by Patricia Yarberry Allen, M.D.

A gourmet meal for 16, 600 miles from my kitchen? How passion, luck, and a dozen to-do lists blossomed at that faraway table.

By Elizabeth Willse

If your mental picture of beer involves tasteless, fizzy yellow stuff, you’re in for a taste treat. Here, some top picks for your next picnic or barbeque.

Veteran cookbook editor Judith Jones is back with a book of her own — and, writes Susan Delson, it’s just what you’d expect from the editorial mind behind “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

Attention, all candidates and wannabees: Learn a valuable lesson from Martha Coakley. If you want to win, don’t take anything for granted. Fight as if your political life depends on it, because it does. The electorate is fickle; just because you’re a Dem running in one of the bluest of blue states for the seat [...]

As New Year’s resolution season approaches, many of us are thinking about food and our health. And luckily, we’ve got an early start from Donald Hensrud, M.D., M.P.H., and his co-authors at the Mayo Clinic, who have just finished a new edition of The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat Well. Enjoy life. Lose Weight (on the [...]

There are many of us for whom the secular Christmas is fraught with landmines of memories. In our dysfunctional ways we learn to manage these memories. We avoid the holiday, we suffer through it, or we make it an MGM spectacular event. I chose the Hollywood option. I loved making Christmas special when I was [...]

I did not feel well enough to travel this holiday. Normally, I would have pushed my way through it, but my husband gave me this gift of the day, the turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie that I needed for my soul. I needed time to be and not do more than I could do, [...]

My mom is one of six sisters. Every Thanksgiving, my mother’s family gathers at Aunt Ruthanne and Uncle Ron’s house in Connecticut. The table stretches from the dining room into the living room, with a joyous crowd of parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and friends. “We don’t say grace,” my late Uncle Howie once quipped. [...]

“Let’s have a family Thanksgiving,” I said to my friend Mary, “without any blood relatives.” It was a time a few years ago when I had had my fill of filial histrionics and was fed up with the my-way-or-the-highway holiday hosts. I wanted a tradition without the traditional baggage, a happy feast prepared and shared [...]

My friend Adam Dolle wrote me last week to let me know that his mother, Viola Dolle, had died after only a brief illness. Mrs. Dolle was a devout Catholic who traveled to Rome when she was 90 for an outdoor Christmas Eve Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II. She lived a long life [...]