January is just about over, folks. What a month it has been! I was nominated for the Creative Blogger Award, took part in my first Top Ten Tuesday linkup, and continued taking part in the Beautiful Books/Beautiful People post series. Plus, I started two new types of posts here on AWR: reading kits and tea premieres! My plan is to post a new reading kit and custom tea blend for every Book of the Month from here on out.
In a way, that just makes it all the harder to move on to our next menu. My one comfort is that the new menu I have in mind involves something I love just as much as King Arthur! Ready for your photo hint? Here it is!
Our new menu is going to be a Pop Culture Corner contribution: our very first TV Series of the Month! Though I don’t plan on doing many TV menus (I don’t want to depart TOO far from classic books), I just HAD to make a menu for this particular show. And once you see what it is, I think you’ll agree that it definitely falls into the “classic” category. 🙂
ANY GUESSES AT WHAT OUR NEXT MENU OF THE MONTH WILL BE?
Initially I wasn’t planning on continuing with Beautiful Books/Beautiful People posts after finishing last year’s NaNo challenge, but I liked the questions for this month’s prompt so much, I actually filled them out just for fun before I even considered making a linkup post! Maybe I’ll keep going with these linkups. Who knows? Let me know if you’re interested in seeing more! 🙂
Would you like to know how excited I was about getting this award? I was so excited that when I tried to title this post, I accidentally called it a “blooger” award. I’m not sure what a blooger is, but something tells me it’s like a blogger, just a lot more awkward…and probably hopped up on sugar. ^.^
Here are the rules for the Creative Blogger Award:
Thank the blogger who nominated you and post the link of said blog.
Share five facts about yourself to your readers.
Nominate 15 to 20 blogs and notify all nominees via their social media or blogs. (NOTE: I decided to only nominate 4. I follow about 35 blogs total and only wanted to nominate those that I thought truly fit the award, rather than working to come up with 15 names to meet the total.)
My very bookish Christmas book haul: an Alice in Wonderland infinity scarf, Novel Teas, Irish pub and Downton Abbey cookbooks, and an olde book messenger bag! My mom and sister actually got me the scarf and teas after seeing them in my bibliophile gift post last year. I’m hoping I can work at least a few of these things into post pics for this year. Fingers crossed! 🙂
Now that we’re starting a fresh new year, I want to give you guys a heads up on some changes you can expect to see around here:
DOUBLE THE POSTING, DOUBLE THE FUN. I’m planning on expanding my schedule and posting twice a week. In addition to my usual weekly recipe, I’ll also post monthly reading kits, Top Ten Tuesday linkups, new tea overviews, and one random post per month. Huzzah!
AN UPDATED THEME AND TEA PAGE. You may remember that some unexpected side effects from a theme update had me shopping for themes last August. I love the theme I found (Tweak Me by Nose Graze), but I want to change the colors and fonts, plus add an awesome header a friend made for me. Some time this month I’ll shut the site down for maintenance for a day so I can make all the updates. In the process, I’ll update our tea page so that, instead of a gallery with just names, there will be paragraph descriptions and food pairings for each tea (much like the format of our 2015 tea review).
WHAT DO WE WANT? A CONSOLIDATED PINTEREST PAGE. WHEN DO WE WANT IT? …PROBABLY SOME TIME TODAY, ACTUALLY. Originally I organized my Pinterest profile by having a board for each menu, but now there are just too many boards. Some time this week (maybe even before this goes live), I plan to condense all my menu boards down to one.
MAKE WAY FOR 2016 NANO! As many of you may recall, I won National Novel Writing Month last November! I’m planning on taking part this year too, so keep an eye out for writing updates when November rolls around.
I WILL FIGURE OUT YUMMLY. I SWEAR ON A STACK OF A MILLION COOKBOOKS. I signed up for Yummly last August and was all excited about it, since it was a streamlined way for me to add printables to all my recipe posts. Unfortunately, I’ve been having trouble getting my posts to upload. When I submit my post to the Yummly database, weeks go by before it’s processed (and sometimes it never gets processed at all). I’ve been working on the problem on and off since I signed up, but now it’s time to buckle down and truly devote myself to solving it. I’m determined to fix it soon…because you beautiful Wonderlings deserve printables! 🙂
Happy 2016, folks! Is there a change you’d like to see that I didn’t mention in the list?
