Trader Joe’s has the best packaging for cheap, don’t they? I just finished making sugar cookies for a Super Bowl party this evening. One of the problems that comes with working in a three star restaurant is that I am almost always embarrassed and nervous to bring food to parties where co-workers will be present. I can’t really cook. I don’t particularly enjoy cooking and I find it rather boring (although I have made a list of dishes for Okunola and I to cook this week and am rather enjoying the process).

I promised I would make something for the party and decided to try my hand at baking. I threw together some mean biscuits for Thanksgiving and figured I should be able to handle a simple sugar cookie recipe adapted from here. I was right. They’re delicious. If I eat another one I will hurl.

Ingredients
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup butter, softened * really, really softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Stir together flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Set aside.

In a bigger bowl, mix together the softened butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Gradually blend in the dry ingredients. I put on gloves and used my hands after my arm started hurting for this part.

Roll rounded teaspoonfuls and tablespoonfuls of dough into balls. I left some the larger tablespoonful balls plain for frosting and rolled the smaller ones with blue and red sugar. Place the balls onto ungreased cookie sheets. If you do not have a cookie sheet like me, feel free to use a cake pan. I think I left ours in the oven when we moved out of the old place.

Bake 7-8 minutes in the preheated oven. They will look and feel soft but will harden a bit after cooling. Let stand on cookie sheet two minutes before removing to cool on wire racks.

The small ones are finished after that. The big ones still need frosting. I picked up a container of pre-made frosting and it was disgusting so I hunted around on the internet and found a great recipe for cream cheese frosting.

Cream cheese, check.
Butter, check.
Vanilla extract, check.
Powdered sugar, nope.
Thank goodness for the Polish corner store around the corner.

Cukier Puder, at your service. I also hadn’t softened more butter than I needed for the cookies overnight and so placed the amount I needed into a plastic bag and mushed it with my hands.

Further, I didn’t have the electric mixer the recipe called for and instead of putting my arm in any more pain, decided to break in the food processor I got for Christmas. The frosting turned out a bit more liquid-y than I would have liked but is insanely delicious. I could have quartered the recipe and had plenty. Anyone in the Chicago area in need of frosting?

Some silver sprinkles and we’re done. Super Bowl cookies. I guess the people playing wear red, white, blue and silver uniforms?

At 4pm on February 1st, the day the great Don Cornelius passed on, we got word via social media that there would be an impromptu Soul Train line in his honor on Milwaukee Avenue at 9:30. About 200 people showed up to pay their respects and make their way down the line in thirty degree weather. You can view much better photos here and here.

Then read ?uestlove on Don Cornelius.

Soul Train started in Chicago. What a blessing to see its creator celebrated here in such a worthy way. Rest in Peace, Don Cornelius.

I have a little brother. Even though we aren’t technically Irish twins I pretend that we are. At exactly seventeen months apart, we experienced a lot at the same time growing up. Chicken pox was one such experience I remember vividly. I was probably around 4 when I caught it from someone in pre-k and I distinctly recall my mother plopping he and I into an Aveeno bath, hoping that he would catch the virus from me so she wouldn’t have to go through it twice. He caught it, we itched together and she was pleased.

We shared a room before our baby sister came along when I was 5 and he was 4. We had twin beds pushed against a wall of clouds, wallpaper that my grandfather put up for us. I had a red pencil lamp on my bedside table and he had a blue pencil lamp on his bedside table. The sheets were covered in clowns. We would smash our beds together to make one big one when we weren’t fighting.

I tried to hurt my baby brother once. My evil moment was right after he was born. I was a mommy’s girl until that day and when my father went to hold my brother I must have realized his existence. I didn’t like that baby brother was getting attention from this man I knew was important somewhere in my periphery and I stuck my fingers down baby brother’s throat. From that day on I paid my dad a lot more attention.

