Archive for December, 2011

Saturday at the Nashville Flea Market

12.20.11 // Comments:9

Tim and I are still enough of newlyweds to regularly look at each other and say, Can you believe we’re married? Remember what it was like when we weren’t? and, on days like this last Saturday, where we went to a flea market we’ve been hearing about since before I moved to Nashville, Remember back then? Back when we didn’t even live in the same state?

Sometimes I can’t even believe we used to just talk on the phone every night, with Tim in Tennessee and me in Chicago. The days of driving eight hours to spend time with him seem like such a long time ago, back when I’d stay a few days and we’d go to Las Paletas and Sevier Park and bake things like pear custard pie at his house.

But I’ve been living in Nashville for ten and a half months. Ten and a half months! It’s not home in the same way the Chicago suburbs are—we still visit my family and everything feels so familiar and normal that it’s like where I belong—but yet it is home, too.

We have Tennessee license plates and library cards and a church family and friends down the street to eat dinner with on Sunday nights. We have our little house, a place that’s gone from an empty living room with an air mattress to watch TV from to a cute space with our pictures on bookshelves and our stockings on the fireplace and our curtains on the windows.

One of the things I’ve loved most about living with Tim is setting up our place, together: making Christmas traditions, cooking dinner after we work all day side by side, having friends over, decorating.

Just like when we were planning our wedding, we’ve become sort of partners in finding old things we like for our house—moving from the days of scouring antique shops for vintage reception plates to the weeks of nabbing $5 chairs from thrift stores. We love fixing things up and making them our own.

And that’s why I really can’t say why it took us so long to hit up the Nashville Flea Market, which is just ten minutes from us and happens on the fourth weekend of every month—or the third weekend in December.

We headed to the state fairgrounds last Saturday, arriving in the afternoon, bundled up for chilly air (that is so much warmer than it is in Illinois, I know, I know), after hearing about this event from everyone from my old roommate to an article my brother forwarded me last week.

Personally, I’ve only been to one other flea market that I can compare it to, but from what I’ve been told, the Nashville Flea is like a lot of others: big, loaded with vendors, filled with everything from tables of athletic socks and piles of discounted bed sheets to gorgeous homemade quilts and unique handcrafted tables.

It’s part craft show, part garage sale, part antique mall—a fun place to get new decorating ideas and an addicting way to find little treasures. There were booths of cowboy boots (hello, Nashville!) and a vendor with all animal skins; fresh barbecue and shelves of individually wrapped, candy-covered caramel apples; tables filled with mason jars; lawn ornaments; burlap-covered chairs and ottomans; bags; clothes; all kinds of nick-knacks.

Some of the market is inside, spread amongst a couple buildings and rooms, and some is outside, beneath tents and awnings and stretching all over the fairgrounds.

As for me and Tim, we came away with a solid, heavy $10 wooden chair that Tim sanded down and painted white, ready to be paired with our other mismatched, much loved dining chairs. The man who sold it to us said it came from a Chicago insane assylum—which we just say adds character.

And I know I also came away with a desire to make this flea market a regular practice in my Nashville life, if only for the excitement of never knowing what you’ll find or what a great price you’ll get it for—the vendors welcome bargaining, and, as any antiquer or thrifter will tell you: that’s half the fun.

So Nashville Flea, I hope to see you again in January, post-Christmas, post-New Year’s, post all the hub-bub of the holidays—and that goes for you too, dear readers, whom I hope to see again next year. Merry Christmas, may your holidays be lovely. I’ll see you soon!

Brown Butter Cranberry Hazelnut Tart + Chocolate Tart

12.13.11 // Comments:25

I never thought much about what our first Christmas would be like—which is funny because, for a classic overthinker like me, it’s rare not to think about something. Maybe it was because of how big October seemed and how faraway December felt.

The first week, we bought a six-foot Fraser fir, purchased from a giant red-and-white tent outside Home Depot, a tree that smells like the forest and sheds needles every day. We stowed it in the back of Tim’s car, alongside a poinsettia and a fresh wreath from Aldi, and put it in our living room, inside a plastic stand Tim hadn’t used for four years and topped by white bulb lights I’d hung at that blog birthday party I had in 2009.

We hung a homemade advent calendar (inspiration: summer harms) on our dining room window, made of leftover wedding kraft envelopes and filled with holiday activities each of us wrote on slips of paper, mixed together and inserted randomly.

The first day was kisses every hour; the second was a thankful list to hang on the fridge.

We made a bed by the tree and read “The Gift of the Magi.”

We had some of our favorite kids over to make ornaments, just simple circles cut out and hung with red string, after which we ate popcorn and watched a movie about a valiant mouse.

We took our burlap wedding runners and made stockings.

Then we took more and wrapped gifts.

And last Saturday, we had a holiday pie party at our house, where everyone brought a pie to share—lemon meringue, key lime meringue, candied apple, pumpkin.

