Category Archives: Home & Kids

Fall wine tasting

A few Saturdays ago, my husband and I went to a wine tasting at our friends Brad and Cassia’s house. Cassia used to work at a winery in California, and with a little encouragement she will launch into an enthusiastic comparison of real versus synthetic corks and other smart wine topics. They hold seasonal wine tastings at their cute little apartment. This was our third or fourth invitation, but every time they had hosted a party, we were out of town. What are the odds, I ask you? Someone was obviously conspiring against us. That’s why I was so excited to receive the quarterly evite and see that we could actually go to this one.

Here is the lovely hostess (in the middle) flanked by Stacy (left, another Nikon lover) and Sarah (right, with a haircut I may have to emulate).

Cassia made a delightful little tray of pumpkin muffins with a cinnamon sugar topping.

With a little encouragement I persuaded her to share the recipe, and will soon be sharing it with all you lovely people.

Cassia? If you were wondering why those muffins disappeared so quickly, well, I may have a confession to make. I simply ate them all, in a quick and quiet frenzy. Then I blamed it on the nearest partygoer.

Just kidding! But I did eat probably half of the cheese. My strategy was simple: position myself by the food with my camera and pretend to be taking a million artistic and well-composed shots. In between each shot, feed myself a delectable, creamy square of cheese. It’s not the first time my camera has allowed for successful subterfuge, and it won’t be the last.

The little bowls of cheese and the plate of salami had these adorable little labels.

Each guest had a wine glass assigned to them with his or her name written on a little circle of paper attached to the stem. It was brilliant–it saved me from losing my wine glass about 5 times.

In the dining room, the wine was laid out: 2 bottles each of 9 different kinds of wine; 4 red, 1 rosé, and 4 white. They were all hidden inside a brown paper bag with their identifying numbers.

The idea was that we would taste all the wines over the course of a couple hours, take notes on these adorable little tasting note cards, and guess from the master list which wine was which.

The person who correctly identified the most wines would win.

I’ll give you a hint: that person was not me.

I tried to challenge myself to smell and taste all the interesting things wine connoisseurs are always identifying in wines. Did it smell like citrus? Like jasmine? Like oak? I was miserably bad at it. I thought I might be good at it since I love cooking so much, and regularly smell and taste all my ingredients. However, as I closed my eyes and told myself “focus, focus: what do you smell?” while attempting to think outside the box and listen to my senses, all my brain said was “Well . . . mmm, it smells like wine!” It was time to beg our hostess for some help. “Cassia,” I said, “all I’m getting from this one is ‘table wine’. What is it that you smell?” She swirled the wine around, inhaled, tasted it. “I’m tasting some almost burnt caramel flavor. It also has some herby undertones to it.” I tasted again. It still read ‘table wine’ to me. “Burnt caramel, burnt caramel, burnt caramel,” I repeated to myself over and over again. “Table wine!” my consciousness shouted. “Be quiet and let me sense the burnt caramel!” I yelled back at myself. Soon there was a yelling match inside my own head. So I did what any reasonable person would do at this point–I gave up and moved on to wine #5.

Unfortunately, wine #9 ran out before I had a chance to taste it, so I shrugged my shoulders and randomly wrote in “Cuvet.” When the results came back in, it came to light that I had only guessed two wines correctly: #4, which was the Rosé (the, um, only Rosé), and #9. Two out of nine! Can you believe it? I think that means that I flunked wines.

What am I doing wrong??? And why can’t I be a wine conoisseur?

Well, at least I had a blast drinking all of them. Yes, I enjoyed every minute of the flunking experience and I slept like a baby that night, lemme tell ya.

It was the perfect party. It was both structured and casual. There was a goal–but one that welcomed conversation. Going for the next glass of wine kept everyone moving and circulating.

If the conversation lagged (doesn’t that happen every 7 minutes, on average?), you could compare tasting notes.

Jess and Nate showed up.

I was very excited because I had yet to meet their now 2 month old baby, Desmond. He is the master of face-making.

He mainly looked surprised to be alive.

Though I thought he also looked like he might have some wine-tasting wisdom of the ages, but just hadn’t learned how to put it into words yet.

If only he could have whispered the answers into my ear! Then I could have sent my A++ wine tasting report card to my parents for them to put on the fridge.

Watching little Desmond’s parents interact with him was one of the highlights of my evening.

Everyone tasted the wines thoughtfully . . .

And Cassia did the rounds, giving us her insight, though no hints, mind you.

On a tangent, Cassia has mastered the art of smiling for the camera. Please notice the open eyes, the relaxed mouth, and the nonexistent wrinkle factor. I apparently was failing at my own tutorial on the ‘fake smile.’ Gragghrar, I hate it when I don’t follow my own rules!

The winner was announced at the end. And it was Jon.

What a little usurper. Eventually I’ll take my rightful victory back from him.

But first I need practice. A lot of practice.

