Dinner At Peridot

^ Fried chicken wings with caramelized fish sauce glaze

^ Green papaya salad with English cucumber, pickled daikon, roasted peanuts, 

fried shallots, spicy lime dressing and house-made beef jerky.

^ Roasted cauliflower with scallion puree, chilies, peanuts, and fresh herbs

^ Seared Dover sole with red curry bagna cauda, bok choy, and chives

 ^ Confit duck spring rolls with kohlrabi puree, pickled Fresno, cilantro, 

scallion dipping sauce

^ Yuzu citrus tart: yuzu citrus curd, black cardamom, diplomat cream, 

orange supreme, cashew crust

* * * * *

Other food we ate before we thought to take a photo:

Fried pork belly with black garlic puree, soy-tamarind gel, pickled beech and alba mushrooms

Star anise bread pudding with Chantilly cream, poached pears, and bourbon caramel sauce

* * * * *

I jumped on a plane

flew across the country to Columbus, Ohio

landed in the evening and soon fell fast asleep.

Next morning,

I jumped into a car

drove to Ann Arbor, Michigan,

and ate dinner at a restaurant called Peridot.

Oh, the food was delicious. Modern Vietnamese, the reviewers say, with a decidedly American point of view. Served on small plates for sharing, which is my absolute favorite. And my companions for the meal were highly entertaining; I dined with my first- and second-born daughters, as well as my nephew who lives in nearby Detroit. But none of those are the reason why I went to such lengths to eat at Peridot.

I went because my youngest nephew is a chef at Peridot. He has a fierce and fiery passion for cooking, this nephew of mine, and I could think of no better way to support him and cheer him on than to show up in person and eat his food. When he came out of the kitchen and saw us sitting nearby, you can't imagine the smile that lit up his face. 

I don't often travel 2,200 miles for my dinner. But I'd do it all again just to see my nephew, the chef, smile.

* * * * *

Photo credits to my first-born.

I was too busy eating. 

* * * * *

How lucky am I to have two chefs in the family?! 

Read about my two brilliant nephews who love to cook.

Dinner At Peridot

Dinner At San Fermo

Watching | Formula 1: Drive To Survive

^ It's Spaniard Carlos Sainz driving for Ferrari! 

Affable and funny, Carlos won the Australian Grand Prix last month. Que bueno!

^Venues in hot climates often schedule their races after dark, 

promising cooler temperatures and maximum visual drama. 

^ Mercedes is my favorite team, Their cars have been performing 

miserably of late, but still Lewis Hamilton is my favorite driver, and 

Toto Wolf (center) is far and away my favorite team principal. 

^ There's a new camera for capturing the driver's POV called Driver's Eye. 

The tiny lens mounts on the rim of the helmet between the driver's eyes 

and it literally makes you feel like you're driving the car. This shot was 

taken with an old-school onboard camera which is still pretty cool.

Formula 1: Drive To Survive | Created by Formula 1 and Netflix

Streaming on Netflix

10 teams.

20 drivers in 20 cars.

23 races every season.

2 big prizes each year - one for the drivers and one for the teams.

And a million ways for it all to go wrong.

Welcome to the world of Formula 1 racing. 

Watch the fastest cars in the world scream around a specially designed circuit or a knitted-together series of public streets. 

Call it a race or a Grand Prix. Either way, it's an hour and a half of flashing metal, squealing tires, throaty downshifts, and nail-biting maneuvers. 

Inside each car is a driver who has his own way of balancing the fiery passion for racing with the need for zen-like calm and self-control behind the wheel. And behind each driver are hundreds of people who design, manufacture, and maintain the car, as well as experts who help the drivers maximize their performance. Sitting in the middle of this massive network is the team principal who attempts to hold everyone together and keep them flowing toward a winning season. 

