Aubergine

Make This At Home: Bowl of Soul

There’s a new coffee company that has exploded onto the Santa Cruz scene recently. A scene, mind you, with no shortage of already established coffee houses. But somehow Verve Coffee is shouldering its way into the crowd and making waves.  They have three shops now, as well as two or three other cafes that have some sort of lease and training arrangement to sell their coffee (beans and drinks).  I hear tell you can also buy their coffee beans as far east as NYC. They are active in the competition scene (did you know there was a barista competition scene?) and many of their baristas are award-winning. 

Their coffee is very good, but I’m not writing about coffee today.  What I’m writing about is the drink I’ve recently fallen for on their menu called a Bowl of Soul.  

Now I should say that this coffee company is really hip.  The interior design of their shops is all recycled industrial, with walls covered in large paintings by local artists that I don’t really get (and I’m an artist!).  The music is just the right amount of loud but not artists I recognize. There are only a handful of things on the menu and the baked goods are displayed like art.

At my ripe old age of 39, I’m probably a good 15 years older than their average customer.  I’m never sure if me drinking coffee in a Verve shop is increasing my hipness quotient or decreasing theirs.  So it took me a few visits before I had the courage to admit to the person taking my order that I had no idea what a bowl of soul was.  She was very nice and didn’t laugh at me. She said it was tea steeped in warmed soy milk with honey and cinnamon. She said normally it was made with chamomile tea, but they could make it with any tea on their menu. I ordered it that day with the Art of Tea cinnamon fig black tea they carry, because I needed to be awake, not lulled to sleep.

And it was awesome. Rich and just barely sweet in a big enough mug to sip while I worked.

Now it is one of my favorite drinks. But since I can’t afford the bar(ista) tab of drinking my tea out all the time, I have recently been making it at home.  This is so simple a recipe it is kind of silly to call it a recipe, but if you don’t live within range of a Verve cafe, I do recommend you try this drink at home!

 

Verve’s Bowl Of Soul

 

Heat enough soy milk for a large latte cup.  

In the cup, place your tea bag, a spoon of honey, and a cinnamon stick (or 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon).  

Pour in the soy milk and let steep for 2-5 minutes. Stir and enjoy!

 

You can make this with a range of teas, so try your favorite!

 

Make this at home: Cherry-pomegranate ice pops

When we were at Strawberry Music Festival over Memorial Day, we had the best ice pops I think I've ever tasted.  They were cherry-pomegranate flavored, just the right balance of sweet and tart, and the most amazing garnet shade of red.  

The weather that weekend was cold (as you may remember me writing about), but we kept finding ourselves standing in line for ice pops anyway.

When we got home I started hunting around for a recipe.  I was surprised to only find a couple of versions. One used yogurt and another was pomegranate-raspberry instead of cherry. How is it that so few people have discovered this delicious combination?

Neither was quite was I was looking for, but using the raspberry recipe as my base I started experimenting.  I ended up with someting pretty delicious, but still not quite those pops we craved even in the snow.  I guess I'll just have to head back to Strawberry for the original version next year!

Here is my version if you want to give them a try.  Let me know what you think, and if you try any variations that come out wonderfully!

Cherry-Pomegranate Ice Pops

Note: Every style of pop molds holds a slightly different volume, so I'm writing this recipe in proportions rather than true measurements.  Adjust your batch accordingly.

2 parts pomegranate juice
1 part cherry juice
1/2 part fresh or frozen cherries, pitted and chopped
agave syrup or honey to taste

Divide the chopped cherries evenly between your ice pop molds.  Mix remaining ingredients together and check to make sure the sweetness is to your taste.  Pour the juice mix over the cherries and insert pop sticks into the molds.  

Freeze until hard.  Serve and enjoy!

Inspired: InstaLove

I recently posted a link to a template on Cathy Zielske's blog that was designed for Instagram photos.  I love Instagram.  I knew I had a handful of sweet little photos of The Bean that I had shot with Instagram, so I put together a quick little layout using CZ's template.  I am so bad at Photoshop, but using a template made the process bearable.  I really like the result. And working with these pictures again I realized how much I love them, filters and all. I'm so glad to get them off my camera and used for something creative.

