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I LOVE any season that is not summer — and I especially love fall. All the colors and crunchy leaves and hot cider and crisp air are well and good, but mostly I get excited about fall because it’s not summer anymore! Oh, I hate the heat.

Anyway, so I get so excited that I want to decorate the whole house. I’ve also been spending lots of time on Pinterest at work lately and getting a ton of good ideas. It also makes me want to take cute pictures of my house and put them on the internets, though. Hope no one is expecting a wordy entry because the rest of this is probably just gonna be pictures.

 

This is my front door wreath. I have a lot of greens and blues in with the browns/reds/yellows/oranges this year. I like it.

 

 

 

Here’s Bitey on his harness. Just because I like taking pictures of Bitey.

 

 

 

 

(This is a detail of the hurricane glass holding the branches above.)

 

 

 

Pinterest idea: grapevine wreath as a charger. Haven’t tried eating on them yet, but it sure is pretty.

 

 

 

things aren’t going so great. most of you know what’s up, but I’m not going to go into it here anyway. suffice it to say that things aren’t so great. in fact, you might even say that they’re pretty bad.

but I’m hopeful, most of the time, and plan to be productive in the coming days. not sure that it will happen today. I guess that’s the thing with productivity, though – planning doesn’t do any good. just doing it is what gets it done. meh. the dishes haven’t gone anywhere so far. they’ll be dirty tomorrow too.

I need to water my orchids. and fold the clean laundry. and the rest of the clean laundry on my bed. and put it away. and do more laundry. and mow the lawn. and clean the house. and stop eating fast food. and put away the stuff I bought at Goodwill on Sunday. and get some exercise.

I’ll get it done. most of it. soonish.

I love any excuse to make pies.  I try not to make them on a regular basis for obvious reasons, but after I realized that it’s 3.14, I figured I’d make Indian food for dinner tomorrow and whip up some pies for tonight.  And I took pictures to, you know, see how I am at blogging about cooking.

For dinner, we had salad and a tomato onion tart (pie…tart…same difference), and for dessert I made strawberry shortcake pie because they have strawberries for $0.69 at Aldi.  I used recipes for the pie crusts, but made up the rest of the pies as I went — and both were delicious!!

To make the strawberry pie, which I did first, I cut about a quart of strawberries and used a potato masher to mash them while I heated them on the stove.  To the strawberry puree I added balsamic vinegar, a little honey, cornstarch, and a pinch of salt.  I simmered it for a bit until I could tell that the cornstarch was in there, then took it off the heat and let it cool a bit.

Meanwhile, I baked the pie crust.  I used one of Martha’s recipes, obviously, because they’re the best.  I’d like to have a food processor for making pie crust, since everything is supposed to be as cold as possible, but since I don’t have one I just use my hands and cut the butter into small pieces.  Seems to work fine, though I haven’t ever made a pie crust using a food processor so I can’t really compare.

You can see the tart pan underneath the pie pan.  Multitasking!  Once the pie crust was finished, I put the strawberry filling in and let it cool for a while in the fridge.

While it was cooling, I put the tart together — sweet potato medallions on top of a layer of sliced onion.  I baked the sweet potato first, but didn’t cook the onions at all (which resulted in some extra crunch).  I sliced a ball of fresh mozzarella and put that on top of the sweet potatoes, and chopped up some fresh basil to sprinkle on top of the mozzarella.  (Lots of basil.)  Topped it off with sliced tomato, salt and pepper, olive oil, and a somewhat sprinkling of balsamic vinegar, and then baked it for about 10 minutes until the cheese melted.

It was SOOOO GOOOOOD.  I mean, it was really good.  The only thing was that the crust ended up being soggy because of the oil and vinegar, plus the mozzarella and tomatoes are very wet.  I dried them between some paper towels before putting them on the tart, but I guess that wasn’t enough.  HOWEVER, I ended up kind of liking the sogginess.  But when I make it again I’ll probably try to avoid that.

I whipped some cream after we finished the tart, and added honey and vanilla to it.  Here’s the finished pie!

Again, I know I said this before and probably shouldn’t again, but the only recipes I used were for the pie crusts.  🙂  Just saying.  It’s okay to brag on my own blog, right?  Especially since the only people who will see this I would brag to anyway.

