“I’m going to make everything around me beautiful — that will be my life.” —Elsie de Wolfe · My entire life has been saturated in the natural and domestic spheres — both creation and creating. Here I share about not only my art and design work, but the other elements that make up a creative life — home, cooking, sewing, inspiration, nature, travel, adventure.
Anthropologie just opened a new store, called BHLDN, that is all about weddings! It looks pretty neat! I love the classiness!
I do think that the name they chose is funny though. I don’t like the way the letters look together and that they are all consonants. I looked up why they named it that, and it just said that it was inspired by the Dutch word for “to keep.” Here, is a little more about their story.
I love wedding inspiration! 🙂
Goodness, it seems like the majority of the posts I’ve made recently have mostly been about cooking! I’ve always liked to cook, but this year it seems that I’ve really developed a passion for it. I spend my days planning out ideas for dinner!
For me, I don’t know what isn’t to love about cooking. It relieves my stress from school by giving me an hour or so that I don’t have to think about homework or school at all and it produces something tasty! It is an art form without all the pressure. Plus, it is pretty easy and quick to cook for just two people. I really don’t like going out to eat actually. I don’t like not knowing what is in my food or who prepared it. I like that when I cook at home, I pick out all the ingredients myself and can make it as healthy as possible. I also really like the challenge of cooking. I like to try to figure out what I can make with the things that we already have, without having to go to the grocery store to get anything else. It forces me to make things that I wouldn’t have thought about before. It also allows me to be more economical, and stretch our food supply as far as it will take us. Walking into a kitchen is like walking into a restaurant without a menu, you can make anything you want!
So anyway, last night we should have eaten some more of the beef stew leftovers that we have, but I wanted something different. Something cheesy sounded good. My first thought was to make some kind of a cheesy chicken casserole with biscuits on top. That sounded really good! (also really not so healthy) I didn’t have a recipe, but I like it best that way. We had a package of chicken tenderloins in the fridge, so I cut some of those into cubes and put them in a skillet with a little olive oil. As they browned, I added in a little salt, chicken seasoning, and some onions. (Whenever I get onions from the store, I cut them up into small pieces and put them in a Ziploc bag in the freezer to use as we need them)
Now, what to do about the sauce? If I was making the casserole, I would have gone along the lines of cream of chicken soup, but that didn’t really sound good. So I went to the fridge for inspiration. We had milk and a little bit of heavy whipping cream left from when Drew make Chicken Tetrazzini for dinner last Wednesday. (It was really good!) Seeing also that we had Parmesan cheese as well, I decided to go for a more Alfredo cheesy sauce.
Leaving the chicken in the pan, I added a little flour and let that brown for a minute or two. Then I added in a little heavy whipping cream, stirred and it started to thicken. I added in a little milk and stirred until it was the consistency that I wanted. I salted and peppered it and cut open a lemon we had and squeezed in a little lemon juice. Mmm, tasty so far!
So what else does it need? How about some Penne pasta and the rest of the bag of frozen peas? I added in the peas, then cooked the pasta, and added it to the sauce as well. I gave it one last stir, and voila, dinner is ready. 🙂
It turned out really, really good. Maybe not the healthiest dinner, but a tasty one! Pretty quick and easy too!
In honor of Valentine’s Day (and well, just because it is my favorite dessert), Drew and I decided to make a fruit tart this past weekend. My mom makes them and they are AMAZING! One of my absolute favorite things. Drew and I had bought a tart pan over Christmas break when we were shopping and we had yet to use it, since tart is probably not the best thing on our eating healthy diet. I really wanted one, and since I won’t be home for a while to have my mom make me one, we decided to try it. It isn’t that difficult of a recipe, but it does involve cutting in butter and we didn’t have a pastry cutter. You should have seen us in the kitchen stabbing at the butter with knives trying to cut it up. It didn’t work very well for us. I eventually ended up using the end of a wire whisk to cut up the butter into smaller chunks. It is also sort-of a big ordeal to bake anything in Drew’s kitchen, because there is only one (tiny) section of counter top. It makes it especially hard to roll out dough. The tiny kitchen was covered in flour!
