Holly Blog

My Favorite Things...220...More Fun with Tammy & A Giveaway Too!

WELCOME TO DAY TWO OF OUR BROWNIE POINTS BLOG-ALONG-ATHON!

Tammy is selling the Fast Flowers Quilt Kit from her website, click here for the details.

You'll be able to get the FREE Fast Flowers Quilt Pattern by clicking here.

My Fast Flowers Tip Sheets will be available as a FREE download on the side bar by TOMORROW.

We're having a second day with Tammy, so that you make sure to see her blog A Tadd More, and her bright and friendly website as well.  I'm hoping she'll have some more pictures of her fabuloso store as well...check out her online store here.

Rumor has it Tammy's got some goodies to give away today, so check her out!

From the first time I saw her, Tammy has always loved bright jewelry, clothing & accessories, it's no wonder that she loves our Fun Flowers Fabric line.  She's done oodles of nifty bag patterns, and probably hundreds of quilt designs with her mom Velda at her side.

I wanted to share some fond memories from a trip that Tammy took with friends & family to visit me in New York City.

A few years ago Tammy, Velda, Tammy's daughter and a gaggle of friends all convened in New York.  With me as their gourmand guide, we walked for hours & hours in Manhattan's SOHO, Nolita, Greenwich Village & Gramercy Park.  We ate French pastries at a teeny bakery called Ceci Cela (try the Napoleans with Fresh Raspberries). We shopped till we almost dropped and ended up at Les Halles (Anthony Bourdain's old restaurant) at the end of the day for some yummy "Steak Frites". 

Here's Tammy & her Mom below...(see what I mean with the bright accessories?!!)

 

Recently Velda's been battling cancer, and I know you'll all want to wish her the best in health and a speedy recovery, so that she can ride shot gun with Tammy & her posse' on another trip again very soon. 

WE LOVE YOU VELDA!

For Every 10 people who leave a message of LOVE & SUPPORT FOR VELDA, I'll give away a free ribbon-tied fat quarter bundle from my personal stash. 

So let's get to it girls...Let's feel the love & send out our best wishes to VELDA! 

Please, only one get well wish for Velda per person.

When you leave Velda your wish doesn't matter, as we'll be drawing your names from a hat (collected from this blog post) at the end of this event.

I'm guessing this will be in the new year, so keep checking back for the names of the prize winners.

Lots more to show & tell & give away!

Y'all come back now...

;o)  H2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Favorite Things...209...Deliciously Excessive!

Not to sound like a broken record or anything, bu-ut...Pastries, aka Patisserie are the nectar of the gods, IMHO, mousse-y things, creamy things, crunchy, crispy, chocolate-y things...Paris...like I've said before, what's not to love about a city that has a pastry shop on every block?

Here's a peek at another inspiration sheet from Penelope, with the new Patisserie, because Paris without Pastries, ho hum...

This is my favorite color palette from the collection...I just love PINK, and all new cakes too.

Running now, late for set up.  More tonight...lots more to show & tell.

;o)

H2

My Favorite Things...176...Teatime Floral 3 & More Cupakes Dear?

I have a new favorite color, it's just a soft whisper of blue.  We'll be calling it "Cloud".  It's used a lot in our new Teatime Floral Three collection, and it's being shown in our new sales booklet format to independent quilt shop owners all over the world as I write.

Here's the cover from the sales booklet...

Imagine my delight, with the new TTF 3 sales booklet just out the door, when I walked into one of my favorite new neighborhood places "Magnolia Bakery", and noticed the same "Cloud" blue in the subway tiles used as a back splash in their kitchen.  Is it just me or do you love this color too?

The cupcakes are what put Magnolia Bakery on the map...rumor has it that the tiny original store in Greenwich Village sells 2500 of them a day.  The Columbus Avenue store is 3 times as big, so I wonder how many cupcakes they sell...?

I love their Chocolate Layer Cake with Vanilla Butter Cream Icing, too...

Speaking of cupcakes, our LakeHouse pink cupcake fabric (LH 08010 Pink) that so many of you have been clamoring for is back in stock in our NJ warehouse.  We actually printed it 3 more times in the last 6 months thanks to all of your enthusiasm for that print...I hope to do more fabrics "in a similar style & taste" in the near future.

That's part two of my "Midsummer Days Tales".

