Happy Easter!

I love Easter. It is a day that, for me, symbolizes new beginnings, a celebration of Spring, one of good food, family, and ...more good food!

We started off our day with our wonderful farm fresh eggs from this morning! YUM!!! We also had my honey's housecured/smoked bacon and some yummy Apricot Panetone. What a treat!

After that we went to church to hear a friend of our sing. It was quite beautiful and inspirational on many levels.


Speaking of new beginnings, we went over to the greenhouse to visit the tomato babies. They are so big I am going to need to refer to them as toddlers!

We are now going to clean up what we can of the back yard and the outdoor kitchen in preparation of guests for Easter dinner. Chef Jeff is fixing his famous Crab and Mango Salad in Avocado halves, my mother's marinade is on the leg of lamb which will be roasted in the wood burning oven along with fingerling potatoes, I will be making a beet, tangerine and mint salad, steamed asparagus and fresh meyer lemon mayonnaise. For dessert...back to the panetone, but this time it will be the one with Moscato wine mixed in.

Wishing all of you a happy Sunday, happy Spring and happy new beginnings!

Will the real Miss Beadle please stand up?

I am lucky enough to call Miss Beadle my friend, the REAL Miss Beadle.

Seventeen years ago my friendship with Ms. Charlotte Stewart was struck. She had already finished her role of Miss Beadle on Little House on the Prairie, and was now a famous Beverly Hills/Hollywood party planner. Charlotte was getting ready to celebrate a birthday with a party and asked me to supervise the food for it. Through the planning of her party we became friends.

It is hard to believe it has been so long. I am so lucky that Charlotte and her husband, David, are like family to me. I just got back from having dinner with them at their house in Napa. It really was like being with...family!

Charlotte has had an incredible career. It started in 1959 when she was crowned Miss Yuba City, then she had parts on the tv shows: My Three Sons, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, then a movie with Elvis, Speedway, a few more tv shows and then...Eraserhead, the famous David Lynch movie. WOW!!! Check out her bio. You will also see that besides the tv shows and David Lynch movies, she was also in Tremors with Kevin Bacon. See how close you are? You can play the game, 6 degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon and score! (I am 1 degree away from Kevin Bacon, you are now 2!)

A couple years ago Charlotte set up a website, Liquid Butterfly. On that website she sells great memorabilia from her time on Little House, along with other periods. You should check it out!

I have to admit that my personal favorite is this poster:

Charlotte opened a store on Santa Monica Boulevard across the street from a recording studio, where, coincidentally, Jim Morrison/The Doors would record, among others. She would make clothes and embroidered jeans. To this day Charlotte is still sewing great things. Right now she is sewing and selling mini shoulder purses using "recycled" jeans and gives 10% to breast cancer research. Charlotte is a proud survivor of this nasty disease and does fund raising for the research.

I am currently in negotiations for some of these purses! I would like to sell them on my future website: www.eastsidefarm.com
As you will see it is under construction...soon!

Happy Easter! Eat Farm Fresh Eggs!

Eastside Farm Eggs go to the Big Apple

Our friends, Mark and Teri Stark of Willi's Wine Bar fame, called us a couple of weeks ago to see if we had "farm fresh eggs" for them to take with them to New York. Seems that they were heading to the James Beard House in New York and wanted to take Sonoma County eggs. Someone reminded them we had eggs, and so we received the call!

Hope y'all had fun at the event!

PS: this is the second trip to the Beard House for our Eastside Farm Eggs. The first time was the Zin Restaurant event last February!