He once was on television. Around the time he was five, baby brother was playing baseball at daycare. He slid into third base (maybe home plate?) and a rusty nail lodged into his knee. Because my mom had started the first workplace daycare center in the state of Wisconsin (and I believe one of the first in the nation, if not the first) while pregnant with me, she was able to be by his side in minutes. The news showed my brother’s injury and my mom talked about how great it was to be able to work and be within a quarter of a mile of her children during their formative years. She was profiled in a Japanese magazine for her contribution to working mothers around this time as well. I was very excited to see the two of them on the big screen though a little jealous that I had not been the one to receive a rusty nail to the knee.

The caption for this photo when I snapped it: No. 18 Making your little brother look like an idiot #1000thanks

My baby brother goes to Barnes and Noble to read books instead of buying them. He read every single Easy Rawlins novel in this way: seated in a comfortable leather chair for a few hours until his work or schooling called, remembering the page number he was on, and coming back the next day to finish up. Well, he used to do this until the Barnes and Noble near his apartment got rid of the leather chairs forcing him to the hard seats in the cafe. I am so pleased that we share a love of books even if I could not fathom reading my own inside a busy store.

He will arm-wrestle anyone at anytime and any place. He is hilarious, often without meaning to be. He loves the Green Bay Packers and the Milwaukee Brewers. He gets off work at 5am and occasionally goes to dive bars for a “nightcap” where his drinking buddies are third shift nurses. He gets his hair cut once a week. You will never catch him in a pair of dirty sneakers.

He is like our mother was: refined, tough, sharp, classy, bright, quiet and a bit closed off but tender and caring all the same.

We argue constantly. We are competitive. We have spelling bees. We use humongous words when we’re together to one-up each other. Sometimes our sentences lack sense and we laugh at our efforts. He texts in full sentences, always ending them with at least two dots because they “add emphasis to the meanings.(.)”

All that to say that he came to town with his gal this weekend and we had a great time.

Related Posts
Mama’s Skirt
Sunday #6

I haven’t had a proper dining room since we occupied the mansion back in my mid-teens. That experience as a whole didn’t go so well. Maybe this is where my ambivalence towards any kind of formal area, be it for seating or dining or really doing anything other than sleeping since you kind of need a bedroom for that (unless you’re my dad, then the living room futon does just fine), stems from. You wanna eat? Do it in the kitchen, while sitting on a counter or at the table, your choice. Or maybe you’d prefer the back porch? Or the couch? Or the bed… while reading a magazine and swatting the dog away from the bowl perched perilously on your lap? Fine by me. Just clean up after yourself.

However, I now have a dining room. A tablecloth-covered desk may be acting as a table and the two benches that used to anchor our bay windows are standing in place for chairs but it’s worked for one gathering so far.

The tablecloth is a piece of fabric my friend Kate brought back from a trip to Curaçao a few years ago and the curtains are hold-overs from the old place. I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to update them soon. Any ideas? Maybe I could turn the tablecloth into curtains. Hmmm….

My favorite part of this room is the new lamp. It blows my $4 floor lamp out of the water both in style and price and was worth every penny thanks to a local vintage boutique. I had been out with Chernara all day looking specifically for a floor lamp for the dining room and I happened to pop into Dovetail while waiting for an order of Thai food from a neighboring restaurant. I pass the shop everyday on my way to work and loved a recent write-up of a co-owner from Time Out but this was my first time visiting. It also happened to be a day where every single item in the store was half off, making me a very happy girl.

And of course I love all of the built-ins! Perfect for the books that used to line the floor of our old abode.

So…who’s coming over to sit at the grown-up table?

Psssst… Chicago! Check out Dovetail!
1452 West Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60642
(312) 243-3100

Saturday Brunch: Longman & Eagle in Logan Square
Three kinds of Bloody Marys
A Ransometta: Ransom gin, Carpano Antica, Luxardo Maraschino and Angostura bitters
Bar seating with Chad, an former co-worker to took great care of us
Biscuits and gravy, bacon, duck egg hash/duck confit, sausage, clam chowder with pork belly

A walk around Logan Square

Viva Riva via Netflix Instant

Sunday Brunch: Nightwood in Pilsen
Tea for Zazzles, she’s on a cleanse
Bacon doughnut!

Some light vintage shopping
Do you think I bought this hat?

