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Olivia was spectacular Sunday morning swimming at the Sheldon High School pool.

Stella Davaz died today, Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009. She was 13-and-a-half years old.  

‘Grand Central’ makes baking a breeze By Kim Davaz Although we are knee-deep in prime baking season, let’s try to spread the butter and sugar wealth around. Start now, but keep up the good work throughout the year. You will be thanked richly. The Grand Central Bakery in Portland was named one of the top 10 bakeries in the country by Bon Appétit magazine. Co-owner Piper Davis learned to cook from her mother, Gwyneth Bassetti, founder of the bakery. In “The Grand Central Baking Book” written with chef and food writer Ellen Jackson, Davis shares the recipes and techniques that won…

Table for one By Kim Davaz While in college, I once worked with a young woman who had majored in home economics. Every night, she told me, she made a complete meal that she ate sitting at a nicely set table. All by herself. I was very impressed that she considered such niceties to be essential. Fifty-one percent of the people living in New York City live alone, according to Judith Jones in her latest cookbook, “The Pleasures of Cooking for One.” Cooking for one is not a chore, Jones insists, but a pleasure. In addition to cooking meals on ordinary…

Authors spice up everyday dishes By Kim Davaz Sara Engram and Katie Luber love spices and herbs. They use the term spices to mean both spices and herbs. Some chefs consider the seeds and bark of plants to be spices and the leaves and stems to be herbs. Let’s not quibble. Call them all spices and use them often. Engram and Luber love spices so much, they started a company that makes little one-teaspoon packets sold online at tspspices .com and through stores such as Smart Spice. (You can find them in Portland at Zupan’s Market.) All are organic. To encourage…

Eliot cheers on his teammates at Spencer Butte Middle School on Saturday, Nov. 22, 2009.

Visit the flavors of Scandinavia By Kim Davaz “The Scandinavian Cookbook” is Trina Hahnemann’s yearlong journey through the beauty and food of Scandinavia, month by month, beginning in January. In her past life, Hahnemann was a caterer to people you may have heard of: Elton John, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. These days, the chef and food writer lives in Denmark, where she owns cafes, including one in the Danish House of Parliament. Each month includes the foods that are best during that time of year, be it gooseberries in August, apples in October or root vegetables in the winter.…

Generous chef shares secrets to better brunches By Kim Davaz Brunch, says chef Ron Silver in “Bubby’s Brunch Cookbook” is a flexible, forgiving and fun meal both to make and to eat. His restaurant, Bubby’s in New York City, is anything but fancy. That’s not his style. He prefers to feed people with the kind of food he grew up eating at home. While plenty of fancy people you’d recognize in a second eat at Bubby’s, there are also plenty of people you’d never notice. All of them love Bubby’s food. Silver is a generous soul, never hesitating to give out…

Escape from L.A. just the ticket By Kim Davaz Gesine Bullock-Prado lived in Los Angeles and experienced everything that the L.A. lifestyle implies. As head of her sister’s production company (yes, Sandra Bullock, here known as Sandy), Bullock-Prado lived life in the fast lane in L.A. Not Los Angeles, where certainly many lovely people live, but capital L capital A - the land of excess, power lunches, the latest fashions and scripts being offered by everyone and his dog for her sister’s consideration. Did anyone care about her or was she merely a conduit to her sister? In “Confections of a…

The leaves are starting to turn in Eugene

Find a favorite page from the past in ‘Best Lost Suppers’ By Kim Davaz One afternoon in New Jersey, my father, two young cousins and I decided to make rice pudding. It’s hard to find a restaurant or grocery store deli counter in New Jersey that doesn’t offer rice pudding. I found a recipe for rice pudding in “Cook’s Country Best Lost Suppers” by the editors at America’s Test Kitchen. As written, the recipe was very good, but not quite what we wanted. We made a copy of the page for noting changes as we made them. It took several batches…

Fishtown is the Philadelphia neighborhood where Reed and Nat live. It’s interesting and diverse.

Nat and Reed in their Philadelphia neighborhood.