More DIY madness and thrift shop finds!

So I have to say, one of my big discovery’s upon entering the “community” of Ann Arbor, is the vast array of thrift shops tucked away in A2’s downtown. My two favorite’s right now, are the Treasure Mart, and the Saturday morning Kiwanis Rummage sale.

On Saturday morning, Heidi and I wandered down to the Kiwanis rummage sale for the first time. The rummage sale gets picked over early on, but if you’re looking for really cheap decent quality anything, you can probably find it there. Heidi found a really cute set of stainless steel mixing bowls, and I managed to score this cute little pot for $2

I absolutely love the look of chrome and enamel. Moreover, I love cute little unique pretty kitchen things that you can’t find at all the major kitchen retailers. Unfortunately the inside of the pot was chipped and wouldn’t be very useful in cooking. So I decided to make it into a potted plant.

I found the plant at Downtown Home & Garden, and they helped me pot it. I was so impressed with their customer service. The store itself is wonderful, and I fear that I can never step foot inside it again. They sell my absolute favorite pretty kitchen things, and this means serious danger for my wallet.

The treasure mart, has become my enabler in the past few weeks. Located only a block away from where I work, it also ranks high on my monetary alert system. Every day they have new pretty things to offer. Milkglass, antique bottles, fiestaware, everything is wonderful.

In my persuit of pretty kitchen things, I’ve managed to snag a few at the treasure mart.

Here is a La Creuset teapot, in perfect condition. Sold for a mere $10.

Next we have fish-jug and Pig-jar. Fish-jug was a graduation present from my aunts and uncles. Since I love to bake, for the past few years I’ve wanted a kitschy, but classy, cookie jar. Something to remind my Grammy’s Buddha cookie jar that pretty much defined my summer’s at Burt Lake when I was little. So of course, at Treasure Mart, I managed to find this kitschy-ish, white pig shaped cookie jar. It sort of matches the fish jug. They are going to be best friends…

Last but not least (mom you are going to kill me) Last Saturday morning after Heidi and I went to the Rummage sale, we hit up the Treasure mart again. And I found this Nambe vase/utensil holder. Now, one of the great things about the treasure mart, is that for every month an item sits on the shelf, it goes down 10%.

So this awesome vase, was originally between $150 and $250. It was a little scratched up so they sold it at TM for $30, and then after sitting on the shelf for 6 months… heheh, I got it for a steal.

So that’s it – I can never set foot in any of these fine establishments ever again. But I think its safe to say that my pretty kitchen is pretty much on its way to realization. Khee!

Love, Sweatergirl

Don’t judge me…

DIY Madness + Table Progress

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had picked up a “Fixer-Upper” cherry table set from a nice lady who had run out of storage space for her pre-depression era, family antique.

So I spent many hours in my unventilated basement, huffing fumes, and stripping the former shellac off the wood. Only to find that what was a “solid cherry table” was actually a cherry veneer on the top, solid cherry on the table legs, and then a “fruit wood” on the remainder of the table and the chairs. Not really a big deal, I got the set for dirt cheap, and it is a beautiful design. With this in mind, I decided that it would be impossible to get the non-cherry wood to match the cherry top. So I threw all caution to the wind and decided to paint the chairs black, with black accents on the non-cherry parts of the table. Tres chic.

Above is my table after 6 coats of a rub-on matte polyurethane finish on the top, and two coats on the legs.

These are the very awesome chairs that match the table. They still have to be re-glued and fixed up a bit (one of my mom’s builder friends is reconstructing the support beams on one of the chairs for me!) but once they are in tip-top shape I’ll paint them black. The design-ey fabric is from IKEA. Who knew that their apholstry fabric was so affordable and sexy?

And finally, here is my table in all of its splendor, with 7 coats of polyurethane on the top, 4 on the legs, and the first coat of matte-black.

Once this is finished, I’m going to send it to Design Sponge’s before and after. I think I have a good sporting chance.

Hooray!

Silliness.

Want to know my deep dark secret?

Well, probably fairly obvious by now…

I love kitchens.

