YIPPEE!

Happy Birthday Erik!

PILLOWS

We have wanted to load our couch up with lots of pillows for awhile, so we finally went to the fabric store! Erik picked out the awesome fabrics and I sewed those buggers up. I think that they help the room look cozier and more inviting.

BIRTHDAY WEEKEND

It was my birthday this past Friday. My darling planned a nice evening for me with beautiful gifts and dinner at my new favorite Italian place, Marzano. Next morning we left for a camping trip in Big Sur. It was an amazing weekend! I have never seen a more beautiful place. Some highlights include; lunch at Nepenthe, (you could not imagine a more spectacular view or banana cream pie), walking barefoot through the river by our campsite and relaxing next to it with our books, Pfeiffer Beach with it's purple sand and crashing surf, breakfast at Big Sur Bakery, and waking up in our tent with fresh air streaming in every morning.

PEANUT

the Very Friendly Elephant

and Peanut 2The pattern is from Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts.

SUMMERTIME

A few weeks back we invited some friends over for a summertime backyard BBQ. We had yummy grilled shish kabobs and quesadillas, chips with Erik's homemade salsa, my guacamole, and Ina Garten's never-fail black bean salad, watermelon, Mexican sodas and horchata for drinks, and Key lime pie, strawberry rhubarb pie, and brownies for dessert. I love my lush California backyard. In our Brooklyn backyard there were too many mosquitoes to ever enjoy anything!

APRICOT JAM AND LEMON CURD

I have wanted to try my hand at canning for a long time. My mom and my grandma both canned (since they lived and worked on a fruit farm in Logan, Utah), and I always thought the process was amazing. I put it off for a long time because it seemed like it would be really hard. Turns out it is really easy. I made a little meyer lemon curd first, with lemons from our backyard. It didn't make much, but it was delicious on ice cream! The next thing I tried was apricot jam. We picked a TON of our own apricots (and plums and nectarines too) in Brentwood and I used a bunch to make jam. It was DELICIOUS! I didn't get any pictures of the procees, but if you would like to make it, the recipe I used is from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook. I love Alice Waters' beautiful and simple recipes!

NEW PAINTINGS

I made a couple of little paintings to fill some wall space in our place. I don't paint very often anymore, but I hope to change that. I really love the whole process; it can be alot of fun and also brings a great sense of accomplishment. I really hope I can get back in the habit of making artwork on a regular basis.

MY FIRST QUILT

I go to church with an incredibly amazing group of women. Most of them are quite a bit older than me, but I look up to them in awe. They love and serve others endlessly, they have been wives and mothers and had impressive careers, they have traveled the world and lived through hardship and good times too, they are fascinating and funny and are all SO engaged with life and learning. I want to be them when I grow up! A few these great women put together a quilting class for us a few weeks ago, and here I made my very first quilt. The quilt is definitely not the best technically, but I love the colors and the design that I made up. I also had so much fun working and learning with some of my new friends.

PORTRAITS

Erik is working on designing a personal calling card for me, and we thought it would be fun to use a self portrait as a background. These are a few sketches I did when I was working on a project for the new J. Crew company, Madewell. (They have great clothes, especially their cardigans!) Sadly, we moved before I got to finish my work with them, but I did get to keep my little drawings and got some great free clothes.

DAVE WILLIAMS' COOKIES

Today we made oatmeal cookies. The recipe is from Dave Williams, a family friend from my hometown. An interesting man; (he has been shot several times, survived a few wildlife attacks, pulled himself out of a raging river, etc.) he always brought these delicious treats to various functions. The cookies are awesome and always come out a little rough around the edges (kind of like Dave Williams).

RECIPE
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups flour
2 1/2 cups oatmeal
raisins to taste

Mix dry and wet ingredients separately, then combine. Put golf-ball sized balls onto cookie sheets then bake at 375 degrees for 8 minutes.

HAPPY HEART DAY

We went out for Valentines Day (La Mediterranee and Ici), but I also wanted to make a little festive dinner at home; a surprise for Erik. On the menu was a roasted butternut squash salad, some roasted asparagus, and a Shaker Meyer Lemon pie. I also (of course) had to make sugar cookies. These pictures are a little dark, sorry!

Mies also helped me address some valentines to friends and family. What a good kitty!

BOUILLABAISSE

I have wanted to try Ina Garten's chicken bouillabaisse for a long time, but put it off because it involved things like cutting up a whole chicken and buying saffron threads. This past week, however, was cold and rainy, so I decided to go for it.


I'm so glad I did! Delicious and satisfying, it is now one of Erik's favorites! You can find the recipe here. Making it is fairly labor intensive, but well worth it! I recommend letting the dish sit for awhile before serving (this allows all of the different flavors to come together, which makes it taste ten times better).

