food & frames

On to Valentine's week! I left off last time with a picture of root vegetables, which were destined to become lunch on Sunday. Steve made them into potato, celery root and sunchoke soup with purple potato chips from Cannelle et Vanille. I had bookmarked it on Pinterest some time ago, although I wasn't sure if we could manage to find all the components at once. It turned out, they were all at the farmers market that Saturday. And I'm glad they were, because this soup was really good. Have I mentioned how much I'm digging sunchokes and celery root lately? The little purple potato chips really kicked it up a notch too. (BAM!)

43/366 root soup

As was the trend that week, the next day's picture was more food. With Valentine's Day approaching on Tuesday, Monday afternoon was spent baking for our breakfast the next day. (Steve makes a fancy dinner; I make breakfast.) This year, I chose the Honey Tea Cakes from the Miette Cookbook, partly so I could use the pretty linen napkin with bees on it that we bought in Florence. I even got a small container of honey and a honey dipper the week before so that I would have more props to use in my picture of the tea cakes.

Too bad the cakes didn't turn out as pretty as I had hoped... The recipe didn't specify how far to fill up the loaf pans; it just said "divide the batter," and I filled them to the tops with batter to spare. Of course—of course—they overflowed. (I knew better.) Unfortunately, only one of the loaves turned out to be at all presentable and only from one angle. So I took pictures of the honey and dipper and used one of those as my picture of the day.

44/366 honey

Valentine's Day followed, which really deserves its own blog post. The short version: Steve made his fanciest dinner yet out of three dishes from the Eleven Madison Park Cookbook. The picture I used for the day was of the main course of lamb with puntarella, apples, and vadouvan. Like the other things he made, it was fabulous. To read more about our dinner, stay tuned for a special Valentine's post, coming soon... as soon as I write it...

45/366 valentine's dinner

Then, Wednesday was Steve's birthday. I opted to order his cake from Miette this year, rather than trying to make the same one from the Miette cookbook. I had done enough baking earlier in the week, and I didn't want to be pressed for time that day. Nor did I want the pressure of making a perfect cake on the first try and finishing in time to take a picture. This way, all I had to do was go to the Ferry Building and pick it up.

I did, however, make something to go on the cake. I had found a picture of some cake bunting on Etsy and realized that I had everything I needed to make one of my own. We even had the skewers already, so all I had to do was cut some triangles out of card stock and sew them together. (I did it while babysitting Elsa during her nap on Valentine's Day, while Dan and Carmen were out picking up their new loveseat.) Next time, I would probably make a little hitch at the end of each triangle, but my backstitching worked quite well otherwise.

That night, we out to dinner at Contigo with Dan, Carmen, Rob, and Traci. The food was great, as always, and we came back to the house for cake and presents after.

46/366 steve's birthday

Thursday was leftover night, but first we ate the fancy salad that Steve didn't end up making for our Valentine's dinner. It was another Eleven Madison Park recipe; he had chosen two and bought most of the ingredients for both. Since I encouraged him to pick just one for Valentine's Day, we decided that he would prepare the other on Thursday, along with the various leftovers that filled our fridge. This was the radicchio salad with mango and basil, and it turned out to be a nice wintery play on a caprese salad. I had a full plate of leftovers of the salad for lunch the next day too.

47/366 valentine's revisited

That concludes the food portion of this post. Frames were next!

I had spent the last week or two acquiring frames and prints for the dining room and living room. In fact, the frames for the living room and the prints of my pictures that I had ordered all arrived on Thursday. Unfortunately, when I finally unpackaged the CB2 frames that I had bought for the dining room the week before, I realized that one of them had a 5x7 mat instead of the 8x10 that I wanted. I had to make another trip to CB2 on Friday to make the exchange before I could put both prints in the frames and take the picture that I wanted for the day.

48/366 ready to hang

On Saturday, I tasked Steve with hanging all the frames that I had acquired. I made templates from the frames' packaging, taping them to the walls to help us decide on placement, and then he did the measuring and hammering. Once we were finished with the dining room frames, we moved on to the living room.

For the living room, I had decided to frame the four notecards that came with the Little Italy Polaroid book from FieryEyed Photography. They were too pretty to actually use as cards, and two of them were taken in Cinque Terre, Italy—one of the places we went on our trip last fall. I was going to make a 2x2 square with the frames on the wall, but then I realized that a simple row would fill the space above the couch better. I really love the result, and now it looks more like we live here! (5 years after painting the room...)

49/366 more frames

Coming up next: a more detailed account of our Valentine's Day dinner and how I photographed it.