A Month of Photos: Day 6, somewhere I've been

I have this habit of never taking pictures when I travel. I get so wrapped up in experiencing what I'm doing and where I am that I end up with a few last minute photos when I remembered to take some. Also I don't like to put pictures of people on my blog without making sure it's okay with them. So for that reason you get a very loose interpretation of a travel photo.



For awhile I was visiting Boston pretty regularly to see a friend. There was one trip where we met in Chicago then flew back to Boston together. In Chicago we wanted to find a toy store for something...a back of the door basketball hoop I'm pretty sure. At one place we found these amazing scooters that we really wanted but they were like $200 and also we had to go to Boston on a plane and scooters probably would have been an oversized or not allowed item.

When we got back to Boston we went to Providence, RI to see a concert and on our way saw a Toys 'R' Us so we decided to stop and see if we could make a last effort to find a basketball hoop since apparently Chicago doesn't carry them. Somehow we decided to also buy a bunch of musical instruments including a keyboard and that we would use these to busk except we don't really like that word so we just called it pan-handling. When we got back to Boston (again) and bought bongos and decided to do this thing.

There was a lot of thought that went into this. We decided typing a sign, using a guitar case but no guitar, and wearing designer jeans would be the ultimate in pan handling irony. We went to Newbury street, a high end shopping area in Boston, and camped out in front of Ralph Lauren. We stayed about two hours before being interrupted by a thunder storm and having to pack up and run.

It was by far one of the most fun things I've done while traveling or ever.

Pasta Pockets

I have wanted to make homemade ravioli for a ridiculously long time. I'm almost embarassed to confess I've been thinking about it for about two years and have never made it happen. I guess I just had in my mind it was the sort of project that would take the entire day and even though I love cooking, the thought of spending the entirety of one of my few days all to myself in the kitchen wasn't super appealing. I mentioned to Lana though that I wanted to tackle this challenge in the "someday we should do this" kind of way people do and within three days she had us making ravioli. That girl gets things done.

We went into this with the mindset that it was a learning experience. Neither of us had done this before, neither of us had even made homemade pasta before. I'd seen it done before on The Food Network and once in this really terrible movie, but that was pretty much where all my pasta making knowledge was gleaned from. I knew it was just mixing eggs and flour though so it didn't seem that difficult. Plus I know someone who is really terrible at cooking and she can make homemade pasta so I figured we could do this.

We (Lana) made our dough. We decided to add rosemary to it because we love rosemary and that seemed really delicious.


I started our sauce. I've only made from scratch tomato sauce once in a cooking class and it was amazing but cooking classes take hours and I sort of end up having no concept of time when I'm in one so I had in my mind that making a from scratch tomato sauce was going to take like three hours but then Lana and the internet told me I was very wrong and that this was actually a super simple undertaking. And they were very right.

Our sauce began with diced onion and pressed garlic in some basil olive oil.


I'm in love with this stuff and sniffing it is heaven.


I thought I'd also just share that if you hate peeling garlic as much as I do you can buy it already peeled for you which is awesome. Or you can purchase a garlic peeler which is like magic and totally simple to use and actually works.


Next we added a couple cans of whole tomatoes, some tomato paste, pepper, and fresh oregano.


Lana poked and squished all the tomatoes and we let it cook for awhile.


Luckily I was cooking with someone who I have a pretty similar palette to because we like our sauce the same way, not chunky and not thin. After maybe an hour of cooking our sauce was still a little too full of tomato pieces for us so we let it cool a bit (so we didn't shatter my blender) then pulsed it a bit. We put it back into the pot to heat back up and at this point we added some salt. With liquids and sauces especially it's wise to wait until towards the end of the cooking process to add salt. If you add it at the beginning and things reduce and become more concentrated it's a lot harder to try to make something less salty than it is to just add your salt at the end. We still felt it was missing something though so I added a bunch of garlic salt and at that point we had achieved making the most amazing sauce ever. Lana told me "It tastes like it came out of an Italian jar." Which I honestly was a little offended by and told her so. Because I thought the whole point of this was for it to not taste like it came out of a jar. But then she clarified she meant it tasted like someone in Italy made it then put it in a jar. So that's how good it was.


