Thank goodness for foodie holidays!

Happy belated Thanksgiving friends! I hope you all had wonderful days filled with family, friends, and food! I spent the holiday with at my Auntie's house in Kirkland. They have just finished rebuilding their house, so we got to help christen their new beautiful kitchen!



The day was filled with dancing (ala Soulja Boy and a "Learn to hip hop by Kelly Peters" dvd). We also later watched "Stomp the Yard" which went along with the whole dancing theme.

Erica was the only one of us to get this Kelly Peters move down:


Of course there was delicious food! One of the most fun to make was the Cranberry Almond Tart from Martha Stewart Living's October issue.



Due to a minor mishap where the pate sucree was placed on top of a lit burner and burned through, I ended up using a different crust recipe than Martha's (because it's quicker)

Crust:

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions
1 Pulse together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a food processor until combined. Add butter and pulse just until mixture resembles coarse meal with some small (roughly pea-size) butter lumps. Add egg and vanilla and pulse just until dough clumps and begins to form a ball, about 15 pulses.

2 Butter and dust with flour the inside of your springform pan. Press dough onto bottom and evenly (about 1/4 inch thick) about two inches up side of springform pan with floured fingertips. Chill pastry in pan until firm, about 10 minutes. Use with Martha's Cranberry Almond Tart recipe in place of the Pate Sucree.

Lori humor

I must be really funny

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Three original gangsters Going 2 see american gangster. Btw the ballard movie theater is really nice! Nice stadium seating.

House on a hill

We are buying a house!

Woohoo! We should be closing early December. I have to admit, I'm really enjoying thinking about revamping the yard and kitchen. I think for the yard, I want to put in a French Drain (because our neighbors house is at a higher elevation, and all the rain in Seattle will make my hill soggy), and I want to terrace our backyard slope to make great areas to grow my veggies and cutting garden. I've already decide I need a cherry tree, apple tree, italian plum tree, lilac tree, some roses, hydrangeas, lots of lavender, and seasonal veggies and herbs. I also want to install a new stone patio (in place of the backyard lawn). I've been going through back issues of Better homes and gardens to look for remodeling and gardening ideas before I recycle them all.

Yay home! And I'll get to take Buddie (the family dog)! He'll love it in Seattle--it's such a dog town.

Elliptical

Blurry went to the gym pic. Yay for a quick workout.

Halloween treats!

My sweet potato pie for the office. I am so festive!

Ms chef!

Chef Clara in the kitchen. She and ervy made delicious curried food friday while i 'read' for class.

Hot n spicy!

Evan going crazy on the food at clara's house

Halloweenie

This house by green lake was remodeled all summer and it looks really cute... Except they have a life-sized Death hanging above their house.

Workin fly fashion

Mr zach 'stole lori's stunner shades' dude.

Gotta represent yo!

Why the heck would u have such a pot-bellied mascot? This is the retired sonics mascot, the weedle.

Mascots

How do i measure up? Btw, no one knows what a sasquatch is. The women team, storm, has doppler after the weather radar thing.

4 ur consideration

Evan considering the sonics half time stats like a true fan. We are big fans of sasquatch. Is he some weird kind of wookie?

Basketball suites(sweets)!

My dessert plate @ the sonics suite. My substitute 4 garlic fries.

@ the sonics pre season game vs rockets

Can u tell which is yao ming? He is sooo tall!

Let's boogie.

Clara and casey @ the go map party - gettin their groove on! I forgot dancing could be so fun!

Diversity in seattle?

@ the go map diversity 'get connected' event

If people haven't been able to tell, I finally implemented blogger's 'moblog' deal where I blog with photos from my phone! I just realized I could change the subject on the mms so that the posts don't all say multimedia message. I still can't get vertical photos to work correctly when posting, so for now, I'll only 'moblog' horizontally :)


On the subject of diversity in Seattle, Evan just sent me this link showing the historical segregation maps of the region.

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Today's fog beats yesterday's fog hands down

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Today i got to seven as gorgeous george was leaving. I've learned the chocolate man's name is gregory.

cupcakes

Eating a banana frosted chocolate cupcake go the bellvue mall. I cant believe view got rid of the gourmet ice cream place

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Goat cheese salad. 14 diff types of micro greens

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Delicious shepherds piefrom the ale house

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@ 74th st ale house 4 lunch. Bearded evan in tow

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The view from top pot donuts downtown. Mmm raspberry old fashioned!

FW:

Asha wants 2 blog 2!

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Asha wants 2 blog 2!

