An ode to HomeGoods

 

A good percentage of my disposable income is spent on patterned wool rugs and vintage furniture, and I have built up a hoarder’s collection of colorful pillows and throws, artwork, frames, masks, brass hooks and interesting-yet-entirely useless items in my 5+ years of living alone. People come to my place and assume I’ve collected them in my travels over the years. My dirty secret is that most of it is from HomeGoods.

 

So naturally, I do read the HomeGoods inspiration blog designHappy to scout great finds and ideas. They just featured my living room ideas and seriously validated all the hours I’ve spent in my life trolling the clearance aisles in a trance, buying things that I absolutely do not need nor have room for in my home. I don’t know how you do it, HG, but I just can’t get enough of you.

 

You can check out the post here.

 

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How to wear your grandma’s fur stole

 

I found this little mink stole for $60 at a vintage shop in Austin last year and haven’t worn it because I wasn’t sure how, other than with a wedding dress (Ashley, it is all yours next February). It has been keeping my mannequin warm and every time I look at it, it reminds me that it needs to get out there into the world. I finally had an excuse to take it out for a test run a few weeks ago when my friend had a speakeasy costume party. The fur was the perfect complement to a silk feathered dress, layers of pearls, and droopy earrings. (And the perfect outfit for a walk in the park, right?)

 

 

Fur is polarizing, but not nearly as controversial as sheer black tights. I’ve replaced all my opaque ones with these sheer ones because I think they’re more flattering than the all-black foot-ankle-leg entity that those solid tights create and they add some much-needed contrast for black suede boots.

What Goes Around Comes Around silk dress, Sigerson Morrison boots, vintage fur.

Photos by Valerie SJ from The Adventures of Valocrat

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Easy-yet-impressive guacamole

If there is one thing I learned from my mom, it is how to take shortcuts in the kitchen. She fed a family of eight for a good 18 years and can whip up a casserole blindfolded while painting her nails in under five minutes.

So this easy-peasy guacamole is really her idea: she discovered Wholly Chunky Avocado dip at Costco and it is guaranteed to be at every single Kelly family event you ever attend until the end of time (which is great because it pairs well with the other Kelly family food group: Tostitos). Mary Lou serves it straight up (it’s just mashed avocado), but I use it as the base for guacamole: it saves time of waiting for the avocados to ripen (and eliminates the risk of waiting too long), plus the peeling, coring, chopping, and mashing. It’s perfect, every time!

To keep it ‘homemade’ I add in fresh cilantro, garlic, tomato, and onion, plus a little salt, pepper and cayenne.

I use a teaspoon to scrape out the seeds and juice from the tomatoes, and then roughly chop everything and stir it with the avocado. For one bag of avocado, I use two cloves of garlic, two small tomatoes, a handful of cilantro, and 1/4 cup of chopped red onion, 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne, and a few dashes of salt and pepper.

 

This can barely be called a recipe, but it is special to me because that bagged guacamole conjures up some great memories – and not all of them from good ol’ Hinsdale, IL.

 

Once, I enticed Wes to fight the traffic on M street in Georgetown to come to my apartment after work for a ‘surprise.’ (Which was that I made this exact recipe, mostly for myself.) He was very disappointed in the surprise, told me he hated avocadoes, and didn’t eat any of it. We eventually reconciled. Now ‘guacamole surprise’ is the name of this recipe, and the name of any event where something unexpectedly bad happens (e.g., traffic violation, broken finger).

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Tips for creating a gallery wall

My favorite little neighborhood coffee shop (Dilworth Coffee for any Charlotte locals) has great taste in interiors. On my way to pick up lattes, I always walk past this gallery wall, admire it, and think about how it wants me to spray paint all my mismatched frames a muted gold. I finally snapped some photos to share their great ideas for creating one of your own.

Granted, I am probably not the best person for giving tips on hanging pictures (I “eyeball” everything, and therefore most of my walls are covered in nail holes), but do think you’ll agree that galleries look best when they are a little willy-nilly and off kilter, as if a real artist just slapped them up there for sale.

