Umple Corner

Recipe!

2014-10-08T19:46:00.003-04:00

You guys! I am the worst blogger, but I am an adequate cook who now has a recipe published in a cookbook!

http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/slow-cooker-frittata-provencal

I am so excited!

I got the cookbook in the mail, after a long day at work and it was really the pick-me-up I needed to feel OK about my day.

I do love this recipe. I have a rack that fits into my slow cooker, so I do not need to do the thing with the foil. Also, I sometimes make it with egg beaters instead of whole eggs, or a mixture.

Cure: Week 1

2014-01-08T20:30:00.001-05:00

I have been marginally following The Cure, except that for the last 2 days, I have been horizontal. My back has basically decided that I need to lay down. It does that once in a while, which you might imagine, does not really help one with home organization. Also, due to the bitterly cold temps, school had a 2 hour delay today, and yesterday off.

Nevertheless, I did manage to make some progress on my list, even if I did not 100% follow the Cure assignments.

Kitchen/Office

~~Clean up my desk~~
~~Clean up Thomas's desk~~
Deal with the things piling up on the window sill and counters

Dining Room

~~Christmas Decoration Overload~~
Lego have taken over this room.

Living/Entry

Fireplace screen falls overhand is fragile.
Storage ottoman: what is even in that thing?
Entry show drop off is a disaster
Better lighting for my side of the couch

Bathroom

Artwork is banged up
~~Need more hooks for robes and towels~~
Need to do something to contain the toothpaste
Need to organize the things falling out of the medicine cabinet.

Master Bedroom

Organize my makeup and jewelry

Thomas's Room/ Guest Room

Fix up the curtains in Thomas's under-bed reading cave.
Organize Thomas's art work for the guest room, and hang up some additional pieces.

I also did a few extra things.

Obtained a small table for in between the two chairs in the living room.

Now that Thomas is older, we don't all fit comfortably on the couch, and having no table over there has been trying.

Moved a drawer unit up from the basement to house Thomas's art supplies and school papers.

The Cure assignment for today is to do one of the projects on my list. I am considering that the answer here might be to order a new table lamp for myself online. I can do that from my horizontal position and technically it counts.

Yesterday's assignment was to set up an "out box", which is basically a holding tank for things we are undecided about. That seems like it might be a bit of a culture shift for my family, so I need to have a conversation with Jeff about it first

Connie Does the Cure

2014-01-02T21:19:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great holiday or winter break or whatever that ends up being for you. For us, it was a lot of lego, a lot of cookies, and a lot of pajamas. I couldn't be happier with it. My 2013 had a bunch of high points, and I am hoping 2014 can top them.

In this blog's previous incarnation, I posted about our home remodeling projects. Mostly the kitchen. That whole set of projects kinda stalled out, in part due to finances, and in part due to family/contractor situation. (Short form: Our contractor is my father in law. Step mother in law passed away over a year ago, and my father in law just hasn't felt like doing anything, which I am totally sympathetic to. In addition, we were in aggressive debt repayment mode, which should be coming to an end in the next few months. Hopefully, it will soon be Game On for home remodeling projects.)

Will it ever be 'done'?

For now, I am doing the Apartment Therapy January Cure. I am really hoping this will help me get over my "nothing will EVER be done around this house" malaise. We have so many projects, many of which are completely dependent on other projects. (Like, remember the structural engineering? Still need to finish that.)

I am hoping the January Cure can help me spruce up without freaking out too much about the dependency chain of our home reno.

My List:

Kitchen/Office

Clean up my desk
Clean up Thomas's desk
Deal with the things piling up on the window sill and counters

Dining Room

~~Christmas Decoration Overload~~ (did this tonight!)
Lego have taken over this room.

Living/Entry

Fireplace screen falls overhand is fragile.
Storage ottoman: what is even in that thing?
Entry show drop off is a disaster
Better lighting for my side of the couch

Bathroom

(Not doing much in here, since we are hoping to do a gut job in 2014)
Artwork is banged up
Need more hooks for robes and towels
Need to do something to contain the toothpaste
Need to organize the things falling out of the medicine cabinet.

Master Bedroom

(Not doing much in here, since we are hoping to do some medium sized reno work here)
Organize my makeup and jewelry

Thomas's Room/ Guest Room

(Both of these rooms just got spruced up, so not much to do in here.)
Fix up the curtains in Thomas's under-bed reading cave.
Organize Thomas's art work for the guest room, and hang up some additional pieces.

So that's my list for Day 1 of the January Cure. Hopefully I'll post some highlights over the next month. In the meantime, here's a small selection of my 2013 highlights.

A Selection of 2013 Highlights

We had a 10th anniversary!

And renewed our vows after a golf cart ride

I finished a half marathon! 13.1 baby!

And I got a new haircut. It will never look like this again because my hairdresser dried it all straight.

Hope you all had an awesome year. Happy 2014!

Beer Shrimp Skillet

2013-07-07T21:02:00.000-04:00

Do you guys know about The Beeroness? I have been loving her blog lately, because it combines some of my favorite things: cooking, pretty photographs, and beer.

A few weekends ago, we took a half day, stopped at Growler Hours and then Penn Avenue Fish and came home with shrimp and beer. I intended to make the recipe I linked to above, but realized that, sadly, I did not actually have the ingredients beyond shrimp and beer. So I made something similar, but not entirely, like it.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 teaspoon old bay
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 pound raw shrimp: cleaned, deveined and peeled
1 cup grape or cherry tomatoes (I used red and yellow)
1 cup amber or red ale
1 tablespoon Sriracha (or to taste, depending on how much spice you like)
a squeeze of fresh lemon, salt and pepper to taste

heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet with a lid
fry the onion until it gets translucent
stir in the old bay and smoked paprika until well mixed with the onion
add the shrimp and tomatoes and stir gently for a minute or two. the shrimp will start to pink up a bit
add the beer and Sriracha and run your spatula around the bottom of the pan to pick up any bits of spice or onion stuck to the bottom. Then put the lid on and let everything simmer for a few minutes. It's ready when the shrimp look fully pink, it should take maybe 5 minutes for regularly sized shrimp. A little more if you get super big ones.
Add lemon, salt, and pepper to taste and serve.

I served mine with some tasty multigrain bread to sop up the yummy sauce at the end, kind of like how I serve mussels. This reminds me that I don't think I posted about the time we made mussels. It was dramatic but tasty.

Creamy Herb Dressing & Community Supported Agriculture

2013-06-13T19:54:00.001-04:00

I am so excited! Today is the first day of our CSA, and this year, we're hosting!

A friend posted on Facebook that a local organic farm was hoping to expand into new areas, including our neck of the woods. Hosting comes with a bit of a discount, so I hopped on board that very night. They checked out my porch to make sure it would work out, fast forward to today and I'm coming home to a porch full of organic vegetables. And apparently an envelope full of capacitors for Jeff. Veggies and capacitors: that's how we roll.

