Tomatoes!

I use tomatoes in at least 50 percent of the recipes I regularly make, so when my mother-in-law comes to town at the end of the month, she's going to teach me how to can, and tomatoes are going to be the big staple to "put up" in our house. I'll be borrowing the gear from someone in the mothers' club and my neighbor is planning to come over and learn from the expert, too.

Yesterday I asked one of my favorite vendors at the Menlo Park Farmers' Market which of his tomatoes would be good for canning. He said I should buy one of his big boxes of "soft" tomatoes for $20. Oh my word that's a lot of tomatoes! Below is a picture of maybe half of them in the sink. Last night I boiled, peeled and chopped the rest. This morning I finished the job. About five of the tomatoes were too far gone to even be used for canning and another 5-10 were some variety that just disintigrated when I tried to peel them. It boils down to what seems like not very much: three gallon freezer bags filled half way.

New room

It's time for yet another room transformation, but not nearly as dramatic as last time: this one involves only one room of the house being covered in dust.

The former office was more-or-less transformed into a functioning guest room for the house-swappers. This mainly involved moving some furniture and making some new curtains (which I stopped liking before I finished making them). Since then, we stayed in this house in Australia that was green and purple, and I fell in love with the color scheme. (Now I just need to find the right fabric for curtains.)

Last night I did some spackling of the area that used to be covered by these random strips of faux-wood about a foot below the ceiling. Hideous. Today I sanded the spackling. Have you ever sanded after spackling? The dust is incredible. I was covered in it. The room is still covered in it, after I wiped the walls and the floor with wet rags. I will have to do so again tomorrow. But then the fun begins! Gotta buy that paint this week...

Bare walls

I'm pretty sure we are never going to find proper dining room furniture. We have a table and chairs, and we did have a corner cabinet for china, but the new door to the kitchen made the corner too small for the cabinet. For some reason, it is really hard to find corner cabinets. And then we need some kind of console table for the wall on the other side of the door. The problem there is that someone in my family is way too picky. The good news is, if we had an Asian-themed decor scheme, we would have found a dozen pieces to suit our needs at the Home Consignment Center in Mountain View today!

SF fabric tour

A couple weeks ago Linda and I went to the city looking for fabrics for a couple projects. We were both mostly looking for home decor fabrics, but I also wanted to get a better feel for what the shopping is like in SF, so I got recommendations from a few friends who sew.

First we went to Discount Fabrics in the Mission. Definitely a place to go back to! They have at least a little of everything, but I've never seen as many different kinds of trim and wacky stuff you can stick on your clothes or curtains. For this reason it's one of the go-to stores for my belly-dancing friends.

Linda found everything she needed there. I found some good candidates for the guest-room curtains I plan to make, but didn't actually buy anything.

Next we went to Fabrix, which was underwhelming. It's a pretty small place, but it's crammed with fabric that mostly seemed cheap and blah. It might be a good place to check out regularly to see what comes through if you lived in the neighborhood, but I wouldn't seek it out.

Across the street is a place called Satin Moon that sounds great, but it's closed right now because of a water main leak! I'll check back next time I need something special. My impression is that it's mostly home dec type fabrics with some high-end silks.

Discount Fabrics was on our list but we didn't make it there. Definitely hoping to check it out some time. I'm also intrigued by this place in the Haight.

Britex, of course, is the Mood of San Francisco, but is pretty overpriced. Rounding out my list is a place you should definitely check out: Peapod. It's a tiny store in the Inner Sunset with a great selection of quilting fabrics. They are beautifully chosen and displayed and coordinated; I bought all the fabric for this quilt I made for my niece, Gwen, at Peapod.



Thanks to Lorah, Laura and Rebeca for their recommendations on where to go!

Finally, I found a pretty cool blog post about SF fabric stores.

New guest room!

Right now our guest room consists of some bland curtains, a blah-ish lamp and some leftover office furniture. When our house-swappers were here, there was inflatable bed, too. The only exciting piece (and it is pretty darn exciting, if you ask me) is the bedside table that Nathan and I (mostly Nathan) made in a woodworking class we took way back before we had kids.

But I have big plans: new curtains, which I started shopping for last week. A new sofa bed, of the same kind Linda and Adam had in their guest room (yes, I slept on it, and it was very comfy). And a color scheme that I plan to base partly on the house we stayed at in the Blue Mountains and partly on the invitation to a million-dollar wedding we went to on Lanai about six years ago -- in short, green and purple. Here's an idea of the colors from the Blue Mountains house:

veggies, veggies, veggies

If you invite me to any kind of potluck event this summer, I shall be bringing a green salad. That's because I get piles of lettuce and other crazy greens (bok choy, arugula, mizuna[?] among them) each week in the CSA box, and I can only eat so many salads. I've also had it with fava beans, and even though almost everything I cook has onions in it, I still can't use them all.

But the CSA also brings lots of the best strawberries ever, wondeful fresh eggs, and yummy stuff we are excited about like carrots and fennel. And those apples that are like eating candy, but are already gone for the spring. And I've lost about 3 pounds since the season started 7 weeks ago, because I'm eating so many more veggies, and not as much other junk :-)

Look who's a cook all of a sudden!

As I write this (on the granite) three pots going on the stove, plus the center burner griddle: squid in tomato sauce, fava beans with bacon, and pasta to go with.

Later tonight I might make a cake from scratch -- just the cake part, cause I made the peanut butter filling and the dark chocolate frosting yesterday.

That, my friends, is now how I roll.