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!