A few pop culture PSAs for your January enjoyment.

Music, TV, books, and recipes that are helping me through the January gloom…yes, Norcal is gloomy, no, this is not me complaining and thus giving you an open invitation to tell me how much worse the weather is in the Midwest ;)

• The playlist “Nancy Meyers’ Kitchen” on Spotify is an absolute delight and has sparked so much joy for me over the last few days. Lots of oldie goodness from her movies, which I have always found to have utterly charming soundtracks. I’ve played it in my own kitchen, as well as my car and at my desk for close to a week, and it leaves me feeling happy and also like watching “Something’s Gotta Give” and “It’s Complicated” on repeat. (Anyone else kind of hate “Julie and Julia?”)

• DJ Earworm’s 2019 mashup is actually pretty good this year, but I really loved his Decade in Review. Also worth peeping: his “2009 v 2019” mashups - a fun eleven-minute ride through some true 2010s classics.

• In the last few weeks, I’ve binged on “Cheer,” “You,” and “Sex Education” on Netlix, “Fleabag” on Amazon (how on EARTH did it take me so long to do this?! It’s utterly luminous!), and…PREPARE TO JUDGE ME…”90 Day Fiancé” on Hulu. Kendra and I are embarrassingly addicted, and it’s got an uncanny way of making me feel so, so good about my personal romantic choices, none of which include falling in love in international chatrooms with language barriers and secret catfishings and hidden sugardaddies. Truly an escapist dream, friends. Coming up next: S3 of “Good Girls,” which premieres in February, along with finishing S3 of “The Crown” and hitting “Mrs. Maisel,” about which I have heard mixed reviews (and am, appropriately, thusly devastated!). Also, throwing it out there, I’m really not loving all the girl-on-girl stupid drama on “The Bachelor” this season, and my picks for top 3 are Madison, Hannah Ann, and Kelley. We’ll see if I’m proven right!

• Book-wise, I blew through Erin Morgenstern’s “The Starless Sea,” which is a beautiful, lyrical, poetry-adjacent second effort that still can’t rival “The Night Circus” in my pantheon. I also finally got around to devouring “Bad Blood,” John Carreyrou’s fantastic exposé of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos fraud. Next up: some professional development reading, starting with “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande. And just for fun, probably something by Ruth Reichl…it feels like everyone is reading her these days, and you all know I have terrible literary FOMO.

• Cooking! I made a fantastic Chicken Florentine casserole for which you can find the recipe on page 27 of this bizarre digital magazine. Sadly, I burned the pine nuts while broiling the Parmesan crust, but I like to think it adds depth of flavor (proving I can do the mental gymnastics to justify absolutely everything). I’m also living on soup lately - enjoying this low-cal tomato basil bisque, and my perennial fallback, Italian chicken quinoa stew.

That’s all - enjoy this ridiculous brain dump :)

That kind of weekend.

I had one of those weekends that was just about as close to perfect as possible, for myriad reasons. The rundown: 

Started Saturday off with a patio brunch at Angelica's in Redwood City - a new-to-me destination with excellent chilaquiles (my current of-the-moment obsession). Dave and I met Bita and Leia...

...and enjoyed bottomless mimosas and puppy paparazzi-ing for several hours. 

From there, we ran a few errands before heading for the East Bay to meet up with Ray for SPORTSBALL! This week's game of choice? The Red Sox-A's game, which was very exciting for Dave and Ray as Chris Sale was pitching. 

Little did we know at this point that we were about to witness Sean Manaea's no-hitter...

...although as the game progressed Dave (and the bastion of other Sox fans we were surrounded by) got more and more despondent. Aside: There were SO MANY Boston fans at the Coliseum, which is a total dump...Dave christened it "Fenway West" which made me laugh. A's fans were seriously outnumbered 4-1 in our section (right off the first baseline). It made the defeat feel that much more ignominious!

Post-game, we took Ray back into the city, picked up Dave's cousin Francesca, and ended up having a little mini-beer tasting party at our place - I had picked up a bunch of Russian River sours when Kelsie was in town, and we worked our way through three of them, along with our favorite Alpha Acid IPA. 

We hit the road bright and early Sunday morning to head down to Monterey - visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium had long been an item on Francesca's bucket list, and with stunning weather and whale migration season, it seemed like the logical time to go. It's funny just how gorgeous California is as soon as you get out of the Bay Area - not that I don't like it here, but getting to see the rolling hills, fields upon fields of produce, and then the Pacific Coast still blows my mind. 

