I’ve been really loving sewing lately. Those wedding napkins were like a gateway drug to more hard-core projects. And now that I have a fancy new machine thanks to my parents, I’ve been a sewing fiend.

A few weeks ago, I sewed new kitchen curtains. The ones that were hanging in the window before — hand-me-downs from my mom — were stained, grungy, and way too short. (The terrible iPhone before picture is below the jump. See what I mean?)

So I saw this polka dot fabric at Mood and thought, “Aha! Adorable curtains.”

I suppose now you want to talk about the seagull. Ok, let’s talk about it. It’s ugly. There. I said it. But here’s the thing. My father-in-law MADE that with his bare hands. It was his first — and perhaps only — attempt at making stained glass.

When I hung the new curtains, my husband said, “It’s ok if you don’t want to hang the stained glass.” I assured him I didn’t mind. “I’m sure you think it’s ugly,” he said. “But I don’t really see it that way. To me, it’s just the thing that has always hung in my house.”

I like that. So now it’s the thing that will always hang in our house. Not everything has to look like it came from a flipping catalog. I’m a sucker for sentimental value.

If you look closely, you’ll also notice that I filled the bottom half of the window with rice paper window film. Our kitchen window is about six feet from the neighbor’s dining room window, and I’ve always been afraid they can see straight through the kitchen into our bedroom. Not anymore though. The rice paper should be a piece of cake to remove too. It sticks with just a misting of slightly soapy water. Magic!

I love that little elephant. It was a gift from my husband’s wild-haired friend who spent time in Thailand. The blue penguin and mouse (tiny and blurry in the picture) came from Italy. I brought them back from Murano, an island near Venice famous for its glasswork and, according to on edition of Lonely Planet, dragon bones.

*photo by Josh Gage

Holy sh*t! I am married. I have a husband. I am a wife. How weird is that?

After Soren nixed my plan to make 150 individual cheesecakes, I came up with an equally stupid brilliant idea. I decided to sew a napkin for each guest. Easy. Never mind that I hadn’t sewn anything since eighth grade. Never mind that I didn’t have a sewing machine. Never mind that I didn’t know how to sew napkins. I was hell-bent.

And, somehow, it all worked out. I enlisted the help of my stepmom and a friend from high school. Together we stitched 156 napkins in the span of just a few months. And we didn’t half-ass it. I sent them very specific instructions (see them here). I made them miter the corners. I got really into it.

Note the TWO sewing machines – mine broke down near the end.

Once the napkins were all nestled in their little boxes, I decided to sew some bunting. Our house looked like a very tiny sweat shop. And then I packed up 156 napkins, four strands of bunting, my wedding dress, wedding bra, wedding shoes (2 pairs), wedding hair flower, wedding hankie and various bridesmaids gifts, and — oh yeah! — clothes and toiletries, and hauled it all on a plane to Bozeman.

North Dakota thrift store finds.

Other evidence of crazy behavior: I forced my bridesmaids to wear heart-shaped glasses (see above photo). I spent months collecting vases, picture frames, and other decorations at thrift stories in the midwest. I forced my father to spray paint tiny plastic animals. I forced my father to iron napkins. I enlisted my aunt and uncle to collect 180 juice glasses for the champagne toast. I talked my mom and dad into turning old picture frames into homemade chalkboards. I convinced my aunts and cousins to help tie elastic bands on tiny name tags so that they could be easily slipped on wine and beer glasses. My husband’s family helped painstakingly assemble programs. My father-in-law calligraphied 156 escort cards. My stepfather sawed through a barn wall to get raw materials to make wedding signs. We all went a little nuts.

Over the next few months, I’ll be posting some of my DIY wedding projects as well as a bunch of other junk . . . you know, to make up for lost time. I hope you enjoy!

Ok, I know I already have a post titled “Best Bread Ever.” But my former best bread has been supplanted by an even better bread. The recipe comes from Tartine Bread, a book written by Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, the baking gurus behind San Fransisco’s Tartine Bakery.