I love everything about them, and I’m silently biding my time, wishing, and waiting, until next month when I get to move into my first post-college house with the beautiful kitchen that comes with it. I have so many ideas running through my head. The perfect vision of what I want it to look and feel like. All of the sudden I’ve found myself plunging into the depths of interior design magazines, garnering wonderful happy ideas.

But I don’t want a mitch-matchy-cutesy kitchen. Nothing you’d find in Martha Stewart, or god forbid, Sandra Lee’s kitchens. I want an eclectic, fun, retro, unique, livable kitchen. I want bright colors, unmatched coffee mugs, vintage bottles, herbs growing in scavenged pots in pans, shelves for all sorts of first edition used cookbooks. And its taking every power of restraint in my body to not move in this second. Is this what I’ve been reduced to? Some sort of maniac who cares more about finding the perfect cast iron skillet, than, say, all the other much more important problems in the world.

Well, my materialistic snobbery aside… In less than a month, I will have a beautiful kitchen.

Holy crap I’m excited.

So now I’ll share with you my reeking obsession.  Three cheers to all the beautiful happy kitchens that I adore.

wishin’

and hopin’

and thinkin’

and prayin’

and plannin’

and dreamin’

sigh. I wasn’t kidding when I said that my chief motivation through my senior year was that one day… one sweet wonderful day, I would have a beautiful kitchen.

How lame is that?

But this last one (pictured above) is possibly my favorite, and most easily obtainable. And in all my free time, I’ve been getting closer to obtaining that goal.

Lofty, I know

So there’s been the table project, which, although far from completion, is getting there, and will be lovely when its finished. Then there is the DIY spice rack idea I stole from Allison (www.myaimistrue.com)

When mom came to visit I got the magnetic knife racks from IKEA. I was inspired by Vaughn Austin not to use the cheap watchmaker tins from Lee Valley Tools, but to go with nice Kamenstein alternatives from Pfaltzgraff which are not only less expensive, but are also obviously made for holding spices (and area a great DIY hack of the much more expensive designer set that runs upwards of $100.

So instead of spending that obscene amount, I spent a total of around $30 – for a sweet spice/knife rack.

Alas, its late.  More on my DIYing/Pretty kitchen things later.

Ciao, G

MIA – And now back for a triumphant return.

Hello dear readers,

So in the last two months I’ve had some major life events take place. Namely, I graduated from college and got my first real job. Graduating from college was an achievement in itself. I finished my last essay at 4PM the day before commencement. My last paper was:

“A Coal Mine Comparative: Trends seen between the Russian and Chinese Coal Industry in the face of contemporary economic reform”

So that kept me busy, quite literally, until the very second. But I feel like I learned a lot, and I guess the college experience isn’t worth it until you can fondly recall the late nights you poured your blood sweat and tears into long winded uppity essays that no one will ever read. I know I poured my sweat and tears in to this last semester… looks like I’ll have to save the blood for grad school.

Alas, the only people who have read my two insanely long papers are Nic, and the two professors who assigned them. Even my parents *cough* set them down once they got a few pages in. On an happier note, my “thesis” was really well recieved and my professor suggested that I get it published… That felt awesome, especially since I’ve never considered myself scholarly material.

So all in all, transition has been fun, and while I’m not moving to greener pastures (I’m staying in wonderful Ann Arbor rather than moving to Seattle, NYC, or Chicago)… I’m still insanely awesomely excited about the road ahead.

Now – the job! (que dramatic music). I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself upon graduation. I had sent out resumes, and gotten pretty far with one particular job prospect, but in the end everything fell through and I was left jobless, a helpless quivering mass in the corner of my dark room. All that was left of me was a pitiful shadow, left to defend myself from the various insults catipulting in my direction by all the naysayers who *cough* believed that this was my just dessert for majoring in something as useless as the Liberal Arts…. ah, going home sure is fun.