Hooray for Veggies!

This time of year in Pittsburgh, veggies are a lot of greens and herbs. And some kind of turnip, which I am not at all sure what to do with. Instead, I made this creamy, herby dressing to go on a big huge salad full of lettuce, and cucumber, and radishes from our garden. ZOMG garden radishes, you are delightfully zingy. Don't stop, radishes! We love you!

Creamy Herb Dressing

2 tablespoons fresh oregano leaves*
2 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves*
2 tablespoons fresh parsley leaves
2 garlic scapes*
1 green onion, with the top and bottom chopped off, and the rest diced up a bit
juice of half a lemon
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup sour cream (I used light)
salt & pepper to taste

Directions: Whiz everything in a blender until it's dressing consistency. Seriously, it's that easy.

*All of these things were in my CSA box this week. To be honest, I kind of ripped off Simply Recipe's Green Goddess recipe, but swapped in stuff I had in my CSA, and omitted the anchovy.

My porch today!!!

I am so excited to be part of the CSA and super excited to be eating yummy organic vegetables again.

Hope you're all having an awesome week!

Tomatoes: My New Favorite Side Dish

2013-05-24T20:31:00.002-04:00

I was telling my friend Karen about how I had 3 pounds of tomatoes in the oven, and she asked me how I got good tomatoes this time of year. I confessed that I did not. I bought the hydroponic romas, which leave a bit to be desired by way of texture and flavor this time of year, but are fairly passable. I do not think she believed me that this oven treatment makes them divine.

(For the record, it's totally possible that they would be more divine if it were prime ripe tomato season, but I'm probably not lighting the oven to bake them at that point. Plus they are already great, so they don't really need it.)

We are AT THE LAKE HOUSE for 4 glorious days. Alas, the weather here is calling for snow overnight, says our neighbor, so it seemed like oven roasting something was reasonable. The lake house does not have AC, which means I mostly do not bake when we are up here in the summer. Lighting your oven when it's 90 degrees inside is not a fun time with no AC. I'm actually thinking it's a good reason to figure out this crock pot bread thing everyone is doing. But anyway, the tomatoes.

To be honest, I am not even sure if this counts as a recipe, but let's just pretend it is, because it is DELICIOUS.

Oven Roasted Tomatoes

Before

After

3 pounds of roma tomatoes, quartered

3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil

Salt & Pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 275
Lay the quartered tomatoes on a cookie sheet and drizzle with oil, sprinkle with salt

I line mine with aluminum foil since we have no dishwasher up here

Bake the tomatoes in the low heated oven for about 3 hours. You can go more, if you like.
I finished these at 375 for about 15 minutes to get the dark crispy edges

Yum!

TheKitchn & White Appliances

2013-05-20T12:26:00.004-04:00

During TheKitchn's reader request week, they answered my request about awesome looking white ranges!

TheKitchn is one of my favorite blogs so I was super excited that they answered my request. I think this one above is my fave of the bunch. Although, one of the commenters suggested the White Ice line from Whirlpool which is looking pretty snazzy.

I am committed to keeping my freebie white range for the rest of the year, though I'd love a newer prettier one with more bells and whistles.

Thanks TheKitchn!!

Puff Pastry: Best Thing Ever

2013-05-11T21:43:00.002-04:00

Happy Mother's Day! My gift to you is a rant about puff pastry and why it's so awesome. AND! A recipe.

Puff pastry is a freezer rock star. You can buy it months in advance, pull it out and have it be ready for toppings in 10 minutes. Plus, you can turn it into a dinner or dessert that everyone loves, because it's difficult not to love something so full of butter.

I am a huge fan of the puff pastry from Trader Joe's, specifically, for two reasons.

It only contains flour, butter, salt, water and sugar. NO HYDROGENATED OILS!
It's pre-flattened. I've bought stuff at other stores that's folded in half, and you have to thaw it and roll it or worry about breaking it if you don't let it thaw enough.

OK, so now we have "freezer friendly" "makes dinner fast" "not full of weird stuff" and "easy to work with". Are there any downsides? Well, yeah, it's full of butter, so it's not exactly the heart healthiest of foods. Still, I think the benefits outweigh the risks for an occasional treat or fast dinner.

Asparagus Romesco Tart

A few weeks ago, I happened to have some puff pastry and some homemade romesco in the freezer. I had some time, but not a lot of energy, so I thawed out both puff pastry sheets on the counter and made the asparagus romesco tart (above) and a tasty strawberry cardamum tart for dessert.

My family was super happy with the results, and I got to feel like I made something complicated and exciting for dinner, when really all I did was smear some stuff on some other stuff and bake.

So basically I got a bunch of the self satisfied happiness of cooking without a ton of effort. Love that!

Yummy Tart

Strawberry Cardamum Tart

1 sheet of puff pastry dough, thawed for about 10 minutes
1/4 cup strawberry preserves or jam
1/4 teaspoon crushed cardamum
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup sliced strawberries

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Place the puff pastry on a baking sheet covered with a silpat or parchment.
Microwave the strawberry preserves for about 30 seconds, until they are spreadable.
Slice the strawberries and toss in a bowl with the sugar and crushed cardamum.
Spread the preserves over most of the tart, leaving an edge like you would for a pizza. Don't push hard and don't bruise up your pastry. Don't spread it on very thickly.
Arrange the strawberries over the top of the preserves. Drizzle on the sugar, cardamum, strawberry juice stuff from the bottom of the bowl. Try your best not to eat the last 3 strawberries and lick your fingers. fail. OMG it's so tasty.
Bake for 15 - 20 minutes until the pastry is puffy.
Take it out of the oven and let it cool while you eat dinner (maybe 20 minutes?). The resting time will let the preserves solidify up a bit.
I slid mine off the silpat with a pizza peel and used a pizza wheel to slice it into 4 to serve.

Note: I bought cardamum seeds out of the pods and I just crush them up with the flat of my chef's knife, and maybe run the blade through them a few times. If you buy the seedpods, crush them to get the seeds out, then crush again and run your blade through them. I do not buy the preground stuff because I think it tastes like dust, and the seeds, when crushed, taste like delightful heavenly wonderfulness.

I could *easily* have eaten half of this. It was delicious. Cardamum and strawberries are amazing together, and this was super easy.

Yum!

Taking the Easy Way (Grapefruit Walnut Salad)

2013-05-01T22:00:00.001-04:00

I love magazines and cookbooks. When I am starting to feel stressed and freaked out, I almost compulsively buy magazines at the grocery store. They represent leisure for me, in a big, big way.

April is one of the busiest months of the year where I work, so of course, I bought 2 cooking magazines that I barely had time to read and didn't get around to cooking anything out of them until, well, May. (Hi May! Nice to see you!)

