I'm going to miss this house SO much.
I was definitely one of those people who resisted getting a faux Christmas tree. I mean, isn't the whole experience of lugging a tree home, sweeping up pine needles every day, and having a home that smells like a forest a huge part of what makes it feel like Christmas?
The other day, Kendrick and I had dinner at our friend Erin's house (she of the awesome Pinterest and crafting blog and Peekskill-trip planning skills). She and her husband have an amazing midcentury buffet table in their dining room that they use to display various odds and ends that they've collected and/or made over the years, and when I spotted a tiny dome housing even tinier gold animals sitting on the buffet I was immediately transfixed. I had visions of them wandering through some obscure thrift store in some adorable middle-of-nowhere town and stumbling across priceless gilded tigers the size of thimbles that had once been the playthings of royal children during the Qing Dynasty, but that they had managed to score for five bucks.
Or something.
Five seconds later my son had whipped that glass dome off and plucked the animals off of their stand, and I was running towards him, with visions of him destroying some precious, irreplaceable artifact (and thereby destroying our newish friendship in the process). I snatched them out of his hands (--> tears), only to discover...
Here is what I think you should make this weekend:
This.
Oh my god, it's so good. It's like everything that's wonderful about winter, and is really best served in the presence of a Christmas tree. You can make it in a slow-cooker if you want, but I only remembered that I wanted to make stew for dinner around 3PM, so I used a regular stovetop pot, and it was done by six P.M. Vegetables, protein, a little carbs, a lot of deliciousness…it's all in there in that one pot.
When I told Kendrick that I found a pair of hide chairs at an antique store across the river and that buying them was not, to my mind, an option, he didn't quite understand why. I mean…we didn't really need chairs. We're moving in a few months. They were pretty expensive (not insanely expensive, but still: for whatever reason, even totally uninteresting, big-chain-store chairs are weirdly pricey for some reason).
So why, exactly, was this such a non-optional purchase for me?
Because I think when you stumble across something - and especially an item that will theoretically be in your life forever, getting used and loved every single day, and then get passed down to your children should they inherit your penchant for furry seating options - that is 1) well made, 2) a one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-million-years find (making it both now-or-never and also a decent investment), 3) in absolutely pristine condition, and 4) exactly your (odd, granted) style...
I have never tried making Indian food before, and last week's experiment taught me a little lesson:
When attempting to cook a dish from an entirely unfamiliar cuisine, follow the damn recipe.
I didn't really follow the recipe. Or I sort of did…but was so confused by the sheer volume of spices it told me to pile into my slow-cooker that I started thinking to myself "That can't be right" and going lighter than the recommended amounts of cumin and cardamom and what have you. And guess what I ended up with?
