Covers

Check out the NYT's selections for the year's best book covers. They're really stunning. I want this one, and I want it bad.

Goodbye 2012

There's only a few weeks left in 2012, so it's time for a year-in-review list! Not of albums, or movies, or books, or anything coherent like that. Just of....things.

• Best worth-it anxiety fest: planning the Russian River getaway.
• Worst anxiety fest: Little Dude's brush with death via kidney failure. But he's a-ok now, despite turning his nose up at his ridiculously expensive prescription food.
• Best surprise: Ian's timely tagalong on our trip to Austin.
• Best health-be-damned decision making: drinking and tanning my way through the summer. I may have gained 10 pounds and given my future self skin cancer, but I had a fantastic time.
• Best dance party: any of the late night ones in the kitchen that closed out our parties. DECEPTACON 4EVER.
• Scariest moment: in between the terrifying screams of my neighbor that someone was trying to kill her and when the police arrived. She was fine, thank god, but the police had to deal with a crazed me, berobed, bangs a-flying, gesturing with the giant tub of peanut butter pretzels that I was stress eating while trying to figure out where the murder noises were coming from.
• Scariest moment for my upstairs neighbors: when the police attempted to knock down their door after I told them that was the source of the screaming. Oops.
• Most stressful work project: launching Magazines.
• Most worth-it work project: launching Magazines.
• Best/weirdest explanation given: That is Ezzie. She has licked all the hair off her butt. She is otherwise healthy, but is an extremely neurotic cat. She takes Prozac and allergy medicine, and now her fur is starting to grow back. Be careful when petting her, as she may give you beard burn.
• Most disappointing realization: I will never ever be able to afford a house in San Francisco. Like, ever. Ok wait, maybe after the Big One hits and there is nothing but rubble. Someone will construct a rubble house and I will buy it with two strips of cat jerky and a book of matches.
• Best $25 spent: free-shipping membership to FTD.com. Between family illnesses and happy events that we couldn't attend, free shipping for flowers got us lots and lots of points, and got our loved ones lots of bouquets.
• Most unexpected nesting instinct: wanting to create Martha Stewart-like tablescapes. As neither a perfectionist nor someone with much of an aesthetic sense, I have no idea why I need to make everything look perfect when I entertain now, especially since everyone just gets drunk and it devolves (evolves?) into chaos.
• Best party: I've got to go with Kirby Cove. On the rager front, Mike's birthday was pretty great too.
• Bugs of the year: these spiders that create decoys, or these insects that spoon each other. Tossup.
• Best source of hometown pride: the Giants. And the Niners. Holy hell, what a year for SF sports! And the rest of the country thinks we're liberal weenies. Pah.
• Best brew: Rye IPA for Mike's birthday party. Was rounded and rich for a hoppy beer.
• Most disappointing brew: Flemish Red. Wasn't sour enough for me; will have to go all out next time.
• Best quickie trips: LA, time 1 and time 2. 
• Weirdest body thing: the hair just back from my hairline has gone coarse and kinky (and not in the "Hey baby I want to #*&% your $%@!" kind of way). Is that an aging thing? Why oh why?
• Favorite thing to do: have people over. Mi casa is su casa, errybody. See you in 2013!

Below is YouTube's year in review. Come on now, you know you want to get a little bit mushy.

This is a true thing.

Huffpo's other "Best Tweets from Women in 2012" are here. Do I wish that it wasn't a thing to have a women's roundup like that? Yes. Are most of the tweets included delightful? Also yes. Go for it.

Moving portraits

Our friends Haley and Simone have a documentary film company called Moving Portraits that does family interviews, videos for weddings and engagements, etc. Last week they threw a holiday party. Aside from having amazing made-as-you-watched dumplings, they also had a video photo booth that absolutely kicked ass. Below is the highlight reel from the booth, with some cameos by me and Mike.

We are inseparable

This Believer interview with Maurice Sendak is really something. Sendak was really something. 

There's this:

There’s a young artist in this town who’s remarkably gifted, and I’ve been tutoring him on the side. And he had this marvelous girlfriend, and I saw what was happening. And I said, “Look, don’t marry. Happily you can live together without any stench.” And they married and within eight minutes she was pregnant. And now they have a child, and all they do is complain about not having time and having to get a job. Fuck you! Why didn’t you listen to me? We don’t need that baby.

And this:

Publishing is such an outrageously stupid profession. Or has become so...Well, nobody knows what they’re doing. I wonder if that’s always been true. I think being old is very fortunate right now. I want to get out of this as soon as possible. It’s terrible. And the great days in the 1950s and after the war, when publishing children’s books was youthful and fun… it really was. It’s not just looking back and pretending that it was good. It was good. And now it’s just stupid...Because of Rupert Murdoch. His name should be what everything is called now.

