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🌿The Soup I Fed My Family

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  Let’s Cook It Right by Adelle Davis was more than a book that sat on a shelf. This one helped feed my family. I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading about nutrition for most of my adult life. My interest may have developed during a few years of food insecurity, but from my discovery of Prevention magazine back in the 1970s until now, I have tried to figure out the healthiest way to eat. I have been vegetarian, mostly raw, Mediterranean-minded and several things in between. I am still interested, still experimenting and still trying to do better without making food the only measure of a healthy life. Because it isn’t. How we move, rest, handle stress, love our people and enjoy our days matters too. When my family was young, I regularly made a ground beef and vegetable soup from Adelle Davis’s Let’s Cook It Right . I had almost forgotten about it until I started looking for ways to use some of the food already in our freezer. Suddenly, I remembered that soup and how mu...
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Janis & Travis: A Dictionary of Our Lives

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  Travis and I were born at exactly the right time to witness one of the greatest transformations in human history—from radio to artificial intelligence, from handwritten letters to video calls, from encyclopedias to carrying nearly all human knowledge in our pockets. Through it all, I have tried to remain curious. I hope that when I am ninety-eight, I'll still be asking questions like, "What words are my age?" Curiosity is one of the qualities that keeps our world from shrinking as we grow older. That matters deeply to me, and I think this little dictionary reflects that. What words are our contemporaries? It's almost impossible to know exactly when a word was "born," but dictionaries usually record the first known appearance of a word in print. Together, these words tell a story. Travis arrived as the world was ending a war and beginning the long work of rebuilding. Three years later, I arrived as America was turning toward technology, psychology, sports,...
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Juan Valdez and Freeze-Dried Coffee

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  I bought a jar of Juan Valdez freeze-dried coffee at Walmart yesterday. It all began with a simple question.  What is the best quality of instant coffee?   I’ve always assumed instant coffee was something you drank when there was no other option.  It was convenient, but convenience at the expense of flavor.  I remembered bitter granules, flat taste, and the knowledge that certainly this was settling for less than the best. But yesterday, I discovered that instant coffee has undergone a transformation. It’s important to know that the difference between traditional spray-dried coffee and the newer freeze-dried varieties is enormous. Freeze-drying preserves much more of the coffee's aroma and flavor.  What I brewed yesterday was smooth, full-bodied, and genuinely pleasant.  The freeze-drying process, which removes water through sublimation rather than heat, preserves the coffee's aromatics in a way the old spray-dried methods couldn't. Who knew tha...
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My Genre

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  For many years, I searched for good books. I read bestseller lists. I looked at award winners. I followed book club recommendations. If a book was widely praised, I felt it might resonate with me, too. I trusted the algorithm to recommend titles suited to my reading preferences. Yet the results puzzled me. Many books that were supposed to be perfect for me left me unmoved, while a handful of others stayed with me for years. The same pattern appeared in television. Some highly acclaimed series failed to capture my interest, while others spoke directly to my heart. Only recently have I begun to pay attention not to the categories of stories I loved, but to the qualities they shared. At first it seemed I must like historical fiction. Then perhaps it was mysteries. Then literary fiction. But none of those labels quite fit. What I have realized is that I am drawn to stories about people learning what matters. My favorite characters are not necessarily brilliant, powerful, or successfu...
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