La Condesa

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I COULD go to trendy new restaurants soon after they open and THEN blog about them, but I much prefer waiting a few years until everyone already knows how awesome Eating Establishment X is, and then write about it like I’m the first to know. I’m talking, in this case, about La Condesa.

I ventured to the downtown TexMex restaurant for lunch recently and was pleased to see the hype wasn’t for nothing. I have no trouble believing this place will be a regular contender when the mister and I find ourselves in the “where should we go for date night” predicament.

Right off the bat I liked La Condesa for the location (across from Austin’s super cool City Hall, The W Hotel, Moody Theater and Lamberts). At night the trees light up and the people watching is superb. So kudos, LC, for picking out some pretty prime real estate in which to serve tacos.

Besides being situated in the heart of mucho A-town action, the architecture and interior design is jaw dropping, astounding even. You could sit inside and stare at the textured walls, vibrant murals, swanky lighting, everything…before  you realize it has been 10 minutes and you haven’t even opened your menu. I’m not overselling either. In fact, the restaurant won a people’s choice restaurant design award from AIA Los Angeles. Pretty nifty.

If you weren’t already intrigued, allow me to go on. I’ve always heard you can tell how good a TexMex restaurant is going to be by the chips and salsa. Perhaps forecasting this very school of thought, the brains behind the La Condesa menu offer not one, but four salsas on which to over indulge before your meal begins. There’s a classic salsa roja, as well as a fresh and creamy avocado tomatillo, chipotle salsa and a super spicy but delectable option. Four salsa choices AND a generous helping of warm chips. Don’t mind if I do.

The main meal itself (fish tacos, my go-to taco when breakfast tacos aren’t an option) was splendid as well. The serving wasn’t too massive, but was still plenty filling and the tacos themselves really hit the spot. The best part about the entree, however, was the extra tortillas that come with the meal. Some places (no names) up-charge for extra tortillas (not cool), but La Condesa included two additional corn tortillas right on the plate, just like that. It was an unexpected treat and came in handy for scooping up extra salsa, black beans and rice. It’s such a small thing to do, but that alone would have tempted me to return for another visit.

By lunch hour’s end, I had been converted. The tasty array of  salsas, visually entrancing atmosphere, and surprise bonus tortilla had me singing the praises of La Condesa to anyone that would hear it. Unfortunately I can’t speak on behalf of their margaritas. I guess I should return for happy hour in order to tell that tale.

Yeah, I’m practically a celebrity.

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“Beep Beep”

What was that?

Oh that? That was just the sound of me tooting my own horn because…

The January issue of Austin Monthly came out and I helped write the cover story! It’s my first cover story since I officially retired from the exciting world of news reporting and it’s nice to know that people who aren’t directly related to me actually enjoy reading what I write.

But wait, there’s more! In the mail last week I received a shiny new copy of Forty Acres of Fun, a new book published by the UT Co-Op which features funny short stories about life on the University of Texas campus. And who’s name is that on page 131? Yep, it’s mine! This may very well be the one and only time I get my words published in a book, so please excuse me for shamelessly plugging it on this blog. Thanks English teachers for book learning me real good.

Hook ‘em!

Going Gray

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This weekend I finally decided on a color to paint the office. Glorious Gray!

It might seem slightly pointless to change a wall from one neutral color to another, in this case beige to gray, but I love the feeling of calm a gray room brings on. Plus the beige walls paired with the beige carpet had me feeling like I lived in a beige cloud, which just isn’t as cool as it sounds. I was also inspired by some of these images that show how gray can make all of the other colors in a room seem a little more vibrant.

It’s not ready for any magazines yet, but I’m pleased with how the new color turned out and look forward to many days of curling up with book in my gray getaway.

Before…

After…

Before…

After…

Before…

After…

Ski

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I’m not a skier.

My friends and skiing compadres told me that when I was 15 just after I mistakenly darted through a half-pipe at 90 miles an hour, narrowly missing my fellow terrain park ski bums. That was fine with me. As far as I was concerned I could go the rest of my life without setting foot or ski on another slope. Texas has a shortage of snow-capped mountain peaks anyway, so what did I need to know how to ski for?