And this, on his brother, which is just woah:

He was my savior. He was gentle and wonderful. We wrote stories and I illustrated them on shirt cardboard. And when my relatives—these goofballs—came, he would read the stories and I would hold up the pictures. He wrote a wonderful story called “We Are Inseparable.” About a brother who falls in love with his sister, which my brother did—Freud didn’t know from Brooklyn, he never flew over Brooklyn—and they’re going to get married. My parents didn’t think anything of it. 

I remember that story, and I hated drawing the scene where they had to kiss, because I couldn’t fit their faces together. And then at the end—because in the back of his mind he knew something was wrong—the boy is in an accident, with bandages like a mummy, and lying in a hospital bed, and the parents are blocking the bed because she’s a banshee and is going to come, and she rushes in and pushes them aside and jumps on him, and they both hurl themselves out of the forty-second-floor window of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital screaming, “We are inseparable.” Ha! I had such a good time drawing the bodies falling and smashing. Total wreckage. It was his masterpiece. 

Luck of the draw

A friend from high school, with whom I had endless political debates (he was conservative, I was liberal, he gave me a copy of the Communist Manifesto with some cute pictures of us taped inside for graduation) has made the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Should I feel like a failure yet? Well I don't, because I won a raffle today. So THERE.

Update: Mike's family friend Martha is on there too! Her job is fascinating - she extracts scholars from countries where the regimes are hostile to their scholarship - but I'm wondering exactly how many of these lists there are.

Also, a chick who is in our circle of friends in Austin has an house tour on Apartment Therapy. Warning, it will make you jealous.

Your happy for today

Here are gorgeous macro photos of snowflakes that you should look at until your eyes cross. SNOWFLAKES! We watched the Dark Knight Rises the other night, and I got pangingly homesick as the digitally-altered New York skyline exploded in flames over and over again. We're not going back east this year for Christmas, and since it's not likely to snow in Houston, I'll just have to stare at these photos and stand under the air conditioning vent at work (yes, the AC is still on) to recreate that wintry chill.

7

This past weekend Mike and I celebrated 7 years together. When I say celebrated, I mean that we just did what we like to do, but more of it. We slept in late. We walked the hills in our neighborhood and enjoyed the views. We saw friends. On Sunday we took a wilderness survival skills class, because who does not get romantic while learning to make fire from sticks and building a debris hut.

And we talked about how when we first started dating we were 22 and 27, living in a falling down house on Lyon Street, battling the mushrooms growing out of the walls and sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It was a really odd and bright time, one that involved late nights and long brunches and early mornings going to shitty jobs. I was learning to cook. Mike was finishing his thesis. We sat on the stoop most nights with our roommate and talked to the neighbors. I borrowed a dress for our first date out - months after we were actually together - and he wore a bolo tie. Then I moved east, and moved back, and we lost grandmas, and changed apartments, and had some good fights, and spent as much time together as humanly possible. And all we can say is more more more.

Bebbes! 

An everlasting meal

Have you read Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal? Have I recommended it to you? If not, it was an oversight on my part. You really should. In some ways it's overwritten, like a really lovely painfully crafted piece of furniture is overdone, but in the same way it's perfect. It's lovely, and delicious, and inspiring.

And now, of course, this tiny lady (I'm assessing everyone by their size right now, nasty habit I know) has an interview on The Kitchn. It's as good as you'd hope. You know when you just want to be friends with someone rill rill bad? But then you think they might actually drive you nuts in person? But they're perfect anyway, like that aforementioned piece of furniture that makes the rest of the room look bad by comparison? Bingo.

3. What's the most memorable meal you've ever cooked in this kitchen? When my oldest friend came to New York for the first time with her Italian boyfriend I threw a big dinner party for 28 people, all seated at a long table. We had to sit two to a chair, some of us, and a lot of people had to eat with chopsticks, others got spoons. The meal was cold lamb leg with salsa verde and chicken liver pate on toasts, and then roast chickens and boiled potatoes and braised artichokes and lots of aioli, then cutting boards covered in cheeses and tons of plums and peaches. I loved that meal. 

4. The biggest challenge in your kitchen: Oh, I don't know. I think it all works fine. 

8. How would you describe your cooking style? Grammatical. 

10. What are you cooking this week? I'm eating the most wonderful boiled broccoli with chilies I pickled a couple of weeks ago right now. And then tomorrow or later I'm going to roast tiny little eggplants with a lot of herbs and an ungodly amount of olive oil, then store them in that and red wine vinegar. And pretty speckled romano beans. They might be called dragons' tongue beans, actually.

