Why I will never be as cool as Mikaela Larson Fuchs (pronounced fox)

I was going to write this in a email to my best friend, but after reading this post and tasting said cheesecake I thought you might appreciate the seeing some of the contrast in our errrrmmmm “skills”. I’ll preface this by saying that while I did manage to make lemon curd while in Augusta, it was only after Mikaela stopped me from vigorously ahinilating a lemon with a grater that any progress was made.

Over the past few weeks people have been graciously donating supplies or our South Africa trip. Tonight Drew bought in several plastic bags full of stuff that had been sitting in his car for a couple days. In one of the bags we discovered a 32 oz package of semi-sweet chocolate chips. For those of you who have never spent a summer in Blacksburg, all you need to know is that temperatures here regularly exceed the melting point of chocolate chips.

I wondered to myself what one does with a jumbo sized bag of melted chocolate chips. It seems there are limited options, so I decided to embrace their current form and threw them into a double boiler. Then I just started adding things. A little bit of butter, some vanilla, some salt…and this is what happened in my head:

“Wow this is going pretty well for having no plan at all. Maybe I could add some oil and flour and turn them into brownies. Oh I KNOW! I’ll add oats. Oats will be delicious! Holy cow this amazing! I totally just invented a new dessert! I must be some sort of undiscovered culinary genius!! Mikaela will be so proud of me!!! MARTHA STEWART WILL BE CALLING ANY…oh wait.

Waaaaaiiit…

These are preacher cookies aren’t they?

Yeeeaah. They are.

Huh.

Whelp. Guess I don’t have to bake them now.”

And with that, good night.

Headboard

Drew’s been working on some projects recently. He’s tackling our room at the moment.

So far he’s finished up the headboard and this end table will probably be next.

Ignore the weird mismatched bedding. And the fact that our bed is about 4 ft high. And the disconcertingly warm overcast created by the walls and lights.

Wait why am I posting this?

Anyway, rumor has it there is also a dresser in the works.

He has also started on the office. We are trying to streamline it so we actually have room to work there. So he built us this nifty work station.

More on the office later.

Did I mention that he build this mantle…

Like half  year ago?

I’m a little behind.

Hey guess what?

All the walls in our house are orange.

Let there be

I get stuck on things. I have an obsessive nature I suppose. And when I get an idea in my head it eats and eats and eats at me until I can make it happen.

For instance, last week I decided I liked ribbon, which drove me to make faux flowers and tear apart old jewelry to make new jewelry.

And for the past few months I have been stuck on industrial lighting in a bad way. However, it seemed that practical industrial lighting was too expensive for us. Boo. BUT, my sweet and fabulous husband brought up these little numbers a few weeks ago and we finally got some tonight!

They will hang off our soon-to-be-headboard shutters like so:

They are industrial and funky and I like them and. AND. they were only $9. Whoohoo!

Consider these before pictures because we are working on our bedroom now. Dressers, end tables, shutters and all. If we can only agree on whether or not to paint the shutters white. I am kinda feeling the dark, but Drew wants to paint them and really really reeeeaaaally distress them. We might have to flip a coin at this point. Of course we’ll lose the knobs and all the scary screws. That we do agree on.

Oh no wait……Drew says he wants to keep the knobs. Hmmm, we’ll see about that.

Either way I’m just excited to have some light in the room!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Fall Fare

I love fall foods.  I was jobless the first fall we were married, so I had time. Lot’s of time. Which I now understand that I totally took for granted. Foolish, foolish me! But, one of my favorite memories that fall was gathering as many pie sized pumpkins from the farm as I could handle and cooking, peeling, pureeing and freezing them. Yes, it took forever. But I had a pureed pumpkin stock that lasted the whole winter.  It was a happy time. Pumpkin soups, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pies, pumpkin pancakes…you get the idea.

But pumpkin isn’t the only fall food gem out there. I have also come to love other members of the squash family, and I ADORE Butternut.

This is one of my favorite recipes and a fall staple for me. It is not mine. It came from a friend who I think got it from another friend and so on and who knows…

Anyway, it’s lovely and sweet and bright bright orangey-yellow. Yay!

