From our front porch

Okay just kidding. Matthew’s Hamper House (another fabulous suggestion by Patti) is this crazy little warehouse down at the State Farmer’s Market. You will swear you have walked into an Oriental Trading Club factory. The Hamper House is where cheap florists go to buy their goods. You will find cheap ribbon, baskets, shrink wrap and the like. And that’s why it’s one of my favorite places to go.

You will also find (the reason I go there) produce baskets, rafia, and gift bags.

I am in love with these! Really because I envision my soap as being a sort of ‘homegrown’ type of product… like something you would pick up at the farmer’s market along with your strawberries and cucumbers. (It’s all very deep for me.) But also because I think these baskets are just so adorable, the perfect shape. and cheap. These cute little baskets are only 40 cents a piece. And they have little half pint ones that are $0.20 (love them too). I’m working on posting my soap on my Etsy store to come in a little 3 for $12 gift basket. I rest the soap in a bed of shredded pages from an old French novel I found in an Antique store. And finally (and this is the deal of the century) I can buy rafia for $1.25 for a huge bundle. I have paid upwards of $3.99 in the craft store for this. I use it for everything, I stocked up on this last trip and it was well worth the trip to do so.

I will leave you with this scrumptious bar of soap to salivate over. I’ve still got a week of curing before I can use it and I almost can’t stand it! It smells like a fresh baked cookie. It’s called Oats and Honey and is all-natural with saponified oils of olive, canola and coconut, old-fashioned rolled oats, and honey. It’s as pure as you can get, and just gorgeous. Let me know if you want to salivate with me.

Love this!

I was in Lowe’s this morning making a return for work, thinking about how wonderful it is to be in a store on a weekday morning. I wish I could do all my shopping before 10AM, all the time. Anyway, while I was in there, the thought popped into my mind that I should confirm that Lowe’s really does sell burlap. I get my little Lowe’s Creative Ideas magazine every few months and had seen it in there last fall. But I’ve never seen it in the store.

Burlap is one of my favorite fabric textures and I’ve been having ideas lately of using it as a table cloth like this.

So I asked a pleasant associate who showed me right where it was. Sure enough, there it was in the garden center.

Not only did they have it, but it was cheap! Burlap can cost up to $5/yard at craft stores, but Lowe’s has an 8 yard bolt for $9.97. Check it out. Just love it. Team that up with Mason jars full of wild flowers, linen napkins, and ice cold lemonade and I’m ready for a summer party. I can’t wait to have a reason to go back and buy it. :)

-b

I read the January issue of Better Homes and Gardens this weekend. It was all about getting organized. I wish I could say it was inspiring, but instead I found myself feeling anxiety as I thought about all of the disorganized aspects of my life. Does anyone ever feel this way? After I finished my coffee while reading a while I had this impulse to clean out the silverware drawer. For me, it’s not just disorganization, but the yucky dirty parts of my house I just can’t stay on top of. Things like silverware drawers and baseboards and fans. Ugh. Talk about sucking the joy out of a weekend morning. I just hate that stuff.

There were a few tips in the magazine, however, that I do love and have either incorporated into my life already or want to do so. Here are my thoughts:

1. “Indoor Mailbox.” I have a basket next to my desk and mail/receipts/bills/etc. all get thrown in here during the week to be dealt with Friday morning. I hate having things lying around the house, so this is the “Deal With” basket and works great for me. (P.S. Currently every CD Tim and I still own is in there because I was just inspired by that crazy BHG magazine to put every cd I have into digital form and get rid of the cds! I guess that’s Friday’s project.)

2. This is in progress, but I have little mini baskets/crates in my freezer to organize ziplock bags full of pesto, tomato sauce, etc. This has been amazing. I have dreams of more crates for things like frozen chicken, sausage, fruit, etc.

