Come to Me, Little Piggy

Now that Valentine's Day has come and gone and I can't find the heart shaped mixing bowls in stores anymore (still available online but I'm too cheap to pay shipping), I've moved on.  This is the NEW latest obsession that I'm threatening to use my employee discount on:
 
A pig shaped cutting board!  SO cute (the picture doesn't do it justice), and SO unnecessary since Sweetie came equipped with, like, five cutting boards and I don't even know where we would put this one.  Still, I want it I want it I want it!

Update Your Look!

Sweets and I have a running joke: we were walking into PB one time, and they had a huge sign that said "Update Your Look with Pillows!".  And so now whenever we're in a home store, without fail, he says in a serious tone "Sweetie, I think we should update our look with pillows." (actually, he really does want new couch pillows - we're just looking for the right ones).

Me, when it comes to seasonal looks, I'm all about the vase filler.  Here's what our winter look was.  Thanks Margaret, for the pine cones!

And now this nice weather we've been having has inspired me to - yes! - update our look with NEW vase filler.  So I busted out a new white candle and the PB Cherry Blossom potpourri I found on sale.  

Et voila!  Spring time!

Except that the candle is too big and not all the vase filler fit in - some pieces were too big.

Decorating is hard.

Holiday!

I was on the phone yesterday with my Mom, and she reminded me what tomorrow is: the day that the little ground bug comes out of its hole, and we get to see how much longer winter is going to last! 

I swear, its her favorite holiday.  I'll have to remember to call her to see how it goes.

What I Just Read: Googled and Cheerful Money

I just finished reading two very different books.  Here are some disjointed thoughts on each:

Googled: Whew, glad I don't work in Old Media! Yikes, Google is so powerful - though in the long term, you do have to wonder what's brewing in some Silicon Valley garage that will be the next big thing.

Cheerful Money by Tad Friend.  Because apparently I will read anything that's excerpted in Vogue.  And I did watch Metropolitan a couple of weeks ago (thanks, Netflix Watch Instantly!).  Wasps!  Snort.  We don't really have many of those here in the Bay Area.  This book reminded me of those boys on the crew team at Columbia.  I might also be biased, influenced by the sneering description I once read in SFBG of the author, reporting on California issues for the New Yorker from the vantage point of his Brooklyn brownstone.  Anyway: stories about someone else's family?  Not always so interesting.  It was just OK.

Chocolate-Caramel Cookie Bars

I like being invited to dinner at people's houses, because usually you're asked to bring something and it's a great excuse to bake.  For years, my go-to recipes was a Lemon Tart, but after attending a party a couple of months ago where someone made the Chocolate-Caramel Cookie Bars from the back page of the November issue of Martha Stewart Living, I have now adopted that recipe as my own.

It's incredibly easy.  You just take eighteen sticks of butter, five lbs. of light brown sugar, and some flour to make the cookie base.  Bake for thirty minutes, and while it's baking you take a bag of sugar, heat it up in water, add another twenty-two sticks of butter and some heavy cream, and boil that up and pour it over a bowl full of chocolate.  Mix, let it sit, and then pour the whole thing over the cookie part, and refrigerate overnight.  And it ends up looking something like this if you're lucky:*

That's salt on the top.  LOVE that salt-chocolate combo.

*That is, unless your hostesses accidentally leave it on top of their warm stove when you bring it over, and the whole thing melts into a gloppy mess.  Oops, mishap!  Oh well, it was still good, though not pretty.

**Product plug**: I love my baking pan that comes with it's own lid.  It makes it so easy to transport your baked goods!

The Week in Pop Culture

• The "new" Office this week was a clip show.  It actually wasn't so bad, and I admire their restraint in waiting so long to do one.  Friends did a clip show in, like, season two.
• Painful: Julianne Moore's wicked bad, bad Boston accent in 30 Rock.  Oh, just BAD.  Didn't someone have the heart to take her aside and tell her?
• Madonna in the Dolce & Gabbana print ads: Yikes.  Her lips are puffed out beyond recognition, and her face has that plastic filled-in look.  This kind of work is just so obvious.
  
