New Year's Long Weekend

We had a lovely New Year's! Since we didn't have a lot of time before or during Christmas, we opened our presents after Christmas once we got home. The carnage was still evident on New Year's Eve.

Dale was a cooking fool on NYE. (I made the enchiladas the day before and they were very, very good). Dale made chocolate espresso mousse from scratch. Delish!

He also made a batch of his grandmother's homemade chocolate syrup. In this picture he's also showing off what was probably his favorite Christmas present of the ones I gave him. He has used the infrared laser thermometer for all his home-style cooking this year.

However, dinner was the real prize. He made crab cakes. very, tasty little brown puffs from heaven!

We served them with a lemon wasabi sauce we bought ages ago back when we first went to Lake Geneva!

We started the new year with fresh homemade hash browns. My mom would be happy to know that Dale is putting the Kitchen Aid she bought for him (seriously, she gave it to him, not me).

And it wouldn't be a post from me without the cats. I went to make the bed and Monty was sitting on the edge of the bed, transfixed. Two squirrels were feasting on the seeds I left out for them. Monty is deeply fascinated by woodland creatures. Particularly when they show up on the porch of our third floor apartment!

Since Memorial Day...

What have we been up to since Memorial Day? It's been pretty random...

I made Dale his favorite pancakes! This mix is from American Spoon and is one of our favorite things. They turn out brown and thin and tasty!

When my Aunt Diane and Uncle Randy came to visit a few weeks back we took them on a little mob tour and we meant to stop at Al Capone's grave but it was closed when we got there. Dale and I just happened to be driving past the cemetery on Memorial Day and stopped to get a couple of photos. The gold cross is made from clothespins, oddly enough.

For some reason Mother Theresa Capone seemed like a funny name to me.

Matthew Capone was Al's brother and somebody left him an offering. He couldn't refuse it, obviously.

Further Randomness...

Dale reached way back in our hall closet and pulled out the crate that holds the hats and scarves. And he thought, "Gosh this feels heavy..." and out popped Sidney. Heh. And, oddly, Dale rifled around under him, got what he was looking for and put him back in the closet without Sidney ever feeling the need to get up.

I was making us some eggs and I cracked the egg and as I went to put it in the pan the egg FLEW out of the shell and landed under the pan. So, yeah, that's not something you see everyday.

Pizza!

One of our new favorite things to do is to make pizza! We started lazy. I buy whole wheat crust from Whole Foods and rub a little olive oil on it. Then I take some pizza sauce--also acquired from WF--and spread it on evenly. We started out with just pepperoni but have quickly graduated to a whole new level (because we're dorks).

We bought a brick of smoked mozzarella and some Crimini mushrooms in order to replicate one of our favorite pizzas from Trattoria 225 in Oak Park.

Anyway, we also re-discovered our Kitchen Aid slicer/shredder attachment--and it works so awesome with the smoked mozza brick! Check out the silly video! I would highly recommend the attachment if you have a KA. And I would also highly recommend smoked mozzarella with Crimini mushrooms on your next pizza.

We were so excited with teh results that we forgot to take the "after" photo of the pizza until, well, "after" we ate some! If you come visit me? I will make you some of this pizza!

Two Random Images

This is Sarah during her last visit. I was excited to have company so I pulled out the creamer cow and some of my vintage coffee cups. I was pretty excited to see the cow in action.

And this is a picture of our kitties eating dinner! Today is Sidney's 11th birthday! It's an arbitrary day we selected and we don't even really celebrate it but it amuses me to know we could. Yes, I know the floor needs to be mopped but it's not like this is a blog about cleaning (thank God).

Anyway from left to right: Sidney Potier, Monty Clift, and Bela Lugosi.

Vintage Dishes...

Dale and I share a well-known (among our friends and family) love of retro and vintage things (particularly things with a midcentury modern aesthetic--in case you want to get us something!) and our dear friends Lara & Trish (mom and daughter) generously offered us Trish's mom's set of dishes from the 1950s. We already use vintage dishes everyday and were very interested! These are the dishes--they are ADORABLE! Pink, with a black and white pinecone/nature theme. They were produced by Taylor Smith Taylor and are the Pink Dwarf Pine design.

LOVE THEM! Thanks Trish & Lara for thinking of us and giving us such a lovely set!

Kitchen Makeover

Last weekend, we decided to do a little nesting! And we started at the greatest/cheapest organizational supplier we know of--IKEA! Which means meatballs. Ikea has this cheap-o lunch counter that serves oddly tasty swedish food! Note the meatballs and the 'lingonberry' soda! It cracks me up to eat there.

Okay, we wanted to get a pot rack to move our pots and pans off our baker's rack so we could take Dale's 50 coffee making devices and put them on the baker's rack so we could actually use our prep counter for, um prep.

Also, we have almost zero natural light in our kitchen--and our light fixture was dingy and small. So we picked up this new light fixture for $17. Seriously, Ikea is insane!

Our baker's rack is now festooned with Dale's many coffee devices--and our pots and pans are hanging!

Yay! A clean prep counter with hanging pots (have I mentioned how cheap Ikea is? It was like $20 for the pot rack)!

We also reconsidered where we put things and I feel like I have 10 times as much as space as I did a week ago. I cleaned out a catch-all drawer and now use it as a spice drawer! And I rearranged a few other things and now the top of the fridge is empty of cereal boxes! It's like we have a whole new kitchen! Yay!

The new lighting fixture and the cleaned-up kitchen in full effect! We also got a new sink drainer--you can barely see it here but our wood one was falling apart.

A New Kitchen Gadget!

This is our stove. One of my goals for this year is to become a better cook and to cook at home and not just "reheat" or "thaw"!

So, we bought a reversible double grill/gridle, which is sure to change our lives! We grilled chicken tonight after letting the chicken sit in a DELICIOUS marinade I found on Kalyn's Kitchen Blog. She highlights South Beach Diet-friendly recipes and everything I've tried to far has been great!

I also purchased a small metal collander for steaming veggies. I steamed some Trader Joe's frozen organic asparagus and tossed some pepper, olive oil and lemon juice on it. Tasty! Dale had corn from a can.

Our stovetop, being fully utilized!

New Counter Space!

So, we have a smaller kitchen with almost zero counter space. This makes doing more than one thing at once quite challenging--and the coffee maker takes up like 33% of the overall counter space! We found the free standing kitchen at Ikea to be just what the doctor ordered!

Dale hate empty kitchen space!

Dale put together new counter!

Pretty new counter! Sweet!

What's up with Dale?

He got a new coffeemaker and is in hot pursuit of the perfect cuppajoe! He's making two or three pots a day with a strange alchemy involving a variety of coffee types, a new grind for each style of coffee and on and on. It's quite the experiment. Good thing I like coffee! --Rebecca

I made awesome pancakes for b'fast using the most awesome mix from American Spoon Foods.
I got the mix from Rebecca for Christmas and I've been ordering it ever since. It's heavenly! I like the wheat and malt mix best. YUMMY! Buy some, yo!