Sangria; A Summertime Specialty

by Sheila

You may have read about our pool float parties.  I'm sure by now you know we like wine.  The natural pairing here is one of our summer favorites; Sangria.  We have been making this since the days we couldn't afford to drink anything else.  I am typically a white wine drinker (might be the heat of the desert), but for Sangria, I definitely prefer red.  This is great to make for  a crowd, and is best if made several hours prior to serving, if not the night before.

 

One of the advantages of a good Sangria, is that you can serve a wine beverage to a large group without breaking the bank.  Because you are adding sugar and fruit, there is no reason to use a high quality expensive wine.  A red that you like in the $5-7 a bottle range should do the trick.  I have been known to use the "leftovers" of a variety of red wines to create my Sangria on weekends that we were doing lots of entertaining, and this works great. This is my favorite all-time Sangria (I like it as well as any I've had in Spain) and this recipe is adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

2 large juice oranges, washed; 1 sliced, 1 juiced

1 large lemon, washed and sliced

1/4 c sugar

1/4 c triple sec

1 750 ml bottle inexpensive, fruity medium bodied red wine chilled (merlot or pinot?)

1.  Add sliced orange and lemon and sugar to bottom of pitcher.  Mash gently with wooden spoon until fruit releases some juice but is not totally crushed, and sugar dissolves.  Stir in orange juice, Triple Sec and wine.  Refrigerate for at least a few hours, and up to 12 hours.  

2.  Add ice to serve and stir briskly to mix up fruit and pulp. 

I have a large beverage dispenser that I like to serve this in, but be careful because the fruit can clog up the spout. I also like to garnish glasses with a slice of fruit as well.  And needless to say, I often double this recipe! 

If you read Heather's post on Monday, you know that we are signing off on our blog, at least for the time being.  It has been a great adventure, but adds one more thing to do in an already busy schedule. Blogging on a regular basis is not without its issues.  Like the time I was in a rental car down at Cranky Al's Donut Shop in Milwaukee using their free wifi at 11 pm at night the night before my post was to be published, trying to get everything done.  Crazy!  We appreciate your interest and loyalty and will be leaving all of our posts up, so if you want to double check one of Ann's recipes, or need some design inspiration from Heather, it will be there.  We have learned a lot along the way, and had fun sharing ideas and solving problems together.  We will continue our friendship "behind the scenes" and if we decide to start up again in the future, we'll post here.  Thanks for reading...

Salute!

Sheila

 

Lighting Makes a Difference

by Sheila

 

One of the ways you can update a home is to replace lighting fixtures.  I have been doing this recently at my Cairo investment property to give it a fresh look and more importantly, to improve the available light in the space.  This isn't difficult, nor does it have to be expensive.  You can spend lots of money on light fixtures, and that may be worth it to you, but you can find reasonably priced options at your local home improvement stores, online and even at salvage and thrift stores.  Hardwired (built in to the wall wiring) fixtures can be converted to plug-in and vice-versa pretty easily.  There are tutorials online for this, or you can hire it done

I salvaged this light from my Son's condo.  I painted it with stainless steel appliance paint and I love it!

Ambient lighting is also known as general lighting and provides the overall lighting for a room. These are most often your overhead lights.  Task lighting does what it says; gives you the light to perform specific tasks within a space, such as a lamp for reading or under-counter lights in a kitchen. Accent lighting highlights certain elements of your decor, such as a wall-mounted picture light or outdoor lights that shine on featured items in your landscape.  All of these are important and should be considered in your overall lighting plan, combining function and style.

I am not a lighting expert and have made a few mistakes over the years with some of my choices. Here are some of the things I have learned:

Light bulbs are hard to keep up with these days.  I know that I generally do not like the "blue" or cooler light color of many of the new energy efficient bulbs.  I know they are getting better with this, but it can really affect the color in a room.  Also, some of these are dimmable, but not all, so be sure you check that if you want to be able to control the amount of light in a space.  

The downstairs bath "before".  How 'bout that orange?



A close-up of the overhead light.  Interesting...



David took pity on me and lent a hand.  Thank you!