Back again in a few...

slurp

H2

My Favorite Things...127...Seattle and More

I'm just about to run out of pictures from my trip...Thank goodness Penny bought a Canon G9  on the advice of our buddy Gina.  It's amazing to me how much better her pictures are with that camera.   I am having nothing but troubles with mine.  Penny's camera has an anti-blur feature,(and mine doesn't) and my hand is really shaky, so taking a clear picture for me is TOTAL FRUSTRATION!  Following are a couple of examples of her camera's abilities...

Remember the picture of the bear with the bowl of macaroni & cheese, from my last blog?  There is no way I could have taken this picture with my camera, it would have been a huge blur.  BTW, I have written the editors at Food & Wine magazine to see if we can get that recipe...and I'll keep you posted.

Here's my shot taken from our hotel room the evening we arrived...

The same vantage point taken with Penny's camera, which has so much more capacity...YIKES!

After Seattle we drove on to Canada.  On the advice of Paton's cousin Peter, we took the ferry to Salt Spring Island.  Here's a picture from the boat as we neared the port...(The snow capped mountains were on Victoria Island in the distance.)

This is an example of the beautiful countryside is on Salt Spring Island...rolling hills, lush greenery, pastoral farms...

It's no wonder that the price of land and housing has sky-rocketed there, it's has become Canada's version of the Hamptons, with vineyards, cheese makers and artists galore...

Just after I took these pictures, I really started having troubles with my camera...pretty much gave up the tourist thing for a few days, so Victoria island and our trip back to Seattle to catch our plane wasn't captured by my camera...I did manage to get a few good shots on Bainbridge Island.  Here are pics from some of the cute shops in the town near the ferry...

A sweet little "paperie" called Grace & Company...

A lush floral boutique called Flowering Around...

And the cutest little quilt shop, called Esther's Fabrics...(LakeHouse spotting at 9-o'clock!)  I just love to collect fun shopping bags from my travels...

And on that note, it's a wrap! 

Next time, it's show and tell:  New fabrics and projects, our Spring Market offerings are about to hit the stores any day.   ;) 

Back in two shakes...H2

 

My Favorite Things...126...Portland & Points Beyond!

I've been burning the midnight oil with two new collections, (more on them soon) so I still haven't finished my Quilt Market tales, and our post-market travel log.  So here goes...

My last bit of praise for Portland is about the neon signs.  What you say?  Yes I say...In the days before market that Penny and I spent getting lost in and around Portland, we saw a lot of really great oh-so-retro neon signs.  Like this one...

I poked my head inside this store, and I felt like I had time traveled back to a childhood trip that my family took to Jackson Hole. I just love places that make me nostalgic, and Portland seemed to be one of those towns.

Penny and I also saw at last a half a dozen 1960's looking neon signs for Chinese restaurants...
Here's a couple that I could take from the car window without causing a pile up!  She really thought I had a screw loose, but I just couldn't resist these signs, I felt like I was on a movie set a lot of the time.

When is the last time you saw a sign for a Buffet style restaurant? 

At the Golden Dragon, it looks like you can have a Mai Tai, some Chow Mein, and then go next door to see Exotic Dancers.

On Monday morning, Penny and I switched our ginormous SUV to a cute little PT cruiser, and headed for points north, or so we thought...?

We were making really good time, so we stopped for lunch an hour or so out of Seattle.  Turns out when we got back on the highway, we were pointed in the wrong direction. In fairness to Penny, it was an overcast day...Hard to tell north from south when you can't see the sun.  LOL  ;)

We stayed at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle that night.  It's a cute place right on the water near Pike Street market...It felt more like an Adirondack fish camp than Seattle waterfront...but the room service  brought us the the best Macaroni & Cheese I have EVER had, so it was all good!  Here's a shot of our room's mascot with what was left in the bowl.

I'll be writing Food & Wine Magazine to see if they can get that recipe for us...Seriously!

Back in two shakes...H2

My Favorite Things...125...Coffee and Donuts!

I can't believe I am still reliving Quilt Market.  If I didn't have my hands in (just about) everything here at the office, I could have been finished a long time ago.  (And in this little saga, Penny and I haven't even left Portland yet, let alone crossed over the border into Canada.)

VooDoo Donuts is yet another must visit Portland place that I found on roadfood.com...they are without a doubt the best donuts I have had since leaving Sausalito, and they are only a few blocks away from the best coffee I have had in YEARS.  I learned about Stumptown Coffee from the waiter at Mother's (it's what they serve). It's smooth, not too acidic, and it's not over-roasted and burnt-tasting like some coffees we all know...(who shall remain nameless)  Bonus Points:  Stumptown has a mail order coffee business!

