suziebeezieland

merry christmas, suziebeezieland ladies! xxoo

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace. 
(Isaiah 9:6)

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that all the world should be registered.
This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria.
And all went to be registered, each to his own town.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth,
to Judea, to the city of David,
which is called Bethlehem,
because he was of the house and lineage of David,
to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.

And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth.
And she gave birth to her firstborn son
and wrapped him in swaddling cloths
and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. 

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.
And an angel of the Lord appeared to them,
and the glory of the Lord shone around them,
and they were filled with fear.

And the angel said to them,
“Fear not, for behold,
I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior,
who is Christ the Lord.
And this will be a sign for you:
you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths
and lying in a manger.”
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host
praising God and saying,  

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” 

(Luke 2:1-14)

chocolate chip scones

Bob and I spent a very nice Wednesday evening celebrating our fifteenth anniversary, and now I am up late baking chocolate chip scones.  It has been a very wild week around here - wild health for several people I love, wild weather, wild busyness - and I am enjoying the calm and warmth of the Christmas kitchen at midnight.

I am sure that a dedicated scone pan is a horrid abomination to scone purists, but mine is my favorite non-essential kitchen item. 

Anyways, my chocolate-chip scone recipe itself is also, doubtless, an abomination to purists, so all is well. These scones are not mean little rocks that showcase your rugged Scottish constitution and say to all "I can live wild and free on the open moors with nought but some water and flour", or that rely on a heavy dousing of jam and clotted cream for moistness and, yay, even flavor.

No, no. 

I believe these particular scones must have been invented by the French.  

These are cream-infused, butter-topped, sugar-sprinkled, chocolate-filled scone cakes that will make people who have only ever sniffed in your general direction before suddenly très amicale because they want the recipe.

I do not exaggerate.

I present to you once again, my favorite recipe for chocolate chip scones. (I got it from a lady in Bible study several years ago. Her name was Julia.)

If you have an eight-scone scone pan (mine came from Harry and David), use it, because they will be so good and tall and moist. Brush the bottom of the pan with some of the melted butter, even if it's non-stick.

The other nice thing about a scone pan at Christmas is that you can give people scone "wreaths," made out of eight scones arranged on a plate in a circle. You might be the only person who notices it is wreath-shaped, but that's okay. It can be your little Christmas scone joke.

If you don't have a scone pan, don't feel bad about that. Use the dough to make twelve like the recipe says, or be luxurious and make eight. They will be a bit flatter and wobblier than if you'd used a scone pan, but they will still be delicious.

2 c. flour, sifted before measuring
3 T. unsalted butter, melted
1 T. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1/4 c. sugar + 2-3 T.
3/4 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 1/4 c. heavy cream

Position rack in the middle of the oven. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Scones will be put onto a heavy baking sheet, no grease. (Or into your buttered scone pan!)

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and 1/4 c. sugar into a bowl.  Toss with fork to mix them thoroughly. Mix in chocolate chips. Pour in cream; mix with a fork until it holds together. Dough will be sticky. Transfer to a lightly floured work space.  Knead dough ten times: push dough away with heel of hand, fold it back, turning a quarter.  (If you're using a scone pan, divide the dough into half, and half again, etc., until you have eight roughly equal pieces. Pat them into the triangles of the pan and top with the butter and sugar as directed.) Pat dough into a 9-inch disc.  Brush with melted butter and sprinkle with 2 T. sugar.  Cut into 12 pie-shaped wedges and transfer to baking sheet. Leave an inch between wedges. Bake for 15-17 minutes, or until tops begin to brown.

a bit of last-minute christmas inspiration

ETA: The search feature is not working well on my tumblr, so perhaps just go here and look through the December and November archives. Click on any little thumbnail that looks Christmas-y and interesting to you. :) Each photo will open in its own window.

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Hi, ladies. :) If you need any last-minute bit of Christmas inspiration, or if you just want to look at some pretty, Christmas-y pictures, I have gathered quite a few on the suziebeezie tumblr. The ideas and inspiration are from all over the place. :)

Only twelve thumbnail photos display per page, so make sure you keep clicking on "next page" to see them all. :) Click on any little rectangular thumbnail photo to see the whole picture.

ps I don't know why, but sometimes all the photos don't load the first time. Just keep reloading the page until you see twelve thumbnails on the first page.

ps1 I always over-explain tumblr. It's not really that confusing.

sweetie 1 + sweetie 2

354

I found two of these knobs at Anthropologie a couple weeks ago, and I bought them because they didn't cost very much and I thought they were pretty. 