Luckily, before leaving my happier surroundings in Ann Arbor, I was drinking a french press coffee with a cute boy at Zingerman’s, when the Ari walked in. I was a nervous wreck, so Nic basically shoved me out of my chair so that I would go talk to Ari about a possible job. Thankfully, I had my cartoon resume on hand. So I gracefully shoved my resume into his hands in stammered, “Hi, I’m Katie, I’m just hoping that you might have a job for someone who is creative and loves food.” I got a call back, an interview, a trial shift, and a job.

So now I’m here to stay in Ann Arbor, at least for a while. I have what I consider to be one of the best jobs in the world, at a company that’s been ranked “the coolest small business in America,” and “America’s most democratic workplace.” I mean, come now, that’s pretty sweet.

So while I may not be cozying up to my plush new apartment in a sexy metropolitan area, or viewing the skyline from my office with a view at a posh magazine publisher… I think I’ve got it pretty well made.

AND!!!

I have a place to stay for next year. I’m moving into a house with a couple of School of Dentistry Grad students. The house is a vintage cottage-ey house in Ann Arbor’s old west historic district. My room is dinky, but cheap, and the rest of the house is awesome. A far cry from the roach infested crack den where I currently live. Perhaps I enjoy hyperbole a little too much, but in all seriousness, I’m more than ready to move out of my college house. Most importantly, my new house has an awesome kitchen. With new appliances, new white cabinets, an exposed brick wall (sexy, no?), polished wood floors, and a GAS OVEN!!! HOT DAMN!

I’m just a little bit excited. The kitchen looks much better in person. And my new roomates seem really chill and fun. So far they don’t seem to mind if I bring my snotty/pretty kitchen things into the house. Which brings me to another subject altogether.

When I was talking to them I said that I would find the kitchen table/chairs that the house was lacking. So I managed to find a solid cherry table on Craigslist that was reasonably priced considering the major reworking it needs.

Did I mention that its a little bit of a fixer upper? The set in its entirety needs to be completely cleaned, the top of the table needs to be completely stripped and re-varnished. One of the chairs needs to be reworked, and practically all of the chairs need some gorilla-glue rehab due to their loose joints. And once all of that is completed, I need to re-upholster all of the chairs. I’m looking forward to the reapholstering the most. And come to think of it, if I manage to pull this off this could turn out to be a really awesome set of furniture that I’ll treasure for years to come. *the woman who sold it to me said that it had been in her family for years and that it was one of the only peices of furniture her great aunt was able to save through the great depression. For all I know, she could have been completely yanking my chain, but if its true, this table is pretty much all around awesome.

I’ve already been looking at a bunch of fabric options for the reupholstery business.  Most are from Ikea, and are cheap crappy cotton that will hold up for a few years.  The rest are nicer fabrics from a design-ey apholsetry website, here are the options I’m considering.  Let me know where your vote is.

I’m pretty excited about this project, so if anyone has an furniture renovating advice I’d love to hear it.

Happily yours, Sweatergirl

Stuff *cough* I Like – Dinner Parties

I had my first grown-up dinner party last night. I had a few of my bestest friends over for dinner, Lauren & John and Lauren & Clayton. I put the crappy college dinner table out on the front porch with my Ikea lamp, two-buck-chuck bottles of wine cleaned and filled with flowers, mason jars with tea candles, and “linens” that I stole from home.

For dinner I made no-knead bread (which Lauren M thought I bought ), tuscan butterflied chicken, asparagus sauteed with bacon, and greek garlic-lemon roasted potatoes (from CI International Cookbook)

Here’s the boy showing Mr. Chicken “what we do to wise guys.”

And true to form, my buddies brought over bottles of wine, jazz was in the background, and we busied ourselves with lighthearted conversation while dinner was finishing up.

For dessert we had Nic’s Dad’s Apple pie, which has a roux! Possibly the most labor intensive pie I’ve ever made, if only because I screwed up the roux the first time around. (Don’t get snotty and brown the butter, it f’s things up.)

Finally we went to the spring formal for TBS KKY, where we danced the night away and generally had a great time.

