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My favorite sandals, already!
Sharing a good sandal find among women is a sacred tradition. I picked these up at Steven Alan while I was in L.A. and have worn them around Boston for several straight days. No blisters and no tired feet! And I love the colors (I bought the hip orange ones, which are called “clay” for some awful reason). If you are loving the nude-on-nude shoe trend, they even have a color for that!
How much? Less than your grocery bill but more than your Comcast bill….$88. And they run small. I’m seriously considering ordering another pair, because I dread the sandal hunt each summer.
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Meeting a (food) blogger you admire
When I realized I was going to be in Santa Monica for a week with free childcare (commonly called grandma) the first thing I though of was xobreakfast.
Xobreakfast is a blogger that I’ve admired since I first read about her on the venerable pages of Wednesday Chef. I like her style, I like her breakfast love, I like her quirky puns, and I love her great taste in recipe development (her maple olive oil oatbread is the house favorite these days). I think the first thing I loved about her was her clever avatar:
irresistible, no?
Though I had piles of affection for this person, of course I’d never spoken with her, much less met her. But I couldn’t resist the opportunity.
And she said yes!
do I look thrilled? I was.
Probably the best thing about meeting up with a food blogger is there’s no shame in emailing back and forth for weeks with our lists of where we think we should meet. L.A. currently has lots of coffee shops that are the best parts of “hipster” culture: obsessive about quality, beautiful architectural almost art-galleryesque interiors, articulate chalkboard menus, fair trade brews, carefully selected pastries…plus, and this was a big unexpected plus to me: patios with sunshine!
We picked a place half way between us, The Coffee Commissary. We were partially convinced by the existence of a food truck name Eggslut that parked outside on week day mornings. In typical fashion, everyone on Yelp insisted that the baristas were jerks who refused to smile and acted like they worked as grim reapers in the evenings….though the Yelpers gravely admitted the coffee was delicious.
But when we got there we found everyone all smiles and cordial explanations (possibly they were tipped off that two glamorous bloggers were arriving?). We both picked up salted caramel rice crispy treats, and I had to circle back halfway through for a cream biscuit with strawberry jam and creme fraiche.
Noelle ordered the signature “slut” which was a coddled egg with pureed potatoes, chives and gray salt that came in an adorable glass jar.
I brought her honey from the east coast. She made me granola. And we talked about…food! Cortados (I had never heard of these mini cappuccinos that were on menus all over LA), muesli, packing too many dishes to take to France, babies and boyfriends, eating too much when you travel to new exciting places, the strawberries at the farmers market, bread recipes….of course we knew lots about each other because we’d read each other’s blogs! It was so fun.
It made me think of this quote on Swiss Miss recently:
There’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ’round the breakfast table. It’s personal — you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting. – Trent Walton
What about you? Is there a blogger who you’d love to meet in person? Would you be nervous to share how much you truly know about them, in conversation?
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an evening cake
The cake I baked yesterday was nearly the antithesis of this quote. I began baking it—setting the espresso pot on the stove, melting the dark chocolate in the double boiler—around 5pm. Anyone who has cared for a baby for 24 hours will tell you never, ever attempt to do anything two hours before bedtime.
Oh, but dense, rich, five eggs ‘n many sticks of butter cake sounded like it would solve so many things. Betty and I were on the same page, this cake would be transformative…except I was baking the cake for myself and would not be stopped.
Joe came home to a kitchen with cake-in-progress written all over it, leftover chicken pot pie burning in the oven, a crying baby, and a wife who had forgotten how to say, “Welcome home!” and instead said, “Why can’t you come home before 7pm???” And the cake tasted like Betty Crocker’s dismal red cardboard box legacy because fatigue and anger came to eat at the table too. (I know this sounds like a bad rendition of a poorly remembered Bible verse, but I promise it was the case. It was a sad scene.)
Fortunately for the recipe‘s reputation, it was still here today. After glaring at it, I cut a slice and added the leftover raspberries from brunch this morning. And shared it with Joe, who had graciously accepted my apologies for nearly sacrificing our family’s weekend on an alter of chocolate. It was dense and nearly-bittersweet with chocolate and had crumb and yet somehow fudgey…..all the things I hoped it would be and this time I could really taste it.
If I get that urge again after 3pm, I’m buying a snickers bar.