Here are some tips I’ve learned from the gallery walls across America that I’ve admired and copied in my own homes over the years:

1. Go beyond picture frames and canvases – sprinkle in some letters, animal heads, or anything else that you feel inclined to nail to the wall – remember that there is no ‘wrong’ in an art gallery

2. Start hanging from the center – choose the frame or two that you want to be the anchor for the rest, and just go ahead and hang ’em up. Below is a photo of the gallery wall from my old studio in DC – I chose to start with the two largest pieces as the center (a canvas and a big white matted print of the Capital). Once I committed to those two as the focus, it was pretty easy to start hanging the the others in the places where I felt they fit. (And if you’re not comfortable making as many nail holes in the walls as your darn well please until it looks right, you can play with the layout on the floor and use a ruler.)

3. Vary size and dimension – use fat frames, skinny ones, long ones, small ones – but stick to roughly the same amount of space between the frames themselves to keep it balanced (I like to keep them one or two ‘thumbs’ apart).

4. Use as many colors and textures as you want – and if you want to change it up, an $8 bottle of gold spray paint is all you need. I decided to copy Dilworth Coffee and paint all my old frames gold – there are still a few left to go (ran out of paint – downside of an impulse project).

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Another idea for how to wear a leopard skirt

There is something about a leopard pencil skirt that reminds me of Fran Drescher and New Jersey circa 1990. It’s not an easy item to pull off, but done right it can become a staple (just like your leopard pumps, leopard belt, leopard purse, etc.)

After many months of hunting eBay for the perfect cheapie, I snapped up this little number for $10. (I never commit to a trend until I first do a trial run with it’s cheap, gently used eBay cousin.) It arrived and I spent weeks Google-imaging how to wear it, and decided that it goes best with soft sweaters and tees. It downplays some of the va-va-voom and is a perfect warm-weather alternative to pretty much any outfit you would otherwise wear with skinny jeans.

Speaking of warm weather, it was 60-something-degrees this weekend in Charlotte and the first time my legs have seen the light of day in months. I’m going to go ahead and add ‘tights-free in February’ to my running list of reasons to stick to the South.

 

 

 

Leopard pencil skirt, eBay.com (similar here); tee shirt, Lovers + Friends, Nordstrom.com; cashmere cardigan, Maxstudio from TJX; bag, (old) madewell.com.

 

The dragon bracelet is from Thailand, and the copper one is from that great old mess of a costume jewelry stand in Eastern Market that I really miss these days!

Photos by Valerie SJ from The Adventures of Valocrat

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Five tips for making perfect chocolate chip cookies, every time

I’ve been baking a lot lately. It’s winter, I’m unmotivated to leave the house, my Kitchen Aid has been calling my name, and I get a strange sense of fulfillment out of creating perfect baked goods all by myself. (I also get a sense of despair when I inadvertently create a disaster like the time I tried do-it-yourself fudge and left crystallized chocolate in a mixing bowl on the counter for two days.)

 

So simple recipes are my forte, and classic chocolate chip cookies are my favorite – I bring them to parties as hostess gifts all the time, and I’ve learned five tricks to getting them right, every single time.

 

1. Follow the recipe exactly (baking is chemistry, after all).

This one seems obvious, but there are many times I skip steps like ‘sift flour, baking soda, and salt over parchment paper’ and instead just dump the ingredients in the mixer. There is a reason for every step in a recipe, and in baking the sequence of steps is very important. It was a personal challenge for me to follow the steps and make my measurements exact but my cookies were always a little off until I learned to do this.

 

 

2. Use a batter scoop to make the dollops of dough exactly the same size.

They will bake at exactly the same rate, spread exactly the same amount, and turn golden at exactly the same time. Ever notice how those Nestle Tollhouse break-and-bake cookies are always perfect? It’s because the dough is measured exactly. I got a three-size scoop set off Amazon, and use the smallest one for cookies (the larger ones are perfect for muffins, cupcakes, and ice cream). Best $8 I spent!

 

 

3. Line your baking sheets with Silpat mats.

This is better than parchment paper because it spreads the heat evenly, protects the cookies from burning and sticking to the pan, and makes it easy to pull the cookies off of the pan and onto a cooling rack as a group! I have two half-sheet size Silpat mats from Macy’s that I use for everything).

 

4. Under bake, and use a cooling rack.

As long as the cookies are sitting on hot metal, they are continuing to bake. I like to pull them out of the oven a few minutes early, let them sit on the hot cookie sheet for two minutes, and then transfer them onto a cooling rack. This keeps them soft and chewy even when they are cooled and a few hours (or days) old.