Also blowing my mind? The aquarium! Situated in an old sardine factory in Cannery Row, it's home to thousands of different animals, and is stunningly designed and positioned right on the coast. Personal faves: 

THE PUFFINS. I freaked out inordinately when we got there, and we had the most enchanting time watching several of them go completely batty up by the glass for a solid ten-ish minutes. I've been obsessed with them since before we went to Iceland, and this did nothing to lessen that fixation. 

Also high on the list of "adorable ocean animals doing adorable things" were the sea otters. We saw them first of all the animals, and I was utterly enchanted by the cutie pies playing with their plastic toys, turning loops, and waving their little paws in the air. Later on, we spotted wild sea otters in the "Open Ocean" area, a protected part of Monterey Bay that is home to many of the species in the aquarium, and I about lost it completely. The little guy had wrapped himself in a kelp leaf like a blanket and was snoozing in the sun, floating around. My heart!! 

Eels - total Flotsam and Jetsam moment...and creepy octopuses. I really don't enjoy the way that octopuses move - they really kind of gross me out - but seeing them up close was really neat. 

And the jellyfish! We spent way too much time in the jellyfish exhibit and it still didn't feel like long enough. I loved watching the way they floated and marveling at the different kinds in the exhibits - beautifully designed and lit, and utterly mesmerizing. 

Also, penguins. Dave and I flipped for them - and I cracked up looking at the lengths he went to in order to get as close as possible to this little preener...

The other pinch-me moment of the day was seeing seal pups and their mothers sunning themselves on the beach under the aquarium, and peeking through an observation spyglass to see wild dolphins frolicking just off the coast. If you would have told me this time last year that I would be seeing actual wild dolphins in the effing Pacific Ocean, I would have marveled...and still do today. 

Post-Aquarium, Dave and Francesca made me snap a photo with my boy John Steinbeck - I may or may not have gone on a major nerd tangent as we drove through Salinas and headed to Cannery Row about how studying Steinbeck completely changed my mind on modern American literature, and got me super into migrant stories...

Once I had finished my nerd-freakout, we headed back into adorable downtown Monterey for the most necessary and delicious lunch at Alvarado Street Brewing - which Dave tentatively dubbed his second-favorite California brewery - and then hoofed it back to the Bay. I had a dinner planned with Mick, a dear old friend who I hadn't seen for close to five years, and we had a ball catching up over oysters and cocktails on the roof of the British Banker's Club before heading downstairs for bubbles. 

And of course, the cherry on top of a perfect weekend? Royal Baby 3, Prince Angelface McSquishyCheeks, made his debut this morning! Waking up to royal baby texts from my mom and Erin was the perfect way to combat Monday blues - as was spending the first two hours of my workday with the Lindo Wing livefeed up on my second monitor! 

Have the happiest week, campers! 

Cooking lately...

Since moving, I've taken advantage of our absurdly spacious kitchen (and two roommates who rarely cook!) to really go wild cooking. Dave will eat pretty much anything that's put in front of him (evidence below) and is generally highly complimentary - it's insanely gratifying.

- my mom's fabulous secret-recipe Chex Mix, which was a staple of all our childhood events and, this year, came out for both our Stanford tailgates and our Christmas party. The batches are enormous, and you can trash them up with whatever you like - I put chocolate-covered cashews in the holiday batch and it was a delight. 

- "Melt in Your Mouth" pumpkin cookies, half with this brown butter pumpkin spice frosting and half with this cinnamon cream cheese frosting - I've made these cookies every fall since Kaitlin and I first made them on a trip to Baltimore way the heck back in 2013...the recipe is incredibly easy and makes a huge batch. I made them this year for our "Worksgiving" potluck, and doubled the batch - thank God, because we went through ten dozen cookies at home and work in a matter of maybe a few days. 

- I've gotten super into marinating chicken breasts, as Safeway runs insane sales on their boneless skinless six-packs pretty much weekly. Two favorites: this rosemary balsamic marinated chicken and this honey lime cilantro chicken, which Dave grilled for me and we shredded up to use in tacos. SO GOOD and so easy! 

- Early in the fall, I woke up craving pancakes. We had a big thing of pancake mix taking up space in our pantry, so Laura, Dave and I made them (it was my first time ever actually making pancakes!). I trashed them up with bourbon butter maple syrup and they were awesome. Fast forward to last weekend, when I was (again) craving pancakes, but we were out of mix. I looked up a recipe from the internet, tried to make them, and oh my god they were SO TERRIBLE. For some reason the outsides burned before the insides even cooked, and they were near-raw in the middles. Dave, being a sweetheart and way too nice to me for his own good, still ate them and didn't make (too much) fun of me...his patience with my foibles is genuinely deeply appreciated. 

