Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from sunny California!

Some of My Favorite Christmas Things

With Christmas two weeks away, things are starting to get Festive around here. Each year, the special things I enjoy about the season seem to remain consistent. 

1. Decorating with lights is the best way to make a small apartment feel magical. What other time of the year is it appropriate to drape our homes with twinkling bulbs?  Don't say Halloween.  Not acceptable. Because of my curious and ultra-naughty felines, it was necessary to forgo a tree, but my solution for decorating includes lots of white lights and spiraling paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling. It may look a tad like an elementary school, but it makes me smile.

2.  Baked Goods also make me smile. Thanksgiving to New Years is the best time possible to bake up a storm and indulge in each creation. During the summer, baked goods are not so fitting when your kitchen is hot, your appetite is down and let's face it, you have a figure to maintain. At Christmas, I say indulge. We all need warmth, sweetness and love in the form of a gingerbread cookie or snowman cupcake. My new mixer was gifted in the absolute best season.

3. Christmas cards are so fun. I can never choose just one design. This year I went with three, and I had a blast sending them out. I also love receiving cards and got some great ones this month. When I get mail, it lights up my day (pathetic?) and around Christmastime, mail is abundant.

4. Christmas music can never be overdone. I listen to it on my commute. I listen to it while I work. I make Chasen listen to it in the car. My favorite songs tend to be traditional hymns from church, mainly because they remind me why Christmas exists in the first place, and they tend to bring to surface the feelings of Christmas anticipation and nostalgia from my childhood. Below is a rendition of one of my favorite Christmas hymns by Sufjan Stevens.

5.  I love when the weather gets chilly just in time for Christmas. Feel free to remind me of this statement after the New Year when I am completely over winter, but currently, my walk to work bundled with mittens, a scarf and fluffy jacket only feels festive and appropriate.  The city is flocked in decorations, my iPod brings cheer to my heart, and hot tea is sure to greet me at my destination.

In the Kitchen Lately...

I made an awesome salad last week using a combination of recipes. The majority of the recipe can be found here. I didn't have many leafy greens, but I substituted some iceberg lettuce.  Acorn squash was sliced and roasted with asparagus to top the lettuce, and for the last 5 minutes of oven time, I warmed mounds of goat cheese rolled in bread crumbs and thyme. A last minute addition of warmed walnuts toasted with brown sugar took away some of the bitterness from the tangy dressing. The dressing was a tad strong, and if I make this again, I will probably hold off on some of he balsamic and red-wine vinegar for more mustard and olive oil, but it did add a ton of zest to the flavorless lettuce. 

Over the weekend, we revisited our go to theme:  Mexican night.  Chase grilled some chicken and flour and corn tortillas, and I made some guac and rice and beans to go with the usual toppings.  Yum.

Homemade cinnamon buns go the extra mile to get me out of bed on a Sunday morning.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We spent our Thanksgiving in Massachusetts again this year; it's always great spending time with family over the Holidays. The weather was a tad colder than Philly, and the trees were showing the bare signs of Winter, which definitely put me in more of a Holiday mood.  The visit was far too short, but we are hoping to head back up when the new St. John baby is born!

Pre-Thanksgiving with Friends

Last Saturday, we went to a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at John and Sarah's apartment before the actual Holiday. John is a good friend of Chasen's, and they carpool to school together. The majority of the meal was cooked by Sarah (John's girlfriend) and I, and it was definitely a success! Eleven people came to the dinner, and each guest brought an appetizer, drink or dessert.

The place cards were my favorite part of the table setting. Sarah bought tiny glass vases at The Christmas Tree Shops on a big sale, and I printed up names on card stock and used ribbon to tie each card to a given vase. 

It was an awesome night and well-worth the preparation!

A shower for Leo

Johanna's baby shower was last Saturday, and everything looked so beautiful! 

Johanna and her college friend Melanie coincidentally wore the exact same outfit!

Baby Leo's future room!

I'm counting down the days until his arrival in January!

Shades of Yellow and Grey

After sanding our dresser back in July, we finally got around to deciding on the right paint color and establishing a theme for the bedroom.  The previous dresser was stained a deep brown, which was nice, but through age it weathered the signs of coffee mugs, spilled hairspray and plenty of moving scratches.  I wanted to clean it up with a sanding and fresh stain, but after the long process of removing layers upon layers of dirty stain, the wood underneath proved to be not so nice.  I settled on a fresh coat of paint.  My amazingly patient husband allowed me to first try out a bright white, which looked starch and hospital-like against the off-white wall.  Benjamin Moore paint samples next led me to a smoky blue-grey titled, "sweatshirt grey" and we went with it.  Paired with some simple glass knobs,  it has a more revived and clean feel as opposed to the dirty stain from before.

My gifted flea-market bedside tables were already a nice yellow-gold, and I continued with the feel by painting my bed posts in the exact same shade. Luckily Home Depot has a great tool for this!  Yellow and grey with white thrown in would be the new theme of the room, and I struggled to only add hints of these colors to items already owned without having to purchase anything new.  I also wanted to avoid the dreaded "matchy-matchy" feel I sometimes get carried away with.

