Kate F____, Girl Reporter

Sorry it’s been quiet around here: It’s busy times in Kate-land. This weekend I went home to Oregon for my 10-year high school reunion (!!) and to throw a wedding shower for my oldest friend, Kathrin. My mom was incredibly generous about hosting at their house and preparing all the food, and she spent a lot of time scrubbing everything up all around the house and yard so that everything was perfect.

I wanted to use bright colors because when I think of Kathrin I think of reds and oranges. A couple months ago I went to Paper Source and found cute invitations with big abstract flowers on them, and then got wrapping paper with the same flowers, along with envelopes and flat cards and labels in the various colors from the paper. I used the wrapping paper to make a belly band holding the flat cards (which I printed as recipe cards) over the invitation text, and then held it together with the labels (I stamped them with a potato stamp, since I didn’t have a “K” stamp!):

Last week I went back to the store to get more of the paper so I could decorate with it for the shower. I also made a holder for the recipe cards, which all the ladies brought back with favorite summer recipes on them.

I lucked out when I went running errands on Friday to get ready for the shower. I didn’t think I’d find tulips this late in the year, but Trader Joe’s had them, in the perfect colors. We rented 48″ square tables and put them in the dining room, filling out my mom’s antique chairs with four rental ones. We rented the tablecloths and napkins, and I used the paper to make a table runner.

The dining table went in back of the sofa for the food, and the smaller table we usually keep there was moved to the side for drinks:

By the way, let’s take a closer look at those radishes (with butter and salt), because they are so lovely:

For drinks we had prosecco and Pimm’s Cups, which I love. I forgot to take a picture of the drink all made, but here are the pretty, pretty garnishes (strawberries are not 100% traditional but I wanted some color):

I made a whole pitcher of Pimm’s Cups (1 1/3 cups Pimm’s to 2 2/3 lemonade made enough for 12 people once the club soda and ice got involved), but the recipe scales up or down easily:

Pimm’s Cup
1 part Pimm’s No. 1
3 parts lemonade
Shake well and pour into a collins glass full of ice, filling about 2/3 of the way, maybe a little more
Top with club soda
Garnish with mint and cucumber (and lemon, orange or strawberry if you want)

Pimm’s is gin-based (which…I love gin, so that makes me happy) but honestly it doesn’t taste very ginny, and it’s worth a try even if you’re more of a vodka drinker. The drink is very mild on the alcohol front, and extremely refreshing for summer. Obviously I had to leave the bottle of Pimm’s in Oregon, so now I need to track down my own for Porch-top sipping.

Anyway, on to the food! My mom made grilled chicken (marinated in garlic and olive oil, with a bit of lemon at the end), asparagus with preserved lemon and a fantastic couscous from the Bouchon cookbook. I will try making that myself one of these days and will include the recipe then! It had more preserved lemon and mint in it and was amazing. Also a big salad. All the vegetables (and the strawberries) came from the farmer’s market that morning, and the mint was from a friend’s back yard–spring comes earlier in Oregon, even in a rainy, cool year like this one.

Lunch was perfect–light and summery. Everyone seemed to have a lovely time! And we finished with a goblet of strawberries, butter cookies and chocolate-covered pretzels while Kathrin opened presents.

Oh, and more Prosecco. Lots of Prosecco.

This is not food-related, though it will lead to very happy food consumption: Ben got a bee in his bonnet on Sunday and by the end of the afternoon we had a porch covered in lovely new furniture, instead of several broken folding chairs and a pile of wood in a cardboard box. Sadly my computer remains on the fritz so I don’t have any before photos from when we lived here–the best I can do is an old through-the-screen shot from before we moved in:

Wow, useless.

Anyway, here is is now!

Long-time readers may remember the trauma I suffered after Ikea sold out of the very narrow table I
wanted last summer. Well, it turned out to be for the best, since this year they still have the other one, but they also have another 24″ wide table, but this time it is a double gateleg, allowing us to tuck it completely out of the way when not in use, which in turn frees up enough walking space to have those adirondack chairs at the end of the porch.

Closed (just over 7 inches deep):

Dinner for two:

Dinner for four, or six if they are really good friends and careful with their knees:

Brilliant! (We do have two more of those chairs, plus our old folding chairs.)

I decided to make cheese fondue for dinner last night. I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten fondue, though I always meant to and loved the idea. And all last year in Hanover I meant to break out the fondue pot but never got around to it. I used a recipe from Epicurious that had lots of happy reviews, a Three Cheese Fondue made with champagne. (I used prosecco.)