The book begins with a master recipe involving a sourdough starter that contains equal parts flour and water — what bread baking know-it-alls refer to as ’100% hydration.’ I’m a sucker for recipes that call for 100% hydration starter because I also like to bake things off a blog called Wild Yeast, and all her recipes call for 100% hydration starter too. Convenient! (See some gorgeous bread photos on Wild Yeast’s YeastSpotting page).If you’ve never worked with a wild yeast starter, don’t be scared. Starter is less  

persnickety than you might think. Some Web sites give the impression that you have to care for your starter like you would care for a tiny newborn baby, feeding it regularly and taking it with you when you travel. Not true. I’m a terrible mother. My starter sits in the fridge and only gets fed when I remember, which is not often. Yet it has never died. All it needs is a little refreshing when I’m ready to use it.

You can make your own starter (recipe here). Or, if you don’t want to go through the semi-laborious process of making your own, you can order some powdered starter here. (Supposedly it traveled the Oregon Trail!)

But it’s really the breadmaking process, not the starter, that makes Tartine’s bread so stellar. You don’t knead this bread, you turn it. You stick a wet hand into the bowl and pull dough up from the bottom, folding it over the top. You have to do this every half an hour for four hours. Then you shape the loaves and let them rise for another 3-4 hours. And here’s the second key: Robertson recommends baking the loaves in a dutch oven. Commercial bread ovens have a steam injection system that helps the make the crust all brown and crackly and lovely. The dutch oven mimics a commercial oven by trapping moisture. Voila! Perfect crust.

Is this bread time-consuming? Hell, yes. But it’s totally worth it. Because the bread is effing amazing. Buy the book. Check it out from the library. Or you can find a variation on the recipe here.

Chad is REALLY into bread. Watch this video . . .

Tartine Bread from 4SP Films on Vimeo.

When I asked Soren if this is the inspiration board he would have come up with, he said, “I wouldn’t have made an inspiration board.” Duh.

When we moved to New York, Soren’s parents were nice enough to give us a dining room set that once belonged to Soren’s grandparents. The table is truly beautiful, but the fabric on the chairs was a throwback to an earlier era — a simpler time when brown and orange stripes were hip.

Around the same time that we moved to New York, I started reading Betty Homemaker blogs. “Why not try switching up the fabric on your dining room chairs?” they asked. At the time, I didn’t have a good answer. But now I am older and wiser. So I’ll tell you why not. It’s flipping difficult.

In the world of upholstery, dining room chairs are considered baby stuff. They’re supposed to be the easiest project one can tackle. DIY blogs will lull you into thinking that this task is so simple even a four-year-old with one arm and ADHD could do it. They’ll make you believe that the chairs, given the opportunity, will nearly reupholster themselves. I’m here to tell you this is a lie. The process is difficult. But it isn’t impossible. For those of you who haven’t been completely deterred by this intro, let me lay out the steps:

1. Gather your tools and supplies
staple gun, staple remover (highly recommended), screwdriver, scissors, scraper, hammer, pliers, band-aids, patience

2. Take the seat off
This is surprisingly easy. Most seats are attached with a few screws. Take these out, and the seat comes right off.

3. Start pulling staples
This is tedious work. Stick with it. Each chair in my dining room set had eleventy-billion staples in the bottom. You can pry those up with a flathead screw driver, but that’s an enormous pain in the ass, not to mention a hazardous endeavor. I can’t tell you the number of times I nearly speared my flesh. Using a special staple remover (which cost a whopping $32 bucks for reasons that I cannot comprehend), makes the process slightly easier and moderately less hazardous. You’ll need pliers to get out the stubbornest staples.

4. Scrape off the old foam
Often the old foam will be glued to the seat bottom. You might be able to peel it off. But a paint scraper works well for dislodging any stubborn bits. You want to have the cleanest, smoothest surface possible.

5. Put on the new foam
I had the shop where I bought my foam cut each piece to the exact shape I would need. They did it for free. If you don’t do this, you will need some sort of foam-cutting device. You can use a knife, but your edges may end up quite jagged.

6. Attach your padding
You want the fabric that goes over your foam to be nicely rounded, not boxy like the foam piece. So I stapled some batting called Dacron over the foam. Then I realized I had covered the screw holes that I needed to reattach the seat. So I had to do it all over again. Sigh.

