This is something we’ve been wanting to do for years – dyeing Easter eggs using vegetables and spices. After seeing how beautiful my friend Jen Causey’s eggs turned out, we planned our yearly egg dyeing activity over the weekend. Here’s the basic method and recipe that we used for our four colors:

Blue: Simmer 4 cups of water with 1 small red cabbage (roughly chopped) for 15 minutes.
 
Red: Simmer 4 cups of water with 2 medium red beets (grated) for 15 minutes.
 
Yellow: Bring 4 cups of water to a boil and stir in 1/4 cup turmeric. Boil for 1 more minute.
 
Brown: Bring 4 cups of water to a boil with 1 cup ground coffee, and simmer for 10 minutes.
 

When each of the mixtures have cooled down, mix in 1/4 cup white vinegar and strain each of the colors into cups for dyeing. We left the eggs in the color baths overnight as per Jen’s suggestion. Stay tuned tomorrow to see how they turned out…

Seems easy to do, right? But sometimes fitting in your recommended servings of fresh vegetables a day is hard. Like drinking 8 glasses of water (if I drank 8 glasses of water, me and my small bladder would be running to the bathroom all the time). We’ve always have had pretty healthy diets and seldom eat anything that is processed or packaged frozen mostly because it’s not in our budget to buy these foods which can notoriously inflate your grocery bill. Ok, living with a chef helps a lot, but I’ve been trying to make more of an effort to eat even healthier. I feel like my body is acting older than it should be. Everything hurts these days. I feel…brittle…and achy. It’s sort of alarming, depressing and a reality check all at once. While I may not be able to control certain pain regarding my back and now tail bone (!?) issues (oh yeah, the chronic tailbone pain is new. FUN TIMES! This is really making me feel like an old lady as it often takes me a bit to stand up from sitting because it hurts so much) there are other things I can control to keep other things in check and that’s diet, particularly since we don’t have the best health insurance (I’m working on the exercise part, I swear).

This is where the less meat/ less diary thing has come in, aside from the fact that I have no interest in butter or cheese and I’ve eaten very little meat in the last few months. Guys, I am not even tempted by bacon, the gateway meat that lures all lapsed vegetarians back to the dark side. So what is going on? I have no idea, but I’m just going with it. Mark, having been a vegetarian for a long time too, kinda kicked back into that mode of cooking and he’s been only cooking with any kind of meat once a week or so. I have never actually cooked meat myself so I don’t even know what to do with it! I remember not too long ago pulling a package of beef out of the fridge because it had to be cooked, looking at it cluelessly and then putting it back in the fridge. I know that being a vegetarian and even a vegan, which I was for about 3 years during that time, doesn’t automatically mean you’re eating healthy if all you’re downing is carbs and fries, so this time I’m making sure I get other sources of protein and eating more vegetables. Also, I am not giving up fish (and really, I’m not officially eliminating all meat from my diet either. I’m not declaring myself a vegetarian or a pescetarian or putting any kind of label on it). I’m not a big fan of cooked fish, but sushi was my gateway meat and I will eat it forever.
 
Mia was curious as to why I wasn’t eating any meat during dinner and I told her some of my reasons, both health and ethically related (swear to god that I became a vegetarian in high school because Morrissey told me that Meat Is Murder). Mia, who despite having some knowledge of how the meat that she eats gets on her plate, is an enthusiastic, self described carnivore. Claudine, on the other hand, overheard our conversation and kept telling us to “stop talking about it” as she quietly continued to work on her drawing. I asked her why and she replied that it made her feel sad and bad and she didn’t want to hear anymore. “It makes them hurt”. Claudine, ever the picky eater, doesn’t eat meat really at all except in the form of the occasional bacon, salami or chicken fingers so I pointed out that bacon comes from pigs and that she likes bacon, which she then replied with a huge smile and insane wide open eyes, “BACON!? I LOVE BACON!!!”.

A recent trip to our local farmer’s market. All Fall goodness. I hear there is snow in some parts of the country already. The transitional seasons always seem so short. It’s still been mild here, but I hear in a few days time we are going to drop to the mid-50s – it is the end of October after all. I’ve been very busy the last 10 days totally immersed in this project with a new client. Dare I say…design has become fun again.