Netflix's Drive to Survive breaks down the particulars of the sport in a way any newcomer can understand, while providing nuance that even the most rabid F1 fans will find fascinating. The series begins with the 2018 season and carries on through 2023, so the viewer gets to know the drivers and the team principals, and begins to understand what makes each one of these distinctive personalities tick. These people would be the first to tell you that they're all a little crazy, but that makes it all the more fun. Netflix pumps up the drama by highlighting the rivalries and grudges that inevitably rise to the surface, but mostly what the show reveals is that there are a lot of really fantastic people striving to make F1  - and Drive To Survive - a wildly entertaining experience.

* * * * *

During the first decade of my life, I was blissfully unaware of mainstream professional sports. Other kids marveled me with their knowledge of our hometown Tigers, Lions, and Pistons but I knew close to nothing. Of course, my parents followed University of Michigan football with the full-blooded passion of the true Blue alumni that they were, and most Saturday nights in winter we tuned in to Hockey Night in Canada, but those were mere runners up to the main sport in my young heart.

Formula 1 racing. 

My dad had a passion for motor sports and I quickly picked it up.

I knew the racers. 

I adored their cars.

My heart thrilled at the sound of the revving engines.

My pulse quickened at lights out as the cars sped off their lines, bunched up impossibly close, and then spread out to circle the track again and again

I loved the tension of waiting to see who would be first to whip past the checkered flag. 

My brothers and I invented endless games that involved us impersonating our favorite drivers. On our swing set, I'd race against them, pumping my tiny legs to make my swing fly as high as it possibly could, and then at the highest point, launching myself out of the seat as they launched themselves out of theirs. As we soared through the air, we would each call out our favorite racer's name. Mine was always the same.

Jimmy Clark!

Sadly, my hero Jim died in a race accident when I was 9, and that - along with my father's departure from our family - really soured the taste of F1 for me.

From then till now, I hit the brakes on racing. 

So imagine my delight when, over the past few years, my two oldest daughters independently fell in love with Formula 1 racing. And earlier this month, when the three of us spent ten days together, their ongoing chatter teased me back onto the track. One of them steered me onto Drive to Survive, and now I'm all caught up on the players, their past races and reputations, and the crazy drama that unfolds when these colorful people come together to race.

Just like in the old days, I'm wildly in love with Formula 1.

I do believe it's in my blood. 

* * * * *

What I'm watching lately. 

Formula 1: Drive To Survive

Masters Of The Air

Downton Abbey

Reading | Books By Anthony Doerr

^The books are beautiful outside as well as inside, and that makes me happy.

Cloud Cuckoo Land | Anthony Doerr
Memory Wall| Anthony Doerr
The Shell Collector| Anthony Doerr  
All The Light We Cannot See| Anthony Doerr
Four Seasons in Rome| Anthony Doerr 
About Grace| Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr (pronounced as door) writes with lyrical sensitivity. 

Every word a poem, 

Every sentence with aching beauty. 

Paragraphs leave me breathless. 

Doerr often tells his stories through the eyes of children, employing their innocence as well as the precarious razor's's edge of their coming of age. He loves to write about people who love nature, science, the study of the earth. His plots, intriguing in their own right, often yield to the patiently detailed descriptions of the particular time and place in which his characters find themselves. Complex emotions abound, and without offering any spoilers, it's fair to say that Doerr is a master of satisfying conclusions that don't always spell out every detail, yet provide the reader a bit of gentle space to imagine exactly how things might have ended up. 

Of Doerr's six books, I could never choose a favorite but I can offer some distinctions between them, and a hint of the treasures that lie within.

In no particular order:

Cloud Cuckoo Land centers around an ancient and whimsical (fictional) folk tale about a man who, in his lifelong pursuit of visiting a celestial city, turns into a donkey and then a fish and then a bird. Doerr's story reveals how that folk story changes the destinies of three groups of listeners scattered across a millennium. Ideally suited for readers who enjoy discontinuities, shifting timelines, and loose ends that are gathered together in ways that simply take your breath away.

Memory Wall is a collection of short stories centered on the theme of memory, including one that follows a Chinese woman coming to terms with the fact that her ancestral village is about to be flooded by a new dam, and another featuring a woman who survived the Holocaust yet, many decades later, still dreams of her childhood friends who did not.

