Hanging Postcards

My boyfriend has all these postcards that he collected/sent me from his cross country road trip a few years ago. In the old place they were just taped to the wall, but I wanted to do something a little classier here and hung them up, along with a few other memorabilia like photographs and concert tickets, using string and clothespins. This kind of display is way cheaper than buying lots of picture frames and putting lots of holes in the wall. I'm not sure where I originally got the clothespin idea - I know it's a cute wedding trend but maybe I first saw this in my former roommate's room. Gina, am I remembering correctly?

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My First Etsy Purchases

I've been an occasional browser of etsy and I see lots of pretty things on there, but I am what you might call an anti-shopaholic, so it requires a lot of deliberating and motivation for me to take the plunge and buy something. Which is why I'd never bought anything from etsy before until now - because I finally had the perfect reason.


After my friend Elaine's wedding, I really wanted to give her something handcrafted for her home, something made with love that would last a long time and be an heirloom in the making. She requested a wooden fruit bowl, considering her "current lack of fruit display options" so I scoured etsy for something just right and finally decided on this bowl, turned from reclaimed Georgia wood and finished with natural tung oil by MyTurningShop.


I wanted to give her a little something else too, and when I spotted this adorable lovebirdie vase, I knew I had to get it, since Elaine's invitations featured birds. The redhotpottery shop has some really awesome ceramics for sale, including heart-shaped ramekins, so check it out!

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Brown Paper Bag It

As much as I love all the open shelving in this apartment, it was getting to be a bit too revealing in places and needed some cover up. I have an entire wall of deep cabinets in the kitchen, perfect for storing random crap (yay for a NYC apartment that has storage space), but it looked kind of messy.



before 
I tried to create a cleaner look by shoving stuff into cardboard boxes (repurposed from moving) so one could gaze upon an array of brown boxes of different shapes and sizes through the glass. However, not everything fit nicely in the boxes, so I needed a new solution. I decided to line the glass with paper instead.

Here's where if I were a cute crafter I would have found some adorable printed gift wrap or wallpaper to work with. But I don't really have the patience for that. Instead, I hit upon a greener solution - I repurposed brown paper bags that were sitting in my craft drawer*. I knew I was saving them for a reason! (Well technically, I had intended to turn the bags into gift wrap come holiday season, but I can always collect more bags before then.)

Cutting up the bags totally reminded me of those days of being ordered by anal middle and high school teachers to cover my textbooks and notebooks with brown paper bags. Did you have to do that too?



after
Overlapping strips of brown paper were cut to fit the tall cabinets and then duct taped to the inside of the glass. You can tell the paper is crinkly but I don't care. It still does its purpose of hiding anything and everything I've been shoving back there. I love the clean look of the lined cabinets, and it really makes the room feel more open. I'm doubly happy that I was able to find an eco-friendly solution for this project by reusing materials I already had.

And before you hate on me for closing up open shelving, don't worry - the apartment still boasts plenty of other glass cabinets and little nooks and shelves that I left untouched to display our stuff, as you will see in tomorrow's post.

* Does anyone else out there save gift wrap, ribbons, paper bags, etc whenever someone gives you a gift? This stuff makes up the bulk of my craft drawer. It's a really smart and green alternative to needing to buy new giftwrap for your own gift giving endeavors.

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Heavenly Grilled Pizza

I think I finally found my perfect dough for grilled pizza - from smitten kitchen (and can anyone tell me exactly how she is still cooking and blogging up a storm while a million months pregnant?). Not too thin like this dough and not too soft like another one I tried. Even though I didn't give the dough enough time to rise into pliabe handstretchable dough, I simply used my rolling pin to roll it out to an amorphous circle the size of the grill, and it rose up well enough on the grill.

In true summer style, I topped the pizza with a base of leftover bruschetta - diced tomato, fresh basil, garlic,and olive oil. To that, I added grilled and diced eggplant to make it a little more hearty, and grated parmesan and gouda. My dining companions and I all mmmm'ed our way through bites of this pizza. I think it was the combination of rich gouda, lots of garlic, and fresh basil - a unique flavor profile that really works. Hopefully I can get one more grilled pizza in before tomato - and grilling - season ends.

