This and That

1.  There are only 11 more school days (with kids) remaining this year.  That's not very many days.  Also, I am amazing at the math.

2.  This summer I will not be working, and because I won't have as much disposable income, I'm working to find fun, free (or very inexpensive) things to do.  Any suggestions?

3.  Trying to turn us into cloth napkin people.  It's easier to do because Kim (of fancy silver fame) also gave me a big bag of Matt's grandmother's linens.  We used them last night, and I felt so sophisticated.  Basically, if you come to our house we'll do things like have string quartets and jewels baked into cakes.

4.  Make these Brussels sprouts, even if you don't like Brussels sprouts.  Every time we make them, they are the star of the meal.  I want to take a day this summer where I do nothing but make and eat these.  Not really free, but could be fun, right?

5.  If you haven't seen Bridesmaids, please do.  I need to talk to someone about how much I love it.  Go see it and then call me so we can laugh about it.

6.  This little ol' blog turned two a couple of weeks ago, and I totally missed it.  Shoooot.  My very first post was done kind of on a whim when a snake jumped out of some bushes and tried to kill me.  Just a few days ago, our sweet little old mailman met Matt and me in the driveway to deliver our mail, telling us that there's been a snake hanging out on our front step.  Later I noticed the note he'd written at the top of our insurance bill.

I love cute mailmen.  I do not love snakes.  That damn snake has now tried to kill me and our mailman!  Snakes will still kill you.  That's what we've learned in two years.

What will the next years bring?  Hopefully more baked goods and less danger.

I'm Basically Bob Vila.

So, a couple of months ago, I read this blog post where this girl took an old funky dresser and jazzed it up by removing the drawers and painting it. It was kind of awesome, and I thought it was something I might be able to do myself.

And just a couple of weeks after that, I was browsing the free section of Craigslist and I saw this dresser that was missing two drawers. Perfect! It was a little busted looking, but it had good bones, and I thought it had some potential for awesomeness.

After I picked it up from a very nice lady named Penny, I brought it home and put it in the office/junk room/catchall for everything in the house that has no real place. And there it sat for two months.

But then last week I got motivated. I removed the hardware, borrowed a sander from a friend, and went to town. In the house. Note to self: do not sand a dresser in the house. Seriously. It was a very stupid idea, but Matt wasn't home and the dresser was too big and cumbersome for me to move it outside myself and I wanted to do it RIGHT THEN and I, on occasion, lack patience. I'll be wiping up brown dust for the next year of my life, and I may or may not have made myself sick with inhaling all of the dust that was laced with Ebola or something comparable. Oops.

So after I sanded the dresser and filled in the wood holes, I primed it and gave it two coats of paint (The same paint that I'll soon be using on other house projects, so none will go to waste. The color is slightly off-white, Martha Stewart's color Talc from Home Depot. I plan to put the dresser in our guest room, and it'll be joining the IKEA Expedit shelf which is a little off-white as well.) I also added new hardware (which I found at Target on clearance for $13.98).

The last thing I needed to do was figure out how to do the bottom part. I considered baskets or some other kind of solution, but ended up just lining the inside with some fabric that I got from IKEA last year.

Anyway, here it is now. I'm in love.

Yeah, you can still totally see where the old hardware was. Also, I don't care.

And here's a breakdown of the cost:

• Dresser: free
• IKEA fabric: I had it already, but I paid $4 for it originally
• Paint: $15, but I only used like 1/10 of a gallon, and I'm using the rest for other stuff. So this was like $3 worth of paint and primer.
• Hardware: $13.98

Total: $20.98

Hell Yeah, HomeGoods!

I'm really cheap.

(Cheap like frugal, not cheap like skanky.) 

Whenever I need something for the house, I always check out HomeGoods first.  And usually, I can find what I'm looking for for a fraction of the cost of the exact item in a department store.  (If this sounds like a commercial, it's because I'm pushing HomeGoods.  But I am sincere about how much I love the place, too.)  I love HomeGoods not only because of the amazing deals (a set of king-sized 600-thread count sheets for $40!  a dutch oven for $24!  birthday cake scented candles for $6!), but also because of some of the hilarious weird stuff that I'll find.  Last year about this time I stopped in a HomeGoods and later posted about that visit.

