.jam.

.i've always been a bread person.

and what goes better with bread than butter and jam? this past winter, i somehow stumbled upon a jam company. welovejam. and let me tell you, they are not just any jam company.

they're based in california and use fresh, local fruits. they put the name of the variety of fruit on their packaging. and don't even get me started on the packaging - they are design geniuses. they don't use pectin or lemon juice. they are pricey, but their jam is just amazing. so good. the blenheim apricot, their specialty, rocks. seriously, it is just so smooth and yummy. and their fleur de sel caramel is great too. i've also had their bleinheim apricot and bing cherry jam, and while it was good, it just can't compare to the standard blenheim. the mariposa plum is good, and i'm looking forward to trying the fukushu kumquat marmelade.

apparently they are also starting to sell their blenheim jam in some williams-sonoma stores, which is exciting.
so yeah. no point to this post other than me gushing about my love affair with jam. and the jam from welovejam rocks.

.cheers.

.food.

.i'm hungry right now.

so i'm thinking about food. and getting antsy about leaving for my trip! until i get back and can post lots of fun pictures, i will leave you with an ode to salads and yummy veggies.




happy holidays, all! hope they're full of family, food, and relaxation.

.cheers.

62 - done!

62. organize my recipes


finally! this one has been a long time coming. i have had stacks and stacks of cooking magazines lounging around the house. cooking light. martha stewart. they had taken over our bookshelf, and several side tables. it was definitely time for me to organize all of the gazillion recipes that i wanted to keep, but the task was so daunting that i had been putting it off for a while.

so, i finally decided to go at it. first, i bought a cute little blue martha stewart recipe box. that gave me the incentive to get to work. and work it was - it definitely took me about a month to go through everything, cutting the recipes out and getting everything onto index cards. granted, i wasn't working on this all the time, but still. quite a feat, if i do say so myself.


i'm so glad that i did it, though. not only is our apartment no longer taken over by magazines, but now i have recipes that are organized, which means i have easy access to them. irish soda bread? no problem - i'll find that in the bread section. black and white cookies? check - with the cookies! there were a few blank sections, also, which was nice, since the labels were slightly lacking. also, it really helped me weed out the recipes that i didn't need to hang onto.

obviously, the desert section is a bit full compared to the other sections, but whatever. you know me - ever the sugar fiend.



phew. glad that one's done with. doesn't it look pretty?

.cheers.

.sick.

.being sick is definitely no fun.


sorry for the lack of posting, but i have had some sort of weird cold/flu lately. i didn't think it could be the flu, since i got a flu shot this year, but maybe it's some crazy strain that the vaccine didn't cover. either way, i've felt really terrible lately, and even left work early today. i'm hoping that i recover quickly, since we leave for philly tomorrow.

we'll see.


in the meantime, i will leave you more hyacinth pictures. man, i could look at these guys all day. and i love how the different light makes them appear different shades of purply blue.

hopefully i'll be all better and ready with more images after our philly trip.

.cheers.

.tanqueray.

.and so continue my sunday sips postings.


on tap today? tanqueray.

it was not until very recently that i began drinking mixed drinks again. although i have occasionally indulged in the various fruity drinks that involve words such as "mango puree" and "muddled sage" and that are served with an orange paper umbrella, my go-to drink for quite some time has been beer. don't get me wrong, there are plenty of awesome cocktails out there, but i think college may have knocked the desire for hard alcohol out of me, at least for a while there.

thankfully, i have come to my senses, and j and i have started keeping a small amount of hard alcohol in our house. don't worry, we're not becoming alcoholics, but it is nice to be able to pour yourself a drink on the weekends occasionally. when we were deciding what liquor we should get, j's choice was whisky, and he decided fairly quickly. i, on the other hand, took a bit more time with my selection. should i go with vodka? no, that just makes me think of santa clara and my poor liver. rum? hmm, potentially, although rum also seems a bit college to me. tequila? no. just, no.

and then i remembered that i enjoy gin. particularly in gin and tonics. actually, not a huge fan of quinine, so it's mainly gin and club soda. and lime. liberal amounts of lime.


apparently quinine was used to prevent malaria, and it was extremely bitter in the 1700s (although i think it still is), so gin was used to cut taste of the quinine. awesome.

anyway, gin and tonics are pretty dang refreshing - cool and crisp - and sipping on these guys makes me want summer to come more quickly.

