Shaking up Hanukkah tradition with a new look at latkes
While most of the country is busy anticipating Christmas dinner and cookie exchanges, the Jewish community — at least the Ashkenazi, or Eastern European, part of it — will be...
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Shaking up Hanukkah tradition with a new look at latkes
While most of the country is busy buying and decorating Christmas trees, putting up lights and anticipating cookie exchanges and yule logs, the Jewish community — at least the Ashkenazi,...
WaterSmart makeover: Welcoming a sense of whimsy
Cathy and Mike Godfrey’s most recent front yard landscape project was not their first rodeo. The couple, who bought their Carlsbad house in August 1997 and are empty nesters with...
Turning a creative eye to fall, winter vegetable dishes
Every family has their established traditions for holiday foods: the ham, the mashed potatoes, the sweet potato pie, the latkes. On the other hand, every generation should have the opportunity...
Focusing on family:1970s split-level reconfigured for modern living
You have to give a lot of credit to the young couple who had the vision to buy their first home in Del Cerro from its 104-year-old owner, despite its...
WaterSmart makeover: A Mediterranean transformation in Otay Water District
When Denee and Bryan Felber bought their Chula Vista home back in 2011, the entire front and back yard were the quintessential SoCal dream: lawn. About three years in, the...
Neutral and natural: Modern Mediterranean design warms large Santaluz home
Walk into the 7,670-square-foot home in Santaluz and you immediately understand that a completely neutral palette doesn’t have to be boring or sterile. Instead, it can be calming and comforting...
Encinitas nonprofit’s tool library removes cost barriers as it lends vital help
It was in August when brand-new, first-time homeowner Zack Stevens found himself with a backyard needing an overhaul.“I’m really interested in laying some vegetable garden beds and some fruit trees...
Encinitas nonprofit’s tool library removes cost barriers as it lends vital help
It was in August when brand-new, first-time homeowner Zack Stevens found himself with a backyard needing an overhaul.“I’m really interested in laying some vegetable garden beds and some fruit trees...
Time for a real home office
For years, Aaron Hoskins had the option to work from home. But Hoskins, who leads the digital operations team at Sharp HealthCare’s Digital Experience department in San Diego, preferred to...
Revamped ranch: New design creates open spaces with cozy, coastal vibe
The 1950s were a prolific time for building ranch-style homes. San Diego architect Clifford May, considered the father of ranch houses, once said that the ranch house was “…everything a...
Fundamentally French classics, made at home
When it comes to French cuisine, Americans from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Julia Child and now, to us, have been in a near-constant swoon. We adore croissants, macarons,...
Want to get into gardening? Here are the essential tools you’ll need to get started.
If you’ve ever bought or rented a house, you the first one, especially if you were acquiring your first garden as an adult. If the garden is already established...
Garden novice? These are the essential tools to get growing
If you’ve ever bought or rented a house, you the first one, especially if you were acquiring your first garden as an adult. If the garden is already established...
Island flair: Coronado renovation rich with tropical touches
It’s the downstairs shower wall that essentially sums up the style of the newly renovated Coronado home owned by Holly and Art Croft. The 24-inch-by-24-inch Jungle Floral Equatoriale tiles with...
Three summer dishes bring out chef’s love of native Sicilian cuisine
We’re at the apex of summer and it can be hard to come up with comfort food that’s soothing like a warm hug but doesn’t dissolve you into a puddle,...
This organization is helping people across San Diego County get into composting
On a sunny Saturday morning in June, Amanda Simons and Gabriel Doyle arrived at the Ocean View Community Garden in San Diego’s Mountain View neighborhood with a 5-gallon, locked white...
Heart of the home: Del Mar redesign brightens home, retains its warmth
As anyone who has lost a life partner knows, there’s a fine, even delicate line between keeping memories alive and starting new ones. It can apply even to a home...
Composting service Food2Soil’s motto: Save your scraps
On a sunny Saturday morning in June, Amanda Simons and Gabriel Doyle arrived at the Ocean View Community Garden in San Diego’s Mountain View neighborhood with a 5-gallon, locked white...
Out with the old: Lighter hues, smart design gives Santaluz home new life
When Paula and Mark Waxman bought their Monterey-style home in Santaluz in 2012, they were living in Boston. They were taken not only by the spacious single-story floorplan, which had...
Unique storage options help tame household mess, add design flair
Is your home ready for company? Not necessarily in the sense that you’ve spiffed things up with new paint and furniture or put new art up on the walls. More...
