gather...

jamie oliver birthed a magazine!!!
ok i am so excited i can hardly contain myself to wait to read the whole thing! i have already read an article on the making of jamie oliver products..so style-y in their packaging:



2 recipes that i cannot wait to cook; roast halibut with beetroot and grilled leeks and fennel salted pork chops with roast carrot, rutabaga (swede) and spicy cabbage, and a Q&A with brad pitt with jamie asking the questions. and as this is a premiere issue i can only assume (and hope) that it will be a regular thing. i love me some Q&A's with famous and/or cool people. and i am only on page 27 out of 130. a magazine with 130 pages?!?! its true. i tell no lies here my friends. i love to cook and i love jamie oliver's style. so passionate about seasonality and organic beginnings and endings and he makes it look so easy! not to mention what he can do with a carrot and an avocado. pretty inspiring actually.
all this after the death of one of my favorite magazines, domino...i feel the publishing gods have felt my pain and seen my tears. i can't wait to divulge more for you.
p.s. i realize that i am probably not the first to break this news as i bought my issue in a borders books. and it IS a dec/jan issue so CLEARLY it has been around in the UK for quite sometime.

the domino effect

sad news for us style bloggers. sad news indeed. anna spiro over at http://www.absolutelybeautifulthings.blogspot.com just informed me that domino magazine is no longer. a few weeks back i got notice in the mail that my other favorite magazine, cottage living was throwing in the towel as well. i managed to get over this fairly quickly as i thought the magazine had lost its original charm and gusto but this...this is not going to be as easy to swallow. what's next house beautiful? country living? is this a domino effect?

*rita konig. my favorite contributing editor at domino

domino was the best as far as i am concerned. it catered to a younger crowd with a smaller budget. hello! now of course there were loads of things that i could not afford in it but they managed to converge all budgets with such great style and cleverness. it was a true inspiration.
now i am wondering if we style bloggers that counted on domino (among others) were the source of its demise. the dr. frankenstein to its monster. how do you ask? well, considering the growing style and home decor blogs out there (and there are hundreds!) i wonder if previous magazine subscribers or even those that bought at the newsstand were starting to realize that they could get all this style info within our blogs? why pay when you can surf the net and get your decor fix?? i mean for me personally, given that i am a junkie, the internet would never take the place of my much loved ritual of a freshly postmarked domino and a glass of wine in my bed. never ever!
and while i know the economy is largely to blame and the fact that US magazine subscriptions are dirt cheap i still wonder if i am not somewhat dead on here in my theory.
either way r.i.p. domino you will be missed dearly by many.

i had no idea!!

living in the south i have seen hydrangeas blue, pink, purple, lavender, white, green even a muted burgundy but never this!!! bright red?!?! are we just missing something in our soil to achieve this color? unbelievable. i love it. blue is still my favorite. but THIS!!! this red is fabulous. i could see these growing in masses outside a white house with black shutters and a provencal blue door.

lusting for linens

so here is my current bedroom obsession



it belongs to sunrise ruffalo (wife of actor mark ruffalo). i love its california simplicity. it is rustic and elegant and modern. i covet the grey linen pillows for my own bed. but alas they are about 140 dollars out of my price range (they are 195 dollars. each) if anyone knows where i might find something similar, please let me know!!

my eyes smell like roses

of all the mascaras that i have tried (and believe me there are LOTS) this one while the most expensive in that list is also my favorite and my best. it is christian dior's diorshow. what makes it the greatest? well for starters it smells like effing roses!!! i believe it is rosewater that does it. but beyond the dreamy smell it also does not give me racoon eyes, it does not clump, it makes my lashes l-o-o-o-n-g and it washes off with whatever you wash your face with. oh...no flakes either. it truly is a superior formula. i recommend you fork out the 23 bucks and get'choo some. i love this product so much that i have given it as a gift, as my good friend anna can attest.
*i don't want to appear insensitive of the dreadful economy right now, so by all means find a way to budget this into your beauty regime. even if you have to use some cheap shampoo or drink cheap wine for a while (i have had some good 5 dollar bottles from spain...i'm just sayin'- where there's a will there's a way).