I love the fog

I've been waking up pretty early (for me), and it of course carries over to weekends. This is somewhat fabulous, because waking up early on the weekends means I have time to read/work while Evan is asleep (which means I don't miss out on quality time while he's awake). This morning I went out to walk to the mail drop box to send off another batch of wedding thank you's. Look how fabulously foggy it was! The best thing was that all the spider webs (and believe me, there are many) were lined in beads of dew, and each one was absolutely breath taking!



I took this foggy opportunity to head out to my favorite neighborhood coffeeshop Seven (right around the corner from my favorite neighborhood brunch place, Pete's Eggnest). The "Chocolate" Man (i.e., maker of all things chocolate in Seven) makes chocolate delicacies on the weekend mornings. Today I had a grilled chocolate sandwich with pepperjack cheese. Sounds like a bit of an odd combo, right? Well, it was scrumptious! The bread was buttered and browned on a pan, leaving the sides rich and a little salty. This contrasted nicely with the rich Belgian chocolate he placed inside and melted against the cheese. The cheese was surprisingly not disturbing in conjunction with the chocolate. It added a nice texture and savory quality to the whole experience. He finished off the sandwich by chopping it into four cute triangles and dusting it with powdered sugar. Yumm-O!



I love the feel of Seattle neighborhood (of course, I'm specifically inclined to love MY Seattle neighborhood, Phinney Ridge/Greenwood). While I was in there, the people of Greenwood neighborhood came in and out. George (of next-door restaurant's Gorgeous George's fame) came in and brought the Chocolate Man some bagels for his special grilled chocolate sandwiches. When asked if he made the bagels, George replied, "No, I got them at Safeway. I am a normal person." I suppose it's very random conversation, but there's something really wonderful about sitting in your neighborhood coffeeshop with so many happy caffeinating neighbors surrounding you. Many of them this morning were shaking their heads at the front window of Seven which had recently been tagged (aka, someone scratched their name across the glass of the front window). Apparently, (according to the baristas), the tagging community normally doesn't hit small business owners. So they supposed this was some teenager (who didn't get the tagging community's memo on the ethics of tagging).

ACK!

Everyone around me is sick!!

gotta gobble up my vitamin C

Is it time to get a flu shot? Do I even have time to get a flu shot?

yikes.

I blame evan

I blame evan for all the cheesy hippie use of 'Zen' in the last post. He kept talking about my terrarium building as similar to doing a Zen garden, and I think it was the only adjective floating around my brain....

classes start tomorrow...

Alternate realities

I've discovered a totally Zen past-time. Friday night, I ended up waking up at 4 am with an intense urge to plant (I'm such a weirdo). So I repotted two plants that needed to move to larger pots, and then (still feeling the gardening urge) I picked up my book on houseplants that I'd gotten at the used book store down the street.

At around 6am, I'd gotten to the part where the author was talking about bottle gardening! Planting a whole little garden inside of a bottle! The concept is like building a ship in a bottle, except with plants (hence making it much more Zen and much cooler).

"Bottle Gardening" as a Google search didn't turn up a ton of results, but "terrarium" did. Ooh ooh! A new hobby!

Lemme show you some neat ones I found on the web. (some by Ann Wood, Hello Yarn, and Paula Hayes)

The best part of making terrariums is collecting the moss from the neighborhood. I collected some off the stones from outside my front door. There was a huge blanket of moss around the telephone poll across the street. It's so cool to get it, because it comes off in one big sheet! It's like a rug! I took it home and put it in a tupperware with warm water to get rid of ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifny buggies. It looks fabulous in my terrariums. I now keep a little plastic bag with me so I can keep an eye out for cool things to put in my terrariums.



Composing little scenes is incredibly soothing. And I can't stop looking at these little worlds. Supposedly, once you get an enclosed terrarium stable, it can sustain itself for a good while without additional water, fertilizer, etc. As soon as I make sure I am okay at sustaining them, I want to try doing this with small necked bottles so I can finally make my bottle garden!




Make some too!

To make your own terrariums you need some kind of clear glass vessel. Goodwill is fabulous for this, but I also have some extra quart size canning jars that I thought would fit the bill.

Pour in a bottom layer of pea sized gravel (this will help with the drainage and provide a good reservoir for the water your little world.
Pour another small layer of activated charcoal over that. (both of these items can be found at a garden center near you). It's recommended that you put a layer of moss over this so that your soil doesn't wash into your gravel layers (but I skipped that step).



Add a small layer of dirt. Plop in any cool stones or wood and then start laying down your moss and putting in your plants in cool arrangements.
Buy some cute inhabitants for your world. Position them in your new mini-garden and add your lids. Voila!

