I designed and illustrated an album cover!
It’s been printed and pressed, and the band – a little outfit cleverly named Provincial Parks – is having a party to celebrate – so you should be there. I will be there, anyways. I would like a copy of my work – and the music inside it’s pretty awesome too (sort of a sparkly-shiny indie rock with some poppy undertones) so I’m excited about getting a copy of that as well.
Typography + Midcentury Design + Food= One of my favourite things ever.
Also, gastrotypographicalassemblage is a pretty awesome word.
More info here.
A few more things I’d like to share:
I tend to swoon over adorable, high-end childrens magazines. This one is free and on the internet, so I don’t have to feel weird about paying money for a magazine about something I don’t have (yet).
And really, I would wear every last outfit in there if they made it adult sizes. There is some gorgeous, swoon-worthy stuff. Check it out.
It’s a pumpkiny season, and there is a bumper crop of squashes out there to be scooped up at discounted prices, so a New York Times collection of pumpkin based recipes is pretty timely. Plus, pumpkins are delicous.
Ombre is pretty. Crafts are fun. These pretty and fun ombre crafts live in that unique Martha Stewart universe where crafty projects end up looking high end, and elegant. You know, as opposed our own dimension where the words “Crafty” and “Elegant” are often mutually exclusive.
Diagnose your font use. Figure out what your typography choices say about you (I like to dance on the ceiling, it turns out).
Karen over at Say It With Pie has long sung the praises of these hand made, artisinal undies. They went on sale, so I finally broke down and bought a set – a days of the weeks set, to be specific – because who doesn’t love an adorable days of the weeks set of underwear? And they’re typographic underwear, no less! Monday is Cooper Black!
Karen says, on top of being really cute, they last forever, and are super comfy. So far I’ve already found the latter to be inordinately true. These things are heaven. Plus, I am strongly behind any operation that simply does not believe in thongs. Sing it, sister.
I’m finding myself completely obsessed with blogs from Portland, and as such, going hiking. The state seems absolutely awash in gorgeous natural wonders, and delightful parks around every corner.
So this weekend, I decided, enough wishing and dreaming I lived halfway across the world, we were going to find the nearest, most picturesque place to go hiking, and then do so. There had to be someplace to go hiking that wasn’t a hundred miles away, right?
I remembered, growing up in Rexdale (yes really) that we often made field trips to the Humber Arboretum, and that it was gorgeous. Plus, who doesn’t love an Arboretum? It’s a museum of trees. An awesome word really, old-timey in the best possible way.
So we packed up a little picnic containing some seasonal treats (the last of my heirloom tomatoes chopped up in a cous-cous salad, some pesto-mayo made from my basil plant before the frost hit it in a yummy sandwich, and of course some of my pumpkin pie squares) and drove up. The arboretum isn’t exactly in our neighborhood, but it’s easy to get to, right off the highway.
It’s a pretty awesome place, especially considering it’s absolutely surrounded by urban sprawl – you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. We even got a little lost at one point – and Liam sort of lost his footing in a swampy area (thankfully we were a few hours in at that point, so we were about ready to go home anyways).
It was a wonderful choice, and totally fulfilled my need to partake in the autumnal splendor. I’m kinda considering investing in hiking boots. I might want to keep doing this.
We’ve been celebrating fall pretty hard-core around here. We even tried to go apple picking this weekend, but it turned out the harvest is over, so we went hiking instead. We also attended a squash sampling party (I liked the turban squash, and the butternut pie the best – yum!). For the party, we brought a little squash-based creation of my own – pumpkin pie squares.
The recipe came about from trying to perfect a recipe for pumpkin bread. The first recipe I tried was dry and flavourless. So I played around until I came up with this recipe – more of a dense, moist square then a bread really.
I also felt the dark chocolate most pumpkin based recipes (which seem to be very trendy these days) call for would be so overwhelming and heavy for the delicate, spicy pumpkin flavour. So I switched dark chocolate chips for white chocolate ones – which was really a genius move, if I do say so myself. The little gooey bits of creamy white chocolate tasted just like tiny bites of whipped cream, mixed into pumpkin pie.
It’s all the flavours of pumpkin pie, in a much more portable square form!
So portable, you could take these squares on a picnic (like we did on our hike), or pack them with your lunch. Just try doing that with a slice of pie!
pumpkin pie squares
This might just become a thing.
Which is a method of getting really neat, old-fashioned, artfully flawed images using a digital camera – along with a old twin lens reflex cameras’ viewfinder. I’ve always loved the way these shots looked, I had no idea producing them was so easy. If this works with my little Canon point and shoot (which it should – it has a pretty awesome macro setting), I’m totally gonna start searching for an old twin lens camera when I thrift.
I may or may not have wasted a good half an hour on this cute little game.
Just a new blog find filled with pretty-pretty things of all varieties. The kind of pretty that inspires rampant and uncontrollable urges to be materialist. But so do many of the pretty-pretty blogs I read. Sigh. It might be time take a break from reading those for a little while. Just until I stop hemorrhaging money.
A retro-revival nineteen-thirties-style carnival – complete with concessions, candy apples, carousel, ferris wheel, and circus show. I was very sad when I found out I missed this entirely this summer. There’s always next summer though.
