LKL’s Blog

14 July is the French national holiday. Learn about the history behind the celebration of Bastille Day and make some French food to celebrate!

This is an interesting site with “A weekly start for a healthier America” (though I see no reason why the rest of the world can’t participate).  Anyway, Meatless Monday is a national campaign to help people eat better by eating less red meat, pork, and poultry. You may not be vegetarian, but that doesn’t mean you have to eat meat every single day, so why not try one “meatless Monday” and see how you feel? The site includes recipes, meal planning, tips, and more to help you make a great meatless meal.
More:  Vegetarian recipes | Vegetarian menus

Here are some links to help you celebrate with your beloved.

French love language
French terms of endearment
Spanish love language
Vegetarian aphrodisiacs

Good-bye 2007 (does anyone else notice that could read Good-bye to 007 [double oh seven]? Is this a sign of James Bond’s future?) and hello 2008. It was a good year - I spent more than half of it in Costa Rica. But this year will be even better, as I’ll spend the majority of it in France. I hope you too will have some long-cherished dreams come true.

Here’s some reading material and ideas for New Year’s Resolutions for you:

New Year’s in France
French New Year’s Resolutions
Veggie Table New Year’s Resolutions

I hope you and your families are happy, safe, and warm this holiday season. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

Vegetarian Christmas Menu
Christmas in France
French Christmas Vocabulary
Spanish Christmas Vocabulary

This is a really interesting essay about how vegans are often viewed as extremists, when in fact it’s meat that is obtained via extreme methods. If you’re a vegetarian-phobe, this article will just annoy you, but it’s interesting reading for anyone with vegetarian tendencies:
Veganism Is Not Extreme

American Thanksgiving dinner, with its traditional turkey as the main course, can be difficult for vegetarians. Here are some ideas to mix and match for your vegetarian Thanksgiving.

Our next stop was Santa Fe, but first we drove through the tiny artists colony of Madrid, which one of my subscribers had kindly told me about. In Santa Fe, we stayed at the wonderful Inn of the Turquoise Bear. We had a nice lunch at Whole Body Cafe, went to Museum Hill to visit the Museum of International Folk Art and Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, saw the “miraculous staircase” at the Loretto Chapel, and had a phenomenal dinner at Il Piatto. If you like Italian, this is the place in Santa Fe.

During my recent trip to California, my husband and I met with a group of adult students who use my French site. In addition to treating us to a lovely lunch (at Nora’s Café, in Palo Alto), they had thoughtfully printed out information about some of their favorite French restaurants in San Francisco. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to visit any of them as we were leaving the next day, but I thought I’d share them here.

• Anjou Restaurant
• Café Claude
• Cornell Hotel de France
• Jardinière

A new study shows a correlation between consumption of vegetables and cognitive activity - according to the results, older people who eat lots of vegetables may have considerably less age-related mental decline than those who don’t. Interestingly, fruit consumption didn’t seem to have an effect one way or the other. But it’s still nice to see yet another argument for vegetarianism.
Source: American Academy of Neurology -
Associations of vegetable and fruit consumption with age-related cognitive change