I forgot to mention that I put a layer of lady fingers on top of the pie crust, and poured the strawberry compote (I guess that’s what it was, right?) over the lady fingers.  I wanted it to be more strawberry shortcake inspired than strawberry pie inspired.

And now it’s 8:00 and the kitchen is a mess, and I’m too full to clean up.  Meh, there’s always tomorrow!

I killed our refrigerator the other day (basically…trying to defrost the freezer I ended up puncturing something that made a huge whhhooOOOOOOSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH sound – which Google confirmed was the freon and not an easy fix).  It was kind of embarrassing, but I will say that we needed a new one anyway because this was the second time that the freezer had frozen up which kept the refrigerator from being in temp.  That, and I also had to keep a bowl in the back of it to catch water coming from…somewhere…..

Anyway, we had a new one delivered today.  But that’s not actually why I’m blogging.  The real reason is that I wanted to post some pictures of the cookies I made yesterday (with the butter and eggs that were still okay though not 41 degrees) and I feel kind of silly posting stuff on Facebook unless it’s, you know, interesting.

I got a huge bag of vintage cookie cutters at Southern Thrift a few weeks ago.

There were several more, but these were the best.  Using up the butter and eggs was a perfect excuse for making cookies and using these cutters, though (I guess if I had made them on Fat Tuesday, that would have worked just as well).  I decided not to try to ice them at all since the designs are so cute.

(Sorry that it’s so washed out.  I didn’t check the film setting on the app first….)

 

Aren’t they the cutest cookies EVER??!  Now I just need to find someone to eat them all since I will otherwise (and Matt won’t … as I believe I’ve complained about before).

So I had to quit blogging for a while because the hard drive on our MacBook crashed (at least that seems to be the problem).  We went for a while without a computer…but do finally have one again (a PC this time, I’ll note).  

But don’t worry, you haven’t missed too much.  So I won’t catch you up and will instead tell you about yesterday when we had a mini Simpsons celebration to watch the 500th episode.  Did you know that only two other primetime, scripted series have aired more than 500 shows?  Those two are Lassie and Gunsmoke.  Just FYI.  

So after I got off work yesterday, we went to the store for sandwich fixin’s and some frogurt.  In case you don’t catch the huge sub sandwich reference, here’s a picture.

And here’s our sandwich.  Much shorter, but then, no sense in letting the mayonnaise turn.

It was delicious, too.  We also had Fresca.

Also from the Simpsons.

Naturally, there were some salty snacks and donuts.  Obviously, to make it complete we would have needed some cans of beer, but I wasn’t in the mood and Matt didn’t want to buy any either, but whatever.  We didn’t just eat, though; we played a few games of Simpsons Scene-It (Matt won all of the games) and watched some of season 3 before the show started at 7:00.  I think the episode last night had something to do with the Simpsons getting banished from Springfield, but I was getting a little tired of watching TV by that time and had started working a crossword. 

So that was that.  Right now I need to go clean up the kitchen and decide what to make for dinner, or else I would blog about the terrariums I made the other day.  They’re AWESOME.  But the kitchen is such a mess….

So the Christmas party was a success, as was the buche de noel. I put this picture up on Facebook, but you know….

Of course, they’re usually chocolate, but this one is a “Birch de Noel.” I thought everything turned out great except for the meringue mushrooms…because the tip on my pastry bag wasn’t big enough. But the whole thing was gone by 9:00 and it tasted amazing. I think I used about a dozen eggs making the whole thing (most of them were just the whites).

Here are a couple of pictures of the tablescape. It turned out well…though the lighting wasn’t so great and neither is my iPhone camera, so they’re kind of grainy and dark.

Left to right – the yule log, sugar cookies (that I made, of course), and sausage balls (which Matt made).

Starting at the top of this picture, there’s a veggie platter, then gougeres (with goat cheese and rosemary), and then endive spears with goat cheese and cranberry relish.

There were about 4 cookies leftover (I had another plate of them in the living room). That was all. I feel quite pleased with myself for pulling it all off so well. 🙂

Now, two days later, we haven’t cleaned anything up. Yesterday was spent in recovery (I may have had a little too much rum in my apple cider), and now I am faced with a house full of cups, plates and forks, gift wrap from the dirty santa game, and lots of empty bottles. Stupid party cleanup. I think I’ll just straighten up today, and save the actual dish-washing for tomorrow. I really wish we had a dishwasher….