The recipe called for Gruyère, Emmenthal and a bit of brie, plus shallots, cornstarch, lemon juice, champagne and a bit of nutmeg and white pepper.

I used the cheese grater in the Cuisinart for the first time–now that we have a dishwasher I’m trying to get over my Cuisinart-Avoidance Complex (all those fussy little pieces to wash!). Oh my GOD. It literally took 20 seconds to perfectly grate all the cheese (not the brie, obviously). Amazing.

I used prosecco that was already in the fridge, since I figured it would be nice to drink with the fondue.

I cooked the mixture on the stove since I’d never used the fondue pot and I’d bought the wrong size sterno can (sigh) and I just didn’t know if it would really cook. I think it would have and it would have been more fun to do the cooking in the pot in front of the fire. Not scenic, though. The mixture looks super gross when you add the cheese in to the shallots and champagne:

It did thicken up nicely, and I transferred it to the glass insert for the fondue pot (which is fussy and hard to get in and out of those handles):

Then put it over the hot water in the metal part of the pot, and set the whole thing up on my pretty new yellow tray (ugh, nice shot.):

We ate it with a big salad straight from the bowl, and the champagne, in front of the fire. It was a bit warm for all that hot cheese and hot fire, but fun to picnic!

I’d planned to make fancy hot chocolate with real whipped cream for dessert, but we were too full. Another time!

There will be cooking this week. It’s just been a rough and busy few weeks with lots of late work for one or both of us/meals in the office/travel, etc.

A few weekends ago when we had the three-day weekend all at home (bliss!), we knocked out lots of little tasks that needed doing around the house. The most satisfying (and life-improving) was finally buying a nightstand. I had been using a $6 Ikea tv tray as a nightstand since 2001. I painted the top at one point, but it was mostly unfinished pine, and just…not good. Because there was no drawer it tended to be cluttered with romantic things like eyeshades (our blinds aren’t great), and it just looked horrible all the time. Plus I kept an old magazine container under it, which was always too full and so I’d stack books and magazines on top of the holder, and….yeah, here’s what it looked like:

Wow, classy.

The new nightstand is simple but it lets me tidy things up. I required a shelf and a drawer, and I got both (I also replaced my lampshade):

So much better! Now I can tuck things away and keep the top neat! I have since moved the book to the bottom shelf. One thing that does stay out, and which you can barely see in that picture, is my new friend, who Christy gave me for Christmas:

Love!

As I said in the last post, we spent a lot of time this weekend working around the apartment. While the kitchen didn’t get any new touches, we did talk and think a lot about what it needs to make it feel complete… I need to upload a more recent photo, since we have added door pulls, etc. since this was taken, but as a reminder this is basically where the kitchen stands now:

We are struggling with how to hang art and shelves–the walls really are not in good shape, and we’re worried that we’ll make major trouble if we drill into them. On the other hand, I desperately want to run two shelves along that long left wall, one at the height of the top of the fridge surround, and one enough lower that I can store the coffee canister, etc. on it. I’d paint them white and we’d give them enough of a lip in front that we could have under-shelf lighting under the bottom one to light the counter. That would help with problem 2, which is lighting, which….sigh. I can’t even think about that right now.

We don’t know how to start with shelves. Do we shell out and have a professional come in? Do we experiment a bit with the lathing? I have become quite adept at using self-adhesive wire mesh and putty to patch large holes. Still, it’s overwhelming! But once we work out the shelf problem, we can also figure out how to hang some art above the sink–probably just my “Tea Revives You” print (which I need to frame), but maybe that plus a bunch of smaller things if we work out a good system. Maybe a hanging rail or something for a flexible system and fewer holes?

Keep Calm, Tea

On a simpler front, I am trying to decide between these two completely different clocks, both from Urban Outfitters. We nearly bought a really amazing vintage clock in France but we decided not to get entangled in issues of ancient battery sizes or hard wiring…

Choice One:

Choice Two:

Tricky! (By the way, the orange one is 8 inches wide; the white is 15 inches!)

The holidays may be the only time of year when my family’s food obsession seems normal–after all, who *isn’t* constantly cooking around Christmas? Ben and I headed out to Oregon on the Sunday before Christmas and stayed a week.