Last week of October. Suddenly trying to cram as many Fall activities in on the weekends before it’s all over. After last year’s farm fail out in New Jersey, we stuck to pumpkin picking on Long Island. I think the trees are a bit confused by all the warm weather we had in September and October because the leaves are still fairly green. Mark and I turned to each other while we were driving in the car yesterday and said “the holidays really are around the corner, aren’t they?” Time to fasten your seatbelts…

Not much happening around here these days. The girls are settled into school and that is going swimmingly well. There have been no transition issues with Claudine and she is loving school. The days are quiet because they’re both gone all day, a first. We’re establishing a new rhythm to the year with school drop offs and pick ups. The busy-ness of the season hasn’t quite hit yet, but there is all this pressure already to prepare for the holidays. I’m doing my best to ignore it at the moment. Trying to squeeze in Fall activities like apple picking even if the weather still doesn’t feel much like Fall.

I’ve proven my theory that no matter how much time I set aside for personal projects by consciously controlling the amount of paid work that I take on, the space fills itself with other stuff – domestic chores, parenting, obsessively looking for a new dining table – you know, life stuff (sort of like your income, yes? Your spending rises and falls commensurate to how much you make). How many times have I said to myself, “If I only had a few free weeks”? And yet, here I am with a few free weeks…and I feel more pressed for time than ever.

Seattle…the weather has been perfect so far and such a nice and warm change to chilly San Francisco. The first thing we did was basically hand the kids off to Mark’s mom, who picked us up at the airport, and Mark and I took a leisurely walk through Pike Place Market. The market is such a different experience when you’re not walking it with kids.
We took our time at the stalls, grabbed a crab cocktail to share, bought some wine, and went into every store we’d normally avoid if we were with the girls. Made me realize that I couldn’t remember the last time Mark and I just took a walk by ourselves, just the 2 of us. Pretty sad. So we did it again one evening a few nights later. Walked down to the waterfront as the girls were being tucked into bed and watched the sunset on the pier over cones of Huckleberry ice cream.

Oh, and one last photo of San Francisco below as we pulled away from the airport after getting up at the ungodly hour of 4am to catch our Seattle flight. Look how the fog monster hovers over the city like a blanket. Amazing.

A nearly 40 degree drop from where we were just a few days ago. I could feel the cold through the car window as we drove closer to the bay. When we got up in the morning at our friends’ Killian and Catherine’s apartment in Berkeley, it felt like a crisp NY day in October. Our friends, who we’ve known since our Portland (and later Brooklyn) days, had a hearty spread of a breakfast ready for us. We then headed out to the Ferry Terminal Market and made our way through Chinatown. And what’s with the lines out the door to get ice cream in this city? We waited for 30 minutes at Ici on College Avenue in Berkeley the first night and on another line at Humphry Slocombe in the Mission the next. AND we were standing among people dressed in NorthFace down jackets and flip flops.

Ok, so…I like traveling with the kids, I really do. But it’s nearly impossible to take a leisurely browse through the market. There were a dozen stands and shops that I would have loved to shop in…but it didn’t happen. I suppose it’s better for my wallet.

Such heavy stuff here over the last few weeks. Today I leave you with apricots (and 1 ripe Bosc pear), a sign of summer for sure. The farmer’s markets are bursting with all the good stuff lately – berries, currants, peaches, plums and apricots. We also seem to be in the middle of a heatwave right now. High 90s the next few days. I don’t do well in this weather at all, but it’s been super busy around here. I have 2 photo shoots in the next 2 days. Very slowly, I am making progress on a project. It’s not totally together in my mind at all, but I’ve decided that it’s better to figure it out as you go along than to not do it at all.

Seems like nothing signals summer better than berry picking. And it hits you, the heavy sweet scent of strawberries as soon as you get out of the car. Claudine is always more interested in picking flowers than she is fruit and our baskets always inevitably get littered with small blossoms and the random wildflower or weed, you know, “for decoration”. These strawberries went into a strawberry rhubarb pie that we brought to a school picnic the next day. Speaking of, today is the official last day of school for NYC public schools. If last year was any indication, Mia will come home awash in mixed emotions. Seems like she takes after me.

It’s that time of year. The time when my dad hands me about a dozen persimmons off of his tree and we scoop it up and eat it like pudding. As I mentioned last year, rumor had it there was a second variety of persimmon tree in the side yard. I noticed it for the first time this year as I saw tons of fruit hanging from the small tree, this time with the smaller squatter variety that you can peel and eat like an apple. We didn’t get any from the crop as we were told they weren’t particularly sweet this year. Maybe next year. And my dad’s newest fruit tree experiment? Yuzu…from the seeds of a friends tree.

The vegetable and flower gardens are done for this year, but here are photos of the last of the flowers. Winter is coming.