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I’ve done a lot of shopping at Ann Taylor Loft this year – sweaters, jewelry, shoes, dresses – but I’m fairly sure that this is it for the year. Appropriately, it’s a party dress that would be great for ringing in 2010 except for the facts that a) it’s not arriving until January 12th and b) I’m spending NYE on the couch.

In fact, I am not entirely sure when the next occasion calling for formalwear will even be, but let’s disregard those little details:

This is it for 2009, people. No more shopping until 2010.

I can always wear it to the opera in April, I suppose.

It’s 5:59pm on New Year’s Eve, I’m spending the night the way I usually do – at home with the cat – and since I did this last year (I think) I’ll do it again.

2009 was a fucking weird year.

Work: In October of 2008 my boss was laid off, leaving me as the one and only librarian at my company. In January, as the economy continued to crash, the entire company moved to a four day week. In May, shortly after I bought tickets for my very first vacation, they announced that we all had to take at least a month’s sabbatical. In June, my second boss was fired. A week later, I had a slightly critical evaluation from the CEO that had me on tenterhooks for much of the summer. I left the Special Libraries Association and started looking at jobs that weren’t necessarily ‘library’ jobs.

In September, we went back to five days a week, and this month I got a glowing evaluation and a raise. So, um. Yay?

Fandom/Writing: In January, I reconnected with a really good friend and we started RPing for a few hours every week. Then in March, we saw Watchmen and started RPing for several hours every single day, and I met a lot of awesome people in a new fandom. Annie and I have probably written thousands of pages, and started a spy novel. Creatively, I don’t think I’ve ever produced this much – if I have, it hasn’t been for years and years. I have written recipes for fictional characters.

Personal: I dated a few boys and flirted with one girl (so far). I went to California and met awesome people, and started to think about the possibility of relocating. I bought a lot of jewelry and clothes, showed my sister around New York in July and saw Jude Law as Hamlet in November. I got contact lenses and new glasses. I turned 29. I baked a crapload of shit, and started a baking blog.

Things I Know Will Happen in 2010: Annie and I will get The Novel written. I will see Renee Fleming in Rossini’s Armida. I’ll go to the Galapagos Islands in July. The world will continue to revolve around my cat.

Beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess.

Hanna Rosin’s got an interesting article in Slate’s XX about the rise of the kitchen bitch, and frankly, after reading it I’m not sure that I’d want to marry a man who likes cooking as much as I do. And it’s entirely because of what Rosin describes: I have a feeling I’d end up with a guy picking (gently or no) at my techniques, ingredients, and recipes, and it would drive me up a fucking wall.

It seems like when guys march into the kitchen, a lot of them make it a competitive arena. The ingredients have to be fresher, the techniques have to be fancier, and the tools have to be the most badass tools available for the job (I blame Alton Brown for the last. Have you seen his immersion blender?) And for myself, I tend to cook the way my mom does. I don’t have problems with canned vegetables. I do tend to bake from scratch, because I like to bake, but my tuna noodle casserole is most certainly not made with sushi grade ahi and cremini mushrooms. It’s made with Chicken of the Sea and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. I cannot evenly chop an onion to save my life. I use pre-chopped garlic from a jar. I own a Rachael Ray cookbook.

But I still love to cook, and it’d piss the hell out of me if someone was standing over my shoulder critiquing my technique; if I wanted that, I could go to culinary school.

I’m not saying all, or even most guys are like that, and maybe I’m getting all New York Times Styles here and building a trend from a couple of random data points. I don’t really think so, though. Food Network has gotten increasingly testosteronized over the past few years – the only pure cooking show left in primetime is Good Eats, and while I dearly love me some Alton, we’ve already mentioned his propensity for superpowered kitchen equipment. Other than that, it’s approximately 10 million competition shows and a few reality shows. The faces of baking is Ace of Cakes‘ Duff, mentioned by Rosin, and the dude from Cake Boss. I don’t watch Cake Boss, but he’s a burly Italian guy from Hoboken.