Christmas Eve we always cook at the home of wonderful family friends, the Davidsons. The menu always varies: One year it was Chinese food (I think that was my favorite) and this year there was an enormous beef tenderloin. We started with lovely salads with cheese, roasted pears, and walnuts. Along with the beef we had broccoli two ways: spicy roasted and pureed; squash, beans, roasted potatoes and sweet potato fries. (Sadly all my photos of the food were horrible!) We pulled crackers and wore the paper crowns while we ate and played out miniature plastic instruments, or read fortunes with those little cellophane fish.

After dinner all the “kids” went for a little walk in the misty, cold night:

Christmas morning we slept in a bit, and then started to open our stockings while Tom made popovers and 40-minute eggs. There was also bacon. Soooo good:

Not long after:

I played around with a very cool new present, a portable photo studio with light diffusing panels and little lights. Maybe I’ll be able to use it for finally-well-lit food shots? Here’s a test with the awesome Polish crêche I grew up with:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Side note
The little hippie grocery store near my house has great produce. Non-Pacific Northwesterners, writhe in envy at the mushroom bounty:

(Note the “Mushroom Mountain” sign)

Doesn’t Romanesco Broccoli look like an alien world or an enchanted forest if you get up close?

More to come…

I’m trying to play catch up a bit… I’m currently in Paris, where it is 1 a.m. Ben is joining me for the weekend tomorrow, and I’ve taken loads of photos, as one does, but I also have a pre-trip backlog. Namely Thanksgiving, which I did almost literally on the fly between trips. I had never roasted a turkey. The one time I roasted a chicken it was a disaster. But off we went!

I went to London the Saturday night before Thanksgiving, worked Monday-Wednesday, then flew back Wednesday afternoon. I got in around 7, we picked my brother Tom up from the airport, and headed home. Ben’s mom and brother joined us for a pasta dinner shortly after we got back (Ben, bless him, cooked), and I trotted off to bed soon after that.

Ben had done the shopping, using lists I’d pulled together on the fly from London. Naturally I’d forgotten lots of things since I wasn’t actually looking at recipes or, you know, spending more than 3 minutes thinking through what I needed to make Thanksgiving dinner. I did not discover any of the missing items until Thursday morning, when it was too late to do much about them (more on that in a moment).

Wednesday night after I went to bed, Ben and his mom made chocolate cream pie. In the morning, Ben made pumpkin pie, and we encountered some first-time-use glitches with the oven, so it took about two hours to get it cooked. Just as I started panicking, though, the oven fixed itself and behaved nicely while I baked the turkey. Meanwhile I realized I was missing shallots (for the beans), parsley (for the stuffing, oh well), celery (also for the stuffing), carrots (for stock and around the turkey), and, for the stuffing, of course….Bread. I meant to get a bag of those croutons that are already all dried out, because this was The Thanksgiving For Shortcuts.

Hmm.

What can you do at 11 a.m. on Thanksgiving? No grocery stores were open. Eventually Tom went to 7-11 and purchased two snack containers of baby carrots and celery, and a loaf of Pepperidge Farm white bread. He cut that up into small pieces and I toasted it as hard as I could without browning it. Meanwhile I prepped the lovely turkey, a little 13-pounder, that we’d gotten from Trader Joe’s. He was pre-brined, so I just had to remove the giblets, etc., give him a nice butter/salt/pepper massage, and slide him into the oven (breast down to start, per Bittman).

I started a stock that never came to anything, and over the course of the morning/afternoon I made the stuffing (dressing, I guess, since I cook it out of the bird), cranberry sauce, and Ben and Tom made a hectare of mashed potatoes. Tom blanched beans, which he later dressed with lemon and olive oil, since we didn’t have shallots. I nearly forgot to make the cauliflower soup that I wanted to start with, but I did that right before we ate. The brined turkey gave of lots of nice drippings and Bittman has you put veggies and broth in the pan, so there was plenty of juice. I used his method, which involves boiling down the drippings and adding cornstarch (dissolved in water) to thicken if needed. This had the benefit of being simpler than a roux, with fewer lumps, and also being gluten-free, so Christy could eat it. She said she hadn’t had gravy in years!

The feast:

First of all, Mr. Turkey. He was fantastic!! Combined with the brine, Bittman’s Start Breast Down and Flip method worked great (he says this maxes out around 10 pounds, but the guys managed to flip our 13-pounder, though I was not around when they did it so who knows…) and the white meat was very juicy. Hurray!

Before the turkey, though, we had soup:

Then the good stuff:

Followed (many hours later) by pies, courtesy of Ben!

