Favorite Friday Recipe: Homemade Pizza

Make your own pizza night is becoming a popular meal at our home lately.  It's quick, easy and fun to make especially when you have company visiting.  What makes it so great is this Basic Pizza Crust recipe by none other than the Pioneer Woman.  And she's right, letting this dough sit at least 24 hours in advance really helps, and if you're baking it 48 to 72 hours later, the dough is miraculously even better! 

In our household, fresh mozarella cheese is a must, then we load on all our ingredients--for me: mushrooms and olives, and for B: some sort of meat (bacon, pepperoni, Canadian bacon).  The trick to making pizza is to really pile on the ingredients, don't be shy!

After a nice little baking in the oven:

Wishlist Wednesday: Arco Lamp

The Arco Lamp is by far one of my favorite lighting options. From Apartment Therapy: The Arco design, like the many other designs by the Castiglioni brothers, simply makes sense while also being visually appealing. An overhead light without the hassle of wiring, it was supposedly inspired by a street lamp, one of many instances where Achille Castiglioni looked to mass-produced everyday items as a springboard for reinventing domestic objects. The impressive chunk of Carrera marble that serves as the base is both decorative and essential to the piece’s physical balance, while the hole in the base is so a couple people can carry it using a broom handle (great idea for a relay race?). The generous sweep of its neck makes the Arco practical and versatile, accomplishing so much with an elegant economy of form and material.

You can find more about the history of the Arco Lamp in their detailed article here.  And here are some more lovely pictures gathered from google images.

Since this lamp runs in the xxxx digits, I've been on the hunt for an alternative and CB2's Big Dipper Arc Lamp certainly fits the bill. It has a gorgeous high arc to it, is relatively sturdy (per reviews) and the lampshade instead of the chrome softens the effect.  This would be perfect for the living room.  Or so I'm trying to convince B.  At the end of each month, I peruse our house budget to see what leftover funds we have so I can finally purchase this indulgence.  Sadly, this remains, still an indulgence (as opposed to landscaping supplies and paper towels and oh...gutters) so it is resigned to sit at the top of my wishlist for a while.

DIY: Raised vegetable garden bed

This Vintage Monday post has been officially hijacked by a DIY post instead!  We've been working on this project for the past couple of weeks now and in order for me to show the progress pictures, I've first got to show you what we started out with!

B and I attended a local gardening class back in March and learned all about how to create a raised vegetable garden bed.  The class also included DIY composting (ew and ick), rain barrels and how to build trellises and green houses.  It was really informative and fun and just the kick start we needed to get going on our own little garden.

Step one:
Locate a plot in your yard that receives a ton of sun.  Mow the grass down (we neglected to do this) and apply compost liberally, making sure you cover a good 1-2 feet outside the edge of your garden bed as well.

Step two: 
Water the compost--it's supposed to help break down the weeds in that area and provide a ton of nutrients for your future vegetable roots.

Step 3: 
Spread out a layer of cardboard to cover the compost.  We broke down cardboard boxes and made sure to peel off all labels and tape.  This cardboard acts as a protective layer to help the compost break down all the weeds and prevent them from growing up in your bed.

Step 4: 
Water the cardboard (do this on and off for an hour or so) and get it really good and soaked.  This helps the cardboard begin to disintegrate more quickly.  Ideally the cardboard helps the compost keep the weeds down to a minimum and yet it also disintegrates in time so that when the vegetable roots do grow, they'll grow down past the cardboard into the composted soil.

Step 5:
Place your newly made wooden frame on top of the cardboard.  B made the frame with untreated pine wood using his handy drill and coated deck screws.  In our class they recommend 4x4 beds.  We got greedy and made ours 8x4.  Ideally you should be able to lean in and reach two squares from each side to make it easier on your back.  Remember to get untreated wood since you'll be growing edibles.  We were hoping for cedar (lasts longer and looks nicer) but Home Depot didn't offer it in the lengths we needed so we went with pine.

Step 6:
Start hauling your soil and place it in the frame.  (We went to the Natural Gardener and bagged our own soil and compost in the soil yard.  By "we" I really mean B)  We went with the Hill Country Garden Soil.  Fun fact: each bag was 10 gallons and weighed 70lbs each!  You can calculate how much soil you need for your frame with this nifty formula.

Step 7:

Once the bed is filled with soil, be sure to mulch the outsides (where the cardboard still lies) to make it prettier and to keep the weeds at a distance from your garden.

Step 8:
Measure and mark each foot.  Then using green gardening tape, stretch it out and staple on each side, horizontally and vertically till you get a nice tic tac toe board.   If you have a 4x4 bed, you should have 16 squares.  In our case, we went with slightly bigger squares and got 7x4=28 squares.

Step 9:
Plan out where you want your plants. We used a combination of seeds and already sprouted plants.  Plus we added some different flowers for color and to also attract and repel certain bugs to our garden.

Here's our diagram of what we planted (so we could remember and not be too surprised when something started sprouting):

Step 10: 
Water daily and keep watch!!

ps: a watchdog helps!

Favorite Friday Recipe: Raisin buns

Thanks to the Pioneer Woman, I have conquered my fear of yeast and baking!  Her cinnamon rolls are legendary and using the same dough recipe, I made some raisin buns for Easter.  Her recipe is actually under Hot Cross Buns, but since I was too lazy and didn't make the icing to cross the buns, I'm just going to call them good ol' raisin buns!  They've already been devoured and there are plans in place to start a second batch this weekend.  Enjoy!

DIY: The makings of an Easter basket

My adorable niece and nephew visited during Easter and I had great fun putting together their Easter baskets and hiding eggs all around the house. My go-to items for Easter baskets: Jelly Bellies and Skittles (in little ziploc bags to put in the plastic eggs), stuffed Peeps animals, coloring book activities, and of course a chocolate bunny!

Wishlist Wednesday: Vera Neumann

If you haven't guessed by now, I am a sucker for vintage linens and prints. One of my favorite vintage print designers is Vera Neumann. A little bit about her from the Vera blog: Vera is an American icon. She began a business at her kitchen table in 1946. By the 70's, she had built a $100 million business. Her products were sold around the world. All of her products (scarves, linens, apparel, etc.) started as an original piece of art from her own hand. Best known for her colorful silk scarves, Neumann produced an incredible amount of work in her lifetime (over 20,000 scarves and 7,000 pieces of original artwork)

I started collecting Vera linens a couple of years ago and am still going strong! That's why I was so excited to see this new book about Vera. It's in stores at Anthropologie right now and at the top of my wishlist!



Here are just a few of my favorite Vera patterns:











(pictures gathered from the Vera Textiles flickr group and trusty google images)

Vintage Monday: Vera linen towel calendar

It's April already? Yikes! I've haven't been blogging lately due to family visiting and a ranunculus flower ingested by a puppy incident. It's all settled down this week now (well not the puppy yet) so let's get to some Monday Vintage goodness!

I thought it'd be cute to collect and display these little linen towel calendars in the kitchen from the years that B and I were born. When I first began searching, there were so many 1977 calendars with great floral patterns and prints that it was difficult to choose. I finally settled on this Vera one with herbs and various flowers on it that I got from etsy. It is in pristine condition--some little old lady hoarded this one well!

So then my search began for a calendar for my birth year--1980, and to my horror, all of the available linen towel calendars out there either have waterwheels or dutch clogs or Italian chefs saying "Bon giorno!" on them. *sigh* I'll keep searching but I don't have much faith in my decade...

Here's the 1977 Vera calendar. I love Vera so so much. In fact I think Wednesday's post will be an All about Vera post!