Santa Monica.

My, I am a bit behind here.  I was in LA last week and did not have 5 minutes of my own bad time to post.  You might have seen a number of images of the Viceroy - but perhaps not the restroom.  Just nice.  Liking the detail of the inset of vertically set tile in contrast to the horizontal layout in the rest of the room.  The green and white carries over from the rest of the lobby/bar area.  More pics and stories tomorrow.

January.

This is what is covering the ground outside my door. No white fluff. Not even soggy straw colored grass. We have seen the sun once in the last two weeks. The fleece lined rain boots are really getting a workout this month. There is a great book on sale right now at Anthropologie filled with photographs of snowmen and snowpeople in all of their melty, dirty, chunky glory. Mmmm. Now I feel better.

Hours in the day running out.

I am currently taking a blogging class to force me to focus my efforts. It is way late and I have to get up for the day in 6 hours. Normally this would be fine, but I am still getting over this Mr. Burns type cough that is killing me. The class seems great so far, but with everything else going on, I have a suspicion that this is going to override my 11pm baking sessions.

Dough...again.

This was a long weekend, as G and I were both sick with this nippy cough. What better way to wrap it up...but by making cookies. A few weeks back I hurt myself with these cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma. Yes, I did spend $19 on cookie cutters. So very wrong. I have a love for words. And a love of cookies, for that matter. There are three shapes, star, heart and scalloped rectangle, that allow for a custom phrase to be stamped into the surface of the dough. Justified them by committing to use them for G's school birthday party treats. Cheaper than ordering the mini cupcakes from Sweet Mandy B's. I will still miss them.

Tricks that I had heard about but never utilized until tonight:

• Roll cookie dough out onto parchment paper - really minimized flour use
• Use silicone rolling pin - once again, less flour, more "feel" for the dough

G used his mini silicone rolling pin and one of my rolling mats to make "tacos" after he had stamped out a reasonable amount of the cut out cookies. Visible to the left of the baked heart cookies. I have to go finish the uncolored dough batch. The paste food coloring is a bit much. It looks identical to the Play Doh from earlier in the week.

Coveted objects.

As I work on cultivating my Buddhist self, I know how wrong it is to love objects. But as a designer and object maker, it is a serious challenge. I am trying to simplify my life. Part of that entails reducing the number of objects that I own. Items that serve a true function, capture a moment in time, assist me in creating new objects or save time are keepers. I want everything that I own to be things that I really love and use. For years and years I had an odd thing going. Some of the wonderful objects that I owned were put away in cabinets or boxes to be saved. Used at some later point in life. One random day, I realized that I could be smashed to bits while walking across the street. How pointless this little system became. Time to bust out the goodies. I want to have one long shelf mounted on a blank wall. Each asymmetrical grouping or sequence of objects can tell a story. G has a red shelf in his room that features a changing array of his beloved toys or serves as a display of his latest projects. Maybe he can be the teacher on this one. There's Buddha right back at me.

It works both ways.

After a serious dough session, about 70% of the dough is a dark purple brown. I don't mind. I have given the warning as to the end result, and whether it is red or purple brown, it does belong to him. The smell always takes you back to the days of old. Or young. I had a great score at a garage sale years ago, so the dough tools..and molds..and cutters..and the press take over two small bins. Who am I to comment about the quantity of tools for making things?

Later that night I had to get some of my own. Dough that is. Although it is wrong to be looking for recipes and concocting pizza dough at 8pm at night, it does happen. It usually takes me longer to go through the process, as I like to ruminate about the options. Not this time.

I have been losing valuable time over at Smitten Kitchen. This is what made me very tired the next morning, but damn, it was good. Pizza Bianca. Essentially pizza dough with olive oil, fresh rosemary and coarse salt. The rosemary becomes this perfectly crisp little bit which is a bit tempered by the high heat baking. I gave a piece to G (The next day, not at 11pm. I do not throw that much caution to the wind.) and waited for him to balk at the rosemary. He proceeded to pick off all the pieces of rosemary and pop them in his mouth one by one until there was a naked piece of dough on the plate. That, people, is a moment that makes a mother proud. Right alongside his ability to identify basil at the farmer's market.

Choose a color, any color.

Oaktag can really be a good thing. Every day G comes home from school with a clear plastic folder with papers inside. Sometimes announcements from school, sometimes drawings, sometimes bits of oaktag that are better than anything you ever did in art school. These slices of paper were placed next to rocks, and the corresponding color was written on the sheet. I want him to make these labels for everything in the entire house.

Guess the color.

We are really missing our Saturday visits to the Farmer's Market. Now that it is January, the winter market only happens once this month. Thank God that Trader Joe's is able to provide some produce amusement for us. One mesh bag filled with a tri color mix of potatoes for two dollars. Before the soup is made, it is time for the guessing game. Time to guess the color inside of the potato! G had the yellow and the red. I think he was a little freaked out by the purple.

Cranberry scones.

So what does this say about me as a parent? Last night, when it was about 7 degrees out, I needed to make a late evening run to the grocery to buy rosemary. G had no interest in going out, as he was busily working on his latest Lego set up. I actually bribed my child to go to the store by telling him I would make him cranberry lemon scones in the morning. Showed him a picture as evidence. He went to get his coat. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Will he grow up to appreciate good food, or will he start to believe that anything is worth doing for a buttery treat?