Lots more to show and tell my little quilties...

Back in two shakes...H2

My Favorite Things...123...Tater Tots & What Nots

Gourmet, gourmand...tomato, tomahto, you decide!

I whole heartedly recommend a terrific site started by Jane and Michael Stern called roadfood.com...I used this site to find local eateries in Portland.  Whenever I go to a new city, I plan ahead, so that I can find out where the natives like to eat...

One of the places we really enjoyed was Jake's Famous Crawfish in the downtown historic area of Portland.  Penny and I shared the Macadamia Nut encrusted Halibut (which was in season when we were there)...it was de-lish.  They also had a desert that was really yummy...if a picture is worth a thousand words, drool along with me.

I'm thinking that this looks like a dessert I'd like to try to make at home...you can see that the chocolate "box" was made by pouring chocolate into a paper bag.  Inside was a white chocolate mousse and there were oodles of berries and a berry coulis too.  For me, this was a perfect dessert...the strong and rich taste of the dark chocolate, the creamy softness of the mousse, and the not too-sweet berries...Plus it was HUGE, so we all had our fill.

Here's a picture of a couple of the adjoining rooms at Jake's, you could tell that the restaurant had grown from one room to another over the years; the place was ginormous (and packed!). There were nostalgic landscape canvases painted on the upper walls of one room, and antique oyster platters displayed over the doors in the next...

There's lots more to show and tell of course...

Back in two shakes...H2

My Favorite Things...119...Cupcakes!

When it comes to cupcakes I think of grade school bake sales, girl scout get-togethers, and two very special bakeries in New York City.  A friend who lives in Greenwich Village took me to Magnolia Bakery at least ten years ago, and I have been a rabid fan of their powdered-sugary butter cream frosting ever since.  Many people think that it was Magnolia Bakery that started the "Cupcake Craze" back in the late nineties, but IMHO, the grandmother of this retro addiction is really the Cupcake Cafe.  They had a tiny bakery on Ninth Avenue near the Port Authority almost ten years before Magnolia opened their doors.  The decorations on the cupcakes at the Cupcake Cafe are so beautiful, I almost hate to eat them.  Ann Warren has made quite a name for herself with her handmade flower decorations.  Ann's frosting is totally different than Magnolia's (from what I can tell, it's made mostly of butter, so they don't last long out of the refrigerator, but more on this later)...BTW, see the flower shaped table topper?  It's an adorable new design called Daisy Dew from Gina Halladay of Quilter's Buzz fame, & aka the Threaded Pear.

You might have heard that we introduced our Little Cupcakes fabric at Spring Quilt Market...So what better way to celebrate this, than with some delicious cupcake giveaways at our booth...Or so you'd think!  It started months before, with me asking my "Girl-in-Portland" the little cheese sandwich herself, Monica Solorio-Snow about who she'd recommend for cupcakes in the Portland area...Monica gave me a list and we started a hunt for a-good-but-affordable-cupcake (it became a bit of an odyssey)...

We started with Saint Cupcake which sounded great: except for the price!  They wanted over $3.00 a piece with custom colored frosting, that's a little pricey even by my ridiculous New York standards.  After contacting several more bakeries, we found the Helen Bernhard Bakery:  real butter cream frosting, and a bargain at just under a dollar each...this seemed the perfect solution...Or so we thought.

We ordered cupcakes in advance, to be delivered each morning of the show.  We planned on putting the cupcakes in a little acetate bag (tied with our LakeHouse ribbon of course) so that the show management wouldn't jump all over us for handing out messy food.  Here's where things went tragically wrong...Let me state clearly: Helen's cupcakes were delicious...problem was that they were frosted with real butter cream alright, but they were the buttery gets soft & unmanageable in 10 minutes out of the fridge type (like Cupcake Cafe), not the travels well, (loaded with sugar) butter cream frosting that Magnolia makes.

Suffice it to say, we had a "pack-o-trouble" getting our little pink cupcakes into their little bags...as the frosting started to get soft and they became increasingly difficult to handle...

All I can say is that it was a bit of a "Lucy & Ethel moment"!

Still lots more to show and tell, so, I'll be...

Back in two shakes...H2

My Favorite Things...116...Road Trip!

Hum along with me..."Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start."
"Captain's Log"--Monday May 12th 2008

I had decided that this market we'd do something different with the booth display, and that meant a lot more shopping in the Portland area in the days before Spring Quilt Market opened on Friday May 16th.