Inspired: a Sunset back yard

I love Sunset Magazine.  I don't even know how long I've been reading it - longer than I've had a house of my own, certainly.  When I recently did a clean out of my magazine subscriptions, Sunset was one of only 3 subscriptions I didn't cancel and the other two have since lapsed. I love when that new issue arrives in my mailbox and I can curl up with a mug of tea and flip through the pretty lifestyles that don't actually seem so unattainable, unlike a lot of magazines I used to read!  

When I bought my house it had been a rental for a number of years, so as you might imagine the yard had largely gone to pot.  Everything was overgrown or weedy. The gophers had the run of the place and I had the twisted ankles to prove it.  A couple of times in the years that I've lived here I managed to rein in the weeds in one or another corner of the lot, but I've never really had the place looking good all at once.  I've never even had all of the front or all of the back looking good at once.  Let's just say the yard was best enjoyed with blinders on.  Just focus on this clean bit and don't look over there!

I've added flower beds, let them grow over, installed a container garden and let it get unruly, trimmed back the lovely antique roses that came with the place and then let them get out of control again, built raised vegetable beds and then forgot to clear them out in the fall, and hoed the weeds down to the dirt just to have them spring back after the next rain.  It has definitely been a one-step-forward-two-steps-back sort of situation.  But slowly, slowly, at least the back yard was becoming habitable.  But then my back went out last fall right when I should have been cleaning up the garden for the winter.  So that didn't happen.  By the time my back healed I was too pregnant to do much in the way of yard work. And then right when it started to get warm again I had a new baby.

One fine day in late March I tied the baby to my chest and went out to survey the damage in the back yard.  I could see the bones, and they were lovely.  But oh, the weeds.  So I set in.  After about 30 minutes, during which I woke the baby by leaning forward so far, drenched myself in sweat from wearing 18 yards of Moby in full sun, and only pulled about 4 linear feet of weeds, I admitted defeat and called my friend Kate for some help.

I think she spent 6 hours back there, and let me tell you, that woman is a whirlwind.  She dealt with the weeds, cleared out the veggie beds, refilled them with fresh dirt and compost, brought me veggie seedlings, was ruthless with the containers (emptied some, cut others back), and even cleared out the trash (hoarded containers) that was lurking in one back corner.  Do you need help in your garden?  Hire this woman.

By Mother's Day, I had a garden worthy of a Sunset photo shoot. At least from one wide angle.

 

But that's a great start!

Inspired: flowers for the nursery

There's a sushi place near our house where we took The Bean a few times when she was a newborn.  Actually, we were taking The Teenager, because he's a sushi fiend, and The Bean was just along for the ride.  They play club music and have flashing lights and things hanging from the ceiling, so The Bean was pretty entertained and Mama was pretty happy to be able to eat raw fish again.  On one visit, they had changed out the dangly ceiling decor to flowers, I guess in celebration of spring, and watching the baby watch them spinning in the breeze, I realized what a cool decoration they would make over her changing table.  Home made mobiles, here I come.

From this:

To this:

It was super easy, except for finding a few minutes when I didn't have arms full of baby so I could stand on the step stool to hang the flowers!  I found the flowers at JoAnn's on clearance so they cost about a quarter each.  I curled up the wire stems of the flowers to different lengths and tied them up to lengths of fishing wire tied to pushpins in the ceiling.  They move just slightly in the breeze through the room, and they are bright enough to catch The Bean's attention - sometimes - while I'm changing her diaper.  And bonus! Some of the flowers match her gDiaper covers.  As a finishing touch I printed out three of her newborn photos taken by the talented Celeste Duran, popped them into inexpensive 4x6" frames and hung them in a row halfway down the wall.  Now I have something to look at, too!

I love easy, cheap, pretty new decor.