False Rival

Mike's band, Mist Giant, has a new album out. It's called False Rival, and you can download it here. It's pay-what-you-like, which could mean zero dollars or it could mean you give them some bucks. They wrote, recorded, and largely mixed and mastered the album on their own, because they are awesome. Check it out, tell your friends, and enjoy it - although I am obviously biased, it's a really lovely and well-made piece of music.

A very public Hangout

Comfort zones are, you know, comfortable. They feel good. But - just like when you're a few days into a cold and your bed and blankets have turned into a nasty little nest of tissues and laziness - too much comfort gets uncomfortable. Your sweatpants get ratty, your cat becomes your best friend, your couch conforms to the shape of your butt. Then it's time to do something.

A few months ago I asked to make a few changes at work. One was to shake up the accounts I manage; I now handle some of the big publishers. Another was to ask a woman who coordinates and conducts celebrity and author interviews (a job which gives me pangs of jealousy) if I could help her at all. She was up for it, and so last Friday I moderated a Hangout on Air on Google+ - essentially a live videoconference - with Lee Child. Child is the author of a wildly popular thriller series about a violent yet heroic man named Jack Reacher who will soon be played by Tom Cruise in a major action movie. In preparation for the event I read a few of the Reacher books. And then another. And another. They were totally fun and satisfying in a way that literary fiction, as much as I love it, is just not.

I did not sleep well the night before the event. Even just a whiff of something that may involve failure makes me clammy. POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE = FAILURE IS INEVITABLE. On the day of the Hangout I was too busy to worry much, though I did have a moment of extreme panic when I realized I had forgotten to apply deodorant. Thank god for cardigans and small forearm gestures.

First Child did an internal Google event, then I escorted him to lunch. He is very tall, very nice, and very British. He wore tweed and took cigarette breaks. I once again realized how very young and sloppy we Googlers look. As Child said during the Googlers-only event, "It's rare that I'm the dumbest and best dressed person in the room."

For the Hangout, a few ardent fans (who call themselves Reacher Creatures) had been selected to ask Child questions live in the Hangout. They had been on the line with each other for over an hour by the time Child and I sat down, and acted like they were old friends. They were also beyond thrilled to talk to the man himself.

Here's the video, which I plan never to watch. I have no ability to judge how it went, but I felt really good about it. It was liberating, all the more so for having been nerve-inducing ahead of time. If you feel like obsessively monitoring the comments WHICH I SURE DO (and spotting which ones are from my family members), you can do so on Google+ here and YouTube here.

Twas the day 'fore Thanksgiving...

I don't know about you, but I'm getting older, and I don't understand how it's happening so quickly. As a result, there are things that I'm learning I need to do to mark the passage of time. Time is like a cranky cat - you need to squeeze it awkwardly to your chest once in a while, even if it's going to scratch you and slink away anyway.

I'm an extrovert, an interacter, and that is as true for time as it is for people. I want to celebrate holidays, follow sports seasons, and participate in seasonal rituals so that I can orient myself, stay right side up in a place without traditional seasons. So I throw barbecues, go pumpkin picking, and celebrate friends' birthdays (a la my last post) to have markers, big red X's in my mental calendar.

Thanksgiving is a mastodon of memory (trademarking that). Every year I make my grandma's stuffing, the only time that I cook meat in our vegetarian house, and the only time I work myself up to sentimental tears while cooking. It's a bacon-studded bread bomb, and I dream about it starting in July. I can flip through my photos of Thanksgiving over the last seven years and see the same core group of friends together, albeit in different kitchens, with different outfits and different hairstyles, and sometimes different partners. It's comforting, especially when actual family is far away.

Bethstravaganza

On Saturday, Beth, Teppi and I flew down to LA for the day to celebrate dear sweet Beth's birthday. We called it Bethstravaganza, and it involved us waking up in the pre-dawn dark and getting ourselves to SFO hours before I would be normally awake on a weekend. There is nothing like getting up early on a Saturday to make a day feel special, like there's a secret that requires creeping out of bed and sneaking out of the house to uncover.

Normally I include everyone and their mother (sometimes literally) when I plan something, but the complexity of the logistics required and the leap of faith entailed in taking a day trip that involves two flights meant that this ladies' day for ladies was limited. In persons, but not in scope, because we had a Full Day. I brought along a homemade paper flower headband for Beth to wear, and wear it she did - to many compliments from strangers.

When we arrived in LA, we picked up our rental car (a Mustang convertible!) and headed to the Santa Monica farmer's market. It was, by LA standards, a terrible day - mid 60s and occasionally drizzly. By San Francisco standards,  however, it was perfectly lovely, and the rain didn't slow us down a bit. We didn't get to put the top down on the convertible as much as I would have liked (I had imagined a photoshoot of the birthday girl in the car, with the sunny beach as a backdrop), but it was still super fun to drive. And so sleek!