Next we made our filling which we decided would consist of ricotta, parmesan, a touch of mozzarella, spinach, asparagus, salt, pepper, and an egg. The asparagus ended up not adding a lot of asparagus flavor but because we roasted it it ended up imparting a really good kind of smoky flavor.




Then came the part where we old school rolled out our pasta dough by hand. It was also at this point that I stepped on a piece of glass from a glass I broke three days prior and apparently didn't clean up well enough. There was a lot of blood but I'll spare you any photos since I've already shown you my blisters once. I also dripped blood all over the floor while walking to the bathroom and Lana offered to clean it up which I declined since cleaning up other people's blood isn't very fun but it was very sweet of her.


Once we got our pieces rolled out we tag teamed this ravioli project and put little piles of filling on one of our pieces of dough and then covered it with the other person's. Then we used these ravioli stamps I'd bought forever ago. There are a lot of tools for making ravioli and many different ways to do it but these stamps were really inexpensive and worked well in my opinion.




Once we had our raviolis made we cooked them which was fairly simple. Sort of like how you've cooked pasta a jillion other times.


In the end our sauce and filling were amazing. And the rosemary in the pasta was an excellent idea. Our pasta just turned out a little tough. As I mentioned before this was meant to be a learning experience so something turning out not perfect wasn't really terrible. We just need to figure out a way to make it better. Lana read that you are supposed to let your dough sit for ten minutes before working with it so something happens with gluten. We left our dough for longer than that so I'm not sure if that process continues or tapers off after ten minutes or if that had anything to do with it being tough anyways. We're going to work on it though. Also there is a significant possibility our not following a recipe had something to do with things. Dinner was still delicious though. And I can't wait to try this again.

A Month of Photos: Day 5, A Favorite Memory

There was a weekend a few years ago when someone very special to me and myself spent the weekend together. It was probably one of the most lazy weekends I've had to date. We even ate in bed. It was also over the 4th of July weekend and on that day we went outside and lit sparklers, the majority of them duds, and then ended up falling asleep in the grass. He woke me up sometime in the middle of the night to go back inside and when it was really morning we both realized we were covered with bug bites. I think we also realized we should probably become functioning members of society as well. After pulling myself together and getting dressed I came upstairs and he told me there was a present for me but I had to find it. I couldn't and he refused to tell me what it was and we both had lives to get back to so he left. It wasn't until later that I found my surprise.

A Month of Photos: Day 4, A Photo of My Day

This pretty much sums up my day. There will be more on this tomorrow.

My most favorite cooking thing ever. For real this time.

It's no secret I'm not into recipes and that for this reason, I won't say I hate baking...but I do sort of hate it. I find it incredibly boring to follow a recipe and I guess I like a challenge and the reward of having actually made something delicious all on my own. To me baking is sort of like a paint by numbers Monet.

But I actually like baked food, I mean who doesn't? So I have a predicament right?

Wrong.

I found this book online and immediately ordered it online. I didn't even ship it, I just paid for it to be picked up in store. That's how anxious I was/am to have it. The book is called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. It takes all kinds of foods that people make frequently and breaks them down into ratios (obviously). So rather than following a recipe for a pie crust you can see that to make a pie dough you need three parts flour, one part liquid, and two parts fat. Do you see what possibilities this opens?! I am beyond excited. Now I can use savory ingredients to make typically sweet things and vice versa. This is seriously awesome and I cannot wait to use this book for everything.

From the tips of my fingers...

Remember four months ago when Lady Gaga made "greige" happen on the September cover of Vanity Fair? Well someone should totally get me a magazine cover because I'm about to make beigrarple happen.