 

He installed this overhead chandelier ($48) and wall sconce ($52) last night.

 

Do you miss the globe light and the orange?  Not me!

 

Also, some lights are hotter than others.  Hot can lights are not a good choice for an Arizona kitchen. I put these as can lights in a rental and it was an issue.  Be sure to ask when you purchase lighting if this is a concern for you. 



Hall wall sconce "before".



And the new wall sconce.

Dimmers are critical for controlling ambience.  These are also easy to install and well worth it.  I put them  EVERYWHERE.  Be sure that the dimmer you choose will dim the light fixture and bulb you are using.  Not all dimmers are created equal.  Also, make sure you select the right dimmer for your switches (single switch operation = single pole dimmer).  



I add dimmers everywhere.

Installs in minutes!

 

Lighting is one of the most important features to create a mood in the evening hours.  A glaring overhead light is not nearly as conducive to a relaxing dinner party as dimmed lighting and candles. On the other hand, if you are cooking and can't see what you are doing, you need to consider additional task light to get the job done.  Is there an area in your home where the right light would improve your use of space?  I am on the lookout for a reading lamp in my den.  There's always something...

Five Steps to Choosing Paint Colors

by Sheila

Paint is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to transform a space.  As some of you know, I am in the process of updating a new investment property to turn it into a Vacation Rental.  One of the biggest changes I will make (in terms of overall visual impact) is painting every square inch of the interior, and some of the exterior.  The tricky part is selecting the right color(s).  Here are some of my suggestions to consider when selecting paint.

1.  Look for inspiration.  This might be a fabric that combines colors you love, art that is hanging on your walls, or a photograph that speaks to you.  Take this with you to the paint store to help you begin your color selection.

This pillow is my inspiration for the downstairs bedroom.  Paint color is Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams (sometimes looks blue, sometimes green).

 

2.  Start a board on Pinterest. I started one specifically for design ideas for my investment property (called Cairo Design Ideas)  and I put my color and other design ideas all together here.  I can add to this and browse for inspiration whenever I need it, and it is all at my fingertips.
 

My Pinterest Board for this house project.  I have become a Pinterest junkie.  We learned at Blog World Expo that the average person spends one hour and seventeen minutes on this site at a time.  Wow!

 

3.  Bring paint swatches home and tape them up in the actual room you are painting.  You will often see differences in paint that you didn't see in the store.  Does that beige color look too pink or too green in this room?  Eliminate it.  Too light or dark?  Keep in mind that color intensifies when you paint an entire wall or room, so when in doubt, go lighter.  Also, you can have the paint store mix a color you like with 25% or 50% less intensity, making it a lighter shade.  I sometimes do this with my samples (see #4), custom mixing a color I really like, and then have the paint store color match it. We recently visited my son and daughter-in-law in the house they have just moved into in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  She has mixed her own paint color and has the formula saved with Sherwin Williams under her name "Margo".  This is a great idea!  Lowe's will save your paint formulas also with their "My Lowe's card".  They need to scan the paint bar code and the color mix bar code in order to for this to work, so keep an eye on this when you are checking out.  
 

Yes, I really did go through all of this to pick a very neutral color; Benjamin Moore's Muslin.

4.  Once you have narrowed down your choices, get samples made of the possibilities you are considering.  Don't skip this step.  They only cost around $3 and it will save you time and money in the long run, by helping you select a color you really like.  Paint these samples either on a large poster board that you can move around to look at on different walls, or use my method and just paint a large swatch right on the wall.  Hey, this means I better get the job done, so I don't have to look at splotches on my walls!  The color will look completely different depending on the light and the other colors in the room, so this will help you decide. 

Can you tell this room needed paint?  What a yucky orange-brown!

5.  Buy quality paint.  I like Valspar (Lowes) paint & primer in one, Behr paint & primer (Home Depot) for wall paint and Benjamin Moore Advance for trim.  My daughter, Elizabeth is a serial painter (like me) and she recommended this Benjamin Moore paint which I really like.  I recommend you select one paint color for trim throughout your house and stick with it.  It unifies the space and makes touch-ups easier.  There are other good options as well, but these tend to be my go to selections for paint.
 