The Shell Collector is Doerr's debut - a collection of short stories featuring the connections between humans and nature. The title story highlights one of Doerr's signature scientific passions: sea shells; the final story plots the complexity of a married couple - one from Africa, the other Ohio - struggling to make a home in world that does not feel utterly foreign to either one or the other. 

All The Light We Cannot See tells the story of children coming of age during World War II. We meet a newly converted French resistance fighter who happens to be blind, and a reluctant Nazi radio operator whose paths slowly and inexorably converge as they both struggle to make sense of the world around them. 

Four Seasons in Rome is a memoir that documents the Doerr family's one-year sabbatical in Rome. Elegant descriptions of Rome's golden light, ethereal trees, and architectural treasures are interposed with unabashedly realistic descriptions of life with newborn twin sons. 

About Grace is the story of one man, David Winkler, and his astonishing gift of premonition. One night he dreams that he will be responsible for his infant daughter's death, and in his frantic efforts to prevent that from happening, his life becomes utterly unmoored. The quality of Doerr's prose is exquisite: painful yet heart stirring, as fragile and infinitely detailed as the snow crystals with which David is consumed. 

* * * * *

Last November, like many millions of other humans around Planet Earth, my husband and I enjoyed the Netflix four-part series of All The Light We Cannot See. Aficionado of World War II stories that I am, I Googled about to discover that the story was indeed based on a book, and I promptly put in a hold for a library copy.

What we eat is a poem.

Days later, casually texting with my second born, I mentioned that this story was a gem and suggested that she might like to read it. "I've already read it; I love that author," she explained. "Anthony Doerr wrote my favorite book."

My second born reads slowly and selectively. I didn't know she had a favorite book. 

I was now on the edge of my seat.

Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw - a flower. 

And so my daughter explained to me that during her college semester abroad, three months in which she studied art in springtime Rome, she was assigned to read Doerr's Four Seasons In Rome and fell under its magical spell. Doerr's unfailing ability to capture

the essence of Roman sunlight, 

the gentle cascade of her flowering tree petals, 

the splashing of her fountains, 

the dark dank of her caverns and catacombs 

and of course, the unspeakable treasure of her art,

put words to the overwhelming scenes and sensations my daughter was experiencing during her very own season in Rome. 

I added that book to my library holds as well, and soon enough read every beautiful word.

(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.

I'd always known that this daughter of mine loved her time in Rome. But now I understood, in new, more specific ways, why she loved it. I saw the swallows flitting against the achingly blue sky, heard the waters of the Tiber gently lapping at the stone embankments, all but tasted icy sweet gelato on my tongue as the sun beat down on my back. I was there with her, and felt closer to her for the sharing.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor -- it is best done in shifts by well-rested people. 

And I thought, isn't that the most wonderful thing that books can do, to give us a shared experience, to bring us closer together with other people, saying, yes, I understand you now. 

Then I went and bought a copy of each one of Anthony Doerr's books. Because now, he is my favorite author too. 

* * * * *

More stories about books I've read in 2024:

Books By Anthony Doerr

What My Bones Know

Books By Emily Henry

The Poisonwood Bible

Harvesting The Heart

Another Chapter

"True love stories never have endings." -Richard Bach

^ This is our latest chapter. But let me tell you the whole story.

Well, we've been at it again.

In the chilly days of January, a certain birthday elf left a surprise at my door. 

Inside this darling little package was a gift from my friend, Heidi, and wouldn't you know, the latest chapter in the long, sweet story of our collaborative game.

^ Don't let the bare feet fool you. It was not warm.

As you may know, Heidi and I went to lunch in 2011 and since I arrived first, I texted Heidi a pic of our table top, set and ready for our meal together. That image (which is of shockingly poor quality) has been bouncing back and forth ever since, telling a story between us for all these many years. With each new version of the image, one of us adjusts it in some way and sends it off for the other to make her own change. 