I bought this color, Muggins by Butter London, back in August and am just now getting around to wearing it. It's sort of a tan/gray/lavender color, it looks way more purple in the photo with flash than it does in real life. I'm pretty sure it's a new favorite though. I could probably use some cuticle oil too.



Also I think Day 3 of the photo month ("post a photo of the cast of your favorite show") is really stupid so I'm not doing it. My nails are probably more fun to look at anyways. If anyone cares I like Gossip Girl.

More Potato Pillows

Remember that time I took a gnocchi class? Well, I decided it was time to tackle making this dish at home. Lana and I hadn't seen each other for about a week so I broke my 'no making plans on Mondays' rule and we made plans to make some pumpkin gnocchi.

If you want to do this at home the only special equipment you'll definitely need is a potato ricer. I also like the gnocchi board for creating grooves but some people swear by using a fork. I end up just making really ugly sort of squished gnocchi with a fork so if you can figure it out you're a better gnocchi maker than I am. (By the way, the reason there are grooves in pasta and gnocchi is so that they are better at holding sauces. The type of pasta used in a dish correlates to the sauce or dressing used. Just in case you weren't in the know.) I also like using a spider to get the gnocchi out of the water but apparently I am the only one on the planet who calls it this because no one knows what I'm talking about when I mention it. Not even the lady who works at Sur La Table.

We used this recipe except actually not really. Neither of us had any all spice and there was none at the store I went to and I didn't really want to use it anyways. So we decided to go a more savory route. I know when people make pumpkin ravioli there are usually cookie crumbs in it which sweetens it but I always find it far too saccharine for my tastes and I didn't want our gnocchi to be that way. So rather than the suggested spices, and with some help from The Flavor Bible, we decided to use just a dash of cinnamon, some garlic salt, and rosemary. We also put in salt and pepper of course.


Lana volunteered to do this part because she's "good at touching hot things." When I took the gnocchi class we used ricers that were a bit more traditional like this one. That kind is incredibly difficult to use though. I won't claim to understand the physics of it but something about it makes it a pain. I think because the kind I have has holes on all sides it's a bit easier to use.


I started mixing the rest of our ingredients.


I have this spice mill thing that I bought once because I wanted to make fortune cookies but couldn't find ground star anise so I decided I'd just buy it whole and grind it myself. I didn't actually end up making the fortune cookies so this thing has pretty much just sat in my cupboard unused. It did end up working perfectly for grinding dried rosemary. Probably because that's the whole point of the spice mill.


I am newly in love with this brand of spices. Mostly because the packaging is adorable and I am easily marketed to.


This was our dough. Don't worry, we got all that flour mixed in.


Lana was pretty enthused by this whole gnocchi paddle thing so I let her take over that while I started cooking our little potato pillows.


Two of the biggest mistakes people make when making gnocchi are using boiling water and thinking they are done when they float to the top. You should use very hot water that is sort of just about to boil but isn't quite yet. Also after the gnocchi float to the top wait a couple more minutes before taking them out. When cooking the gnocchi one of the most important things is the ones going in the pot at the same time are the same size. Otherwise you end up with some gummy, some right, and some hard. Put in batches of around 15 pieces and use the spider to take them out when done.

Then you can put them on a tray and let them firm up a touch and enjoy. We used browned butter and some amazing parmesan on ours. Followed by ice cream. And I'm going to brag a bit here because gnocchi is notoriously difficult to get right and ours was awesome.

A Month of Photos: Day 2

So day two of this little adventure calls for a photo of "you and the person you have been closest to the longest."

This is a difficult one for me. I'm not close to my family and while I have friends I'm close to I'm in my mid twenties which means it hasn't been until fairly recently that my friends stay in the same place for long given college, jobs, etc. Then I realized the person I've been closest to the longest isn't someone I can call when I have a break up or who takes me out to drinks on my birthday, it's this little munchkin of a girl who I've taken care of since birth. I've re-discovered the awe of the ocean, building forts, mixing colored water to make new colors like magic...and so much more with this girl. And for as many times as I've kissed her owies and made her feel better she's done the same for me tenfold. I know, don't barf okay?

