Despite my aversion to Christmas, I have always loved Easter. My experience of it was never religious, but purely secular. Growing up, Easter meant a celebration of Spring, egg hunts, fluffy bunnies and chicks, dyeing eggs with onion skins and flowers, and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. For several years I got to work in a gourmet store in the weeks leading up to Easter. The only thing better than taking home broken chocolate Santas had to have been taking home broken chocolate bunnies.

Along with the first calls of the loons, the chirping of birds, the bright sunshine and the earthy fragrance of the woods, comes my desire for pound cake. Most years, these signs of spring in northern Minnesota coincide with Easter.

This year, though, snow still covers the grass around my house and it's cold enough outside to warrant a warm jacket. But even an Easter with no sign of spring in sight does not prevent my thoughts from turning to the tantalizing aroma of a baking pound cake wafting through my kitchen.

In a true southern kitchen, Coca-Cola is not only found in the refrigerator, it's also found in the pantry. You are more likely to find a few cans of Coke stashed with the flour and sugar than you are to find a bottle of balsamic vinegar. We marinate ham with it, make barbeque sauce out of it, add it to baked beans and even bake cakes with it.

I have been convinced for years that someday I will be discovered by a Coke executive in a hotel at 5 am, as I am standing by a Coke machine in my pajamas, or what I refer to as my 'almost pajamas,' a line of clothing I am going to design someday for those of us who start our day wandering around the halls searching for a Coke machine. It would be a perfect commercial.

Dear SOS: Whenever I get out to L.A., I have to stop at Auntie Em's Kitchen in Eagle Rock for a cupcake fix -- specifically, for a coconut cupcake with coconut cream cheese frosting. It's a miracle of a baked good. Do you think you could get the recipe for a Bostonite who's stuck on the East Coast dreaming of this confection?
-- Jenny Sawyer, Boston

Dear Jenny: This billowy coconut cupcake is pretty irresistible. The cake has a hint of almond and a light buttermilk tang. There's tender, shredded coconut baked into the cake too. And the frosting -- it's a cream cheese frosting with butter mixed in, airy and creamy both, finished with a sprinkling of more shredded coconut on top. This one's for you, Bostonites.

Get the recipe at L.A. Times...

As Easter fast approaches I get excited at the prospect of having a houseful of friends and family that have been fasting for the last 30 hours that I can lovingly overfeed!

When my Grandmother came to America in 1914, all her recipes were stored in her head. As she settled in a small town in Maine, she had a tin knocker make a set of baking pans for her food. I was lucky enough to have these handed down and we fill them every Easter just as she did.

My sister and I cook non-stop for 2 days, then we start decorating the house. The olives need marinating, the eggs have to be dyed and polished, the cookies need to be baked and dusted with confectionary sugar, the lamb butterflied and bathed in wine and herbs. We are busier than santa’s workshop!

Easter in our house, a tiny hovel on the east side of Kansas City, Missouri, was always fraught with tension generated by my Mother.

She was not used to entertaining and on holidays we hosted my cousin, a Jesuit priest, for Sunday dinner. We usually did Turkey and Fixings’. Mama would get up in the middle of the night to put the big Tom turkey in the oven.

No wonder by dinnertime it was dry and tough. But she made pretty good gravy and it was the most requested part of the meal. “Any more gravy, Irene? My, my! That sure is fine gravy! Please, pass the gravy!”

The moistening effect on the dry turkey was just what was needed.

Calling Vermont winters “long” is like saying I have “salt-and-pepper” hair.  My hair is gray, the winters are endless, and even the craggiest New Englanders start to get a little squirrelly once Christmas is over.  This situation is exacerbated by something called,  “the January Thaw;” a cruel, meteorological joke which, somehow, allows the weather to warm up sufficiently for a couple of days to melt all the snow. 

This sends giddy people who ought to know better, rushing onto the roads in jogging shorts and into their yards to chip golf balls.  Then 48 hours later, another storm thunders in, the temperature plunges below zero and everyone slinks back inside to retrieve their long underwear from laundry baskets and fire up their wood stoves.

Around Valentine’s Day, however, we start to get indications that liberation, in the form of an actual spring, is on the way.  Even though it’s still so cold the air is blue, seed catalogs being arriving in the mail.   Next, we read in the paper that the Red Sox are heading to spring training.  Soon we’ll actually be able to see them running around on the field down in Florida if a nor’easter doesn’t knock out the satellite dish. 

We saved a bundle by getting married in March and it allowed our relatives to relieve their East Coast cabin fever, but it makes celebrating our anniversary a bit of a problem. Since we live in Los Angeles and hate cold weather (the reason we moved here to begin with), our travel options are quite slim, especially since we don't usually have the time or inclination to schlep to Hawaii or Florida. Why fly 6 hours for the same climate? Living next door to Arizona and being baseball freaks has recently helped solve this vacation dilemma. 

The Phoenix/Scottsdale area is home to the Cactus League, the Spring Training grounds of our beloved Chicago Cubs and, as of next year, our hometown Dodgers. So, for the past few years, instead of scouring the Internet for an interesting place in Southern California to while away a weekend, we’ve just jumped in our car and headed East. The drive is brutally dull and longer than you'd imagine considering flying to Phoenix only takes an hour, but our excitement and the MLB channel on XM kept our spirits up.

I love soccer so I get really excited when I go to visit my dad in London where it’s soccer season all year long.  England as you probably know has an undying passion for the sport, they treat it less as a game and more as a way of life.  For example, on a sold out night at Emirates Stadium after Arsenal scores the crowd collectively expenses 100 times the world’s energy output for a day in the 30 seconds after the goal.  Like baseball or basketball in the US, football in the UK permeates the culture – it’s everywhere.  It has both a light and dark side, and can go from having fun with your mates to total warfare very quickly. 

Spring break senior year, two months before I graduate from NYU is not exactly a vacation even though I went to London to visit my Dad.  It’s more like preparation for my final senior project, a focused study amalgamating EVERYTHING I’ve learned up ‘til now, split up by small breaks of art, shopping, and of course, food.  Basically, stress oozed out of every pore the entire ten days.  I tried doing yoga; I tried going for runs; I tried a few breathing exercises, and sure, all of that helped, but there’s really only one thing that hit the spot: chain restaurants.

As Spring slowly arrives in Maine and the snow stubbornly retreats, I push back the compost covering my rhubarb patch that has been growing for as long as I can remember. The day is sunny and kinda’ warm, what that means around here is, the mid fifties.

The air smells alive, the birds are flying happily and my rhubarb is poking through the winter protective covering. With the spring rain it will grow at lightning speed and keep growing as I madly pull at it to make many Spring and early Summer treats. 

In my house this is the first pie of the year and the first food out of our garden, making us dream of what pies lie ahead, small sweet strawberries, fragrant raspberries and mounds of wild Maine blueberries. But today we “make due” with rhubarb....

From tomatoes to tiaras, Southerners are notorious for celebrating a crop with a beauty queen. There's Miss Vidalia Onion, Miss Georgia Peach, Miss Georgia Peanut, Miss Sweet Potato and my personal favorite Miss Jiggy Piggy.

Ok, I know there is no such thing as a crop called 'jiggy piggy' but these pageants are are always followed by a festival of fine food. Miss Jiggy Piggy represents the Pig Jig in Vienna, the biggest barbeque festival in Georgia.

I read a lot of newspapers from all over, even a lot of local newspapers and whenever I see a picture of a girl with a tiara on her head holding long stem red roses my eyes get big and my mouth starts watering.