• I don't care, I'm still not planning to see Avatar.
• Last season was the most boring Project Runway ever, but I'm giving it another chance.  It's back in New York, which helps a lot, and Michael (salute) and Nina (wave) appear to be back on as regulars.  Tim just seems to be getting crankier and crankier with every passing season, though.
• Flight of the Conchords Season Two, Disc One has now been in my home for 30 days and I have yet to watch it. 

Bad.

Meal # 2: American Meatloaf

I didn't cook last week, but I was determined to get back on track this week.  Today's meatloaf recipe came from Marion Cunningham's Learning to Cook.  I got this book years ago in my RH days, but gave it away at some point.  Then I hooked up with Sweets and he had his own well-worn copy.  What goes around comes around!

These are things I learned/could have done better:

• Timing.  The steamed broccoli was done first, followed by the baked sweet potatoes ten minutes later.  The meatloaf took about twenty minutes longer than I thought it would.  This could have been better planned out.
• I steamed the broccoli too long and it was limp.  No more than ten minutes next time!
• I liked this recipe, especially the addition of the spinach.  And I think that the beef-pork combo tastes better than turkey.  But it would have been better with ketchup, which is found in many other meatloaf recipes.  Noted for next time.

Overall, not bad.  And I have leftovers for lunch!

Speaking of cooking, this is the latest item I am threatening to use my employee discount on:

Heart-shaped melamine bowls.  So cute!

It was my birthday.

Another January 16 came and went.  At least I didn't have to spend it at the office:

Pretty flowers!  Thanks, Sweets.

It's That Time of Year: Wedding Fair Season

I found this in my secondary e-mail account:

Here's your Complimentary Ticket to the Bridal Event of the Year!

We'd like you to be our guest at the Modern Luxury Weddings Bridal Event at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Sunday, January 10th. It's an unforgettable afternoon filled with decadent hors d'oeuvres and gourmet tastings from renowned chefs, champagne and martini bars, the glamour of the Vera Wang and Monique Lhuiller High Fashion Runway Show and over 80 magnificent exhibits filling the ballrooms of San Francisco's only Five-Star, Five Diamond hotel...

Um...can I still go?

Meal #1: Spaghetti Bolognese

Another New Year's resolution: cook more. Or more accurately, just cook at all. My goal is to make one meal a week for Sweetie and myself. I have to somehow justify all the cookware and tools and all the other kitchen stuff that I've been buying or want to buy.

Tonight I started with something easy: Spaghetti Bolognese, a recipe I clipped from Shape magazine. You saute a minced clove of garlic in a saucepan in a teaspoon of olive oil, then add four ounces of ground turkey breast and cook for five minutes until it's browned (I think I should have browned it more - it remained quite pale). You then add a cup of canned diced tomatos, 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, bring to a boil, and then simmer for ten minutes. Serve over spaghetti (I bought the multigrain kind - it wasn't bad).


Eh, it was OK. Not at all like the bolognese that I've gotten at, say, Oliveto, but at least it was maybe not so bad for us. I doubt I'll be making it again. But at least I spent some time in the kitchen and gave Dave a break. And the bar is set pretty low for my next meal!

What Do You Do All Day, Kitty?

Wool blanket on top of laundry basket + hissing radiator = kitty's found a new happy place.

Hike #2 : Phoenix Lake

Hike #2! We've gone hiking twice this year and it's only January 3!

This was hike #8 in the book, another easy one: Phoenix Lake, Tucker and Bill Williams Trails. It was supposed to be only 3.5 miles but we did a compete loop around the lake which put us at at least 4 miles. We're planning to get in shape for longer hikes this Spring.