The chapters unfold and our story keeps growing.

^ So here's where we were: last spring, I'd sent Heidi this Easter banner. Now it was her turn  to make something new for me from these cutout letters and gold cord. 

She dismantled the banner, stacked the letters, coiled the gold cord on top, and took photos. From enlarged copies of those photos, she made an origami box. 

^  The top and the bottom of the box are made from different images, as you'll see more clearly further down. And the cord she used to tie the box shut? I do believe it's the same cord I used to string the banner. 

^ Heidi also took one of the photos she'd taken of the banner letters and coiled gold cord and created a pixelated version for a card. Super cute. 

^ And the gift inside the box? A set of three magnets, each sharing a circle of our deeply layered pattern. How fun!

Now it was my turn to write the next chapter, and this time I faced an extra challenge. Heidi's gift to me actually included three different threads of our story. How was I to choose which version - the top of the box, the bottom of the box, or the card - to move ahead?

As usual, the ideal solution popped into my head just as I was falling asleep.

A book.

I decided to make a little handmade book - Heidi is a devoted keeper of journals - and use strips of all three patterns to decorate the cover.

Here, let me show you.

^From left to right, these are my photocopies of the bottom of the box, the card, and the top of the box. 

First, I unfolded the top and bottom of Heidi's box, grabbed the card, and assigned my husband the task of making copies. Our printer is sublimely temperamental and he is better suited to fuss with it. Even so, he came to me with his head hung low, presenting me with the copies he'd made and confessing that the colors of these new copies were not true to the originals. 

But I assured him that the name of this game is transformation and it was perfectly fine to introduce some change in my new telling of the story.

^ Next I ripped the photos into strips, an inch to two and a half inches wide, and glued them front and back, inside and out, to a folded bit of white cardstock.

^ Once the glue dried, I trimmed the edges and had myself a little book cover. 

I cut a dozen pages of white printer paper to fit inside the cover, folded them in half, and used our brand new sewing machine to stitch the book together.

^Every picture tells a story and every book needs a title. Mine is short and sweet.

And thus the latest chapter in my collaborative story with Heidi has been told. 

But we are nowhere near the end.

* * * * *

Here are all the details of how our project has evolved. 

Start at the top of this list for a chronological report:

The Creative Adventures of Heidi and Diane

The Adventures Continue

Heidi Strikes Again!

It's Your Move

Another Chapter

Equinox

 "To love beauty is to see light." -Victor Hugo

Spring peepers, yes.

Pale pink cherry blossoms.

Spunky purple crocus.

Greening grass and slowly leafing trees.

And sunny days that sneak up and surprise us, delight us, warm our weary bones.

These are all vanguards of spring, brilliant waving banners that announce our side of the planet's tilt toward the sun.

But more than anything else, what heralds to me the change in the season is the light.

As the sun's angles shift, afternoon rays stream through my south facing windows. Golden sunbeams pour into my home in fresh and exciting ways; patterns of light play against every surface to announce the new season.

Spring has finally come. And, once again, its beauty leaves me breathless.

My Little Irish Lass

"Bless your little Irish heart and every other Irish part." -Irish blessing

^ My friend and me, with our lovely Irish lassies at the 2019 St. Patrick's Day parade in Seattle. 

Guess which one of us loves to dress up in costume.

After sharing most of my life with these spunky redheaded dogs, you'd think every day I'd be grateful for their many charms. 

But the truth is that with all of my setters, and these days Gracie in particular, I take certain things for granted.

The sparkle and shine in her eyes.

Her ever-wagging tail.

Her quick gait and alert posture as she hunts.

The gentle way she greets strangers, especially children.

Her unending desire to please me. 

The unmistakable look of mischief on her face when she's up to no good.

Her charm, delight, and never-ending blarney.

You would think I would appreciate every single day the magic that my lady leprechaun  - and my other Irish gentlemen before her - bring into my life. But honestly, I'm so regularly blessed with those smiling Irish eyes that I sometimes forget all I have to be thankful for.

