my 2¢

well, my beloved (whom i might sometimes refer to as yessie) decided she wanted to try her hand at a blog last week, so she set up a joint blog, which i think is lovely. perhaps it is part of our nesting process :) it seems only appropriate that those activities find their way to the lands of the internets.

many things have been happening in our little kitchen this week. although we weren't hosting thanksgiving dinner, we did make 3 vegan dishes and a bevy of bread to take with us to the lovely home where we'd been invited to share thanksgiving supper.

there was an abundance of leftover veggies from our CSA pickup last week and thanksgiving is the one day a year the food pantry that we share veggies with is closed. So we loaded our counters (and the counters of friends) with many extra veggies.

for thanksgiving, i cooked beets with clementine slices, chinese five spice, and additional cloves and cinnamon that were FABulous, as well as roasted turnips & sweet potatoes, and pomegranate glazed greens with cranberries and pine nuts. yessie baked FOUR kinds of bread (mostly rolls, but some loaves)--wheat, garlic challah, garlic vegan, and cranberry walnut. The kitchen was bustling all day, and it was wonderful.

on saturday we took on a task of monolithic proportions and decided to repaint our kitchen. last week our kitchen was a dirty white and the soffit was crayola orange. we've been talking about repainting the soffit for a while because the orange didn't really pop the way we wanted it too. we also decided to repaint the white walls because there were gaping holes present where i'd removed hardware that had been left by the former tenant.

we went to the hardware store and bought a few test samples to try--they looked terrible. we decided to steer away from orange completely and went back to the store and picked out a deep purple that appeared to be somewhere between the color of a raisin and a eggplant. for the other walls we chose the palest version of this color (basically a bright white). i like the white because it makes the kitchen feel cleaner. so far our soffit looks like barney the dinosaur--it still needs a few layers to fully cover crayola orange, so we haven't given up on it yet. i was hoping it would have more of a brown undertone to it, but apparently that paint color doesn't exist. it is fascinating to me how paint almost never looks the way you expect it to look. que sera...

so, why limit the use of one's little kitchen to the task of painting? we invited 4 people over and made gnocchi saturday night! butternut squash and roasted garlic gnocchi as well as a beet and potato gnochhi. they were beautiful, but not as soft and billowy as i'd hoped. does anyone have good gnocchi tricks, tips, or recipes? we mixed the gnocchi with peas, pecans, goat cheese, salt, pepper, and olive oil--it was very filling, and pretty darn tasty.

today the kitchen has a sinkful of dishes waiting to be washed and a soffit with a second coat of paint. soon the dishes will be clean, the soffit will be purple, and our little kitchen will begin to settle into itself again. as always, it continues to overflow with love.