Holiday dinners, holiday parties, intimate gatherings with family and friends — cooking is key, but you have to decorate too. You could buy the obligatory bunch of grocery store flowers and stick them in the vase that those roses came in last Valentine’s Day, or you could exercise a little thought and creativity and come up with a simple centerpiece on a budget.
Tags: Centerpieces·Decor·Entertaining·holiday
wasn’t sure what to call this. The recipe that I adapted it from is called a pie, but we all know a pie, and this is no pie. Cobbler would have a higher proportion of fruit, crisp would be, well, crisp. Torte seems too highbrow. This combination of sweet tart cranberries, caramelized sugar, crunchy nuts and a dense, sweet buttery dough is definitely not highbrow. It takes maybe 10 minutes to throw together (if you move slowly) and is homey and delicious and beautiful. Cake is perhaps the closest approximation, though light and fluffy this is not.
Tags: Christmas·cranberries·desssert·holiday·nuts·sweets·Thanksgiving
Our nightstands were really bothering me. They were purchase many years (and three tiny New York apartments) ago, and while they were OK aesthetically, they were just too small to fit the holy quartet of nightstand accoutrements: lamp, alarm clock, book, cup of coffee. There were many many spilled cups of coffee. So I decided it was time for a change.
Because I am both thrifty (read: cheap) and crafty, I decided to make my own. Because I am also klutzy and not exactly a whiz with tools, I decided to start with Ikea. Notably, the Ikea Rast: $30 of plain, unfinished pine, just waiting for someone ambitious to come along and change it up