Lori's terrarium web album

Power thoughts

I was scanning google news for the headlines and read a bit about this student that was tasered at a university Q&A with John Kerry. The news sources seemed to cover the scene objectively, but I then watched the this video of the student asking his questions and the ensuing police ordeal.

I have to admit, I think the police way over reacted in this case. It's a university forum afterall. Shouldn't students be able to ask questions like these without being pounced on? And honestly, I know that the Darley and Latane studies all showed that diffusion of responsibility, but it's freaky, really truly freaky to watch that video of this guy being dragged by the police, screaming for help with a full auditorium of students not budging to intervene or even pay attention to him! I can't completely blame them. They were probably afraid of the police given that the treatment of the questioner. But it's scary what will happen when people aren't willing to object when another person is being mistreated before their eyes.

Yesterday, I was listening to Marketplace's radio piece on the RIAA's sometimes mistaken lawsuits. Like the video of the tasering, this also frightened me. That a group with so much power/money can completely wreck people's lives--incorrectly or not--without conscience seems utterly senseless to me. Even when wrongly accused, people are told they should settle and declare bankruptcy! I know the world is not just and fair, but I still can't help being outraged by this. I hope that the class action suit against the RIAA gains speed on this, because it's damn scary that a group like this isn't kept in check.

Squirreled away

 
Last week we had a squirrel incident. I would walk outside, and suddenly I had a squirrel hopping next to me, barking and wagging its tail. Honestly, I didn't know what was up its butt, although it reminded a lot of the angry squirrels at Stanford (except less black).

Watching the squirrel, I noticed that it ran up and down the ladder my neighbor had placed up against his house. It wasn't until later that night when Evan came home, did we notice why. By the evening there were shrill shrieks coming from the rooftop of our neighbor's house. Apparently, the squirrel had made a nest in the attic of the house next door. Our neighbor had fenced off the opening with chicken wire so that the mommy squirrel couldn't get back in....BUT there were two baby squirrel trapped in the attic!

We went next door to tell our neighbor about the babies--i mean surely no one would want the babies to die up there! But in actuality, he did know the babies were trapped up there. He apparently had some traumatic rodent incident as a child that rendered him non-sympathetic to any creature of that category. But, at our (and his children's) request, he removed the wire. One of the babies jetted out and down our driveway (away from the direction of its mother who was shouting at us from somewhere in a chestnut tree in the backyard). I have never seen such a small squirrel! It was immediately followed by the neighbor's dog and cat. Yikes! I'm not really sure what happened to this one.



The mother squirrel didn't return until the next morning where I saw her reunite with the last baby squirrel in the attic. The baby crawled over the mother and they bounded away from the house...so at least i know one of the babies survived!

look new glasses!

 

Woohoo! I look kinda emo now. They're prodesian, and they're the first glasses i've gotten in five years! I had to wear them today, because yesterday i chopped some peppers from the farmer's market. My hand burned all night! And when i tried to put my contacts in this morning, it was seriously burning! So i figured i'd better wait for this pepper stuff to wear off.

W(h)ining and dining

The erv and his mummy at our rehearsal dinner.

The M's are in town!

I really like my in-laws, and I know I'm definitely lucky in that respect. They've been in town for the past few days which has given us a wonderful excuse to go out and have good food and drink good wine! We did go out to Woodinville for wine tasting, and I have to say, Woodinville wineries sux0r compared to Sonoma wineries. First of all, they charge you for a tasting so it can get expensive to try a bunch of wines. Secondly, even though we were paying for tastings, they poured barely enough wine for two sips! How am I supposed to taste the wine if I can barely freakin' moisten my lips with it? And I should mention, it's not like the erv and I are trying to get drunk off the tastings, but we are looking for tasty bottles to buy. I left Woodinville extremely disappointed.

We did try a great wine the other day at dinner by Cadence winery in Washington. We had their 2005 Coda. I thought it was a delicious drinking wine on its own. It didn't stand up well to the food we got (I had a wild boar dish with gorgonzola), but I'm still very interested in trying some of their other wines!

I'd rather be playing bocce

There's just something so wonderfully simple and fun about tossing colorful balls and walking upon green crunchy grass under a warm sun with friends. It just reeks of a great summer day.



I love the sharp shadows across the grass! Everyone has their own 'technique.' Some people look like they're dancing, while others look like children just learning how to bowl.