Butternut Squash Soup (Serves 4 to 6)  2 tablespoons unsalted butter, olive oil, or vegetable oil 1 medium onion, 3 medium shallots, or 1 medium leek (white and light green parts only), chopped 2 tablespoons dry sherry or white wine 1 medium butternut squash (about 2 1/2) pounds) peeled, halved, seeded, and cut into 1/2 inch cubes to yield 5 cups 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon (or more) white pepper 1 teaspoon ground ginger whipping cream (approx. 1/2 to 1 cup) (can sub milk or non-dairy alternative) 2 teaspoons minced fresh tarragon, mint, chive, or parsley leaves 1.  Heat butter or oil in large saucepan over medium-high heat.  Add onion; saute’ until golden, about 5 minutes.  Add sherry and squash; stir – cook until sherry evaporates, about 3 seconds. 2.  Add stock, salt, pepper to taste, and ginger to saucepan; bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to simmer; cover and cook until squash is tender, about 15 minutes. 3.  Ladle squash mixture into blender.  Blend until very smooth.  At the same time, begin adding cream.  Stop adding when color and consistency are appropriate.  Return soup to saucepan;  cook over low heat until warmed through.  If soup is too thick, store in additional cream or milk to thin.  Adjust seasonings.  (Soup can be refrigerated for 3 days and reheated just before serving.) 4.  Ladle soup into individual bowls.  Garnish with minced herb and serve immediately.

Another fall favorite is beer bread which is fabulous with soups and spreads galore, aaannnnnnd it’s super super easy and quick to make.  It’ll make your tongue slap your brains out, I tell ya.

Beer Bread (adapted from food.com)
3 cups all purpose flour, sifted
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar
12 oz beer
1. Preheat oven to 375*
2. Combine dry ingredients and stir in beer
3. Pour into greased load pan
4. Bake for approx 1 hour (check after 45 min)

This recipe is great because you can mix it up. Try using different beers, adding different spices or even cheese. Yum!

Table

Finally, it’s done.

Love it.

PS….our floor is not as loud in real life as it is photos.

Proportionality

“The proportions are all wrong!” he declared as we crept past the stranger’s house in our tan Mitsubishi Colt that was probably birthed sometime in the late 1970′s. Or maybe we were in the early eighties model Caravan. I don’t remember. You see, I can’t recall the specifics of those drives in my early childhood because one emotion grotesquely distorts the memories.

The AGONY!!!!

Having completed his 5 year stint in the architecture program at Virginia Teach, my dad was now a young professional in a field that fascinated him. I, on the other hand, wanted to fall out of the car and die right there on the pavement. Nothing could be less interesting to a tomboyish girl under the age of 10 who had spent the morning cooped up in a Sunday school room wearing a dress her mother had practically sewn her into. No, nothing could be less interesting than driving around various neighborhoods after church looking at houses. What a waste of my precious time! Didn’t he know that Sunday was the last day before Monday? That horrid day when I would be carted off to school and force fed things like math and spelling, surrounded by hideous carpeted room dividers? Didn’t he know that I could not spend ONE MORE SECOND in this car!?!?

Yes, it was torture.

But it raises the question…what is proportionate? What did Dad see in the house that looked absolutely fine to me? And how could I possibly be “blowing things out of proportion” when I tried to lovingly express to my father that he was shortening the years of my life by making me do this.

Proportion and it’s “rules” still haunt me today. Are there rules? Maybe mathematicians have rules for proportions. But visually, are there rules? Art-wise, are there rules? And should we follow them?

We seem to posses some inborn sense of proportion, like the way we know beauty but can’t define it. In photography we are told to consider the rule of thirds.  And, for practical reasons, you probably won’t find a potter at his wheel throwing coffee mugs that can hold a gallon each.

And then there is the matter of ankle boots. These will forever baffle me.

How can something so wonderful on its own, look so freaky on peoples’ feet?

These questions followed Drew and me to Lowes the other week where we had an…err “discussion”…about what width of pine board to buy. See, we are redoing our dining room table top and the plan is to take it from sleek to farmhouse rustic. I cast my vote for the 2″ boards and he cast his for 1″.

In short, we went with the 2″.

But it got me thinking about how the rules of proportion can be generally agreed upon, but subjective at the same time.