Anyway, you can imagine my excitement when I got a complimentary $25 gift card in the mail from HomeGoods.  The idea was that I would buy gifts for other people (and then talk about it on the internet).  But here's the thing: I'd already completed my Christmas shopping.  So I decided that this gift card would be for Matt and me and our pretty little kitchen.  Here's what I picked up (all for $25!).

Awesome new box grater that grates right into a container. 

 This one was for Matt, who often gets stuck with the job of grating cheese (usually parmesan), and was growing tired of our little IKEA oval ones. 

A giant ice cream scoop. 

Why didn't I have one of these already?  I was planning on using it when we went to Hugh and Cassie's for Thanksgiving--you know, when I was supposed to make Mandy's Famous Pumpkin Cheesecake Ice Cream.  But I forgot to bring the ice cream maker.  I did not, however, forget to bring this giant ice cream scoop. 

And, finally, I got his new whisk.  I already have a whisk exactly like this but orange, so I was a little reluctant to buy this one.  While I was shopping, I had it in my hands, fawning over the pretty periwinkle color.  I was talking to Matt on the phone, asking him if it was really excessive for me to buy another whisk exactly like my favorite orange one (apparently I never had this conversation with him while I was on my "different-colored enamel colanders" kick), and he assured me that since I'd received the gift card for free, that, no, it was not excessive and that I should buy what I want. 

I love it when Matt encourages me to be frivilous.  I also love it when he grates the parmesan cheese.

What about you?  Are you a HomeGoods shopper, or does it stress you out?

Score!

You know how Target is my home away from home?  It's kind of sad, really.  It's just that Target is less than five minutes from our house, and it's nice, and clean, and if I have to get something small (paper towels, cough drops, a new pack of Pilot Precise V Rolling Ball pens), I opt to go there instead of the nearby grocery store, the one that makes me more of a misanthrope with each visit.  So, in short, Target keeps me from hating people.

And when I go to Target, because I have the luxury of time at this point in my life, I'll put that one necessary item in the cart and walk around the entire store looking for a good deal, usually whilst talking on the phone.  My friends and family must think that I actually live in Target, like Natalie Portman lived in a Wal-Mart in that awful movie that I watched once. 

For the last week and a half, every time I was at Target, I'd walk through the purse section, and look at this bag.  I am usually not a fan of bigger purses, but lately I've been carrying my camera around a lot and I needed more space.  And I liked how this one had all of the compartments and looked all weathered.  It was like I could carry this purse and also ride a motorcycle.

But it was $35, which is, in my opinion, way too much to spend for a Target purse.  But then it went on clearance for $25, which is, in my opinion, still way too much to spend for a Target purse. 

So instead of just buying the purse, I'd put it in my cart, walk around the entire store staring at it and debating the purchase.  I'd run the tag under one of the price scanners to see if there was some kind of miraculous price reduction, and then when there wasn't I'd put it back where I'd found it.

I was beginning to get nervous, though, because this was the only one of its kind at the store.  I was playing fast and loose.

So on Thursday, while walking around and talking to Chloe on the phone, I decided to be cunning and to hide the purse behind a bunch of other purses and turn the tag around so that another shopper might not notice the red clearance tag.  I think Chloe thought I was crazy.  I figured that I would wait until Tuesday (when our Target does all of their markdowns, or so I've been told), and then I'd go back (or I'd be there anyway) and see if the purse was still there and if the price had gone down.  It was farfetched, sure, but I had nothing to lose.

But then Saturday I was at Target again because we were getting low on dishwasher detergent.  I went back to the purse, put it in my cart, and walked around the store talking to Matt's mom and looking at it.  At this point I was about to cave and just pay the $25 for the bag since I was obsessing over it so.

I ran the tag under one of the price scanners just to see. 

$8.74!

Who's the big winner? 

So now I have a fancy brown fake leather purse from Target.  And tonight I wore a denim jacket. 

Tomorrow I'll be buying a motorcycle.

