Intimate Thanksgiving featured in Beauty & the Feast, Life Choices Magazine
My column on food and table art in Life Choices Magazine
The new autumn edition of Life Choices Magazine is out with my feature column Beauty and the Feast focusing on an intimate Thanksgiving with all the fixings. Take your time reading all the wonderful articles submitted by a bevy of lovely ladies. You’ll find my column Beauty and the Feast on page 52.
A simple Thanksgiving celebrated among an intimate foursome of friends. That’s pink champagne in the vintage coupes.
Roast turkey bursting with oyster cornbread dressing.
My great grandmother made pumpkin pies like this back on the prairie.
A page from the Walkertown NC Ladies cookbook with recipe for the most heavenly sweet yams ever.
I’m running for Mayor!
Here’s my draft logo for my campaign for Mayor of Pismo Beach.
Election Day Nov 8, 2016.
Beauty and the Feast Tajine Debut in Life Choices Magazine
Debut of new feature in Life Choices Magazine
The Spring Quarter issue of Life Choices Magazine pp 30-32 features a new article by me on making killer tajines and setting beautiful tables.
Check out pages 30-32 for my now-not-so-secret recipe for tajine (also spelled tagine). This is a basic recipe that can be adapted to any kind of protein – or just veggies – mixing up the spices and herbs for a different result each time. You’ll also find ideas for what to serve with a tajine and tips on how to set a drop dead gorgeous table.
Link here – See pp 30-32: Life Choices Magazine feature Beauty and the Feast
Lamb tagine
Two of my tajine dishes
A leopard dinner to go with a wild meal.
Neon hieroglyphs and giants with mystical crowns in the Temple of Dendur
Color the Temple: Scene I
The light projection project at the New York Metropolitan Museum Temple of Dendura
When I wrote The Red Mirror, I held an image in my mind of the interior of an Egyptian temple far different than anything I’d ever seen in photos or real life. The walls pulsed with a color palette so vivid that the strange giants with human bodies and animal heads with mystical crowns leapt from the stone to dance in the still air.
Here’s a quick excerpt from Chapter Three – The Temple:
Simmering hieroglyphs in colors bright as neon exploded from every surface. Giants with mystical crowns or the heads of animals performed strange rituals in soaring murals painted in vibrant red, yellow and blue.
I resisted leaning my head back to take in the vast ceiling with its elaborate geometric designs, absorbing as much as possible without being obvious. But I couldn’t stop my eyes from traveling everywhere at once.
As if in answer to my imagination begging for manifestation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recreated by magic of light projection what archaeologists believe are the original colors of one vignette in the Temple of Dendur. The scene couldn’t be closer to what I saw in my mind’s eye when my character, for the first time, walks back in time through the shadowy incense-fogged chambers of a temple on the Nile. Of course, in my vision, every square inch of the walls and ceiling throbbed with the same bold colors as you see in the photo.
Although the beautiful Egypto-Roman Dendur Temple relocated from Egypt is about 500 years “younger” than my temple in The Red Mirror, it reflects the stature and majesty of the setting in my novel. There, among the polychromatic neon gods and goddesses, Isenkhebe Nefrusobek (Isis) experiences her first encounter with Egyptian mysticism and sacred sexuality.
See the New York Times article here: NY Times article on Metropolitan Museum of Art Color the Temple Scene I
An altar to January purity, peace and beauty
When all the hustle and bustle of Christmas is over, I usually strip my mantle right down for January austerity. This year my hunger for richness lingers on well into the new year. In these troubling times of world pain and conflict, I offer my altar to peace and beauty.
Radio Interview about my life and travels in North Africa
That’s me in 1976 outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Not North Africa but Middle East.
For more than three remarkable years of my life I lived in North Africa and the Middle East — specifically Morocco, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. Those adventures, both wonderful and not so wonderful, formed the person that I am today, and most especially, the woman who wrote Isis Trilogy. Drawn from my own personal experiences hitchhiking across the Sahara, surviving sandstorms, sleeping under vast desert skies, wandering from oasis to oasis, my books are a fanciful retelling of my life in settings right out of 1001 Nights.
Isis Trilogy: The Red Mirror, The Emerald Tablet, The Black Scroll.
Click Here for the March 18 2016 KVEC am radio podcast that retraces some of those adventures in an interview conducted by Deborah Bayles. My reminiscing lasts about 40 minutes. Commercial breaks have blessedly been removed.
That’s me in 1971 photo for Algerian visa to start my journey south across the Sahara.
Mark Rankin, the very brave American who traveled with me on our hitchhiking adventure. Yes, sometimes on trucks and sometimes on camels.
Highlighted towns from my Sahara Odyssey.
Share this:
Like this:
May 26, 2016 at 11:53 pm Leave a comment