So I stopped thinking about it.

we can sit by the fire at the end of the day

and that’s exactly what we intend to do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Drew has been building us some fun stuff recently and we are starting to work on our bedroom AND re-doing our dining table. So I am super excited about all that. Hopefully I will get some pictures up over the weekend of all the happenings.

But right now I’m going to go enjoy being with my wonderful and amazing husband. Night.

Luminaries

The other week my mother in law presented me with oodles of old glass jars.

It made me happy. Super happy! Because if one old glass jar is great, oodles of them is ever better!

So we used some to make luminaries for the back porch. Tonight was the first try out.

I used dark colored beading wire to hold the jars a little more securely than string and bought a cheap pack of little candles. I might try changing them out for citronella ones at some point since the bugs are eating us alive this year. Also, if we want to burn ‘em  for a long period of time we will have to put tinfoil or something in bottom of the jars to catch the wax. Still working on that idea…

PB on the cheap

Have I mentioned that we are cheap? We are.

We wanted curtains for the living room for two reasons:

1. to make it feel a little more homey

2. our blinds are see thru. completely see thru. and we are too cheap to buy new ones.

I loved the look of these pottery barn ones,

but we haven’t been able to afford anything from pottery barn since our wedding, when people paid for things from Pottery Barn for us ( Which was just lovely of them, I might add). So you understand our dilemma.

So here’s what we came up with instead.

Ahhh knock-offs. Wonderful things. We like ‘em. And if you like the idea you’re in luck because it’s super super easy to do.

First, we went to the fabric store and searched thru all the 50% off section until we found enough. $22

Next, we went to Big Lots to look for the little ring hanger thingys. $11.00

Then, off to the home improvement store for PVC pipe and caps and some spray paint. Yes. PVC pipe. When drew first mentioned it I flat out said NO! For some reason I have it in for PVC pipe. I’ve always harbored an irrational hatred for the stuff. Probably because it’s ugly and flimsy and until now has been of no direct use to me. BUT when we discovered that the cheapest “normal” curtain rod that would span our absurdly large window was going to cost about $30 I gave in.

Two 8′ lengths of PVC pipe. $3.50

Pipe caps $1.00

Spray Paint $4.00

Hooks to hold up the PVC rods $1.00

Total of $41.50. Not bad.

Word of advice: don’t skimp on the spray paint. Your mother’s old mantra, “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” applies here. For a few extra dollars they make spray paint that bonds to plastic. They also make sealers/protectors. Do it. We are cheap, so we didn’t. For some reason standing in front of the spray paint after shopping all night made the difference between $4 and $7 seem like a year’s wages. We just bought the plain stuff. Now I can see where the paint is chipping and we probably need to touch it up and give it some sort of protective coating.

(Now that I type it all out this sounds awfully toxic to be hanging in our living room…)

Anyhoo…as you can see I sill need to hem the curtains…eventually. The good news is that our windows are no longer see thru at night. Which makes us feel less awkward and probably makes our neighbors and hapless passers by  feel thankful.

The only downside with un-pleated linen-y curtains like this is that when you close them it pretty much looks like you have a bed sheet hanging over your window.

But I can live with that if it means I don’t have to wear pants in the living room at night.

What Drew’s been up to…

I’ve been waiting a long time to see this. By a long time I mean like 2 weeks, but trust me…it feels like forever ago that he started this project. That is mostly due to the fact that the past couple weeks have been crazy! We had a great weekend that I haven’t even gotten around to posting about yet. Pictures soon! I promise! (maybe).

Annnnnyway. Long story short, we found this headboard at Goodwill a couple weeks about for about $4. Drew decided it needed to come home with us, so it did. At that point there was no plan, just an interesting old headboard, but Drew quickly decided to give it a new purpose.

A bench!

I would tell you about the process here…but I don’t actually know what he did. He worked on it a few days while I was at work, so it was a fun surprise when I came home today to see it sitting in the house, completed. I can tell you that it was created from an old headboard, and bench we found in the basement, some salvaged lumber and some finials. It may or may not be used to spruce up our front porch (slowly working on that).

Well, it’s my bed time so I’m off. But before I go here’s one more thing we’re working on.

Chalkboard frame:

Night all!