Concert on the Square is over for the summer but is a favorite tradition in Madison. The chance to be quiet , to talk , to be with each other face-to-face, not have to talk if you don’t want to or can’t – the chance to listen, to indulge in a bottle of wine, cheese and dinner.
Does your city have any great summer traditions?
Ryan and I are easily entertained, so movie critics we are not. However, it’s rare that he will admit to liking chick flicks (even though he will chuckle and hold me tight at all the right parts). But we both really enjoyed New York, I Love You.
I wasn’t expecting much (I guess it’s based off of Paris, Je T’aime which is supposedly fantastic), and we watched it last Friday night in. I loved the vignettes by different filmmakers, and felt like I had gotten a glimpse into each character’s life, kind of like how you imagine a person’s life in the moments they walk by you on the street.
I am not sure what’s better and more deluding to your health than a delicious bagel sandwich.
Gotham Bagels in my neighborhood are New York style, and if you’re in the city, you should defniitely give them a visit. This particular beauty, called the “V”, is scallion cream cheese, roasted poblano peppers, tomato, arugula and avocado on a bagel. Ryan picked it up and hand-delivered it to me a few weeks ago. Have I mentioned I’m a lucky girl?
One day I went out with my best friend and when I came home, she had given me an armful of books to read. This is the first of them, and I have been letting it sit a while before talking about it.
The book received mixed reviews, with many people saying things like, “This entire book is just way too bizarre and weird for my taste,” or “The characters were wholly unsympathetic, their decisions and actions incomprehensible, and the plot implausible.”
But despite what might be an extremely uncomfortable reading, The Almost Moon deserves your attention. While the main character Helen does little to engender compassion, it is precisely her dysfunction that I spiraled down along with throughout the book.
Yes, it’s not a book for optimists. You’ve been forewarned.
The Almost Moon, $6.
On Friday, there were numerous severe weather watches and it had been raining all day. Ryan and I ordered in and just as our food arrived, we saw a rainbow. There were actually two of them!
You must start this meal (Ryan would call it an appetizer, I will call it a meal) with a delicious extra virgin olive oil, the kind you wouldn’t mind dipping your finger into just to taste…. this variety came to me from Sicily via Alice. You can see how much I’ve used already and the bottle only recently arrived at my doorstep. Ah, Sicily!
Now that you’ve found a quality olive oil, here is the rest of the recipe:
Broiled Bread w/ Zucchini, Goat Cheese & Basil
Adapted from The Dabble.
Ingredients
Preparation Instructions
Drizzle your olive oil over slices of french bread. Pop the slices under the broiler while you fry up some thin slices of zucchini, in more olive oil, and ground some salt and pepper to taste. In a bowl, mix a healthy handful of basil, red pepper flakes and even more olive oil. Add your thinly sliced fried zucchini when they’re lightly browned and tender. Mix ’em up, then take out your lightly broiled bread, add the zucchini mixture and top it off with your favorite goat cheese (try garlic and herbs – divine!).
It will seem like a simple dish.
I am going to get to why you should wear red, but I first want to tell you that Ryan has been exercising and eating right like a madman lately. I blame it on his ex-roommate who obsessed his way into a completely new body. Ryan is well on his way. I keep telling him to stop counting calories and he keeps telling me that my metabolism is too high to comment. So, okay.
When I offered this delectable treat to him at first, he gave a face. This is a man who believes that going without meat for one meal is bad. Very, very bad. Even when on a diet. But I had faith he would really like my simple treat. So I foisted it upon him. And guess what? Now, when goes to buy his lean pork chops and ground turkey, he picks up some blueberries and yogurt as well. The non-fat kind of course.
Blueberry Yogurt Snack & Dessert
Ingredients
Preparation Instructions
The vanilla yogurt is key to this treat as well as the quart-sized containers, which match up well with the blueberry’s containers and will last you the week. I also suggest cute ramekins. Red is a good color. In fact, when women wear red, men pay more attention and think they’re more attractive. So it stands to reason that putting healthy food in red ramekins has to be a smart move as well.