Steak Marinated in Soy, Ginger and Lime with Red Onion Toasts

So, this is one of the recipes we tried for Operation: Cook New Stuff.  It's from Jonathan Waxman's cookbook, A Great American Cook: Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential American Chefs.  When we watched Top Chef Masters this summer, Waxman was always our favorite, and it seemed that his cooking style would suit us well.  He was the simple guy.

Simple compared to the other Top Chef Masters.  (Kind of like how Maci is the "smart one" on Teen Mom.)  In the cookbook, Waxman explains that this recipe--a recipe that is far more involved and sophisticated than anything we ever make--is his take on fast food.  Now, our take on fast food is something like a spicy chicken go-wrap from Wendy's.  Or if we want to get fancy with our take on fast food we'll go to Chick-Fil-A and get a deluxe spicy chicken sandwich.  This recipe: not fast food.  But it's delicious and really fun to make, so we can give ol' Waxman a pass on that one.

Another perk about this recipe is that it uses relatively simple and inexpensive ingredients.  For the entire meal, we probably spent $15 (for four servings).  Even more exciting was that we learned where the broiler is on our oven.  (Yeah, we've lived here for three years and always wondered why that drawer that most people use for pots and pans would get so hot.  Sometimes I can't believe that the State of Georgia lets me teach children.) 

We intentionally cooked this meal last night because last night was Top Chef night, so it allowed us to eat amazing food and feel fancy.  And fancy we felt!** If you have a chance, or if you're trying to impress somebody, make this steak.  (Also, my picture doesn't even come close to doing it justice.  Those purpley things are the shallots that had been simmering in red wine and butter--ugly but awesome.  And those little red onion toasts?  Well, I could eat about a million and a half of those.) 

Jonathan Waxman's Steak Marinated with Soy, Ginger and Lime with Red Onion Toasts

Ingredients


2 pounds skirt or hanger steak
1 2-inch piece fresh ginger
1 lime
1⁄4 cup soy sauce
3 garlic cloves
1 cup dry red wine
3 shallots
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 red onion
4 slices sourdough bread
 
Preparation


Pat the steak dry with paper towels and place it in a nonreactive baking pan.

Peel and grate the ginger. Juice the lime. In a small bowl, mix the ginger with the lime juice and soy sauce. Smash 2 of the garlic cloves and add them to the marinade. Pour the mixture over the steak, cover, and marinate in the refrigerator for 2 hours.

Remove the steak from the marinade and place on a platter. Discard the garlic and ginger and reserve the marinade.

Bring the red wine to a boil in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. Chop the shallots and add them to the wine. Boil to reduce the wine to 1/4 cup. Stir in the butter and salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Meanwhile, heat the broiler. Slice the onion into 1/4-inch-thick rounds and place on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with the reserved marinade and broil the onion until tender and dark brown, about 10 minutes; be careful not to burn it. Transfer to a plate and set aside. Leave the broiler on.

Place the steak on the broiler pan and broil, turning once, just until medium-rare, about 4 minutes per side. Transfer to a cutting board and cover loosely to keep warm.


Toast the bread on both sides under the broiler.

Meanwhile, reheat the sauce over low heat. Split the remaining garlic clove in half and rub the slices of toast with the garlic. Place a slice of toast on each plate. Divide the onion among the toasts. Slice the steak and place on the plates. Top the steak with the red wine sauce and serve.

4 servings

**I should note, too, that it was Matt who did most of the work cooking this meal, mostly because I am incapable of following directions and he is so anal about following directions that he measures the water and uses a timer when he makes ramen noodles.  I chopped, he cooked.

Recycling

Almost two weeks ago, Cassie brought me this pretty bouquet of flowers (in JMU colors!). 

They lasted for a pretty long time, but then a few of them were starting to bite it.  I'm cheap, though, and managed to take that one big beautiful bouquet and turn it into three smaller ones.

They make me really happy. 

(I'm especially enamored with the sunflowers, which take me back to about 1994, when I loved anything and everything sunflowers, and wanted to do my entire room in sunflower yellow and hunter green and I even had an ankle-length spaghetti-strap dress with sunflowers on it that I wore over a little white baby tee.  Oh, the '90s. . .such a simple and hideous time.)

