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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!

FARMHOUSE FACELIFT: KITCHEN, PART ONE

hey, how many music school graduates does it take to renovate a kitchen?

trick question: omg we have no idea what we're doing.

well, ok, i'm not giving eggboy enough credit. his rugged manly farmerness has come out a bit and he knows some things, but mainly he knows enough to know that we don't know what we're doing.

that is why most of these pictures are of paint chips!

so far we have done these things:

1. painted a couple of walls in the colors crumb cookie and sage

2. removed the hanging cabinets

3. painted some of the remaining cabinets

4. ordered wallpaper samples and decided not to get the one with the bunnies

5. decided that we want butcher block countertops and that we'll likely order those from ikea

our goal is to have everything done by the time the chickens arrive (may) and, nope, that's probably not going to happen. but it's ok! mostly i am just excited to move down the road to a house with a chicken coup and to have an address without an apartment number after it!!!

-yeh!

A SNOW PICNIC

santa has come, santa has gone, i forgot to put out cookies for him, but he was still good to me. i received big girls gifts like industrial style chairs and cast iron kitchen accessories and a snazzy vintage pyrex pie plate. a lot has changed since the furby/tamagotchi/overhead projector years. 

we celebrated with a roast and lefse and one of my gifts to eggboy: the pleasure of my company while watching lawrence of arabia. it's his favorite movie, but as you may have guessed, my favorite movies are rom coms and made-for-tv christmas movies.

it was actually last christmas when i presented him with a homemade "i will be in the same room as you while you watch lawrence of arabia" coupon, but it has taken us this long to get around to it. and, surprisingly, i was not completely uninterested. peter o'toole was a hunk. and those camels! they brought back such fond memories.

on christmas eve day, the eggfamily and i bundled up real good and headed to the farm for a little snow picnic inspired by asian shaved ice, baobing. we brought all sorts of tasty sweets and plopped them on fluffy mounds of snow before feasting till our brains froze over and wrestling each other to the ground.

it was a balmy 13ºf. really quite lovely.

oh what is that? you want to have your own baobing snow picnic?

here is what you will need:

-clean deep snow

-snow pants or a towel to sit on, fuzzy gloves, other warm apparel

-chopped fruit

-condensed milk

-red bean paste (i made my own from this recipe, it is so easy! but if you don't live in the middle of nowhere, you can just get it at your neighborhood h mart or the equivalent)

-brown sugar syrup (i actually forgot about this part...oops)

other fun toppings: mochi bits, matcha green tea powder, nuts, sesame seeds, candy...

and then all you do is:

1. make a mountain of snow

2. sprinkle on the toppings to your heart's desire

3. enjoy!!!! and then wrestle in the snow and try not to vom.

-yeh!

SNOW CARAMELS

i promise, cross my heart, that i'm not just saying this so that all of you will visit me in this new tundra home of mine, but -16ºf is really not that bad.

maybe it's that i've been overly prepared with my new sweater layering skills and my new favorite thing, the bomber hat.

maybe it's that i never have to walk to a subway or hail a cab.

maybe it's that it gives me a good reason to stay inside and bake all day.

snow here is a friendly snow and people accept it. they don't kvetch about it, cancel their work, and then drink all day. life carries on, people bundle up, they drive safely. i hear there are even free cross country ski rentals at a local park.

this weekend, the snow helped us make caramels! we heated up our sugars and then poured it into the deep farm snow for the fastest cooling caramels i ever did make.

i imagine you can use any caramel recipe. i used the kitchn's. cooling caramels in the snow isn't the thing to do if you want perfect, smooth, rectangular, cutely wrapped, chewy caramels. it's more the thing to do if you want to have fun in the snow but are too much of a scaredy cat for a snow ball fight and just not feeling free spirited enough to make a snow angel.

they'll probably be a little bit crackly on the outsides from being frozen in the snow, and their shapes will be awkward. but you'll have fun, i promise.

basically all you do is you cook your sugars according to the recipe, and then instead of pouring the syrup into a prepared pan, quickly (and carefully!) run outside and drizzle it in some deep and clean snow. use a spoon or spatula to collect the hardened caramels from the snow, and then rinse off excess snow in a colander. pat them to dry and enjoy! 

don't forget to brush your teeth.

-yeh!