Fabric abroad and October goals

Readers, I am woefully behind on posting.  Like I haven’t written in 4 garments behind.  I will try to remedy that this week.  Writing will be on my to do list a little every day this week to try and catch up.  In the mean time, I will phone in a post about fabric shopping away from home.

We just got back from seeing my husband’s family in San Diego, and somewhere between going to the zoo and the beach and enjoying our time with family, my mother-in-law and I popped out to check out a couple of fabric stores.

Our first stop was Discount Fabrics.  It’s located in an old theater.  The reviews tend to suggest that the employees are rude, but the lady helping me was very nice, and I tend to ignore such comments because I believe that if you go in with a sour attitude you will probably be treated in kind.  It’s kind of divey but the ambience was fun and they had a nice selection of random bits of this and that.  They had quite a lot of silk–a lot of charmeuse (would that my wallet and lifestyle could justify being wrapped in fabric butter) and dupioni (wouldn’t you know I passed by a perfectly lovely aqua piece only because I have a darker teal dupioni that I have no idea what to do with).  I picked up a chiffon to line a blouse I’ve had in the queue and some denim that was $3/yd.  The denim was a flat fold that was up in one of the balconies where there were lots of tables of remnants which were all very reasonably priced.

Next we ended up at the Clairemont Yardage Town as it was not too far from Discount Fabrics and also close to my husband’s grandmother’s house where we stayed.  They had a really good selection of all sorts of garment fabrics with very very little quilty stuff (is it snobby of me to be excited about that?).  There was lots of nice heavier weight knits, mostly solids and a really beautiful silk chiffon that I regrettably parted ways with because I only budgeted $30 for both stores (I was over that by a quarter–I impressed myself).  Instead, I picked up a fun small wale corduroy for some wintery jeans.  I like the splotches of green in the gray.  And I was over the moon when I found this light cotton knit.  I love the gray on the green, I love that it’s a zebra print, I love that the pattern runs diagonally, and most of all, I love that it goes with the corduroy.  This will not last very long in the stash at all.

If you’re in San Diego, I would highly recommend both places.

Remember my hand-written goals of yore?  I’ve gone back to doing them the past couple of months and have been doing quite well with them.  I like drawing if for no other reason than I get to use my beloved Prismacolors, and I find it helps me to have a general idea of what I’m working on rather than a nebulous sort of queue.  This month I’m starting work on a winter coat, and I would like to get to Butterick 5677

because I think it’s fantastic, but I’m purposely leaving those off of my written goals because I’ve noticed an incredible lack of casual clothes in my wardrobe.  A recent post by Cidell left me thinking about what indeed DO you wear to watch football ?  I’ve been sewing as if I was still teaching, and while I like wearing nicer clothes while I’m at home, the sweats and pajamas inevitably come out when I’ve acquired enough layers of spit up on the nice clothes.  I just don’t have anything else that’s casual.  So on the printed goals are some wardrobe basics this month, and when I finish those I’ll add more details about the coat and other things to the queue.

I like to be able to finish what I set out in the time period I give myself.  If I get too ambitious, I just end up feeling overwhelmed (I’ll be honest though and say that I’m so motivated to blow through this queue because that Butterick dress is eating up my head with its awesomeness).  What time periods do you all like to work within to help you achieve your goals?

Pretty fabric

While Nathan was off at his conference with the laptop, I went riding the rails on BART and go to a few fabric stores along the way.  Mostly I was  looking for good quality non-ugly knits for me to make a couple pieces of maternity clothes with, but alas it was not meant to be.

I actually made two tops from an awesome Butterick pattern, I just haven’t bothered to photograph them since I’ve been writing about cookies.  It’s pretty amazing at A)how few maternity clothes there are and B) what horrific colors they come in.  The days of tenting yourself into oblivion are over, but apparently we’re all supposed to wear these dark oppressive colors.  I have two problems with that.  1.  I’m not that depressed and 2. I’m a spring complexion-wise.  Really intense dark colors swallow me up.  So sew I shall.

At any rate, the first store that I came to had all these weird signs posted about how they didn’t want you to pull bolts off the shelves…how you were supposed to look at anything is beyond me.  Since they had no interesting remnants and since nobody in there seemed to inclined to be helpful enough to pull things off the shelves (because apparently it’s very difficult from all of the signage), I left in a hurry.  On my way to the next shop, I stopped at a jazzy little organic market and had a tangerine.  It had this pretty pink blush to it.  It was super tart and just what I needed for a little snack.

The next store was delightfully promising, but I’ll talk about the 3rd store first.  Britex in San Francisco has to be about one of the most awe-inspiring places I’ve been.  Undoubtedly they carry the most beautiful fabrics I’ve ever seen.  If you were a designer, I could imagine this being one of your haunts.  Unfortunately, all these shelves that looked much like the Tiffany’s of the fabric world also cost the equivalent of Tiffany’s in the fabric world.  I was afraid to breathe on these fabrics lest I have to shell out several hundred dollars for marring them in any such way.  So I guess if you had a trust fund and owned several islands in the South Pacific or your clients did, then you could afford to buy fabric from Britex.  Do go if you’re in San Francisco.  It’s a beautiful store even if you CAN only afford Breakfast at Britex.