7. Attach your fabric
This is the real bitch. You want the fabric to be straight and taut, but not stretched so tight that you can see it pulling. On each corner, you have to make a fold. Ideally, you want all the folds to look the same. This is harder than it sounds. Making them look neat and professional takes time and several do-overs. I think my corners look pretty amateurish. But at some point you have to say, “Goddammit, I have a life to live. I am done redoing these effing corners.”

I also don’t think I got my fabric tight enough. Occasionally when the cat jumps off a chair, you can see a tiny indent where her paw was. The indent isn’t permanent, but I still don’t think that should be happening.

And, voila! The finished product . . .

On our last day, the weather was beautiful. So we decided to walk a half mile to the General Store to get coffee and a breakfast snack. Harrisville, NH, is adorable. According to a real estate brochure we saw, it is the most photographed town in New England.

On the way, we stopped at the public beach to goof off.

Soren took photos while I made attempt after increasingly dramatic attempt to leap onto this rock, which, as you can see, was not all that far from shore.

Success!

Then, a surprising twist! Just as I was about to say, “We better get a move on before my hunger turns me into a whirling dervish of fury and irrational hatred,” he sat me down on the sand and proposed. Yes, marriage. I accepted. And then I cried a little. And then we took some pictures.This is the spot where it happened:

And this is me demonstrating where my ring will go:

Soren knows how picky I am. So he didn’t buy a ring ahead of time. He wanted me to help him pick it out. Wise move. Not having a ring is so much better than having a ring you hate but have to pretend to like.

But I think Soren felt bad that he didn’t give me anything round, not even a lifesaver or a fruit loop. So this week he went out and bought me a lovely little silver ring with an amethyst on it. He didn’t need to, but I’m happy that he did. Every time I look at my hand, I smile.

My paternal grandma has been gone for more than a decade, but yesterday I missed her something fierce. So I pulled out one of her old cookbooks: Cook with Hope. Published in 1973 by the women of Trinity United Methodist Church in Cavalier, North Dakota, it begins with a few helpful hints. Here’s one gem:

To dry lettuce, pat it with crumpled paper toweling. It absorbs water quickly and does not bruise the leaves. Lettuce for salad should be well dried and cold.

I mean no disrespect to the women of Cavalier, but drying lettuce with paper towels sounds less like a “helpful hint” and more like common sense. Maybe paper towels were a new thing back then. Maybe lettuce had only recently arrived in North Dakota. Maybe people had been standing out in their yards shaking the dickens out of leaves of iceberg before this book hit the shelves.

If Grandma was a good cook, you wouldn’t know it by the recipes she added to Cook with Hope. The back page includes a handwritten recipe for “Fluffy Rice.” What’s in fluffy rice? Rice, water, salt. So basically, it’s just rice. Still, she had her standards. Next to a recipe for Rhubarb Cake she penned “no good.”

On page 98, I found the recipe for Toll House cookies clipped from back of a package of chocolate chips. Under the tape were bits of brown sugar and a lump of what looked like ancient cookie dough. Making cookies with Grandma was a weekly activity when I was small. Finding that familiar piece of crinkly yellow plastic made me weepy, nostalgic, and hungry all at the same time.

Original Nestlé Tollhouse Chocolate-chip Cookies were one of Grandma’s signature dishes. She also loved banana bread, Special K bars, and Duncan Hines blueberry muffins with streusal topping. And every Christmas Eve she made oyster stew with canned oysters. I’m not sure why she bothered. Only my grandpa and a couple of brave uncles ever partook. She didn’t. I certainly didn’t. I imagine that the china tureen she used for serving the stew (which now belongs to me) thinks wistfully about oysters from time to time.

In the past few years, I have become, well, a bit of a food snob. I make my own bread. I make my own yogurt. Last night I made my own tomato soup. I can’t remember the last time a can of Campbell’s graced my shelves, let alone made its way into my dinner.

Cook with Hope, a book based on convenience, condensed soup, and copious amounts of margarine, inspired equal parts fascination and horror. I have taken the liberty of scanning a few of the worst recipes. First up, Wiener Soup (p. 268).

