Buffalo NY and close neighbors, like Hamburg, and Orchard Park, on national news with record snow fall, low temps, roads and schools closed, three days now.
Wouldn’t you know that while UPS was closed, needed to send a few dresses back for a very good client, sorry Josephine, the local grocer, Wegman’s, was open, and the fish came in today.
Roasted some halibut and some leftover counter-top tomatoes, quickly boiled up some sugar snap peas. Red, white, and green, are you feeling it too?
Note on the wine: really loving this Butternut Chardonnay, 90 point rating on some sites, and it’s less than $15. Check it out here at Bounty Hunter, one of our favorite stops in Napa CA. at Thinking we need to buy a case or three with two daughters coming home for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Stay warm and safe everyone, every day dress. xoxo
With Upstate New York blanketed in a blizzard, let’s make it quick, and keep it safe. Record low temperatures reported almost everywhere, again, let’s make it quick.
Wishing everyone a safe trip to wherever they may be going, hopefully home. Sharing here a recipe for best banana bread ever, and, you can make it quick. Perfect antidote to a snow day. Have been baking and gifting these loaves for years, one of our very fit friends calls it crack, in good jest. Almost everyone has 2 or 3 overripe bananas on the countertop, photos shown we had 6, yielding 2 cups of mashed, and 2 full-sized loaves. Should you not have sour cream on hand, simply use vanilla or plain yogurt, thinking you probably have that in the fridge.
Banana Bread | The Martha Stewart Cookbook | Collected Recipes for Every Day (love how the title divides the every day, just like here)
makes 1 large loaf of 4 small loaves
1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup mashed very ripe bananas
1/2 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan or several smaller pans.
With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, beating well.
Sift the dry ingredients together and combine with the butter mixture. Blend well. Add the bananas, sour cream, and vanilla. Stir well. Stir in the nuts and pour into the prepared pan.
Bake 1 hour, until a cake tester comes out clean. Turn out onto a rack to cool.
ps. These loaves freeze well. Sometimes I substitute and/or add unsweetened chocolate chips, 1/2 cup per loaf. Recipe doubles well in a KitchenAid stand mixer. Photos shown I baked two.
pss. School closed again tomorrow, let’s make it quick, :).
psss. my copy here is dog-eared, even has scribbles, it’s so well-loved.
With big food days approaching, you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas, yikes, every day dress was gifted yesterday.
Thinking we all might like to make it ahead, and couldn’t be more thrilled to have Ina’s latest in the repertoire, thank you.
Mom, client, I get to dress her in the day job, wrapped it up nicely: plain white tissue, real ribbon, small gift card, and a sprig of thyme.
Ina, we count on you. Just yesterday did your Mac & Cheese, no tomatoes in the house and used whole wheat bread for the crumb top, your recipes and way of cooking and presenting have become part of our every day life.
Can’t wait to dig into your latest volume, now we just need to make a little more room on the shelf.
Thanks, mom, client, early gifting is so much fun. xo
Ina Garten | make it ahead
ps. hyperlink to Ina Garten, Make It Ahead, so slow on the upload. You know where to find her, she’s that good.
Change is good. Keeps you on your toes, right? After years of serving family style starting a slow switch again to now we’re plated.
Had a chef come in three nights out of six while in Provence in September. Obviously, he plated everything. Now that we’re settled in back at home trying to recreate that French kind of feeling.
Here’s my stateside effort:
Three courses, still working on that. Lifestyle is a work in progress, for sure. Always a good thing to keep things fresh, now we’re plated.
And, here’s one more: chicken, haha, husband’s favorite. 🙂 Homemade sweet potato fries make up for the sameness. 🙂
Spent a good part of the weekend outdoors, walking. Walked everywhere and did some good work. It’s amazing what can get done in your head when you walk miles.
Read a book too: Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered, by Austin Kleon. Really like what he had to say, if you have any sort of online presence, artist or not, (aren’t we all really artists in one way or another?) this quick little read gets to the good points fast. He talks about sharing, and teach what you know.
And, now that the eyes need help picked up some readers. Usually buy them half-dozen at a time, here you see three pair.
So, here’s my Sunday night share: walk always, every day. Visit your local art gallery. Read. Cook dinner, doesn’t have to be fancy. Tonight its Caesar Salad with pan-sauteed chicken. Always use real cheese and grate it yourself. Best reading glasses? At the gallery.
Saturday night, all tucked in, going nowhere, and couldn’t be happier. Travel, while great, has me roasted.
To compensate, it’s been all things work and domestic. Brussels sprouts, clipped off with kitchen shears, combined with some olive oil and good old kosher salt, and roasted in the oven. Almost like eating potato chips, ha.
Baked the cookies for the new neighbors, they’ve been here since August, and delivered with, shocker, a bottle of wine, always feeling just a bit behind. 🙂
Every day dress, roasted, and baked.
Thanks everyone for reading. Thinking this might be a good little feel good about what you do blog. Thinking that if you like to dress and you like to cook or even simply like to eat, you might find something of interest here. Everything we all do matters. For those that like numbers, site visits are about 200 per day, so you all out there, small group and couldn’t be happier, seem to keep coming back. Thank you.
Kind of at a blogging standstill so decided to just jump right back in with the things I seem to do best: dress and cook. Simple they may be but they both move us all through the day.
Yesterday for an off-site client meeting wore the few new things that have been added to the rotation: sweater, scarf, bag. Pretty standard, especially when paired with black jeans, a bit of the difference being doing the sweater in cashmere and making certain that the jeans are hemmed to a good length. So many of us run around in jeans all day and really by paying attention to the length of your pant your style standard can be instantly upgraded.
Dinner was simple oven baked wild cod, pan roasted organic sweet grape tomatoes, blanched and then sautéed green beans. Salad and bread on the side and dinner done. No cookbook, no google search, no recipes needed.
Not going for any fashion or food empire here, intent is to inspire the women (and men) that matter to me to do small things every day that make their days better.
Haven’t posted since last week Saturday, busy week. Two weeks in France can set you back a bit, no complaints.
Travel abroad teaches so much. Always fun to bring it home. Tonight’s dinner snapped on the iPhone made from last weekends ham for the dozen or so teenaged girls for a Sunday morning post football game sleepover. Ham and Lentil Soup and Grilled Gruyère Sandwiches on days old sliced crusty bread. Anything I read about French cooking tells me that they never waste a thing, use everything to everything.
There’s something magical about the shift from day to night: a new chapter, a new beginning, another coming together.
To mark the transition, it’s always nice to dress for dinner.
You might change everything you wore before or simply light the candles, reapply your lip and (finally) brush your hair, the key being the mind-set to move beyond.
We love to dress for dinner, whatever that may be on any given day.
There’s something so soul satisfying about pulling leaves off of a basil stem. We’ve been watering those things all summer long and now it’s time to pull in the harvest. Even from a small kitchen pot garden it’s a gratifying thing when you make time for pesto.
Pesto tolerates time in the freezer, yikes, the only thing in there now is ice cream and gelato.