This paint dries very hard and goes on smooth.  My only complaint is that with the dark colors in this house, it is taking two coats.  Way more time and money!

On our recent visit to see my son and daughter-in-law, we painted the living room in their new home. We changed it from a dark red to her very own color mixed "Margo" paint.  It transformed the space from a dark, bold room to a light, open, welcoming space that works much better with their furniture and style.   

Margo's formula for the color named after her!

The supplies...

b

Margo & Ty's dark red living room "before"

Margo at work.  We used Lowe's Valspar paint & primer (yes, they color matched from the formula we gave them)  and it covered beautifully in one coat! 

The rest of the crew at work.  Tyler and David are the roller operators.  I think Charlotte is attempting to paint Papa's leg.

The youngest painter in the crowd - my granddaughter Charlotte.  How could we have managed without her?

Color selection made - it's time to get to work.  See my blog posts I Love Paint I and I Love Paint Part II for more info on painting and let your transformation begin!

Summer Tea Time

by Heather

Home Goods plates; vintage teacups from another china set; Home Goods place mats; tea towels (which I use as napkins) from a little shop in Minneapolis 

I like tea parties. Give me any excuse to have one and I will. This time the tea started out to be for one party but segued into another instead. Oh well...any excuse will do. I always have loose tea leaves on hand -- I start each day with a pot of tea -- and I usually have scone mix in the cupboard. I know how to make scones from scratch but why would anyone bother to do so when, with this mix, all you do is add water and they're great every time. 

With the scones, I like to serve several types of jams -- usually strawberry and lemon curd -- and clotted cream (aka Devonshire cream).

Lemon curd and strawberry with champagne jam are held in glass bowls with glass serving spoons from local shop, Bungalow; clotted cream is in vintage Waterford; butter dish from Home Goods

Cost Plus is the place where I can find all of these items at good prices. I'll also pick up Cadbury milk chocolate fingers and Walkers shortbread if I know that I'm doing a tea in the near future.  Can you tell that I'm not the baker in our blogging trio?

Scones, shortbread and chocolate fingers are placed on Home Goods two-tiered plate stand.

For this tea, I made two types of tea sandwiches: egg salad on wheat and chive butter/cucumber on white. I used a mandolin slicer for the first time to get the cucumber slices thin enough -- why haven't I used this before?? It's been sitting in the cupboard for years!

Sandwiches are placed on a tiered glass stand from Home Decor. Note the sweet birds perched at the top; they fit right in with the bird motif on the plates.

 If I'm going all out, I will generally add at least one more type of sandwich as well as cheese straws and sausage rolls and if I'm really on a roll, jam tarts and sandwich cake.

One of the best parts of having a tea is setting the table. I love the green bird and flower patterned china that I picked up at Home Goods this spring so I started with those plates.

I wanted to offer both de-caf and regular tea so I needed two teapots. Home Goods again to the rescue with two pots I had picked up this spring -- one to match the green plates; one in cream with a bird motif.

The only new items on the table: two candelabras from Home Goods (where else?)

I couldn't resist these candelabras. I'll probably put them into storage after the tea and bring them out again at Christmas. I can picture them during that season surrounded by silver and sparkle.

A green linen runner down the middle of the table and two preserved boxwoods in their own wire basket, both from Home Goods, added to the off-center centerpiece.

Butter knives and additional tea spoons are corralled in silver cups

Maybe for my next tea, I'll do a coastal theme. The tea pot below with a matching sugar and creamer is needing some action.

Home Goods tea pot, sugar, creamer, and tray

Home Goods jar; Nordstrom's candleholders

Come on over for a cuppa, okay?

Love,
Heather

Homemade Pasta

by Ann

Making pasta from scratch?  Really?  Is that a good idea?  Is it cheaper?  I'd have to say "it depends" to the first question, and definitely "no" to the second.  Yet I've got to blog about it because I just spent a stupid amount of money on a pasta attachment, and that's with my hefty discount at Sur la Table!