Place spoonfuls of yogurt into a red ramekin all the way to the edge. Dip your spoon in. Add blueberries until they start to overflow over the top. Enjoy the creamy, fruity goodness.
For the 4th of July weekend, Ryan and I went to Taliesin in Spring Green, WI, which was Frank Lloyd Wright’s home during the summer months. This was my third time there. I wrote a bit about my fascination with Wright here. We weren’t allowed to take interior shots, but I took some good exterior photos using my iPhone camera.
This is Romeo and Juliet in the background.
The meandering entrance to the Taliesin home.
Back of the house.
Some of the gardens. This is looking towards Wright’s bedroom.
You get a bit of the sense of how the house is built into the hill here.
Gorgeous, calming views.
Bye, bye Mr. Wright.
Afterwords we drove back to Madison for dinner, drinks, and a cigar and new sunglasses for Ryan. Then we headed to James Madison Park for the fireworks show. It’s a day I will remember for a long time.
I recently got the craving for quesadillas from an article describing how sad the state of food was now that we are elevating the plain and humble quesadilla. Which only made my insensitive taste buds salivate at the thought of delicious melted cheese. Ohh, cheesy cheese!
Mainly quesadillas, with some of your favorite flavors, are easy to make as a quick dinner on a Monday summer night.
Just take some corn tortillas – stay away from flour, please. Corn tortillas have so much more flavor and are usually smaller which means you can experiment with different fillings in one session. Plus, they’re better for you. Which is good because we’re going to add a lot of cheese next.
A lot of goat cheese, to be exact. You can grab all the cheeses from your drawer however, and try each variety one after the other.
Your choice of mushrooms from your local grower. We’ve got some crimini and oyster mushrooms here.
And finally, some fresh spinach for strength.
Look at ’em frying up all cute just for us.
Mushroom, Spinach & Goat Cheese Quesadillas
Ingredients
Preparation Instructions
After you’ve chopped the mushrooms and given them a quick warming up, fry the tortilla with some goat cheese spread all over. Peek underneath, and when it starts to show a light crunch, add a small handful of spinach. Remember, spinach shrinks when you cook it, so add a couple more leaves than will seemingly fit. Add a small drizzle of olive oil, and fold the tortilla over.
Fry the quesadilla on both sides (if you have a non-stick pan, no oil necessary), open it up and then add your cooked mushrooms. Fold it back over and transfer to a plate for scrumptious eating.
If tomatoes are in season, chopped with salt and pepper is all you’ll need on the side as a salsa.
Be sure to try different cheeses and variations on fillings as that’s half the fun of quesadillas. Cheddar, artichoke hearts, and broiled red peppers would all be good in our lowly quesadilla as well.
These awesome prints are actually by the designer I work with at Alice. He’s fabulous at transforming my sad-looking wireframes into works of marketing genius, but he also creates real works of art. He’s been recognized in a variety of areas, most recently with several collaborations with Urban Outfitters and Society 6.
These are photos from a Cobble Hill apartment in Brooklyn, home to the architects/designers behind Workstead. All of the pieces are meaningful in some way to the couple, have a rich history and a story to tell. The boyfriend had this lovely quote in the article:
“When I bring something home that’s new, or if I’m not sure where it came from, I find it loud, distracting,” Mr. Highsmith said.
via Seesaw via New York Times.
I love maps. I mean, I really, really loooove maps. Which is strange, because I don’t have a good sense of geography. But maybe if I hung this up in my place, that would improve. You can also mark all the places you’ve been. The print comes with 202 pins to chart your path. 200 of the pins are black, one of them is red and one of them is blue. Red is for headquarters, blue is for next target.
Oh, the places you’ll go!
$180 at You and Me, The Royal We.
