing and taking them apart from each other, I couldn’t contain myself and had to cut them to see if they were OK inside.

Well, they were.

Look at them. LOOK AT THEM. They are huge. The best part is that there’s nothing wrong with them. They smell and taste divine.

Then I grew really impatient, and after cutting them all I decided it was best to squeeze them, except they were so big that they wouldn’t fit on the juicer so I had to hand squeeze them. The lemon juice filled up an entire water bottle’s worth.

Now I can’t decide between lemonade, salad dressing or lemon bars.

These lemons emerged from the tree in my backyard.

They are the only living thing left that I have connected to  my grandmother.

After she lost her battle with Alzheimer’s, my parents plucked the lemon tree she had nurtured for years and planted it in our yard, hoping that it would blossom under our care as well as it did under hers.

It did.

She had something to do with it, I’m sure.

I went to pluck a few lemons some weeks ago and as I piled them up into a bowl and set them on the table which was drowning in the afternoon sun, I suddenly smelled the most heavenly aroma – one which I have never smelled before. It was the smell of lemons. Grocery store lemons had never smelled that way.

They smelled like the sun, and the Earth and like love.

They smelled like love.

I scraped off their rinds, and the intoxicating smell arose some more.

Then I cut up some strawberries, hoping my grandmother could join me for one last snack.

She didn’t.

But I’ll always have the lemons.

I love subcultures. Oh I do. I love them so much. This explains why I can watch endless episodes of Louis Theroux documentaries and never get tired. This is the reason why I look forward to Hoarders and 16 & Pregnant every week, as if my life depends on it. This is the reason why that when the chance presented itself to cover a Belly Dance Festival, there was no way I could say no.

You can find the article in the Glendale News-Press here: All The Right Moves, but here is a choice quote on the art and history of belly dancing:

“It doesn’t matter what year it is, this is never going to go out of style as women become more in touch with themselves, their own power and lives.”

Enjoy some photos!

What does it mean if you want to be too many things at once?

I think I have terminal ADHD, meaning this indecision business and wanting everything and anything now, now, now is going to truly kill me, because the world just isn’t letting me break out of this pigeon hole that I feel like I’m stuck in.

I needed some comforting tonight, so for the first time in so many months, I started listening to music. It’s not that I don’t listen to music, hell I listen every single day.

Music is what saves me from going insane inside the cubicle I sit in and in many ways, music is what saved me tonight because I really listened.

I listened to Antony and the Johnsons and Amy Winehouse and José Gonzales and Air and Dustin O’Halloran and John Lennon and Yann Tiersen and whatever I felt like was going to stop me from tumbling down the rabbit hole into nothingness.

Is it normal to know what you want and not know what you want with such intensity?

Maybe I’ve lost my muchness like Alice.

The thing is, I’ve never just wanted to be one thing. When I was younger, I would switch career ambitions every 24 hours. I wanted to be a veterinarian, an archeologist, a microbiologist, a painter, I wanted to work for the Centers for Disease Control and be a part-time ballerina at the New York City Ballet.

And then when I was 12, I discovered something that allowed me to experience anything and everything: journalism.

And it was magical.

The truth is, there’s too much I want in this world. The truth is, I need to slow down. The truth is, I don’t want to.