Luckily, I celebrate a special holiday every year that reminds me of my good fortune.

I am blessed for the love of my little Irish lass. 

Watching | Masters Of The Air

^ There she is. Glamour shot of our leading lady.

 ^ And action footage of her gorgeous profile in motion. What a beauty.

^ Okay yeah, there are some actual humans in the cast as well. Meet Bucky (left) and Buck, our pilot besties with matching nicknames. They're cute.

^ But we all know the true stars of this show. 

Masters Of The Air | Created by John Shiban and John Orioff

Streaming on AppleTV

Here's a fresh World War II miniseries along the lines of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and similarly, based on a book. This time, the action is centered around the Americans in the 100th Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force, stationed in east England, who fly a variety of heavy duty bombing runs over Europe. Of course, there are roguish pilots, devoted underlings, affectionate English ladies, and even a bevy of rosy cheeked local children who cheer the Yanks on.

But the true stars of the show are the Flying Fortresses, the fast and high-flying Boeing B-17s perfectly designed for devastatingly lethal long-distance daytime raids over vast swathes of Nazi Germany. Most episodes feature long, loving takes of the planes droning across the Channel in precise formation, or falling from the sky in flames, or landing safely back at the airbase to the whoops and cheers of all. The entire series is a loving ode to this magnificent aircraft and to the men who so bravely and capably flew them. 

Like other miniseries in this genre, extended credits roll after the ninth and final episode to show us actual photos of the men on whom many of the characters were based, along with tidbits about their actual lives after the war. Today, more than ever before, we do well to remind ourselves of these men's dedication and sacrifice, as well as the many others who fell in battle, whose stories we don't recall. Let us remember them all and remind ourselves: never again. 

* * * * *

Though I was born 14 years after VE and VJ Days, World War II was very much a part of my childhood. My parents were teenagers during the years of the war, so neither they nor their parents served directly. But like most Americans of their day, my parents felt immensely proud of their country: still stunned by the brazen attack on Pearl Harbor, still dazzled by America's ability to rise to the challenge of this war, still horrified by the discovery of the concentration camps and the pure evil of the Third Reich's Final Solution. But proud of our nation's get-up-and-go, proud of our technological and military intelligence, proud of our boys in uniform.

My mom told us stories about the war quite often. Because even though my grandparents were too old to serve and my parents too young, my mother's mother, Clara, had a brood of younger brothers who were swept off into active duty.

Most of them came home. Uncle Dick was lost in some sort of piloting accident, but Ed, Bill, and Mickey all made it over and back in one piece each. I could never keep straight who did what, but apparently one served as a bodyguard for General Patton; another parachuted into France on D Day; a third spent time as a POW. Mom was always a bit short on facts because once they came home, my great uncles refused to talk at all about their wars.

I thought a lot about that.

I knew these uncles as towering giants - all the Belz men were well over six feet tall, huge tree trunks yet the most gentle of men. As a five-, six-, seven-year-old, I remember looking way, way up to see their faces, their sweet restrained smiles shining down on me. "She's one of Clara's," they would quietly remark to one another, and I felt a lovely sense of peace and protection.

It took some thinking for me to fully grasp that these very same men had been to war. 

They had done unthinkably dangerous things. 

They had held guns. 

They had fired guns.

They had most certainly killed people. 

And then they came home and softly laid their huge hands on top of my little head. 

How could such gentle men fight in a war?

In time, I came to understand the menacing evil of Nazi Germany. 

I understood that as much as we all hate the unthinkable act of killing other human beings, sometimes that is the only way to stop evil in its tracks. 

During the dark days after Pearl Harbor, the United States - including my sweet great uncles - had no choice but to stand up and do what is unthinkable. 

In order to protect what is good and true.

In order to protect me. 

And if I should ever be so tested, I hope I will muster a tiny portion of the unthinkable courage and infinite gentleness that I saw in my great uncles. 

* * * * *

What I'm watching lately. 

Formula 1: Drive To Survive

Masters Of The Air

Downton Abbey