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There is something substantial, comforting and, I thought, enduring about the sweet side of the food connection between my mother and me. For decades, food has occupied a place in our collective memories: We talked favorite restaurants, new cookbooks, best new food authors, latest vegetable stars—beets! kale! cauliflower! We weighed the merits of cream-cheese versus all-butter dough as well as the importance of nuts in cookies and brownies, and then went deeper to decide if they should be pecans or walnuts.  Little that related to food missed our culinary dissection—both criticism and praise. And through the years, the symbiosis between...

  I salivate thinking about confections of spun sugar and butter cream, fruit pies with a crisscrossed crust on top or tarts crowned by glazed fruit—apricots, raspberries, strawberries, and kiwi that look as if they were lifted from a Renaissance painting. I also adore gooey butter cookies, assorted French designer chocolates, thick custards, puddings and decadent multi-layer chocolate cakes with ganache icing.  Sweets are the enemy of our bodies. I know that, yet when they beckon, I feel powerless over my need to consume a handful of chocolate covered nuts or a big chunky double chocolate brownie. I know it’s reached...

You know it’s time to make a change when you hear the “click” in your head, a term that was coined for Gregory Peck in the movie, “Gentleman’s Agreement.” He is assigned to do a magazine piece on anti-Semitism but with a new twist. After weeks of gathering stats, a series of false starts and several eye-opening incidents, he finally develops an angle. He shouts to his mother: Ma…this is it. That click just happened inside of me. The click can be the moment of critical mass, threshold or boiling point that writer Malcolm Gladwell dubbed “the tipping point” and...

We all treat ourselves whether it’s a $4.15 Venti (large) latte at a favorite coffee place, a $3.50 pecan oatmeal cookie at a neighborhood pastry shop, our favorite chocolates or a special $30 tinted moisturizer at the makeup counter of a department store.   Are these non-essential items or “tiny wants” (a term used by New York Times financial writer Tim Herrera in an interview, “Go Ahead, Just Buy the Cup of Coffee,” June 24, 2019) really going to make a dent in our budgets long-term? We say no. In fact, we feel that trying to curb these small cravings...

We are forever recycling the past with our possessions. They surround us in our homes. Many represent a special memory. For me there are so many but the most important are the Chinoiserie lamps and black lacquer bar we bought in San Francisco on our honeymoon, the thousands of vinyl records my late husband accumulated over his 68 years, the first painting we purchased from a local St. Louis art gallery, the early 20th-century Gramophone my husband found for sale at a farmhouse, the sheet music our two sons used to learn their various instruments, the carefully framed newspaper and...