I bought a copy of Cooking Light this month. Their version of this recipe looks much prettier than mine, and was probably tastier, because I totally cheated. I am not complaining, it was pretty tasty.

Here is my cheater version. It only really serves 2.

Grapefruit Walnut Salad

1/2 ruby red grapefruit
2 cups of roughly chopped butter lettuce
2 tablespoons walnuts
1/4 cup feta cheese
A drizzle of olive oil
Salt & Pepper to taste

Slice the peel and pith from the grapefruit. I sliced a few sections out of it and pulled the membrane off by hand. It was not super pretty, but it was tasty enough for me.

Arrange the chopped lettuce on a platter and place the grapefruit sections around the plate.

Sprinkle on the walnuts and crumble the feta cheese over the top.

I did not bother to make dressing. I squeezed some of the remaining grapefruit over top, drizzled on some olive oil, and then salt & pepper to taste.

Indian Style Chopped Salad

2013-04-28T21:16:00.002-04:00

Last Thanksgiving, we went to my mother in law's new house in Myrtle Beach. My mother in law was happy to let me cook dinner, so while the family went out to watch my husband run the turkey trot 10k, I stayed home and cooked. Since it was just 6 of us, and we don't eat turkey, I opted for a nontraditional menu with lots of indian flavors, since we LOVE indian food.

Chopped salads are not difficult to make, but they do take a good bit of chopping. This recipe also involves roasting the chick peas and making the dressing, so it can be a bit time consuming, but totally worth the effort. The key is to make sure everything is chopped up nice and small.

Indian Style Chopped Salad

Dressing:

1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 bunch fresh cilantro, divided
1/4 cup fresh mint
juice of 1 lime
1 garlic clove
1 teaspoon cumin
salt & pepper, to taste

Whizz all ingredients in a blender or food processor until they are dressing consistency.

Roasted Chick Peas:

1 14 ounce can chick peas
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 tablespoons olive oil
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Drain and rinse chick peas. I like to slip the skins off the chick peas in my colander, but it's not strictly necessary.
Mix the chick peas, oil, and curry powder in a bowl and toss to combine.
Roast chick peas until they dark and starting to get dry. Somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes.

Salad

1 yellow or orange bell pepper
1 cup green beans, steamed in the microwave
4 cups spinach
1/4 cup fresh cilantro
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1 pint grape tomatoes
Roasted chick peas

Chop bell pepper and green beans into 1 centimeter cubes.
Chop spinach and cilantro into bite size pieces, or maybe a bit smaller.
Combine all the salad ingredients including the roasted chick peas and serve alongside the dressing.

Enjoy!

Let's Get Awesome: Tear Off Sheets

2012-12-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

I am doing my best to put some thought, right now, into my new years resolution and how I might motivate myself.

Let's Get Awesome!

I am not trying to lose a specific amount of weight and I am not training for a particular race. I just want to exercise more. I have been reading about Blue Zones and it strikes me that the one place I fall down is not walking everywhere. I am not in a position to relocate my life all to one walkable work/life location right now, so I want to at least get up reasonably and walk or run or bike or do some yoga or whatever.

Enter my new idea: Tear Off Get Awesome Sheets.

Me and my son crossing the finish line at a 5k
I really can exercise! Seriously!

The thing is, I have a hard time making the choice to go run for a half hour when I could be sitting around or baking cookies or doing something else. In an effort to motivate myself, I have entered into a pact with one of my friends.

The Get Awesome Gift Pact

Find a friend and set a budget
Buy each other a specific amount of presents (we are doing 6) during the post-Christmas holiday sales
Wrap the gifts super tight so that your friend cannot tell what you got her and exchange gifts
Print out your tear off sheets linked to this post, or make your own!

Pages has a template for flyers. I assume MS Word does as well.

Cut the bottom little flaps so that you have 10 easy-to-tear-off strips of paper and post it somewhere you will see it.

I'm putting this on my fridge or maybe my calendar.

Every time you exercise or do whatever life affirming activity you are doing, tear off a strip. When you get to 5, open a present!

For my sheets, when you get to five, you get a present. am doing 3 sets of sheets, with 10 items on each sheet. This is ENTIRELY because I use Pages (the Mac document creator) and there's a template that has 10 tear off strips on the bottom, and I like getting a perk halfway through. We are going to do 6 gifts each so that we can print 3 sheets.

My friend is not sure if she wants to exercise or do something else, so I am including two templates. One for my exercising. Each unit is either 30 minutes running, 45 minutes biking, or an hour of yoga.
The other is for life affirming activities. For some people, that might be "getting out to coffee without my kids" or "going on a date with my husband" or "taking my car to the car wash because I love it" or "spending an hour crocheting that blanket I've been working on". Whatever works for you.

Get Fit

Get Awesome

I think this is fab for a few reasons:

There's no time limit or constraints.

If you wanted to run on Thursday but Thursday ended up sucking, take a break. Run whenever you have some time that weekend. Your reward is waiting for you.

After Christmas sales are awesome and full of cute little things to gift each other.
You are helping a friend.
It's motivating and fun and mysterious.

What is in that little cylindrical one, anyway? Man, I have to know! I'm going to run four days this week.

If gifts are not your thing or you and your friend are strapped for cash, you can give your friend cards with permission to do things for herself. I know it sounds silly, but being able to say "hey, Connie told me I got to have a 20 minute bubble bath today" to your partner or kids totally works. I authorize you one trip to the library and get a new book. Permission to paint your toenails hot pink with black polka dots. Whatever you think she'd like.

So that's my crazy idea. Thanks to Pages for having an easy to edit flyer template and thanks to Vintage Printables for having free clip art I used for the flyers linked here.

Peppermint Pretzel Bark

2012-12-09T16:02:00.002-05:00

You guys, I made some awesome candy bark thing!!!

I was reading a magazine of Christmas Cookies, on account of how I am addicted to buying magazines and then mucking up the recipes. But anyway, my mom is allergic to nuts, so I was looking for recipes without nuts and there was a Thin Mint Bark recipe, but that wasn't quite what I wanted, so I doctored it up to be Peppermint Pretzel Bark! It was super easy, too.

Here's (most) of the cast of characters:

MISSING: Some milk chocolate chips, see below

Ingredients:

1 bag of Hershey's mint chocolate chips
1 bag of Sharfen Berger semisweet chocolate chips
about 2 cups of pretzels (I like the ones that are little squares kinda)
about a cup of peppermint candies - pulsed in the food processor.

If you don't have a food processor, you can also put them in a zip top bag and crush them with a rolling pin

half a bag of milk chocolate chips

You can also add a bit of shortening to the chocolate if you like, when you're melting it. It makes it shinier, but I kinda didn't care so much about that. I did use some butter to coat the bottom of my jelly roll pan.

Instructions:

Line a jelly roll pan with foil and rub it down with butter or spray it with nonstick spray, then cover with a layer of pretzels.

