My new vase and some roses from my garden

Roses from my garden (they smell like sweet rose and lemon), white astrantia, and variegated pittosporum in my new vase from Tail of the Yak, Berkeley

I love the backs of these–the white petals with the green tips

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Bulgogi Update

I went with the recipe from epicurious.com and it turned out great.  

I have to confess my meal lacked kimchi.  I didn’t make it down to Koreana Plaza on Telegraph in time.  I’ve never been, but supposedly Koreana (formerly Pusan Market) is the place to go for all your Korean specialty food needs.  Still, my bulgogi was a hit.  I splurged and got expensive ribeye from Enzo’s, and had them do the extra-thin-slicing there.  My knife skills are still at the amateur level. 

I did the table up with the “good” china, silver, crystal, candles, and surprise balls from Tail of the Yak, but none of the pictures turned out well.  I think I had the ISO turned all the way up, because they look grainy ???  Here’s the only one that looks any good:

Things that Soothe: I do not live in New York!

It was a beeeeeeooooooooo-tiful 67 degrees in Oakland today (compared to the 40s in NYC).  I had an early meeting, which I was through with by 9:30, so today felt like a good old day of playing hooky from then on.

A friend and I had lunch (which included Concord grape spritzers) and then did a Rockridge to Elmwood walk along College Avenue.  We soaked up the sun and ended up at ICI, honestly one of my favorite places in the WHOLE world.  MSP and RCR got ice cream, while I soothed with a Blue Bottle iced latte since I. and I are having a no-sugar contest to kick off 2009.  The bench outside of Ici was taken, but who cares?  It’s not on the sunny side of the street!  So we went to take advantage of the one good and useful thing about the strange and mysterious yoga-fitness business known as Lululemon (who shops there?  and why?): the bench in front on the north-west corner of College and Ashby, which is ALWAYS sunny.  

Afterwards we stopped in at Tail of the Yak, otherwise known as my favorite place in the world #1, right before Ici at #2.  I picked up a simple black silk fan for $10 and some beautiful mini-tapers for $8.  FYI: the mini-tapers that TotY carries in many colors may not be available for much longer.  Get them while they’re hot!

PS: Regarding my favorite places in the whole world at spots #1 and #2, both of these establishments have INCREDIBLY wonderful scents.  Ici is like sitting in a old fashioned glass canister of super-fine sugar and Tail of the Yak has equal parts rose, sage, and juniper.  Love it!  So soothing.

In other news: Ranunculus are back!  More on that in the next post!

Changez-les idees!

The Christmas Tree

We’re almost finished decorating the Christmas tree.  The scavaged and gilded leaves turned out exceedingly well.  We even found some magnolia leaves!  Here are photographs of the end result:

Lit Christmas trees are very difficult to photograph but I did my best.  We are all especially enamored with the long narrow seed pods that we glittered (the embossing glitter from Paper Source is excellent for this purpose).  I brought the garlands up from Rockridge.  They are gilded paper, available at Tail of the Yak in Berkeley for approximately $10.  I believe we only used 2 for our eight foot tree.