Picnics and Me

I'm always up for a picnic. Combine eating with being outdoors and I'm there. While this is something that I've always been happy to do, I found it was something I really truly enjoyed when I was in Europe for a month seven years ago.

While trying to enjoy the local ambiance, while also not spending too much, my then boyfriend and I would often go to a market and buy a loaf bread, a hunk of cheese, cured meat, whatever fruit they had and some tomatoes, along with a bottle of water and of wine. We ate everywhere - in rowboats, on trains, on museum steps. I preferred it to every restaurant we went to.

Before that, in the spring of 2005, we had visited Italy by itself for his boss' wedding in Capri. We stayed for a week and while there, we dropped in on my best friend who was attending school in Florence for a couple months. We bought essentially the same things we would come to live on that fall in the rest of Europe, and went to her dorm. She pulled the sheets off her bed and we used them as a blanket while sitting in the olive groves just over the hill from her school. It was so amazing, so European, so perfect - until the mosquitos came. But it is one of my fondest memories.

But picnics aren't about where you are, so they're just as wonderful here - as long as the right people are there. From time to time, my boyfriend and I enjoy picnics (the picture above was taken recently at Encino State Park) and it's become a tradition to go on a picnic with his sister and her boyfriend after church on Easter.

I gave up eating mammals about two years ago, so the cured salami and prosciutto of the past has turned into honey roasted turkey or chicken, but that's fine with me. Tomatoes are always a good option - especially grape tomatoes, since you don't have to cut them (kind of a to-do when all you have is a small paper plate and a plastic knife - plus I often forget to bring napkins along).

Living in a LA works out well for me - picnic season lasts from March to October. Couldn't ask for more.