In 3 separate bowls, microwave each of the bags of chocolate chips for about 2 and a half minutes on high, stopping to stir every 45 seconds or so. At some point, you'll still see a bunch of the shape of the chips but they'll melt when you stir. When you get to that point, you have another 15 or so seconds to go and then you're done.

btw - if you can't find mint chocolate chips, you can stir in about a teaspoon of mint extract to 1 of the bowls of chocolate, but do this after it's done microwaving. Don't overdo it.

Start by glopping the dark chocolate onto the pretzels, kinda randomly.

see, kinda randomly?

Then do the mint chocolate. Same thing, but try to get a good coating.

see? at this point, I realized I needed more chocolate, so I bust out the milk chocolate.

So then do the last chocolate.

This looks pretty well coated.

At this point, you are going to take a thin spatula and start to smooth it all out, so you are completely covering the pretzels. It's OK if you don't get it all the way to the edges. It will taste fine just the same.

When you get it all spread out, sprinkle the candies on top.

The mints give you some idea what it's going to taste like. Delicious, that's what.

Cute! Now chuck it in your fridge for about a half hour. After that, start breaking off little bits of it and eating it. Mostly I did this because my son was bugging me like crazy to try it so I caved. So take off some chunks to get your family to leave you alone and leave the rest in overnight.

Then take a big knife and start chunking it up.

At this point, if you have a blog, you set up kind of ludicrous pictures to make a cute thumbnail so you can pin it on pinterest.

OK I totally had to have my 5 year old hold up the corners of this towel because I don't have a good background. I should figure that out over the Christmas break.

Enjoy!

Geek Christmas

2012-12-02T22:03:00.001-05:00

I love it when a plan comes together.

We are having a relatively geeky Christmas this year. To start with, I made these:

Yes, we are apparently Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk and Ironman this year for Christmas. I'm obviously the Hulk. Thomas wanted to be Spidey, and Jeff said he'd be Ironman.

I saw the felt cutouts of superheroes on Pinterest. To be honest, I have no idea how I got to them, but that's basically the joy of Pinterest, you know?

I have them hung up by the chimney with care. You know, right next to the infant stages of our Lego Christmas Village. (Thanks Jeff!!)

I especially like the juxtaposition of Santa and the punk concert.

We have them on both sides of the fireplace. Someday, when I can figure out how to take adequate pics of my fireplace, I will show you. Here's the other side.

Jeff decorated up some Harry Potter with blinking lights.

I really don't have much content in this post, other than the geeky Christmas bits and to tell you that I am OBSESSING over getting a teeny miniature girldog schnauzer. A lot. So much so that I actually was looking at webkins schnauzers to see if they were adequately cute. (They are not.) I found one on petfinder that I have been referring to as the upcoming cause of my impending divorce, on account of how if I brought home a 3rd dog, Jeff would leave me. I have a husband, a son, and 2 boy dogs. I just want something to dress up in little dresses, you know? Testosterone, yeesch.

So, to stop obsessing, I decided to dress up the dogs I have. That's them in little matching hoodies.

To be honest, Dogma's is *way* too small. (He's the red hooded dog, and he's a big guy.) Karma's fits great, but Karma is also all skin and bones. I am worried about him. Every since we came back from Thanksgiving, you can see each of his ribs and vertebrae. When I went out to buy the hoodies, I got them some kind of granola bone chews and that fake dog bacon. He also got Thomas's grilled cheese ends. Hopefully, he'll put on some weight, but he is 12 years old, which is kinda old for labs. This is all kinda sad, and I'm not really getting a little mini schnauzer in a pink dress.

I will just try to be happy with our superhero Christmas stockings.

Reverse Keg Ride!

2012-10-27T18:52:00.000-04:00

I turned 29! Again! It's like the 7th anniversary of that or something.

Local Beer is Delicious!

I had a really great weekend. I occasionally get irritated at blogs where everything is always rosy and happy; that's not realistic. In this case, however, we have had such a great October, it's hard not to post all sorts of happy stuff.

black eyed susans are totally happy

Yesterday, I walked to South Hills Power Yoga for a morning class. (I took the day off, since there's really no good reason to work on your birthday if you don't have to.)

I talked to the instructor a bit before class, because I have some physical weirdness with my shoulder and she gave me some tips. The whole class went awesomely after that, and I left feeling happy. Hot Yoga!

(Basically, if you want to take pressure off your shoulder, stay on your knees in plank. Seems simple, and works like a champ.)

From there, I headed to the Sugar Cafe for some thing kind of like lunch. I asked for iced tea, but only if I could pick the tea. The nice guy behind the counter recommended something called Cinnamon Sunset with ginger syrup. It was fantastic, but not as good as the apple-butternut-cranberry turnover I had for a post-yoga snack. I have heaps of winter squashes and apples and I am determined to make something tasty out of them. Sorry, no pictures. You'll just have to head to Dormont for some of your own. :)

Walked back to my house and lounged around drinking coffee and watching TV shows that I legally downloaded from the internet for a small fee. We are IN THE FUTURE, people. If you happened to miss 2 episode of Rizzoli & Isles, the Apple TV is here for you!!!

Jeff came home so we dropped the little one off at meemaw's house and went out for dinner. He slept over, in preparation for our big bike outing this morning.

Basically, the deal is this. My birthday is around Halloween. That means every year on my birthday weekend, there are too many things to do, most of them involving costumes and probably involving lots of loud people. I am not super into loud. Jeff could not decide between the Terrifying 10k or the Reverse Keg Ride this year, since they were both today. I basically said "hey, we're doing the keg ride, because I don't want to do a 10k on account of how I'm lazy and don't like to exercise, but I can totally bike to where there's beer".

You can read more about it at the link, but basically some folks tow a keg of beer from point A to point B, and when we get to point B, we drink some! You know, for charity! This year, point B was East End Brewing's soon-to-be opened brewery and growler shop, which is also a coffee roaster. roastery? Place in which coffee is roasted, I guess.

I am not in shape, so it was a pretty long ride for me. There was fine. Back was harder, but we went faster and stopped at the old brewery, so it was an extra mile. I am totally hurting between arthritic yoga, walking 2 miles, and a 13ish mile bike ride in 2 days.

I won't gush anymore, but I will leave you with some pretty pics.

A Perfect Fall Day

2012-10-20T20:30:00.000-04:00

Today was basically perfect.

To start with, it's fall, which is obviously the best season. This morning, Jeff let me sleep in and lounge around, which was fab. Eventually, I got up and we all got cleaned up to go to soccer.

He kicks!

After soccer, we went to the Original Pancake House with my mom and dad. Someday, I will get there before we are starving and we will order the Dutch Baby and the huge Apple Pancake. They ask for an extra 30 minutes to make those, and I am never ready to wait 30 minutes.

