A good friend of mine from London moved back to Paris a few years ago and met her now-husband on her first weekend back in the City of Lights.  He is now a Senator, and this lovely couple invited us to join a private tour and dinner at the Sénat last night.

I hadn’t entirely understood what we were getting ourselves into.  I’ve strolled around the Jardins Luxembourg almost every day since we arrived in Paris seven weeks ago, and though I knew that the gardens technically belong to the Sénat, I hadn’t stopped to consider the actual building and what went on inside.  We were late (of course), and the tour was in rapid fire French, so I can’t be too precise about the politics, the electoral system, how a bill becomes a law, or even if Senators are the people who are responsible for making laws in France.

I can, however, speak to the few gems that I was able to glean on our whiz through the second half of the tour, including some obvious contrasts between the Sénat here and the United States Senate and its Capitol Building in Washington, DC:

Can you believe it? I ended up on the nut farm! OK, no wise comments. I’m talking about a real nut farm in Hawaii, where my five kids and five grandkids can ramble around, work up an appetite (I don’t have to work at it), and then enjoy some of the luscious macadamia nut cookies that I’ll be making for them on Mother’s Day. (I know that’s backward — they should be making them for me.)

Mac nuts are the best — pearly and buttery, with just the right texture and so easy to crunch. Everybody loves them. Of course, that includes the wild pigs that have grudgingly agreed to let Granny (that’s me, I still can’t believe it), the kids and their pals share the place with them and the wild turkeys.

The gorgeous greenery, the ocean in the distance, the sound of the rain that keeps it all lush and fragrant: It’s a sweet slice of heaven, and I hope everyone can find their own little slice of that, wherever they are.

For me there is no food more appealing than roast chicken. I'd be happy to subsist on it all the time. Instead of roasting a whole chicken, which can take an hour or more, I prefer roasting chicken in pieces. It's so much faster especially for a weeknight meal. I love roasting chicken breasts, sometimes a whole bunch at one time. This way I have leftovers for dinner the following night or I can enjoy it for lunch atop a salad the next day. For dinner though, especially when I'm pressed for time, I like to make simple sides. And there's nothing more simpler than roasting vegetables alongside the chicken. Plus with this recipe the chicken and the vegetables both finish at the same time. Now that sounds like a simple supper.

For this recipe I chose to roast carrots and kohlrabi. Their flavors concentrate and sweeten from the high oven heat. Kohlrabi, a turnip-like vegetable with a broccoli flavor, which many people would most likely pass in the market without a second thought, is actually one of my favorite vegetables. I love them in soup, but this roasting method makes them taste even better. With only seven ingredients, this is probably the least fussiest recipes you will ever find. And the end result is so rewarding that you will want to make it again and again. With so little preparation spent in the kitchen there's more time to kick back, relax, and enjoy a glass of wine, perhaps a Chardonnay, to toast the mellow evening.

Cinespia screenings on the side of the mausoleum at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery have been staples of Los Angeles summertime since their first screening in 2000. Still, I was too afraid to attend until last summer. I thought watching icon filled movies amidst the sleeping corpses of the icons themselves would be too tempting to their ghosts. Would not an actor or director or musician—narcissistic by trade—want to take a final curtain call? Wouldn’t the music of applause be enough to wretch their resting spirits from eternal slumber? So I left the screenings to burgeoning hipsters and longtime cinephiles and chose to rent classic movies at Vidiots instead.

I now love the screenings, so last Saturday when my friends asked me to join them at the cemetery to watch Elia Kazan's Cain and Abel classic East of Eden starring the James Dean, I said yes. However, like the great films themselves, going to the Hollywood Forever screenings is quite a production.