R. put a few new photos up on his flickr site.

I had so many plans for this weekend, but really all I accomplished were these cookies, Originally spotted at Orangette.

My husband and I are in the habit of rating just about everything, a la Netflix (i.e., scale of 1 to 5). In my mind, a 5 should be almost unattainable. Just to orient you:

1 - The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc. If the scale had a zero, this movie would have received it. Horrible.
3 - most things in life
5 - Our dinner here, breakfast here and these

I notice all of my personal fives have to do with food, and in some way with chocolate, but I digress.

I think these cookies might be a 5.

Notes: I baked a few after 15 hours and a few more once the dough had been in the fridge for 24 hours. The ones that incubated longer were more flavorful, but I think if you baked these even after a short chill in the fridge they would still be good.

I used these bittersweet chips

These cookies are LARGE and very rich. Half a cookie is possibly the perfect amount.

I'm curious to see how these hold up after being frozen. I scooped the rest of the dough into a plastic freezer bag so we'll see...

Update: previously frozen cookies work just fine, and took ~22 minutes to bake.

How boring

Here's where all of our $$ is going for the next few months

Old photos

Kindergarden. I remember totally loving that corduroy vest.


First grade, I think? Things went swiftly downhill from here (perm, braces etc.)


Mom and Dad, 1968


Paternal grandparents on their wedding day, 1945

My Mom has a whole drawer full of old photos, maybe I'll work on scanning some more.

etsy favorites

House-related stuff I like from etsy:


apple tablecloth from PataPri


poppy tea towels from Michelle Brusegaard

set of utensil prints from dazeychic

plenty of pots from seaspray blue

lampshade from draw flowers

quilt from shelece

We had a great weekend with the Lipcans, filled with variations on this theme:

with a little soccer and tennis foolishness mixed in. Plus a few local garage sales and some shanghai rummy.

And... we bought a carpet for our dining room from Material Culture. It was difficult to make a decision but I really like what we ended up with.

6'1" husband for scale:

Now what we really want to do is save up for this table and these chairs (or something like them) from The Old Farm Table Company, based in Virginia:

First attempt

at pizza on the grill:

We started with these basic guidelines, but I used the pizza dough recipe from here. Toppings were herbs, turkey sausage and mozzarella.

The verdict:

1. The dough was much too thick. I'm going to try this one next time, or else divide the dough into 3-4 balls and roll it out thinner.

2. You really need to move quick! It was starting to burn when we flipped it over.

3. More sauce

4. Simpler toppings

One room down

The challenge: oddly colored countertops and yellow-stained walls in our kitchen. Gross. R.'s parents were here for a visit last week and did everything while we were at work. It was great.

At first we thought we'd go with a light grey and white scheme but it was too dark. We ended up with white/brick red which I really like!

The walls have a bumpy texture to them, so the paint job required a lot of fine-tuning. It's still a little uneven where the red meets the white ceiling, so we might need to eventually add some molding in those areas.

Pretty much every other room in the house needs a coat of paint, so we're hoping to get a lot of it done this summer.

My MIL and I also worked out in the yard, I'll try to get a few photos at some point.