Amy Ephron

I have a complicated relationship with my Keurig. It was given to us at Christmas by my husband's children. It was an amazing gift, thoughtful, inventive, and big. It is big. It is also streamlined and beautiful. I'd never seen anything like it before, which made them laugh hysterically (as...

I have an image of my father wearing a blue and white canvas pin-stripe apron over his clothes that my mother gave him (with good reason), standing over the barbecue in our backyard alternately spraying charcoal fluid (with big effect) on the briquettes and a few moments later spraying, using...

There are so many things wrong with Meg Whitman's story that it's difficult to know where to start. Meg Whitman was paying Nicky Diaz Santillan, her housekeeper, $23.00 an hour for 15 hours a week. Who pays their housekeeper $23.00 an hour? Answer (and I've researched this): Nobody. But...

I admit it -- I have a soft spot for hotel bars partly because the first time my present husband declared himself to me was at a hotel bar -- albeit it was coming on the heels of "I think you have another girlfriend (true) or two (also true) and...

Food has styles and fashions. And in the last few years, as we've gotten out of the habit of ready-to-eat frozen foods or canned foods in favor of fresh, home-made, and preservative free. But there are still a few stand-outs that make holiday cooking easy, elegant, delicious and less...

On Friday, NASA is planning to crash into the moon. I'm just wondering: who gave them permission to crash into the moon? Not once, but twice. The rocket and satellite will smash into the moon at 5600 mph (more than seven times the speed of sound). The size of the...

I have to confess -- my relationship to the barbecue is voyeur at best. Occasionally, I'm assigned "Bri-ing me a-nother platter," which is ordered up as a faint cry from the deck where hopefully someone else is keeping "the barbecuer" company as I sort of regard "the grill" as a...

I predict there's another shoe that's going to drop (not sure where she bought this one, but it's coming).

Everything about Sarah Palin has been stunning and spectacular since John McCain announced her as his running mate -- to the "surprise" announcement that she was resigning, followed by the...

California has always seemed idyllic, cutting edge, a source of endless natural resources and opportunities. But our Golden State has been so mismanaged that it's, now, threatening to crash under its own weight. As the deadline to plug the 24 billion (yes, that's right 24 billion) dollar deficit in California...

There's probably a baseball analogy in here somewhere but I'm not sure where it is. Oh well, here goes. A shortstop's job is to stop players from getting to third base and if you can't get to third base, there's no way you can score a run. And while I'm...

There is a movement to strip billions of dollars from the stimulus bill led by Ben Nelson of Omaha (whose Democratic status is debatable) and Susan Collins (Republican) of Maine.

Included in the cuts are $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (of course), $14 million...

My son Ethan and I once tried to cook our way through Jamie Oliver's Italy -- Ethan was going off to school and had some delusional fantasy that there would be a kitchen in his dorm (not!) and that he would be able to cook for his friends and his...

Dear Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid,

You've been writing to me for months (years), now I'm writing to you....
Why are we bailing out the auto industry?

We have enough cars sitting in new car lots and used car lots across the country that nobody can buy. Why do...

If I were running for Vice-President, what would I wear? In light of Sarah Palin's recent clothing expenditures ($150,000 and counting), it occurred to me to wonder if I were running for Vice-President, what would I wear? I'm a Brentwood Mom. Jeans? Sweats? No, probably not.

But Sarah Palin's...

Mama, take the tanning lights off me
I can't take it anymore.
It's getting dark, too dark for me to see
Russia from my front door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on Putin's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on Putin's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on Putin's door
...

I dropped my son Ethan at school at GW last week and as I was leaving our nation's capital, I realized he was going to be three thousand miles away from his polling place and had no idea how to register to vote absentee and neither did any of his...

We'd walked past it a couple of times, a simple storefront set back from the street with a small porch, a glimpse of tables inside, unassuming. The Key Lime Cafe. Full at lunch-time, we assumed it was a Maryland version of a diner. We never even ventured up on to...

Without a qualm, or a thought to the people's lives he was affecting, Governor Schwarzenegger signed an order yesterday to reduce government employees salaries to the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, (which could affect 200,000 people) because of the budget stalemate. Luckily, State Controller John Chiang, who writes the...

Checks and balances. Have you ever thought about how amazing those two words are? In the simplest sense, writing checks and figuring out how much money you have left after you've written them. In the larger sense, if something is depleted or out of whack, something comes along to reestablish...

I have a theory that in order to be First Lady you have to have a cookie recipe.

Martha Washington had a cookie recipe: jumbals. (Jumbals have fallen out of fashion but they're a little like a pretzel made out of biscuit dough.)

Mary Lincoln had a cookie recipe:...