Some dumpling making action over Thanksgiving weekend with my mom and the girls.
 
My mom claims that she hasn’t made homemade dumplings in 20 or so years. I do remember making them with her and my grandmother. She was telling the girls that when I was a kid, there weren’t that many Korean grocery stores and that they would have to make all the foods that are readily available now at stores, like dumplings and sheets of salted, toasted seaweed – you know, the kind that you can buy now already cut up in 2″ x 3″ rectangles in a foil packet. My grandmother would brush sesame oil on each large piece of seaweed, sprinkle some salt and then turn them over the fire on the stove to toast each side. She’d then cut the stacked toasted sheets into smaller pieces with a knife and store them in tupperware containers for the week. Sometimes I would help brush the sesame oil on the seaweed or snip off the roots of beansprouts before they would go into the steamer.
 
The girls were super into making dumplings especially since it’s Mia’s favorite food. Claudine, not so much, but making them appealed to her meticulous nature and they could have made dumplings for days. I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes I see flashbacks of when I was a kid when I see the girls with my parents. Making dumplings with grandma…just like I used to as a kid.

The holidays are coming! The holidays are coming! Can you believe Thanksgiving is less than 2 weeks away? Oh…the craziness is about to start. Some biz news to share with you now that some holiday events are being confirmed.
 

We’ll be at the West Elm/ Etsy Holiday Mini Mart on December 1st, 6-9pm in the West Elm Dumbo, Brooklyn store.
This year, the Bust Holiday Craftacular is an entire weekend with a new location! December 10th & 11th at 82 Mercer Street in Soho.
 

We’re also excited to announce that our products are in a new Brooklyn shop in our very own neighborhood. Valley Shepherd Creamery is a NJ based creamery who just opened a store on 211 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Support our new local cheese shop!
 
…And Philly friends, more marshmallows and cookies are back on the shelves at Green Aisle Grocery in Philadelphia.
 
For a list of all of our current retailers, visit our retailers page. We may be adding a few more soon.
 
Have a great weekend, friends. We’re having a few girls over from school for Claudine’s Birthday, take 2. I keep forgetting we’re throwing a party. Oh, and my crazy freelance work schedule is over for now (until the crazy holidaze kicks in, that is), so hopefully I’ll be around the blog more next week. I recently passed 1000 posts (this is post 1017)! Craziness!

Such a lovely night for trick or treating, especially after all that freakish snow. The weather was perfect and the neighborhood was lively and festive. Our friend who visited over the weekend from Southern California said that she couldn’t believe how many adults dressed up for Halloween in NY. I guess people take this holiday very seriously here! I mean look at the 2nd and 3rd photo. A neighbor who builds a haunted house in the yard of his brownstone builds these elaborate facades in front of his building every year. This year’s was the best by far. It’s cool to walk past the build out every day on our way to school, but see the finished structure on Halloween night where people line up to enter his haunted yard. And the dude that was sitting lifeless in a box in the middle of the yard dressed as Elvis or Evel Knievel – I don’t even know – jumped out and totally scared us. I mean screaming type of scared. I love this neighborhood. The free candy ain’t bad either.

Lucked out this year with the costumes as the girls picked things that were easy to assemble. Claudine decided that she was going to be a cat, which is what Mia was last year and Mia is going to be a vampire bat so we’re recycling the bat wings I made for her a few years ago with the perfect black velvet goth dress that we just got as a hand me down from a friend. Just in time too as Halloween in the city really lasts for 2 weeks since there are at least a dozen events each weekend day around town leading up to Halloween itself. Since December is so crazy for us and we don’t have time to participate in any holiday merrymaking then (sucks, huh?), we try to front load all the Fall activities as much as possible. Good thing there’s so much going on. The Northeast was made for Fall!

You might recall that last year we met Sara Jensen at her family lakehouse, a house that her great grandfather built in 1906, located 1 hour north of NYC. Sara and I had never met before up until that weekend, having only just chatted over the internet, and I guess she decided that we were not scary strangers or anything because she invited us back again this year. It’s funny what kids remember or don’t remember from the past, but the girls have fond memories of spending the weekend at the house last year and couldn’t stop talking about it the week or so leading up to the 4th. Now, it just feels like a part of summer to us.

(oh, and shhhh…don’t tell anyone we were roasting store-bought marshmallows. totally forgot to bring our own this year).

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there! Not much else to say except that Mark is enjoying a full day off today and we are contemplating going strawberry picking. Here is a Father’s Day post from last year, and a post about our favorite dad here. Hope your day is great!

Eggs. Peeps. Kinder eggs and other chocolate goodies from Norway. Grandpa. Driving home from upstate. Melting chocolate left in the car while we ate lunch at a stopover. Air conditoning on the rest of the drive home. Brooklyn. Hope your Easter was grand.