The fact is that increasingly, there are less and less female voices in the culinary press and pop culture, and as a woman who likes to cook, I worry about that. Do I want to be tethered to the stove? Not really. Do I want cooking to be yet another arena where I get mansplained to? No. I’ve got plenty of those as is.

Dear New Yorkers and New Jerseians traversing the streets of Manhattan,

It’s pouring down rain today. As it is late fall/early winter in New York City, this isn’t exactly a rare occasion. It rains in New York for three-quarters of the year, and the months of November and December tend to be more water-logged than most. One would think that would mean we’d all be experts at traversing the streets in downpours by now. One would be wrong, clearly, so here are some tips and tricks for not pissing the soaked girl in the purple wool coat off to the homicidal point.

1. A fallen umbrella is not a car accident. It does not require slowing down, it does not require rubber-necking, and it definitely doesn’t require both of those things at 8:40 am when two trains have just emptied out at the World Trade Center site. Move. Walk. Please.
2. Golf umbrellas are great for when you’re sheltering several people in an open air space like, say, a golf course. Golf umbrellas are horrible for when you’re using it solo in an extremely densely populated area. Get a smaller umbrella for the commute, all of you. The head you keep ramming into thanks you.
3. The usage of an umbrella of any size increases your space requirements. Keep this in mind, and other pedestrians’ hair won’t get caught on your umbrella, thus making you both late for work.

This public service announcement is brought to you by the fact that I’ve been at work for two and a half hours, and my feet are still wet.

Lindsay at Jezebel posted a video yesterday of one of the Gap’s holiday ads in a post entitled: New Gap Commercial With Little Girls Is, Yeah, A Little Gross. I’m…not seeing it, honestly.  Neither are most of the commenters.

The sticking point is apparently at :08, where one of the girls does a hip-pop. Now, I can’t dance. I really can’t dance. I can’t dance so much that I took weight training in college instead of a class in modern dance (which was considerably closer to my dorm, I might add), and even I know that hip popping is pretty much a standard in jazz and modern dance, not to mention modern cheerleading. The move itself isn’t sexual. It’s certainly not inherently sexual when performed by little girls in sweaters, tights, and boots.

But about 500 commenters agree with me there, and it’s not the thing that’s bugging me now. What’s bugging me are the comments like this one:

“it’s sick, quite frankly, that little girls would care so much about their clothing– how materialistic.”

This isn’t the only comment of this kind on the post – there are several in the vein of “they’re too young to care about their shoes!” – but this was definitely the most to the point.

Part of my reaction to it is increduality – I was pretty tomboyish after I got over my initial frilly dress phase around age seven, and I spent elementary school dying for a pair of Guess jeans. I got to go to the Gap for my back-to-school clothes for the first time when I was 12 and was so thrilled. I wanted my tennis shoes and sturdy sandals that I ran around to be cute.

And this is from someone who didn’t pay attention to fashion and what really looked nice until sometime in college, or possibly grad school.

There’s nothing wrong with being interested in clothes at the age of 8. There’s also nothing wrong with not being interested in them at that age (or any other). Kids are just as individual as adults, people. Really.

Before I get too deeply into Rachael Ray and my issues with, plus ridiculously easy tomato soup, I feel like I should point out one thing: I have a baking blog now. It’s called Live Every Week Like It’s Cake Week. That is all, carry on.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m really not all that fond of Rachael Ray – I can’t watch her on tv, she just grates, endlessly – but to give her her due, I did rely heavily upon her approximately five years ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school, 1500 miles away from my mother’s cooking, broke as hell (heh, some things don’t change), and in need of dinner seven days a week.

I made a lot of Rachael Ray recipes those first two to three years, and while she’s slowly been phased out in favor of Jamie Oliver, Tyler Florence, Dave Lieberman, and Ina Garten, plus lots of food blogs and the ever popular Recipes Sent By My Mother…there are still one or two 30 Minute Meals I make.

And yes, they’re all soups. You know me so well.

There are two great things about this soup. First, it’s adaptable. Out of shallots? Yes, an onion works fine. No vegetable broth? I’ve made it with chicken and just plain water with no adverse effects. Craving bacon? Fry up a few slices and saute the onions/shallots and garlic in the fat. Can’t stand spinach? No one says you have to put it in.