The best place by far I went was Whizbang Fabrics

in the Mission District.  The owner has to be one of the kindest, most interesting people I’ve ever met.  She was super helpful in brainstorming with me through a project I imagine I’ll get to late February.  I love people who spend time talking to you and manage to be knowledgeable without pressuring you into buying anything either.  She carries an astonishing amount of designer quilting weight fabrics and some heavier prints for the tiny space that the shop occupies.  I could not resist these:

 

 

Plus she also had a few bolts of vintage 36″ wide fabric from the 1940′s which was so charming and lovely.  I think I will make a utility apron out of this vintage fabric.  It just screams to be used daily. 

We are at Nathan’s parents’ for the next week up in the peace and fog that one finds in the Redwoods of VERY northern CA.  I think I will enjoy my time here immensely writing and sketching projects out.

12 Days of Christmas Cookies, Day 12

Congratulations intrepid blog readers…you have made it to the end of the cookie-a-thon. 

#12 Alfajores

I’m always on the lookout for unusual cookies.  When I was researching my list last year, this was one I came across that was more different than any other cookie I had seen before.  And it should be–it’s Argentinian.  The recipe is from Nick Malgieri’s A Baker’s Tour, which I picked up at Ross one day for $4 (that was a good day).  The cookie itself is odd in that it contains a high proportion of cornstarch which yields a rather tender cookie.  It is flavored with a good bit of lemon zest and cognac of all things.  This in and of itself would be a good cookie, but it gets more interesting.  The cookies, which are rolled and cut are then sandwiched and coated on the outside with dulce de leche.  The sides are then dipped in coconut.  The combination of flavors was so different I thought that they had to be tried.  These were the dark horse of last year’s cookie fest.  First, I must express my love for dulce de leche.

In college, I had a friend whose Dad did a lot of business in Brazil, and he would bring back treats for her from time to time.  The one I always managed to convince her to let me have was arequipe, which is the Brazilian form of dulce de leche.  Many graham crackers were eaten in Brittany’s dorm room with this amazing stuff slathered on.  Thankfully, I found out you didn’t have to go to Brazil to get some of it.  It seems every Latin culture has some version of this delightful milk caramel.  It comes by different names–arequipe, cajeta, dulce de leche–but the idea is the same no matter what you call it.  You simmer sweetened milk to which a tiny bit of baking soda has been added and maybe some flavoring like a cinnamon stick down until it is brown and thick…you can use sweetened condensed milk to save some time, but I find it tastes like the can often.  Last year, I made it from the can per Nick’s instructions (which very much unlike him were rather fussy–involving baking the stuff in a water bath and stirring it at regular intervals and replenishing the water) with the sweetened condensed milk and while the end result was passable, I wanted to try the homemade stuff this year.

So about a week before we assembled the cookies, I made the cajeta.  Cajeta is made with goat’s milk which brings a little bit of tang that tempers the sweetness.  Yes, you have to simmer it for about an hour and a half, but really you don’t have to pay attention to it at all.  I think I overcooked it this time in my effort to get a deep caramel color…it spread kind of weird on the cookies.  No difference, though because they are still wonderfully delicious.

One last invitation from me: add your pictures of your Christmas cookies here.  It’s fun seeing what people make.

Nathan and I are in San Francisco for a couple of days.  He has a science conference here, and I tagged along to eat and shop (which sounds worse on both counts than it actually is).  I imagine I shall write about where we eat and any jiffy fabric places I may come across in the next day or so.  I’m so excited to eat dim sum on Saturday!

12 Days of Christmas Cookies, Day 11

#11 Bizcochitos

I have two links to New Mexican food…my sweet sister-in-law has some extended family from there originally and my friend Lisa and I took a culinary and artistic road trip through Santa Fe and Albuquerque a few years ago. 

That trip was so much fun, despite the fact that we learned a painful, yet important fact about culinary travel, which is that really spicy food plus a lot of fat that is partially used to tame the fire does not lead to happy times for one’s stomach.  It was Labor Day weekend, which means green chile time.  As we stopped to get our bushel of peppers roasted  with our friend we were visiting in Albuquerque, her husband ironically slipped off to get us some Alka-Seltzer.  If it wasn’t so painful, it would have been very funny.  It was a good trip despite that.  The Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe is about the coolest museum I’ve ever been to, perhaps barring the museums we went to in Florence.  We shopped at The Spanish Table where I bought a couple jars of awesome piquillo peppers and moscatel vinegar, as well as some olivewood utensils.  That’s just a fascinating store anyhow–they sell Paella pans that are literally 5′ across…I can’t imagine how many people could eat off of that much rice.  The other thing we discovered about Santa Fe besides an awesome farmer’s market where we ate these rock hard fresh pippin apples was how easy it is to make U-turns there.  I love u-turning!