Penny and I synchronized our schedule to arrive within a few minutes of each other at the Portland airport.  We rented a jumbo-sized SUV and headed straight to IKEA, which was spitting distance from the rental car parking lot.

With list in hand, Penny and I went in the returns exit (the only way to shop at IKEA and leave with your brain cells fully intact!) and sped through our list of must-have-items.  We then drove to the hotel near the Lloyd center.  It was time for a late lunch...Heck we'd been on the ground for almost an hour.  We hopped the free in-town-light-rail in search of Mother's Bistro, which was recommended to us by none other than the little Happy Zombie herself, Monica Solorio-Snow...Drats, closed on Monday!

We made it on Tuesday morning instead...

They serve Stumptown coffee at Mother's...one of the best latte's I've ever had.

Here's Penny, multi-tasking with her Blackberry as we wait for breakfast.

The pancakes and the cornflake-crusted-french-toast were uber-delish...(my mouth is watering as I type).  Sorry, but we gobbled our food up before remembering to take pictures.

Lots more to show and tell, back in two shakes...H2

109...My Favorite Things...Winter Soups, Part One

It's cold here in these parts, and when it's cold, I want to eat soup, soup, and more soup.  Since I'm usually time-challenged, short cuts are the only way to go...I stock up on these Orrington Farms soup bases whenever they are on sale.  The chicken flavor has about 25% less sodium than some of the other brands, and the beef has significantly less sodium.  Admittedly, all soup stocks have some form of multi-syllabic scary sounding chemicals, but better living through chemistry I say...

My soup starts with my version of "Miripoix" or what some call "the Holy Trinity". Standard Miripoix is equal parts chopped carrot, celery & onion.  I don't use the celery that much, primarily because I cook in a style influenced by several ethnic cuisines, where IMHO, cilantro does a much better job.

If you don't like cilantro...oops!

Fair Warning:  Unless I am baking, (where proper chemistry is the key to success) my cooking style is "add a little at a time and correct".  That's one of the reasons I love soup, because it doesn't take a high level of skill or concentration to make it.

I whipped up this soup for everyone in the office for lunch on Friday, and Danielle our new intern almost whined (!) for the recipe, so here goes:

This soup will have a southeast Asian influence, (Yes I know that in most parts of the US it's nothing like Thailand, but this will still satisfy, I promise!)

In a large stock pot or stainless steel wok (It's what I cook in here at Casa No Cucina):

2 T oil of your choice (I cook mostly with EVOO)
"Hollypoix":  3/4 cup each of chopped carrots, cilantro* & onions

*chop a cup's worth and save some for the garnish

Saute until the onions are translucent. (Keep this mixture moving so that it doesn't burn)

Add:
2 T chicken soup base mix (to start)
2 T low sodium beef soup base (to start)

2 quarts of water

Add your vegetables.
Yesterday I added chopped broccoli...but almost anything green will do.
Allow to come to a boil for a minute.

Add rice noodles...
I use Ka Me vermicelli, it's great because it takes only 3 minutes and doesn't get all gummy.
Boil for 3 minutes.

While it's boiling add 1 lb of chopped chicken breast
(It's really much nicer if the chicken isn't cooked until it's like rubber!)

While you're at it, throw in a 1/2 box of frozen baby peas.
(Also prettier and better tasting when not over cooked.)

Once the chicken is cooked, add 1 T of curry powder (McCormick's is good)

Cook for a minute or so and correct your seasonings...more soup base, more curry, etc.
(Like I said, soup is very forgiving.)

At this point, you have a really good and low calorie soup.

But if you are a "petite cochon comme moi", you'll add:

One half to one full 16 oz. can of coconut milk   

Let the soup simmer for 3 or 4 more minutes (hint:  once you add any milk or cream to a soup, try to not let it get back to a full rolling boil!) 

Check & correct your seasonings one last time.

In each person's bowl, throw a little extra chopped cilantro on top to finish her off.

If you have any soup left over from the meal, I'd suggest that you scoop out the noodles and save them in a separate container from the liquid.  That way your next bowl of soup will be every bit as nice as your first.

Makes 4 to 6 meal sized bowls of soup...

It takes about 15 minutes of pre-prep time and 15 minutes to make this soup.  Paton has gotten really good with his knife skills, so we can have soup made in 20 minutes if we work together.

Enjoy!

Back in two shakes...H2

I'll show you pictures of the soup as soon as I can get my flash to work on my camera, it's acting wacky again.  In the M/T, check out my guest post on Kimberly Jolly's blog this coming week...I'll let you know when it's up.