We split crab cakes benedict and cinnamon apple pancakes. The boy had rainbow pancakes and hot chocolate. They were yum.

A friend recommended that we go to Triple B Farms in Monongahela, PA and I've been wanting to go. It's about a 40 minute drive from our house, which is not too bad, but certainly a commitment.

As soon as we got in the car it started raining. It rained. And rained. And kept raining. I told Jeff that I was POSITIVE it would stop raining when we got there and it'd be double awesome because it wouldn't be busy, since everyone would have bailed due to the rain. It was a foolproof scheme! The guys looked pretty skeptical, but we kept going anyway.

Pretty Farm

I swear, as soon as we parked the car, the rain stopped. By the time we paid and got inside, the sun came out. It was like our trip to the farm was blessed by whichever higher power you prefer. The rest of the day seemed pretty amazing to me after that. It was sunny. And warm. And not crowded. (That last part is especially important for us introverts. Crowds make us super cranky.)

We went through a rope maze and a haunted house and down a cool tube slide. We water-raced rubber duckies by pumping a hand pump.

I got to see plenty of goats. I <3 goats and gnomes. I also <3 lilacs and coffee and pumpkin pie and tea from that Teavana place in the mall.

Is this a goat? Yak? Something?

This is totally a goat. Love the rectangular pupils.

The guys used a ginormous slingshot to launch tennis balls over towards the apple orchard.

Jeff claims that I have no idea how fun this is.
Jeff is usually right.

We got hopelessly lost in a corn maze. Last year, we went to a different farm and the maze was basically a path with a lot of turns. Not so, with this maize maze! We spent about a half hour wandering around before we found our way out.

Seriously, it was the only annoying part of the day. It went on forever. Also, when you let the five year old make all of your decisions, you don't start out with a plan. Then Jeff insisted that he wrote a program in college that did this and we could just make all lefts and get out. The maze was full of loops, however, and that was not an efficient exit strategy.

Our kid does not want to miss out on *anything*. When he found out that we could pick apples, we were basically required to do that. I did manage to get us on a hayride first. I don't think I have ever been on a hayride so I was pretty jazzed about it.

I was surprised how fun picking apples was. They are easy to see because they are so shiny red. When you get high enough up in the orchard where the apples aren't picked over, it's pretty easy to fill up your bag. Jeff and I went berry picking last summer with a friend and her and my little boys. Jeff was kind of whiny about it because he said he detests berry picking. Turns out, berry picking out in the country where Jeff grew up consists of "hiking for an hour into the woods to pick berries from a big wooded mess of berries". Picking berries (or apples) from a farm you pay to get into consists of going on a hayride up to where the nice wide rows of apples are, and then moseying down a path leisurely filling your bag. Totally different experience.

We picked our five dollars worth of apples and realized that the rain was probably coming back.

Ominous Skies in the Apple Orchard

One thing I failed to take a good picture of was the cider doughnuts. We wandered into the, er, dining barn? Not sure. The covered place with food. Our friend from New York is always talking about how good cider doughnuts are, and Triple B is the only place in Pittsburgh that has them, from what I can tell. The whole drive out, I was thinking "it will rain, but at least I can get a cider doughnut, and stop caring about those. They can't possibly be as good as I keep hearing. How could they possibly compare to those doughnuts full of chocolate whipped cream? That's just crazy talk."

Friends? I was wrong. Cider doughnuts are AMAZING. We got 3 and some hot cider and sat down. About two bites into his, Jeff said "we should have got a dozen". I pointed out that we could get some before we left and he said "wait here, I'm getting a dozen". Hah!

On the ride home, we determined that the deal is this: Cider Doughnuts are amazing in a completely different way the doughnuts full of pudding or chocolate whipped cream. They are effectively a completely different kind of pastry. A delicious, delicious pastry. If you have them, get them now. They might be the best thing you can buy for 75 cents a pop.

It was a perfect day. We bought some fudge and picked our pumpkins and drove home.

I love fall.

Lunch systems: Adorable. Functional. Easy to care for. (pick 2)

2012-10-18T19:52:00.002-04:00

It is amazing how one purchase can spiral your shopping out of control.

I have been saving up for, and finally purchased refurbished, an 11" MacBook Air. It is ADORABLE and so far I am really loving it. (Previously, I was using an older netbook running Ubuntu, which was surprisingly adequate, but just didn't have the full toolset I wanted.)

But now that I have my super portable laptop, I needed an appropriate bag. My other laptop bags had laptop compartments that were huge and I did not want my fancy new teeny laptop floating around in there. Enter, the Timbuk2 bag designed for the 11" air

Perfect Bag. So far, mostly sold out everywhere.

I did my normal thing where I obsess about it for about a week, spending every evening online paying half attention to TV while making myself nuts trying to decide and obsess about colors. But so far, I am really loving it. It fits my laptop, my wallet-onna-string that holds my cell phone and wallet stuff (but I can use it as a teeny purse), and my makeup bag, sunglasses, charger. I am really loving it.

Enter the problem: The Lunch Bag.

vine

Jeff got me a really awesome little lunch tote a few years ago for christmas, but it's purple and pink! It will kind of class with my adorable new laptop bag. So I am investigating new lunch bags. I have found some pretty cute ones, too.

amazon

Lately, I have been freezing stuff for lunches in these little glass containers I got off amazon. They are pretty fab, so I need my tote to be kinda damp-proof since stuff comes out of the freezer and gets a bit wet. (The main reason I don't want it in my laptop bag. It totally fits.)

ebags

Lots of cute stuff. I haven't even gotten started on the thing where all my coats are pink and purple, so I may want to replace those as well. Oops.

Well, in any case, it is very easy to obsess about the PERFECT lunch containment system. Maybe I should perform a requirements analysis. Perhaps that is too much like work.

Ohai! with quilting

2012-10-11T22:06:00.001-04:00

I have been considering migrating this blog to a personal domain instead of blogger. Largely because I'm not really posting much about renovating anymore, since we are on hold with the bath reno, but I have lots of other things I'd like to blog about. I am still sort of torn about it.

In any case, did you guys know about Connecting Threads? I ordered some stuff from KnitPicks (which I love) and the box it came in had the names of their sister companies (apparently) including Connecting Threads, their fabric and quilting website.

I was pleased to find out about it, because KnitPicks is so fab with their relatively inexpensive luxury yarn. Online fabric stores don't seem as well organized or something. They're free patterns look pretty good, too.

Adorable Kimono, right?

But the MOST exciting thing is laminated cottons!

OMG OMG OMG Laminated

I'm sort of curious about them, now. I am trying not to buy myself any craft supplies, though. My birthday is the end of this month and then 2 months until Christmas. Buying myself stuff in the last third of the year seems like i'm risking something. I have no idea what. Psychology is so weird.

