Pillow Madness

My mom gave me a sewing machine for my birthday last year, but I didn't have any room to set it up in our jam-packed apartment. It sat sadly in its box for almost a year while I dreamt of a simple hand-sewn wardrobe and no trips to H&M and Old Navy ever, ever again. 

Finally, in my studio in our new home, my dream could become a reality! I put myself to work with something simple, since it had been about 20 years since I'd touched a sewing machine - sewing curtains for the many, many un-shuttered windows in our house.  Next thing I knew, I had been bitten by the sewing bug, HARD.

Besides curtains, I've made several basic garments at this point (Lotta Jansdotter's book has been a godsend!). But this week I finally got round to a problem in my living room: a distinct lack of squish.



When we moved, I scoured all the local antique and thrift stores, and found a collection of living room furniture that fills me with delight every morning when I come downstairs. A pink wing-back chair, a dark blue fainting couch (I have ALWAYS wanted a fainting couch!) and a fabulous chartreuse squared-off sofa. They all have dark wood accents which pull them together, and they are all somewhat understuffed (or, in the case of the squared sofa, completely uncontoured to the human form). They scream for pillows. As of this week, I had finally collected enough pillow forms and somewhat complimentary fabrics to make my dream a reality.

I used this envelope pillowcase tutorial, which was incredibly simple and helpful. It took me only a few hours over two days to churn out what feels like a very excessive amount of pillows!

I didn't make the Zac pillow - it was a gift from an understanding friend!

I had so much fun making pillows that I'm considering starting my own pillow empire. As good a way as any to make my millions, right?

SQUISHINESS FOR ALL.

New Year

I love the turnover of the year.  A constant in my childhood was my parents' raucous neighborhood New Year's Eve party, an annual bacchanal that, of course, became tamer with every year I grew closer to drinking age. As a kid, the night was a rare occasion where my brother, sister, best friends and I got to roam wild - navigating the strangely loud and happy adults all around us, venturing down to our basement to play bumper pool or get a chance at my dad's dartboard, which was shut up for the rest of the year. I was always vaguely aware that the grown-ups around me were drunk (at least), but I don't think it ever occurred to us to try to sneak alcohol. 

The best part of the night was always when it devolved (or evolved?) into music. Neither of my parents are particularly musical, but almost all of their friends are. By midnight there were always at least eight people, and often more like 15, gathered around my great-grandmother's practice piano, producing what I still consider the best live music I've ever heard. There were two lynchpins - a brilliant pianist and an amazing singer/guitarist - and then a hodgepodge of other players: several more guitars, maracas, a washboard tie, and on lucky years, a mandolin.

I've spent almost all my 30 New Years Eve's in this fashion: sitting on my parents' stairs, listening to their friends fill the house with the Beatles, the Traveling Wilburys, the Grateful Dead. Every year I reflect on the passage of time and the accordion effect that happens when you have an annual moment of synchronicity. I can compare this December 31st effortlessly to the one in 1999, because I'm sitting in the same place, having almost the same experience - and wow, how much I have changed.

I got married last year, and all the people singing around the piano were there. So was my husband, of course, and this was the first year that he also sat next to me on the stairs and heard the music play. I don't think he quite got it- and it's possible that the music isn't that good, that the piano won't stay in tune, that the singers keep forgetting the lyrics - this is all true. I tried to videotape the performance once, and the playback just wasn't the same. It's the moment, and it's me. It has to be enjoyed and then savored - hopefully just until next year. But who knows? Every year, I feel so lucky to be back there, to have one more chance. 

I didn't mean for this to get so melancholy! I've been feeling so inspired lately to DO things. I've started painting again - I've been getting the house in order - I'm on the second heel of my first post-holiday socks. 

I think it will be a good year.

Butternut Squash Winter Salad

I'm heading out of town for the holidays, which is a great excuse to clean out my fridge. I won't describe the horrors I encountered therein, but they were many and disgusting. On the upside, I realized that I had all the ingredients for this delicious salad, which my mom introduced me to last winter. 

Perfect Butternut Squash and Arugula Salad

(with pomegranate seeds and feta!)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 

Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil and drizzle with olive oil. 

Peel and slice one butternut squash into uniform chunks. I like to peel the squash while it's whole with a sharp knife, but that might be because my vegetable peeler is wimpy.  Toss the chunks in the olive oil on the baking sheet.

In a small bowl, mix a few glugs of maple syrup (about 2 Tb) with a few shakes of cumin. Brush mixture over the butternut squash pieces and place baking sheet in oven.

After 10 minutes, take out the squash, flip the pieces, and brush them again. Bake for another 10 minutes, or until soft and starting to caramelize.

While squash cooks, wash arugula (I always skip this because I am lazy/Trader Joe's arugula seems pretty clean) and arrange on a serving platter. Crumble as much feta cheese as you want over the arugula. Sprinkle with pomegranate seeds or dried cranberries.*

When squash is cooked, arrange the pieces over the arugula. 

