Hometime New Years

I am entirely too disorganized to post all the food and the adventure and the holiday I've been having, but in the spirit of 'one step at a time', I thought I'd just stop in to wish you a happy start to this year. I crossed into 2011 happily in the company of both of my siblings and my old time besties Abby + Matt in their fair Madison, WI. (This, you may realize, is a mere stone's throw from my hometown hometown, Neenah.) New Years's in Wisconsin have never been in my experience terribly memorable and this year, we were hoping to change that.

We made homemade ravioli! I've never done that! And despite their filling being a little 'overwhelmingly hazelnut', they were tasty. Other perks of the holiday included some scrappy rum and coke pre-gaming, champagne and cocktails at the new cozy & hip farm to table spot downtown for midnight, an awesome show in a crowded bar to finish off our livers, hot, frosted cinnamon rolls and breakfast sammies to cure any lingering hangovers this morning and, then, college football. With the exception of Badger defeat at the hands of TCU, it was perfect.










Not bad, Wisconsin, not bad at all. To the new! Cheers.

Epic Meats

Got a call from a friend on Saturday that something epic was afoot at the aforementioned Ice House. Boy, was it.


That, for the record, is a burger skewered on sausages and wrapped in a woven cloak of bacon, waiting patiently for space on the grill. One of many, many, many meat treats at the, get ready, Montrose Beer & Gun Club Annual Cookoff & Music Extravaganza, a benefit for, also get ready, kids who wish things were better. You pay five dollars at the door and then eat as much as you possibly can from the 20-30 little stands set up on the grounds at the ice house. Beer is for sale, like always, but mostly, there's just a crazy amount of food. Things get made in waves, the offerings change as the day wears on, but we saw lots of chili, six kinds of beans, tenderloin on the grill, a roasted pig head, tamales, tacos, chicken, quail, rabbit, everything. And each with some kind of sauce, tenderly drizzled over top. I got to eat some stuff here and there, but yeah, mostly I just watched.







That there? That's a candied jalapeno. Momentarily sweet but really just hugely spicy, for the record.

West Alabama Ice House

I am not ashamed to say that I have managed to locate for myself, a bar. Arguably, for a grad student and a fan of fun, this is the most important thing to nail down in a new city. This one, it hits all the notes.





Pool table, outdoor seating, cheap beer, old timers, taco truck, huge white dog, check.

Ok, Ok.

We were celebrating and I have a million or so photos, but then we were relaxing and then, you know, one thing leads to another and three months go by and here I am excusing myself, yet again to you.



We were celebrating Emily & Ryan's wedding in Delaware. Here they are, wife and husband:


Helping your best friends get married is so much fun. So much fun, in fact, that we spent two weeks recovering after we got back. Going to bed at 9:30 for a week is actually pretty epic, in its own, underrated sort of way. A more complete recap is in order, but not just yet.

Some sun.

Why, hello summer. I didn't realize you'd be stopping by so soon.

Hardworking, that Ryan

Thanks for being so patient. As I foreshadowed last week, I have some photos to show you of a fun project I did recently for one of our very best friends, Ryan. He asked me to make him a holster to wear at work back when he and Emily visited us in November. November was a while ago! I've been busy, as you well know.

Ryan is a server at the bustling South Philly Cantina and he wanted something to carry a check presenter, an iPhone, a pen and a pencil and his chapstick, with possibly a secret pocket thrown in for good measure and belt loops to attach to his belt. My schedule had a tiny window in it two weeks back and I headed to this year's legendary White Elephant Sale (a great source for fabric and raw material for crafting projects) on the hunt for interesting plaids and inspiration.

I decided to make him two. One for business and one for pleasure, you might say. One classic red and black plaid with brown leather accents and one crazier one, featuring vintage/awesome hand screened canvas in a neon green and yellow and purple pattern. That way, if Ryan is feeling fruitier one day and lumberjacked the next, he need not sacrifice self-expression while working.







In the end each included designated pockets for each of his aforementioned necessities, plus a few extra, with two reinforced belt loops of leather or seatbelt, two secret pockets for small things in back and a stitch-suggested pocket for chapstick.

It was so nice to be sewing again. So nice.

**John's modeling here, as Ryan lives in Philadelphia.

Portland, Oregon

After we left Comptche, we drove almost 14 hours along Route 1 into Oregon. It was a long day. We stopped to say hi to John's Aunt Honey and Uncle Eric, who live on a sort of menagerie in rural Oregon, and then we spent the duration in PDX, itself. We'd both been before, but never with such worthy friends to stay with and never over Thankgsgiving. Thanksgiving is my favorite no matter where you spend it, but may I especially recommend you find a year to spend that holiday in Portland. The drizzle, the bungalows, the comfy style of the city is perfectly and completely suited to a November vacation devoted to eating.

The next few posts will be a collection of the most photogenic moments of our trip. Just to put names with faces, we were visiting Jesse and Lauren, old favorites from Virginia and Mary Frances Wegmann, my better half. Hope you'll indulge yet another photographic reminiscence.











More soon.

The Cabin

I've had all these things to show you, gathering dust since late November, when we took a West Coast vacation through Mendocino County and up to Portland, Oregon to be with friends for the Thanksgiving holiday. There are so may moments worth recounting that I expect this will come in several parts. It all started when Miriam invited us to come stay for a weekend in her family cabin in Comptche, a tiny tiny town just 20 miles or so from Fort Bragg in Northern California.



We headed up on a Saturday afternoon. After leaving California Hwy. 101, we drove mostly along a winding road through a sleepy hollow sort of landscape, light green and lush and rocky beautiful the whole way. We lost the light thirty minutes shy of our arrival, so that by the time we pulled into the cabin's gravel drive, our eyes were tired from squinting at road signs. We were in a forest, we figured, dark as it was by 6:30, but that was all we could tell.

My grandparents have a cabin in northern Wisconsin, perched on a hill, looking over a lake. Jungle Lake, as we fondly call it, is painted in a blue wash and decorated with vaguely Scandinavian knick-nacks, built by my dad's family in the 60's. Not knowing what to expect, as always with my California, I imagined to find the same sort of thing at Miriam's in Comptche. I woke up our first morning, to find something else entirely.








In truth, they aren't so different. The redwood forest that surrounds Comptche, at the scale of the majestic, is more impressive probably than the familiar woods at Jungle Lake. But where the cabin itself was punctuated with their families' history there--a museum of treasures collected on hikes adorning an exterior wall, lamps and drinking glasses handmade by Miriam's dad and the cabin garden tended by Miriam's mom--I was constantly reminded of the parallel traditions we kept at Jungle Lake. We have a birch cribbage table that my grandfather made from a felled log and an announcemnent still hangs in the hall closet for a pounce tournament "tomorrow morning" that we made when we were kids. Each time Miriam would explain a ritual of Comptche, I would remember one of my own. In a bit of a flood of memory, I realized how much I'd forgotten of the Jungle Lake traditions since I moved away.

They're a lot like time capsules, cabins. They envelope you in that familial slowness, where things assure you they will remain the same forever and you can just laze about in that promise. In the comfort of someone else's cabin capsule, I was able to enjoy that very home feeling. It was a perfect way to begin our Thanksgiving.