Mothering

My Top Chef Cheftestant Kid Plays With Food

December 1, 2011

Author’s note:  This is a continuation of a series of blogs about the experience of watching my daughter, Chef Dakota Weiss,  make her way through Bravo TV’s Top Chef Texas, currently airing on Wednesday nights.    Early in Dakota’s career she worked under the chef de cuisine at The Mansion at Turtle Creek in Dallas.  There she met and observed celebrity chef Dean Fearing. This was a natural transition from her time with chef Mark Miller and his chef de cuisine,  Jeff […]

A Berry Pie, A Pale Carpet, & A Top Chef Future?

October 4, 2011

After a 1986 spring visit to the chi-chi shops of Palm Springs, a Southwestern pastel pallet of peach, mauve and teal inspired a redo of our harvest gold and brown home’s interior.  Two weeks later, my now pre-adolescent daughters and I swooned over a pale apricot carpet sample.    OMG the apricot carpeting and peach painted walls, trimmed in pale teal, was gorgeous. It reversed our masculine-inspired home to a three females in-charge and in-control home.  Concurrent to the home redo my […]

Top Chef Cheftestant Mama

September 21, 2011

Dakota’s road to Top Chef began after a long labor some 30-plus years ago in my home where I gave birth to Dakota. The unconventional birthing included a male midwife, my late husband, a psychic, an astrologer, and my Siamese cat who was very concerned throughout the entire 22-hour birthing drama.

A Cemetery Hunt Brings Me To The Table

May 10, 2009

 “It would be a good idea to find your mother’s grave,” spouse gently suggested.  “Sure, someday we’ll do that,” was my oft-repeated and irritated response. The inevitable visit took place on Sunday. All I knew was that Jean Haley, my mother, was in section H of Los Angeles’s historical Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery.  Also in this cemetery are my matrilineal great-grandparents, grandparents, and an aunt and uncle.  All people I barely knew in life.  We never sat around a dinner table together. Section H […]