A Month of Photos

So, there's this thing going around on the internet among people who blog (remember when that word was still new and you were like what the hell is a 'blog'?). It's a month of photos. Here's how it works:

Day 01 - A picture of yourself with 10 facts
Day 02 - A picture of you and the person you have been closest with the longest.
Day 03 - A picture of the cast from your favorite show.
Day 04 - A picture of your day.
Day 05 - A picture of your favorite memory.
Day 06 - A picture of somewhere you've been.
Day 07 - A picture that shows your true self.
Day 08 - A picture that makes you laugh.
Day 09 - A picture of the person who has gotten you through the most.
Day 10 - A picture of someone you see yourself marrying in the future.
Day 11 - A picture of something you hate.
Day 12 - A picture of something you love.
Day 13 - A picture of your favorite band or artist.
Day 14 - A picture of your favorite pastime.
Day 15 - A picture of something you want to do before you die.
Day 16 - A picture of someone you've been friends with the longest and still feel connected to.
Day 17 - A picture of your biggest insecurity.
Day 18 - A picture of your favorite place.
Day 19 - A picture of a habit you wish you didn't have.
Day 20 - A picture of somewhere you'd love to travel.
Day 21 - A picture of something you wish you could forget.
Day 22 - A picture of something you wish you were better at.
Day 23 - A picture of your favorite book.
Day 24 - A picture of something you wish you could change
Day 25 - A picture of you last year and how you've changed since then
Day 26 - A picture of something that means a lot to you.
Day 27 - A picture of yourself and a family member.
Day 28 - A picture of something you're afraid of.
Day 29 - A picture that can always make you smile.
Day 30 - A picture of someone you miss.

Shall we begin?


This picture is an older one but one of my favorites of myself. One of the girls I nannied and I were playing with a camera and taking pictures of each other. She took this. She must have been three at the time so I'm not really sure how she managed to not take something blurry and off center but she did and we were having fun and it reminds me of a time I felt really happy.

I love strawberries and blackberries and pretty much all the kinds of berries there are. Except I cannot handle raw blueberries. I love them frozen though. Especially in milk.

I used to wear the necklace in that photo a lot. I had bought it in the BP section of Nordstrom but without fail every time I wore it someone would ask if I had just gotten back from Hawaii. I'm pretty sure I still own it although I can't for the life of me imagine wearing it now.

I also used to be super blonde (duh). After awhile I hated how people treated me for being blonde and I hated how much I felt I had to wear dark serious clothes to be taken seriously. After I dyed my hair dark again I resolved to never be blonde again although I'm coming dangerously close again these days.

I'm not allergic to anything with the exception of one kind of Neutrogena makeup. I once tried it and it made my face red and bumpy. I started a new job the same week and was mortified but after time and tragedy mixed and things became funny I confessed to my employer how embarrassed I had been. She claimed she had never noticed but I still doubt the veracity of that.

I sleep with the windows open year round. When I woke up this morning it was 27 degrees Farenheit but I still love the feeling of waking up and things being fresh and how cozy my bed feels with all the covers and pillows and Javier when there's just a bit of a chill in the air.

I have scars on my knees from playing basketball outside when I was in high school. One time I was team captain against this big six foot tall guy and his team. My team was winning at one point so he shoved me. I got gravel in my knees and they were pretty gross for awhile but I also feel proud of them.

I eat quiche with soy sauce on it. It's weird and I don't know why but quiche is never as good without soy sauce. I don't even know what prompted me to try it but I've eaten it that way since I was a child.

In general I always keep my Monday nights to myself. I love alone time and find myself frantic if I don't schedule some for myself. I also love sort of easing into the hectic week by leaving my Monday evenings free of plans.

