winter capsule

Our team is rounding in the fall winter 18 fashion season while feverishly prepping to enjoy all holiday gatherings and the ringing in of the new year. Everyone is on the go go – shopping, cleaning, cooking, baking, decorating, travel, getting kids home from school, work work work. Doing all this stuff requires clothing (optional?), and sometimes it’s best to keep it tight. 

A capsule wardrobe is a collection of a few essential items of clothing that can be worn over and over.  The term capsule wardrobe was coined by Susie Faux, owner of the London boutique ‘Wardrobe’, in the 1970’s. Donna Karan popularized it here in the 80’s by releasing a capsule collection of seven interchangeable work-wear pieces. While not shiny or colorful, the concept works.  You can always mix in a few trend pieces. 

black turtleneck, black skinny trouser
Worth New York

black silk blouse with tie, black silk skirt
Worth New York
ultra luxurious black suede dress, feel free to layer a blouse, tee, or bodysuit underneath
thank you Michelle of Black White + Kuhl  

You know we love black, so here are a few of our current picks for this busy, challenging, and most wonderful time of the year, eye roll. 

silk blouse with tie as belt
silk skirt woth graphic tee
and now for some fun add a sequin mini t-shirt dress, wink wink

trimmed and tied, always ongoing

black sweater, blue denim, suede flat, lots of green

Still getting settled after Thanksgiving week and now entering holiday mode, oh, boy. We’ve done this before, yet there’s always those moments of uncertainty when you think you just can’t get there. One year when staging and decorating for husband’s office Christmas party with major event designer sister from CA, she said, ‘you can never be done’, and I still think of that. Any party or event or dinner or holiday or even wedding planning could just keep going and going. Now I tell myself to give it a really good strong effort and then at some point just let it be enough.

We’ve got trees, some decorated, some not. Some with skirts, and some without. Twenty year old daughter hung some of the ornaments while home from break and I wasn’t even in the room with her. We chatted, room to room, her hanging, me cooking, and I just let her be. Years past or even recent years I might have micro-managed, this tree decorating I can totally let go.

Card writing is giving me anxiety, and we’ve even got a great photo or two this year. The actual card is on order, and that’s two steps ahead of where we usually are in this production process. We’ve looked at stamps, no decision yet. Details details.

easiest dinner ever is to have your butcher trim and tie a whole tenderloin, pop it in a super hot oven for 22 minutes or so, let rest, and carve

We had a full house, and I cooked and baked my head off. Tenderloin, ham, turkey. Potatoes, beans, pasta. Cinnamon rolls, pies, cakes. Bacon bacon and bacon. Wine wine and more wine. Can you tell where this is going?

probably spent 16+ hours or so in an apron

new French food processor, needs to go back, Pulse button not working!

This most wonderful time of the year is by any stretch not easy. Trimmed and tied, perhaps, yet always ongoing….

big chunk of blue and chopped tarragon

birthday wedge and bolognese for fourteen, kind of standard. this was after Thanksgiving and there wasn’t a clean white linen left in the house, so, mismatched it was

bought two $40 bouquets at grocery and had oldest daughter cut them down into 11 small arrangements in canning jars, a look she totally dismissed for wedding vibe, hahaha (and agree) 

Merry merry, hustle hustle.

always happy and forever in blue jeans baby

Every day dress, xoxo.

 

everything takes longer

tomato and roasted red pepper soup

Okay, so we’re desperately working on finishing professional plant-based cooking curriculum at Rouxbe, and it’s as expected in our world taking longer than what’s expected. We even paid extra for extra time to finish, a 30 day extension for $129.99 to be precise. As we have only 9 days left to finish, upload and send 28 graded activities, we’re most likely definitely looking at another extension for another chunk of cash. We’ve got life to tend to, the fall garden, the small business, and the family.

We’ve always been a non-traditional student. Night school non-matriculated courses at State University of New York at Buffalo served as our college introduction, and that entire process evolved over seven years, with an eighteen month old and twin newborns in the arms of my husband on graduation day.

This Professional Plant-Based Certification Course is intense. Designed as a six month foundational instruction in plant-based culinary arts, it focuses on the core techniques found in a plant-based kitchen. The course forces me to explore and practice a variety of recipes and flavors from around the world that I might never experience without having to leave my home. It’s all online, love that, and you receive ongoing chef instruction and support. I am consistently challenged to master technique, and those skills will now stay with me forever.

You might recall I was enrolled in the Rouxbe Professional Cook Certification, and that course took me longer to complete than the expected six-months as well. For us, everything seems to take longer, and that’s okay. A few of the lessons are repeated in the Plant-Based curriculum, such as knife skills and dicing practice, and I could upload my earlier work to move the process along. Thought about it, and then thought not. I’m here to learn, and get better, and by doing it again I’ll only get better. Doing things again and over and over to make a more pleasing, satisfying outcome, is the basic tenet of our every day dress lifestyle. It takes work, and it can take a long time, and like I said before we don’t always get it right.

simple cabbage soup with heat from cayenne

confetti quinoa salad – big hit with twenty-six year old daughter

While prepping plant-based soup and salad a few days ago I’m sure I swore and eye rolled a few times as plant things seem to take way longer to bring to table than throwing a tenderloin of any kind into a hot oven. Simple Cabbage Soup with scratch vegetable stock and Confetti Quinoa Salad with garlic fried quinoa will take every flat surface and probably every bowl and several pots and pans in your kitchen.

It’s a journey, and we’re definitely learning new things, and that’s kind of what life is all about anyways.

 

As for the what to wear where, we’re about adding some color to the rotation. If we’re doing new things in the kitchen why not add some new dimension to the wardrobe.

Every day dress all the time and why does everything always take longer than what we expect?