My fuzzy assistant!
I’m adding Toulouse Petit to my restaurant list; check out the food photos on Urban Spoon!
♥ Momo
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Capitol Hill
I was walking around the hill the other day, and found myself in the middle of a heated shouting match, but thankfully not the usual kind:
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- Loud!
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- He’s got a lot to say!
I might have been cramping his style, but he kept on yelling to the other birds across the street well after I’d pulled out my camera. I think he was self conscious, because after a few photos he stopped to look at me. I wonder what it was about?
♥ Momo
Posted in Uncategorized
Cafe Presse & Capitol Hill
Cafe Presse is great. Open at 7 a.m., serving food til 2 a.m., always delicious, sometimes not so fast with the service, but it’s a good thing. In my experience, the slow service is usually after the food has come, and while we are engrossed in conversation about how great that food was.
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- Mustard!
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- Oishiiiii
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- It’s just so beautiful….
We also had bread pudding with caramel sauce…and apple up-side-down cake, with a vanilla bean cream sauce, but they were both gone by the time I realized there was no evidence…then I realized that there was no evidence!
I love the atmosphere at Presse; the front of the house is dominated by an enormous bar, and a wall of tables for two, lit by floor to ceiling windows covering the entrance, and I’m pretty certain that there are skylights. The back room is just past the kitchen, and much darker, lit sparsely by dozens of well placed tea lights in the evening. The little touches are nice too; small bright bottles of salt, pepper and mustard at each table, with a fresh dish of peanuts brought to your table as you sit down. The bread is perfect in its simplicity: chewy, dense baguettes with a little bit of a sour bite to them to break up and eat with butter while you wait for the main meal. (Or if you’re having soup, you horde it and ask for more.)
Post-dinner cuddles:
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- Blog cat!
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- “Say what??”
♥ Momo
Life List 2010: Draft
Organization for Life
Vintage Hardware Drawers: I love them!
This year, I will:
Learn to Knit.
Learn to Felt.
Make Bread from Scratch.
Make Soup.
Make dinner from scratch at least twice a week.
Plan meals.
Sleep well.
Run, walk, breathe, stretch.
Go outside every day, if only for a moment.
Organize a cohesive wardrobe.
Make jewelry and sell it on Etsy or in the gallery.
Play with the cat each day until she flops.
Catch fish.
Read a new book each week.
Keep a clean house.
Be Happy.
♥ Momo
Inotomo
Grey Goose
Sunday Pounce!
I ♥ Inotomo: she feels like one of those Spring days where you walk out of the house in a sunbeam, suddenly realizing that it’s pouring rain, with the warm sun still on your face. Glee!
I don’t usually talk about music here, but it’s such a huge part of what I do; I can’t begin to clean the house properly without making the perfect playlist. I make a new list before I leave the house, to keep me warm and safe, to hold me up in the mold of who I am today. I cook to This American Life for dinners, to Concrete Blonde for box mixes, and Ms. John Soda for cookies. I walk to the bus to Múm, Psapp, Metric & Angelique Kidjo. When I want to be left alone, I listen to Postal Service, Death Cab & Azure Ray, but when I’m triumphant, I put on Brazilian girls and Louis Armstrong.I fall asleep to Pink Floyd because they make me feel safe, I fall in love with Anja Garbarek when I watch Angel-A, and I make jewelry to the Garden State soundtrack, because it’s the only CD that works in the player at the studio anymore….I need to fix that, it’s getting very old.
Have you ever seen Kikujiro? I ♥ Beat Takeshi, and this is my favorite movie of his. Joe Hisaishi did the soundtrack, and it makes our apartment feel like it has twenty foot ceilings and endless open square footage. I plan to make raspberry brownies to this album later this week.
In completely unrelated news, I made an Italian meatloaf! It was fantastic…and suspiciously easy, for how oishiiii it was…I had to touch raw meat, but it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as it might have been. Also, the kitchen has been completely sanitized, removing any possible trace of raw meat, making this an even better recipe for forcing me to clean the entire kitchen immediately ♣
I have new jewelry photos to put up, and a couple of fantastic pieces from a local designer. Love her!
♥ Momo
Rainy Sunday
I’ve had an epiphany: Let it rain, let it rain now, let it rain all night, because tomorrow I must do laundry. There’s no point in asking it not to rain, it’s too late for all that. But aha! the Poirot voice in my head exclaims, I can ask it to keep raining, rain a LOT, to get it all out now, because in the morning I will rise, run to the bead store, and when I’m home, I admit rain will seem like an awfully big impediment to laundry.
♥ Momo
Dueling Zucchini Spice Loaves, Part I
Let the games begin! First, a small disclaimer; I have made this without walnuts, because one of the possible judges has a nut allergy, and that just wouldn’t be fair to the first contender.
