Happy holidays from the Midwestern United States! I'm home for a couple of weeks with my family, and I'm really enjoying my time here.

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Although I moved out to California (five and a half years ago, now!) where nature is bitchin' at every turn, I still find an exceptional amount of beauty in the simplicity of nature here in Illinois. Each morning, I've been waking early, bundling up, and walking to the Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary, which is about ten minutes from my house. It's a 135-acre refuge of fields, forests, marshes and streams and in the winter, it's full of prairie grasses, bittersweet berries, pine trees, grey squirrels, and deer.

At the west entrance is the Volkening Heritage Farm where one can step back in time to the 1880's when Schaumburg was a rural German farm community. The horses stand idly around the red barn,

and roosters hang out on the fence keeping watch on the visitors.

On Thursday morning, there was even a fire burning in the pit on the farm. There's nothing like standing over a warm fire on a foggy, drizzly day! My explorations at the sanctuary have been a good way to start the days and to reacquaint myself with the land here.

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On Thursday evening, my Mom took me with her to her yoga class which was held in the log cabin in the Nature Center. For one hour, we stretched and cleared our minds while the fog rolled in over the pond and the leaves rustled outside. The teacher even had hot peppermint tea for us after the class was over! I'm hooked.

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Of course, I have also been baking. My neighbor Serena (who I remember being a tiny little thing) wanted to bake, so I invited her over to make some cookies. She's in eighth grade now!

We had a great time baking and telling each other our life stories. She was born in Tokyo, then moved to Manhattan as a littler girl, then here to Illinois when she was in the first grade. She may only be 14, but she already has a black belt, is an excellent pianist and wants to be a surgeon after she goes to Stanford :) She had great stories about her recent trip to Tokyo this summer, and she wanted to know all about California and baking, so we shared stories all afternoon.

It was so much fun! The cookies we made were delicious: potato chip cookies (big surprise, huh?) and cranberry pecan tassies (recipe to follow).

When Serena left, I continued baking and made chocolate ginger cookies, lime meltaways and date pinwheels. I think that this was my most successful year baking - all the cookies were delicious, and nothing burned!

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The day ended on a great note with my bestest boyfriends on earth: Kevin and Royd. I met these clowns when I was in the fifth grade, and we've stayed close ever since.

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Kevin works as Chemical Engineer in Chicago, and Royd is a producer for the Dan Ho Show on Discovery Health in New York City, so amongst the three of us, we've got the country covered from East to West! We tried out Cousin's Incredible Vitality in Chicago for dinner. It was all raw (cold), vegan (no dairy), and healthy (no greasy fat). I was really excited to try it out, but I was not impressed. The food was mediocre and generally unpleasing, which left us disappointed. The worst part was the crummy 80's dance music that started blasting about twenty minutes into our meal; the lights went off and the disco ball started spinning as a dance party got under way in the center of the restaurant.

To erase the memory of a mediocre meal from our minds, we headed to the Hopleaf Bar and ordered Framboise Lambics, Belgian beers, Belgian frites (fried food! fat! mmm!), a bread and cheese plate (dairy!) and some Tomato Bisque (warm food!) Now *that* was fun. We gorged ourselves, talked about our lives and laughed until our sides hurt - the usual order when we're together.

Kevin generously put us up for the night in Chicago, but we had to get up at the crack of dawn to drive back to the suburbs so that Royd could go to chuch. Here are the boys this morning, clearly, none of us are morning people.

And that's that! I must now get on to cooking and baking even more :) And I also have a few token gifts for my family that I'll wrap in old newspapers and put under the sprig of pine I foraged for this morning :) Happy Holidays, friends! Much love to you all.