I switched up the knobs on my armoire with sale knobs from Anthropologie.  They were $2 each!

These hanging vases found here  are a simple solution for curious cats and their tendency to paw at eye level vases.  I also made a basic print in Illustrator, and after it was printed, I mounted it in a cheap Target frame to add color to the blank stretch of wall that was previously uncovered.

One corner of our room that I left untouched tends to break up the color theme. Why mess with what already works?

Comfort Food

I haven't done a whole lot of cooking these past 2 weeks. Two weekends ago, it snowed, and we were stuck in the apartment with very little food. Takeout, movies and popcorn satisfied our boredom that snowy Saturday.

 

On Halloween, with the cold, windy weather and the sad fact of a Monday, I decided to take on my absolute favorite comfort food:  macaroni and cheese. I used aged Gruyere, Sharp Cheddar and Mozzarella.  It was melty, stringy and full of warmth. 

For dessert, I attempted candy corn cookies, found here.

They weren't quite as elegant as that recipe, on account of my using frosting instead of icing, but they were fun to make and sugary in the best way possible.  I ended up bringing the majority to work since it would have been overkill to eat the entire batch!

Our sister's wedding in California

We took a trip out to California last weekend for Dustin and Courtney's wedding. Chase and I were so excited to be in the wedding party, and it was an absolutely beautiful day from start to finish. Unfortunately, I was so busy the entire weekend, I only managed to snag one picture of the bride moments before she walked down the aisle.  When I have a wonderful memory or a great time somewhere, I rarely return with pictures. In order to capture a moment, it seems necessary to step away from what you are doing to get a camera and take the shot. My lack of pictures best represents how awesome of a time I really had.

Our weekend in California was one of the best we have spent in a while. The weather was perfect, seeing friends and family was amazing and neither of us wanted the time to end. Luckily we will be back at Christmas!

Autumn Weekends

I absolutely love the season we are in. The Pennsylvania Fall comes slower than up North, and October days are filled with chilly mornings and afternoons of sun and light breeze. The trees in the city don't seem to be changing, but as soon as I get off the train to walk home, I remember why we live in Mt. Airy- the leaves are incredibly vibrant!

I walked through my neighborhood on Saturday and stopped by a couple farm stands to buy groceries.  One stand had a great setup with pumpkins and a huge selection of locally grown apples.  I never seem to find much value for pumpkins in my life (not much of a carver and wouldn't go through the trouble of making a pie from scratch) but there is something so nostalgic about apples and pumpkins together on a beautiful Autumn Day.

Lots of cooking was had with my favorite Fall foods, and Chase and I stopped by a brewery on Saturday to buy a variety pack of cider.  In Pennsylvania you have to buy an entire case of beer per purchase. I wondered how the 2 of us would finish 50 bottles of cider on our own, but they all are so delicious we will handle them easily by the end of November. 

For lunch we had Fall cider and a salad I tried to replicate after a recent trip to our favorite local restaurant:  greens, apples, toasted walnuts, cranberries, goat cheese and a balsamic/honey dressing.  I didn't have red onions, but there is still a secret ingredient I have yet to discover!

We went to a Fall Festival in our neighborhood which allowed us to try new restaurants at a much more affordable price.  I opted for a natural food taco and Chase tried Asian infused Cin Cin.

Sunday we both played soccer with an old friend of mine from UMass. I think for Chase and I, Fall has always meant soccer, and it was awesome to get out there and play again. I also made my favorite butternut squash pasta dish, which is my sister's recipe, and some amazing peanut butter cookies as a kick-off (no pun intended) to Halloween.

Roasted butternut squash and Portabella Mushrooms, caramelized onions in brown sugar, goat cheese and ziti:

Things I Appreciate...

Flowers from my husband

 Time spent with my nephews

Sunsets in Maine

Free vintage suitcases claimed at a clothing swap

Autumn leaves

 Sibling love

A Simple Birthday Cake

Chase turned 26 on Sunday and I attempted to decorate a cake for him.  I used a cheap piping kit and the help of Martha Stewart.  While it didn't come out perfect, I think for my first attempt, it was a fun project.

1.  I added blue and green food coloring to the vanilla frosting until I reached my desired shade of blue.

2.  The top of both cakes were trimmed so they would be level.

3.  The first layer was frosted with chocolate and the second was sandwiched on top.
4.  I then frosted the entire cake with blue frosting for a "crumb base" and put it in the fridge for 15 minutes.

5.  When the frosting was set, I added another layer of blue and marked 8 divots equally spaced around the circumference.

6.  A pastry bag with a semi-skinny circle tip was filled with melted chocolate to write out Chase's name.  This was no small feat-melted chocolate has a mind of its own.

7.  To finish, I completed the connections between the spots that I marked with piping swags.
8.  The last step was to connect the swags with blue rosettes.

This was the most difficult part of the cake, as the thicker chocolate frosting began to seep out of the tip of the pastry bags.  I guess that's what I get for buying the set at IKEA!