Lil' Eats

I had some time today to wander around and check out a bunch of little places I found on the interwebs and basically noshed my way around town.

Chök - Their beautiful display of gourmet doughnuts caught my eye as I walked by. It's around the corner for La Bocqueria and boy oh boy was I bummed out that Adam wasn't in Barcelona with us. Surely, Adam would have organized an extensive tasting of doughnuts had he been here. Instead, I admired the treats and bought a chocolate covered churro.

Lots of doughnuts

Wait, there's even more doughnuts

Chocolate "salami" or chocolate ganache mixed with crushed cookie, shaped like a salami and dusted with powdered sugar

More doughnuts, this time displayed on dowels

Lis Bakery - This gardenista review of the La Bocqueria Market referenced xuxus or xuixo, a custard filled flakey pastry, which led me to Lis Bakery about 10 minutes from my hotel. 

Cute little storefront 

Some xuixos in the window

 

Whole

Yummy custard filling with crisp flakey crust

Horchateria SIRVENT - Croissanteria, Focacciaria, Horchateria...don't mind if I do. I had to turn on my iPhone to make sure I was heading the right direction and it was worth the data I used to find it. It's a little dessert and drink cafe that serves horchata...hence the name horchateria. I enjoyed a cold glass in the cafe and bought a takeaway cup for Adam's mom to try.

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Butifarring - This was another one I found on Culinary Backstreets. Homemade sausages served in crusty baguettes. I ordered the Classico Catalan style sausage with onions and cheese and an itty bitty mini one euro beer. They also recommended the aioli and spicy braves sauce as toppings.  I would have inhaled the entire thing, but I didn't want to fill up an hour before dinner.

Char grilled homemade sausage with mini beer

Cafe Granja Viader - I walked by this churro and chocolate place at least three times today to triple check their hours and make sure I didn't miss out. I insisted we go after a very filling tapas dinner and it was a tasty little treat. The dark hot chocolate was not too sweet, not too dark and the viscosity was just right for dipping my hot churros.

Cafe Granja Viader

Dark Hot Chocolate and Churros

Roca Moo

We checked out the La Pedrera first thing this morning and enjoyed a long leisurely lunch around the corner at Roca Moo. Their lunch special included:

• Four small "snacks"
• Extra little appetizer
• Soup
• Appetizer
• Main course
• Desser
• Extra dessert aka petite fours
• Oh, and there was sparkling water, one class of wine and coffee to boot

Note: Sorry about the lackluster photos. Adam's better at taking food photos because he's a perfectionist and infinitely more patient. I just wanted to eat. Language barriers also left us with very succinct food descriptions and we're not sure 100% what was in everything. It was tasty!

Small starter snacks. Strawberry & Campari bon bon with liquid inside. Some sort of melon cute with red savory flakes

 Small starter snacks included small arepa like sandwiches and a crispy shrimp stick with carefully placed dots of sauce and caviar

Extra appetizer of cod foam and fried cod skin

Cold cucumber soup and tomato soup with olive ice cream and a bunch of other surprises like mussels 

Vegetable ravioli with arugula foam

Duck with figs and some sort of white apple gel foam

Pineapple with cheese ice cream, dehydrated pineapple slice and crunchy freeze dried bits of something tasty

Not pictured...petite fours included mango pate fruit, chocolate truffle and chocolate caramel candy

Catalan Way Today

Day two in Barcelona and it's Catalan Day. Catalonian flags are flying everywhere: over buildings, over the Sagrada Familia, as sarongs, on shirts, on portable flagpoles and my favorite of all, on people's backs like superhero capes. It's very festive and quite crowded. I use "quite" in the way Adam uses it which means "very" crowded. If only it wasn't frowned upon to creatively wear the American flag, we might encounter more flag wear back home. Creative flag wear may not be a great trend overall, but American flags as superhero capes could be the next big thing. Watch out Cap'n America!