Sunday Dinner: The reconcepted and reopened Tuman’s in Ukrainian Village
Skeeball, Pac-Man
Saison Dupont
Beet and goat cheese salad, panko-crusted chicken tenders, fries, so good the fries

Happy Monday.

I have a curtain problem: I want nice curtains but I can’t justify spending more than $10 a panel for a piece of fabric. This is why I painted the curtains in the kitchen and why I went to town on upcycling (I’m so tired of that word but I can’t think of another one: redoing? changing? manipulating?) three tab-topped pairs from IKEA. I’ve spent more time on these curtains than they were worth if I translated that time to an hourly rate and I’m still not sure that I like them. See for yourself.

Our living room, as of a few weeks ago. Notice the tension rods holding up some sad white Wilma curtains, $12.99 for a pair. I hated walking the dog past our apartment and looking at the tabs from outside. They were just messy. So I tried to sew down the tabs. That was a disaster. I studied them closely after my failed attempt and noticed a little pocket attaching the tabs to the body of the curtains: it was the perfect size for some thin rods I had also picked up at IKEA.

I used a seam ripper to pull off the stitches holding the pocket together. My neck hurt from looking down afterwards but it was worth it. No more tabs!

Still not satisfied, I picked up a couple of packages of iDye while in LA and dyed the curtains in our apartment building’s washing machine. It couldn’t have been easier, minus the staining my hand received when I reached into the washer to agitate the fabric. Don’t make that mistake or you will have tinted cuticles for days. The color, to me, is much more blue than gray and this is probably due to the short washing cycle of our crappy shared machine. If I had a machine that allowed a longer wash/soak cycle I believe the color would have been richer.

I don’t love them. I don’t hate them. They will do until the perfect set of affordable curtains come my way.

Here are some questions for you.

1. Should they be hemmed?
2. Aren’t they more blue than gray?
3. Should I have mounted the rods on the inside of the window well to show off the woodwork?
4. Isn’t our coffee table too big for this living room?
5. What do you think of our new Kattrup rug?

xxoo

The Mister has granted me permission to post some of his great shots from our STT trip.

Did I mention that it will be a whopping 50 degrees in Chicago today? Who needs sun and sand?

Over the Christmas holiday we visited California to spend some time with family. It was my first time setting foot in the state since we lived there. We rode out in late 2007 after a two-year bid yelling expletives out of the car window, flipping off the strip malls and subdivisions. Getting back to Chicago could not have come quickly enough.

I was bitter when we left. Angry at the boorish, snotty people we encountered, frustrated with trying to maintain a status quo that wasn’t in my DNA, sick and tired of defending my choice of work when I was “just so bright!” And the driving? Oh, the driving!

All of California fell under my wrath after our move back to the Midwest. My eyes flared when speaking about our time there. I told anyone who would listen that the state should fall into the ocean (saving my mother-in-law and dear friends who still lived there). I spoke about the Bay as if the metro area itself had personally stolen my dog and sold him to canine-eating miscreants.

Most of our issues were centered on where we lived: a small, very rich city on The Peninsula. Bet it won’t take you long to figure out which one. While we both had great jobs and lived in a beautiful apartment, we had difficulty making friends (minus Javiera mi amorcita linda, I know you’re reading this) and the emotional expense of being away from our Chicago family and folks wore on us. Combine that with the loutish people who inhabited our little town and the dollars the California lifestyle requires and it was a recipe for Get-Megan-Outta-Dodge-The-Bay-Area by the end of our first month living there. OK, maybe that’s extreme. The fifth week. Summer in December was nice, after all.

When I touched down at LAX the day before Christmas Eve I looked around at my surroundings and sent a quick text to a girlfriend: “I remember why we left.” I don’t even know what prompted me to send that text. I mean, airport people are airport people, let’s face it: no gate in any terminal in any airport in any city in the good old U S of A highlights our best and brightest, least of all Chicago’s own O’Hare. Why was I being so snotty? Because I just am?

By day two in SoCal I was sending a very different text to the same friend: “I love it here! Why did I leave again? Its seventy-fiiiiiiiiive degreeesssss!!!!!”