NEW CALENDAR

For the past couple of years we have used the Pentagram Typography Calendar for our wall. This year, however, finding it wasn't as easy, so I decided to try to make an alternative. Using big sheets of graph paper, yellow stencils, and colorful markers, I created a loose version of the famous Stendig Calendar. I like how it turned out. It's clean and modern like our old calendar choice, but now has a bit of a feminine touch with the color and the hand-done markings. This month is pink (for obvious reasons!) and each of the following months will feature a different color that fits that particular time of the year. I really liked making these; drawing them out was fun, easy, and even a little bit soothing.

THE PERFECT BROWNIE

A while back, I bought a promising looking cookbook called Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. The book is a collection of greatest hits from a bakery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, (I place I never went to or even knew about while we lived in Brooklyn. So sad!) The authors claimed that their brownie was the best (Martha and Oprah both agreed), which caught my interest. At first I was skeptical; my husband and I are firm believers that no version of homemade can surpass the simple magnificence of the boxed brownie, but I decided to try it out.
We no longer doubt. These brownies are almost painfully good. Dense, rich and fudgey, while also just cakey enough to count as a brownie and not a candy bar, these will no doubt enter heavy rotation in our dessert repertoire. I recommend this book wholeheartedly; I've made a few other things from it, and they've all been dangerously, fatteningly wonderful.

THE BAKED BROWNIE
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons dark unsweetened cocoa powder
11 ounces dark chocolate (60 to 72% cacao), coarsely chopped
1 cups (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
5 large eggs, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter the sides and bottom of a 9 by 13 inch glass or light-colored metal baking pan.
In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, salt, and cocoa powder together.
Put the chocolate, butter, and instant espresso powder in a large bowl and set it over a saucepan of simmering water, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate and butter are completely melted and smooth. Turn off the heat, but keep the bowl over the water and add the sugars. Whisk until completely combined, then remove the bowl from the pan. The mixture should be room temperature.
Add 3 eggs to the chocolate mixture and whisk until combined. Add the remaining eggs and whisk until combined. Add the vanilla and stir until completely combined. Do not overbeat the batter at this stage or your brownies will be cakey.
Sprinkle the flour mixture over the chocolate mixture. Using a spatula (not a whisk), fold the flour mixture into the chocolate mixture until just a bit of the flour mixture is visible.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake in the center of the oven for 30 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking time, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few moist crumbs sticking to it. Let the brownie cool completely then serve!

FIRST MORNING

We began the first day of the new year by eating some cranberry and Meyer lemon scones with tea. I made the scones from a recipe I found here with lemons from the tree in our back yard. It's a treat to have such a fruitful tree just outside the kitchen door. I use them whenever possible. Meyer lemons was pretty new to me when I first moved to California, but they are quickly becoming a favorite flavor. The tea was a souvenir from the Grande Epicerie in Paris. My favorite part of traveling to any new place, especially out of the country, is grocery shopping. We ate our little breakfast while watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an amazingly beautiful film considered to be the first full-length animated movie. It was made by Lotte Reiniger, who created the whole thing from VERY intricate hand-cut paper silhouettes! It was inspiring, colorful, and magical. A very nice start to the New Year.

CHRISTMAS CARDS

Since getting married, my husband and I have made homemade Christmas cards every year. It is so much fun and we hope that we will be able to carry on this tradition each and every Christmas. One of my favorite parts of putting these together is making stamp collages on the envelopes from old holiday postage. Below are examples of a few envelopes we mailed to ourselves at our old Brooklyn address as well as the Christmas cards from the past three years.





This was our first card. We printed red text on translucent vellum, with a hand cut snowflake in each card. The first scan above shows the front of the card. In person, you can see the snowflake faintly through the vellum, its various cuts and facets playing nicely against the spare and simple text. The next scan above shows the card open. We slipped in little personal notes typed on my (pink!) Lettera 22 on the back of slips of silver wrapping paper (not shown). The 3rd scan above shows the envelope & stamp collage.



This is the second year's card. I made a marker drawing from a photo we took, posing for this image. I think it really captures us well with very few lines. We used the Optima typeface on the card and envelope after seeing it on many '50s Christmas cards. We felt like the card had a mid-century feel. Could it be the Bertoia chair I'm sitting on? The stamp collage was a little different as we used non-Christmas stamps that had a Christmas/winter feel to them.


This is this year's card. I hand printed the red image with a lino cut I made based on this cover of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales". The text was printed on our laserjet. Unfortunately, I didn't send one to us this year (supplies were limited!), so I don't have an envelope. It was done with another stamp collage and hand-written addresses in thick red marker cursive.