We had some on the weekend. They were delicious – totally the best hot-dogs I’ve ever had (although, it should be said that they don’t really resemble traditional hot dogs all that closely, so consider yourself forewarned). They are little artisinal sausages (that taste a bit like teensy fresh salamis) accompanied by one of four (locally sourced) cheeses and a one of a dozen sauces (cooked up individually by the best chefs in the city using fresh, local ingredients). A lot of internet types seem to be upset that portions are small, and the concept pretentious. I would tell them that if they want street meat, it’s readily available. This is not street meat, it’s a culinary novelty (and a cheap one at that – certainly the cheapest way to have lunch made by Jamie Kennedy – via his 25 cent sauce offering). If you’re a foodie, you’ll love it. If you’re more of a steak and potatoes kinda person, feel free to steer clear. I, for one, found it delicious and delightful.
A few recent finds:
You know my allegiance to noodles. Second only to my loyalty to dumplings. You can pry carbohydrates away from my cold, dead hands.
Pretty up my alley, don’t you think?
A great sounding mineral makeup company. Vegan, enviromentally friendly, super inexpensive, safe for sensitive skin, tons of colours, cute packaging… Need I say more? Oh, ok then, there are free samples to be had (free! I know!). Go. Run. Get some.
An amazing sounding diner cooking hardcore American comfort foods – but always with a twist. There are over 900 menu items! This place sounds like priority number one for when we finally make it to NYC. The cookbook sounds amazing too.
I’ve been looking for a cute bag for a long time, and I’ve finally narrowed it down to a Moop duffel in black. The bag is sturdy, has lots of pockets and is water resistant, the companies run by an awesome lady, and everything is environmentally friendly, handmade and designed from scratch. What can’t you find on Etsy?
The other day I was in the market, and was in awe of all the beautiful, brightly coloured autumnal produce. This season is wondrous.
In particular, I found some lanky Japanese eggplant, along with some long and pointy red sweet peppers, and thought immediately of my pile of yellow zucchini from the garden sitting on my credenza at home.
“Ratatouille!” I thought to myself.
So it came to pass, and it was delicious, and beautiful – as you can see – just as the little chef intended.
It was a good respite from all my friends who have been making visits to Paris. It’ll be a while yet before I’m able to go myself, so baking this in my little french Le Creuset casserole dish soothed my jealousy a little, and brought a little of France to me.
Blame my meat and potatoes upbringing (where all but the frozen vegetable was variation on a monochromatic theme), but food that looks likes like this, with that pinwheel of gorgeous saturated colour, it just kills me.
(BTW I used the Smitten Kitchen recipe, in case you were wondering – just used ony 1 colour of zucchini, since that was all I had, and sprinkled some julienned purple basil over the top – for an even bigger punch of colour. It was plenty delicious, like most of her recipes).
It was our anniversary on the weekend, and we had a splendid day.
Rather than unnecessarily blow a wad of cash on fancy dinners and shows and things (as we sometimes do) we decided to have the nicest day around the neighborhood for under 100 dollars, and save up for a vacation later on instead. And as a result, I think we had one of the nicest days we’ve ever had.
For lunch we wandered around the Distillery.
We bought a coronation chicken sandwich and a tarragon chicken pot pie from the Brick Street Bakery. Both were astoundingly (astoundingly!) good. I am quickly becoming very fond of the rather retro combo of apricots, curry, cream and poultry that is Coronation Chicken. My royalty loving grandmother would no doubt approve, heartily. The pie was stuffed with juicy, spicy meat, and surrounded by pretty much the best crust I’ve ever had on a savoury pie. I am not a huge crust fan, but this crust made the pie. Perfectly flaky and crumbly and moist.
After some gallery browsing, we made our way to Soma where we had some gelato (a scoop each of: sour cream and lemon; raspberry, lemon and black pepper; and pistachio – all were dreamy) and some mayan hot chocolate. Soma has the best gelato and chocolate in town. It just does.
Then for dinner we went to a little restaurant down the street called Batifole. I had heard nothing but good things about it, namely that it is the best approximation of French bistro cooking in the whole city, and that it was astoundingly reasonably priced. Both were true. It was some of the best food I’ve ever had.
When we sat down we got bread accompanied by a little pat of butter sprinkled with grey salt – and it was some of the best bread I’ve ever had. I asked if they baked it themselves, and they said they had it made for them by the Brick Bakery. Of course they did. It’s the best bakery in town, it seems.
We started off with a brule of pate. Yep, that’s right, like a creme brule, in a little pot topped with a layer of crunchy caramel – but inside was chicken livers. For a creme brule addict like me it was a revelation.
For our mains, Liam had a blanchette de veau – a little rare veal steak covered in a calvados, apples and cream sauce. It was as wonderful as it sounds. I had a cassoulet. It was 3 kinds of meat (duck confit, sausage and gorgeous thick hunks of bacon) swimming in gorgeous melted pools of fat. I have never willingly ingested so much cholesterol in my life, but it was wonderful.
With our mains we got a little basket of frites with tarragon mayonnaise. They were perfection – I can not emphasize this enough – the best fries I’ve ever had, hands down. A rough crispiness on the outside, perfectly salted, meltingly soft on the inside. Perfection.
We didn’t get to desert. We would have liked to, but I was much too full of wonderful fats.
So yeah. Pretty much the best food day ever.
Best part is, since none of it was prohibitively expensive we can do it all again sometime.
Christine on tweets for 2010-01-25
the Sis on christmas ready
kickpleat on a chicken (and rice) in every pot Christine on married kickpleat on married