Anyway, check your cake baking motives, friends. And once you have, take a look at this beer & wheat flour & maple syrup cake recipe. I think I know what I’m doing next Friday morning…
quote from Domestology (click to see her lovely stitched art!), found via 101cookbooks favorites list.
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Annie writes again
I literally do the same thing every day. I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom. I sit down at the same time every day because I don’t want it to be an issue. I’m like a teenager. If you give me a chance to negotiate around sitting down at 9 a.m. and beginning the piece, I’m going to be like a 15-year-old. I may have a reason why that doesn’t really make sense and why you’re trying to bum my trip.
My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It’s not anything lofty, and it doesn’t have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor. I’ve written 13 books now. It’s not really important that I write a lot more books, but I do it as a debt of honor. I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don’t love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I’ve been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
-Anne Lamott, interview on goodreads.com
Comes out March 20th.
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the good nap
I like to have my first cup of coffee after Lux wakes up from her first nap. This nap is a retreat from the world that became too tiring almost immediately after she woke up, two short hours of liveliness: pulling back the curtains and peering out the window at the gray dawn, cackling next to Joe until he opens his eyes, poking at the bookshelves until a book falls on her face, looking in all our mirrors and joyously admiring her toothless gums.
Lux falling alseep on her own is absolutely clutch to our system. Once I’ve laid her down in her crib and left the room, she shouts, she makes little cursing noises, she grumbles like an old man. A little stuffed seal that keeps her company often takes the brunt of her frustration, usually ending up on the other side of the crib. After a few minutes of noisily documenting her progress for me, listening from the next room, she silents falls asleep with her arms sprawled in front of her and the flannel blankets piled around her.
Many mornings after she falls asleep, I sneak back and take a nap of my own on my bed, just across from hers. A fan blows and hums from the corner, the white curtains are still closed against the drippy black Beacon Hill rooftops outside. She wakes from her nap completely refreshed, of course, and crows with glee to see me asleep in front of her. And that’s how I awake, like the blearly unexpected host of a surprise birthday party, with my honored guest animatedly gesturing for us to begin.
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We be tumbling
Hello friends! I started tracking our dinners on a tumbler. My ultimate goal is to click “archives” and see my motley dinners, poorly photographed and too-closely documented, spread neatly across one screen. Thus tumbler and the internet will be at last harnessed for my own selfish gain.
In a couple posts recently I mention a beef stew, and let me just link to it directly because it is damn. good. It’s by Alice Waters, who I am currently addicted to as a recipe developer. Joe is going away for a night or two on a company ski trip and I’ll either be eating that or picking up the discount sushi at Whole Foods for the next two nights. what with our budget surplus for February*, I figure why not…
*tragically, this is sarcastic. Are leap years exempt from monthly budgets?
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Tiny Furniture: now streaming!
When it came to Indie films and my family, I used to be “I’ve seen everything and am co-habitating with a bunch of Philistines.” I volunteered at the Telluride Film Festival three years in a row and saw movies 6-9 months before the previews even showed up to the party.
Then my sister starting dating a scary-savvy LA film-industry boy and now she’s sees everything. I text her about something I caught on Netflix streaming, and she’s like, “um yeah, I saw that last year. When it came out.”
and I know you probably also read about this one last year, but I just watched it and wanted to tell you loved it. I came home with Lux after a Superbowl party, put her to bed, and reveled in my moment to choose whatever I wanted to watch.
It’s streaming on Netflix, it’s written, directed, and starred in by a girl in her twenties. It’s great. And she has a show coming on HBO that she produced with Judd Apatow. Girls. which should be read as: girls! get excited for this show about girls, and by girls!
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My Valentine’s Day
Lux and I listened to this all day, like the latin lovers that we are. (on Grooveshark. I couldn’t find it on Spotify, Rdio, or Last.fm. What, no kids music? Come on guys.)
I had a dentist appointment and they gave me a rose. Sweet, but the implication reminded me that I’m there a lot these days (sad but true) and neglecting my first love (my teeth) made room for our new relationship…Or some metaphor like that. When I walked home carrying the rose, people smiled knowingly at me, and I wanted to say, “it’s not as good as you think guys!”
A little vintage ring for me from Joe, from our local antique jewelry shop. With a background of aging roses from a friend who visited over the weekend.