At the farmer's market we picked up a few gorgeous dragonfruits and a protea for Beth, a nod to her wedding bouquet. We strolled Santa Monica, popping into shops, occasionally cooing over tiny trendy baby clothes. Ladies' day for ladies!

ATX

We had a crazy and wonderful and busy and exciting and INDULGENT trip to Austin. I had looked forward to it for weeks - I was a bit burnt out, as evidenced by some grouchy posts on here - and I wondered if I was going to turn into a stressy mess instead of enjoying my vacation. But no, my friends - we wrung out maximum enjoyment.

The excitement started two days before we left, when my brother wrote to me from the Hong Kong airport to say that his flight home from Perth to New York had been cancelled because of Hurricane (er, Superstorm?) Sandy, and Cathay Pacific could really only send him to San Francisco. He offered up his services as a catsitter while Mike and I were in Austin with my parents, which was sweet but misguided. Because thanks to a Gchat that lasted most of a day and on into the evening, we not only got him onto our flight to Austin two days later (this is why I hoard my miles), but we realized we could surprise the hell out of our parents AND got him a free VIP pass to the music festival going on while we were there. Like buttah.

So Ian landed in San Francisco the next day without a single shred of knowledge about what timezone his body was in, the day after that we got on the plane to Austin, and a few hours after THAT we had a huge tub of queso and a giant stack of tortillas with us when we showed up at the rental house to surprise our parents with Ian's presence. My mom told us she had guessed he was with us when he suspiciously hadn't called her back after "dropping us at the airport", but my dad sat up in bed and said, "What the hell are you doing here?", which was immensely satisfying.

The first chips and queso are always the best.

We settled into our little rental for the week and ate our way through Austin. Our first two days were picture perfect perfection. We went to Trudy's for brunch that first Friday, and introduced my parents to frozen margaritas (seriously), queso, and mexican martinis. We trolled the craft beer section at Central Market, dipped and sunned at Barton Springs, and had a luxurious early dinner at Uchiko. Divine. They even brought us a free dessert because I had tipped off the restaurant that this was my parents' anniversary dinner (though a few months late). After two of the best desserts I've ever had (the sweet corn sorbet and the fried milk) my parents headed home to crash, and Ian and I caught up with Mike at Fun Fun Fun Fest.

Steak cooking on a hot rock at Uchiko

Butternut

I'm back from ten days in Texas, and am therefore experiencing the life shock that comes at the end of any vacation. It turns out I have to wake up early to go to work and can't have my first margarita of the day at 11 a.m. When we left San Francisco it was Halloween and Indian summer hot, and now it's The Holidays and chilly and dark at 5:30.

On the plus side, we're now in the high holy days of butternut squash season. Hallelujah and amen. Sorry for not having pictures on the dishes below, but that's what happens when stuff is super tasty but not very pretty, or when I get drunk while cooking.

Last night for dinner I made some grains - quinoa and teff - then prepared a squash "sauce" to dress therm. First I peeled, de-seeded, diced and roasted a small butternut shipped to me from my parents' garden. It went into a 400 degree oven with some oil and salt, and alongside it I tucked in an entire head of garlic. Post-roasting, I squeezed the garlic out of its casings and threw it in the food processor with some of the boil water from the grains, basil, olive oil and salt. Handful by handful I added the squash and spoonfuls of the grain water until it was a scoopable consistency - not runny but still soft. I piled the sauce on the grains and topped it all with toasted pine nuts. If I had had any feta or parmesan I would have sprinkled on some of that, and a bit of parsley as well. If you have any herb oil (I'm on a kick) you could drizzle that on too.

My annual contribution to Friendsgiving is twice baked butternut squash, a dish that I feel very sure I made up on my own, which I simultaneously acknowledge is not super likely. I halve a large squash lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, and roast the heck out of it. I carefully scoop the flesh into a bowl, making sure to keep the squash skin intact. Into the bowl goes sauteed kale, garlic and onions, as well as other vegetables I think would be tasty (leeks, shaved carrots, chard). I mix in a cup of Greek yogurt and a few handfuls of shaved cheddar as well - if this is going to be my token healthy item on the table, I use reduced fat cheese and nonfat yogurt. I scoop the mixture back into the empty squash halves, top with some more cheese, and throw it back in the oven, ether to reheat (if it was made ahead of time) or to broil the cheese to crispy goodness.

For dessert, I have, in a pinch (read: in Berlin where canned pumpkin apparently doesn't exist, only a nasty pickled variety that you should stop thinking about immediately) made Smitten Kitchen's pumpkin bread pudding with roasted butternut squash that we pureed, spiced and sweetened. It turned out beautifully.