Now that I've shown you my daughter's made-over bedroom, I wanted to talk mural-style wallpaper in general - because personally, it's not something I'd ever considered before...but now I totally get the appeal.
What is mural wallpaper?
Looks simple enough. ...Right?
I had big plans for today's post, about wallpapering my daughter's room. My great-grandfather, you see, was a professional wallpaper hanger, and I have this old newspaper clipping with a black-and-white photo of him hanging paper in Rockefeller Center just before it opened. I was going to write about how everyone told me hanging wallpaper was hard, but it's in my blood, and triumphantly post shots of my stunning new wallpaper along with how-to tips and tricks and such.
And then I Googled "how to hang wallpaper."
Me cooking and blogging, a looooong time ago in the old apartment
Since I'm busy reminiscing about cooking today: Those of you who've been reading here since way back when may remember that I used to make reader-submitted recipes on a fairly regular basis. They were a big part of the process of me figuring out how to cook, since they usually felt more accessible to me than recipes in cookbooks and such (and since I could just email the person who sent the recipe in if I had a question), and a few of them are still in regular rotation at our house, because they were just that good. (Most of them, obviously, are pasta.)
So: If you have a family-friendly - read: easy and non-fussy - dinner recipe that you particularly love and think I need to make...help a girl out? It doesn't have to be your personal recipe; just one that you love.
Remember when I started this site, and I didn't know how to cook, but pretended I did because I thought I was supposed to know how to do things if I was going to write about them? (I abandoned that ethos pretty quickly, but there was definitely a period when I authoritatively delivered tomato sauce recipes that included actual Prego - which I still enjoy as its own thing, because come on, Prego is delicious, but no longer add to meat to make "homemade bolognese.") My meal repertoire at that point was mostly a rotation of roast chicken from a recipe I'd found in Allure in the '90s and Bertoli four-cheese tortellini with, yes, Prego.
But writing this site inspired me to do many, many (many many many) things I never would have done otherwise, and among them was learning my way around a kitchen. I don't consider myself a "food blogger," obviously - I consider myself a person who likes food, and writes about it, but who still has to solicit advice from Google and my next-door neighbor Alisa whenever I run into something tricky. And while I might make little adjustments to recipes (usually more salt, less pepper, because in my opinion pepper should be illegal) I wouldn't ever really presume to have improved upon an actual recipe written by an actual food person. I always assume, in other words, that everybody who has ever come up with and published a recipe is a better cook than I am, and I should probably sit down and listen.
And then, last night, this cool little thing happened: I found a recipe I wanted to make on The Kitchn, and as I was reading it I thought...hm. Some of this doesn't sound like it'll work quite right.
This is not my closet; it's Ashley Tisdale's. Mine doesn't have a chandelier, alas.
I was talking to a colleague the other day about a very particular manifestation of mom guilt: the home-and-decor-related type. In short: On top of the other ways that you feel like you have to prioritize your children's needs (all of them), you also feel like you have to prioritize them when it comes to how you set up and decorate your house. And if you don't?
Guilt.
