our town bakery

down a straight and dusty road, not more than 20 farmsteads south of ours, is a grain elevator and its town, hillsboro, north dakota. it occupies one square mile that's home to a large city hall with a stately bust of abraham lincoln out front, a very cute vintage shop where blue stickers denote the registered items for whatever town wedding is approaching, and a magical little bakery.

this bakery, our town bakery, is the definition of a gem.

one apple muffin and one bite out of the golden section of eggboy's cinnamon roll is worth every second of the 40 minutes it takes to drive there. and all i want in this moment is one of their sprinkley donuts.

sometimes when we're there we pretend that we're in the bushwick-circa-2009 of the world. if that even makes sense. it's just so much goodness in the middle of so much nowhere. and no you can't ride your bike from manhattan.

so if you're wondering a) what you should do if you ever find yourself in hillsboro without me or, b) what eggboy and i did this weekend when we should have been unpacking/painting/putting up wallpaper/ordering our floors, the answer is our town.

how were all of your weekends?? did you eat anything yummy?

-yeh!

scenes from florida + friday links

about last weekend: i remember cousin russell telling stoop and me what the goal for the bar tab was and then i remember getting off a plane three days later at o'hare and seeing an old schoolmate dash up the escalator with his cello. 

in between was fuzzy, but i do know this: there was boogying, there was a sundae bar, there was a man who airbrushed "eggboy" and a picture of a chihuahua onto a t-shirt for me. and that much family in one place at one time? oh it really doesn't get much better than that. it didn't matter that approximately 12 people over the course of the weekend thought i was 16 years old, i still did my part in helping cousin russell reach his bar tab goal, with a side of one more caviar toast, please. (i mean...?!) 

recovery came in the form of a little day trip to sarasota to celebrate george's birthday on the beach with some very delightful homies. we played bean bags and ate quiche, we gossiped, we avoided sunburn.

an a plus weekend. and now on to the next!! but first, some links...

i can't stop staring at samantha lee's instagram feed. i wonder if she'd take my request for a lorde onigiri?

gimme all the matcha cakes!

if you don't hear from me next week it's because i am busy eating bacon matzoh brei.

a hunt for smiles in new york.

black sesame macarons are my favorite macarons, and these ones have nutter butter filling.

just a little reminder that it's been entirely too long since i had a bakewell tart.

rosemary + citrus, wins every time.

i'm gonna kidnap some of eggboy's soybeans next harvest so that i can make homemade tofu.

remember that time i discovered how cute yonkers is? the fruits of that labor are now on the internet and it is so groovy!

macaroon season is upon on us!!!!! pistachio macaroon granola bars, macaroons that use coconut chips, lemon meringue macaroons, macaroon bread! oh my oh my oh my. 

i made a grilled chicken version of these korean tacos last night and they were the tops.

a regular rumpelstiltskin as a bread maker, that was my favorite imagery this week.

pretzel crusted pie (!)

why have i never had a tres leches cake before?

my recipe for peeps (along with ways to make them boozy and herby and green tea-y) is up on food52.

tuba bonfire.

happy weekend, everybody!!

-yeh!!!

CHICAGO

when i lived in new york, a trip home to chicago meant a quiet getaway filled with days of relaxation and nights of movies or going out makeupless for shakes at the steak n shake, and then falling asleep to the silence of the suburbs. it was all about family time and scones and laziness.

now that i live in the opposite of new york, a chicago trip means eating all the tacos, getting in all the bagels, seeing this, seeing that, going to trader joe's and the asian market and stocking up on every single thing that's not available in north dakota, walk walk walking, trying new cheese, and putting an ounce of effort into personal presentation because, my heavens, there are so many people!

it's an odd and unexpected change, but so far it has been:

1. a perfect dose of city life for this newly converted farm human.

2. good for reminding me how lucky i am to have found a boy that is from a land where traffic means a slight 60 second delay on main street. (you should have seen the look on all the egg faces when they saw chicago's st. patrick's day traffic.)