Other than that, graduation looms ever closer. I still have a major paper to write (Comparative analysis of privatization in China and Russia in the mid-nineties and its affect on labor policy), along with two exams. Thankfully, I finished Zvi’s paper of doom; for the first time I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – rather than a train.

Here’s to a great spring,

-Sweatergirl

Behold the joy of rice-cookers!

I was bored, and procrastinating, and bored.

And when you’re feeling bored, and you’re procrastinating – what’s better than rice pudding? Nothing really.

But I’m way to lazy to sit and stir the rice for 40 minutes as it absorbs the loyal ingrediants.

TA-DAH!

Rice-cooker-rice-pudding.

For this recipe you need to have a decent rice cooker – I used my housemate’s rice cooker, it looks like this one -

Nothing too fancy, but its a great rice cooker nonetheless. I altered the rice pudding recipe from “how to cook everything” and came up with this sassy lady.

“Coconut rice pudding – because its just one of those days”

1 cup of short grain rice

1 1/2 cups of water

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1 15 oz. can of lite coconut milk

1 /2 cup of milk

1/2 tsp. ginger

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. vanilla

1/3 cup of sugar

Steps

1) Combine rice water and salt in the rice cooker bowl.

2) Push the cook button.

3) When the rice is done, fluff it, and stir in the remaining ingredients.

4) Push the cook button. This time as its cooking, open the cooker a few times to reincorporate all the ingredients. Cook until it reaches your desired rice pudding consistency.

Rocket science, right?

Breakfast(s) of Champions

As much as I loved the Quaker Oats Peaches ‘n Cream instant oatmeal when I was a little kid, sometimes you’ve just got to have a little bit more. This oatmeal is made by cooking Quaker rolled oats on the stove top with half water / half apple cider, about a teaspoon of unsalted butter, and a sprinkle of good salt. Stir in the oats with a handful of dried cherries, a pinch of nutmeg, Cinnamon and the zest of one orange. While you are making the oatmeal, on the side roast a handful of chopped pecans.

When its finished, top with a drizzle of maple syrup and a bit of milk… Mmmm Mmmm.

Sorry there is no recipe, but its pretty much self-explanatory.

This is another one of my favorite breakfasts. I haven’t made it in a while, and now that I have fresh no-knead bread in my pantry I’ll be sure to try it again.

Pretty simple no recipe required. Toast two slices of good bread (Zingerman’s day old semolina if you’re a snotty college kid in Ann Arbor) With a slice of fresh Mozzarella. Meanwhile, heat up a small skillet with a tsp. of olive oil and a dab of butter (raise the smoking point of the olive oil… get it?) Fry two eggs over medium and while they are cooking, sprinkle with dried basil and black pepper. You want the eggs well cooked but still runny. Anyways, Put a dollup of tomato sauce over the eggs, and enjoy.

My favorite part is when you bite into the yolk and it mixes in with the sauce and the cheese and the bread. Mmmm.

No Knead Bread

Okay, I’m only a year behind the trend. But seeing that no-knead bread is sweeping the blogosphere, this is a bandwagon I’m happy to jump on.

All together now: Oooh pretty!

Here’s the original recipe / Video of Marc Bittman from the New York Times learning how to make this bread at the Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan:

My only beef with this bread was that it was a bit too bland. Next time I make it I’m going to try the Cooks Illustrated version which calls for slightly higher salt and lager to boost the flavor. I think I’ll also try rolling the bread in sesame seeds to get that nice semolina-ishness.

Nic and I also made Guinness beef stew last night with the Cooks Illustrated: Best International Cookbook. It was very delicious, robust, and perhaps laced with testosterone. No cream of mushroom needed! But I umm, forgot to take pictures. Whoops.

1 page down 64 to go!