As it turns out, when your buds Maranjanark offer up their family’s condo in Vail for a long weekend of gratis mountaineering, you don’t exactly turn them down. So, away we went with a few other snow-loving Austinites for a post-Christmas friend trip to the great state of Colorado.

I’d had one other brush with Vail before taking off. A summer Vail vacation with my family when I was 13 was pretty enjoyable until a 40-year-old naked male sunbather opted to position himself right outside our condo window. Heath knew only that Vail was “where rich people go to ski.” So that’s what we were working with. Vail: a destination for the wealthy and naked.

The trip to Vail proved neither pricey nor scantily clad. The little mountain town does rob you blind with $100-a-day lift tickets, but that was about as bold as we got when it came to emptying our wallets. We saved a chunk of change by cooking at home rather than shelling out dollar after dollar at over-priced downtown restaurants. (Like seriously over-priced, we’re talking the neighborhood of $9 for a warm Bud Light…cruise ship expensive.) So rather than wine and dine in town, we munched on breakfast tacos by Nick, Mark’s meatloaf and Jaime’s Oreo cookie balls. At nights we drank boxed wine on the couch and enjoyed locally brewed beer over riotous games of Things. Perhaps it’s not how the rich and famous (and naked) do Vail, but it is how we rolled on this particular MLK weekend.

We did live it up too, of course. There was mountain skiing (no half-pipes this time), ice skating, gondola riding, snow tubing, city walking, photography jaunting (I feel like Vail is a place people “jaunt”), snow ball throwing, salad bar cruising, brewery touring, Australian tourist meeting and even heated pool swimming.

We packed a lot of living into 3 days of vacation, but as all trips by privileged 20-somethings go, it was the company and conversation, not the location, that made the weekend getaway one for the books blog.

You are what you eat

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To start the new year off with a bang (and to undo some of the damage we inflicted upon ourselves over the holidays) Heath and I vowed to go on a two week binge of micronutrients. No savory poultry, no delectable cheese, no fluffy breads or creamy desserts or salty snacks. Just a lot of this…

this…

this…

and this.

Think blueberries for breakfast, salads for lunch and veggie stews for dinner. Snacks of Hershey’s kisses have been traded for fistfuls of Craisins, and desserts of red wine are being subbed out for freshly squeezed OJ. The dining  table is topped with celery and salsa instead of chips and dip, and a shiny, substantial juicer is taking up valuable real estate on the kitchen counter. Overhaul indeed.

The fruit/veggie cleanse/fast was inspired by some friends who endured a juice fast (and swear by its powers) and further spurred on by agenda-pushing documentaries like Food Inc., Supersize Me and Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. We realized over the last few months we ate far too many processed Cheez-Its and far too few fresh spinach salads. We wanted to do something that would make us more conscious of what we put into our bodies and perhaps influence our future eating habits. Boy has it.

It’s day 10 of vegging out and here’s what we’ve discovered:

-It’s nearly impossible to dine out. I’ve heard vegans make this complaint before, but didn’t understand just how saturated modern menus are with the things we have declared temporarily forbidden. You can be hard pressed to find a salad without cheese and croutons or a soup made without chicken broth. The diet has certainly pushed kitchen creativity to the limit.
-Fresh foods–turns out they really do keep you fuller longer.  On lazy days, or days where I thought I earned a treat, I’d be known to grab a breakfast taco or two to start the morning. About 4,000 calories and 2 hours later I’d be hungry again…and usually for something equally greasy and icky. But on the fruit/veggie diet I can stay full for hours on a freshly blended smoothie or guac salad. It really gets you thinking about how your body digests food.
- I really miss cheese. I miss bread and eggs and fish too, but cheese…that’s the kicker. I know cheese rounds out the the top of the list of foods that are pretty horribly unhealthy, but I can’t help but fantasize about chomping down on a slice of cheesy goodness. I have even dreamed of swimming through pools of queso. It’s been the hardest habit to kick, hands down.