.cheers.

29 - done!

29. buy a blender


i was so excited to check this one off my 101 in 1001 list.

as i may have mentioned, i am slightly obsessed with fruit, and smoothies. just a bit. my jamba juice withdrawals have gotten quite serious, so i decided that it was time to bite the bullet and buy a blender. most of the blenders that i have had in the past, or used in the past, have been fairly cheap and shoddy, so this time i wanted to spend a bit extra for a good blender that will ensure that my smoothies are nice and, well, smooth.


so, i decided to go with a kitchenaid blender - part of the cook for the cure collection.

anyway, the blender is amazing. seriously, i've had at least one smoothie a day for the past few weeks. maybe not every day, but almost every day. the only problem is that now i'm spending all my money on frozen fruits. i suppose there are worse things i could be spending my money on. i bought some beautiful blood oranges the other day, with all good intentions of taking pictures of them to put up with this post, but i ate them before i could take pictures. i'm a sucker for citrus.


anyway, i'm loving my blender - being able to make smoothies whenever i want is fabulous. the end. now, if only i had enough money/room in the kitchen for a stand mixer.

.cheers.

19 - done!

19. read 8 books in 5 months

.admittedly, this one was probably a bit too easy.

pillars of the earth. when the astors owned new york. the likeness. the road. the bodies left behind. confessions of an ugly stepsister. little face. thirteen moons. world without end.

okay, okay, i actually read 9 books in 4 months, and i'm half-way through a tenth. so, really, i probably should have made this one a bit more difficult. particularly since i have a 2 hour total commute on the t every day.

but, oh well! i love reading. can't help it.

i actually put this one on the list because i had been spending a lot of my commute time either reading the newspaper or playing around on my ipod touch. i mean, i read at home, but i hadn't been reading much fluff literature at the time, and i was really craving some easy reads. okay not necessarily 'easy' or 'fluff,' but, well, not a textbook. i read enough of those every day. and hey, it gave me an excuse to read even more!

now, i know that two ~1,000 page books don't seem like 'fluff,' but really, pillars of the earth and world without end (the beasts!) were the quickest reads on the list. well, not exactly - i read the road in 8 hours.

but, they were definitely not heavy books (mentally. they were heavy physically) - very fun, and i love historical fiction.


when the astors owned new york was a free book i got at my conference in new orleans, and i picked it up because i am a little obsessed with the progressive era and the gilded age. and the wealthy. you know.

you'll note that little face isn't in the pictures - that's because i read this book in one day while i was snowed in at home in seattle. it was a great christmas gift (thanks mom!). i loved this book because it had a really weird timeline. and, of course, i couldn't complete this task from my list without adding a jeffrey deaver book. the bodies left behind is a murder mystery thriller - my favorite 'fluff' book! love them. although i creep myself out at night after i read them, thinking about all the ways a murderer could sneak into my apartment.


thirteen moons is awesome, as is confessions of an ugly stepsister. i loved wicked, and confessions of an ugly stepsister was almost as good.

but, my favorite of the books? the likeness. of course. i am obsessed with tana french. ever since i read in the woods, i have been a fan. her writing is fantastic, and creepy, and eerie, and fabulous. so as soon as i finished in the woods, i went to her website, stalker-like, in an attempt to read anything else that she had written. i promptly went down to the harvard coop and picked up the likeness. in hardback. and let me tell you, i never buy books in hardback. never. and yet, i am so obsessed with tana french as a writer that i bought the hardback.

and i had to force myself to read the book slowly. it was so fabulous! much, much better than in the woods, and that's saying a lot. highly recommended.

so there you have it. great books, all of them.

.cheers.

.fruit.