But fond musings of New Mexico aside, apparently bizcochitos are a very famous New Mexican sugar cookie made with lard (they sure seem to use a lot of lard in their food), sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and flavored with anise seeds.  I found out about them soon after Lisa’s and my trip, but I’d been avoiding them because I’m not a huge licorice fan.  This year I figured I’d give them a chance this year because I can’t eat butter right now and I really love rendering my own lard (an odd fascination I picked up in learning to make tamales a few years ago).  If I had known what crispy, pastry-like flaky cookies they would have turned out to be, I would have started making them a long time ago.  These are one of those pastries that has multiple layers of flavor–you taste the crisp first, then the cinnamon sugar, then a faint bit of anise, and then the lard right at the end of the taste.  Bizcochitos were hands down the dark horse of this year’s cookie selection.  And the recipe (I modified it–this is not my favorite cookie book…good ideas, but the recipes don’t all work out right) makes about a million, so there are plenty of opportunities to take a couple without depleting the stash for all of the bags of cookies that I’ve made for people.

Montreal Food Recap

As I said, food in Montreal was marvelous.  We did not have a bad meal–and by and large, it was quite affordable (bonus!).

Montreal has this lovely little specialty–smoked meat.  I’m sorry if you’re a vegetarian.  It’s beef that has been heavily spiced and smoked until it’s somewhere between really fatty pastrami and Texas-style brisket.  This might be a totally wrong description, but that’s the one that makes the most sense to me.  It completely melts on your first bite; at once you are struck by how on earth something can be so scandalously juicy and savory when it’s only adorned with yellow mustard and rye bread.  After losing our luggage and spending a day muddling around feeling dirty, this sandwich started to make things better (sorry about the picture–the lighting in there was less than optimal, and I didn’t want to get thrown out for taking a picture–I’m not sure why I was worried about that, but I was–there’s a better picture of smoked meat at Wikipedia).

We ate many many more delicious places, but of course my camera was not with me.  I did manage to remember to take the camera the night that we ate at a little Pho place in Chinatown.

Pho is the one really good ethnic food we can get in Denver that’s pretty authentic, although I haven’t gone taco-trucking in this town yet…  There’s a pho place that we go to probably once a month.  Everyone’s a regular there, and there’s as many Vietnamese people who eat there as there are people of every other race and station in life.  When the weather is cold, we go eat pho.  When we’re tired of eating really heavy food, we go eat pho.  When I’m depressed and the notion of cooking anything makes my head want to explode, we go eat pho.  For someone who really doesn’t like or eat a lot of red meat, I really love pho.  Lucky for us, there was a place around the corner from our hotel that was recommended in our guidebook.  We ordered some spring rolls before the pho that were packed with fresh mint–a refreshing change from the cilantro that I’m used to in spring rolls.  Then the beauty came:

We went here the same night that I went to have tea at Camellia Sinensis, which was the kind of cooler, rainy sort of day perfect for pho (but I need little reason to go eat it).  I tore up a mess of basil leaves into my soup and put some oyster sauce and what appeared to be homemade chile-garlic sauce into my soup and commenced to thoroughly enjoy my rice noodles.

Many more tasty things happened in Montreal, but without photos to help me describe what was going on, I will save them for my food journal.

I love Montreal

After the luggage fiasco, Montreal has been increasingly kind to us.  I’ve walked around a lot, drank some fantastic tea (this is a tea town–how could I not love it!), eaten some wonderful food and generally had a good time.  More on food later when I’m not blogging in my hotel room…

Today I tried to go the museum of fine arts.  They have an exhibit on Yves Saint-Laurent’s clothes.  I’ve been quite excited about seeing them, but Google maps proved less than accurate–actually EXTREMELY inaccurate when it came to directions–it was off 4 subway stops!  So, after wandering and checking the map, I decided the walk that would compensate for the bad directions was far too far for today.  It was time for tea.

So I went here :

 

How bad could a tea house with the botanical name of tea be?  Not at all.  Actually, it was fantastic.  I sat down in this beautiful place (oh that I were a student in Montreal–I’d never leave) and was greeted by the sweet staff with a wee cup of Indian Assam tea while I browsed the menu.  I was also given a tiny little bell to ring when I was ready to order.  Given that the menu was in French, I just went with the name of the tea, Perles du Dragon.  Dragon Pearls green tea.  I also decided to get some chocolates from a local chocolatier.  They were out of those chocolates, so I had 3 matcha covered truffles instead.

The tea came, and I felt my blood pressure instantly drop.  I love that about tea–it’s so relaxing, and it FORCES you to slow down–particularly good for me who doesn’t really ever stop moving or thinking.  The owner told me the tea had jasmine in it, which explained the amazing fragrance of flowers.  But this was very subtlely flavored with jasmine.  The truffles were a lovely accompaniment too, but I think a chocolate lover would have appreciated them more.  I loved the gooseberry that was a garnish.  It was tart like a kumquat but also flowery tasting like the tea.