5. Make half the recipe.

Part of the reason my cookies fail is due to the fact that I just don’t have the endurance to do rounds and rounds of sheet scrubbing, dough-scooping, kitchen-timer-setting, and waiting-while-baking. Making half a recipe solves this problem AND also helps keep you skinnier by the simple fact that there are just less cookies to go around. Perfect for a two-person household.

 

Here’s my favorite ‘half-recipe’ that is a real crowd-pleaser, adapted from a Williams Sonoma original.

 

Ingredients:

 

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1 egg

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

6 oz. semisweet chocolate chips

 

Directions:

1. Preheat an oven to 350°F.
2. In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda and salt.
3. In a mixer on medium-high speed, beat together the butter and the granulated and brown sugars until the mixture is light in texture, about 3 minutes.
4. Beat in the egg, then the vanilla.
5. Reduce the speed to low and gradually add the flour mixture, beating just until smooth and stopping to scrape down the bowl as needed.
6. With a spatula, stir in the chocolate chips, distributing them evenly throughout the dough.
7. Using a small scoop, measure dough onto a cookie sheet lined with Silpat, spacing about 2 inches apart.
8. Bake for no more than 10 minutes, remove the sheet from the oven, and allow cookies to continue to bake on the hot cookie sheet for two minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely.

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How to make a bad rental kitchen (sort of) nice

For all the charm of this little old 1930s bungalow, the turquoise countertops are almost a deal-breaker – the kitchen was in a sad, disorganized state for months and I had no idea how to fix it.

So I decided to stop fighting it, accept those ugly laminate counters for what they were, and work with them by adding other quirky accents to liven the place up a little (and focus the eye on the white space of the pantry door).

For some reason, spelling out ‘EAT’ in large letters in your kitchen is suddenly cool, and I hopped on that bandwagon for a mere $10 worth of wooden block letters from Michael’s and sat them on top of the crown molding above the pantry door. I added a knife magnet for organization purposes, and dragged Wes’s (stolen?) street sign home from his old high school bedroom where it fit nicely above the cabinets for now. The brass pineapple hook was an eBay steal ($6) and the perfect home for an amazing Crate & Barrel dishtowel (it has all of the measurement conversions you’ll ever need, in machine-washable cotton for $6 – it’s my kitchen reference library!).

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The best (and easiest) roasted butternut squash recipe, ever

 

My pants are getting a little tight these days. Maybe it’s because I’ve been making a habit of eating chocolate chip cookies for dinner, or just that it’s winter and I’ve spent the entire season in one pair of (very forgiving) wool leggings, sitting on my couch, and depleting the supply on my wine rack.

 

This week, I am going on a clean diet filled with vegetables, nuts, and fruit which is no easy feat, especially with a man-roommate who gets upset when I bring things like green beans and Brussels sprouts home from the grocery store. But even Wes loves eating this butternut squash recipe – it makes a great side dish, snack, or even an entrée (I love to add walnuts for a little protein kick and bring it to work for lunch).

 

Butternut squash is healthy, filling, and low-cal (one serving has just 45 calories). It’s good on it’s own, but this recipe adds just enough bad to make it really good. (And I always include a generous dose of cayenne pepper to make it truly addicting.) Prep time should take you five minutes, but be sure to allow a full 45 minutes to roast these until crispy.

 

Ingredients:

• A two-pound box of cubed butternut squash (or you can peel and cube your own if you’re the ambitious type
• Two tablespoons of olive oil
• Two tablespoons of brown sugar
• A half teaspoon of ground cinnamon
• A half teaspoon of cayenne pepper
• One teaspoon of salt

 

Supplies:

• A mixing bow
• A spatula
• Two cookie sheets
• Aluminum foil

 

Directions:

 

Pre-heat oven to 425. Drizzle the olive oil over the butternut squash, and add the rest of the ingredients.

 

Mix well with a spatula until the cubes are evenly coated.

 

Line each cookie sheet with aluminum foil, and place half of the butternut squash mixture on each sheet. Take time to space out the cubes so that each has plenty of room around it (see picture below). This will help them become perfectly brown and crisp on the outside.

Bake for 25 minutes, then remove from the oven and turn each cube over. Place back into the oven for another 20 minutes. Remove from the oven when the corners of the cubes of squash are golden brown, and allow the squash to cool on a wire rack for five minutes.

 

Serve while it’s hot, and enjoy the compliments!

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