Leave it in a comment below, and I’ll take it into consideration! 🙂
Happy 2016, folks! Can you believe we’ve made 52 recipes this year? I can’t. I’m convinced cooking fairies came in the night and finished all these posts for me…mostly because I want to believe there are such things as cooking fairies. 😉
These little beauties combine white rum, vodka, lime, coconut water, strawberries, and fresh basil into a refreshing accompaniment to homemade basil crackers.
Do you have your drink? Ok. Time to reveal this year’s most popular posts! The winners are…
Here’s my last Beautiful Books linkup for National Novel Writing Month! I got all the way to 50k words with my first draft, so I’m feeling super accomplished. Now comes editing! This linkup focuses on my plans in that arena. If you’d like to see which other NaNo writers have joined the linkup, swing by Paper Fury and take a look! Plus, read some of Cait’s posts while you’re there, because she’s hilarious and awesome. 🙂
…moving quickly in a car past me and about a million other people. But it still counts.
This is a pic the Mister got as the Pope drove by us!
You may have noticed that I’ve been mostly AWOL from the the interwebs since Thursday. That’s because I’ve been busy flying to Philadelphia and fangirling over Pope Francis all weekend!!! I walked more than 20 miles over the span of 3 days: first site seeing in Philly and then gettin’ down with my Catholic self at the Festival of Families and the Papal Mass. SO MANY PEOPLE! SO MUCH EXCITEMENT! 😀
Needless to say, this made blogging a bit tricky. In fact, I pretty much failed at sharing my last Monty Python post on Facebook/Twitter. So I decided to make up for it by posting the shares today and linking to it here (better late than never, right?). If it’s any consolation, we’re finishing up our Monty Python menu today by adding a new custom tea to our Adagio collection: Monty Python’s Coconut Camelot Tea! Click on the link or the pic below to see a description of the tea and details on how to order.
Wow…with our Monty Python menu finished up, that means it’s almost October! HOW can it be almost October, guys? I could have sworn September just started yesterday. Then again, this month has been super busy for me, and not just with papal visit plans. I interviewed Jonathan Stroud about his new book tour a couple weeks ago, and I just finished my next Real Life at Home guest post. Plus, the Mister and I are moving on Halloween, and I’m doing NaNoWrMo this November. In short: CHAOS! It’s really no wonder October snuck up on me. Still, I’m SUPER excited for our new menu, especially since it involves one of my favorite authors! Want a hint as to what it could be? Check out the picture below!
Any guesses at what it could be? BONUS HINT: Instead of focusing on one book, this menu will focus on several books all by the same author (not necessarily a series).
Now then, I’m going to find a lovely little corner of my apartment in which to curl up and sleep off my 7 am flight from yesterday (if I wake up and see my shadow, we get 6 more weeks of fall).
Last night, I interviewed Jonathan Stroud (famous for his bestselling Bartimaeus series) at a tour event for his new book, The Hollow Boy! And strangely enough, I owe it all to Goodreads. 🙂
I devoured the Bartimaeus books when they first came out, so I was thrilled when Goodreads notified me about Stroud’s new series: Lockwood & Co. It’s the story of three teens who run their own ghost-hunting agency in London, which is plagued by a sudden and mysterious ghost epidemic. An avid ghost story reader, I decided to read and review the first two Lockwood books (you can read my reviews here and here). Goodreads also informed me that Stroud was planning a promotional tour for the newest Lockwood book, The Hollow Boy. One of the tour events was scheduled to take place in La Grange, IL…not far from where I live! I tracked down the contact info for Stroud’s publicist and asked if I could pretty please have an interview with Mr. Stroud at the La Grange event. The publicist was gracious enough to forward the info to him, and he said YES! * cue shameless fangirl squeals *
So there’s this book blog called Paper Fury that I follow religiously. The author (Cait) is hilarious, quirky, clever, and original…and she blogs about books, which automatically makes her awesome in my world. Anyway, she recently published a post entitled Why Books Should Always (Copiously) Mention Food, and I love it because she basically sums up my reasons for book-and-food blogging. She has this to say about the book/food relationship:
Hey there, everybody! I’ve got some exciting news: I just became a guest writer for Real Life at Home! My first post is a recipe for Heart Petit Fours with Raspberry Cordial Jam. It’s a mash-up of some previous Alison’s Wonderland recipes you might recognize (Hearts of Gold and Raspberry Cordial Ice Cream). And just in time for Valentine’s Day! You can view the post here or by clicking the images in this post.