We traveled upstate last night to spend the weekend with Mark’s dad’s side of the family. We seem to find ourselves up here the last few Easters and the girls get a little dose of their Russian side. I like coming to stay at Mark’s uncle’s house because there are a lot of objects and photos here that’s tied to family history which is really cool because I feel like my mom’s house, which they moved into about 10 years ago, is pretty devoid of that kind of stuff. We don’t have old family heirlooms like these beautifully intricate pysanky eggs from the 60s and 70s.

We plan on doing Easter eggs tomorrow. I think one year we attempted to get fancy with the eggs using these as inspiration, but dude, it’s HARD. I think we’ll stick to simple egg dyes. Happy weekend.

I don’t really do resolutions. I don’t need yet another avenue of unrealized goals and dreams to feel bad about myself! But I did make one promise last year and that was to spend more time with friends. I’m happy to say that it was one resolution I made good on. 2010 was a year of friendships and connecting with people. It was most likely the only way I got through the mess that was the first half of the year.

When I was a child, we used to go to these epic New Year’s Eve parties with a group of family friends hosted by a rotation of homes every year. The kids had their own party within a party playing games, hanging out, and later, when we were a wee bit older, sneaking sips of drinks. The parents would play traditional Korean card games into the night with some friendly gambling and there was always a ton of food.

New Year’s Eve in recent years have been quiet since the kids have come along. In the past, Mark always worked that night at restaurants, but it was the one holiday where he didn’t mind working – even the chefs and cooks took a break to toast around midnight and it must have been nice to be in a festive, bustling atmosphere, even if you were at your job. Babysitters are hard to come by New Year’s Eve so I always stayed home with the kids. I let the kids stay up as late as they wanted last year, but they only lasted till 9:30. At that point they were both on the floor laying like corpses in random places around the apartment. After a short while they were begging to go to sleep. But oh, New Years Day! I may actually like it better than Christmas. Such a day of leisure, calm and renewal.

This year we did things a little differently. We were invited to a party by our friend Rachel in New Jersey and it felt so much like the parties that I remember fondly from my childhood. We left with an overnight bag when the skies were already pitch black and the kids managed to stay up like rock stars till past midnight. Nichole and Evan invited us to crash at their place and we did. 6 hours later the next morning, we all woke up with a little less sleep, but hours of good coffee and conversation ahead of us. I think that was the longest Nichole and I had stayed away from our computers even though we both had deadlines looming over us.

When we got back to Brooklyn, it was a new year.
Happy new year, friends.

Daaayum. It’s like the city has never dealt with snow before. Like we’re on the West Coast or something and not capable of handling a blizzard. Like we’re living out some scenes from a Will Smith/Dennis Quaid/Morgan Freeman world is ending sort of Hollywood movie. See that sunrise in the first photo? They say that’s a snow day sunrise. Sure, 20 something inches came down, but c’mon New York, I know you’re better than this. What the hell happened? We’re not even in the city to revel in the collective snowpocalypse atmosphere, but still at my parents’ house in the burbs. It’s just quiet here. With nothing to do. Really. Actually, the roads around here are all plowed and we’ve shoveled the car out, but it’s the city that’s the problem. Heard Brooklyn is still a mess – 8pm and the roads are still unsalted and unplowed. Cars are abandoned in the middle of the streets, everything is closed, a garage roof a block away from our house has caved in creating closed roads and more havoc. Craziness. I don’t remember the last time the city was crippled by snow, but as with any natural and unnatural calamities, the internets is going crazy with photos, tweets, “eyewitness” news reports and general oversaturation of information. Oh, technology. But how else would I know staying out in the burbs is probably a smart idea? This storm is going down in history with the Great Double Tornado of 2010, the Blizzard of 2006, the Blackout of 2004, the Hurricane of 1985, etc. etc.

So what do you do when you’re snowed in?
You make pie. Apple pie with caramelized apple cider. YUM.

You give the kids some leftover dough to play with, but your mom has more fun sculpting things than the kids.

You let the kids discover vintage cartoons on TV. You know, the ones that we grew up watching: Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, Tom & Jerry.

The kids play with their new American Girl dolls that they got for Christmas while you somehow feel defeated by succumbing to American capitalism at its worst. But then you can’t help but be a little too enthusiastic about the gray wool coat that you bought for the dolls and you realize that it’s a lot like your new gray winter coat that you’re wearing these days (oh snap). Oh btw, meet Ivy (Mia’s doll) and Angie (Claudine’s doll).

And when all else fails, your dad pulls out his stash of wigs and eyelashes leftover from his wig store including the ones that are custom for Diana Ross, and much to the delight of the kids, proceeds to dress them up like drag queens. Not your idea, his.

And when Claudine casts the eyelashes away, your mom picks them up from the floor and uses them as hair for her leftover pie dough sculptures.

True story.