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Mermaid Party, Take Two

September 29, 2016

Remember when I said that my friend Elise and I decided to go for the same theme for both of our daughter's birthday parties, so we could share the decorations (both the cost and the labor)? It ended up being such a good idea.

I loved how Goldie's party turned out - and Elise's was absolutely spectacular (ok, it helps that she had a friend with an insanely beautiful house who offered to let her throw the party in the backyard). The coolest part: even though all the decorations and activities were the same at the two parties, they ended up feeling special and unique in both venues with just minor tweaks.

Click here to check out Mermaid Party, Take One

SIDESSALADS

OK Fiiiine, This Is Better

September 27, 2016

Hello I love you.

Confession: I am a person who makes steam-in-bag rice. (This should not be a major surprise to you, as I am also the kind of person who has been known to make spaghetti sauce with a Prego base. Hush, Prego is delicious.) I'm a steam-in-bag rice kind of girl because I have a memory dating back to when I was fifteen years old and burned a pot of rice and decided that rice is a pain in the ass to make...but I mostly because I don't care, and because to me "steam-in-bag rice" is rice. Like, the same rice that real rice is.

Then, a couple of months ago, my friend Alisa - who is apparently my go-to friend for making me realize that I need to step up my game - came over for dinner and asked me what she should bring, and I said, "Oh, nothing, just yourself!" Except then I told her what I was making, and when she discovered I was making steam-in-bag rice to go with my lovely Korean BBQ she said "Stop. No. I will make real rice." And okayyyy fiiiiine, what she made was way better than steam-in-bag rice.

Eat

Kids In The Kitchen

September 21, 2016

From the time that my son could understand the word “cook,” he’s been in the kitchen right next to me more nights than not...and now that my daughter’s two, she’s starting to join us. Everyone has their special thing that they do with their kids, and for me it’s talking them through recipes; having them pour in milk or stir in chocolate chips; letting them taste as we go and see that it’s okay to experiment.

It’s less important to me that the food come out perfectly than that they feel confident in the kitchen – I want to make sure they know how to cook, but I also want to make sure they enjoy it. (My reasons for involving them in cooking so much are also selfish: in the kitchen is simply my favorite place to hang out with them, because they're simultaneously super-engaged and excited.)

Decor

Remote Restyle

September 16, 2016

There are many drawbacks to living in the Age Of The Internet. Among them is the fact that I can no longer have a phone conversation where I sound like a marginally well-functioning human being as opposed to an awkward, stuttering person-bot programmed to focus solely on how quickly the interaction can come to an end (apparently this "condition" is increasingly common nowadays thanks to the fact that emojis let us LOL without actually risking another wrinkle).

So, okay, the fact that people can now communicate without actually seeing each other is potentially problematic, and a bit of a bummer. But it also means that people like me, who live thousands of miles away from many of the people they love the most in the world, get to occasionally feel like those people are a part of their lives in the present moment, not just in occasional "so what have you been up to?!" bursts.

Take Francesca, for example (who lives only about 400 miles away, in Los Angeles, but still: I would very much like to see her every single day, so the example holds). Every once in awhile we get on a back-and-forth text or email marathon about nothing especially important - and it's those kinds of conversations I love the most, because you skip all the "catching up" and just...talk.

Eat

In Which I Eat My Words

September 15, 2016

easy recipe for hoisin beef stir-fry with vegetables

Cher Blanc Square Bowls Rochelle Gold Serving Bowl

I've been using Blue Apron for two entire weeks now, so I think that obviously qualifies me to give my expert opinion on it. (That is a joke. But I still want to write about it because I finally hopped on the food-delivery train four years after everyone else, and now I obviously need to be the 1,994,854th person to weigh in.)

Here are the reasons that I pshawed about Blue Apron (and similar services) for years:

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