.well, i'm back in cambridge.

blah. i miss seattle.

particularly the smoothies. yes, the smoothies.

first of all, we have one jamba juice in the entire state of massachusetts. one. and it's really annoying to get to from where i live. so i like to have as many jamba juice smoothies when i'm home as possible. mmm, sunrise strawberry.

anyway, i also like to make smoothies. i really should just buy a blender, because smoothies are just so darn easy, and they're so good for you. just toss in some yogurt, some satsuma or orange juice, a banana, and some frozen blueberries/strawberries/whatever other frozen fruit you have in the freezer, and voila!

yummy smoothie. well, the focus is off, but you get the idea. that was my breakfast and lunch most days that i was home.

wait. i forgot my secret ingredient.

spinach! that's right, i put spinach in my smoothies.

it's so healthy for you, and you know what? you can't even taste it. i was just sad that the blueberries made the smoothie so purple-y - if i had used lighter fruits, the smoothie would have turned green. and that would be awesome. so healthy. yum.

yep. time to invest in a blender. or at least inundate jamba juice's customer service inbox with requests for a cambridge location until they cave. we'll see which comes first.

.cheers.

.deck the halls.

i love christmastime! the mood is always so festive and fun - it's always over far too quickly. which is why i constantly listen to christmas caroles in december, and surround myself in as much christmas as possible while i can.

i got a package in the mail from sue the other day, and lo and behold, it contained a mini christmas tree that i had decorated many many years ago! it's just a fake little thing, with painted pine cones and ribbon, but i love that little tree, and since j and i have absolutely no christmas decorations (we're pathetic, i know), it now has a place of honor on our kitchen table.

thanks sue!

it's good to have some semblance of christmas cheer around.

and, i made my cards this past weekend! apparently 'god jul' is not a common phrase amongst normal folk, so the cards may be incomprehensible to some people, but oh well. i think christmas trees and reindeer are fairly universal symbols of awesomeness.

but no peeking!

so there you have it. tidings of comfort and joy. seattle one week from today!

.cheers.

.red.

.well, it is officially the holiday season!.

i know that for the shopping centers, the holiday season began the day after halloween, but for me, thanksgiving week always gets me in the mood (and j let me start listening to christmas carols the day after thanksgiving! well, let's be honest, i maintained that thanksgiving morning counts as "after thanksgiving" because it's after the day started. clearly flawless logic.)

anyway, thanksgiving dinner went off without a hitch (has it really been this long since i've posted??), and it was great having a long, relaxing weekend. a friend from scu came up from baltimore, and it was great seeing her, wandering around cambridge and looking at the christmas lights.

i am now in full holiday swing - i just made all my christmas cards this past sunday, so i'm good to go. now i just have to write and address them. but that's the fun part.

anyway, i'll post more on that at some point, but i finally got some recent pictures uploaded via j's computer, and noticed the abundance of festive red in the images. love. it.

what christmas season would be complete without a nice, juicy pomegranate?

and seriously, i mean juicy. it was a struggle with this guy - the juice definitely squirted into my eyeballs several times (no dirty jokes, you perverts), and my hands were stained red for a few hours after the tussle. which only yielded about a cup and a half of the fruit.

but i love pomegranates! they are the coolest fruit ever.
seriously - all the weird sections, the tart, jewel-like seeds. so awesome.

and j had never eaten them before, so that was a fun experience.

next up: cranberry sauce!

i love making cranberry sauce. not only does it taste fantastic (i like tart, sour things - can you tell?), it's also fun to hear the cranberry skins pop when they burst open in the boiling water! as i was trying to snap the shot of them popping (didn't really catch it too well, although you can see some skins that have burst open at the top), my lens kept fogging up and the boiling water kept spraying on me. so much for being a food photographer.

so not only do the holidays mean red for me, but apparently they also mean food. or at least fruit. which is fine by me!

.cheers.

.spice.

.i made a pumpkin pie the other weekend.

it must be a thanksgiving thing - november always makes me think of pumpkin pie.

i think pie is probably my favorite food ever. they're just so yummy! and, at least for pumpkin pies, i love the myriad of spices that goes into it. beautiful!

apologies for the terrible lighting, but i suppose it is that time of year - the dark, indoors, poor lighting time of year. darn you, winter.

.cheers.

.failure.

