Crafty Devil

Giant Fork & Spoon

Over Christmas, I convinced my grandma to give me these:

You see, I'd long been enamored of the giant fork and spoon, and now I have a vintage kitchen. I thought they'd look perfect. I was right, I love them.

Liz Lemon has a orange pair in her office:

Inspired by the orange, I decided that my spoon and fork needed a little more punch. A few coats of paint later, and here they are:

Full disclosure: I originally painted them orange, like Liz Lemon's. But the orange was too muted and was too similar in color to my knotty pine cabinets. The bright blue is a much better contrast.

I've got a can of blue spray paint left. What do I paint next?

Painting the House: Before & After

Roasted Portobello Lasagna

Lately, I've been a little obsessed with lasagna. I pretty much make a batch every time I entertain. Why? Because it's delish. And because it's a dish you can make ahead, then pop it in the oven when it's time to eat dinner. That means I get to socialize with my guests instead of slaving away at the stove while everyone else partays.

My go-to lasagna recipe is from Cooking Dinner: Simple Italian Recipes Everyone Can Make. It features a simple meat ragu and bechemel sauce version that's oh so yummy. But my sister-in-law is visiting from England this week and I needed a vegetarian version. This Roasted Portobello Lasagna is what I came up with (it's basically a mash-up of a few lasagna recipes).

Roasting the portobello mushrooms brings out their rich, smoky flavor. Coupled with creamy bechemel and sharp parmesan-reggiano, this lasagna is a truly amazing dish (if I don't say so myself).

This is the lasagna before it's been baked. Even uncooked it's beautiful!

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lbs portobello mushrooms
Olive oil
4 cups milk
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp salt
Pepper to taste
1/8 ground nutmeg
12 lasagna noodles
8 oz shredded mozzarella cheese
1 cup freshly grated parmesan-reggiano cheese

For the bechemel sauce:
Heat the milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat until it's just about to boil. Meanwhile, melt the butter over low heat in a larger saucepan. When melted, remove from heat and whisk in the flour until smooth. Continue whisking, and add the heated milk about one cup at a time.

Return the mixture to low heat. Add salt and nutmeg and stir until the sauce reaches a boil. Cook for three more minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and set aside until ready to use.

For the roasted portobellos:
Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees.

Remove stems and slice the caps about 1/4 inch thick. Drizzle olive oil over a cookie sheet and lay the slices closely together on the pan. Drizzle more olive oil over the slices and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Roast portobellos for about ten minutes, until they are sizzling. Turn them over, then roast for an additional ten minutes. They will shrink considerably and become a lovely rich brown color. Set aside until ready to use.

For the lasagna noodles:
Fill a large pot with water, salt it, and bring to boil. Add the noodles and boil for 10 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water until cool enough to handle.

Assemble the lasagna:
Ladle a spoonful of bechemel into the bottom of an 8x12x2 inch pan. Add a layer of noodles. Add another layer of bechemel, 1/3 of the mushrooms, top with a sprinkling of mozzarella and 1/4 cup parmesan-reggiano. Repeat 2 more times. Add a final layer of noodles, sauce, and parmesan-reggiano.

Bake the lasagna in a 375 degree oven for 45 minutes, or until the top is browned and the sauce is bubbling. Allow to sit for 15 minutes at room temperature before serving.

Substitutions: Take a page from my friend Ben's recipe book and use sharp white cheddar cheese instead of the mozzarella and parmesan-reggiano.

Finally, here's where I get all food-snob on your ass. If you haven't tried lasagna (meat or otherwise) with bechemel instead of ricotta or <shudder> cottage cheese, do yourself a favor and try it. You'll never look at the world the same after that.

 

 

The Story of the New House

At the beginning of the year, I wrote this post, which I cleverly called "New Year, New House." The thing is, I never meant it literally.

And yet, here I am.

We bought a new friggin' house, and I love it. I feel like the luckiest person alive, and while there's something kind of scary about having everything you want, even if it's only for a moment, I'm really trying to enjoy it and take it all in.

If this all seems rather sudden to you, you're not alone. We're still in a little bit of shock.

On January 23, my husband and I went out for lunch. There may have been margaritas involved. At the time, we had every intention of going forward with our plan to renovate our condo and turn it into our dream abode. The windows were already in the process of being replaced and we were discussing our further design plans when one of us--I'm not sure who--brought up the subject of looking at houses, just to see if there was anything out there we liked. We continued the discussion and agreed that a yard for the dogs was paramount. We'd been schlepping them up and down in the elevator for eleven years and let's face it, Stuart's not getting any younger. Our experience with trying to get Kramer downstairs to the street before he had any accidents was still fresh in our minds, even after three years, and going through the same thing with Stuart just didn't seem like our idea of fun (the little red wagon notwithstanding).

Kramer, March 2008

We kept talking, and by the time we left the restaurant that day, the tentative suggestion we should look at some houses had turned into a full-on quest for the house of our dreams.

We found it three days later.

The thing was, the place already had a buyer and was in escrow. But the owner was accepting backup offers, and my husband and I decided to make one. It was accepted, but the original deal was still in the works. For about five days we were on tenterhooks, waiting to see if that contract would fall through. It did, and our escrow opened on February 8. It might've been the fastest escrow in history, because we closed and took ownership of the house on February 14.