I stuck them on a cheap little pine cabinet in our dining room that I bought at Ikea in 1996 or 1997. It was orangey-yellow pine for years, then when we moved into this house I painted it (light blue), then later I painted it again (black), then later I painted it again (white.) It has been white for a few years now. I'm sticking with white.

The original knobs were wooden and were painted on (I was lazy and didn't remove them for the black or white coats of paint) so they didn't come off even after I removed the screws. So I whacked them each with a hammer, just once, and they popped right off. That was surprisingly satisfying. I want to whack something else with a hammer. 

Now as I look at the knobs, I notice the period is missing after "No". So it's not actually an abbreviation for the word "number". It's just the word "no".

No! Vote no on 354! 

I wonder what 354 is. 

Despite appearances to the contrary, I don't actually have a master plan in place to turn my entire house yellow.

O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter!

We finally got our Christmas tree decorated this morning. :)

Claire and I tried really, really hard to be patient about getting a tree this year.  We put our other decorations out ages ago. It felt a bit like putting on a hat and gloves and fancy shoes, but no dress.

If I were more mature, I would raise my eyebrows slowly and cooly and insert brisk, pragmatic words here about the importance of patience, etc., etc., and whatnot. But you will have to search elsewhere for such a woman. Alas. 

Bob has been gone on business trips, and has had long hours at work, and then we were all gone to San Francisco.  And then he and Claire were both quite sick this past Friday and weekend (with two separate illnesses).  So the month has been zooming by, treeless. 

If Bob were gone for one long trip, of course Claire and I would have charged cheerfully ahead without him, and had that tree up in no time. It would have been crooked and would have lost most of its needles as I dragged it across the lawn from the car, and I would have had to do a running tackle to put the star on top, like in Elf, but it would have been up.

But Bob has had three separate, shorter trips, and was home in between each, so it seemed good to be patient and wait for him to find time to decorate it with us. After all, (1) he is the founder of the feast, and (2) he likes decorating Christmas trees a lot, too.

Then -- oh, joy -- we finally got a tree the day before yesterday (Sunday) when Bob felt a bit better. But you know how it is -- you feel better than you felt before, but not as well as you feel normally, and by the time you buy a tree and put it up, you realize you're not completely well yet, and you need to go to bed rather than stay up to decorate.  

So then Claire and I were patient some more, all through Sunday night and yesterday, when Claire was home sick from school, lying on the sofa and staring at that bare tree, and right up until today, when she was home sick again, and we were both looking at each other and thinking, "Would it really be that bad if we went ahead and decorated it ourselves?"

Of course we kept this traitorous thought to ourselves.

But then Bob surprised us by going in late to work this morning so that we could all decorate the tree together. 

Hooray! 

plenty of room at the hotel california

Lest you think I have forgotten that we are changing our craftroom into a guest room where you can watch t.v. and do crafts if you want to, no, I have not forgotten! Although I can see why you might think that, since I never finished painting my old dollhouse for Claire. (But I will!)(Some day!)(Soon!) I also never finished showing you our photos from England last spring. (But I will!)(Some day!)(Soon!) And there are other things we needn't discuss that I have kind of meandered through rather than hustled through, because I am a meanderer of meanderers.

But! I will have you know that the craftroom has been clean and painted for several weeks now, and has had a new twin bed in it for a couple weeks now, and the existing furniture is where it will be, and some stuff is hung back up on the walls. I'm waiting until we get a rug and chair to show you all of it, so that you don't think "wow, that's a weird place for a television," which is what you would think if I showed it to you now.

But I thought I could at least show you a photo of one of our first guests enjoying the comfy bed. :)

san francisco, part 2

After lunch on Saturday, we headed up the Embarcadero toward Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf. Just in front of the Ferry Building, I was delighted to see this charming pink bike and this even charminger knitted pole-cozy:

Did you ever? I never.