Big Bath Reno: On Hold

2012-03-09T22:11:00.000-05:00

For financial reasons, the Big Bath Reno is on hold. After going through our finances, taking into consideration the new furnace and new AC we had to put in over the last six months, we are going to hold off for a while. I think it's for the best, but I'm kinda melancholy about it.

I am trying to focus on the positive. (A few years ago at work, I focused on the positive, and it was pretty successful. This year, I tried focusing on the realistic, but the folks on my team have told me they liked Positive Connie better than Realistic Connie.)

For whatever reason, I ended up thinking about the apartment I lived at when I lived in Seattle for a year. It weirds me out a bit how easily I can stalk neighborhoods I lived in 10 years ago on google maps. I can't actually remember the address. I am blaming Old Age on that one.

I think it was about here.

The place was really pretty cheap, at the time. But it was awesome, because the balcony, tiny though it was, had a nice view of Salmon Bay and the fishing boats that were docked there. It was awesome.

I could also walk to the Chittendon Locks, which were nifty to watch, but the botanical gardens nearby were really pretty, so I ended up looking those more than the locks.

This might be the place I lived, but I honestly can't remember.

For some reason, I remember that the local coffee shop I could walk to also was the post office. And they had orange cranberry bread that I LOVED and tried to make in my bread maker and utterly failed.

This whole post is pretty disjointed. Sorry ya'll. Happy March and don't forget to turn your clocks this week (for those of you in locales that do that).

The Big Bath Reno

2012-02-13T22:50:00.000-05:00

So, you might remember that we ended up out a few grand for a new furnace, among other problems.

We are back on track to start working on the upstairs bath. Thing is, with the structural engineering stuff we found out, we need to do the main bath on the 2nd floor first. Jeff says, since we need to sister up a bunch of joists, it's easier to do that from above, rather than below. Makes sense to me, only we don't have another full bath in the house, so we'll be trying to do this on the quick. Some plans to make that happen:

Staging: We're trying to buy basically everything in advance. We'll probably keep it in the EstroDen, since it's the room right by the bath that we're not using daily. So, tub, toilet, tile, cement board, 2X4s, drywall, whatever. We'll have it 'all' here in advance, before we start demo.
Layout: Layout stays the same. We're putting in a new floor and fixing up the joists and whatnot, but moving plumbing around takes time, and honestly, the bath room is only 7X7 anyway, so there's not really much reconfiguring we can do. I'm OK with that.
Reusing: We are pretty sure we're going to reuse the existing sink and vanity (and cabinet over the toilet).

Here is my trouble. We're trying to do this both fast *and* cheap, and you might know that thing about good cheap fast: pick two.

So. I want to paint the oak cabinet a pretty color. I was thinking a soft taupe-grey or maybe a subdued teal. The countertop on top of that cabinet is ... pink. Seriously, sandy pink. And it's a corian-kind of solid surface, too, so it's *nice*. Just...pink.

Counter is on the right.

So here I am trying to mock up some finishes I could go with that may 'work' with the pink. Not loving it, but it seems OK. The floor here is a white basket weave I found at Home Depot for $6.95 a square foot. I can get something nearly the same at the Tile Shop for $5.29 a sq ft, says their web site, so about $270. This could work.

I do kind of want to replace the pink top with this nice white one (which is $170 or so, and will fit on our 4' long cabinet).

Pretty nice, huh?

Wandering around Lowe's, we found some even cheaper octagon dot tile flooring for $2.57 a square foot, or about $130.

Octodot

I just don't love it as much, you know? But it's nice. Also, this pic has some 1X2 subway tile on a mesh back. Above is larger, single tiles arranged in a subway pattern which are 8X12.

My big problem is that what I *really* want is marble basket weave, which is OBVIOUSLY gonna be vastly more expensive.

It's just so gorgeous!!! I really want it with the bigger tiles on the left. You'll have to forgive my primitive photoshop skills. You get the basic idea. Anyway, at $12.99 a square foot, that's $630 or so which is, you know, like 5 times as much. Kind of hard to sell the husband on that one. See above for "cheap".

So I'm torn. I want to buck up for the marble, honestly, because the floor is the main thing that you're just NOT gonna replace later, right? So I should put out the coin for the marble and leave the pink top alone, right? That will save me the $160 for the top, and I can replace that next year when we have some more money.

This could work, right?

So maybe I keep the top, buck up for the floor, and then go with a more blue-ey grey color that I basically made up in photoshop. I kind of like this. It's not perfect, and it's not 100% what I want, but I think it might be workable. Just need to find a nice grey. The white in between the two tiles is "Opal" from Martha Stewart's Home Depot line of paints.

(Oh, btw, the shower curtains are from pottery barn -pink and multi colored- and garnet hill, i think - teal. Most of this is on my pinterest board.)

We're just planning a relatively plain tub. The toilet has a cracked top, so that needs to go. I am kinda thinking that if I put this off for another month, maybe I can afford the fancy floor. Since we're planning on getting everything in advance, maybe we just buy that last.

It's a shame we only get paid once a month.

Bad News, Zero Cost

2012-02-02T22:06:00.001-05:00

You guys, I am like bad-news-betty, lately. And not really stuff for me, but bad news for people one or two degrees away. Here is what happened last week:

My sister in law's father died of cancer. Cancer can suck it.
My husband's step mother had to have her big toe amputated. Diabetes can also suck it.
My son threw up for about 5 days straight. Viruses? Join the suck it club.

On top of that, I had my first mammogram (boobs: normal. hooray!) and then our furnace decided to die a horrible death. So I stayed home from work with the sick kid and to get the new furnace installed. I am irked by the furnace situation. Partly because I have a bunch of assorted other family stuff going on that is, frankly, distressing. Also, though, a new furnace costs money. Money I was hoping to spend on a bathroom reno. Disappointment!

I needed a pick me up this weekend, so I decided to go for a 0-cost makeover of the Estroden. The Estroden (or woman cave) is the 3rd bedroom on our 2nd floor. It's the smallest bedroom, a little bigger than 8X10. I had some things in there but it never quite gelled, and over time it turned into a dumping ground for stuff.

Dumping Ground

Not loving it

I did have, however, a few yards of fabric that I intended to be a bed scarf but decided I didn't like it. Also, I had this line, clip doohickey from Ikea that I was using to post pictures and things on, but also works like a curtain rod.

And I even kept the instructions and ikea tool!

My husband gave me this old cork board, which could replace my ikea string clip thing. Dignitet.

Butterknives are official staple removal tools. Seriously.

So, Jeff was nice enough to help me move things around and put up my dignatet. Dingbat. Thingy.

I got ahold of the staple gun and used it to recover the board with some of the fabric, and use the rest for curtains. Which I totally didn't sew, by the way. I will get around to it at some point. I want to put a block of some orange or teal fabric at the bottom.

