I’ll cop to the fact that I frequently make my life more complicated than is strictly necessary. Case in point, I’m making a quilt from old t-shirts. The easy way to do this is to cut out 14”x14” squares from each t-shirt, iron it onto fusible interfacing, sew them together and attach a backing fabric and hey presto, you’re done. Is this what I’m doing? Not even close. Read the rest of this entry »
Where did August go? I have a fairly clear idea about what happened to June (wedding in late May + NOLA trip), I’m reasonably sure I remember July . . . but, it’s the first of September today? How did that even happen? Where did August go? Was it kidnapped? Can we ransom it back?
Rather than focusing on the fact that the weather has embraced Fall, and it’s getting duskier and duskier as I walk home at night, and that come Monday I won’t be able to wear white shoes anymore, I’m going to look at the bright side of the start of the close of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
My office and I exist at different ends of the entertainment spectrum. I go to museums for fun, they only go if dragged by an out of town elderly aunt. I go out to dinner in Cambridge (fusion cuisine, small, innovative + cocktails), they go out to dinner in Boston (classic high end and/or neighborhood dive bars). I plan excursions to Newport to tour Gilded Age mansions and have high tea, they go to football games and tailgate. Overlap only ever tends to occur at the nexus points of Harry Potter movies and HBO shows.
When people in my office asked me what I’d done this weekend the response to “I went to the annual Corn and Tomato Festival at Verrill Farm” was met with a long pause and an expression of ‘well, of course you did’. I, however, refuse to apologize for an afternoon spent sitting in the sunshine watching small adorable children being given rides on equally small adorable ponies while sampling 20 kinds of tomatoes, 10 kinds of corn and a tent’s worth of dishes made from seasonal farm produce (the chilled corn-poblano soup was particularly spectacular this year) and listening to a live blue grass band. Read the rest of this entry »
My roommate and I were up in Stowe, Vermont this past weekend for the annual antique car show – her father has a 1942 fully restored Cadillac (which won best in its class for the second year running this year – full web album of the car parade here. We go up every year for this and while her parents are showing off the car to other antique car enthusiasts we tool around Stowe poking into the various arts & crafts stores, buying chocolates to take home with us, and sampling copious varieties of jam at the awesome Stowe Farmer’s Market. We managed to spend entirely too much money on clothing, jewelry and a seriously awesome tray (we got the square elephant one – it was on sale!). What we did not get to do, sadly, was go to the Dutch Pancake House for brunch on Sunday morning. Read the rest of this entry »
For reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I’ve been staring at a lot of upscale restaurant and catering menus recently. This is an activity which is mostly completely pointless because the event that I’m perusing them for isn’t happening for another three years at which point some of these restaurants may no longer be around/as good as they are now, and other new exciting restaurants will have opened. These facts have not stopped me in the slightest.
Having now looked at more menus than I can count I’ve realized several things. One, I actually have a better reason than I’m pretentious for liking farm-to-table restaurants. Read the rest of this entry »
There are some weeks when my menu planning falls into place like the perfect game of tetris. Then there are weeks when I leave my menu plan open in the background on my computer all day long, all week and keep clicking back to it in spare moments to swap things in and out and leave blanks and email everyone I know (okay, my mother and Jes) asking them for help figuring out what’s missing. This week was a lot more like the latter than the former. At this point, I’ve made and eaten Dinner and I’m still not entirely happy with the juxtaposition of all the dishes. 90% of it was there, but the green beans felt off somehow, like they didn’t quite fit into the rest of the meal. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not a secret that I love summer. It’s not just the fact that for a brief period of time I’m actually warm all the time (except at work where I wear wool scarves and hard warmers). It’s also that there’s pretty much nothing that shows up at the farmer’s market that I don’t want to (and do) buy in egregious quantities.
I am so known/notorious for this that at least one of the vendors that I go to all the time (seriously – they know me so well they’ll give me things on credit when I’ve bought more than I have cash for in my wallet that day) teases me that she could find my house by following the trail of tomatoes. As if I’d ever waste a summer tomato on the ground like that. Also, I’m not sure she realizes that what I buy on Monday will only last me through Tuesday evening, and that I go buy more on Thursdays. Read the rest of this entry »
Summer is my favorite time of year, and now that it’s finally summer in Boston (it took a while) I’m fully enjoying it while it lasts. Upsides include:
It’s finally hot – I get that not everyone sees this as a serious upside, but I’m cold blooded and this is the only 8 weeks of the year that I don’t have cold hands and feet. Well, so long as I’m not at work, where the first thing I do every morning is turn on my space heater and put on a sweater.
A corollary to the above – I finally have a tan, which means I can wear white and not look jaundiced. Vanity thy name is woman. Read the rest of this entry »
When I was in high school my parents and I went on a vacation to Vienna during which it was so cold that every activity was punctuated by a stop in a café for coffee (mit schlag, aber natürlich) and torte and to defrost. The five days I just spent in New Orleans was highly reminiscent of that – substitute heat for cold, air conditioning for radiators and beignets and café au lait for coffee and torte. If we didn’t succeed in eating our way through the city, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying; and if there were iconic dishes we didn’t sample it was only because there simply were not enough meals in the day. Read the rest of this entry »
I firmly believe that sandwiches are the world’s perfect food. You can eat them for any meal of the day. They can be sweet or savory. They can be hand held or served on a plate and require a knife and fork to eat. They can embody the spirit of any culture and cuisine. Plus, by definition they contain a tasty starch. There is no bad in this equation.
The British understand the appeal of sandwiches (and bacon) on such a deep emotional level that students at Leeds University got funding to research and derive a scientific formula for making the perfect bacon buttie. How much do you wish you could have been a part of that research team? Read the rest of this entry »