With 4 days of apple juice drinking, pistachio snacking and salad munching left, I feel pretty good about the whole experience (and by “pretty good” I mean, confident I can survive the remaining days without cheese). I know we are no heroes; we didn’t endure a month of vegan-ing, or a 60-day juice fast or 2 week Master Cleanse, but we did find a way to incorporate more of the good stuff into our routine and think differently about how the food we eat affects our mood, mind and waist line. I think it’s the beginning of a major diet overhaul and hopefully a longer life.

Phase One = Complete

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Fancifying the kitchen is a three-step process. When we moved in, the kitchen looked like this.

Please note:

  • the dated knotty pine
  • the old fashioned black hinges
  • the bland countertops/backsplash
  • the aged cabinets
Not ideal for the modern, color loving family we are. A plan must be developed. Why not exchange the drab countertops from this…
to this…
Beautiful, bright, white quarts countertops….muah. It’s so crisp, so clean, so shiny and pretty and happy. I lust for them. Durable, practical, life changing. It’s not exactly normal to have a crush on a countertop but never you mind. The counter tops will be changed. As will the backsplash, from “landlord neutral” to fantastic blue subway tile.
Imagine it. The shiny white surface surrounded by iridescent blues and rich wooden cabinetry. It looks good, feels good, heck…it smells good. It is a far cry from the original. Despite at first HATING the knotty pine (and blogging about it here) I ultimately decided to keep it.  One reason for keeping the O.G. cabinets is to salvage something that is perfectly functional. No “out with the old and in the new” for this little lady. I wanted to keep something in that kitchen legit—in true 50s era style. The other reason for keeping the color was rooted in me wanting to prove the internet wrong. Search after search would furnish results which would have me believe that no one in their right mind would keep the knotty pine look in a modernish kitchen setting. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. So phase one does not include demolishing the worn but still in-good-condition original cabinets.
Instead, it consists of doing some stripping, sanding, staining and hinge replacing. Switching out hardware like this…
For this…
Resulting in something like this…
It’s a look that’s a little old school and a little modern; a little eclectic and a little chic. So we spent the winter break refinishing the wood and bringing the fixtures up to the 21st century.
It wasn’t easy and we are still cleaning up saw dust, but what a difference a hinge can make! We are thrilled with the glossy new stain and shiny metallic hardware that now adorn our kitchen. Only two steps to go until the kitchen transforms into my cooking fantasy.

Happily Handmade

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Handmade Christmas gifts are the best. I like to give ‘em, I like to receive ‘em. Something about putting the finishing touches on a mediocre craft and boxing it up to distribute to family who are obligated to love it just feels über Christmasy. This year I was lucky to receive my fair share of handmade trinkets and goodies.

A favorite might have been these ornaments my mom made to resemble Stella and Wyatt. Our tree was lacking in doodle-themed ornaments–something that clearly had to be remedied. See the resemblance?

My sister and brother-in-law, of StormulaOne Photography fame, put together these coasters featuring his photography. I’m a big fan of his work, so getting to glance down at mini prints of his photography on my coffee table is really exciting. I might have to commission more.

Heath’s mother made this reversible hobo bag that I can’t wait to use as a travel pouch.

And of course, let’s not discount all the jellies, jams and baked goods from my mother and from Ranjana that will carry us into the new year.

So, too soon to start working on next years gifts? The wheels are already turning.

Repurpose

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I’m obsessed with finding clever ways to repurpose what I may have, at one time, considered trash. I’d like to flatter myself and pretend my recent obsession with turning the ugly and useless into something pretty and functional is solely rooted in a deep desire to save the planet and eliminate waste, but honestly, it’s mostly about saving a buck (sorry, Captain Planet). Minimizing the amount of junk I contribute to the landfill is just a great ego-boosting bonus.

We done good so far. Our chicken coop was made using materials we salvaged from the old one in the move, and I saved up my wine bottles over the past few months to create a garden border, but there is still so much to do and not a lot of money to do it with.

Fortunately, I have picked up some recent gems online that I’m 90 percent sure I can emulate.

