I love a well organized kitchen and pantry. Sadly, since moving to San Francisco, all of the places I've lived have lacked a pantry. No pantry means one has to get creative with storage. Some solutions, while pretty, aren't always best at keeping food. I'm now on a mission to organize my kitchen with prevention of food spoilage in mind.     Right now winter vegetables are available from our CSA, some of which I'm not very familiar with -- hard or winter squash varieties for example. And, with cubes until recently on a soft foods diet we didn't go through what I was buying as quickly as before. So, I was seeing potatoes turn green or shrivel. Squash rot. Garlic turn to dust. Seeing this waste a light bulb went on: I must be storing the vegetables wrong. To my cookbooks and the Internet I went in search of the right way(s) to keep them. And I discovered, or rather confirmed, I was doing it wrong.   General Guidelines for Storing Vegetables Most of us don't hav...

It's said breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But day in and day out, rushing to get out the door, it can become a little bland. The same old, same old.   So why not grab some fresh apples (or pears) and whip up a pitcher of yogurt smoothies instead of grabbing a breakfast burrito or fruit-filled pastry?     What's your favorite on-the-go breakfast?  

No one attends the same conference as another and walks away with the same key insights or takeaways. What we glean from a conference is what we bring to it. If we're seeking guidance for the direction of our path or our purpose, we're more likely to "hear" or interpret what we hear with that filter. Here is my takeaway from Women 2.0 Conference 2014.     When I heard about the Women 2.0 Conference 2014 I wasn't sure what to expect. I hadn't read anything about it, so I didn't much beyond the Pitch Competition and whether sessions would be inspirational or informational in nature.   What conferences have you attended recently?  

I have big plans for 2014, especially the first quarter of 2014. Crucial to these plans was/is a move of this blog to Squarespace. In fact, I'd hoped by now that I'd be writing this post from my newly designed space. But alas, I'm not. I'm still on Blogger.     Blogger as a initial platform served me well. I was able to share my thoughts and visions with little overhead. But, at some point in a blog's life, the editor is faced with a decision about how to facilitate growth. For me, that decision came this past summer.   I discovered that my Intra-site search was no longer indexing posts prior to May 2013. For me, this was a problem as I have a lot of evergreen content that I refer readers to (I've been sharing tips here since 2008). When I couldn't find the Chanukkah prayers on my own site and I knew without a doubt I had shared them, I knew it was time. Time to move on from Blogger.   Moving platforms is not for the faint of heart. Each platform has the...

I've always been a fan of healthy discourse, especially over a shared meal with some great wine. And maybe it's because I've loved cooking since I was eight, but I just crave the energy found in a kitchen filled with people. So one of my side projects that I'm extremely excited about is Family Dinners at The Station.     Because of my upbringing, conversation and food go together. My mom gathered all of us nightly around the dining room table for dinner where we'd share our adventures and discuss current events. Both sets of grandparents brought family from near and far into their homes for the holidays, birthdays, and major sporting events. When I think of when and where I've been happiest it's been around one of their tables. And, I've spent a good part of my life creating the opportunity for more of these happy memories to happen.     Why Family Dinners? The years spent living outside of California were ones in which I wanted to recreate a sense ...

So many spend their lives comparing themselves to others, missing out on the ordinary moments in their lives that make an extraordinary tale. For 2014, I started an Instagram challenge, My Ordinary 365 , that focuses me on my life, not the lives of others.     On January 1st, I started exploring the beauty of the seemingly ordinary in my life to reveal the extraordinary. I decided to capture these moments with my iPhone and share them on Instagram. Some days I have more than one moment I want to share, other days it's hard to find one.     The exercise of finding what's good in my life is an important one. One that I first learned of when attending Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting Program . For one week, our instructor had us document one positive experience. I was in the last trimester of my pregnancy and was focused on all of the negatives. The exercise turned my thinking around and helped me to realize whether we have The Good Life or not is in what ...

Alt Summit SLC 2014 has come and gone. You may or may not have noticed, but leading up to this year's conference, I tried very hard not to become singularly focused on Alt (unlike last year). In marketing, one tends to define product cycles in terms of events (those fixed milestones that you count down to and focus all your efforts on), so it's hard not to suffer from tunnel vision.   Since returning from Salt Lake City I've been flipping through my notes and revisiting my proposed outreach and promotion tactics for the blog. And, I've been struggling with how I want to wrap up Alt and share highlights from my trip. So here goes the first of two "recap" posts, my top ten takeaways.     Takeaway 1: "If the first thing you do isn't embarrassing, you're moving too slowly." - Jen Hansard, Simple Green Smoothies Somewhere between when I graduated from college and recently, I began caring too much about what other people think. In fact, a lot o...