The historic trolley cars (not to be confused with the historic cable cars) stop right in front of the Ferry Building, so we took a few steps to the little shelter to wait for the trolley (Line F Market), and I looked down and saw this:

I had lunch with Diane Wakoski when I was in college. Just Diane and an English professor and I, sitting in the cafeteria. She's pretty interesting. I was surprised to find her there like that, all of a sudden.

San Francisco made me feel like Alice down the rabbit hole, really. I quite like that feeling, because then you start looking for unusual things, and unusual things start popping out, everywhere.

Going north on the Embarcadero in a trolley car from the Ferry Building is very enjoyable, because you can count the piers (starting from Pier One) on your right as you head up the coast. The buildings in front of the piers are all labeled, and they fly by. It's a quick trip to Pier 39.

Pier 39 is what I would describe as a clean, very touristy shopping area. When I was a teenager, I bought a poster of Mikhael Baryshnikov at Image Arts San Francisco. I was excited to see that the store was still there.

If Pier 39 consisted only of the shopping, you would be okay just skipping it. :) But there are such neat views out the back. 

For instance, there is Alcatraz. 

It makes me feel cold and lonely just looking at it.

(We didn't want to tour the island with Claire along because of course it's a grim tour, but if you wanted to do that, you just hop off at Pier 33. There is a whole industry devoted to Alcatraz. Pier 39 had several shops.)

And then there is this lovely view of Coit Tower, seemingly right-next-to and the-same-size-as the Transamerica Building, although in fact Coit Tower is 210 feet tall, and is in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood (on top of the hill), whereas the Transamerica Building is 850 feet tall and is in the Financial District. (We could see the Transamerica Building out our hotel window. I mean, we had to lean, but it was there.)

If you ever find yourself in the mood to read about wealthy socialites who wore trousers and smoked cigars and chased fires, read about Lillie Hitchcock Coit, whose money was used to build Coit Tower. She was a character.

So after we poked around Pier 39 for a bit (and saw the sea lions who lie on the docks), we walked the short rest of the way to Fisherman's Wharf.

While Pier 39 is touristy and borderline tacky, Fisherman's Wharf has just pulled out all the stops and is going for all-singing, all-dancing gaucherie. It seems to have been planned by the same folks who brought you the U.S. side of Niagara Falls.

Why do these places always have wax museums? And is all that yellow signage really necessary, Kodak store? Yeesh.

So I'd say skip Fisherman's Wharf, which is congested and ugly and mostly inane, but then you'd miss Boudin bakery's flagship location (which contains a bakery and cafe in Baker's Hall, a marketplace, and a bistro, plus a demonstration bakery and a museum), which is lovely, and you don't want to miss that. Boudin is San Francisco's oldest continuously running company (since 1849), and you would miss the wonderful smell and taste of fresh sourdough bread if you didn't pop in. 

(Although if you do decide to give Fisherman's Wharf a miss, there are other Boudin cafe/bakeries dotted around the city. There is one at Pier 39, for instance.)

The demonstration bakery faces the street through a 30-foot observation window, and you can speak to the bakers and hear them.

I'm not saying I did buy and then consume an entire .5 lb. round of sourdough bread in the time it took to walk from Boudin up to Ghirardelli Square, but if you wanted to do this, I bet you could. Yep.

I don't mind telling you that bread is my great food weakness in life. I could do without almost any food except bread.

(And cheese. I also need cheese.)

I remembered Ghirardelli Square fondly from my time with Elizabeth, Susie, and Jenny. The big sign wasn't turned on yet as we headed up the hill. Sorry about that.

However, this little midget sign was turned on, and this is where we entered to buy delicious chocolate. I should note that every time you go through the front door, you get a free sample of something. This time it was Peppermint Bark. 

(Oh, and chocolate. I also need chocolate.)

After Bob and Claire had each consumed an icecream sundae, which did not sound good to me at all because I may or may not have eaten half a pound of bread, we headed back down the Fisherman's Wharf to take our Mr. Toad's Tour. I absolutely recommend this if you visit San Francisco! We took the 90-minute "Holiday Lights" tour, and saw all kinds of interesting places: beautiful houses in the Marina District and Pacific Heights, the Presidio (an old Army base that is now a national park; the headquarters of George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic is there), Russian Hill, Nob Hill, North Beach (the traditionally Italian section of San Francisco, that is full of delicious-smelling Italian restaurants), lots of other places, and a wonderful view of the sparkly-at-night Golden Gate Bridge. 