True Love

Hello, you perfect trouser, you.

If you're in the market for some fantastic black (or gray or navy pinstripe) pants for school or work or just plain ol' hookin' (actually, you shouldn't be hookin' at all, and if you are hookin', this seems to be more appropriate than nice, sensible trousers), then scoot yourself down to your local Gap and pick yourself up a pair of these babies.

Also, Gap's been giving out these 40% off a single item on Wednesdays coupons, so get one of those, and then go on Wednesday and get the perfect trousers for a more perfect price. 

Oh, and in case you were wondering (yeah, like you were wondering), that is not my body in those pictures.  Girls don't get to looking like that by eating hot dogs four days in a row.  Seriously.  I've eaten at least one hot dog every day since Monday.  It's disgusting.  And delicious.  But more disgusting.

Multitasking

Remember when I found and bought my dream shoes last week?  Well, there was a minor hiccup.  See, I wear a size 8.5, and the shoes were only available in an 8 or a 9.5.  I decided to go the half size down, since the heels were 3.5 inches and I didn't want to be unstable when walking around.  I even went and found another pair of peep toe slingbacks that were the same brand and tried those on to see if my toes could handle a smaller size.  My toes said that, yes, they could handle the smaller size.  My brain said that the smaller size would mean we were putting safety first, since I would be so much more stable.  (Let go of these pretty green shoes last year because I felt like I would fall down when I wore them.) 

I'll tell you one thing.  My toes and my brain are leading me on a path to destruction!

When the shoes arrived I wore them around the house to break them in.  And it was during that time (perhaps while I was wearing them whilst vacuuming?--how very 1950's!) that I realized that if I wanted to both wear these shoes and continue to have toes, I would need to find a way to stretch them out.

After a little bit of research on the interwebs, I decided to go with my favorite plan, filling the shoes with ziploc bags of water and putting them in the freezer.  The idea was that the water would expand when frozen, and it would stretch out my shoes.  Well, I couldn't even figure out how to make that happen.  Matt walked into the kitchen while I was trying to shove a freezer bag of water into these peep toe slingbacks, and just shook his head and walked away. 

And then, a stroke of brilliance.

Multitasking.

And it seems to be working!  I mean, is Matt really annoyed every time he goes to change the channel?  Yes.  But is it hilarious to watch Matt change the channel while holding a pretty shoe?  Hell yes. 

Vacation: The Food

I don't even know where to begin in explaining just how wonderful our recent vacation was.  For starters, I need to give props to Matt's parents, who have created an escape that's a perfect balance between fun and relaxing.  While at the lake, one is never bored and never stressed.

Their house is so accommodating, too.  There are tons of beach towels, a well-stocked kitchen, and comfortable beds.  And last year they built a boat house that sports a 16-foot wide dock, a perfect place to relax, to play, and to drink Diet A&W root beer.  We've never had a bad time there.  Hell, we've never had a bad day there.

This year we invited Hugh and Cassie to join us for a few days, and they brought along their two furry children, Henry the Cat and Fletcher the Dog.

I might have to do a few posts about our glorious four days at Lake Gaston. 

Let's start with the food.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that by inviting Cassie and Hugh to join us, I'd be spoiled by their cooking during the entire trip.  And we were!  There was spaghetti carbonara, burgers, steak, more steak, and BBQ chicken pizza.

You'd have to hit up Cassie to find the recipes for the carbonara and the pizza, but let me tell you about the steak.

We'd been gushing about Fresh Market steaks to Matt's parents for years, and wanted them to share in the experience.  So on Wednesday, before heading out of town, I stopped by Fresh Market to pick up two filets for the 'rents, and four ribeyes for the rest of us.  When I got there, I saw that beef tenderloin was on sale for $10/pound.  Hmph?  The filets themselves were $18/pound and the ribeyes were $15/pound.  While I'd walked into the store prepared to drop some cash on steaks, I couldn't resist the idea of having six pounds of filet for about half the cost.  (The FM butcher assured me that it was the same meat.)

So we drove up to Lake Gaston with a cow in tow.

Seriously.

And then we put Hugh on butchering detail, figuring that his first year of med school would have honed his already impressive knife skills.