For our contributions, Tim and I made two tarts: David Lebovitz’s dark chocolate (the perfect dessert for incorporating some coffee Starbucks sent me a few months ago):

And Meg Gordon’s brown butter cranberry with a hazelnut crust, beautifully Christmassy with its bright red berries and set on a nutty cookie-like crust:

And so here we are, less than two weeks from Christmas Day, in the throes of new traditions and new memories, and I’m certain of one thing:

I may not have thought much about what our Christmas would be, but I know I will think, often, of what it was.

Satsuma Layer Cake

12.06.11 // Comments:22

So listen, should you ever find yourself in possession of 15 pounds of satsumas, say because of a killer sale last Friday at Whole Foods, a sale you’d been anticipating for days, Googling recipes and wondering about things like satsuma ice cream or satsuma salad or satsuma marmalade or jam, and you’d teamed up with your brother-in-law’s one box in order to bring your combined total up to three, knowing the store gives a fourth box free, and so you’d wandered out Friday night, box and box and box of tiny oranges in your cart, here is what you should do:

To start, give some away. After all, it’s Christmastime, the season of celebrating what is the Greatest Gift, so why not extend the December 25 presents all month long? It will make you feel happy and joyful, in the same way that celebrating your first Christmas with your new husband tends to do, and, combined with your every-other-day Advent calendar and newly purchased Fraser fir and bright red pillows on the sofa, this small act of giving unexpected gifts, even little ones like boxes of oranges, will feel like this special tradition, this special Christmas memory between the two of you.

Then, with the box you have leftover, come home, set your oranges on the counter, and eat them, remembering how much you love their easy peels and sweet, sweet mandarin flavor. Have a satsuma when you get up in the morning or before bed at night. Take some in the car or in your lunch each day.

But before they’re all gone, and trust me, you’ll be glad you did this, save three or four and bake.

Bake this satsuma layer cake.

The idea for this cake came from a picture I saw on Flickr, one I cannot find today, of a tall cake, made up of three or four layers of white or yellow cake, sandwiched around thick, white frosting, with round rows of orange pieces all over the top. There was no recipe and no link for more info, but the image stuck with me: before we left for Whole Foods Friday night, I told Tim, I want to make a satsuma layer cake!

So Saturday afternoon, while Tim was building a buffet for our living room, using that mental image of the satsuma cake I’d seen, I set to work: I took round layers of moist yellow cake, made for my first time with a blend of unusual ingredients like white spelt flour and olive oil and yogurt, and I layered them with a simple, thinned-out cream cheese frosting infused with satsuma zest. Individual pieces of satsumas decorated the middle layer, and neat, round rows of them piled up on top.

When the cake was first finished, the layer with oranges looked like it had space between it, as if the fat slices of satsumas were holding up the cake. But within a few hours, everything cemented together, beautifully, perfectly, like a fancy bakery cake that was just the right sweetness and texture, with bursts of juicy orange in every bite.

We ate some Saturday night, after celebrating this Christmas month with a free showing of It’s a Wonderful Life put on by Nashville’s Wonderful Life Foundation, and Tim looked at me, and I kid you not, told me this was the best thing I’d made him in a while.

So if you don’t take my word on it, take his.

And then prepare to wish satsumas were on sale every week.

Satsuma Layer Cake
Makes one (3-layered, 9″) round cake

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1/2 cup olive oil
3/4 cup Sucanat (alternate: brown sugar), ground in a food processor
3/4 cup palm sugar (alternate: white sugar), ground in a food processor
4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 3/4 cups white spelt flour (alternate: all-purpose flour)
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1/2 cup yogurt
1/4 cup water

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour three 9″ round cake pans. (Confession: I still have my cake pans in Illinois, so I used two glass baking dishes that were round, and I sliced one cake in half horizontally to create three layers. Three cake pans would be ideal.)

In a large bowl, cream the butter, olive oil and sugars (i.e., Sucanat and palm sugar) together. Note that I ground my unprocessed sugars in a food processor ahead of time, just to get them a little more fine for the sake of the cake texture. Beat in the four eggs and vanilla.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt.

In a small bowl, combine milk, yogurt and water.

Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternately to the butter-sugar mix. Mix well. Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake cakes for 30 to 40 minutes, until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool before slicing.

When ready, spread cream cheese frosting between layers, adding satsuma pieces to the second layer. Top the cake with satsumas all the way around.

Cream Cheese Frosting
I was eyballing the sugar, flour and milk here, so my amounts aren’t exact–however, that may still be helpful as you can adjust to your tastes. Oh, and don’t panic if the mixture starts to look a little like cottage cheese, by the way. Mine did, but it was delicious.

Ingredients:
8 ounces cream cheese
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
The zest of one satsuma orange
Organic powdered sugar, to taste
Milk, to desired consistency

Directions:
Combine ingredients in a bowl, adjusting sugar and milk until frosting is desired taste and consistency. You may also add a little water if you want to thin it out more.