3. “The Drop Zone.” We have a table in our hallway that is Tim’s drop zone, for his phone, chapstick, keys, etc. This recently got moved from the living room, which I love, because its a bit more hidden, and smaller. At one time we had a basket, but that started accumulating junk and had to go. Now, we have a plate. If it doesn’t fit in the plate, it doesn’t go there.

4. These are the funny things, but there are several things I have just discovered that are making my life much easier and organized: (a) I keep a sharpie in the ziploc bag drawer so that when something goes into a bag and into the freezer, it gets a date right then and there. I also keep one in the bathroom so that I can write down when I put in a new pair of contacts (I always forget). (b) I put my digital camera cord in my camera case. Again, small, but I can’t tell you how many times I would put off uploading pics because I couldn’t find the stupid thing or it would take me 10 minutes to actually locate it. No more. (c) Recipe Binder. This idea came from a friend. I used to have just piles of messy magazine clippings of recipes lying in a cabinet or stuck inside cookbooks. My friend recommended I get a three-ring binder and plastic sheet protectors and every time I found a recipe I wanted to keep, I could tear it out and put it in the binder. Good-bye magazine and hello perfectly organized and protected notebook. I’ve also done this with craft and travel ideas and I love it.

Okay now for the confessions of the things I have not figured out. These are the bane of my existence.

1. The pantry. Ugh. I just don’t know how to get things in here and not forget about them.

2. The bookshelf in the office. We have a small house with only two bedrooms so the second bedroom/office is the catch-all room. I have dreams of this doubling as a guest bedroom one day with a cute day bed in there and minimal and hidden storage…but they are only dreams. For now, I deal with this 16-cube shelving system and attempt to hide things in baskets and boxes, and save my pennies for whatever is next.

How about you? What are your greatest organizational strategies the world needs to know about?

Saturday night we celebrated (my husband) Tim’s birthday. There is nothing better than getting together with friends in the dead of winter–especially to eat big bowls of soup. Last year we had the brilliant idea of having a Soup Party, four different kinds of soup to try throughout the night. It was a blast, so we decided to host round two this year. We invited our friends and had a ball.

Let me tell you, my friends can cook. I’m not talking your standard chicken noodle here. This is gourmet, best-I’ve-ever-had kind of soup. Three of my friends offered to each make a pot of soup to bring and share. I myself made one as well, along with cornbread and French bread toasts. The sharing of the cooking (especially when its at their own houses) lightens the load so much, plus it brings together different styles and talents. Party prep was super simple and when the soup showed up, we were ready to go!

I made Baked Potato Soup from my Cook’s Country Cookbook. This stuff is intense and oh so good. Topped with fried potato peels and bacon, I could drink this soup. It’s amazing and rich.

Patti made Shrimp Corn Chowder, a coveted recipe of Taqueria del Sol, one of the best little restaurants in Atlanta. A friend of a friend got the recipe and passed it along to her. This was delicious and Tim’s favorite soup of the night. P.S. Patti has an incredibly fun blog about entertaining and cooking called Anatomy of a Dinner Party. I adore it (and her)!

Crystal made a Harvest Pork Stew with parsley and cracklins. (A) How can you go wrong with fried pork skins? (B) I’ve never had pork in a stew. I know that sounds funny, but this was my first experience, and I am hooked. She slow-cooked a pork butt the day prior and then incorporated it into this rich stew. It was just incredible.

Finally, Amanda made Winter Minestrone Soup. A classic and delicious. This just screams comfort, and the secret of letting the parmesan rind melt away in the soup just adds just a velvety richness. She made homemade rosemary croutons too. Let me tell you, we ate good.

One thing Tim loves to do is invite a variety of friends that don’t know each other and facilitate a time for them to meet and talk! We love our friends so much, and had such a fun time just watching people make connections and meet people they wouldn’t normally meet. And when it’s over delicious food, it’s even better.

