summer | kimberly ah

Aug 29 2013

crafty adventures, home is a 1970s apartment, homemaking, summer manifesto

Paper Weaving Party

I mentioned here that I had some ladies over on Sunday night for a casual evening of paper crafting. We all worked on paper weaving projects, both big and small. I’ve been wanting to do some paper weaving for awhile now, and the stars finally aligned for all of us to get together and try it out. We each tried something different… Linda did a weaving with a vacation picture and a journal page, Jackie worked on a fabulous sushi weaving and a huge weaving of British-themed papers, Karen practiced with some old craft papers and I was aiming to finish a small piece of art for the bathroom. My creation is one of the three DIY art pieces that I mentioned during my Summer Manifesto. (“Summer” is going to extend into September around here!) The weaving is made from four different 12×12 scrapbooking papers, all shades of grey of course. I am going to put in into one of these frames (I have an extra) and hang it in the master bath. I added the shiny silver at the end and I quite like the little shine it adds to the otherwise monochromatic (aka DULL) weaving. (For the record, I like monochromatic…and dull.)I’m waiting until after our vacation to frame it and hang it. I’ll share that with you when it’s all ready. Perhaps when that is done, I can actually show you the bathroom?

For today, I am dealing with a broken air conditioner (nothing like shelling out money for that right before vacation!), cleaning our apartment and trying to get our ducks in a row with cat/house/garden sitters and packing. I can’t believe Japan is just a few days away!!

Tagged crafts, decorating, diy, home, home improvement, homemaking, summer

Aug 28 2013

2 Comments

gardening, home is a 1970s apartment, homemaking, summer manifesto

Shamrock Revival

This shamrock plant was “dead” in the spring. It had been sitting on my kitchen window ledge and on my desk since March 2012, and over the winter, it kind of gave up. I think lack of water and limited sunlight were contributing factors. I almost threw it out, but the book clubs ladies encouraged me to keep it and move it to more sunlight. I dug around in the soil and found the little oxalis bulbs. They still looked healthy, so I planted them in a fresh pot with some fresh soil and stuck the pot in the north corner of our balcony and forgot about it. (Forgot about it=rarely watered it.) The next time I noticed it, several leaves were popping up…by the end of July (when this picture was taken), the plant was thriving, bright green and full of flowers. Lesson learned…it needs more light. I have two other oxalis sitting on my kitchen window. Their leaves are purplish green…I’m thinking about moving them outside for the rest of the summer, too.

When we get home from Japan, I have to start thinking about the plant plan for the cold weather months. I have brought more indoor plants into the apartment this past year, and finding a place for both the houseplants and the balcony plants (the ones that come inside for the winter) is going to be a challenge. I’m a little sad just thinking about it.

Tagged garden, gardening, home, home improvement, homemaking, summer

Aug 26 2013

3 Comments

gardening, homemaking, Simple Summer Suppers, summer manifesto

Simple Summer Suppers: Roasted Tomato Caprese

The challenge is on! We need to eat up all of our tomatoes around here before they go bad and before we hop on a plane for Japan. We’ve been giving away tons of red beauties, but still have so many to use! Last weekend, we had a mini-garden fest with our friend, Karen. We dined on our favorite panzanella, lightly grilled zucchini, Karen’s citrus rice salad and this delicious roasted tomato caprese salad. We were so lucky that the weather was perfect for dining outside on the balcony.

Honestly, it seems like a shame to roast perfectly delicious, garden-grown tomatoes…but it’s more of a shame to let them go to waste. I really think this salad will be a good one to try this winter with sad, peaked grocery store tomatoes. I’ll let you know. But for garden tomatoes…holy cow, the salad is crazy-good!Ina Garten’s Roasted Caprese Salad

12 plum tomatoes (or the equivalent in lovely tomato varieties from your garden), halved with seeds removed

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

16 oz fresh mozzarella

handful of fresh basil, julienned

Preheat your oven to 275 degrees while you prep the tomatoes.Place your tomatoes on a sheet pan (I covered mine with parchment paper to reduce sticky messes.) cut side up and drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Add garlic, sugar, salt and pepper.

Roast for two hours.

Cool tomatoes to room temperature and dump contents of pan (tomatoes and liquid) into serving bowl. Add fresh mozzarella (sliced) and basil. Mix and serve.Ina recommends arranging everything beautifully and adding a bit of extra olive oil, salt and pepper. But we found that the dish is fine without the extra oil. And while it’s lovely to serve alternating slices of tomato and mozzarella, serving it in a bowl is easy and rustic (and in no way lazy at all).

Tagged food, garden, gardening, homemaking, summer

Aug 21 2013

5 Comments

Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening, summer manifesto

Garden Update: CUCUMBER!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a cucumber!