- October to me means all the pumpkin/squash/apple food possible, and I made this butternut squash mac and cheese with bacon, caramelized onions, and apples twice this fall. It is so decadent, but shockingly not that bad for you - the whole wheat pasta, coupled with replacing most of the cheese with butternut squash purée really cuts down on some of the calories. 

- This lemony thyme pasta salad was a staple at the cabin every summer, and I made it with grilled chicken sometime this fall - I kind of lost track of what month it was when our December still felt like September. It's light and tangy and fun and different - I love it. 

- Holiday baking! I went ham this year given we were having a huge Christmas party, I had a work potluck, and Dave wasn't going home/needed tradition brought around our neck of the woods, clearly. I did ginger snaps, peanut blossoms, white chocolate-dipped pretzels, and a TOTAL fail batch of Spritz cookies...for some reason, the cookies would just not detach from the press, and I got irrationally irritated about midway through and just threw the dough away. The ones I actually managed to make were super good, but I just think Spritzes are maybe not for me. 

- As I've mentioned a couple times here, we had a holiday party. It was awesome, and the best part, in my humble opinion, was the food. I wanted everything to be very easy to eat while socializing, so in addition to the usual suspects (cheese plate, charcuterie, chips and salsa, and of course the cookies!), I made these astoundingly good bourbon barbecue meatballs, along with super-easy but very fancy-looking cranberry brie bites and a Mexican spinach dip that was a huge hit (Dave, in particular, was a BIG fan...ooh, a tablecloth!). 

- To go with all the killer food at our party, I made a holiday sangria that I thought, based on the recipe, was going to be crazy-potent. So I labeled it accordingly, and everyone was very cautious - at first - as they drank it out of very festive glittery plastic champagne flutes (thanks, Target!) . Turns out the Kirkland sangria wine I bought was low-alcohol and nobody got drunk off the sangria at all...at least not until I started just randomly adding brandy and entire bottles of red wine to it midway through the evening. I am nothing if not a hostess who is relentlessly focused on her guests having a VERY good time. 

On the books coming up soon in Lizzie's Kitchen: alllllllllll the eggs, chicken breasts, salads and healthy veggie side dishes imaginable, and none of the fun desserts, pastas, or cheesy melty delicious things I'm craving. Booooo January, you're the worst! 

101 in 1001 #57: Make homemade pasta!

Shortly after I moved out here, Dave and I binge-watched "Master of None," which I had never seen and which he proclaimed one of the best modern shows he'd seen. I adored it unequivocally - not in the least for the second season's first few episodes, set in stunning Italy as lead character Dev (a lovably hapless-in-love Aziz Ansari) learns to make homemade pasta. 

The show, coupled with the fact that Dave is the child of an Italian family and had made pasta from practically infancy, made me urgently want to check this item off my list. When I came back from Thanksgiving to find a superabundance of potatoes in our kitchen, Dave's suggestion that they become gnocchi couldn't have seemed more timely. 

We had noble goals of spending Dave's Friday night on call cooking, which went rapidly off the rails when he had to go in to the hospital. I prepared to press pause on the whole enterprise, and cozied up with a glass of champagne and some sportsball on television to wait him out. Around 9:30, however, he texted me that he was unlikely to make it home at a decent hour...and that I was on my own to make gnocchi. 

I panicked, a little bit, as one does when confronted with the news that she has to tackle pasta solo for the first time ever. And then I went to town. 

I had a blast churning the potatoes through my new food mill, purchased at Williams-Sonoma based on Dave's instructions. Aside: I'm dangerously obsessed with Williams-Sonoma lately, especially as I've been cooking so much more (and enjoying it so much more). Every time I go in there I want to spend obscene gobs of money on all the gorgeous cookware and gadgety things. GROWN-UP PROBLEMS. 

The situation went downhill with alarming speed when, having followed Dave's instructions to a T, I was left with excessively sticky dough. In hindsight, the common-sense thing to do would have been to add flour...but I was convinced that Dave knew what he was doing and that I was being an idiot by thinking this was wrong. So I blithely continued to "make gnocchi..."

And you would think that I would have at some point realized how awful things were going to turn out when the dough was near-impossible to manipulate. The key is to roll it out into long snakes and cut the dough into little tiny pillows...Dave's words, not mine. My snakes wouldn't roll, they just kind of gummed up our counter, and when I cut them they sort of...puddled. I don't have a better verb for what they did, but trust me - it wasn't pretty. 