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Reddish Velvet Beet Cupcakes with Bourbon Cream Cheese Icing

My friend Jamie had a big birthday last week, so we celebrated in style. She loves red velvet cupcakes (she is from the South after all), but I don't really like the idea of adding red food dye, and the natural food coloring available at Whole Foods was prohibitively expensive. I love using beets in baked goods, so I went ahead and made this version of red velvet cupcakes, minus the food coloring, and with the addition of 1/3 cup cooked and pureed beets to add natural coloring. I also added extra bourbon to the icing because it's another one of Jamie's faves (recipe below).


Well, as I've heard happens but hoped it wouldn't, the cupcakes came out a light reddish brown. The beets I used were pale pink because that's all I could find on short notice, so I'd like to experiment again using normal deep dark red beets.


So even though my creation turned out more as "Reddish" Velvet Beet Cupcakes, they were still tasty, especially because of the Bourbon Cream Cheese Icing, which was a big hit with my coworkers and Jamie. Luckily I ended up with leftover icing, a perfect excuse to make another batch of cupcakes - cinnamon-spiced flecked with diced apples and pears - this week to use up that sugary creamy goodness.

Later on for the birthday girl's big night out, we went to Mason Dixon in the LES for bourbon and bull-riding! I don't normally like going out in Manhattan, but the bartenders there were supernice. I wonder why? Maybe it's their way of bringing Southern hospitality to New York? Oh yeah and after much insisting from Jamie, I rode a mechanical bull ;-)

Bourbon Cream Cheese Icing

5 tbsp butter
1 package cream cheese (8 oz)
roughly 3/4 of a box of Dominos Confectioners Sugar
1 tsp milk
1 tbsp vanilla bean-infused bourbon (or 1 tsp vanilla and 2 tsp bourbon)

Let butter and cream cheese soften after taking out of the fridge. Cream together with a fork, then combine with remaining ingredients until smooth. Adjust ingredients to taste (ie, add more vanilla bourbon if too dry, add more sugar if too wet). Makes enough icing for approximately 24 cupcakes, depending on how much icing you use to top off each cupcake.

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The Trials of Faux-Vegetarianism

Some time ago in the past couple years I pledged to try to only eat meat that is sustainably raised. Because I'm grossed out by the idea of eating meat from an animal that spent its life in a dirty crowded small space pumped with corn feed and antibiotics grosses me out. And because thoughtful, ethical, sustainable farms leave less of a trace on the planet. However, try is the key word there.

I keep my pledge in my own home by only buying meat from the farmers market. I keep it by eating out at restaurants that source their food from local and organic farms.

BUT I run into trouble when circumstance forces me to eat from places that don't give a f* about the meat they serve, which would be most eateries. Because most of the time, the vegetarian options are unappealing and are usually limited to one or two lines on a menu, and outside of NYC sometimes none! For some reason, they often involve mushrooms, which guess what, not every "vegetarian" likes mushrooms and wants to eat them every time she goes out! Or the options are a grilled cheese sandwich or a plain salad, which I'd rather not spend my hard-earned money on something I could just as easily make at home, thank you very much. Or fries, which is not exactly a "meal."

So this is why I slip up. Because when vegetarian options just don't do it for me, I'd rather eat meat because I'm not a vegetarian and I do enjoy eating meat.

Which leads me to my question for the vegetarians out there, don't you feel offended by the scant options you're given? How do you deal with this??

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Art from Art

During my car-free weekend upstate, I also spent a rainy day at the Dia Beacon, a contemporary art museum. It wasn't really my kind of thing. Lots of minimalist artwork that doesn't look like art (think geometric shapes with simple variations) and lots of handouts so full of pretentious gobbledygook that all I could do was scoff at them; the museum's words didn't help me understand any better how this stuff could be art.


But I DID like the huge Richard Serra metal sculptures because of their interactivity as you walk through, in, and around them.



Also, my boyfriend is obsessed with using his iThing apps, especially Photo Booth, to take cool pictures that turn art into meta-art.

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