This was great cause for celebration on Saturday afternoon at the garden. Because we didn’t care for our vine plants properly (hence the Wild West title for that part of the garden), they’ve only managed to become a tangled mess of cucumber and watermelon vines intertwined with fallen peas and lima beans and a wayward Juliet tomato plant. We kind of gave up on that section, chalking it up to our rookie year (and a little bit of laziness for not building a little vining contraption sooner).

So, when we were digging around looking for red Juliets, I came across the little guy above and shouted, “LOOK! A CUCUMBER!!!” Thankfully, we were the only ones at the garden, because I’m pretty sure I sounded like a crazy woman…but if you can’t get excited about growing a vegetable, what can you get excited about?In other good gardening news, our red pepper is getting bigger and starting to turn red. It’s often overshadowed in the garden by the crazy tomatoes, so I’m glad it’s plodding right along to redness. While Naoto weeded, I harvested another large bag of tomatoes (along with a yellow squash from Haig). I gave a few pounds to the book club ladies on Saturday morning, and by Saturday afternoon, our kitchen counter was full again.

Tomato takeover!

Tagged food, forest park, garden, gardening, summer

Aug 20 2013

Pleasant Home Movies on the Porch: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

On Friday night, I dragged Naoto to see a silent movie.

Pleasant Home, a historic home/museum in our neighborhood, is hosting Silent Movies on the Porch this month. The porch is huge, the summer nights are mild and there is live piano accompaniment! It felt like a real old-time theater experience! I have never seen a silent movie (sad, I know!) so I thought watching one on a porch with live music was a great place to start. At least if the movie lost my interest, I could appreciate the piano, right? Well, the movie never lost my interest…even Naoto had a great time!

Friday’s movie was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a 1920 German horror film. The movie was kind of weird, kind of scary (though not scary by today’s standards). The set was charming–characters walked among jaggedly painted buildings and hills, they opened oddly-shaped doors and windows, they congregated in tiny, spare rooms… The actors were fun to watch…great facial expressions, great hand motions…without the captions, you could still get a feel for what was going on. There was a plot twist at the end. (I love a good plot twist.)The best part about this particular movie on the porch, though, was that the pianist, Thomas Holmes, wrote his own score for this movie! (You can read more about that here.) Apparently, the movie’s original score was too string-heavy to duplicate with just a piano, so he decided to write a new one…no big deal, right? His music really made the movie come alive–the suspenseful scenes were so much more effective with the piano behind them! There were several extreme close-ups of creepy Dr. Caligari during the movie, and Holmes’s music for these scenes was perfect to set the creepy mood!

The movie on the porch was so much fun that I think we’re going to do it again. This week Pleasant Home is showing Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality. I’ll be spending all week talking it up to Naoto…but we all know he’s going to enjoy it, right?

Tagged adventures, Pleasant Home, summer

Aug 08 2013

2 Comments

adventures, cocktails, what's for dinner

K&N and the Girl & the Goat

Naoto has been wanting to eat at Stephanie Izard’s Girl & the Goat for years. Our neighbors have eaten there a few times and have raved about it so much. Naoto has been trying to get us a reservation for awhile now…he was especially anxious to eat there after we ate at Little Goat and had such a delicious experience.

Last Friday, we were able to go after one of his co-workers offered up her reservation to us. (Thanks, Missy!) So at five o’clock on a Friday night, we sat down to a dining adventure at the Goat. My favorite part was the cocktails. Don’t get me wrong–the food was AMAZING–but my cocktail, the Foghorn, was the scene-stealer (pictured above with Naoto’s boring beer). The Foghorn is, according to the menu, “SanFrancisco’s answer to the Manhattan”. It is made with gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur and orange bitters, garnished with an orange peel. So simple, but when it’s the right mix of quality ingredients and good proportions, simple can be so good! It was sweet, but not too sweet and no one ingredient overpowered the others–a perfect drink in my book. I also enjoyed the Charlie Ross cocktail (gin, sugar and bitters)…so tasty!

The menu at Girl & the Goat is separated into three parts: veggies, fish and meat. It is a small-plate restaurant, where you order several things and share a few bites of each thing. I like this style of restaurant, because if something is underwhelming, it’s good to know something new and different will be showing up at the table soon. But, at Girl & the Goat, nothing was underwhelming.