We ended the night with a fabulous chocolate raspberry cake made by my sister, Melissa. I wish I had a website to link to (she just started a little cake business, Melissa Makes Cakes, and the website is in process…so all you have to look at is this beautiful cake. If you ever do want a cake made and live in the Atlanta area, email me and I’ll make the hook-up. She makes this incredible homemade buttercream frosting that is to die for.

This year for Tim’s birthday, we asked friends to forego gifts and make a donation to the Beltline Bike Shop. This is a really cool program(?) (let’s be honest, it’s our life) God plopped in our lap last spring. It has exploded and by the grace of God we are now an official non-profit organization. How fun is that? Check out Tim’s blog for all of his cool stories. Since we just became official and Tim has lots of big dreams for the year ahead, it was a fun little idea to ask people to give a few bucks to the shop to launch us into the spring. And let’s be honest, we just don’t need that much more stuff around this little house of ours. Helping kids in the ‘hood is much more rewarding.

The management of our money is probably the first thing in my life I can actually say I have practiced intense discipline with. The discipline that hurts. And that came from living on a budget. Here are my tips to living on a budget:

1. Admit that you’re not a rockstar. Case in point: I have had to learn to color my hair at home. This is one of the most painful effects of the budget. But honestly ladies, I was spending over $1200 a year at the salon. That is four months worth of groceries for us. It’s more than my mortgage payment. When I got my first job, for some reason I thought I was suddenly loaded. I was not. It had to go.

2. Spend less than you make. This is ‘Admit that You’re Not a Rockstar Part 2’. Identify the stuff you don’t need and can’t afford. Admit that you cannot buy $4 cups of coffee several times a week. Decide that you cannot go to the mall every weekend and buy a new outfit. You cannot afford an iPhone, a new car, or anything else beyond what you need to make it day to day.

3. Make a plan and stick to it. Have weekly budget checkups. I keep a basket next to my desk and every time Tim or I buy something, we drop the receipt in the basket. Then, on Friday morning, I take an hour and enter all of those purchases into the budget spreadsheet. And when the line item is gone, we stop buying stuff. It’s amazing what happens when you realize you can actually wait a week to buy something.

4. Embrace the time for what it is. (a) Tim and I do not, obviously, plan on being broke forever. We look forward to buying new clothes again, flying to New York for the weekend on a whim, and writing big checks to good causes. But for now, we’re not there. (b) Interestingly enough, we have found that being forced to spend less money has slowed our lives down, and we actually feel like our quality of life has gone up! There have been so many wonderful things that have come of this. I have fallen in love with cooking and baking. Tim and I bought an espresso machine when we first got married and are enjoying better coffee than we ever had at Starbucks. We even make our own vanilla syrup. We hang out with our neighbors. We take walks. We garden. We have fallen in love with thrift stores and garage saling.

Final bragging moment? My new favorite outfit is a pair of Gap Jeans and a cute Forever 21 jacket that I found, practically brand new, at the Goodwill for $9. And yes, I will totally brag about that.

Our life on a budget. Two and a half years ago, when my husband, Tim, and I got married, we were like most normal, engaged American couples. Tim had just started a business and I had finished a semester of grad school, and we were living well. We went out to eat a few times a week, you could find us in Starbucks frequently, we both had iPods, significant cell phone plans, decent cars, and a big pile of debt. $22,000 to be exact. It was pretty normal to see balances on credit card statements and use them to make it to the end of the month when the paycheck had run out. And we thought that was pretty normal.

Tim and I had pretty similar childhood experiences when it came to money. We never learned anything about it. Sure, I learned how to balance a checkbook in grade school at some point, but that didn’t really help me, other than make sure it didn’t get to zero. In my family, investing was this mystical thing I dreamed of understanding one day. All I knew was that it would be better to have more money than my parents did. But by the time I graduated college, I had no concept of a budget or how or why I might live on one.

When we got married and realized we were broke, I happened to pick up a book at a friend’s house, Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover. I read it in a weekend and from that day forward our lives changed. The Total Money Makeover was the first book I ever read that made money make sense. All of a sudden, I realized why we might want to be out of debt and what a difference a plan makes when it comes to wealth-building.

