The Hipster Home

Let me first start with an apology. Lo siento!  There is no reason (except overwhelming business) to keep you guys in the dark about recent THH developments. Pardon my radio silence, even in the face of an epic amount of attention brought by a certain design*sponge post. If you didn’t see from my recent tweets (which I just learned weren’t showing in my sidebar), I was in Austin last week to celebrate my sister’s marriage! Although she’s halfway across the country, my family was able to plan all sorts of activities and events including a bridal shower, an important BBQ visit and more. Yeehaw.

One of the tasks I assigned myself was to create a Love Mixtape. Little known fact: I was a debutante my senior year of high school and as a result absolutely DETEST most event DJs. That includes weddings. I figured that if I was going to make it through this, there better be high doses of delightful lovey-dovey tunes hand picked with a certain amount of discretion. My friends were good sports and sent numerous examples of their favorite love songs.

Between making salted citrus caramels, packing a travel cooking kit and taking pains for personal beautification, I updated, tweaked, and expanded the mix to its current glory. As a reformed music biz professional, I know better than to post the whole thing in its entirety as a download but thought that you may already have a majority of these tunes in your music library. Bold songs denote favorites you should download! When I can, I’ve linked to the songs around the web. (UPDATE: wow, The Hype Machine had them ALL!)

A Love Mixtape: for F&S

1. First Day of My Life by Bright Eyes
2. All is Full of Love by Death Cab for Cutie
3. H in New England by Mac Richter (From an instrumental piano album that is worth the purchase)
4. Not Going Anywhere by Keren Ann
5. Heartbeats (A Knife cover) by Jose Gonzalez
6. Anyone Else But You by Moldy Peaches
7. Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (amazing new musician)
8. All I Want by Barry Louis Polisar
9. This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) by Talking Heads
10. The Look of Love (Part 1) by ABC (from one of my top 5 albums of all time, excellent and VERY 80s)
11. All I Want is You by U2
12. Heart of Chambers by Beach House
13. The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields (from the greatest collection of love songs ever, 69 Love Songs)
14. Can’t Help Falling in Love (An Elvis cover) by Ingrid Michaelson
15. Make You Feel my Love (A Bob Dyland cover) by Adele
16. Row by Jon Brion (instrumental track from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack, which is all fantastic)
Row – Jon Brion
17. More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley (my favorite love song, get the whole damn album)
18. If This Ain’t Love (Don’t Knw What Is) by Nicole WIllis & The Soul Investigators
19. Sea of Love by Cat Power
20. The Luckiest by Ben Folds
The Luckiest (Album Version) -…
21. 3 Rounds and a Sound by Blind Pilot
22. I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie

Wow, TWO Death Cab songs? What was I thinking?? Speaking of love and Ben Gibbard, we finally sat down to watch (500) Days of Summer last night. It left me in a strange mood, mainly that of dissatisfaction. But as the Mr. pointed out, that was kind of the point.

Let’s hear it, do you have any favorite love songs that I missed? Did a certain Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie leave you sour on Los Angeles love?

(PS I also made a sexy mix featuring the likes of R. Kelly, Ludacris, Color Me Badd and CSS. Are you interested in that playlist too?)

There are many reasons why family is great, especially sisters, and I’m constantly reminded of this fact around the holidays. My all-time favorite reason to love ‘em is that sometimes you’ll get a mid-September call asking if you have some random piece of kitchenware. If you say no, chances are a package will arrive holding an early Christmas gift, many months in advance.

My sister C* (the one who instilled in me my bargain-seeking, ruthless-cheapskate desire to get the best deal possible and to take delight in the hunt) struck gold and wanted to send this perfect gift to me as quick as possible.

Say hello to the newest Hipster Home addition, Mildred the Pasta Machine!

I’m no stranger to homemade pasta. It happened once before, like a violent explosion of flour and egg. A newly unearthed blog, The Amateur Gourmet, was making pasta and he said that a pasta machine is your best bet unless you’re an Italian grandmother. Did you just hear him question my abilities? That is a CHALLENGE. As a half Italian lady nowhere near grandma status, I decided, irrationally, that there was something to prove here. I huffed and puffed and rolled that stubborn dough out.  The sweat, grunting, bruises and broken rolling pin were worth it. Fresh pasta, afternoon delight!  I knew that if I could roll out pasta by hand ONCE, that I’d be free to use a machine the rest of my life. Cue new machine.

Mildred and I got working the other night, just to experiment. I’m including no recipes because frankly, I don’t think Mildred and I are on those kind of terms yet. I will say that pasta dough for ravioli was made combining eggs, flour, salt and olive oil. It then rested inside some cuddly plastic wrap while I worked on the filling.

The insides were a freestyle concoction of caramelized onions, toasted pine nuts and some roasted Red Kuri squash (yes, THAT ONE from a month ago!)


After it was seasoned to satisfaction, time to wrangle up some thin sheets of pasta dough! This was also improvised as I had a hard time finding any suggestions as to how thick ravioli pasta should be rolled out too. I was also going to use the ravioli mold but decided to make them irregularly by hand. OH MONSTROUS RAVIOLI!

Hmm, the next question was what should go on the ravioli? The Hipster Home’s own Mr. set out to make another bowl-lickable sauce, that of cream, nutmeg, parmesan reggiano and butter. White Sauce Ahoy! Delicious, hearty, stick to your ribs autumnal meal- Ding!

Lessons learned: the thinnest setting of my pasta machine is TOO THIN FOR ANYTHING. I also tried my hand at some other cut pasta and it was way way too delicate. Also: don’t overfill your ravioli! It messes with the proportion of pasta/filling/sauce. Finally a note-to-self: this was easy, tasty and low-mess. Make it more often, dummy!

Have you made pasta before? Got any pointers or great pasta recipess? DO SHARE!!!!

*P.S. Did I mention my sister has a wicked sense of humor? Look what we got in the box:

(it still makes me laugh, no one has eaten it yet!)