Tiny House...Big Obsession

"Tiny houses are the next BIG thing" according to the hosts of my new favorite show, Tiny House Nation. There's just something about these tiny houses that are almost alluring. We live in a pretty spacious but cozy home that's far from tiny, yet I'm strangely obsessed with tiny houses.

• Whenever someone posts something tiny house related on Facebook, my feed kinda blows up and I enthusiastically google "tiny houses" and spend at least an hour ogling photos of tiny houses. 
• I'm so excited about Somerville BIG tiny house festival in September. I'm so there and I'm so dragging Adam with me. 
• I would absolutely consider hopping on a plane to visit a tiny house uninvited if only one of my acquaintances would move into one. Build some tiny houses people!!!
• I not so secretly wish I could have a tiny house for my yard so I can go hang out there and pretend to be some sort of tiny house homesteader which might invite unfortunate comparisons to Marie Antoinette now that I think of it.
• I watch Tiny House Nation religiously, more religiously than my actual prayer habits. After each week's episode of Tiny House Nation, I find Adam and hopefully suggest, "maybe we should live in a tiny house?"

Fortunately for Adam, I'm not actually serious about living in an actual tiny house given that our newly renovated kitchen is the size of a tiny house. Why then am I totally enamored with these teeny tiny homes? A few thoughts:

• Tiny houses are so damn cute!
• Freedom! Financial freedom from radical downsizing. Freedom to enjoy life versus the obligation of taking care of stuff.
• Tiny houses are like Swiss Army knives with their ingenious multipurpose design idea.
• Tiny houses need to be so efficiently designed, that there's virtually no wasted space and how virtuous is that?
• I have a hunch that it would be good for my soul to live with less stuff. At least I could finally have some sort of life choice that I could be justifiably self righteous about because my love of junk food is never going to be righteous, it's merely obnoxious. 
• Oh, I forgot to mention that tiny houses are really freakin' cute.

While I will probably never live in an actual tiny house, the tiny house movement does prompt me to be feel gratitude. It also reminds me that if I don't really "need" or "want" a larger home, it's not "unAmerican," it's maybe a perfectly okay choice.

It's really a "junk" station, but let's call it a modular storage solution

Adam and I have a special talent for creating piles of clutter and we're constantly trying to invent new systems of organizing our entryway stuff with very little success. Because we've totally bought into the American Dream, the one where everyone can shop their way into a super organized life, we've shopped our way into a new system that I'm hoping will help us find our stuff so we can get out the door more easily. A girl can dream!

Our little entryway is too small for a console table so we appropriated a shallow area in the corner of our kitchen. It's a mere 15 inches deep so anything deeper than 13-14 inches starts intruding into the walkway of the kitchen and anything less than 12 inches is kinda useless and flimsy. I almost had to buy a children's bookcase since it was a bit challenging to find an attractive shallow bookcase that was sturdy, functional and the right size.

My original plan was pretty conventionally boring, buy some canvas bins and baskets and organize our stuff,  but then I came across this modular bookcase where the bins and trays are actually built into the design. The bookcase is a wood frame and then you can buy separate modular trays, shelfs and bins to configure the storage. Rather than buying a traditional bookcase and then buying separate bins and trays to organize the bookcase, it's all integrated.

We just go it today so we're still getting used to it, but right now we have our bins and trays set up so we each have a separate bin. That way, our stuff can coexist peacefully without too much stressful commingling. I'm really hoping that Adam won't be asking me "where's my wallet" or "where's my phone" or " where's my sunglasses" or "have you seen my bag" as much. Like I said, a girl can dream!

Kitchen Renovation: Complete at Week 12

Hooray! Pull out the giant scissors and cut the ginormous ribbon, I'm calling it complete at week 12. Now we just need to pass that final inspection, but that's just administrative mumbo jumbo.