One of the things I'm most proud of is the fact that I have sold some of my paintings as well as had some commissioned. One of the things I regret most is not thinking highly enough of my work and myself to have photographed them before selling them.

Reflections and Resolutions

When I was about 18 my then boyfriend's mom told me that as you get older time seems to go by more quickly because each day, month, year becomes a smaller percentage of your life. At the time I thought it was a bit of a silly theory but as I've gotten older it's proved true. I remember when the months seemed to last forever and now they fly by.

2010 for me both lasted far too long and went by way too quickly. In the beginning of the year I was dealing with the geographical loss of a few friends and that was fairly difficult for me. Then I had a friend attempt suicide. This friend was my best friend and the only person I've ever been able to speak so openly and honestly with. After his attempt he disappeared from my life. He's still alive but has decided to not speak with me any longer. I don't fault him. He may just need time to work on things, he may blame me for not doing something sooner to help him be okay...I don't know. I miss him and love him dearly and I hope one day we can know each other again but right now that's not reality. After I lost this friend I went through a really rough time. I went from being extremely busy and social to creating a life that involved work and sleep and little else. I ended up losing more friends because of how little involvement I had in their and my own lives.

I've mentioned before that I started therapy this year and it all essentially came from that incident with my friend. I mean, to be sure there was a build up of things and I definitely needed therapy long before this year but I guess things came together in just the right way to completely break me down and make me get help. And even though 2010 was the worst year in some ways it was also the best because I feel like a real person now, a feeling I didn't even know before. What I considered normal was so high strung and scheduled and pressured that it was only after feeling the way I do now that I understood I perhaps have never felt normal my entire life. It was freeing and grounding and amazing. And I'm so thankful to have that now.

I'm also thankful for Craig who was such a good friend when I was the worst of friends. Craig allowed me to talk about things that were serious or to just ignore everything in my life and be distracted for a bit. He also stuck around for months when I didn't want to hang out or return phone calls. He would have been completely justified in walking away from our friendship and he didn't. I'm not sure he'll ever know how much I appreciate that.

I don't think Lana realizes the significance of herself in my life either. After nearly a year of being opposed to creating any kind of new relationships because of this stubborn insistence and fear that any person in my life would leave me this girl stepped in and broke down those walls for me. And I'm having a ton of fun with her.

This past year also proved that I do have a family in the family I nannied for. The girls are in my life in a significant way and going over to have dinner with their family makes me feel at home. It's one of my favorite feelings. I love being with them. I love helping and knowing where everything is and just feeling a part of these people. I love being expected to be there on holidays and the hugs I get when I walk in the door and that I'm the first one asked to watch the girls when their parents go out of town and the fact that they don't have to tell me anything before they leave because we're that close.

I'm glad last year is over and that I have a feeling of beginning something new but I also hope that this year continues to help me grow and learn as much as the past one did. Just maybe sans some of the rough parts. And while I'm not big on resolutions because I feel it's a setup for failure I do have some things I want to work on.

I want to make dinner for someone once a week. A real dinner and it doesn't really matter who for. I love cooking so much and I don't want to continue to let life get in the way and keep me from doing something I love.

I want to write a blog post every day but I realize there's no way that's going to happen. I think a goal of a post five days a week is practical.

I want to start working out regularly. But I hate the gym. And I especially hate the gym in January when everyone has resolved to work out. I instead am going to play Just Dance on Wii every day for at least a half hour. Don't make fun of me until you try dancing to Justice's D.A.N.C.E. on that game. I guarantee you'll agree it's a legit workout. Plus I'm totally going to gain some moves.

I want to create. I need to do that and so often it slips away. I am going to be sure to draw, paint, glue, something at least once a week.

And I think that's a good start. There are other things I could put on this list but I want to actually do these things and not feel overwhelmed or obligated. So, here's to 2011!

Oh, I also have a really fun daily photo project I'm going to do for the next 30 days so keep an eye out for that.