Our tart wasn’t a complete disaster, it turned out relatively well, the main problem was that our tart pan is a lot bigger than my mom’s tart pan. So in order to get the crust to fit in there, I had to roll it out thinner than it was supposed to be. (that and the fact that Drew kept eating the dough–but the dough of tart crust, is the absolute yummiest of doughs) Anyway, we got it in the pan and it was supposed to bake for a while with the pie weights in it to keep the crust from bubbling up. So I did that. Then you are supposed to take the weights out and cook it for just a little bit longer. So I did that. I only put it in there for two more minutes and when I came back to check on it, DISASTER had almost ensued.
It wasn’t burnt, thank goodness, it was only merely (a lot) overdone. The bottom of it, where it was rolled too thin, was a little too brown and hard. I couldn’t believe how much that thing cooked in those mere two minutes! I guess it really was too thin. But anyway, we let it cool and then I put the filling on it and the berries and it still tasted wonderful. The crust was a little too crunchy, but it did keep it from getting soggy the next day.
After we finished it and each ate a piece, came the next ordeal: trying to fit it in the refrigerator. We only have a small, baby, apartment sized refrigerator. We always have it full. Plus we had just gone to the grocery store and we have a gigantic pot of beef stew leftovers in there. The main problem was more about what to put it on to put it in the fridge. Our plates aren’t flat, plus they were too small. Luckily though, Drew’s microwave stopped working a couple months ago, so he had to get rid of it. He did however keep the glass piece out of the bottom of it–like a big glass plate. It was flat, although still a little too small for our tart, since he had a small microwave, but I cut the tart all up and made it fit on the microwave thing. We wrapped it in foil and I rearranged the whole fridge and got it to fit (barely).
I guess we didn’t have to worry about that for long though. It was so tasty that we have already eaten almost the entire thing. Just the two of us. Eek! We’ve got to get better about this diet! Although it did get Drew to actually eat a few blueberries. (he doesn’t like blueberries) I told him he needed the antioxidants and he couldn’t have any tart if he didn’t eat the blueberries on it. He agreed, but got the pieces that were all strawberries with just one or two blueberries. Oh well, I guess it is better than none.
Anyway, Happy Valentine’s Day to you all! I’m off to go eat another piece of tart! YUM!
Drew and I have really gotten a lot better lately about cooking new things with new ingredients (one of the things on my 20 before twenty list). Lately we’ve been making several new recipes each week. We’ve also started to graduate to more complex recipes! (Today our recipe was on the intermediate cooking level!) Drew really wants to do a Julie/Julia project where we get a cookbook and have to make every single recipe in it. I don’t want to do Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking like Julia does though, that sounds like a little too much for me. Anyone have any good cookbook suggestions? We were thinking maybe one of the stars on the Food Network might have a pretty good well-rounded cookbook. Looks like we need to make a trip to the bookstore soon.
Anyway, today we made Beef Bourguignon (Julia Child does have a recipe for this, although we didn’t use hers). We used this one. It turned out pretty delicious! We even followed the recipe almost exactly! (I get carried away sometimes with tweaking recipes to my own liking) It did make a lot though for just Drew and I, so we’ll have to eat it every night for the rest of the week to finish it! But I would definitely recommend it.
38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38-39
As of the week before last, I’m officially co-chair of the Tulane Newcomb Art Student Association (T/NASA). It has been an organization for like 2o something years at Tulane, but last year or the year before, all the officers graduated and the adviser quit, so it all fell apart. So, I have no idea how the old club was run, but we are hoping to revitalize it and get it back and better than ever. For a nice start, I made a logo for the club to put on all of our flyers and such.
We have a lot of great ideas for the club, so if you go to Tulane, you should join!
Today I stumbled across the blog, Honey We’re Home, and I was so impressed by her house! Her blog illustrates her going through designing, building, and now decorating her new home. You should all check it out!
I really, really love her office!
I also really like the layout of her kitchen. I like that it is open to the living room and breakfast area, but is still its own room.
I think pretty much anyone would agree that this closet is AMAZING!
I’m excited to see how she chooses to decorate the rest of her house!
Today has been stressful. This week has been stressful. The remainder of this week will be twice as stressful as the first half of it was. I just have too much to do. But regardless of that, this post is a break from the stressful. Let’s talk about aesthetics.
Aesthetics: a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, taste, and the creation of and appreciation of beauty–reflections on art, culture and nature.
What a pretty definition. I think it pretty much sums up all my favorite things. Art, Cooking, Decorating, Design, Crafts, Nature, etc…
I heard someone today talking about aesthetics. They said that when you are engaged in aesthetic thinking, your senses are at their peak. Another big part of aesthetics is that “you are present in the current moment.”