This photo makes the ring look really nice, which it is, but Joe promises that it was not expensive as I have tragically lost rings before and neither of us want to worry about that. I love how the stone looks black but is actually a little red. It’s too big so I need to find one of those little adjustment-pieces that make rings smaller.
a little antique (not really) Scotch whiskey for Joe. He likes peaty stuff from Islay, and I’m running out of new brands to try as I basically buy him whiskey for all special occasions.
While I was at the dentist, Joe took Lux out and bought her a sneaky Sylvester. oh my gosh does she love balloons. And I do too. We had to bring him on our walk to soften the blow of being stroll-ered around. It worked!
In the evening after Joe got out of work, we met him midway to go to a favorite local wine shop that also sells chocolate, olives, eighty-five different kinds of cheese, and salami! On the T ride to meet him, the car was full of people holding bouquets of flowers, fiddling with their ties, or fixing their hair. When we waited for Joe outside there was a feeling of anticipation in the cold air and we watched as couples excitedly met up for the night. One corner of the T station was taken up with a bustling impromptu flower shop. It felt a bit like Christmas eve!
The wine shop was having a very clever wine tasting and oyster-eating event. For $10 you could try three different wines and have a small plate of three oysters. Lots of people were taking advantage of it. I loved how they gave you a slip of paper with the names of the wine, and the cost of the bottle, for easy reference.
Lux spent a lot of her time looking around for other baby friends, to no avail.
We used some Valentines money (thanks Mom! thanks Mimi!) and picked out a german champagne, soft cheese, a salami, homemade crackers, and homemade biscotti. It was all irresistible!
After we got home, we settled in with our snacks, and caught up on episodes of Downton Abbey. Joe said, “wine, cheese, and the aristocracy!” All and all, we barely noticed that we couldn’t go out to a nice dinner or a late night party.
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Goodreads, and the Yelp syndrome
Goodreads is the yelp of the book world. Like yelp, they are the chosen venue for their genre of reviews: they have more than 7 million users and offer a variety of ways to track your interactions with their chosen field: progress updates, themed bookshelves, snooping your friends recent reads, and of course: reviews.
Just like Yelp, read the reviews, and you are are plagued by the problem of no-elected-critic: some people seem to trash a book for personal reasons, some careful cite their opinions and then forget what they were talking about and meander on a different topic, some arbitrarily nominate their recent read as the greatest book of all time because they happend to be drunk while reading (this last one happens more with yelp than goodreads, but still).
And yet, just like Yelp, I read dozens of these strange strangers’ opinions; squinting as I read, trying to spot their neuroses and discover whether they match mine or not. If you both think slow service is cause for complaint (oh my goodness no. stop reading of this person’s frantic life immediately), or if you both think quirky signage makes it worth the trip (yes!) perhaps you can share an opinion or two.
I liked my friend Kate’s careful specification of what exactly each star means to her (you can click the photo for a close up). Goodreads should adapt her specifications and suggest these boundaries to you as your review. She’s a librarian, so of course we can count on her to guide society towards agreed upon organization.
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a Ski Trip
Last week we went to Telluride, CO to ski with my family. Lux has a circadian clock like no other, so she woke up around 5:30 every morning. We would moan and groan, and finally turn on the lights and get dressed, much to her delight.
Because everyone else was still sleeping, we’d go down to the lobby of our building where a fire was roaring, and bad coffee was served for free. The New York Times can’t make it up the mountain in time for the day, so they fax a “summary” paper which the resort then prints out and staples together.
I grew up skiing with my dad.
Joe hadn’t skied, ever, in his life, until last year.
We signed him up for a few lessons, and when I checked in again, he was roughly 5x better than me. To become a better skier you have to be fearless and love speed. I like: watching my ski tips plow through the fresh snow, slowly weaving through tree trails and down really lazy mountain passages, and riding the chairlift with the sun on my face.
So now Joe’s faster and better than me, but we still skied together for a couple hours every day, and took breaks along the way at the little places you can buy hot chocolate (and once, champagne with ham and cheese sandwiches).
At the warming huts you buy the cup for the hot chocolate and then you use push-button machine to fill it up. That’s not very romantic, except they leave the bin of mini marshmallows and canisters of whipping cream out, serve yourself style. So you can layering as much of both as you like, with no one even noticing what you made off with.
