Weekend

Pretty morning

Mad Men premiere "Zou bisou bisou"

If this wasn't stuck in your head all day Monday, I am surprised . . .

As a side note, I might be becoming one of those people who obsessively follows one television show - at least I love a good one. :) After re-watching the first season (which I own) last fall, I sort of forgot how well-crafted and historically accurate this show has remained throughout the years.  Love.

Here is a translation of the lyrics courtesy of Slate.com:

Kiss kiss kiss etc.

My God, how soft they are! 

Kiss kiss kiss etc.

The sound of kisses!

In the bushes, under the August sky

Lovers glide stealthily

Like birds, they have dates

Everywhere you hear:

Kiss kiss kiss etc.

My God, how soft they are!

But tell me, do you know

What that means, between us,

What does “zou bisou” mean?

It means, I confess to you,

But yes, I love only you!

Kiss kiss kiss etc.

My God, how soft it is!

But no need for bushes in the month of August

When you kiss me softly on the neck!

It’s funny, you see, I confess,

I feel it everywhere

Kiss kiss kiss etc.

My God, how soft it is!

Kiss kiss kiss etc.

Little kisses

Kiss kiss kiss

Happy Monday!

I know that it's Monday . . . but since everything is in bloom and the air is getting warm, the weeks go by faster and faster, making it easier to tolerate these quick weeks filled with work and days spent inside.

This weekend, I did two things I've never done before: ran 13.1 miles (a half marathon) and I made French bread from scratch - admittedly, an odd pair of hobbies, but I've been trying to make the most of my weekends and my work/life balance.  The 13.1 wasn't pretty, but I did it.  I feel far more confident about the actual marathon I'm registered to run next Sunday in Chicago.  I'm actually starting to get very excited.  It also didn't hurt that the weather today was perfect for running - moments of sun interspersed with lots of fog and mist close to Lake Michigan.  My new iPhone app is great, too.  I don't have to use an adapter to track my distance/calories/pace.  Instead, GPS keeps up with my location.  My only wish is that I could run Spotify in conjunction with the app, rather than running them separately.  In short, looking forward to getting after it next weekend.

As far as the bread goes, I get tired of buying bread from the store all of the time and love the fresh bread that we get from Bennison's bakery at the farmers' market each week during the summer.  However, as I was flipping through my go-to cookbook: I decided that the bread chapter - often under-utilized - was worth a second look.  I will save you the boring parts and the ridiculous stickiness and messiness associated with baking French bread - although, it is supposed to be one of the easier ones - and suffice it to say, that my favorite part will be eating the bread.  Though, I did love when the bread went from the size of a softball to something more like this:

 Which I then got to "punch" down.  Way fun.  Of course, the 90 seconds of fun that I had punching it down did not compare to the half an hour of cleaning flour off of every surface in my kitchen when my Kitchen Aid mixer decided to reject the enormous ball of dough.  "Ruby," as I like to call her, needs to toughen up.  No hard feelings, Ruby.  I just didn't appreciate being covered in flour. I digress. 

So after the punching and dividing and rising, etc., the loaves looked like this: 

That's cornmeal (well, actually it is bread crumbs because I am out of corn meal) on the pan.  After more rising, the loaves looked like this: 

 

Okay, enough with the pre-bread documentation. 

Anyway, so the bread ended up looking like this.

I hope it tastes good . . .  I must admit that halfway through this process, I was ready to call my dad and ask if we could borrow his bread maker, as this process is tedious.  However, I will not stop until I learn how to make pretzel bread - my personal favorite. All in all, a very successful weekend. 

Beautiful.

Spring is coming!

Opi - Holland collection
Kiss my Tulips

Healthy Eating: Salsa

I know I've blogged about the ridiculous amount of vegetables my husband and I eat on a daily/weekly basis.  While I absolutely love veggies, eating them the same way all of the time can get incredibly boring.  Enter: Trader Joe's.  I fell in love with Trader Joe's fresh salsa while at a birthday party for one of our friends.  It was so fresh and tart that I could not drag myself away from the food table.  Earlier this week, as I was doing our weekly grocery shopping, I ran across the salsa in the hummus/semi-fresh pasta/pizza dough refrigerated case at TJ's.  As I reached for it, I stopped to look at the ingredients: apple cider vinegar, cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, etc.  All of it was real food - which is very important to me & my husband.  I decided that I could make it more cheaply and probably even a little more healthily than TJ's.

