Category: All (-ish)

20th (and 9 Month) Anniversary Dinner at Republica

Our 20th anniversary was really on May 1, but I tried to make reservations the week of and that wasn’t happening. So we celebrated several weeks later with a very fancy dinner at Republica that was worth the wait.

Our welcome and delicious menu.

This was our third course. As you can see, Republica is the kind of fancy restaurant where the portions are small. (This is a thing I like about fancy restaurants.) But don’t worry, by the time we got to the sixth course, we were well fed. We would eat half of the food on our plate and then switch. I learned that Matt really doesn’t like squid.

This was our fourth course and it was both beautiful and delicious.

It was a good choice for a big (and smaller) anniversary.

Impulse Buy: Couscous From My Late Teens

I haven’t had this in years, but for whatever reason, it ended up in my grocery cart the last time I shopped.

I most associate this brand and flavor of couscous with the summer I was a lifeguard. It cooked up in five minutes! (If you don’t count the water measuring and boiling time.) It was delicious.

I remember being very disappointed to learn that this wasn’t REAL couscous, it was more like very small cut-up spaghetti. But I kept eating it just the same.

Eating it now, I enjoyed the speed, but the flavor wasn’t quite what I remembered. I think quinoa has taken the place of this brand of couscous.

Dueling Quotes re: Passion

I bought a notepad as a gift and I ended up not giving it to the person. I’ve been using it lately to track work things, and let me tell you, most of those quotes are really subpar.

Today though, I enjoyed two in a row about passion.

In other news, I’m not really sure what that stain is on my blanket. Maybe time for a wash?

Square Dance Graduation Cakes!

The fancy butter begat two delicious sheet cakes.

Each square dance class chooses a rose’s name for their class name. Since there happen to be 2.3 million rose names, the choices are many.

The 2022 graduating class chose Lavender Pinocchio. I made them a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

The 2020 class chose the name Autumn Sunset. They got a yellow cake with vanilla frosting.

I had fun planning out the cakes.

Kiriki Press: Beach Day

I love, love, love how this one turned out. Yay for Beach Day!

Aside from liking the beach, I bought this sampler because I was curious about how to make the hat. How does one get embroidery to stick up like that?

In this case, I was instructed to do couching stitch to build up half of a sphere and then cover it with detached buttonhole. Brilliant! The base of the flip flop is just chain stitch, but with that thread color, it looks like a rattan sandal.

This stitched up fast, too! Probably the hardest part was tying that bow.