Everything Stops for Tea: Afternoon Tea Hearts and Jack Buchanan

"Everything Stops for Tea" (1935)

Mandeltaschen and The Merry Widow

Keep pantry and refrigerator always well stocked with the most basic baking ingredients like butter, sugar, eggs, flour, yeast, nuts, chocolate, etc., so you will have everything ready if a rainy, snowy, or stormy day keeps you indoors. The best baking days are thus provided by nature herself.

-Lilly Joss Reich

We've had a good dusting of snow this week, so it's been the perfect time to bake some of these delicious, flaky, almond-y Mandeltaschen. Thanks to my recently reorganized pantry, I had everything on hand.

New Year, New Kitchen

Well, it only seems new. That's because Paul and I took everything out of the cabinets, bought some bins and reorganized. I'm awfully proud of it and I thought our ideas might help others with "problem" pantries. We rent, so it's not like we can remodel but we can rearrange. Our cabinets are so deep that it makes it really difficult to see what all we have (I had two bottles of molasses and two bottles of Karo syrup--I would just buy more because I didn't know what there was), so I decided to put everything in "media storage" bins. Welcome to a tour of my "new" kitchen!

Video: Wintry Herbal Tea (first Q&A post)

Wintry Herbal Tea from Lauren Hairston on Vimeo.

Dinner and a Movie: The Love Parade (1929)

Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade

I love early talkies. It's so amazing to get to see and hear the 1920s at the same time. I'm always blown away by that particular decade, because it, at once, seems so terribly modern and quaintly old-fashioned. Filmed in 1929, The Love Parade was director Ernst Lubitsch's first talkie, Jeanette MacDonald's first-ever film and (according to IMDb) the first movie musical to incorporate the songs into the storyline. The direction is top-notch, the sound is clear (it was all dubbed in post-production) and the cast is fantastic. Besides Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, there are roles for Eugene Pallette, music-hall veteran Lupino Lane (who would later introduce the world to "The Lambeth Walk") and former vaudevillian Lillian Roth. If you're a fan of 20s clothes, you'll want to check this one out. Jeanette MacDonald has a doozy of a wardrobe. The songs aren't really anything to write home about, but The Love Parade is such fun I don't think you'll mind. It had me hooked from the very beginning:

St. Lucia Blog Procession 2012

Heather at Audrey Eclectic (that's her work above) is hosting a St. Lucia Blog Procession today to celebrate St. Lucia Day, which happens every December 13th. Before we switched to the Gregorian calendar, the feast of St. Lucia coincided with the winter solstice.* The holiday is a celebration of the return of light after months of short days and darkness.

There's a town just north of us that does a Swedish Lucia Fest every year. Paul and I visited in 2010 and there's more about our visit at this previous post. I still haven't managed to make it back to Lindsborg to photograph the awesome taxidermy.

Heather made the traditional St. Lucia buns last year, so I thought I'd provide a couple of other Swedish recipes you can use this holiday season. They're both terribly yummy and can be scaled up for a party.