I think I ought to have a category tag titled “Serendipitous Breads”, because I started this post having found two zucchini recipes that are different enough from each other, one being considerably fancier, only to get word from my spy at the store that there were no. zucchini. in. stock. After a few deep breaths, spies then reported that they had found the last zucchini in the store! Huzzah! And so we find our heroine, with borrowed iPhone in hand for visual documentation, marching bravely into kitchen stadium…wait. That’s Iron Chef. I’ll just bake the thing and get on with it. ♥
2 c. all purpose flour
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
2 tsp grated lemon peel – I’m fond of lemon, and so I threw in at least 1 Tbsp, to be honest. I almost always throw in at least 1 Tbsp of lemon into everything. I even had lemon zest on shepherds pie last week, and it was surprisingly good!
…I have another confession; I squeezed an impromptu bit of lemon juice into the liquid mixture after adding the lemon zest – if I had to guess, maybe 1 tsp? I believe it made a pleasant difference.
2 c. coarsely grated zucchini – from the lovely zucchini pictured below:
1 cup walnuts, toasted, coarsely chopped
Preheat oven to 325°F.
Butter and flour two 8x4x2 1/2-inch metal loaf pans. (I made do with one looooong pan and one very baby pan.)
Combine flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, allspice, and baking powder in medium bowl. In a Kitchenaid mixer – what can I say, I love them – with a whisk attachment, combine sugar, vegetable oil, eggs, vanilla, and lemon peel.
…I have another confession; I squeezed an impromptu bit of lemon juice into the liquid mixture after adding the lemon zest – if I had to guess, maybe 1 tsp? I believe it made a pleasant difference.
Add Flour mixture gradually, remove bowl from mixer and fold in zucchini…and walnuts, if you don’t care about your loved ones with allergies.
Pour batter into prepared pans. If I were adding nuts, I like to place halved walnuts on top in cute daisy patterns. But not today…sigh.
This was my first experience baking two loaves at once, let alone loaves of different sizes. Epicurious advised a little over an hour, for two equal pans, so I baked them together for 35 mins, checking every ten minutes until at 50 mins the smallest loaf was done, and at 1 hour ten mins the long loaf was finished.
Let stand 10 minutes, if you can stand it! Turn breads out onto rack and cool completely. To store, I wrap in foil and leave at room temperature; these loaves of mine tend to go pretty quickly, so I’ve never really had to see about storing them for more than 24 hours.
Watched Tonari no Totoro again this week! Disney finally re-released the DVD, and while I suspect they’ve redone the Japanese actors as well as the American, it was still the great movie I remember.
We love Totoro!
I just got home from Eastern Washington to word that the enormous loaf I left with family is essentially gone. So the recipe is going up before the final pics, which I need from that borrowed camera…hint, hint.
Enjoy!
♥ Momo
Circus Themes
Circus Birds
Designs for one of my favorite books, Water for Elephants. I am so in love with the sugar and creamer above, and it just gets better:
I am actually fortunate enough to have this piece; it sprang from my wishlist into my delighted embrace last Christmas ♥
Merry Go Round
I don’t know if these really say “Circus” to anyone else, but they just sort of fit for me. They also do double time in tropical themed parties, or a fancy dress party in Vegas:
Parrots at the Circus
I’ve got to try to balance the baking and fashion on this site better; I’ve just been so excited about a lot of the new work on Etsy ♥ Coming up: Dueling Zucchini Spice Loaves, Part I!
♥ Momo
Posted in Uncategorized
Orange Cat & Blue Bird
Lovely
Wednesday Pounce! This sounds like the beginning of a great children’s story: The Further Adventures of Orange Cat & Blue Bird! We last saw our heroes romping in the weeds while innocent bystanders drank coffee and ate delicious Zucchini loaf, completely unaware of the events to unfold that day. That’s what I’m talking about.
In fact, everything this artist does is pretty fantastic; I love how whimsical everything is in her Etsy shop. Just check this out:
"Fancy meeting you here..."
Cat Butt!
Cat Butt. It’s the thing that’s been missing from my life…oh wait, this is what I wake up to every morning! I love it!
♥ Momo
Posted in Uncategorized
Spudnuts!
Trout Apples!
I’m up this morning drinking Yorkshire Gold and eating a Spudnut doughnut with cantaloupe in Eastern Washington and stalking Etsy. What could be better?♣
♣ Things that might be better: sipping coffee and eating a macadamia nut sticky bun on Kauai; Sipping coffee and breaking off fresh pieces of baguette while sitting on a bench near the Eiffel Tower; the triumphant feeling of making perfect English scones for the first time, for starters – but I’ll take this.
Yesterday was spent running all over the Tri City area looking for a terra cotta garden pot, to be used to cook a fancy roast. My camera battery has died, but I’ll see about posting pics of the final results. In the course of our impromptu tour of every garden nursery in Eastern Washington, I got some pretty nice pics of pretty plants, and my all time favorite, the pussy willow:
Soft!
My parents used to buy these when I got a splinter, which is so much easier to remove from a six year old who’s preoccupied with the botanical equivalent of a new kitten. I wish we could keep them around the house, especially since they keep better than a vase full of flowers, but Migi loves them too. She loves them the way Simpkin loved the same little fat mice as the Tailor of Glouster, with clearly mischievous intentions. So no bundles of pussy willows for me today!
I have a few recipes up my sleeve for either my time here or this weekend when I’m back at home – Zucchini loaf should be first up; I’m really looking forward to it!
♥ Momo