January 31, 2011

January.

A few more hours January and you will be leaving us for another year. You've been good to us up here in the Pacific NW. Your weather has held and while cold, you've remained fairly dry (except of course for that flooding that happened a couple weeks ago). You brought us new recipes, mini road trips laden with fog, time with family and friends and cold lazy winter days cuddled under blankets perusing cookbooks and foodie magazines with the slow cooker puttering in the background. Most importantly though January, you helped us find a new apartment, full of light and promise. A new start to our lives together. While your waning days leave us surrounded by moving boxes and bags destined for Goodwill, we thank you January, for being good to us and look forward to seeing you again next year.

Here are just a few things that caught our eyes in January:

Baggu bags - stylish and eco friendly grocery bags.
Mid-century modern furniture - yet another reason to road trip to San Francisco (with a pickup truck).
DIY headboard - I love the wood and the industrial look of this.
Bedding - who doesn't love stripes?
Quilts - comfy and feminine, in a masculine dark gray color (she says we'll accent it with some mustard yellow)
Table lamps - any one of these would look great in our new apartment.
Another take on lighting - I love this idea for a lamp/bookshelf. A 2 in 1 project!
Turning drawers into a credenza - brilliant.

Places we are looking forward to (close-in):
Olympic Provisions in the NW - I'm already salivating
(and far away:)
A getaway destination


We hope that your January was as good to you as it was to us.
What are some of your favorite things from January?

(beautiful polaroid calendar by our friend Azuree Wiitala)

January 27, 2011

January 25, 2011

In Search of Fog, pt. 2















 



Film photographs from our fog adventure a while back. Photos taken with a lomo LC-A, Olympus XA2, Pentax k1000 and a Polaroid Spectra.

January 20, 2011

Ch ch changes

Dave is in San Diego for the next few days, so I’m using the alone time to get organized… because we’re moving three weeks from today! We found an apartment with great natural light (very important) that looks out on a tree lined park in the Nob Hill area of town. The timing is perfect, as the trees will be blooming beautiful pink blossoms in a month or two. It will be like living in a pink blossomed snow globe for a few weeks. Well, I like to imagine that anyway. The apartment is on the top floor, so we will no longer be awoken at 3:30 a.m. by the apartment drunk who resides above Dave. Lady Gaga is cool and all, but not at 3:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. In addition to shorting out the entire buildings electricity, said drunk also flooded her bathroom, which subsequently flooded Dave’s. I feel sorry for whoever moves in below that hot mess and gets to inherit her special treats. Don’t worry though, apartment successor - she comes with a noise complaint free of charge. One more and she’s out of there!  

Having spent my entire Portland life on the inner eastside, I am looking forward to calling a different area of town home. My middle school pipe dream was to live in NW and now 15 years later, I’m finally doing it. Of course twelve-year-old Whitney only wanted to live in NW to be close to Urban Outfitters. Now it beckons me due to its proximity to my workplace. Does this mean I’m getting old? If that doesn’t, I think the fact I got excited picking out a new soap pump for our bathroom does. Its milk glass, guys.

While I hate packing (does anyone not?), I am very excited to unpack and create a cozy nest of sorts.  New color schemes, organizing, (some) new furniture, maybe even a polaroid wall? Stay tuned… 

*Polaroid taken 3/2/2007. Coincidentally, it was taken on the exact same street we are moving too. 

January 19, 2011

Potato & Bacon Soup



This soup is both filling and tasty - perfect for a cold, wet Portland day.

January 16, 2011

Sunday Afternoons

I first heard about Nigel Slater the other day via my friend Claire's Flickr. She posted a photo and talked about an amazing dish of "red potatoes sliced & lightly fried, layered in a dish with sage, onion, bacon and chicken stock..." she made from Nigel Slater's Appetite cookbook. I drooled all over my keyboard reading about those potatoes and scoured the internet to learn more about this "Nigel Slater." A British food writer, he has written for The Observer Magazine for over a decade and has published over a dozen of his own cookbooks and thoughts on food. I'm a sucker for new cookbooks and love to peruse the aisles looking at volumes of gorgeous photos of food, imagining the way flavors come together as I read through a recipe. So, with him in mind, on the way to a movie, we popped into Powell's Books and found The Kitchen Diaries for only $10. (Score!) Two pages in and I was smitten. Back at home I interrupted Whitney over and over with things like, "listen to what he says about farmers markets versus commercial supermarkets" or "check out this recipe for pork chops in mustard sauce", "dude! Steamed sea bass with ginger and cucumber!" She rolled her eyes and accepted my enthusiasm as my nose hid behind this book for the next few hours. So today, a lazy and rainy Sunday afternoon, I hungrily poked through the pages reading off recipes to Whitney while the Patriots and Jets battled it out in the background. We settled on "Roast Chicken Wings with Lemon and Cracked Pepper."





All at once citrusy and delicious, we devoured almost a dozen wings in less than 10 minutes. The meat fell off the bone and our fingers and lips became sticky with the wonderful flavors. We quickly determined that the next time we make this, we will certainly need to double the recipe. A fabulous, quick and easy lazy Sunday afternoon snack.
Check out Nigel Slater and his wonderful books. We highly recommend it.

January 11, 2011

Carnitas tacos


It's no secret that we enjoy food. We love to try new recipes and during the last few months, "Slow Cooker Sunday" has become part of our weekend routine. Beef short ribs, French onion soup, beef stew, chili and tortilla soup are just a few of the things we've made. This week we set out to make carnitas tacos. We started with this recipe from Epicurius and then modified it by adding cumin, cayenne pepper, garlic and a tiny bit of homemade chicken stock. Once the meat was tender, we shredded it and threw it under the broiler to get it a bit crispy. Carnitas, avocado, cilantro, onion and a squeeze of lime juice made for one delicious taco.

January 9, 2011

Hello!

Our first photo of 2011, taken shortly after midnight on New Year's Day.