Yearly Archives: 2011

So much for a little between-holiday downtime. We seem to be racing toward 2012 at the speed of light. Lots of friends have been in town visiting – so there have been big crab dinners, rock concerts and late nights drinking champagne. On Friday, I helped put together a birthday breakfast for a member of…

I had soup to make on Tuesday night and needed something long to watch while picking apart the Christmas turkey. Luckily, Masterpiece Theater had two episodes of Return to Cranford. Anything with Judi Dench is, of course, wonderful and this was so good! You must watch both parts before the series come down on 1/10.…

This may be a favorite new tradition for the holidays! With Rob missing Christmas on account of his cold, I made a big dinner of leftovers for us on Monday night. The two of us sat by candlelight with the bright tree…it was the nicest dinner imaginable!

I don’t know how it was in your neck of the woods, but here in California – Christmas was almost cancelled by what seemed to be a massive outbreak of cold and flu. All told, we missed out on seeing 9 different people this weekend due to illness – not our finest holiday. It hit…

This is such an easy annual party. Even when sick, it’s a breeze to put together a menu for 20+ guests. Even cute, tiny guests in velvet party dresses: The menu this year consisted of our favorite local ham roasted in the oven for 5 hours, and served with truffle mustard, a giant smoked salmon…

I’m still recovering from this weekend. As seems to be holiday tradition, I come down with a fresh cold on Friday before the season’s biggest social weekend. I blew off two really fun sounding Christmas parties and barely recovered in time for our big brunch on Sunday. Despite the cold making me pretty useless and…

I stocked up on fashion magazines in Japan. The amount of inspirational outfits, hairstyles and nail polish designs they put together in these things is amazing, so it doesn’t really matter if you can’t read Japanese at all. I snapped pictures from More magazine to share with you over the next few weeks. For today,…

My office moved to a new building last week and my 30-second commute grew to a 20 minute walk across SOMA and Union Square. It’s been fun to have a bigger transition in the morning and see all the holiday storefronts, but I’ve needed to bundle up like never before! This outfit was inspired by…

Last night’s LAC party was a fun and easy holiday craft. Lindsay hosted us for making sock snowmen, a project she remembered fondly as a kid and wanted to recreate. Along with the project, she served wine, hot cider, hummus, jalapeno jam with cheese and a homemade chocolate cream pie. Making the snowmen is super…

There’s one thing I really wanted to bring home from Japan but didn’t: the Homestar Aqua Planetarium. You see, in Japan, there’s a whole category of gadgets designed around relaxation. From glowing humidifiers to floating fountains for the tub – it’s serious business. I fell in love with the idea of this little planetarium for…