.i suppose the title is a bit of a double-entendre today (except not risque...because when is my life risque?).

first - i am a failure at blogging. period. it's not completely my fault though: i blame my lack of a laptop.

the dang thing keeps giving me the blue screen of death. or the black screen of death with lots of white letters and essentially the message 'eff off, i don't work anymore.' i may be paraphrasing there, but really. we know that's what it means.

second - failure of our economy. can we say melt down?

i was bringing some contract in to my marketer to look over yesterday, and i was like, oh, yeah, how's it going, blah blah, and he just looked at me and i'm watching the market crash.


ahhh, i see... so of course i rushed back to my cube and pulled up all of the great news outlets (what what seattle times!) and low and behold BAILOUT PLAN DENIED splashed across every news website. ever. in huge letters. well, if there wasn't an economic freak-out beforehand, obviously there was one after everyone saw that there could be one. stocks plummeting, etc. etc. i really wouldn't be surprised if we were in for another great depression. i just imagine tumbleweed blowing through my office, pilling up on top of all the manuscripts and books that are already crowding me out of my cube.


no, i don't know. i don't know what to think about this. all i know is that it makes me furious that those ceos make over 1 billion dollars a year. oh wait, silly me, i forgot to add a 0 in there. oh wait, again, silly me... most of them make over 30 billion a year. billion. that is absurd. no one needs that amount of money, particularly people who so royally screw up.

i had a good shot of the nytimes website, but for some reason, that one didn't turn out. oh well.

anyhoo. i baked cookies today. for some reason, i love baking. it is just so soothing. i would have taken pictures, but i'm still using j's computer (god love him)


hopefully, my new computer will arrive soon, and i shall have pictures galore to share. for now, screenshots will have to do.


.cheers.

.farewell.

.my computer is dying.

it has been on the fritz for the past few days, and i have no idea what is wrong with it. (i have no idea where that phrase comes from, or even what that word means, really, but i love it and thus will continue to use it)

and after my billion dollars worth of repairs a year and a half ago, it is definitely not worth it to try to fix it again. i'm sad, i love my little guy. so, i've ordered a new lenovo. should be good, we'll see! meanwhile, i am on j's computer, so can't really post. i wanted to post about new england autumn, and about the red sox game we went to, but that will have to wait.

thankfully, every once in a while, it lets me actually turn it on, and last night was one such night, so i was able to get all of my files off onto an external hard drive. yay.

rip compaq presario, rip. you shall be missed.

.cheers.

.home.

.it is official - i'll be home for christmas!

booked my flights last night, and almost gagged due to the ridiculous price of tickets. and there i was, hoping that i could upgrade to first class via saved miles. tough luck. ah, oh well.

for those of you who care (and, i know, religiously follow my blog), i'll be getting into seattle the morning of 18 december, and will be leaving on the same early-morning flight that i always do on sunday, 28 december. so, that will be nice to have so much time at home. (kristin, will you be coming home for cmas?)

nothing else new here. tonight, j's friend from l. school is hosting a dessert party with his wife (i think she's the one that is hosting, really). they just had a baby, so i think it is mostly to introduce everyone to the baby. i'm going to make my dark and light brownies. mmm.


one thing that i think is funny - j decided to order pizza (apparently playing im football out in the rain makes you hungry...who knew), and he felt the need to order via the world wide web. so he ordered his pizza, and on the confirmation page, it shows you when the pizza is in the order, prep, bake, box, and delivery stages. so, we could see that fabio was prepping j's pizza, that it went into the oven at 2:14, and that omar is delivering our pizza. now that, my friends, is an example of way too much information.

a few more macro shots (told you i'm obsessed). flowers are even awesome when they're all shriveled and wrinkly. i love the visibility of their veins, and the texture of the petals - all leathery and dry.



.cheers.

.comfy.computer?

.i realize that due to my position, i am slightly biased in regards to this subject, but i don't care. i felt this way before, and i will continue to feel this way after i leave my job (which is hopefully a ways down the road!).

i read this article in the l.a. times today about how free online books are beginning to replace the "costly textbooks." i realize that book prices are pretty high - i do not miss the days of shelling out around $400 for textbooks. ouch. (i'm not talking so much about smaller publishing companies, like w-b, but the massive ones that gouge you for all you're worth)

however, it would be a real shame if computers ever replaced books. things like this article. the kindle. the crazy book retrieval machine in the santa clara library. they all make me sad, because there is nothing like curling up with a good book. or browsing the dusty shelves in the back corner of a library, cocooned in the dark, surrounded by weathered tomes. i love it. i love libraries. i love books. reading from a computer screen makes my eyeballs hurt.


there's almost nothing i like more than curling up with a good book.

and that definitely cannot be said about a computer.

.save the books!

.cheers.