“Please don’t wake me from this dream!” I said out loud to my husband while eating the brilliant meal in front of me, prepared by my live-in chef. Uh-huh, you heard correctly. My private chef.
Let me take you back five days. I received a late-night email. It was from an old friend, Olivia. She told me her son was here in Los Angeles from London (where they live) and that the minute he arrived, he had a bust-up with his girlfriend. She said that he could use a friendly face. I answered immediately: “Of course, have him call me.”
First call the following day was Oscar, whom I’ve never met. In fact, I have not seen his mother in thirty years. Since he was already in Venice, I asked him to meet me at one of my favorite restaurants, Gjelina on Abbot Kinney. My husband Michael agreed to join us. Oscar, looking lost and forlorn, told us he had planned to take his now ex-girlfriend to Valentine’s dinner here at this same restaurant the following night. We offered our home to Oscar for the rest of his vacation. I didn’t think we would be too intriguing, but later that day he told me that eating lunch with us was the most fun he had had so far in Los Angeles. And when he told us he was a chef, I nearly screamed. Actually, I did, but only internally.
When you enter the door at the Beverly Hills Cheese Store - the greatest cheese store in the U.S. of A. (419 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210), the first friendly face and voice you see and hear on your left will always be that of Cheese Wiz Sebastian Robin Craig working behind the counter like a whirling dervish - unless he is jetting off to the cheese caves of Roquefort, France for a tasting; or Stockholm, Sweden to compose more jazz (go to iTunes for his latest CD “Volition”); or just kicking back and learning Russian.
Most people go to Vermont to watch the leaves change colors in the fall but I like it in the spring when the leaves on the trees are green, 67 colors of green, so that the bonnets of the trees look like a jigsaw puzzle and the tulips are in bloom and the geraniums and the cherry blossom trees – there’s nothing fancy about Vermont, it’s all straight up plain flowers plainly blooming everywhere, as if the earth is starting fresh again after winter and toward the end of May it hits an optimum equilibrium even if it does rain every other day which if you’re only there for a day and a half isn’t very good odds, at least not of skipping the rain. But people in Vermont don’t mind, they just take out their umbrellas and keep on truckin’…. 
I’d just finished writing my memoir 
, a
coming of age tale filled with recipes from my Armenian youth, my
vegetarian restaurant on the island of Ibiza and various exotic locales
I’d spent time in. 
A group of good friends, connected by a love of politics and good food,
always used to get together every August in Santa Barbara. Life slowed
down; we’d cook together using all local produce – sweet corn, plum
tomatoes, Armenian cucumbers, peppers, tomatillos, Blenheim apricots,
avocadoes, Santa Rosa plums – and then feast as the sun went down
behind rolling hills planted with avocadoes and lemons. 