It's not great, but I am happy enough with my 0 cost makeover. It was a nice pick me up.

board and desk I already had!

My son insists on reading his bedtime stories on the big futon cushions I put on the floor every night.

big cushions on the bottom left

It's a small room, so it's not easy to take a big picture of the whole space. I can try again later. Jeff thinks it looks like a 70s den in a house of ill repute. (He said something else there, but it's not really appropriate for blogland.)

I hope you guys are having a better month than we are.

Bread! And other things

2012-01-21T16:14:00.000-05:00

I have no idea when this turned from a renovation blog into a food/technology/randomness blog, but it looks like it was right around the time of the great structural engineering debacle, which resulted in such a complex dependency chain of stuff, that we have ground to a halt on construction progress. Alas.

Oh well, with the new Apple news about iBooks Author, I have been putting together a miniature iPad version of my cookbook and beta testing recipes and trying my best to take pictures of them.

I decided to take a break today to try out this Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day thing. WOW that actually works! I am impressed. The link above is the site I used to get the main recipe.

Here's what it looked like when it was done with it's first, 2 hour rise:

This does not look like any bread dough I have ever seen.

And here's what it looks like when I was done baking my first loaf:

Dude, this looks like ACTUAL bread!

The deal is that you make a very low-effort, wet dough and then leave it in your fridge for a few weeks. When you want bread, take some out, let it rest, and then bake it. I am pretty happy with it. I am going to try it out to be naan next. Woo naan!

So try it out. Those folks are getting my $15 for the iPad version by the end of the day. Love!

My only complaint is that the container they recommend you buy (which looks awesome) is BPA plastic (which is arguably not awesome). To be honest, I am not really convinced either way about BPA, but I have a small child at home, and I see no reason to tempt fate. Or tempt cancer. Or both.

The answer appears to be "buy the OXO thing that's approximately equivalent". Really, that's the right answer enough that I should probably just try OXO first for kitchen stuff.

So hey. Have you tried this bread? Any cool tips or variations?

Anything you want to share about BPA?

Hope everyone is having a good January so far.

A Few More Food Pix

2012-01-09T20:40:00.000-05:00

Black Beans

I should probably start prefacing these with the fact that I don't really know what the hell I am doing. I've only had my camera for about 3 months and I started reading/watching things about food photography a week ago.

but in any case, yesterday I posted a bunch of photographs where foods were begin directly lit with a makeshift light (my husbands work clamp lamp thingy -- tat's the technical term!). Today I learned that is called 'specular' light and that if you filter your light with something, it's called 'diffuse' light. Apparently, the 120 degree direct angle from yesterday is supposed to emulate late afternoon sunshine. Diffuse lighting (the filtered one) is closer to an overcast day. Cool.

I don't have a big piece of anything official to filter the light with, but we got something in the mail last week that was wrapped in bubble wrap, which is TOTALLY translucent, so I used that.

This would be a nice picture if that tomato wedge didn't look like an ear.

Everything was pretty much the same set up as yesterday, except I asked my husband to hold a piece of bubble wrap over the light. That's probably not really safe, so I should figure out what I can use that's more legit and, you know, not a fire hazard.

Honestly, this still looks late-afternoon-ey too me, so I'm not sure if the bubble wrap is not diffuse enough, or if I should have the light further away. Not sure.

A little more diffuse

I should mention that black beans do not make super pretty food pics, and that I sprayed them with cooking spray so they'd look more shiny and pretty. They look oddly like coffee beans to me. *shrug*

Lighting Food Pictures

2012-01-08T21:43:00.004-05:00

So, I have been experimenting with some lighting stuff to take better pictures of my food. (See also recent post where I am gonna need to take pictures for my perhaps e-book cookbook I mostly wrote and now need to field test and take pictures of.)

So, I read a bunch of things and watched some videos online and set up to practice some things today in my kitchen. I did not want to buy any fancy lighting equipment yet, but my husband had some clamp work lights, so he gave me one of those. I started with a 60 watt clear regular lightbulb, set at a few feet away, about 120 degrees off set from my camera, using the food as the center of a circle. Actually, I guess that's negative 120 degrees. Math is slowly coming back to me. So, I tried that.

-120 degree light offset, 60watt clear

It was just a regular lightbulb. You can put flood light bulbs in the work clamp lights, but man, those are BRIGHT. So anyway, you can see a lot of shadow on the right side (light was on the left).

OK, take two, I set up a white reflected card (which was actually a white piece of funny foam stuff from Joann's, since that was like a dollar and buying actual photographic white card seemed like it might be expensive.) I set that up between 90 and 120 degrees positive. (So basically the other side of the food).

same as above, plus a white reflector card

White reflects a lot of light back, and everything looks more bright with the shadows on the right side. Kinda nice. I did try one more thing.

Used my mac laptop as a brushed silver reflector card

So yeah, I propped up my laptop as a reflector card. Brushed silver is apparently thing. I actually like it the best. I suspect because it was more shiny and thus more reflective than the foam, which is pretty much matte. Really, though, all if it seems a little bit too high contrast for me. So I decided to lower the wattage of the light bulb and switched to a ceiling fan 40 watt bulb.

I also switched everything around, because I think the peppers are naturally too shiny, and I was trying to get a handle on this diffuse light thing.

40 watts, no reflector card

40 watts, back to the white foam

I used a white melamine tray instead of the foam

I think I like the melamine tray the best for my faux reflector card. I was really pretty happy with how that one turned out. It's kinda glowy or something.

Here's some shots I took with my iPhone of the setup for taking these pictures. They are not great because it was kind of hard to figure out what to take of, but maybe they will be illustrative.

top view, pretend the white card was held up by something

Side view, continue to assume that card is being held up

super closeup. ignore my dishes, ok? thanks

I started to put everything away, but I realized that a lemon was not all that exciting and that I had some other food I could play with. (Yay playing with one's food!)

same setup, with tomatoes

I oiled my poor, unloved, bamboo cutting board to make it prettier. (Don't neglect your cutting boards, folks, mine is split and sad.) I rinsed off the tomatoes because ... I don't know exactly; I think I always rinse off food when I am about to use it. I really liked this one a lot. Still glowy, nice water drops. It's not perfect food photos, but I thought it was pretty nice for basically being homework.

More food, un-oiled cutting board

I broke out my bigger cutting board and was too lazy to oil it, but I added some other foods to make a sort of scene out of it. I really nee to work on aperture and focus but I thought this was pretty OK.