Winter hiking is so different from any other season. The much shorter days, the nip in the air, the trails muddy from recent rains. Still, I'm glad to live in a place where we can do this year round. I had never heard of Phoenix Lake before seeing it in this book, and indeed, it seems like a place that mostly Ross locals go. No entrance fee, but a teeny tiny parking lot with barely any street parking allowed. There were a lot of people there - I'm not sure if people are fired up from resolutions, or if that's always the case. And they're so nice! Two men stopped and asked us if we needed help as we consulted the book for directions at trail junctions - one of them a runner who came to a total stop. I coined a new phrase for Dave: Marin Nice!

The trail was wide and open for most of the part around the reservoir, but the Tucker/Williams part of the trail was very woodsy, taking us around super steep ravines and winding creeks. It was great to be out and about outdoors. I'm so out of shape right now but I felt really energized. Yay, 2010 hiking!

What I Just Read: Farm City

I'm always so sad when I get to the end of a book that I've been enjoying. I slow down my pace of reading the final few pages, not wanting the book to end. It's been a while since I read a book like that, but tonight I got to experience that again as I finished Farm City by Novella Carpenter. As I said in my Facebook update, who knew that a book about squatter backyard farming in the Oakland ghetto could be so interesting? (I almost called it engaging, bit I'm not sure if it's correct to describe a book as engaging?)

Anyway, lately I seem to be reading books written by Bay Area people (last week I finished Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon), or books having to to with food (like Cleaved by Julie Powell). I liked the Chabon book, but I did not really enjoy Cleaved. I think that as a happy newlywed, I just can't relate to the story of a woman who has an extramarital affair and stays with her husband, who knows about it and starts having affairs himself. The parts about her apprenticing at a butcher shop in upstate NY were OK - there are some interesting and likeable characters at the shop - but my eyes did glaze over as she went on and on and on and on about meat and butchery. Even the latter part of the book where she travels was not that interesting. I found myself feeling the same disdain for the author that I felt when I read Eat, Pray, Love. And she was so likeable in Julie and Julia! Somehow I don't think they're going to make a movie starring Amy Adams out of this.

So back to Farm City: it does make me look at the semi-accessible backyard of our building in a new way. But shoot, I've always had a black thumb...maybe I'll have to settle for encouraging Dave to start up his window herb garden again.

Hello, Twenty-Ten!

I love a new year - I love to make resolutions! Like this one:

So, back in 2001 I bought a book called 101 Hikes in the Bay Area. I had just started hiking with OAC, and I thought it would be cool to do all 101 hikes in the book. I knocked off more than a few, both with OAC and on my own with friends. When Sweetie and I met - thank god he likes to hike! - we had a goal of completing the book together. We've done just under twenty hikes from the book - the wedding and all the planning it involved really sidetracked things. We intended to pick up where we left off, but I don't know, 101 suddenly seems like such a daunting number. And since the book was published in 2001, I wondered how much of the information was out of date. So, we picked a new book to get through: Falcon Guide's Best Hikes Near San Francisco. Forty hikes in one year? I think we can totally do it. Yay, a project! It's like my own version of Julie & Julia, only with less butter.


Yesterday we started with hike #18: The Presidio - Lovers' Lane and the Ecology Trail. I have a hard time calling this a hike because of the short distance and also because this is pretty much what I do for exercise (a.k.a. my hour-long hilly walks around my neighborhood), but whatever, it's in the book, so it counts.

Though I'm very familiar with this part of the Presidio due to said walks, Dave hadn't really ventured out here, despite the fact that the Presidio Gates are a ten-minute walk from our apartment. I had been wanting to bring him out there ever since we moved here - over ten months ago now! I didn't want us to move away from here some day and be like "Oh, we never went to the Presidio..." You have to take advantage of these things when they're right in your backyard.

Anyway, it was a lovely little hike on a gray overcast day, complete with - of course! - a kiss on Lovers Lane. A nice way to start the year.