Maison Tranquille Blog

  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,...

  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...

  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...

  For years I tried to find the perfect way to eat. These days I'm more interested in ways of eating that are simple enough to do every day. My current Maison Tranquille meal plan is uncomplicated: Breakfast: Avocado toast with sprouts plus a rotating side of eggs, sardines, apple and walnuts, tomato and cucumber, or oatmeal. Lunch: A big smoothie made with coleslaw mix, spinach, bananas, frozen mixed berries, flax seeds, apple juice and water Dinner: A house salad topped with whatever proteins, veggies, or grains sound good that night The salad dressing is mixed right in the bottom of the bowl: • 1 tablespoon olive oil • 1 tablespoon lemon juice or red wine vinegar • 1 teaspoon Maille French mustard (or any dijon mustard) • 1 teaspoon of Season-All Whisk, add the greens, and toss. I've been growing broccoli, radish, kale, and sulforaphane sprouts again and adding them wherever I can. It's amazing how much nutrition can come from a few simple habits repeated day after da...

My personal aesthetic currently falls somewhere between French grandmother, Mediterranean wellness,  and woman buying sardines in Asics sneakers. I have to tell you about sardines. Not just because they’re having a moment—though they absolutely are—but because something this small and humble fish has suddenly infiltrated everything. Not tucked away in emergency pantries or doomsday prepper hauls, but center stage: splashed across fashion prints, name-dropped in wellness podcasts, starring in Mediterranean recipe reels, artfully arranged on open kitchen shelves, and anointed by chefs as the ultimate weeknight meal. Tiny, oily fish have, against all odds, become stylish. At boutiques, you’ll find clothing with sardine motifs—whimsical little fish embroidered onto linen tops, or Mediterranean-inspired graphics that feel both nostalgic and absurdly modern. And yes, Drew Barrymore does have a bamboo melamine dinnerware collection called Sardine, part of her Beautiful by Drew line at Wa...

  NYC Street Food Cart "Laws are like sausages — it is better not to see them being made." — attributed to Otto von Bismarck   The same could be said for our future. Most people carry some internal picture of the future they hope humanity will move toward. Perhaps more humane, more rational, more beautiful, more truthful, more compassionate, more free, more stable, more curious, more dignified. But one of the most unsettling things about periods of rapid change is realizing that history is not automatically pulled toward the best vision. Different visions compete constantly — through culture, economics, politics, technology, education, and everyday human behavior. My own vision isn't about certainty. It's more about preserving human dignity in a world that often treats people as data points, protecting democratic and humanitarian values, staying evidence-informed without letting cynicism harden my heart. It's about keeping curiosity alive, resisting extremism,...

  An ancient funerary boat, made to carry the dead into the next world. Photographed in a museum I no longer remember. That last scene in The Dig is extraordinary. It doesn't force emotion. It just lets love appear woven into the fabric of a story. The little boy isn't really talking about a queen sailing. He's trying to build a bridge between this world and whatever comes next for his mother. Children in stories often grasp what adults miss: that imagination, memory, myth, and love all overlap. And the film mirrors the work the archaeologists do throughout the story - preserving something fragile before it vanishes. That's why the scene lands so deeply. It isn't sentimental in the usual sense. It's about tenderness in the face of impermanence. The Dig circles a single idea: civilizations disappear, people disappear, war looms, and bodies return to the earth. But traces remain. Stories endure. Moments of human connection linger. Sutton Hoo, the film's set...

  This morning I found myself comparing coffee filters.  The natural brown kind, the white kind, the slightly more expensive kind versus the store brand.  One of those tiny domestic decisions that should mean almost nothing. And suddenly I was remembering my mother when she was out of coffee filters and out of money to buy more.  Sometimes she would improvise with a white paper towel or even a plain Kleenex.  It wasn’t a lifestyle experiment.  It was what was available. My mother had good taste.  Poverty never changed that.  She didn’t learn to love cheap things.  She learned to live without things.  She would not pretend that imitation was the same thing as quality. She expressed beauty in the ways available to her, which meant primarily two things:  Sewing and making food. This is where she remained entirely herself, where circumstances had the least reach. She was an excellent seamstress, and she recognized quality in fabric and ...

  I saw a post this morning that made my heart beat faster. Not because I believed it. Because I understood the story it was trying to tell. Before I even finished reading it, I could already feel the familiar tightening in my stomach, the racing thoughts, the knowledge that another wave of fear and suspicion was being released into the world.  The post claimed the hantavirus outbreak was caused by the covid vaccine. I didn't believe it for a moment. But I recognized the same script, the same structure, the same emotional undertow we've seen so many times before. That recognition carries grief. It was not really about hantavirus. It was about narrative. It was about the way emotionally charged information now moves through society faster than reflection does, faster than context does, and faster than trust can be rebuilt once it has been damaged. One of the hardest parts of living in this moment is learning to recognize the difference between skepticism and permanent suspicion...

  Still Learning On admiring thinkers without becoming their disciples I like Sam Harris. I really do. I genuinely admire that he is rational, clear-eyed, and serious about ideas. He respects evidence, distrusts extremism and sloppy reasoning, practices mindfulness, and cares about the long-term welfare of humanity. On many things we agree. And yet I cannot follow him regularly. Something pulls me back, and I have spent a bit of time trying to understand what that something is and what it tells me about myself. It is not his arguments. But I need more than a good argument. I need compassion alongside clarity, and tenderness toward the messy, contradictory reality of being human. When I lose that sense of warmth in a voice I am following, I tend to withdraw. I want truth, but I also want heart. I want discernment, but not without mercy. I feel the same way when I try to follow Brené Brown. She is doing something genuinely worthwhile by encouraging honesty, working to reduce shame, a...