So it was 61 degrees in the house when I got home from work (going to have to start leaving the heat on during the day I guess), and it’s taken me FOREVER to warm up. Granted, an hour later it’s still 66 degrees, but I’m quite warm now after putting on a thick pull-over sweater underneath my fleece robe. I’m about to take off the sweater actually. This is why I can’t ever wear these things out – because in about 5 minutes, I overheat but can’t take it off since I anticipated being hot and only wore a cami underneath. I usually forget deodorant, too.

Anyway. So I’m throwing a Christmas party on Saturday, and am planning on going all out with the hors d’oeurves. Plus I’m going to make a “Birch de Noel” – Martha’s white chocolate take on the buche de noel. The picture was so cool-looking that I decided I’d rather make it than babka. I might still make babka. We’ll see.

But I’m being ridiculously detailed in my planning for this party. I made myself a timeline and a schedule (is that the same thing?) and a shopping list and all that. Even spent all of yesterday finishing this table runner —

Though not as pretty as the picture (if anyone cares, this is also one of Martha’s inspirations), it actually turned out a lot better than I anticipated.

Anyway, this afternoon – on the Party Schedule – I’m supposed to deep clean the house. At this point in the afternoon, I’m kind of seeing “deep clean” as meaning that I’ll clean the bathroom, do a couple of loads of laundry, wash the dishes, and probably sweep. That’s more like “normal clean,” but hey, I generally keep things fairly clean anyway… (I’m much better at housekeeping now).

So I’m watching/listening to A Christmas Carol since Matt hates Christmas movies. We spent way too much time the other day talking about whether George Bailey is a “common, everyday yokel” or not. (Really, the debate was about whether that movie is a parable or not…and whether the moral — no man who has friends is a failure or whatever it is — was actually true.) I think my argument should be obvious, though he did make a pretty good point at times. Good, if jaded. So you know.

I’m doing a fabulous job of not cleaning the house. Guess at least I should put a load of laundry in…

I know it’s still November, but I kind of give myself permission to start decorating for Christmas once Thanksgiving is over.

SO! I bought a Christmas tree today. Matt’s in class all afternoon, but he is a self-proclaimed humbug and didn’t want to help with any of the setup or anything. We’re having a Christmas party and he’s insisting on building a Festivus pole. (Which is fine with me of course.)

So I went to Lowe’s and found a big Douglas Fir and bought it and everything all by myself (still kind of a big deal). The quiet, nice older man who trimmed it and wrapped it for me helped me get it in my little Kia trunk. I took a picture for effect. It’s a small car.

Ha!  Getting it out was the hard part, as you can probably imagine.  But I did get it in and set up, and it looks great!

The Charlie Brown tree that we used last year is in the dining room.  🙂

Vlad snuck his little butt outside and got himself lost. He’s been gone for about 10 days now so we’ve pretty much given up looking for him. I posted a couple of ads on craigslist and went out looking for him a couple of times – but how are you supposed to find cats? It’s not easy. I hope that somebody found him and took him in, and that he’s well-fed and warm. Ah, well.

Bitey seems happier about it, though. He’s acting the way he used to act – privileged, spoiled, cocky, needy, and always whiny. Good thing he’s so cute!

..because I had to drive Matt to work (we still only have one drivable car, but that’s not important). I have to close later today, but it’s just as well since Matt has class all day long anyway. Don’t think I mentioned, but Vanderbilt is sending him to electrical school to get some kind of license…journeyman’s, maybe? He does that two nights a week and will be done in two years, I think.

But anyway, so I’m awake. Our friends, Chris and Nita, gave us a beautiful pine entertainment center, and we moved it yesterday. They just wanted to get rid of it to do something new with their living room – it takes up a LOT of space and kind of dominated the area. But I think it looks great here. It’s three separate parts – the center, where the TV is supposed to go. Then it has two bookcases on each side, both set back about a foot from the front of the center piece. Anyway, so we put the two bookcases into the dining room and have the center in the living room. And I LOVE it. It looks so great with the rest of the furniture, etc.

So this is the middle.  You can’t tell how deep it is in this picture, but it’s at least three feet I’d say.

And, here in the dining room, are the two other pieces.  I had to take down some of the pictures to make room, which is why there are a few on the table.

Our gaming and liquor cabinets.  Game days will be even more fun now!