3. fattening, but worth it because deep dish.

4. an appropriate amount of time for getting mildly shitfaced with my homegirls.

5. good inspiration for new foods, new design, and new fashions.

6. filled with slushy and realizing that that's probably why winter gets such a bad rap. see, up in these parts, it's so cold that the snow and ice don't have the chance to melt down to slushy until the spring. it's a much cleaner winter than the one i grew up with.

7. a practice in non-awkward human interaction because, again, there are so many people.

last week in chicago we went to some of our old standbys and also met a few new wonderful places:

blue door farm stand: home of my dad's new favorite food (their massive carrot cake), cute rustic floors that would be perfect in the farmhouse, and jam stand jams!

bob chinn's crab house: after so many years, this place is still the bee's knees. and i had forgotten how kryptonite-y their garlic rolls are.

das radler: i was sincerely overdue for a schnitzel and some spätzle and the company of hipsters.

big star!: eggboy's favorite. we've learned to always go during lunch to avoid the wait.

the bourgeois pig: i've never been to paris, but i imagine that all of the coffee shops there are just like this one.

mizrahi grill: i could take a bath in their hummus and then sleep a perfect night's sleep in a bed made out of their pita.

-yeh!

home

we made the five hour journey to ikea this weekend. i think i love that place more than pie. it is so worth the trek. i mean i really miss being a bike ride away from an ikea, but at least now we get to make a fun weekend trip out of it complete with drive-through egg mcmuffins and a san fermin/son lux concert, you know? 

eggboy and i officially have about half a dozen wildly successful ikea voyages under our belt, so i think this means that we can safely cross off any comparison to liz and criss in this regard and i am just too smitten with this realization. somehow we were plopped on the same ikea wavelength and each time we go to that store it gets better and better. we get in early, we get out before we're too crabby, and in between a few wonderful things always happen:

1. we share meatballs and he always lets me have the last one. 

2. if there is an extra cute dessert (especially one covered in marzipan of a pretty color), i obviously get it and bounce up and down excitedly and basically improvise a short broadway show about it at our table and he never gets embarrassed. (and yesterday it was a mini princess cake and omg it was the cutest thing ever ever everrrrrrrr!@!!!! jazz hands!!!!!!!)

3. we usually agree on aesthetics and if we don't, we stay calm and logical. if necessary, we spend an appropriate amount of time with, for example, hektar, getting to know him, envisioning how he would get along with our kitchen, meeting his family. we're not afraid to decide at the last minute to buy a twin set of mini hektars instead of the papa hektar that we had originally planned on.

3a. we keep receipts incase mini hektars need to go back. 

4. by the time we get to the kitchen accessories and i have to do that thing that i do every single time which is debate whether or not i need a pony shaped cake pan, he usually has an idea for a song lyric and will happily hang out with the mountains of tupperware, finding words that rhyme, while i decide for the "final" time that no, i do not need a pony shaped cake pan. 

5. egg is real good at calling me out on wanting to impulse buy things that i'll never use, so on the rare occasion that he does support a random thing i found and suddenly had to have, i know it's for real. 

6. and on the even rarer occasion that we both stop dead in our tracks in front of a really cool thing that is about to be sold out, we grab one. even if we have no idea where we will put it. (because planning out our lighting is officially my least favorite thing, because i have no idea how to light a house, because can someone come over and do it for me? and not crush my filament lightbulb dreams like this new york times article just did?)

...which is all to say that our ikea trip has made me even more excited about our farmhouse facelift and it has given me the motivation to whine less when eggboy suggests that instead of watching house of cards we go and sand some cabinets. 

and speaking of our home, a little thing i wrote about living in the country has been published in the kinfolk home issue and i am so excited i could poop. i talk about elk and eggs and how my concept of home has changed since moving here from the city. the issue officially comes out next week!

ok, i am off to go browse wallpaper and possibly make chocolate mint meringues. or rosewater meringues.

-yeh!