Kate Spade Dorothy Coat

Wandering up and down El Paseo in Palm Springs earlier this month, I totally lusted after this hot pink Kate Spade Dorothy coat. It's giant bow detail, even my husband was a little surprised that I didn't even try it on. 

Perking Up Your Home Permanently

So here's a secret that I'm not really ashamed of - I have a lot of silk flowers in my house. It's not that I don't love real flowers - oh, I do. It's that I have two cats who think that anything and everything is fair game to be eaten. Pool noodles, wicker baskets, spiral bound books, any meal of mine and yes that includes plants. 

All types of plants. So no, I can't have real flowers in my house because 1, they would be eaten in less than 4 hours and 2, lots of plants are toxic  to cats and I can't keep straight which ones. So silk it is! 

Silk plants are a little bit more expensive at the onset, but in the long run, they are a major cost saver and mood booster.  You're not replacing flowers every week, there are not little bugs that come in on them, and the water never starts to stink when you forget to change them out. 

These is the silk bouquet I keep beside my kitchen.

I get my silk flowers at Chintz & Co, because they are some of the most beautiful and highest quality I have ever found. We're not talking about the ones you find at Michaels with spare threads flying around. I have lots of guests who can't tell the difference between my silks and the real mccoys. 

The other reason I love silk flowers is that they are in bloom all year round. There's no seasons. If you have a favourite flower, you can enjoy it all year long.  And it's not just flowers I buy - check out this little desert display I put together. Infact - call me CRAZY - I would even buy a few of these faux blooms, pop them in a glass vase and call it a terrarium.

What's also nice about silks is if/when you get tired of your arrangement, you can either mix it up by buying one or two new types / colours of blooms or if you have a second silk arrangement, just mix up some of the flowers. 

So quit bashing silk flowers! And for the final act, enjoy this photo of a calla lily that one of my cats ate...

Obsessing over these tin mugs...

Don't lie to me - you're obsessing over these tin mugs and they're jaunty spring colours too. Find them at The Social Page, they're are only $6 EACH. 

Yam & Ginger Soup

Picture this: your in-laws came for a visit over the noon hour but they ate before they came. You did not. They left at 2, you're starving, it's -30 out so you're not driving anywhere and you have skeletal food in the fridge. My suggestion is to try this. 

As someone who would not call flatter myself with the title of "cook", lately I've been a bit more adventurous. Today I tried to hack together this recipe for Yam & Ginger Soup - my first error was that the original recipe is actually for Sweet Potato & Ginger Soup but I grabbed a yam instead of a sweet potato and that's how we arrived my "updated" version of the recipe.

The original, which I got from Yoga Journal, looked easy enough. That's always how it starts though.

So after I peeled my yam, rolled my eyes at my own genius, I quickly re-scanned the recipe. What I thought I read was to mince the garlic and ginger, sauté it and then add the cubes of yam. Obviously that it not what it says up there, but I didn't notice that until after I sautéed the garlic and ginger for 5 minutes. Well, you can only do what you can do! 

So I popped my cubed yams into the pan to sauté them for 5 minutes and wouldn't you know it, I had sautéed my ginger to a pleasant crisp. At a point like this, I'd often consider giving up but the truth of the matter is the ginger smelled so flipping good that I just kept going. 

That is steam fogging up my camera. 

But, at this point, I abandoned the recipe. I mixed four cups of hot water with 2 spoons of bouillon, and poured it in the pan to boil for 15 minutes. 

15 minutes later, these babies were ready for a mash in'! At first I grabbed my hand blender but after scalding myself basically immediately, I grabbed my old fashioned masher and it was perfect. This soup ended up being 100% exactly right for a day where it's -30 degrees (not including wind chill). 

Normally, on a food blog, this is where people would show you the finished product of their incredible recipe, taken with some super camera that they bought for $1800. I did not - for two reasons. One, if I had a super camera, it would be covered in butter all the time and two, I ATE THE SOUP. I was hungry. 

Well, aren't I fickle?

A few years ago, I moved over to Tumblr to test it out and see how I liked it as a blogger. I did like it - sharing images has never been so easy, for real. But at the same time, I have undeniable inclinations to write and for that, Tumblr wasn't so hot. There's something kind of irking about having to format the code to centre your images.

So now I'm coming home - back to Blogger.