I think that is a very important part of life, remembering to actually be present in the current moment. It is one thing that is hard to do sometimes. Especially when all day long you are sitting in a classroom, or doing homework, or working, or whatever it is that passes most of your time. Before you realize it, the day is over, the week is over, the year is over. Time flies so fast and we look back wondering where all the time went.
That is one of my joys in blogging. It has helped me to pay more attention to the little things and be present in the current moment. It also allows me to be able to look back and see where all my time went. Plus I mostly talk about aesthetics, so my senses are apparently at their peak. I also find that it helps relieve my stress. As if writing down my thoughts somehow takes the weight of them off my back.
So anyway, now that I’ve left you with that thought, I must go finish my painting homework.
Well, yesterday didn’t exactly go as planned. Drew and I had been doing homework most of the weekend, so we decided to make a quick trip to the mall to walk around and get out of the house for a bit. We didn’t really need anything, but decided to see if we could find a nice computer bag for Drew. (the one he has right now does not exactly scream professional) So we went to the mall, where everybody and their great uncle’s second cousins twice removed also were. It was super busy, so we just looked around a little and then decided to leave and pick up some wings and head back home so that he could watch the Superbowl. They have been doing road construction for a while all around the mall and as soon as you pull out of the parking lot, you are ushered into crazy traffic to get onto the overpass and cars are flying past all over the place and it is just a huge mess. Well, we are just about to merge into the fast-flowing traffic on the causeway and the car, a taxi, in front of us starts to go, Drew looks behind to make sure he is clear to get over, starts to go forward and crash, bang, boom, ends up not entering the causeway, but going straight into the back of the Yellow Cab (which happened to be painted orange) in front of us. On Drew’s behalf, the car in front of us, despite being a taxi, did not know how to drive, and instead of going ahead and merging into the traffic like he had started to (and all was clear for him) he started forward and then suddenly chickened out and stopped right in front of us. I saw this, and started yelling at Drew to stop, but by then of course, we were already all up in their orange paint.
Of course this automatically makes for a not-so-great day. We only went forward a couple feet and really only scratched the other car, but Drew’s car has a pretty substantial dent all in the front, a bent hood, broken light, torn off license plate, cracked bumper and the radiator leaked all the water out of it. So now we were stuck on the front of the entrance to the extremely busy highway and whenever Drew tried to start the car back up, it kept revving up all the way, making loud noises, and the gas petal was sticking. Not exactly the safest thing to drive anywhere, especially when the cars next to you are all going 60+ mph. So we waited and waited and waited some more for the police to come and then it took forever for them to handle the whole mess. Trust me, you don’t realize really how alone you are in such a big city until you are literally on the side of the road with no vehicle (that you can drive, that is) and no one that you can call to come and get you. So by then, it was dark and we walked over to a gas station that happened to have another taxi there that we paid to take us home. Although once we got home and were able to look up towing companies and repair places, and called them, they told us that we had to be there for them to tow the car. So then we had to get back there for that all to happen and needless to say, it has just been a big mess. Luckily we weren’t hurt at all and only the front of the car is messed-up. There were glitches in the insurance that had us freaked out for a bit, but now it seems to have all been taken care of, although it has been a stressful twenty-four hours. He got a rental car this afternoon, his car is in the repair shop, and everything should be on the right track to getting it repaired.
On a lighter note, today has been much better. I made smothered pork chops with rice and green beans for dinner. I don’t cook very much pork usually, so I decided to try out a combination of a couple recipes I found for smothered pork chops (in a onion and mushroom gravy). They turned out pretty well, although I accidentally added a little (or a lot) too much pepper (it just came out of the top of the shaker too fast). But after the pork chops and the gravy simmered for a while, it somewhat diluted the pepper taste. I would definitely make these again sometime, sans the extra pepper. Dinner added a much needed smile to someone’s face:
So, how do you peel a banana? Until yesterday, I was unaware of the fact that there are apparently different ways in which to do so. I had always opened a banana by pulling back on the stem part (as I made Drew demonstrate for blogging purposes):
But then yesterday when we were on our way to shop for household items, I looked over and Drew is eating a banana that he peeled backwards! (as I had him demonstrate again for blogging purposes):
When I questioned him about this odd behavior, he simply claimed, “that is how monkeys do it.” I was unaware until then that he happened to be a monkey. But apparently that is how they peel their bananas. Am I the only person that has never peeled a banana like that? How do you do it?