Tim and I are 28 months into our Total Money Makeover. We are not perfect (we totally bought and renovated a house 4 months into the plan, something Dave would not have recommended). But, 28 months from that life-changing weekend, Tim and I have moved $35,000 in the opposite direction and are a few months away from having our 6-month emergency fund in the bank. For two people who could barely ever saw four digit numbers in our savings accounts, to be able to say we could live on savings for six-months is pretty incredible.

Once we hit this next goal, we’re onto investing, something I now know is not mystical or elusive. We have a 15-year mortgage and our house payment is still less than a quarter of our take home pay. We think we might actually have it paid off in less than 10 years.

Part Two Tomorrow: Making a Budget Work (aka I love Excel)

An apple cranberry pie baking in the oven, filling my home with an indescribable aroma… preparing for a dinner tonight… more to come soon

Tonight, Tim made steak fajitas for dinner. We had seen a Throwdown episode with Bobby Flay that was fajita-themed. Tim was inspired. Dinner was divine. Just watching the process of everything come together… the steak, onions and peppers, cheese, avocado, corn on the cob… it was beautiful. I couldn’t wait to eat.

As we sat down and took our first bites, Tim looked up and said, ‘I feel like it should be light out.’ Meaning, this is a summer meal. We should be eating this on the back deck with fresh-squeezed lemonade and friends gathered around. It just didn’t feel the same in the middle of January. We then proceeded to talk about just how long it would be until we could plant the garden (3 months)… followed by how long it would be until we could start prepping the soil (2 months). That made us feel better.

A piece of summer, however, that I don’t mind eating in the middle of winter are s’more’s. (pronounced Sa-more-ay, like Amore, per my neighbor Crystal!). These are no ordinary smores.

Instead of graham crackers, Hershey’s and marshmallows, this recipe calls for toasted French bread, Nutella, and marshmallows. They’re like grown-up smores. And in the winter (as I crave all things sweet), I make them right in the broiler. Here’s a step by step.

Gather the ingredients. I keep a bag full of French Bread disks in the freezer. This is also great for a little toast with a pasta dish at any moment. And we rarely eat a whole loaf before it goes stale.

Drizzle the bread with a little olive oil and sprinkle with a little salt. I think the salt adds such a wonderful contrast to the sweet. Toast the bread, both sides. Watch it so it doesn’t burn!

Toast the marshmallows, smear Nutella on the toasts, and assemble!

Some of my best memories of this past summer are sitting around our fire pit, roasting marshmallows and eating S’mores into late in the night with friends… Isn’t it amazing how food can trigger such emotions and memories?

The weather outside is frightful. As the snow came down Thursday evening here in Atlanta, I knew I needed something delicious to look forward to Friday morning. Have I said how much I hate cold weather? I truly feel like I just buy time between January and April. That being said, I went straight for coping ingredients–cream and butter. Let it scone, let it scone, let it scone.

Tell me these aren’t gorgeous. I made them Thursday night, popped them in the fridge until Friday morning, and them baked them up in 12 minutes while Tim was preparing the lattes. Vanilla lattes are a daily necessity in this house. Life is too short to drink bad coffee!

Here is the super simple recipe. I hope you’re inspired to enjoy a simple and quick indulgence this weekend.