I have a lot of writing before I graduate… Too much, I’ll likely die of exhaustion. But since I’m a glutton for procrastination…
1.What is your occupation?
I’ll be graduating fro U of M in May – I’m desperately trying to get a research job at an Industrial/Product Design firm. My frustration at the fact that nobody ever mentioned what you could with design (and fallow my fourth grade dream of being an Inventor AND an artist on the side) Knows no bounds. Especially given that now I could have a bachelors in ID rather than a PolSci/History dual major from the angry sadistic pretentious tenured Professors at U of M who enjoy making my life a living hell the semester before I graduate with two majors I’ll never use. Angry much? Yeah, a little.
2. What color are your socks right now?
Gray with purple blue and green hearts!
3. What are you listening to right now?
The soundtrack from Ratatouille. What an awesome movie!
4. What was the last thing that you ate?
I just had lunch so: leftover Pad Thai I made with Nic, an orange, and a chocolate chip cherry cookie.
5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yup, my mom and dad taught me on their Jeep Wrangler before I was allowed to touch an automatic.
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
Yellow-green
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
Mom
9. Favorite drink?
Non-alcoholic would be French press coffee, alcoholic would be a good Belgian beer or a G&T
10. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Michigan Football (Go Blue!)
11. Have you ever dyed your hair?
Yup, every year I was on the swim team in High School, four years of awkward growing out stages.
12. Pets?
Someday I’ll have a huge dog, until then I’ve got my ivy plant Verna.
13. Favorite food?
Can’t pick
14. Last movie you watched?
Across the Universe – It was “artsy” in the bad way, cool visuals with no continuity and bad bad acting.
15. Favorite Day of the year?
Thanksgiving, you come together as a family without the pretense of gifts – while sharing a whole bunch great, and not so great culinary traditions.
16. What do you do to vent anger?
Bitch and moan, become cynical and sarcastic.
17. What was your favorite toy as a child?
My fisher price kitchen set.
18. What is your favorite, fall or spring?
Spring, because everything is alive again.
19. Hugs or kisses?
Hugs
20. What kind of pie?
Pecan pie with ice cream!
21. Living arrangements?
Shitty college house… no comments.
22. When was the last time you cried?
The other day when I was stressed out about school.
23. What is on the floor of your closet?
My stash of yarn, dirty clothes hamper, discarded shoes.
24. Favorite smell?
I like nutmeg and bread baking in the oven.
25. What inspires you?
Pretty things.
26. What are you afraid of?
I have an irrational fear of starfish and long toenails
27. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers?
Cheese!
28. Favorite car?
Our beat-up volvo station wagon. I LOVE station wagons.
29. Favorite cat breed?
Gross, I’ll take any large dog that can eat your favorite cat breed.
30. Number of keys on your key ring?
4: House key, room key, bike key, guitar case key
31. How many years at your current job?
Two years as a lifeguard for Michigan recsports, I just quit though, goodbye, we’ll meet again.
32. Favorite day of the week?
Saturday
33. How many states have you lived in?
Two: California and Michigan
34. How many countries have you been to?
Only Canada, studying abroad is for rich kids.

That’s it, Sweatergirl

Cooking Indian food with my Sous Chef

Last night Nic and I made Indian food! Using my AMAZING international cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen we managed to make some pretty delicious Chicken Tikka Masala accompanying some homemade Naan – delicious! Here is the Chicken Tikka Masala simmering in my flamed orange Crueset, one of my favorite pretty kitchen things.

So maybe Indian food isn’t the prettiest, I however, think its heavenly. Naan is traditionally cooked in a stone tandoori oven. Seeing as I don’t have a tandoori oven readily available, my cookbook suggested that I use a super hot cast iron skillet on my stove top. It seemed to do the trick nicely.

The dough is a simple combination of flour, yeast, water, olive oil, sugar, and yogurt. I kneaded it in my kitchen-aid and let it rise while I was at class. Then you punch it and separate it into 8 balls and let them rest. Once you are ready to make them you roll them into 6″ circles, stretch out a bit, and throw them onto the super hot skillet.

Note the cute boy and the nasty college kitchen in the background – its a dichotomy of juxtapositions.

Et Voila!

After dinner was ready we enjoyed our favorite pastime of making fun of the “chef personalities” on Food Network – Namely Rachel Ray. Her stoup and sammies can’t touch this.

I have a ton of cilantro to use up – stay tuned for Thai food!

Ciao, Sweatergirl