He researched everything there was to know about beef tenderloin, cut out some amazing filets for our dinner, set aside the head steak (this was a teachable moment, you see) for the next day's lunch (steak sandwiches!), and even reserved a delicious fatty piece for dog steak. (Our dogs are very, very spoiled.)

Now, when it came to actually cooking the steak, the boys employed our favorite steak-cooking method.  It was slightly different, though, because they cooked the steaks on skillets on the grill.  The skillets got so hot that they melted the little pot holders that go on the handles!

Dog steak.

Accompanying the steak were grilled asparagus, grilled onions, twice-baked potatoes, caesar salad, and then, for dessert, Thomas Jefferson's Famous Vanilla Ice Cream!

I couldn't get over how delicious this meal was.  And I couldn't get over the fact that for $60, we fed AMAZING filets to six adults, for two meals.  Oh, and two dogs.  Never forget about dog steak.

That's cheaper than Wendy's!!

Take Me Out to the Ball Game!

On Monday, Matt and I spent our evening watching a Sand Gnats game at Historic Grayson Stadium.  For those of you who don't know, the Sand Gnats are Savannah's minor league baseball team, and they're a feeder team for the Mets, which makes Matt happy.  Historic Grayson Stadium is the oldest minor league stadium in the country, and a bunch of old famous players like Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson played there, which means that it's important.

 

And in case you don't know what a sand gnat is, well, it's a gnat that will bite the shit out of you.  They're evil, but a pretty cool name for a team.  The mascot used to be awesome, when it was Gnic the Gnat, but then Gnic was scaring all of the little kids, so they changed the mascot to Gnate the Gnat, and Gnate is lame.  Matt always talks about how he wants Gnic to come back, and to beat Gnate to a bloody pulp on the pitcher's mound.  I'm sure that wouldn't scare children.

 

Gnic:

 

[source]

 

And Gnate:

[source]

 

See what I mean?  Don't you kind of want to punch Gnate in the face?

 

The stadium is part of Daffin Park, the badass park that's only blocks away from our house.  Daffin is where Mitch and I go for our walk/jogs (something that needs to start happening again soon, lest my skin explode because it can no longer hold in all the fat), and it's one of those places that makes me happy to be living in Savannah. 

 

So, on Monday we made the trek to the stadium, in 97 degree heat.  I had a stroke of brilliance (one that may or may not have saved my life) when I decided to wet two wash cloths and put them in a big ziploc bag of ice.  Monday was one of the hottest nights that has ever happened in the history of the world.  I felt like my body might, at any moment, just burst into flames.  So it was nice to pull out an iced-down washcloth and pat my sweaty, disgusting face.

 

One of the reasons we'd decided to go on Monday was because the stadium is having a Dollar Mondays promotion, which meant that admission, hot dogs, small sodas, and Gnatty Light beers were all $1 each.  So the night was great fun, and super cheap to boot!  Three cheers for fun and cheap!

 

Some highlights:

• A little girl sang a terrible rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner."  Now, I love this song as much as the next patriot (I started to love it even more when I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald is a direct descendent of Francis Scott Key--what a family of writers!), and I tear up when I'm standing there with my hand on my heart.  I just wish that the singers of the anthem would lay off of the rifts.  "And the roo--ahh-aahhh--keeh-eeets reee-ahh-addd glah-aire."  Seriously.  It's a pretty song the way it is, and we don't need the star of the high school chorus fucking it up.
• Heckler guy.  Matt's going to tell you more about him.

• Random proposal between innings.  Kind of cute, but I think I'd have killed Matt if he'd proposed to me during a minor leage baseball game on a Dollar Monday.

Anyway, it was a hellafun night, and we laughed and joked and I provided my really insightful commentary about sports (being a sportscaster is basically my backup job) like "Run faster all the way around!" and "You know what the Sand Gnats are good at?  Throwing and catching."  Turns out that they're also good at the hitting, because they won that night, and they're currently in first place in their division, or in the world, or something.  Go Gnats!

So if you're in Savannah, don't forget to go to a few games this summer.  If you're not, come visit us and we'll take you.  The guest room awaits.