A few things:

The differences are both subtle and dramatic with the reflector card, but you don't have to have anything fancy, so that's nice. I used a plate stand from my china and some white stuff I had around. The white card was really RIGHT up close to the right hand side of the food, though. Basically barely out of the shot.
I had much better results when I started putting my camera right up next to the food. Because I have such a short lens, that means super close. If you have a longer lens, you might be able to be further away.
These are the five or ten good shots out of maybe 50 or 60 total. Digital photography means volume is your friend! So wiggle around a little and stuff, until you get something you like, and throw the rest of what you don't like away.
These are all straight out of the camera, no editing, no color correcting, using my camera's incandescent white balance. So nothing fancy and no post processing, which would probably help a bunch of them. Still, it shows what the different lights and stuff do.
I have windows in my kitchen, so there was ambient/extra light in the room.
I have a semi-fancy interchangeable lens camera. (Olympus Pen E-p3). Not a DSLR but still pretty nice. I am somewhat convinced, though, that you can get pretty good results with good lighting and a point and shoot, so that's something to think about. Case in point, I took this picture with the same lighting setup with the lemon. Not great, but not totally terrible. I probably needed more overall light with this.

not awful for an iPhone

I don't want to end my post with that, so here is that pretty tomato picture again.

pretty tomatoes!

Busy Bee Me

2012-01-05T23:00:00.005-05:00

So, hey guys, I kind of wrote a draft of a cookbook. Most of one, anyway.

We're pescetarian, so that knocks out a whole bunch of cookbooks for us. On top of that, because we both work such long hours, we end up all getting home at 6:30 and with a 4 year old, we really need to eat now now now. If you take 45 minutes to cook dinner, and your kid's bedtime is 8pm, you are basically setting yourself up to never see your kid or never have time to give him a bath and read him a story!

So I usually cook a lot of stuff and freeze it. Lately, I have been really experimenting with freezing, slow cookers, rice cookers, and meals that cook up super quick. In order to keep track of them better for when I'm doing my weekly meal planning, I started to make a binder of recipes. On Saturday mornings, my husband makes us pancakes and I set at the breakfast bar and have pancakes and coffee and make my grocery list and having the binder makes it much easier.

We also turned this...

and this

into this

... so now I have a chalkboard with all my meals for the week somewhere I can check them every morning

In any case, I just kept going and going with the recipe collection, and it turned into a cookbook. Nifty!

I'm not entirely sure what to do with it, but I am thinking that maybe self publishing an e-book is an option? Dunno.

Next up, though, I will be mastering food photography and then field testing my recipes! Today, I watched a bunch of videos and got some great tips with things like using floral cards to hold up reflecting cards and using holding a lit incense stick briefly over a cup of hot coffee to fake some steam. Awesome!

In any case, I sent a few things to friends to field test and tested this one out myself tonight. (I am not really a cook who measures stuff, so it was kind of important to test.) Here ya go!

Pepper Poached Eggs & Toast

1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, minced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
2 red bell peppers, diced
15 ounce can of diced tomatoes
about a 1/4 cup hot sauce
4 raw eggs
flatbread or sourdough baguette for serving

Heat the olive oil in a large pan with a lid over medium heat, and fry the onion for about two minutes.

Add the garlic, smoked paprika and bell peppers and continue to cook for another 4 or 5 minutes.

Add the diced tomatoes, trying to pick up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Stir in the hot sauce (i like 1/4 cup, but you might like less or more, it’s up to you.)

Using your spoon, make four wells in the pan, moving the tomato and peppers to the side, but making sure to leave some liquid in each well.

Crack one egg into each well and cover the pan. Simmer for about 10 minutes or until the eggs are cooked through.

Serve with flatbread or the baguette. (Or tonight we had it with just plain toast, cause that's what we had!)

Structural Engineering

2012-01-02T22:07:00.000-05:00

It all started with a door around Thanksgiving.

The old kitchen (a.k.a. the Room of Despair) is visible from the front door. Since we were having about 10 guests for Thanksgiving, I asked my husband to put a door up in the doorway, so that we could close it and our guests didn't have to look at the gigantic mess and lack of walls and exposed electrical.

(OK, technically, there are two doors, but the other is in the dining room, so I put up a curtain there, and wheeled the kegerator right up to the door. It was awesome! )

In any case, we had a door that we thought went there, so Jeff tried to put it up. Denied! The doorway, however, was totally not square in any way. This somehow turned into us calling a structural engineer, because Jeff was pretty sure the house was not square if the doorway was not square. Which hey, turns out to be true.

The short answer is: shore up some stuff in the next 5 years. Which is really no big deal, but does put our next set of work into a different order than we intended.

Mainly, we need to do the upstairs bath before the 1st floor bath. This is because we need to sister up a bunch of joists and that's easier to do if we work from the top down. (The upstairs bath is over the Room of Despair, which is gonna become the 1st floor powder room, someday.)

Here's some pics.

It turns out, you are not supposed to cut big holes in your joists to route plumbing.

Another view of that.

Above you can see where we'll be rerouting the plumbing for the main bath and powder rooms and sistering the joists (which apparently means adding a joist to each side of the original joist to add support).

I gotta say, that does look like something that's gonna break. This is just one example, we have about five or six of these. So basically, we are going to tear out the floor of the main bath (after working up the plumbing in advance to make the remodeling go faster) and add the sister joists from above.

You should ignore the boxes we never unpacked and our nonfunctioning roomba.

Here's a shot of how the steps to our basement are not actually held up by anything.

See the big pole? That's holding up the house. More on that later. To the left of that, you see a 2X4, right? Except it was chopped off.

That is supposed to be touching the floor, holding up the steps. Those steps have always seemed super rickety to us, so it's completely unsurprising. We shoved a 4X4 under neath to hold the steps up for now. Those babies will be going bye bye and being replaced with new steps.

Here's the top of the aforementioned post. If you look, you can see some wood shims above the post. That's apparently a no-no, said our structural engineer. We are smack dab in the middle of a period of building for our house when people used that kind of post with wood shims. Wood moves, expands, contracts. Which it did, and now our house isn't level. Metal shims will need to go in there.

We asked about jacking up the house with these things you put under your posts and slowly turn, but the engineer said that probably will just result in other craziness happening in the above floors, so instead we need to double the number of posts. (We have 3, going to 6.)

That involves jackhammering out some concrete in the floor, pouring a new concrete bed, and then putting in 3 new metal posts in. 2X the posts = 4X the support.

So, cool.

The downside to the new posts is that we will need to tear out the existing hardwood and put in a new, level subfloor. We were hoping that if we jacked the house up a bit, we could refinish the original floors. But, you know, the original floors are like 90 years old, so it's not the end of the world.

We are leaving the awful, boring beige carpet for now, because we have a wall to demo and rebuild in the living room and there's no reason to do that all over my brand new floor. (Plastic brick, people? Really?)

We are both fairly convinced to put in some laminate after that, since with the dogs and the son, we could use something indestructible. In the old house, the hardwood got super scratched up, so we'll see.

via lumber liquidators website

This is kinda pretty for laminate.

So that's what's happening for us. You know, besides christmas and stuff.

Merry Belated Christmas and Happy 2012 everyone! May your house not require a structural engineer!