These fantastic restaurants near Nashville boast fabulous food and lots of small-town Southern charm. This post was written in partnership with Visit Rutherford.  Nashville’s restaurant scene is on fire right now, but while this means more options on the food front, it also means higher prices, longer waits for a table, and the disappearance of […]

Seventeen years ago (!), some kind soul gave us a waffle iron as a wedding present. Over the years, I’ve made waffles on occasion, but since pancakes are soooo much easier, there’s really only one reason I don’t Kondo the big, heavy iron altogether — PIZZA WAFFLES. Pizza waffles are one of my kids’ favorite […]

I got to try QuikFix free of charge. My opinions, as always, are my own.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve had odd jobs that would be perfect for a college kid in need of beer money cash to help pay off student loan debt. I have the numbers of several good handymen, but it […]

Get ready for the ultimate Chattanooga family vacation. If there’s any city I feel completely knowledgeable about (besides Nashville), it’s Chattanooga, Tennessee. My oldest stepdaughter enrolled at UT Chattanooga in 2008, my younger stepdaughter followed her a few years later, and at least one of them has lived in Chattanooga ever since. We generally visit […]

I always get off to a slow reading start in January — I think it’s because I generally devote lots of time to reading in December, when everything shuts down for the holidays and the kids have time off and it just feels like the perfect time to curl up with a good book. By […]

A while back, I wrote about my favorite ‘secret’ hiking trail in Nashville — the Hidden Lake trail at Harpeth River State Park. It’s a gorgeous trail with a fascinating past, and most people who read the post were excited to find out about it. Notice I said MOST. ‘Well, I guess it’s not a […]

  Last weekend, my eleven-year-old son and I went to the zoo. It was a cold, snowy day and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We had fun watching the clouded leopards and Andean bears in their exhibits… But what we really enjoyed was the playground. The Nashville Zoo’s playground is massive– It’s […]

I’ve spent the last year completely overhauling my family’s diet in an effort to eat healthier meals without sacrificing taste. For us, this has meant buying organic, whole foods without added ingredients as often as possible and eliminating wheat and gluten whenever we can. Trying healthier recipes (I’m partial to Paleo recipes) has introduced me […]

Years ago, when I was a young reporter for the ABC affiliate in Columbia, South Carolina, I interviewed a minister who’d been a local leader in the Civil Rights Movement and had worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. The interview took place in his home, and before we arrived, he’d pulled out albums full […]

Capriotti’s provided the food for this post.  There are so many new restaurants opening in Nashville lately that it’s hard to keep track, but I’ve been wanting to try Capriotti’s ever since reading about it in the Nashville Scene. As food writer Chris Chamberlain tells it, when he informed people who were familiar with Capriotti’s […]