Drizzle with your dressing of choice and dig in! (I ALWAYS use Cardini's because

 it is the only dressing that matters, but there are several recipes floating around the internet for homemade vinaigrettes and such!)

*note: I have always used cranberries in this recipe, but I happened to buy a cheap pomegranate and thought I'd try it. It was delicious! I was excited to try a trick I read in an Ottolenghi cookbook: apparently if you whack the back of the pomegranate with a wooden spoon, the seeds will fall right out! Spoiler alert: this did not work. Maybe I wasn't whacking hard enough. I picked them out with my fingers, pretending to be Persephone the whole time, of course.

I don't even want to admit how much I eat this salad. I struggle through non-winter-squash months. If it wasn't for summer tomatoes, I don't know what I'd do!

Culinary Judaism

In college I trained myself to stay awake until midnight, at least, but I'm usually in bed soon after, and I have a blessed ability to fall asleep quickly and easily. I never realized what a gift this was until I met my husband, who routinely stays up until 3 or 4 in the morning and then can't sleep once he forces himself to get in bed. Sometimes, during those creepy dark hours when he's the only one awake, kept company only by our Tom Servo and Crow robots, he gets weird cravings.

Yesterday at the grocery store, he confessed that the night before, he had been tormented by visions of matzoh ball soup. That was all I needed to hear to go into full-blown culinary jew mode.

I'm technically Jewish on my mother's side, but I'm about as secular as you can get. I identify strongly with my heritage on a cultural level, but I've only been inside a synagogue to attend a funeral, and when my family connects with our practicing relatives to celebrate Passover Seder, I usually embarrassingly mispronounce something like charoses. I didn't even remember to light Hanukah candles this year! 

The food, though? I've got that covered. (Not gefilte fish. Are you crazy?) When it comes to the basics, I lean pretty heavily on Smitten Kitchen and her delicious latke recipe. I double it because 12? That's not enough. I also use her matzoh ball recipe for the balls themselves, which are always deliciously fluffy (I double those, too). But I've never pulled it together to make my own chicken stock - I'm still embarrassingly squeamish around raw chicken carcasses. I'll get over it someday! 

This time, I hopped over to another recipe - Orangette's simple chicken soup. I made this recipe as written a few weeks ago (I even found a chayote, which I'd never heard of, in our southern Maine Hannaford's!) and it was really, really good. I liked the unfinicky simplicity of throwing the chicken pieces right into the pot and cooking them with the soup, so I borrowed that technique here.

Julia's Assemblage Matzoh ball soup:

Follow instructions to make Smitten Kitchen's matzoh ball batter. Refrigerate for half an hour while getting the stock on the stove. Put a separate pot of water on to boil to cook the balls.

Put skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs in a soup pot (I used 4 thighs). Cover with chicken stock, making sure chicken is covered by several inches (think about how much soup you want in the end, and remember that the volume of chicken will be reduced when you remove the bones). I use Better than Bouillon.

While stock is heating, peel and slice 2-3 carrots and 2 stalks of celery. 

Bring stock to a boil, then reduce to simmer. Add carrots and celery. Simmer for 40 minutes, skimming off scum and foam that come to the surface.

Once the soup is simmering, pull out the refrigerated matzoh batter. Form balls as directed by Smitten Kitchen and drop into the bubbling pot (gently!). They should be done cooking at the same time as your soup.

After 40 minutes, pull out chicken. Shred meat, discarding the gross bones and skin. Add meat back to pot. At this point, if you like noodles in your matzoh ball soup, add them! (wide egg noodles are best!)

Cook until noodles are done, about 8-10 minutes. 
Your matzoh balls should be done now, too.

Ladle in matzoh balls. DEVOUR.

Forgive the cell phone picture - we were too hungry to be elegant!

I made my latkes first, because they're easy to keep warm in the oven. Eaten with sour cream and applesauce in front of the Democratic Debate - heaven! And this morning I had a few more, topped with Molly Wizenberg's seven-minute egg. It doesn't get better than that.

Drop Stitch Cowl

I've decided that since my blog is super-secret and no one knows it exists, no harm will be done by posting some of the holiday projects I'm excited about! 

On our honeymoon this summer, my husband and I went to Wales. In the spirit of transparency, one of the main draws for me was the promise of sheep, wool, and spinning. And sheep we saw!

We also saw a lot of spinning, although it was mainly of the mechanized variety - Wales is speckled with historical textile factories. I left Will in the car more than once to dive into a world of depressing history! (the textile industry was routinely not great to women.) I would love to do a longer post later on the factories I saw. 