I loved how the Palace of Fine Arts glowed. (It was built for the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915, which celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal and San Francisco's rebirth following the 1906 earthquake.)

It was just the nicest, coziest, most fun tour. And then we went back to the hotel and found milk and cookies waiting for us (awesome turndown service!) and went to bed. 

Tomorrow I will tell you about what we did Sunday, and that will conclude our little San Francisco vacation. :)

san francisco

We spent the weekend in San Francisco, and just came back yesterday morning. I was there for a couple days with my parents when I was a teenager, and then spent a very nice day there a couple years ago with Elizabeth, Susie, and Jenny. (That was when Claire still called it "France and Cisco.")

But these past three days were the most time I've ever spent just exploring the city, and wow, it's so neat.

We stayed at the Omni in the financial district ("FiDi"). It's a lovely hotel, with people just falling all over themselves to help you. We just loved it.  Their Christmas decorations in the lobby were so beautiful.

The entire financial district had really great trees outside. Everything would have been gray without them.

The Omni is on California Street, just down a bit from Chinatown.

I liked the layers of history and culture in this single photo below: the financial district represented by the high-rise (Diane Feinstein is criticized/credited for the "Manhattanization" of the area in the 1980s), and then Old St. Mary's Cathedral, which was finished in 1854 and survived the earthquake of 1906 (when everything in California west of the San Andreas Fault shifted north sixteen feet, and one-third of San Francisco was wiped out), and then Chinatown (which was established in the 1840s, and is the largest Chinese community outside Asia).

We got in Friday night, and Saturday morning we got up and walked uphill, up, up, up ...

... and more up, up, up (I kept stopping on the pretense of taking photos, but really, I was just gasping for air) ...

... to the Union Square area to have breakfast at Sear's Fine Food, famous for their Swedish silver-dollar pancakes. It was a long wait before we ate (our waitress was the busiest waitress I've ever seen) but yum, the pancakes were delicious, and we gobbled up everything on our table, so famished we were from our climb. (Eighteen come in a serving. We all three ate all eighteen of our pancakes!) 

Then we poked around Union Square for a bit, enjoying the big-city Christmas feeling. Say what you will about corporate America ... they are great with lights and trees. :)

Macy's had a tufted patent-red-leather theme going on inside, which wasn't really me, but chacun à son goût, right? Here Claire is sitting in Mrs. Claus's chair, and checking out a tree made of yarn balls, which I quite liked and fully expect one of you crafty girls to reproduce in your own living room mere minutes after seeing this.

The BEST tree was in Neiman Marcus, under their beautiful dome. 

The Union Square area is a really nice shopping district. We licked all the windows. :) 

After Union Square, we crashed at a Starbucks for a bit, and I gave Claire a little foot massage because she was complaining about sore feet. :) My feet were fine because I was wearing my old, super comfy brown clogs, which unfortunately were falling apart to begin with (I got them when Claire was in preschool) and which started leaking on Sunday, so that I had wet feet a good chunk of Sunday when it rained, and which therefore are now in the trash somewhere in San Francisco. R.I.P., good clogs. But Saturday was dry, and all was well.

So after cocoa and lattes, we headed toward the Ferry Building, which Bob had visited on business awhile back and thought I might like.

On the way, we saw some Santas.

Here is the Ferry Building from afar. It turned out to be my favorite thing we'd seen so far.

Behind the Ferry Building was the water and a good view of the Bay Bridge (which we'd crossed the night before coming from the airport in Oakland).

And inside the Ferry Building was a food market the likes of which I haven't seen outside Europe.

Local, fresh, sustainable, organic, gourmet, family-owned, artisan, and DELICIOUS ... all the words you want to hear about food. :)

Out front, there was a farmer's market, which I think is always there.

We ate lunch there at Gott's, which Bob remembered from a business trip as having super delicious hamburgers. He was right. :)

We sat outside. Bob was excited about all the northern California microbreweries they had on tap. I was excited because they had good sweet potato fries, and because Coit Tower is on the hill in the background to the left of Bob's head. Claire was excited because she saw the fattest pigeon she had ever seen (full of bread and sweet potato fries, I suspect), and because the chairs looked like they were dancing.

So that gets us to lunch on Saturday. :) I'll post more later about this fun city.