We ordered six dishes (pictured in order below): Squash Blossom Rangoon (crab and yogurt inside a lightly fried squash blossom), Kona Kompachi Crudo (raw fish with aioli and pork), Bristol Bay Sockeye Salmon (salmon with a peach panzanelle salad), Roasted Cauliflower (pure heaven, with pine nuts), Sweet Corn Goat Cheese Wontons (goat cheese wontons served with tiny heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and popcorn!) and Wood Oven Roasted Pig Face (pork cheek served with a fried egg and potatoes). Every dish was really creative and interesting, but my favorite was probably the most simple–the cauliflower. Naoto and I roast cauliflower pretty often around here, and it’s pretty delicious, but it’s nothing like this. I can’t stop thinking that they must really have a secret to making it so good… I’m glad Naoto let me eat most of the cauliflower, and because of his generosity, I only had a bite of the pig face. He was crazy excited to eat Girl & the Goat’s most popular dish. Of course, we had to get coffee and dessert. Naoto got the Miso-Butterscotch Budino (a creamy miso and butterscotch pudding with cashews, pineapple and bacon toffee on top). After this dessert, and the other miso dessert at the Little Goat Diner, I’m convinced that Naoto has the utmost respect for Stephanie Izard and her skills with this Japanese ingredient. I ordered the Goat Cheese Bavarois (brown sugar cake topped with blueberries, caramel krispies and goat cheese). I would tell you that the creamy goat cheese was the best part of this dessert, but then I’d be leaving out how amazing the brown sugar cake was, and the blueberries, and the caramelized krispie gems…What I liked best about Girl & the Goat was that it’s a casual restaurant…no white tablecloths or pretentious servers…it’s just incredibly creative food in a comfortable atmosphere. We definitely want to go back again…the menu changes all the time, so it would be fun to go back in another season to see what’s new. And to get another Foghorn.

Tagged adventures, cocktails, coffee, food, summer

Aug 06 2013

4 Comments

Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening, summer manifesto

Garden Update: Leaning Towers of Tomatoes

This week at the garden, I was informed that I bought “terrible tomato cages”.

Thanks for the “advice”, fellow gardener…a couple of months too late.

This first year has been all about learning. I didn’t remember from my dad’s garden (which is about twenty times the size of our plot) that tomato plants grow this much. I didn’t do a lot of research about each of the tomato varieties that we planted, but if I had, I would have learned that Brandywines (the tomatoes pictured above) are very heavy, and tend to weigh the plant down a ton. We should have staked it with a pile driver. (Kidding.) Now that we are harvesting the tomatoes, I feel like as long as we can keep the plants standing and producing, we’ve succeeded for Year One.Right now, since we cannot turn back time and buy sturdier cages, we are doing what we can to keep the plants stable and (as much as possible) out of the walking paths in the community garden. We bought some sturdy stakes and have tried to situate them in a way that holds up the cage along with the fruit-laden plants. We also brought some twine to the garden so we could tie up the wayward branches (as seen above on one of our Early Girls). Our garden plot isn’t going to win any Garden of the Year awards–especially considering the Wild West portion (pictured above…seriously, have you ever seen such a mess of plants?!) but we are really happy with our tomato harvests so far. We’ve pulled juicy red tomatoes from each of our four varieties and they are all sweet and delicious and there are many, many more green ones in waiting. As long as we can keep the plants standing, I’m sure we’ll be eating tomatoes throughout August and into September. We’ve also harvested a few more peas and some lima beans–not quite enough to make a side dish, but enough for me to have a first little taste of freshly picked peas and limas…a win in my book.

Tagged food, forest park, garden, gardening, homemaking, summer

Aug 02 2013

3 Comments

gardening, home is a 1970s apartment, homemaking, summer manifesto

The Summer Balcony

The balcony is in full summer mode right now. Everything is blooming like crazy, even my old geraniums! (They started blooming in mid-June and have been going strong ever since!) And, I’m happy to report that it’s August 2nd and ALL of my plants are not just alive, they are thriving! I think this is only partly due to the fact that I’ve been diligent about watering, but mostly due to the mild weather and the fact that I picked pretty easy going plants this year.

In the spring, Naoto and I relocated the bird feeder to the north end of the balcony. We also decided to stop filling it during the summer. The birds can find plenty of food in nature right now, and the birdseed makes such a mess on the balcony and blows into my flower pots, starting weeds in my flowers. We’re happy to fill it up again in the winter to feed the birds when they need it most and (more importantly) to give Presley back her birdwatching pastime. Once we created more room, I made a little conversation area on the south end of the balcony. It’s hard to work with the space, since it’s only five feet wide. There’s not much room for walking (as you can tell by the fact that the chairs are soooo close together!) It’s not perfect, but it’s fine for small gatherings. We’ve had our neighbor friends over quite often lately and it’s been wonderful to take advantage of the mild summer nights out there. On the north side, we have our little bistro table and the “potting area” (the pile of pots in the corner). In the morning, this area is nicely shaded for early morning letter writing, reading and crafting. (You know…the things I should be doing instead of watching the TODAY show!)

I’m a little nervous that August is going to be sweltering since we’ve had such a perfectly mild summer so far, but for now, I’m just going to try to soak up as many hours as I can outside.