chocolate is a drug and i need my fix

some of you know that i stay away from that evil enemy....sugar. it is a hard road to do so. its everywhere...not just in the sweet form found in candies and cookies and brownies et al. but its other not-so-obvious form called bread, pasta, rice and corn. its hard i tell you!!! so like most red-blooded women i need chocolate from time to time and unsweetened chocolate is about as edible as burnt hair. so what do i do?!?!?! i make "brownie batter", faux brownie batter is more like it. lets call it brouxnie batter. one sweetener i allow myself (in small doses) is called agave nectar. its a syrup made from the cactus plant and ..it...is sweeeeeeet! it is pretty flavorless to me although some say it has an aftertaste. i have yet to detect it. not like honey, or barley or rice syrups which are, to me, incredibly strong. so agave is the winner. it also has the lowest glycemic index of all sweeteners. not including those chemical renditions of sugar which i stay away from on principal. so i take my favorite cocoa powder from green and black's and pour about 2 1/2 tablespoons into a small bowl, followed by a pinch of sea salt. i then add enough agave (about 2 teaspoons) to emulsify it, or turn it into a paste. then i add a few tablespoons of heavy cream and incorporate it. the consistency at this point should be like what you would pour over your ice cream. of course you can start eating straight away (and i do) but you should wait at least 20 minutes when it will set a bit (thank you heavy cream) and turn into a truffle-y consistency or a brownie..excuse me...brouxnie batter. for someone like me who loves chocolate like i love my own child but can't eat the real thing b/c of all the sugar this is a fabulous substitute. i do think the best cocoa powder is worth getting for this and the addition of salt takes it to another level. chocolate loves salt. and when its that time of the month and you NEED chocolate or you might kill someone, this is a very easy and fast thing to pull together and it literally can be pulled together in less than 5 minutes. and this really is for those moments when you need something and there is nothing available unless you get in your car and drive somewhere. plus such a small amount is needed to suffice. truly!! a few tablespoons and i feel a bit sick to my stomach. thankfully!! then i can move on to something salty. which as we ALL know only leads right back into the kitchen for another tablespoon of brouxnie batter.

lush-ious

4 years ago i stumbled into a store in harrogate, UK called lush. harrogate, england of all places?!?!
so for a while i thought this was an english store. i did however know that there were lush stores all over the place (although none in atlanta at the time) but i STILL thought it was an english store in its origin. its actually canadian. go figure. anyway, this place had me at hello. you could smell it about a mile down the street. all clean and flowery. now i have smelled a lot of bath bars, bombs and bubbles in my 39 years but the products in lush seem to surpass all others. there is a particular odor that seems to resonate throughout all of their products, meaning if i walked into your house and you had just bathed with one of their many bath bombs i would know that it was a lush bath bomb even though i have not smelled all of them and they are all very different. so back to harrogate. i love this town. it is quaint and victorian in its architecture even though its origin i believe is 17th century.
i travelled there back when my daughter was almost 9 months old. it was a family trip...and i mean the whole family; mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, husband, self and baby. whew!! not recommended, travelling over seas with a baby. despite this it was a very memorable and lovely time. and for me my memories are recalled by smell. images too but mostly smell. it has always been this way for me. so lush is just a happy place for me. i told everyone at dinner right after visiting that it was my new favorite store and i wish i had 100 bucks to spend in there. well...ask and ye shall receive!!! the next night at dinner my dad presented me with a 100 dollar gift certificate to lush. so i woke up the next morning plopped daughter in husband's hands and said... see ya later!! it was a great girly spending moment. nothing like spending someone else's money. why is it when its someone else's we seem to have no problem buying 30 dollar face lotion? so bought i did. 100 dollars worth of yummy smelling stuff. mostly for my bath but also creams and oils foir after the bath. i would smell great for months!!!! there was so much to choose from. one thing i went for straightaway was a bath bomb called chelsea garden. now a bath bomb for those that might not know is a round ball of bath salts, perfume, oils, bits of herb, flowers, and/or glitter and all sorts of girly pieces of love that you put under hot running water and it dissolves in the tub creating a sublime bathing sensation. there are lots of different ones with lots of different ingredients. now chelsea garden was a lavender bath bomb with bits of real flowers stuck inside and it smelled like....a garden.