I tried to cook them anyway - following Dave's instructions to wait until they floated and then pull them out - and this was the end result: 

I don't even know what you would call these. Sad mashed-potato nuggets? I was simultaneously so frustrated and amused that I couldn't stop laughing - I don't think I've ever been so appalled by something I "created" in the kitchen before, and that's really saying something. 

I scrapped the dough/mush/goo, set our (amazing) homemade vodka sauce aside, cleaned up the war zone that was the kitchen, and boiled Dave some fettuccine noodles for dinner when he finally made it home around 11pm. Though he was on call again the following night, we tried again...this time, SO much more successfully! 

Largely because Dave took charge of the dough and taught me what it's actually supposed to look and feel like: 

How much better do those look? The recipe is legit just a whole bag of potatoes, put through a ricer or food mill...plus three egg yolks, a pinch of salt and pepper, and flour to the point where it forms ^that^ kind of dough. It couldn't be easier - but so much of it is dependent on texture and feel that I was just screwed from the start. 

Dave also appreciated the importance of letting me taste-test all the way along the way - and had made another giant double batch of vodka sauce while I rolled and cut fifty million gnocchi. He cooked a few of them up for me and threw them in sauce/topped them with basil while I cut...and I almost immediately started dreaming of moving to Italy and just making/eating pasta full-time, "Master of None" style. 

UM HI. How delicious do those look?! 

So there you have it - homemade gnocchi by Chef Dave with yours truly alongside for sous chef comic relief. We have an overabundance of them hanging out in our freezer now - can't wait to spend the next couple months experimenting with sauces, or to keep learning the homemade pasta world! 

For more 101 in 1001, head here...it's probably about time to start thinking about tackling macarons, hmm?! 

Schwegmanigans: Wine Country Edition!

YOU GUYS there are like fifty pictures in this post and I can't even begin to narrow it down further because this was SUCH a fantastically fun day. 

My family came out to visit me about six weeks after I moved this summer - ostensibly to see my new city, tour Stanford, etc. - but in reality, our end goal was simple: CHANDON. 

As I have told you all ad nauseum, my sister Emily is a ridiculously gifted designer whose work was selected by Domaine Chandon for their limited edition "American Summer" champagne bottles this summer. With wine country the same distance from my new home as cabin country is from the Twin Cities, I've made it my new favorite weekend destination - and Chandon has become the winery equivalent of Cheers for me. (This was my third trip, and I've subsequently made a couple more...oops!) 

We were so excited to bring Emily to see all her work in action - and the winery staff were almost equally excited when we told them she had done the design work. They comped us a bottle of their reserve label cuvée, one of my favorites, to enjoy outside! 

...and enjoy we did. In addition to the bottle that we received from Chandon, I also had a wine club shipment to pick up, and they waived the corkage fee to open it on site. I also receive free tastings or full glasses as a club member...so needless to say, we had QUITE a few bubbles in our systems by the time we rolled out a few hours later. 

We quickly made our way to the Adirondacks out back, and while we started out perfectly respectable, I PROMISE...

...things rapidly devolved as we cracked into bottle #2. Jonathan will clearly make an excellent and HIGHLY professional sommelier someday.

I absolutely adore these people beyond all measure and reason. We had way too much fun popping bottles, taking pictures, and telling, I shit you not, EVERYONE we came in contact with that Emily had done the design work. I think she was ready to absolutely murder Dad by the time we headed out. 

Fortunately, Dad had provided for us with a massive haul at Bouchon Bakery down the street...he does this great thing where he kind of blacks out at any given bakery counter, and all of a sudden we have like three times as many pastries as any family of five could justifiably need. He also went HAM on the macaron selection, and they were an ideal re-up after all the bubbles. 

As temperatures soared into the 90s, we headed for our second stop of the day, Alpha Omega's gorgeous outdoor tasting patio. Could this setting be any more idyllic? 

The girls did a custom flight of white wines - perfect for the heat - while Papa Bear and Jonathan went full-out with the Beckstoffer To Kalon tasting - three wine archive-quality cabernets plus a current offering. It was, in a word, sublime. 

A little bit wined-out, we turned to one of my favorite hidden gems in St. Helena, Goose & Gander. With a Michelin-recommended cocktail program in their charming basement bar, it was the perfect mid-afternoon stop to beat the heat and take a break from wine for a time. Bonus: Dad adores their hand-chipped, crystal-clear giant ice cubes... 

From there, it was back down the road to Farmstead at Long Meadow Ranch for a happy hour glass of wine and some snacks while we waited out the worst of rush hour traffic back into the city. We loved their grass-fed meatballs and mini ham sandwiches!

As usual, an unbelievably lovely day in wine country with my Schwegfam faves :)