Does wood flooring really have to be wood?
There’s little doubt that hardwood floors — whether light or dark, wide plank or herringbone pattern — add a specific feeling of nostalgia for how we think of home. Shag...
Gorgeous guesthouse: Back yard transformed into modern, multifunctional retreat
It isn’t easy to have your property turned upside down to create a guesthouse and totally redo the rest of the backyard — especially with two young kids in the...
Creating serenity in the bedroom
We’ve all been through a lot over the past couple of years — grief, isolation, anxiety, overwork, underwork, home schooling, home working. And some of us have been sick or...
Time to paint your home’s exterior? Here’s what to expect, and how to find a professional
Perhaps it’s been a while — like, 15 or 20 years? You’re starting to see a little paint peeling or fading on the trim around your sun-drenched doors or chipping...
The versatile glory of grain bowls
Where in the world did grain bowls come from? We see them everywhere now, but a meal in a bowl, sometimes called a “Buddha Bowl,” has a lofty history. The...
Lightening the look: Fresh design helps family fall in love with Del Sur home
A large backyard and hefty square footage can go a long way in helping home buyers decide to purchase a house, despite qualms about the interior aesthetics. That was certainly...
Kid-safe kitchen tools open up a world of practical enjoyment
My very first memory is of being held over the kitchen stove by my dad when I was 3 years old, so he could teach me how to scramble eggs...
Mid-century makeover: Couple preserves past, embraces future of La Jolla Shores duplex
When noted San Diego architects Homer Delawie and Lloyd Ruocco designed a mid-century duplex in the heart of La Jolla Shores in 1960, they followed the modernist precepts of simplicity...
Serene spaces: Coronado home transformed into light, open retreat
Making a move from the Northeast to Southern California can be overwhelming, especially with four children. This family took it slow, renting for a while, before committing to a two-story,...
Does wood flooring really have to be wood?
There’s little doubt that hardwood floors — whether light or dark, wide plank or herringbone pattern — add a very specific feeling of nostalgia for how we think of home....
Perfect perch: Downtown condo elevated by calming hues, sweeping views
When Linda and Steve Klosterman bought a 30th-floor condo in downtown San Diego’s Columbia District, they had no idea it would become a lock-down bunker within two months of their...
How to display your prized possessions in a memorable way
Shells. Hats. Teapots. Snow globes. Cartoon lunchboxes. Any one of these items has pretty much nothing to do with the other. But gather several of any one of them and...
Staging can unlock a home’s star power for hopeful sellers
La Jolla Realtor Michelle Silverman can easily tick off the various homes she’s sold for which she got more and higher offers because of effective staging.“There was one home that...
Beloved San Diego chef’s ion for Filipino heritage lives on
When Tara Monsod met Anthony Sinsay in 2012, she was a new graduate of The Art Institutes in San Diego and had just taken a job in the kitchen of...
Beautiful design, with kids and pets? Yes, you can have both.
On any given day of the last 20-plus years, as I’ve cleaned up fur balls from my living room area rug, puppy pee on my Saltillo tile floor, and 2...
Time for a new ceiling fan? Here’s how to make sense of all the choices
Do you have a ceiling fan that came with your home that you can’t stand — and can’t wait to finally fail — so you have an excuse to buy...
Clean eating recipes help sustain a life – and renew a ion for food
Rachel Riggs likes to say she’s the OG of quarantine. If you think you had it bad stuck at home for 15 or more months before being liberated by a...
Research chemist Pierre Bounaud fires up his creative side with ceramic arts
It was a small cube vase with a unique textured black-and-white crackle finish that first drew me into Pierre Bounaud’s ceramic work. I encountered him through the San Diego Potters’...
Restorative little cookbook aims to make eating fun again
Among the many devastating physical ailments that COVID-19 has wreaked on those who have suffered from it is the loss of taste and smell. In fact, they became notable as...
Lotusland gardens a dedicated stage for over-the-top botanical beauty
When Carlsbad resident Sharon Corrigan visited the 37-acre Montecito botanical garden Lotusland with the San Diego Horticultural Society, she was bowled over.“I’m not one to botanical names of plants,”...
Next-gen furniture rentals deliver curated style with sustainability
When 33-year-old San Diego native Rainier Rabanzo moved into his two-bedroom Mission Valley apartment last year, he found himself going down the online furniture-hunting rabbit hole. You know — seeing...
Your pets are perfectly safe around the indoor plants. Or are they?