Yarn, though, was surprisingly scarce, and the few shops I found were stocked with lots of novelty and acrylic yarns in baby colors. I have nothing against synthetic yarn, but I was hoping that the absurd density of sheep would translate into more delicious stuff! Luckily, we spent a few nights in the town of Dolgellau. The town center is a warren of old stone buildings and cobblestone streets. It's the most fairytale, semi-bizarre place I've ever been. Every building is a little old factory! 

Tucked along one of those narrow, twisty streets was a little yarn shop called Knit One. And hidden in that yarn shop was the yarn I was looking for! Welsh-made, 100% wool, soft… and the most WACKY shades of neon I had ever seen. I bought two skeins. 

So I've had this awesome art yarn in my stash since June, and I've been afraid to touch it! It was TOO BEAUTIFUL, too full of feelings, and also I don't have much experience with bulky yarn. But then I realized I wanted to make something special for my mom this Christmas! She elevated mom-hood to an art form this year - she was my wedding planner extraordinaire, and on top of that reached new heights in her own textile art (she's a fabric dyer and art quilter, though those words hardly articulate what she creates). 

I started and frogged many, many different patterns. I knew I had to do a cowl based on my yardage, but I had trouble finding a pattern that would show off the yarn to its best advantage. The lucky combination was size 15 needles and this drop stitch cowl pattern. It was easy, fast (REALLY fast after months of nothing but sock knitting!) and I love how it turned out! The long dropped stitches were ideal for showing off the variegated weight of the yarn.  It's squishy and neon and I don't want to give it away! But I will, because I love my mom!

It is a REALLY weird feeling jumping from size 1 needles to size 15. It's like having stupid toddler hands.

Holiday

I've been incredibly industrious and crafty lately, but unfortunately all the yarn fruits of my labor must remain hidden for the time being, as they're gifts for people I love. Even though no one knows this blog actually exists, it still seems like tempting fate to toss up pictures!

I will say that everyone should go to Ravelry and drop $5 on this Feminist Killjoy hat. It's amazing. I can't wait to see it on the recipient's head, and I'm already planning to make another for myself. (I would recommend adding some repeats at the brim and the crown - the prototype I made was pretty shallow.)

I made cassoulet last night. It's one of my all-time favorite dishes (probably because it's replete with duck, for which I have an all-consuming passion) but I had long considered it way too complex for home-cooking. This recipe, which I found through David Lebovitz, convinced me otherwise. I couldn't even track down duck fat (and this in a city with a RESTAURANT called Duckfat!) and it was still the MOST delicious thing that has ever come out of my kitchen. I'm heating leftovers for breakfast as we speak. I have a lot of leftovers because my husband refuses to eat beans. MORE FOR ME.

TRANSITION

Have you all seen Holiday? The third-best-well-known Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant team-up is less aggressively brilliant than their most famous outing, The Philadelphia Story, and less bonkers than the almost exhausting Bringing up Baby.  It's absolutely wonderful.

First of all, this poster is quite misleading! Million dollars aside… one of the most fun things about this movie is that, against type, Cary Grant is playing something close to what he actually was - a working-class guy. (A working class guy who can do back-handsprings, which former acrobat Grant actually did!) He's worked his way up with a flair for business, and is on the verge of making that promised million, but Johnny Case is not the cultured man-about-town that we're so used to seeing Grant excel at. When we meet him, he's arriving at his fiancé's house for the first time. He assumes that she's a maid in the giant mansion, and is both delighted and weirded out when he realizes that she's a daughter of a household with a full staff and an elevator. 

It's a very small story, really - a couple gets engaged and then finds out if they actually like each other. But there are so many layers, mainly expressed through the diverse characters. Besides Grant, you've got Edward Everett Horton as his best friend, a middle-class professor (it's quite fun to see Horton in a non-bumbling role!). Lew Ayres is completely heartbreaking as the baby brother of the millionaire family, who stumbles about in a drunken stupor to avoid his reality as a disappointment to his authoritarian father. And then, of course, there's Katharine Hepburn as the black sheep of the family. 

It's funny to look back on, given that Hepburn is the Meryl Streep of Hollywood's golden age, but in 1938 she was still famously considered "box office poison." The label would not be rescinded until 1940's The Philadelphia Story, where she sent up her icy, snobbish persona to great effect. Hepburn had, of course, an undeniable personality that stamped itself on every role she played. Her authoritative bearing, her exaggerated transatlantic accent, her high cheekbones - she was arrogant! Many people found it hard to swallow. In retrospect, she is a force of nature. 

She struggled to escape the inescapable. In 1937's Stage Door, she played a rich girl who wants to act and assumes it's easy. It's an unlikeable role, not helped by the fact that in the end she achieves her goal through the death of the movie's sweetest character! In 1938, the same year as Holiday, she played against type in Bringing Up Baby, which is now seen as a perfect example of screwball comedy. It was a huge critical and commercial failure at the time. Personally, it's not one of my favorites - Hepburn is brilliant, but I find her chattering character exhausting! 