We have lots of pasta classes at the store, so that must mean that lots of people want to make it from scratch.  I get that.  At high-end Italian restaurants when I ordered something simple like lasagna I wondered why the heck it tasted so much better than what I could make at home.  The answer lies in the melt-in-your mouth noodles that are so different than those that come from a package.  With that said, you can find a box of pasta on sale for a buck -- the attachment for the Kitchen Aide mixer is $200.  There is no way on earth that I'll be making 200 batches of homemade lasagna before it's all said and done.  (Oh yeah, with my discount I don't have to make quite that many, but it still won't be happening -- plus if we're getting picky about costing it out, I'd need to include the cost of the ingredients!) 

I am three batches into ownership of the pasta attachment.  The first one was a bit of a disaster, but the second two were fabulous.  I have worked several pasta classes, so had seen it done, but looked at a couple of You-tube videos prior to doing it on my own.  One suggested using the dough-hook attachment of the Kitchen Aide to actually make the dough.  Great idea -- or so I thought, until the dough was so tough and dry that it was hard to roll out in sheets.  The machine will keep incorporating all of the flour, when in contrast if you do it by hand you will get the "feel" for when it is pliable and just right. Lesson learned -- the next two times I did it by hand, which is a very easy procedure.

The ingredients are amazingly simple - 2 1/2 c all purpose flour, 1 T kosher salt and four large fresh eggs.  The recipe says adding a tablespoon of olive oil is optional -- I didn't think of it until after the photo below, so sprinkled a drizzle over the mixture, but think I could have been fine without it.

This is not something you'd want to do if you were finicky about getting your hands dirty (or about handling raw eggs....).

Knead the dough for 5-10 minutes until it is pliable but no longer sticky.  This was where I got in trouble using the machine.  The Kitchen Aide had no trouble incorporating all the flour, but it was way too tough and dry at the end.

When the kneading is done, the dough needs to be wrapped and allowed to rest at room temperature for 10 minutes or up to an hour.  If made in advance, refrigerate and then allow to sit out until it reaches room temp.  The pile of crud to the left is all of the excess flour that was tossed.

After the pasta has rested the fun begins.  Speaking of fun, we'd invited two couples over for dinner to help provide the material for this post, and to have a fun evening together. My co-chefs were my dear friends Kim and Sally.  The husbands were plenty entertained just watching us make the pasta.

The rested dough was divided into thirds so each of us had a manageable piece to work with.  Each third was kneaded a bit more before it was ready to start processing through the machine.  The first run is rough, but after folded into thirds and run through again the sheets begin to look like fresh pasta.

Prepare each portion of dough to fit through the roller set at a wide setting.

The first time through the dough looks rough, but that's ok.  Each piece goes through the roller about six times before it is the melt-in-your-mouth-amazing homemade pasta.

Take the first time through rough sheet, fold it in thirds and then send it through the wide set roller again.  After the first time it sticks together.  The process is to then adjust the roller tighter and tighter each pass through of the dough.

See how it's hanging together better the second pass through?

Sally is supervising Kim on what I would guess to be the third or fourth pass through the roller.  The sheet gets longer and longer as the pasta gets thinner and thinner.

Once the pasta is the desired thickness the attachment is changed to the cutting roller to make spaghetti or fettuccine.  

Since the pasta is fresh it takes only a couple of minutes to cook in the boiling salted water.  Use plenty of salt in the pan!  (No picture -- you can visualize it, I'm sure...)

My guess is that most of you, our dear readers will NOT be going out to buy a pasta machine, but I hope that reading this has helped you gain an appreciation for what is going on in the kitchens of restaurants that prepare their own pasta.  For a "take-away" that is more applicable, here's a word of advice on preparing red sauce.  Prior to serving make it mellow, extra-delicious, and decadent by adding a splash of cream (about 1/2 c for six servings). At Sur la Table it seems like we "finish" most recipes with cream or butter.  Maybe I don't want to do that for every meal, but this fabulous pasta deserves an equally fabulous sauce, so the heck with those added calories!

Dinner is served!