About two years ago, after adopting an extremely shy young Siamese cat I named Bodhi, I woke up in the middle of the night to what sounded like someone crunching...
Deck the walls with lush florals, patterns and a whiff of nostalgia
When I was growing up and my dad, a museum , had to go out of town for meetings, my mom had two rituals: make breakfast for dinner, including waffles...
WaterSmart landscape winner: Making the cut in Vista
There’s nothing like launching a gardening ion by tearing out a hilly front lawn by hand with a saw and crowbar, deg a low-water garden, and then getting it installed....
Two WaterSmart winners: Budget-smart beauty and colorful cottage
For two 2020 WaterSmart Landscape Contest winners, the contrasts couldn’t be greater. Melissa and Josh Perrell, Santee homeowners who won the Padre Dam Municipal Water District contest, took a minimalist,...
Two WaterSmart winners: Botanical abundance and Craftsman charm
Sometimes it takes a pro to design and implement a beautiful landscape, but sometimes a thoughtful amateur can also turn a sad front yard into — literally — an award-winning...
Two WaterSmart winners: surfin’ safari, and succulents
Two homes. Two very different parts of San Diego County. And two totally different takes on what it means to have a drought-tolerant landscape. But these homeowners both were winners...
How to choose an area rug and set the room’s style, from the ground up
In the market for an area rug? What’s your need: To define a space? Create a vignette? Have something cozy under your feet? Protect your floors? Keep kids and animals...
Relaunch into summer adventure with a family-focused backyard
Kids and backyards don’t have to automatically trigger an impulse to buy a swing set and molded plastic playhouse, especially if the yard isn’t huge. If you have a growing...
Rethinking your outdoor space? Cast tradition to the wind
Bet you weren’t planning on a summer staycation back in January or February. But here we are. And even as San Diego begins to open up, along with the rest...
Immune boosters: Build diet with rainbow of foods
How are you feeling?It seems that this is the first question we ask friends, family and work colleagues by text, phone or Zoom. These days, how we’re feeling isn’t just...
Corzetti pays tribute to Italian heritage
You may consider yourself pretty well educated in the dozens upon dozens of varieties of pasta — dried and fresh — that originate in Italy, but the chances are pretty...
Empanadas argentinas para saborear en casa (incluye recetas)
Si tu concepto de empanadas es el postre de manzana en McDonald's o los Hot Pockets descongelados, tienes que salir más. Los empanadas - o pastelillos con rellenos salados o...
Empanadas: Argentina’s take on turnovers
If your experience with turnovers is the apple dessert at McDonald’s or defrosted Hot Pockets, you need to get out more. Turnovers — or hand pies, with savory or sweet...
A trio of healthy winter soups
As I sit down to write this, it’s a damp, dreary winter day in San Diego. Poor, poor pitiful us suffering through temperatures in the low 60s, right? But it’s...
For Hanukkah, it’s all about the oil
It doesn’t take much during the holiday season to flip the switch back to my childhood. But unlike the majority of celebrants in San Diego, my “Rosebud” is a potato...
Farm-to-table holiday appetizers
when our idea of divine decadent holiday dips were gooey baked brie, rich crab Rangoon dip and creamy spinach-artichoke dip? Oh yeah, they’re utterly delicious in their very luxuriant,...
Beans at their best
How many cans of beans do you have in your pantry? I’ll be honest. I always keep a few for last-minute needs. They’re generally garbanzos, which I like to toss...
Homeowners saved thousands with repurposed items for kitchen remodel
When Jim Marshall and Eric Ayaso purchased their 5,000-square-foot midcentury Mount Helix home in 2012 the motivation was to enjoy more space than their tight Bankers Hill home provided for...
Anti-inflammatory diet: a food fight against disease
How are you feeling? A little achy around the ts with arthritis? Perhaps you’ve got diabetes or cancer or are concerned about developing Alzheimer’s. According to Harvard Women’s Health Watch,...
Decadent French toast recipes from Breakfast Republic’s chef
Did you grow up eating French toast on the weekend? Perhaps your mom or dad taught you their simple approach: beat together eggs with milk, stir in some cinnamon and...
3 chefs share recipes inspired by their cooking dads
‘What was your inspiration for that dish?” It’s a question that chefs get frequently, usually from writers like me. The answers tend to fall into a few categories: recent travels,...
Farm-to-school produce cultivated in Encinitas
On Saturday, June 8, chefs, farmers and community will gather at Encinitas’ Farm Lab for its first “Green Feast.” It’s to be a celebratory meal to raise funds for...