Tagged decorating, garden, gardening, home, home improvement, homemaking, summer

Aug 01 2013

4 Comments

gardening, homemaking, Simple Summer Suppers, summer manifesto

Simple Summer Suppers: Homegrown Panzanella

Tuesday I was watching the TODAY Show (Don’t judge…it’s a sickness, I know.) and Giada was whipping up a dish with bread and tomatoes and artichokes and vinegar and basil–panzanella! I could not stop thinking about it. So I decided, eying the fresh harvest of tomatoes and basil sitting on the counter, that we would have to have panzanella for dinner.

Panzanella is the perfect summer meal. It’s the ideal recipe for fresh garden (or farmers market) tomatoes. I can’t imagine this dish could ever be enjoyed in the winter with the mealy, barely pink, imported grocery store tomatoes. Nope…better enjoy it now while we are harvesting the rich red tomatoes of summer.

Homegrown Panzanella
(slightly adapted from Giada’s Artichoke & Tomato Panzanella)

3 cups bread, cubed into 1-2 inch pieces (I used ciabatta)

3 large tomatoes, cut into 1-2 inch pieces, or sliced (I used a mix of tiny Juliets and two big Brandywines, all freshly picked from our garden!)

1 can artichoke hearts, sliced in half

handful of chopped basil

2/3 cup good olive oil (For salads, we love Trader Joe’s California Estate Olive Oil.)

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

drizzle of olive oil for cooking

salt & pepper

Preheat a grill pan on medium heat. Toss your bread and artichokes with a little bit of olive oil. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper and add the bread and the artichokes to the preheated grill. Turn every couple of minutes until each side is golden brown. Remove from the grill and add to a serving bowl with your tomatoes and basil. Toss to combine.

Whisk the good olive oil and vinegar together and add salt and pepper to taste. Pour over the salad. Toss and serve.

You could add olives, red onion or parmesan cheese.

As it was, the panzanella was amazing. We ate it as our main course, with a side of fresh green beans from the farmers market and a couple of glasses of red wine. We took advantage of another mild summer night and ate outside…it just might have been the perfect summer meal.

Tagged food, forest park, garden, gardening, homemaking, summer

Jul 30 2013

3 Comments

adventures, gardening

Oak Park Conservatory–Uncorked

I am a sucker for local events. The Oak Park Conservatory is hosting Uncorked Summer Nights on the last Fridays of the next few months. The first one was last Friday and I went with Naoto and our neighbor friend Karen to check it out. For $10, you get two drink tickets, a tour of the conservatory, passed appetizers and then a chance to mill around with other plant lovers both inside the conservatory and outside on the patio.

I’ve never been to the conservatory…what a shame because it is such a local treasure! The actual conservatory was built in 1929 and it holds more than 3000 plants. There are three sections in the conservatory–the fern room, the rainforest room and the desert room. Our docent gave us a thorough tour of each room and I took plenty of pictures.

Above is the view as you walk into the fern room. You are overcome with green, in the best way possible. Here are some other views from the fern room. I’m not sure what the first two plants are (I just loved their interesting shapes!), but the last one is a lemon tree.

As we walked into the rainforest room, we could feel the change in humidity. Three birds live in this room (they chatter at you as you walk by!) and there’s a river running though the room with a few large, colorful koi fish and a tiny turtle! (It’s hard to see the little guy in my picture, but he’s right by the koi’s tail.) We also saw a cacao tree (third picture down) and a huge fiddle leaf fig (not pictured), the biggest “thing” in home blogging since chevron.The last room, the desert, was dry and warm (obviously). I was most looking forward to seeing the century plant, an agave from Mexico that only blooms once every thirty years. The picture below is from a few weeks ago when the plant started growing through the roof of the conservatory. The book club ladies and I walked down one evening to take a peek at it poking through the roof of the conservatory. Sadly, before it had a chance to really flourish, it broke off in a bad storm the week before. But we got to see the blooms up close on display since the conservatory staff was able to save those from the broken plant. From the inside of the conservatory, the base of the century plant looks like an enormous, Dr. Suess-ish plant with a giant asparagus poking out of it. I’m really not a desert person, but I loved seeing the cacti and succulents up close. There were so many interesting ones! The one below was part of a series of enormous aloe plants. Naoto cut his leg on one. (We were warned not to touch the cacti!) There were also plenty of little mice frolicking about the plants in here. It was alarming at first (they were really out in the open!) but they quickly became fun to watch (as long as they didn’t run out into the walkways!) Karen took this picture of Naoto and me in front of the century plant. I decided to wear my new floral dress (as a departure from my usual summer black and grey and cat shirts) for the gardening occasion. I’m already looking forward to going back and exploring more during August’s Uncorked event!