I had to call 911 this week.
It was horrible, feeling helpless when someone you love needs you the most.

While everything is ok now, and will be ok from here on out, it was an experience no one will forget.

And in an effort to regain some soul, some peace and calm after our tumbles down the dark, deep rabbit hole, I did the only thing I thought could make everyone whole again.

I made some pie.

A ginger peach and nectarine pie, with hints of cinnamon, nutmeg and homemade crust.

At 8 a.m., with most of L.A. still tucked into their beds, my hands were covered in flour and butter.

The sinking feeling in my stomach was replaced with all the fruit I poured into the crust.

Then I cut out some hearts.

It was beautiful.

And everything seemed ok.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon,  fellow journalist Darleen and I decided to partake in a past time we both adore: discovering new tea rooms in the vast city of L.A. and beyond.

And since we hadn’t seen each other for so long that I can’t even remember, we decided to go all out and indulge in some tea and treats at the Scarlet Tea Room.

I first met Darleen in a mutual class we both had.  I was really intrigued because I think she was carrying some knitting she was working on and I was completely impressed because it was something I would do.

Not only do we share a mutual love of knitting, writing, music, art and identifying annoying people almost immediately, but we also love tea. and tea rooms.

Located on charming Green Street in Pasadena, the Scarlet Tea Room has a set up I haven’t seen before. While most tea rooms typically fall into the “Old English Rosey” category, this one blends old Hollywood charm with sophistication.

The set up consists of big wooden chairs with glass blown light fixtures and mirrors all around.

But never mind how the place looks, lets get to the good stuff.

The tea, while very delicious, wasn’t hot enough for my taste. The China however, was beautiful. I think I got black peach tea, but we were so wrapped up in conversation about the ups and downs of our lives post-college, where we all sat in a room and poured our heart and souls into journalism, that I’m not completely sure.

The tea sandwiches however, were nothing short of amazing. I ordered “Fig and Goat Cheese Spread” and “Mascarpone with Citrus Marmalade.”

Heaven in two bites.

The Scarlet Tea Room is very vegetarian friendly as well - with hearts printed next to sandwich options without any meat.

The absolute best part of the afternoon, sans the conversation, came in the form of a dessert I couldn’t believe I had never tried: Strawberries Romanoff.

Made with strawberries, sugar, liqueur, ice cream and heavy cream, Strawberries Romanoff is like a party for your taste buds, who go wild with excitement when you take a spoonful to your mouth. It’s hard to pin point what’s better - the strawberries or the cream, but together they make an explosive combination.

For a few hours, the tea flowed, the dainty sandwiches came and we even got to gawk at a bachelorette party taking place across the room, neon thongs and all.

The world stood still.

Our problems melted into the leaves in our cups and just for a bit, we were free of responsibility, of what ifs, of haves and have nots, of wondering what we’re doing with our lives, or where we’ll be 10 years from now, or the cruel world of journalism.

For two hours, we were more than ok, drenched in the sweetness of strawberries and cream.

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.

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.

Paul and Julia Child, circa 1952

It’s 12:05 a.m.  on a very dark and rainy Monday in Los Angeles, and for the first time in so many months, I’m actually not forcing myself to fill this little white box with words that form coherent sentences, but rather they seem to be coming on their own.

Don’t ask me why.

I watched “Julie & Julia” for the third time a few hours ago, but I still haven’t managed to get through the book, even though I bought it probably a full year before the movie came out.  Doesn’t seem like I’ll ever finish it, but I’ve made peace with it.

I often wonder about starting a blog exclusively about food or some niche subject or another, but the problem is that I’m just interested in too many damn things, that I couldn’t just concentrate on one and give up the rest.

If I started a food blog, where would I write about media and journalism? If I started a Los Angeles blog, how could I discuss my penchant for embarrassingly cheesy films or write about my travel adventures? It just doesn’t seem like it would work for me, at least not while I want to have my hands in every pie.

And that’s part of my problem in life, isn’t it? That I want to do everything and anything all at once, which leads me to self diagnosis this problem as ADHD.

One minute I want to be an investigative reporter covering the latest environmental problem, another minute I want to write interesting, insightful human interest stories and then I want to be a novelist, a blogger, a photographer, a gardener, a film maker, a baker and God only knows what else. And I would gladly love to be ALL of those things, but this silly, stupid world just won’t let me.

I want to travel, yet have a lovely space of my own to live in. I want work to be my life’s passion, not somewhere I feel relieved to leave every day. I want to be a whole hearted journalist and writer.  I want to live my life according to “joie de vivre.” The more I think about it, the more I realize that my being born in this era was such a mistake. I wish I could rewind my birthday several upon several decades back - back to typewriters, hat boxes, to fresh open air markets and to more opportunities to experience the joy of life.

Bonne nuit, réves doux.

Until we meet again.

I was feeling especially festive this Easter and kind of sort of fell into taking over egg dying duties at my house. After a few hours of trying different color baths (and my hands looking like something from Return of the Living Dead) I ended up, quite accidentally in fact, with an egg tribute to Alice in Wonderland. Enjoy a few photos below.

It’s been slightly over a month since I have been home from my European adventure and still the feelings, the memories, the experience lives with me as if I was still there. I miss it every single day, which is probably why I have been holding off on sharing photos of my trip here - as soon as I post them I’ll know for sure that it’s over, that I’m back in Los Angeles, that cobble stone streets, lazy weekdays in quaint cafés and taking the metro have been replaced with traffic jams, absolutely no inspiration to write and a daily routine that is slowly going to amount in me having a nervous breakdown.

So I decided to make macarons.

Little did I know the amount of work I was getting myself into.

It’s funny how these little almond flour cookie contraptions took over my life. When we were in Paris, we stopped outside Ladurée, the famous French pastry shop known for inventing the macaron, but after looking at the slightly ridiculously expensive menu, we decided on another nearby café. At the time, we didn’t realize what we had missed, and I suppose the macaron challenge I presented myself with was an effort to make up for it.

It was an ambitious project, one that I didn’t over think too much, which was a good thing. After sifting and whipping and sifting and folding, my first batch, although a great effort, cracked.

That’s when I realized how incredibly important the consistency of the batter was. I had folded the batter exactly 50 times, but realized that it needed a few more turns.

Why must the French make everything so damn hard?

The second batch came out much better - any French chef would have been proud. I happened to use a Martha Stewart recipe, which in my experience, have delivered. However, if you are going to be making these, I recommend this recipe from Fabrice Bendano, pastry chef at Adour Restaurant in Washington D.C.

My idea of a perfect afternoon is a day spent at a swap meet. Since the really good ones only happen on specific days of the month - all of which I always happen to miss, my consolation prize always comes in the form of having tea, but not just the kind where you drop a sad, withered tea bag that has the remnants of what used to be called ‘tea,’ just like the crud you get when you poor the last of your cereal in a bowl, into your mug - the kind that comes with beautifully crafted China, high quality flavorful tea, melt-in-your-mouth tiny pastries and an aura of peace, calm and quiet.

I’d rather let the photos do the talking for themselves, but these were taken by me at “The T Room,” one of the most charming places I’ve ever been in Montrose. The occasion? Two cunning locas by the names of Alina and Nathalie kidnapped me for a birthday surprise last month. I could have spent forever there.