Monday, March 28, 2011

Why Haven't I Made This Before?

Vanilla roasted pears in their own caramel sauce served with goat cheese and walnuts....

This was delicious! I'm sorry for the glare on the picture, but seriously, I just wanted to hurry up and taste it!

As DH pointed out, this would make a light meal with some salad greens, a very nice start to a meal, and yes, a great dessert, as served. He was thinking ice cream, I am thinking about tomorrow morning's bowl of steel cut oats. The recipe is here, and you could absolutely do it without the vanilla bean, although your house won't smell like mine does right now! You're all going to thank me.

I'm going to try a balsamic roasted pear with honey and pepper next time, but I'll definitely repeat this.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Lots. Of. Painting.

It starts so innocently, so offhandedly, so inexpensively.

The carpet on the stairs needs replaced. Easy.

No.

Because what we really want is a hardwood staircase, just like the first floor of the house. So we're going to rebuild the staircase, replace the wooden balusters with iron because, well, what the heck -  there we are with a dismantled staircase - and remove some (really unattractive) trim on the woodwork.

But that all comes later. Later because first we are going to rip up the carpeting in all the bedrooms and the hallway and put a wood floor down. But first first, since the bedrooms are emptied one at a time for the floor work, we're painting the rooms because, well, what the heck - there we are with a dismantled bedroom.

So my daughter's beautiful & bold room of about eight years is transformed. The three colors we used then: a warm tomato-pumpkin on one wall, and a pea-lime and bright blue on either side of the chair rail on the other three. Trust me, it was a great look and suited her style and decor when she was...14.
Now she chose the sophisticated and mysteriously-changing shade "northern cliffs" from Benjamin Moore:

It's grey, it's green (really), it's mauve, it's putty. It's quite lovely with the white woodwork and the new floor. I'd like to thank Benjamin Moore for coming up with their line of Aura paint, which actually did cover those deep colors in one coat, although I applied two.

DS2 has finally decided to move into his older brother's room, said brother only needing a bedroom in the house for a handful of weeks each year. After much deliberation, his choice of "evening dove" and "silvery moon" is stunning:

The dark and stormy blue is gorgeous. DH just painted one wall with it - one coat of Aura - in a flat finish and it is fantastic. My job is to do the other three walls in the silvery grey - what a nice room this will be, especially once we come up with windows and bedding.

For the third room, I am going to take the extra gallon of "northern cliffs" back to the store and have them take it to a darker shade, just to make it a little different from DD's. All of the traipsing around for paint swatches has given me yet another opportunity to tell my family that buying a Benjamin Moore deck of swatches is an easy and great gift idea....

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Organized Yarn

BTW, this is The End of the yarn stash organizing...

There are 12 bins stacked on shelves in one half of a closet. Some of the bins, like the one in the top picture, have project names while others are grouped according to fiber. They look spectacularly boring and cloudy in every photograph, so use your imagination. I have two UFO containers; for those who are unfamiliar with the technical terminology of knitting, that would be two containers of UnFinished Objects.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

iPads, Kindles, Peace

Yesterday I read this article in the New York Times Magazine and it struck a chord. I'd already read about Kindle Singles but that's not what grabbed me here. The writer's points (and the printed version may be different from the online) about the commercialism of the web and the attendant "noise" are spot-on.

Read it and see what you think. Kindle Singles are welcome here in an age of USA Today and short news blurbs; apps for my iPad that present my RSS feeds, FB, magazine content, videos, and news subscriptions without flashing peripheral ads every few seconds are fantastic.

So basically, I think this defends my position of being (possibly unhealthily) involved with my iPad and Kindle.
Ha.