The 1-minute rule

I have always known that I was secretely lazy. Don’t get me wrong–I’m a very hard and responsible worker when outside factors are pushing me, like school, or a job. I’m a performance and approval driven person (and trying to get over it . . .), so if there’s a boss or teacher who needs to be pleased, I will do whatever it takes to get the job done. However, when it comes to motivating myself to do things that only I may care about . . . that’s another story. Earlier this year I journaled about it–I had just joined the gym near our apartment and was contemplating my new life of regular exercise:

“I want the infusion of energy that regular exercise brings, but this is also a chance to exercise discipline over myself–because with no external motivation, I appear to be naturally lazy. This was reinforced 2 weekends ago when my frustration about the state of our apartment was driving me mad–the mysterious brown piece at the back of the microwave, the 3 spots on the kitchen flor, the loose thread hanging from our library chair . . . so I had a small breakdown and threw myself into an emotionally charged, frenzied cleaning. At the root of it was the frustration I felt with myself for letting all these little things nag away at my soul and yet failing to take action! I was amazed at my laziness and appalled that I hadn’t just taken care of those things when they first bothered me. Most of them took a minute tops to put aright.”

My resolution after writing all this down was to do what I want. It sounds selfish initially, but with a deeper reading you’ll see that it’s really about self-control and discipline. If I truly want a lovely, clean home, I should be faithful to that desire and follow through to make it happen. It’s a way of being true to myself. I still struggle with it, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve found it helpful to identify what my true and deep desires are, and then to commit myself to working towards them to the best of my ability. For example, I want to be cute and sexy at home. I have a secret fear of becoming an unkempt wifely mess at some point in my life (greasy hair, soiled bathrobe, possibly fleas and/or lice) and I truly want to look as best as I can for my husband. However, my tendency is to throw on that pair of baggy, disgusting sweat pants that are now about 10 years old. I don’t know why I gravitate towards them–I just do (does anyone else have this problem?). So what is more important? My desire to please my husband (which also helps my own self esteem) and be the cute and attractive wife? Or my desire to feel the comforting existence of those pants surrounding me in all their baggy glory on a daily basis? I need to weigh my desires and choose the ‘true’ or greater one, and pursue that.

On a tangent, I’m not saying baggy sweatpants have no place in a marriage, or that wives shouldn’t dress to please themselves as well, or that being sexy and comfy aren’t compatible–hopefully you see the point beyond the example. Your case could, in fact, be the opposite–you feel oppressed by what you think you should look like and trapped by a sense of obligation to your spouse, and wearing those sweatpants could be a move towards freedom for you! Let each woman (or man! No discrimination against male readers!) know herself.

This also means that you have to have a good understanding not only of what your deep desires are, but how they relate to each other. Many times I have to prioritize one over another. I’ll give a kind of obvious example: I desire to be a good homemaker and have a clean, beautiful, peaceful house. However, I also value hospitality. I grew up in a very open and welcoming home, and I greatly admire my Mom’s ability to randomly take in large groups of people on very short notice, or take in a stranded person for Christmas who doesn’t have any family close by–and to do it all with a smile and a genuine enthusiasm and love for her guests. Large batches of homemade pizza, big pots of Pozole, or a paella were whipped up in the kitchen, beds were made, fresh towels laid out. Let’s be honest–hosting a large group can mean your house will soon become a messy, chaotic place (though I have high hopes of discovering the top-secret workaround to this otherwise universal truth via the Martha Stewart magazine). I desire to be hospitable, and I desire a clean and orderly home–the two desires in this example are in conflict. At that point I have to examine them and say ‘which is more important to me?’ And for me, hospitality trumps order. It’s more important for me to take in the 6 woebegone friends who are stranded in Chicago because their flights were canceled than to turn them down but keep my house clean and perfect. I would prefer to have luggage strewn all over, blankets layering the entire span of the livingroom, and a precarious pile of blow-up mattresses, than to have peace and quiet and not extend the hand of love to these friends.

This is hypothetical, since (unfortunately) no friends of ours have been stranded in Chicago. But I secretely hope that someday we’ll get a ‘freebie’ visit via living so close to an international airport.

I read a rule in a book called “The Happiness Project.” The rule essentially states that if it takes less than 1 minute to complete a certain task, you shouldn’t put it off. I think this little rule is extremely helpful, because it eliminates all the clutter of tiny things that you tend to leave undone until they’ve accumulated into One Massive Task. For example, last night my husband and I snuggled under a blanket on the couch. We watched a movie, drank tea, and then headed to bed. I knew that leaving the blanket on that couch in a messy pile was just going to depress me the next day when I encountered the ‘chaos’ in the morning light. I could have chosen to leave it because I was tired and just wanted to crawl into bed–but instead, I reminded myself “this will take 20 seconds tops”, folded the blanket, and felt much better about the general state of things both that night and the next morning. The mysterious piece of brown something in the back of the microwave that I journaled about took all of 10 seconds to wipe out and throw away–but I let it bug me every time I opened that microwave for over 3 weeks. I hereby proclaim that next time, I will simply grab a paper towel and deal with it on the spot.

It’s surprising how quickly those little details (especially the ones that relate to the house) can get under my skin and make me irritable. The 1-minute rule has been really helpful to me, and I hope it will be for you, too. But this little trick is part of a greater lesson that involves knowing your heart and pursuing what you truly desire with all your strength.