$40 per round cocktails at a rooftop lounge in Venice had undone my disdain in minutes.

I remembered that I liked LA. I spent six weeks there for work in 07 and didn’t want to go back north: a total shocker for a lefty-somewhat-granola-boho-ish-type-girl who had been force fed the idea that the Bay was the epicenter of the liberal universe and LA a hotbed of plasticity. I found the inhabitants of SoCal kind and smiley, people who actually speak when you pass them on a sidewalk. I fell in love with the weather. The thrifting goodness didn’t hurt either. Had The Mister’s job not required him to stay up north, I would have lobbied for us to move down to Los Angeles immediately.

It was, like, twenty degrees in Chicago. I didn’t hate California, I just really, really, really disliked that small Northern town. It wasn’t really fair for me to direct my aggression at the whole state. I was drinking a beer on a rooftop in DECEMBER. How can anyone be mad at that?

Walks in the mountains, a day trip to San Diego to visit one of our favorite couples, lunch in Beverly Hills, a tour of the gorgeous grounds of the college my mother-in-law teaches at… it was a really good few days. I won’t be so long in going back this time. As long as I’m not made to go up north.

Until we meet again. Oh, California.

If you are my pal on Instagram you have probably already seen these photos but in case you are not, this is how we rang in 2012; same as the last few, with a quick jaunt to St. Thomas. This time we had friends in tow and it was made all the more memorable with their presence.

I’m hoping to get my life together enough to start posting regularly again. Lots going on in the new apartment… off to dye some curtains. Happy New Year!

When we lived in Palo Alto I took an art class with this amazing abstract painter. I had to have been the only one who left each period with yellow and purple hair, paint embedded into my fingernails, paint streaking my jeans. I have no problem making a big old mess of myself.

I do, however, have a problem with plain white tab-topped curtains. And mini-blinds. The problem was that I had both: blinds in the kitchen and boring curtains in the Room Where Things Go To Die. I woke up on Sunday feeling exceptionally aggressive after a disastrous post-Thanksgiving dinner with my immediate family and needed to channel my energy into something. Anything! The curtains were screaming for attention, the mini-blinds were assaulting my otherwise coming-together kitchen and I had some blue paint and a red Solo cup.

So I tested a few stamps on some crappy stained white fabric. I liked it. Then I took my tab-topped curtains, ironed down the hems, and stitched a small seam so they wouldn’t be visible on a rod.

Next came newspapering my kitchen floor and laying my freshly ironed curtain down. And stamping. Stamping and stamping. I didn’t have much of a pattern in mind and thought I would do the whole thing until my wrist got tired and I realized how little paint I had.

I finished one and snapped a photo of it so I could check the pattern while stamping the second. Then I stared at it. Where in the hell was this thing going to sit to dry while I worked on the second piece? I left to buy– the horror– some tension rods and prayed it would be dry when I got back (Chicagoans, that K-Mart on Ashland and Milwaukee? Instant depression, stay away). It wasn’t. Where was it gonna go?

Onto the stove. I know this was probably dangerous, right? I couldn’t believe The Mister walked in without chastising me.

After three hours of drying, the first curtain was finally ready to be hung. It was too long. I half-heartedly measured before I started and I guess I got it way wrong.

So, I cut and hemmed. And wanted to cry a little.

Not many circles made it to the bottom. One of these days I’ll take them down to re-stamp. Why did I make it so short? My plants need sun, folks!

This is what they looked like around 5:30 in the morning on Tuesday. Don’t ask.

And there they are at night. Why the one on the left is leaning forward all weird is beyond me, I need to go adjust it. Also, flatware people: they’re up!

Overall, I’m satisfied. Not in love, but glad to not have to look at the mini-blinds. The tension rods pose the biggest problem but I don’t quite feel like drilling hardware into these walls just yet. We’ll see if I can stand them for a bit.

Sorry for the iPhone photos. My SLR isn’t behaving these days and I really just felt like blogging without waiting for some time to shoot the curtains in the daylight.

PS I took the cabinet doors off! The kitchen is my favorite room in the house these days.