So she had tried two extremes - playing her persona to the hilt, and tossing it aside completely. In Holiday she did something subtler. Her character is to the manor born, but dissatisfied with her privilege. She's a prisoner in a golden cage. It could come off as "poor little rich girl" but instead it works - maybe because Hepburn felt herself to be in a similar trap.

In 1938, America was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, which wouldn't entirely fade until war production ramped up a few years later. It was perhaps a daring choice to make a movie about unhappy rich people. Not that there weren't movies about the rich - the depression years were filled with escapist fantasies (several of the Fred and Ginger movies come to mind). Stranger, though, was a movie that posited that a poor man was in fact happier and better than a rich one, and that money would not buy happiness. Audiences without enough to eat, who would presumably identify with Cary Grant and his friends, were asked also to feel sympathy for Lew Ayres and Katharine Hepburn, who had an elevator in their home but no love, no joy. It's a nice grey scale of characterization that gives depth to what could be a lightweight comedy (though we still get the cartoonishly avaricious rich in the persons of Grant's fiancé and her father).

To a modern viewer, it works. But although the film was critically lauded, it didn't make money - contemporaries still didn't like Hepburn. Her next professional move was to leave RKO and Hollywood to star in Broadway in the play The Philadelphia Story, written especially for her. She didn't make another movie until she starred in the movie adaptation of that play, two years later. The rest is history.

A few notes: 

Lew Ayres, most well-known from All Quiet on the Western Front, is completely heartbreaking in this film as the depressed, drunken brother who doesn't have the willpower to escape his misery. When World War II broke out a few years after Holiday, Ayres registered as a conscientious objector - his work on All Quiet had exposed him to the horrors of war. He served as a medic in the Pacific theater, but public opinion was vicious. His career was irreparably damaged. 

Fun fact to offset this horrible story: He was briefly married to Ginger Rogers!

Holiday was directed by George Cukor, a giant of classic Hollywood, who was one of Katharine Hepburn's champions. By 1938, Cukor had already directed her in Little Women and Sylvia Scarlett (the latter with Cary Grant). He would go on to helm many of her collaborations with Spencer Tracy, as well as that little tour de force, The Philadelphia Story. Cukor was famous for being great with actors, particularly women. He should get a lot of credit for continuing to champion Hepburn when most of Hollywood had turned away. He deserves his own article!

I feel like I've mentioned The Philadelphia Story more than Holiday in this essay! It's hard to get away from it when writing about Katharine Hepburn, and especially her collaborations with Cary Grant. Its importance in film history aside, it's a perfect movie that I'll write about one day when I'm feeling brave. 

A last note: Cary Grant's Johnny Case seals a business deal over the course of the movie that nets him a tidy sum. He decides to retire on the profits, because he'd rather enjoy life as a young man and go back to work when he's old. He is 30. I will just say that his decision reads very differently to me, also 30, than it did when I first saw this movie a decade ago. Also, this sort of undercuts the movie's thesis that money can't buy happiness. Guess what - it does!! It's WORKING that stinks, duh.

Despite this movie being called Holiday (and my writing about it in December) it's not a Christmas movie (although it does take place over the New Year). The holiday of the title refers to Johnny's dream of a life on holiday. Nevertheless, it's wonderful holiday viewing! It's heartwarming, funny, and you get to see Cary Grant do acrobatics (and, at one point, a routine where Hepburn somersaults off his shoulders from standing height. It's very impressive!). What more do you need?

Still Alive!

Why hello!

I seem to have lost a month in there, didn't I? That's what happens, I suppose, when you plan a big move without realizing that a married couple of - I will admit it- adult age just may have a lot more stuff than a single post-college itinerant wanderer. When I moved to California at 22 I packed all my belongings into my beloved Honda Accord and drove myself cross country. Three years later, I had accumulated enough furniture to warrant a small storage cube, the kind that the moving company drops off and hauls for you. 

This time? My husband and I were wedged into a tiny one-bedroom that we had long ago outgrown - our wedding gifts were still piled in my grandmother's spare room, our extra storage space was overflowing, and we could barely walk. It was time to upsize. 

I won't go into detail, but in the end our move required two U-Haul trucks, both my parents (one to load, one to unload) three professional movers, and many, many days. In the end, though, we found ourselves in paradise: a new home (a HOUSE!) just a block from a wonderfully cold, rocky beach, with an office for him and a studio for me, a big kitchen, and the salty smell in the air that I've been missing for far too long. It's nice to be a New Englander again.

ASAP I'll be posting a catch-up on all the crafting I've managed to squeeze in, which is actually a lot; procrastinating from packing is a remarkably efficient way to finish many pairs of socks! I've also watched many quality movies while sorting through approximately 8,000 boxes of who-knows-what.

Let the new chapter commence!