I can't believe classes/the academic year start again in two weeks! I'm not ready, I'm not ready! I still have too many research projects to read up on, plan, and finish. A recent visit to my advisor's office led to some gentle-ish nudging to get my projects finished up and ready...things I have been trying to do! sigh

Still, I want to enjoy my summer a bit more still. Anyone up for bocce?

I declare

I am alive....











I'm just stuck in a stale-aired-windowless office, reading another manuscript draft.

more coffee... SO MUCH MORE COFFEE! WHEEEE....

haha, that's my caffeine high starting in, right?

Wednesdays I don't have class on campus, so I sought out a new coffee house to study at. I ended up at Green Bean (down the street from me). I loved loved loved the feel of the place. It was very bright and very flea market finds type of decor. The chairs were of all shapes and sizes, the tables had that shabby chic sort of feel, and there were lots of reclaimed windows and frames that had bright happy messages written in them, like "fresh baked goodies!" "Tis all fair trade!"

In fact, the people there are also extremely happy... like happy to a point that had me wondering whether it was chemically induced happiness. I'm not just talking about the woman behind the counter with the infectious bubbly laughing. The CUSTOMERS were happy people (granted it was a sunnyish day in Seattle, which makes most Seattlites happier). It was a place where women came for late afternoon get togethers to chat and smile. The people behind me happily plunked down with coffee, conversation, and dominoes! It was actually not very effective for working, as there was so much happy chatter and domino clinking. But while I sat there grumpily reading some journal articles, it occurred to me that perhaps just being around such effusive happiness could make me happier. Yup, well, unfortunately, the drip coffee was just so-so, and the croissant was downright awful (tasted artifically made, no flaky crust and a sickly sweet raspberry jammy interior. It basically tasted like it came out of a package). So it's probably unlikely I'll head back there unless I'm desparately seeking a dose of happy.


Today, I'm at Wayward Coffeehouse, also in my hood. The coffee was good, and the chocolate croissant was ok (essential baking co, but it tasted kind of stale). But it's too DARK! It's a really large warehousey type place with windows at the front and back, but it's too big and not enough light!
It is open late though, and has live music on the weekends, so who knows? Maybe I'll be back here sometime when I'm not light starved...

So at some point, I will find the best coffee house for me, but the search must go on...

Craving the sweet things in life

It's the first day of Spring quarter, and since I was sick most of
break, I figured I would skip going home right after school and head
over to Ballard. I decided to go to Cupcake Royale for some sugar
and caffeine--a graduate student's two best friends. They serve Verite
coffee, which I have to say was quite delicious. They were brewing
Ethiopia Happy Valley today on drip, and it had a lovely earthiness to
go with my sweet red velvet cupcake. I didn't think to blog until
after I ate my cupcake, but the proof is there in the overly dyed
wrapper, eh? The cupcake itself wasn't that extraordinary beyond the
red dye. It was a little dry actually, but it still made me happy just
to have a pretty confection.

I like the vibe of this place. They already cycled through a Mates of
States CD making me extremely happy. The music selection has been
quite good in general after that too. It's a very laid back, Seattle
coffee shop with lots of pink cupcake boxes and globe lanterns.
There's of course free wifi (but there's rarely a coffee place here
without that), and there's a magnificent metallic cupcake right above
the doorway when you come in.



I have to say it's extremely delightful to sit here and watch children
come by with their parents and grandparents, so excited for a sugary
cupcake! Otherwise, the clientele are very unordinary Seattle people,
almost all of whom are on Mac computers (myself included).


Yikes! I think you can still see the Winter quarter blues on my face.

Overall, this is a great place to chill and pretend I have a life
outside of graduate school. You can take the 44 bus straight from UW
campus into Ballard and hit this joint on the way.

Cupcake Royale
Ballard 2052 NW Market St 206.782.9557

They have some cute cupcake shirts to check out too.

slippery white stuff

I still can't believe I live here.
I almost did the splits today walking from my house to the bus stop (the snow was powdery but slippery at the same time!) Of course I left the house at 7:30am to get to work for my meeting at 9:30a because I just assumed the buses would be out of whack. And really it did take me about 1.25 hrs to get to work. The buses were soooo full, we couldn't pick people up at all the stops.



While I'm actually blogging, I want to say that I love the cookbook ervy got me for christmas.


It has a lot of neat anecdotes about the time period and rations. Most of the recipes call for very few ingredients and are low in sugar and butter (since those were rationed heavily). I recently made Apple Butter Pudding with the Apple Butter I made and canned during the fall. It was amazing! It wasn't overly sweet and had a subtle flavor of apples and spices. I can't wait to bake more from this!