300 Days of Sunshine

This season is full of cute and interesting trends – from dress styles and decorations, to themes in catering and venues.   Here are my thoughts about which trends to embrace, and which will be short-lived. Love it:   Lace, lace, lace.   Love, love, love!   Lace is timeless, elegant, and absolutely stunning.   A bride who wears a lace gown can look back at her pictures 20, 30, 70 years from now and her gown will still be in style.   Lace is feminine, flirty, sophisticated, and sure to amaze every guest from the conservative grandma to the trendy sorority sister.   Everyone looks amazing in lace! Leave It:   Supersized centerpieces We’ve all seen them.   And sure, they’re stunning in an empty room.   But when seating arrangements are carefully and strategically planned, how is your high school bff supposed to hit it off with your fiance’s former co-worker when all she can see to converse with is a g...

Ceviche is a Peruvian-inspired cuisine in which fresh meat or seafood is marinated in a citrus mixture.  Recipes for ceviche typically call for raw meat or seafood, and the citrus content of the sauce functions to denature the proteins in the meat, thus creating an effect as if the meat were cooked.  With fresh shrimp being difficult to find in the land-locked desert that is New Mexico, this particular recipe uses frozen shrimp. Shrimp Ceviche (from the Santa Fe School of Cooking's Flavors of the Southwest): SERVES 14 Ingredients: 2 pounds frozen shrimp, thawed, peeled and deveined Olive oil 1 medium white onion, finely chopped 1 cup chile sauce or ketchup 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro 1/2 cup pimiento-stuffed green olives, chopped  Pickled serrano or jalapeno chiles, to taste, chopped Juice from the can of pickled chiles to taste 1 tablespoons Worchestershire sauce 1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano Juice of 2 fresh ora...

Happy Mardi Gras!   This was me one year ago:   Needless to say, Mardi Gras this year was a little calmer.   I wore a few strands of purple and gold beads to work, ate some King Cake, and tuned into Fats Domino radio on Pandora.   It was quite wonderful.   And no one got arrested for public intoxication or indecent exposure. Here's the King Cake that my sister baked and mailed all the way from Boston!    I planned to make Shrimp Jambalaya for dinner, but Jaycob wanted to go out.  So here's what I'm cooking tomorrow night to keep the New Orleans spirit alive... Recipe for Shrimp Jambalaya: Serves 8 Ingredients: 1 cup onion, finely chopped 1 cup celery, finely chopped 1 carrot, finely chopped 3 tablespoons olive oil 2 cups diced ham 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 teaspoon chili powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons ground black pepper 1 small can tomato sauce 1 large can diced tomatoes 2 bay leaves...

January sure flew by!   It was a busy month and I worked a lot of weekends (in fact I think I only had 5 days off all month), which didn’t leave a lot of time for enjoying the outdoors.   I did manage squeeze in a few familiar hikes, though – Picacho Peak, Borrego Bear Wallows, and the Windsor Trail, to name a few. Last weekend I finally made it up to the Ski Basin for the first time this season!   After growing up skiing in the Midwest, I am still blown away but the beauty of the ski mountains here.   The snow wasn’t fabulous and there wasn’t really fresh powder by the time I got up there, but 90% of the trails were open and it was a beautiful day to be on the slopes.    I always have some anxiety to put on my skis for the first time of the season.   What if I forget how to turn?   What if I fall?   What if I’m not in shape for this?   But as always, my muscles remembered what to do after...

I am embracing the fact the Santa Fe is not a temporary place of residence or a short-term clinical rotation for me, but my new home, a place where I actually live .   I have developed a routine here, made good friends, and equally important, I have developed a taste for New Mexican cuisine. For Christmas I received a wonderful new cookbook... Santa Fe School of Cooking: Flavors of the Southwest. As explained in the introduction of the book, “the mission of the Santa Fe School of Cooking has always been to celebrate and promote the rich historical traditions and food of Santa Fe and its surroundings.”   Santa Fean cuisine is truly a unique blend of Native American, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo cultures.   And what a delicious cuisine to celebrate!   In 2012, Santa Fe won the award for “ America’s Best Food ” from USA Today. Paging through the book, I feel more than a little overwhelmed by the complexity of the recipes and my la...

Since 2013 is my year of wedding planning (or I should say my final year of wedding planning, because what girl hasn’t been planning their wedding since they were old enough to walk and hold flowers), I have determined to dedicate a few of my blog posts this year to that which consumes my life.   My first wedding reflection: rustic themes and trends.   We see these elements everywhere in the wedding planning realm – mason jars, twine, chalk boards, mismatched glassware, wild flowers, bridesmaids in boots, the list goes on!   Here are some examples from Pinterest: I can’t help but ask myself, what is with this infatuation with Rustic ?   Is it an attempt to get away from pompous formalities and expectations in an effort to display one’s creative side?   Is Rustic a movement toward keeping things simple, perhaps to draw the attention away from the things and toward the people , which is what a celebration is all abo...

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. ~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850 Another year over, and a new one just begun…   2012 was an exciting year for me and Jaycob!   It was our first full year in Santa Fe, and we’re enjoying our new home here more and more now that we have a great group of friends, many favorite restaurants and hang-out spots, and greater familiarity with the hiking trails.   We celebrated several friends’ weddings this year, and welcomed a few new babies into the world (with more to come in 2013!).   We enjoyed vacations and visits to New Orleans, Denver, Minneapolis, Aspen, Chicago, Bloomington, Boca Raton, Virginia Beach and Miami, and we were excited to have some of our friends and family members come visit us in the southwest.   We went to Balloon Fiesta (twice), took a ride in a hot air balloon, rode horses, expl...