Red pendant lamps with a vintage flair over our big table provide a big punch of red color and much needed light

(Red Old Dixie Pendant w/ Chevron Cord)

We hung up our colorful Cow and Pig butcher diagrams in the same spot as our old kitchen

(Drywell on Etsy)

Much bigger spice rack with five tiers was the most functional and capacious rack I could find

(J.Brothers & Company)

Just in case you're looking for the loo, a faux vintage WC sign. "Powder room" seemed too fussy, "Restroom" too commercial and "Bathroom" seemed misleading so "WC" it is.

(Farmhouse Musings)

Compost bin that I'm using as a countertop trash can. I've labeled it "Trash" so no one is under the false impression that I'm some sort of hippie that composts.

Kitchen Renovation: Weeks 8-11...almost there

I've been procrastinating on kitchen renovation updates because I was waiting for it all to be 100% complete and presentable which is a bit silly in retrospect. By week 10, the kitchen was fully operational and we started moving all of our stuff back in. Next week, the last of the paint and the electrical should be totally finished. Yay!

Do we love our new kitchen? YES YES and YES!!! Last week, I came down to find Adam quietly singing a made up song to himself that goes something like this, "I love my new kitchen, la la la." We're enjoying the open space and we're appreciating all the extra storage though we manage to fill it up pretty quickly and had to get rid of a few things. 

Our new kitchen is a larger L shaped layout with an eat in dining table

The white cabinets are all IKEA with white Lidingo style doors

The marble-esque counters are Caesarstone London Grey quartz

We kept one leg of the L shaped layout as one continuous counter for baking, making coffee, toasting bread, etc. Since the kitchen is eat in, we'll use this long counter as a sideboard or buffet.

Pullout storage for all my baking supplies

Flat plastic storage for more baking equipment and supplies. A box for cookie cutters, a box for  cellophane bags, a box for cupcake liners and even a box for skewers because I have an unexplainably large collection of skewers.

At the end of the counter is a little nook I like to call the "appliance carport" for tucking our small appliances out of the way.

We love this IKEA tall pantry for storing our food including about 10 kinds of crackers.

Custom open bookshelf above the sink for all our cookbooks and it's also a perfect spot for our Jambox. A second prep space to the right of the sink. 

Six burner gas cooktop with a exhaust hood. I'm so excited that our whole house won't smell like food with this more powerful exhaust hood. 

P.S. Our contractor did a wonderful job installing our tile backsplash, it looks so serene

 Drawers under the cooktop for all our pots and pans

Custom shelving for storing sheet pans, cupcake pans, madeline pans, trays, etc.

More storage for bundt pans, cake pans, springform pans, lasagna pans, etc.

So open!!! Our dining table is a butcher block table top installed on an electric adjustable table base from MultiTable. We can raise it to counter height for more prep space and lower it to dining table height for eating and playing games.

The dining chairs are stackable so we can store them in the corner and they're [wink wink] made of plastic. If you're wondering where you should put your used napkin...put it in the bag that says "laundry."

Kitchen Renovation: Week 7 brings counters

They opened up the sheetrock partition today so they could start working on the various trim work for the room. If you remember, the original opening to the kitchen used to be much larger, but we shrunk the opening down a bit to accommodate more cabinets along the wall and to create an actual doorway.

I'm really liking the Caesarstone London Grey counters Marbella Kitchen and Bath installed today. I really love the look of marble, but I didn't want the hassle of maintaining natural stone since we're not the neatest bears and we like to eat colorful foods so we went with engineered quartz that looks a little marble-esque. The installation took about an hour and the kitchen felt like a clown car with about 8 of us hovering in and around the room and large slabs of counters being maneuvered around piles of equipment and appliances. 

I'm excited about the giant sink!

We opted to extend the counters to the wall in this corner to utilize the dead space. It doesn't look like much now, but I'm hoping to store our countertop appliances in this little nook so they're accessible, but out of the way. I'm calling it our appliance carport. 

Next up is figuring out wall paint color.