The second great thing about this soup is that it takes fifteen minutes to make, and the most complicated part is chopping the shallots. Seriously, that’s it. It’s a great option when you’re exhausted and broke (otherwise known as: me.)

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Last night, when I was role-playing with Annie, Adrian Veidt served up a plate of lemon-lavender shortbread to the the character I was playing (of course Adrian bakes! What are you saying!), and it sounded so good that I immediately wanted some.  Coincidentally, shortbread is also the only cookie I had the ingredients for.

It ended up working out quite well, although we had to make some modifications when the dough wouldn’t come together. This might not have been necessary if my butter had truly been at room temperature. Recipe is based off of Jamie Oliver’s from Cook With Jamie, and can be modified with the flavorings you want – I had no lemon or lavender, so I went with orange flavor, and it was pretty good.

This is a thick dough, about the consistency of pie dough, so you won’t be able to pour it into the pan. Technically you’re supposed to roll it out to 1″ thick, but I work in a kitchen with no counter space, so I just flattened it in the pan.

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I would be happy to celebrate but, well, I’m cleaning the kitchen today, and A&P isn’t bringing me my groceries until tomorrow. So celebration will have to wait until later this week, when I have bittersweet chocolate and espresso powder and a nice bottle of Jack Daniels for chocolate bourbon bundt cake.

But rest assured, this day will be appropriately celebrated. Just a little late.

When I love a pair of shoes, I love a pair of shoes. I wear them constantly. I make them work with any outfit. I wear them until they can’t take anymore, and then I mourn.

My favorite pair of shoes for the past two years have been a pair of magenta patent AK Anne Klein flats that I bought at Piperlime for $80. This was pretty expensive for me at the time – I was just getting into fashion and style stuff – but it paid off in this case. I wore them at least once a week, sometimes twice, in summer and winter, and for the past six months I’ve been wearing them despite the fact that I’ve actually worn a hole in one of the heels. But at some point you have to let go, and so for several months I’ve been looking for a replacement. Criteria: Flat, shiny, in a fun color that I can wear with a lot of things, and fairly inexpensive. I’m poor, people. I’ve worked only four days a week most of the year and was on furlough for August. Shoes over $100 weren’t happening.

It took forever to find anything; AK Anne Klein has an almost identical shoe this year, but it’s in yellow, which isn’t a favorite color of mine. There was a dearth of deep pinks and greens. A lot of purple, which I love, but nothing quite right – either was too lavender (I own some lavender peep toes already) or not patent, or absolutely perfect and $180 or something. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to need to tape over the hole or something.

Okay, not really. But still, it was dire.

Then someone in the comments of this post recommended Marais USA, and I went to check them out. They don’t have much in the way of selection – they’re a small, NYC-based firm that’s only been around for a few years – but what they do have is really cute, and I immediately began lusting after all three of their flats, especially in the Suit color. When the Mulberry Mary Jane went on sale at Urban Outfitters, I immediately bought them.

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I have been thinking about making chicken pot pie for years now.

It began when my brother bought me the Marshall Field’s Cookbook shortly after (may it rest in peace) its untimely demise at the hands of Macy’s, something that Chicago will collectively never forgive Macy’s for. The cover recipe of the book is, of course, the dish that started it all: the Marshall Field’s chicken pot pie that was first served to two well-off Fields customers by an extremely accomadating saleswoman.

I’ve worked in retail, and hell would have frozen over before I gave any customer at Sears my lunch. But I digress.

Pot pie is somehow something I’ve never gotten around to. The Fields version involves fussy chicken preparation and individual ramekins and really, at heart, I’m lazy. Extremely lazy. As it is, pot pie is strictly a weekend meal, and my version isn’t even that difficult.

My version is cobbled together from various versions floating around the internet with some inspiration drawn from Nick Malgieri’s recipe in The Modern Baker. It has a biscuit top, loads of tender dark meat chicken, onion, mushrooms, carrots and peas. It’s time-consuming – probably 6 hours in total – but easy as (wait for it) pie.
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