Simple Cream Scones

2 cups (10 ounces) all-purpose flour
3 tbs sugar
1 tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
5 tbs unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces and chilled
1/2 cup currants, blueberries, dried fruit and citrus zest…anything you have on hand. I mixed in blueberries this week since I had them on hand in the freezer.
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees, position your oven rack in the middle, and line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
2. Pulse the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together in the food processor to combine, about 3 pulses. Scatter the butter evenly over the top and continue to pulse until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, about 12 more pulses. Transfer mixture to a bowl and stir in the currants/blueberries/whatever you’ve chosen. Stir in cream with a rubber spatula until the dough begins to form, about 30 seconds. (If you don’t have a food processor, just use a stand mixer.)
3.  Turn the dough and any floury bits out onto a floured counter and knead until it forms a rough ball, about 10 seconds. Press into a 9-inch cake pan to shape, and then turn out. Cut in to 8 wedges.
4. Place the wedges on the prepared baking sheet (if you’re feeling really ambitious, coat with an egg wash so they shine!) We sprinkle sugar on top, because it looks even better. Bake 12-15 minutes. Let them cool for about 10 minutes! Enjoy warm with a fabulous cup of coffee.

Enjoy a few more photos of the snow. Even though its 16 degrees outside and horribly miserable, its hard not to admit it is beautiful. I didn’t venture farther than the front porch for these, though. I do have my limits.

I do most of my cooking and baking on the weekends. It always seems that when the week starts, my brain turns to some sort of mush and its all I can do to keep up and moving from one thing to the next. We do eat dinner from home, but its usually quick, preplanned, and does not involve the enjoyable, leisure cooking I obsess over.

I actually plan my weekends around those sorts of dishes. Seriously. These are things I start dreaming about as early as Wednesday and by Friday morning, (when my weekend starts), I’m ready to make my plan and grocery list. Making a grocery list makes me giddy.

I’m always trying to make things that morph into other meals. While I do love leftovers, it’s so much more enjoyable if the food takes another form so you’re not stuck eating spaghetti for 3 days. Thank you, Robin Miller. That woman is brilliant. I don’t always love all of her recipes, but she has inspired me to think through what I’m cooking and get creative.  This past weekend, we had roast chicken breasts for dinner Saturday night. I popped a few extra pieces in the oven and those morphed into chicken salad for Monday’s lunch. It was a delightful change up from the norm. I share the recipes because (a) roasting chicken is hard (and this is finally a good recipe, thanks to my dear Amanda) and (b) one can never have too many good chicken salad recipes.

How to roast chicken well? HIGH HEAT.
Preheat your oven to 500 degrees and position rack closest to the top as possible. Once your chicken is seasoned or marinated, cook it on the top rack for 30-35 minutes, until white meat registers at 160 and dark at 175 degrees. It will come out moist and with a beautiful, crisp skin. Make sure you let it rest 5-8 minutes, covered with foil, after it comes out, or you’ll lose all those delicious juices!

I love to marinate, but don’t stress if you haven’t preplanned and don’t have time. Sprinkle a good spice mixture or a little paprika, garlic powder, salt and pepper and you’ll be fine! Here is one of my favorite marinades from the fabulous Ina Garten:

Tuscan Lemon Chicken
Several chicken pieces, bone-in, skin on (up to 3 lbs)
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tsp grated lemon zest (2 lemons)
1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1tbs minced garlic (3 cloves)
1 tbs minced fresh rosemary
salt and pepper
If you can marinate your meat in this mixture for at least 4 hours, you’re golden. This past weekend, I didn’t prep in advance enough and it still turned out great. We turned the juices into a little pan sauce afterwards and loved it.

Confession: I had a photo of the chicken salad and it just didn’t do it justice. I pulled it at the last minute in an effort to not gross anyone out by the gobs of mayonnaise that make chicken salad oh so good. So just envision it with me in your mind. :) Here’s the recipe

America’s Test Kitchen‘s Chicken Salad

Your leftover chicken, refrigerated, about 1 1/2 pounds
Salt and pepper
2 ribs celery, minced
3/4 cup mayonnaise
2 scallions, minced
2 tbs fresh lemon juice
2 tbs minced fresh parsley

If you make this in advance, it’s always great to liven it up with a little extra mayo and lemon juice right before you eat it. Also, you can use red onion here, but if you haven’t discovered the joys of scallions, go out immediately and buy one. They are fabulous — a sweet and tender onion flavor — nothing overwhelming here.