The book showcases many recipes by Mrs. Ed Steiger. Several of them included wieners, butter, milk, and crackers — apparently pantry staples in the Steiger home. But none seemed quite so horrifying or misguided as wiener soup. The idea of sliced hot dogs floating in a sea of buttery, salty milk makes me want to wretch. Soren and I fantasized about inviting over some of our foodie friends and serving them wiener soup without letting them in on the joke. We would sit with our serious faces and silently sip our soup. “What?” I might ask, “Don’t you like it?”

After choking down a bowl of wiener soup, our guests might expect some sort of entree. A big dish of mock chicken (p. 245) always delights. The recipe includes two more North Dakota pantry staples — Jello and mayo. (A note: When recipes call for “salad dressing,” they mean mayo. Because, really, what’s a salad without a hefty dollop of artery clogging Hellman’s?)

If we needed a side dish for this fantasy dinner, I can think of no better candidate than Salmon and Banana Salad (p.246). While you or I might serve salmon with dill sauce or string beans, Grace Enerson has come up with a delightful concoction that includes salmon, bananas, pineapple, and walnuts.

The more Soren and I read, the more our horror grew. “People really ate like this!” he said in wonder. “And they lived.” I think it made him feel better about smoking. Yes, he smokes. But at least he doesn’t eat lemon Jello with tuna and cream of chicken soup. That shit will KILL you.

Grandma didn’t smoke. And she didn’t eat much either — maybe a muffin, a buttered roll, or a slice of banana bread. She claimed to have no appetite. While we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire, she sat in the living room, watching and worrying that I would wander into the flames or spear myself with a marshmallow stick. Maybe she clipped recipes and taped them into Cook with Hope while she worried. I like to think that Mrs. Ed Steiger’s recipe for Wiener Soup would have made her laugh too.

Saturday morning found me at the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market wading through piles of vegetables, each one more attractive and enchanting than the last. I wanted to take them all home. But I had a list and I was hell-bent on sticking to it. My plan was to can salsa, so I allowed myself five things: tomatoes, hot peppers, regular peppers, onions, and cilantro. Stupid list! To compensate for my self-imposed restrictions, I bought vast quantities of each.

In fact, I bought so many ingredients, I spent much of Sunday chopping. And chopping. And then I chopped some more.

The recipe said I would get six pint jars. I ended up with eight pints and two half-pints. We are officially swimming in salsa.

[*A not-so-brief note on sourdough starters: Don't be scared, they're friendly and easier than you might think to maintain. (If you don't already have one, Wild Yeast has an excellent tutorial on how to start one here. You can also order one, like I did, here.) One common myth is that you need to be super careful to feed them weekly. I have gone as long as a month without feeding my starter, which I keep refrigerated. And it's still going strong. If I leave it for a particularly long time, I will throw most of it out before I bake and start building it up again by adding flour and water, then waiting for it to get really bubbly, then adding more flour and water, and so on. There are some great tips for maintaining your starter here.

What I love about Wild Yeast is that Susan uses a 100% hydration starter for all her recipes. That means that you add equal amounts of flour and water (I do this by weight, not by volume). No complicated math = fewer screwups. So MY starter (also 100% hydration) will work for every single recipe on her site, no tweaking required. Much simpler.]

But enough talk! You want to see the pictures, don’t you?

Mmm. Fresh bread with butter and homemade strawberry jam.

Of course, I’m a hopeless perfectionist, so I will tell you what displeases me about this loaf.

1. You can see that it’s rather flat. I didn’t get a nice dome like I wanted. I have a sneaking suspicion that this has something to do with the way I manhandled the loaf while trying to wrestle it into the oven. But how are you supposed to transfer the loaves from the place where they rise to the place where they cook, anyway? I’m thinking parchment paper for next time.

2. I cannot for the life of me get a good “ear.” The ear is the nice crispy flap that you see on the tops of artisan loaves. Here’s how it forms: You slash the loaves before they go in the oven to release gas and the dough flap formed by the slash is supposed to rear up and get really brown and crispy. Mine doesn’t. Maybe because I hacksaw my slashes with a serrated knife?

3. The bottoms of my loaves, this one included, tend to get overly thick and crisp. They are so crisp, you need some serious bicep strength to saw through them. Is my stone too close to the heat? Is that normal? What gives?

Questions to ponder I as gobble slice after slice of butter-slathered bread positively dripping with jam.