Lest you think we bought the house just so we wouldn't have to walk our dogs, there were plenty of other reasons we wanted a new place. We love the condo, but we were eager to own something that belonged to us alone--no shared walls.

And have you seen this bedroom?

It was love at first sight.

We moved in on February 17 and we're pretty settled already, even though the guest room is full of boxes. We even had our first BBQ on Sunday, just to break the place in.

I'll more pictures as soon as the place is a little more set up.

New Year, New House

On Tuesday, my husband and I are moving out of our condo and moving into a temporary apartment. The reason? A much needed, almost total overhaul of our place.

This reno will include:

1) New windows. These are the ones we're getting:

Metal Window Corporation

That project is kind of already underway, as they've begun the demo. It's a huge project--our house has over 50 separate panes of glass, and our living room walls are made up entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows (134 inches tall). So, yeah.

2) New kitchen
The scope of this project is yet to be determined. At minimum, we are opening up the pass through between the kitchen and dining room, adding a metal oven hood, moving the fridge to the other side of the room, and installing new hardwood floors. More likely, however, will be cabinet re-facing, new countertops, new appliances, new sink, etc.

To give you an idea what I mean when I say we're "opening up" the pass-through, here is how it looks now:

 

And from the dining room side:

Our neighbor, whose kitchen has a very similar layout to ours, has already opened hers up, so this is roughly what we plan to do:

And here it is from the dining room side:

As far as I'm concerned, this update is pretty much a no-brainer.

3) New master bathroom
This will most likely be a complete renovation: new countertops, cabinets, flooring, bathtub, toilet, shower. I dream of having this as my new bathroom:

But Mick isn't crazy about it. Still, it's beautiful, isn't it?

As you can see, the condo currently has a very dark color palette. That's all changing folks. In 2011, we're lightening things up, big time. The new look will be very similar to this:

 
I. can't. wait.

There are a few "before" pics in this post I wrote in 2009 when we were refinancing. In fact, it goes all the way back to the way the place looked when we first bought it in 2000.

Casa West Before/After - 2009

 

Baba Ganoosh Recipe

I got an eggplant in my Farm Fresh to You box this week and as soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to make baba ganoosh with it. I love this simple eggplant dip--I devour it every time we go to Taverna Tony.

Here's the easy recipe:

Ingredients
1 large eggplant (1 pound)
1/4 cup tahini
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp salt (or to taste)
Fresh parsley (garnish)

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.

Pierce the eggplant 10 - 12 times with a fork and put it in a baking dish. Bake for about 50 minutes or until soft. Let cool and remove skin.

Finely chop the eggplant and combine with remaining ingredients.

Garnish with fresh parsley and serve at room temperature with pita bread or crackers. Or, if you're like me, eat it plain straight out of the bowl.

DIY Pendant Light

I kind of want to make one of these lights:

Trendy DIY Pendant Light

In theory, they remind me of many of the pendant lights I've been looking at to go in one corner of our living room. In execution, they might be a child's craft project on steroids.

Part of the reason I'm conflicted is that they put me in the mind of a certain Christmas ornament my brother made when he was five. It involved a balloon, starch, and a yellow ball of string. It is possibly the ugliest Christmas ornament ever, and every year I begged my mom not to put it on the tree. Unfortunately her misguided nostalgia always won out and it was an annual focal point on the tree.

But there is something appealing about these lamps at the same time. The simple orb, the contemporary look, and frankly, the opportunity to make a light, which I've been looking to do for some time. I even looked for a light kit in Home Depot the other day (not to make one of these, but to get ideas how I might design my own).

What do you think? Should I try to make one of these pendant lights or are they in reality horrible examples of DIY gone wrong?

Functional Rearrangement

The notorious Los Angeles June gloom is beginning to lift and as a result, yesterday I spent a lot of time reading on my balcony. We are lucky in that we rarely have to use the air conditioning, even when it's hot, because the ocean breeze usually blows enough throughout the day to keep the house cooled when the windows are all open. To help with the cross breeze, I've also been keeping the balcony door open.

I say balcony "door" but really, there are two. But we've never, in the entire 10 years we've lived here, opened the two doors together. This is because much of the time there's been a heavy drape in front of the second door and a big leather chair blocking it so it only opened partially and looked awkward.

Yesterday I decided we needed to utilize that second door. Here we have these lovely french doors in our house and we never use them. It suddenly seemed very silly. Mick and I did a bit of quick rearranging, and the room is airier and open now.

Here's how it looked before:

Danielle Steel's Beach Retreat

Estimated to be worth $600-$800 million, author Danielle Steel owns a few wonderful properties. But this is where she most likes to call home:

Click here to see the slide show.

Click here to read the Wall Street Journal article.

Not Your Child's Bean Bag Chair

Now this is a Fab Freebie from Young House Love I can get behind, or at least put my behind on:

It's a Booty Beanbag chair!

To enter, head on over to Young House Love and comment on this post. But first, read the rules, you know, so their aren't any misunderstandings.

I'd wish you good luck, but I'm hoping to win this myself.