Stumbling across this hanging shoe rack-turned-vegetable garden on Instructables set my heart in a tizzy. For starters, it’s amazingly cute and I can picture it hanging it from the side of our lackluster metal shed. The space gets ample sun and could undoubtedly benefit from the addition of some gorgeous greenery. Secondly, I have one of these bad boys just sitting in a bag in my closet! The new casa has sliding closet doors that don’t do well with hanging intrusions (like this shoe rack), but I couldn’t bring myself to toss a perfectly well-functioning storage device. Now that I’ve discovered this precious number, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a funky new yard piece I can show off to friends whether they want to see it or not.

I feel likewise about this pallet herb garden from Apartment Therapy. Our fridge was delivered on a similar pallet that we kept because, you know, free wood, but haven’t found a use for yet. Finding this pretty much solved that problem.

Since visiting the Habitat for Humanity ReStore a month ago, we knew we wanted to incorporate old windows into the garden somehow. At $5 a pop, how could we not?  Using them in a green house capacity was always in the cards but this design was quite inspiring, and I feel falls well within the skill level of Handyman Heath. With freezing temps still very much in our future, getting one of these up and running may happen sooner rather than later.

We have an unofficial wine bottle theme happening in the yard now, so this torch idea from Design Sponge is practically inevitable.  The only hiccup is waiting for the privacy fence to go up before something like this could be installed. That probably won’t happen until spring, but the bright side is it gives me time to collect more bottles (aka drink lots and lots of wine).

Since moving, we’ve acquired about a dozen paint cans that are nearly empty but not quite. I’ve been saving them with the idea that I might need to touch up a wall or two over time, but seeing this creative use of old paint cans on Best Green Home Tips makes me want to attack them right away and use them to spice up a drab section of fence. The only problem is, I’m not sure how advisable it is to dump paint down the drain. Something tells me The Lorax wouldn’t be too happy about that one.

I found this side table made from old shutters on Good Housekeeping. Writing that sentence makes me a little scared of my own domesticity (Stepford much?), but come on, that’s cute.

Wine bottles, paint cans, shoe racks…nothing is off limits. I don’t know that I will make a habit of rummaging through my neighbors’ garbage for salvageable material, but it’s nice to know that when it comes to creating art from junk, virtually anything is possible.

 

A Christmas Miracle

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For years I have heard the following sentence…

“Stella is a Muppet.”

Yeah, yeah. I know. But WHICH Muppet? She’s not Rowlf, the go-to Muppet dog character. So why is it that we all (me included) think she looks like a Muppet?

After a recent viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol  last week, it hit me. A background character, a Muppet extra if you will, sounded an alarm in my head. Stella is Sprocket, the occasional doggy guest star from Fraggle Rock.

Exhibit A: Sprocket, looking delightfully loveable.

Exhibit B: Stella. Very happy about the Christmas tree behind her (and the awesome new camera lens used to take this photo).

Again…

Sprocket.

Stella.

The similarities are undeniable.

It’s a Christmas miracle. The Muppet mystery has finally been solved. God bless us, everyone.

Yard Work

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DISCLAIMER: the yard is in no way near completion. Not even close. But after working from dawn till dusk today to make it one step closer to a mini urban paradise, I felt compelled to offer up a few before/(almost) after photos of the progress.

Before–a dead fig tree took over a substantial portion of the backyard…a portion that Heath saw as ideal for veggie growing.

After–we took a pick ax to the fig tree and added new gardens and a chicken coop.

The owners before said a bird bath and wild flowers inhabited this odd, circular dead patch of yard.

We turned the same space into a  graveled area for socializing. Firepit included.

When we moved in, there was no landscaping to speak of, plus the patio had an exposed air conditioning unit smack dab in the middle that was a devastating eye sore.

To disguise the AC unit but keep the required ventilation, I surrounded it with decorative concrete blocks topped with some of my favorite potted plants. I thought the end result was not too shabby.

So that’s just the beginning, but accomplishing the baby steps definitely makes me dream big for the future. Stay tuned for more.