Felt Veggies from Umecrafts on Etsy

Leila can’t eat veggies yet. Not unless they’re pureed. I thought felt food toys might be a cute way to teach her the names of some foods.

It’s never too early to get my kid hooked on junk food.

Felt Ravioli works for me.

Cute little anime egg tart.

Breakfast, Fruit, Pizza

The Cranberry Sauce kills me, and you’re selling a pattern?

What do you do when a favorite houseplant oversteps its boundaries, yet you don’t have new pots waiting? You look around the kitchen for something that will do! I was almost out of green tea from this canister, which Mike brought back with him from Japan. The only thing I had to do was punch some small holes in the bottom using a nail. I’m surprised at how stylish the african violet looks in something I would have otherwise recycled!

Oatmeal Raisin cookies from the Grand Central book

Simple gift-giving involves giving something that is needed, but with extra meaning or a little flair. Even though I’ve known Mike for a very long time, I only recently found out that oatmeal raisin cookies are one of his favorites! So I told him I’d bake him a batch for Valentine’s day, and he said he’d cook me dinner.

Sausage and Linguine dinner. There was a *lot* of garlic! :)

Taking photos of food has made me more curious about presentation in general. How often is food morphed and enhanced into something delectable via photoshop and good lighting? Hard to tell. The result was me getting fed up with my perfectionist placement of cookies on a tray, and I just started snapping photos around the kitchen without moving anything. Here’s the result with a little explanation.

Leila’s sippy cup next to a ficus plant I bought last year made a nice contrast. She still needs to master drinking water, as it usually ends up all over her outfit. The wine bottles are usually kept next to the spice cabinet, as they are usually consumed within week.

I don’t have the time to catalog all of the drawers and cabinets, but almost every one in my kitchen is slightly askew. No matter how many times I close all of the drawers, they all just pop open or don’t line up properly. This glass-front cabinet is particularly naughty, as the one door always gets a bit in the way when I’m making coffee. How did I not notice when we were looking to buy our home? The kitchen is imperfect, but it definitely has personality.

To the right, just a bunch of notes and cards on the fridge.

Finally, and I suppose randomly, most parents will tell you that kids love to play with anything that isn’t actually a toy. Here we have Leila with a hard-boiled egg. No doubt its odd movement when pushed around is what kept her amused for 10 minutes.

wow lettuce!

I recently took a trip to Vashon Island to see Karen, one of my former coworkers. Karen offered to show us the best of the island, and I took her up on the offer.
I didn’t know much about Vashon, except for 3 things:

1) It’s very rural

2) You have to take a ferry to get on the island

3) Alex Borstein lives there

One of the highlights was a trip to the Monkey Tree Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant in the heart of Vashon’s small downtown. If you read the reviews on Yelp, there are lots of complaints about having to wait in order to get a table. This is true, but to be honest I find this to be a phenomenon with almost any good vegetarian restaurant, from East Coast to West. My theory is that there just aren’t a lot of really good vegetarian restaurants, which very simply leads to a bottleneck whenever it’s prime time for eating.

The waiter really cared about us. For example, I ordered the cherry soda. He said, I just want to warn you, it’s sweet. That’s cool, I said. He said, just checking, but it’s sweet, like cherry life savers sweet. OK, got it, I’ll take it! We had a theory that one other customer ordered it once and gave this poor guy a hard time.

I knew what I was going to order instantly. The fig and gorgonzola sandwich. Here it is:

Fig and gorgonzola sandwich

It was good. It showed thought on the part of the staff to try and come up with a good sandwich. However, there weren’t enough figs in the sandwich to balance out the cheese. (Could it be because fresh figs are expensive and were possibly out of season?) Gorgonzola is a very powerful cheese, so leaving it as the main flavor without other flavors to properly balance things out can be unpleasantly overpowering. But everything was very fresh, the salad crisp, and the soda sweet.

View from western edge of the island – thanks for the photo Mike!

Upon entering 15th Ave Coffee & Tea, there’s a clear note on the door that states the shop is “Inspired by Starbucks”. It sure doesn’t look like any Starbucks I’ve ever visited!

When I asked if I could take photos and write about the place, I got a not-so-joking answer of “only if you write something positive”. I got the sense that the employees were somewhat weary of answering questions about the the stealth mode of this coffee shop. In case you’re not familiar with the issue, there are some powerful reactions to “test[ing] out marketing coffee with neighborhood-specific names rather than a slutty mermaid” and smaller coffee shop owners seeing “teams of Starbucks employees in [their] shop, making notes and actually placing them in folders marked “Observations.”".

At this particular Seattle location in Capitol Hill, the baked goods are from Essential Baking. That’s a wonderfully good thing. I’m not entirely sure if using local baking companies is a trend for the future or just an experiment. I’ve had stale pastries at Starbucks before and it’s horrible when you can tell a slice of cake was just defrosted.

The decor reminds me of the inside of an Anthropologie – everything was artfully thrown together. The furniture looked very nice, like it was antiqued rather than thrifted from Goodwill out of necessity. There were fresh flowers everywhere, from the tabletops to the shelves behind the baristas.

The coffee: good! There was a selection of about 10 different types of beans to choose from for my single cup of coffee. They’re taking part of the trend in single-cup brewing a cup of coffee to order, instead of creating an entire pot of coffee. Mighty tasty.

The music was decent, a blend of late 80s/early 90s alt-rock that was a lot more toe-tapping than the Barbara Streisand/Norah Jones background noise I usually hear in Starbucks lately.

Starbucks is the queen of ubiquitous chains. If they wanted to endear more people to their brand—especially in an urban area with great coffee and competition—it’s a good start. But can Starbucks afford fresh flowers, wood tea trays, and antique-shop furniture across all their stores across the USA? Probably not, but this is their experiment.