As temperatures soar above 100F for days and weeks on end, here’s one sure (and pretty low carb) way to keep your cool: Tinto de Verano, low carb style.

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As many of you may know, Mike and I have been on a two-week jaunt through the Emerald Isle occasioned by his participation in a golf tournament in County Cork. A visit to Ireland means, for him, plenty of Jameson and Guinness (both of which he enjoyed in ample measure) and for me (really for us both, because he likes it, too) it means enjoying a pint of good Irish hard cider.

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Forgive my lengthy absence from the blog desk. As those of you who also read Mike’s blog know, I’ve been up to my eyeballs for the last month finishing a couple of major business projects and wearing my SB Choral Society President and soprano-in-the-chorus hats getting our Verdi Requiem behind us (which, as he’s already blogged about, was a smashing critical success, thank you very much) and as such all work on my blog got pushed to the back burner. Mea culpa!

Then before you could turn around and catch a breath, we were off on this trip to China.

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We were recently invited to join our friends, Mike and Debbie, to celebrate their anniversary with a weekend of wine tasting and golf in Napa. The acme of the trip–the clincher that made me instantly agree to join them the second Deb’s email hit my inbox–was dinner at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, about which veteran readers of my darling husband’s blog have already heard an earful…or two.

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Thanks to the miracle that is the world wide web, our blogs reach people in all parts of the globe. Just the other day, for example, a reader from India wrote telling us that she had purchased our book Protein Power and was persuaded by it to commit to the diet to lose weight and improve her health. She loved the book, but wrote to point up what she felt was a glaring omission: no recipes in sync with her native Indian cuisine, particularly traditional Indian breakfast and lunch fare.

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We arrived on July 14 in Florence and it was HOT HOT HOT. The temp was about 105 degrees and pretty humid, what with the Arno meandering through town and the town’s being situated in a broad valley that traps the heat. We had arranged tickets for the group for entrance into the Accademia (to see David) which Mike and I opted out of, having seen David a couple of times before. The group also had advance tickets for the Uffizi, which we opted to do, even though we’d also done it a couple of times before as well, figuring that at the Accademia there’s primarily the David (which is glorious) and a few other of Michelangelo’s works, but not the volume to see that there is at the Uffizi, which really deserves multiple visits. After this experience, I wouldn’t recommend doing it in the summer, however, since it is just people cheek by jowl and it’s tough to even get close enough to the Botticelli Venus (or anything else for that matter) to really study it much. You pretty much just get herded through in a flock and it’s not the most artistically satisfying way to do it.

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Sorry for being absent for the last couple of weeks, but as most of you know, Mike and I are with my Santa Barbara Choral Society European performance tour and the schedule has been nothing short of a forced march through Italy, since the group arrived on July 11.

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