It was the last meal at our patched together little table/kitchen table combo:

Because the next day our long back-ordered table came in, and the guys brought it home!

Almost two weeks ago we were home for the weekend, without guests or a trip, for the first time since…. Hmm, early September. There was a crazy storm on Saturday, which I was excited to see forecast since Ben had studying to do and I wanted nothing so much as an excuse to laze around all day. Friday I got a delivery of a lovely loaf of challah from a guy in the office, and I stopped after work to pick up essential groceries so we wouldn’t have to go outside all day.

Witness, a perfect day (half of the Sunday NY Times comes Saturday, so we had that handy!):

I wandered out to the dining room around 9:30, greeted by steaming steel-cut oatmeal cooked by Ben, who is the Oatmeal Master. His other areas of expertise: brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and pancakes. I’m not going to argue with that skill set!

After a very leisurely breakfast we retired to the living room and lit a fire, which we kept going all day. It was a violent storm, extremely windy with sheets of rain and dramatic whipping-about of all the trees.

When we got hungry for a little lunch, I got out the naan I’d bought the night before, drizzled them with olive oil, and topped Ben’s with goat cheese and mine with ricotta salata and leftover beets, and heated them up:

Later there was mint tea (I love the Trader Joe’s brand):

And through the day, the fire and my annual re-read of Pride & Prejudice. What could be better?

We were supposed to go to a party that night but we didn’t end up heading out into the rain. A friend from b-school came over and we had a casual pasta dinner. So cozy! As much as I envy the outdoor living thing you can do in Southern CA, I could never give up late fall/winter days.

Ben ordered the new stove, and we’re thinking about hoods; scary and exciting stuff. Here’s what we’re thinking:

Hood: We need a recirculating hood because drilling through to the outside for ventilation will be a nightmare. Not sure what to do yet.

Stove: I saw the white enamel Viking in Domino at least a year ago and flagged the page, never imagining I might actually have a place to put it. Over the summer I saw it in person at the kitchen showroom where E worked. Stunning. Supposedly it is coming Friday! We will see if the plumber can actually detach our old stove in time, and come hook up the new one. Sadly, I leave for London Saturday night so I won’t get to play with the new stove much at all. (The photo is of the 36″ version–we’re getting the 30″, which will free up some space on that side of the room.)

I have ordered a bunch of prints over the last couple months (for all over the house), and when the last one arrives I will start thinking about how to frame them. I mocked these up at Frames by Mail… I’m thinking these first two, with some other stuff, would be good in the kitchen:
Amy Ross, Manshroom

Keep Calm, Tea

I adore Etsy artist Sk8ordiehard, and I’ve been eyeing her Fungi poster for many moons. But the bright colors definitely send things in a different direction than those mellow browns. Hmmmm.

I already have those first two prints (well, “Tea” is on its way), but they could live in other places in the Funghi poster seems like a better fit in the kitchen. What do you think?

We have a beautiful dining table, a 1790 antique drop-leaf made of New England maple, but it seats four and we can’t patch together that and the kitchen table as easily in this apartment as we could in Hanover. Meanwhile, the table we’re using behind the couch (first thing you see when you walk in) is too small, and the dining table would be perfect in that spot, as a landing pad and grounding element. We need a dining table that can seat six, and hopefully eight in a squeeze, and yet won’t be too big for everyday. The dining room is almost square, with the door in and the door to the kitchen diagonally across from each other, so that a table in the middle of the room will force an annoying weave through the room. Oh well! I want a chandelier, and that needs to be centered, and the table needs to be centered under it. But it does mean I think we need a round table that expands to an oval, and this weekend we saw this one at Pottery Barn and finally were ready to bite the bullet. We’ve been looking and looking at antique stores, flea markets, every furniture store we pass…Nothing has been quite right. This one *is* solid wood, which we felt strongly about. And it’s nice and simple? The photo in the right finish shows it unexpanded, which will be the everyday size (45″):

>

Here it is expanded, with giant chairs and not my style of stuff surrounding it (why is there Sooooooo much stuff on it? Weird.):

Simple, right? Next up: Chairs. I like these from West Elm, but maybe we’ll get something really plain and upholstered, like these from CB2.

West Elm:

CB2:

And then there’s lighting. We saw some promising specimens at Restoration Hardware this weekend:

(Ok, that last one is more like something I’d want in the living room…)

But I think I’ll at least give it another couple months of looking for something vintage before I give in to the box stores on the lighting!