For my fresh salsa, I chopped 3/4 of an onion, a green pepper, two small vine tomatoes and added a can of rinsed black beans.  I topped it all with apple cider vinegar - I didn't measure, but instead just poured as I added the veggies to the container.  The total cost of TJ's 12 oz container is about $2.99.  The cost of my 64 oz of salsa: $2.00.  The breakdown is about $.24 an ounce versus $.04 an ounce - for over five times the amount of healthy, low sodium, natural salsa.  The best part: it tastes great added to an arugula salad as dressing.  The black beans make it extra filling, as well.

I am a firm believer that cooking and buying smarter is much more affordable than couponing . . . which leads me to my next blog post.

New Table Linens for Spring

My super fun & talented sewing husband has been at work once again.  We chose this Lilly Pulitzer inspired fabric and he sewed some place mats and a table runner.  This fabric, which cost about $22 for three yards, is much less expensive than purchasing specialty table runners for our extra-long dining room table.  I love the story behind our homemade table "clothes," as my husband calls them. :) I also love that he made these himself.

"I always have to be doin' a little somethin'."

According to my Dad, my great-grandmother used to always say that she "had to be doin' a little somethin' all the time.  She liked to stay busy gardening, cooking and taking care of her rug rat great-grandchildren :).  Like my great-grandmother (& my dad) I'm a list-maker and like to stay busy - except for a completely lazy weekend here and there.

My dad sent me this post from another blogger: Country Consultant.  Within the post, there is a list of helpful habits.  Being the list-enthusiast I am, Dad knew that I would enjoy this.

Helpful Habits – by Carla Emery

1. Don’t discuss the obvious
2. Don’t own a television
3. Quit a job when you’re losing efficiency
4. Go to bed when you’re tired
5. Eat less salt and sugar and use less heat
6. Keep lists of things to do and things to buy
7. Then get somebody else to do as many of those as possible
8. Don’t drink coffee, tea, cola, or alcohol; smoke cigarettes; chew snooze; or use illegal drugs
9. Sing a lot
10. Pray a lot

While I can't adopt all of these habits - see number 8 sans the illegal drugs/snooze(?)/cigarettes part.  I really appreciate many of these suggestions and can see why these are "helpful" habits.  

To me, number one is number one for a reason - it is one of the best (ironically, the most obvious) suggestions I've heard in awhile.  This is what that says to me: skip the obvious complaint, the cheesy unproductive small-talk, Monday-bashing, weather-chatting, traffic, etc.  All of this is generally information of which we are keenly aware.  I'm not saying that I'm going to start deep conversations in the office kitchen rather than talking about traffic or the weather when I'm pouring my a.m. coffee, but to me, it means taking advantage of having meaningful conversations with the people we care about when given the opportunity to do so.  I already think that my future children are going to have such a different social experience than I ever did - I just hope that they pry themselves away from television and technology enough to develop basic social skills, a since of humor, the ability to make interesting small talk and the ability to navigate themselves out of awkward conversations.  Aside from learning how to read, write and spell in elementary school and how to type properly in middle school, I think that college and sorority gave me a crash course in effective communication, organization and millions of other things - I can plan a party and rush a freshman like it's my business ;).

The rest of the list, which I may blog about in later posts, seems to be a primer on how to make your life simpler and uncomplicated.  I like it.  I feel like while I love Chicago, everything is a little more complicated - mostly because there are more people to navigate around than in most places. Though, I guess every city has its pros and cons.  

102 Must See Movies

I've always liked the book better than the movie.  It typically doesn't matter what the movie is - I will always like the book.  That being said, I love to watch good, classic movies.  I also love foreign films (8 Femmes, Indochine, Baji on the Beach).  I haven't been all that impressed with or thrilled with the movies that have come out in the past few years.  I know that I missed some good ones during law school, but I've never been a huge fan of going to the movies . . . I know, am I even American?!

Anyway, I am hoping to watch some classic movies over the next few months to try to catch up, so I found the following list of some of the best movies of all time, according to Roger Ebert.  However, given the fact that many of these movies came out when my grandparents were young, I must not have missed much in law school.

According to Roger Ebert, you should see the following classics.  (I've seen the ones highlighted in yellow).
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
"Apocalypse Now" (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
"Bambi" (1942) Disney
"The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn
"Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel 
"Do the Right Thing" (1989 Spike Lee
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
"Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
"A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It's a Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"The Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
"Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming