The time passed quickly with Stephanie telling me new Julia stories and me reminding her of my favorite moments with Julia. Julia loved having fun and if you were a friend you might have known she played the famous SNL/Dan Aykroyd piece at her own dinner parties.

Summer is meant for fried chicken, first love, long walks, skinny dipping, music in the park, sunburned noses, berry tarts and vanilla ice cream. Here is my recipe for fried chicken, perfected after all day and night in my test kitchen.

Will cookbooks survive? Will paper books totally disappear? Is traditional publishing dead? Cookbooks are all about sales, and they always have been. What has changed is how the author will sell the book.

Okay, I'm jumping into the fray. I want to go on record first thing by saying that I have never met Paula Deen. I did get a call from her team years a...

The miracle every Christmas was that the turkey ever got to the table.

My Aunt Celestina was pure Italian. She had a big home. All her closets were full. Three of those closets were refrigerators. She never threw a morsel of food away. A man named Mussolini tried to starve her once and she remained scared for the rest of her life.

His secretary started calling me at noon every Monday with, "He'd like a full turkey dinner for dinner tonight. Okay, bye, bye." There were the strings... tied right to my bag of money. He tugged the strings and I roasted the turkeys.

Her memoir and cookbook is the history of her life. Oh my. What a life she has had.

I decided I had to make a meal worthy of my new beautiful china. It took me a while to decide on the menu but I kept seeing rich, gold tones in my imaginings, and I remembered Steak Diane.

In food styling, like most small businesses, you say, "Yes" no matter what. If the client can think it, we can achieve it. My latest lesson learned in, "I can't make this up" came in the form of a whole pig.

I've worked with many celebrities that write cookbooks. Some are very sincere, some are skanks, some are desperate for the attention, and some want to transition out of what they are doing.