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…
It’s December 31st! The year is ending, and with it our Little Women menu. It’s been a fun year, folks! I’m excited to start a new one with you tomorrow, so today I decided to post something I’ve been working on for MONTHS: a full review of all of the teas we’ve made on AWR!
Back in August, I invited my friends Laura and Mary from The Twins’ Guide over to perform a very serious task: review our Alison’s Wonderland Teas. The goal was to see how the teas hold up across a range of different palates and get some ideas about which ones could be improved. There are a few teas in this post that weren’t reviewed at the party because I hadn’t created them yet (like the chocolate mocha tea). For these, I brewed them several ways over the course of weeks to be sure they created a balanced cup each time.
Below you’ll find a picture of each tea followed by its name, description, a food pairing, and notes from the review. The pictures and titles link to the page on Adagio.com where you can order each tea. Enjoy!
P.S. These are all loose teas. To brew, you can place them in a tea infuser or paper tea filter…or you can drink your tea like Professor Trelawney and brew the leaves loose in the teapot! 🙂
I mentioned in my first Little Women post that Jo celebrates Christmas while living away from home for the very first time. She loves New York but is a little homesick…until a box of homemade gifts arrives from home, delicious bits of crunchy gingerbread among them! This recipe from Taste of Home is jut the sort of sweet, fragrant, gently spicy cookie that would warm my heart and lift my spirits if I were Jo March. And to make them even more in keeping with our Little Women theme, I decided to decorate my cookies to look like the March sisters!
No fruit or vegetable appears more often in Little Women than apples. They’re Jo’s go-to reading snack, and the final chapter is even set in the Bhaers’ apple orchard. In honor of Jo’s apples, I decided to make my own interpretation of baked apples, which pairs well with our turkey roulade and has enough sweet-savory balance to work as a side dish or dessert. Plus, it’s got those cozy, subtle spice flavors that fit so well in a Christmas menu!
Today is my 2nd wedding anniversary! Last year on my anniversary, I posted about the origin of my wedding ring. Since it’s still one of my most popular posts, I decided to do another anniversary post, this time about my bouquet. Enjoy!
When I was a little girl, I didn’t have big plans for my wedding. I had no idea what kind of dress I wanted to wear or how many tiers the cake should have. In fact, I very much doubted I’d get married at all, since I wasn’t exactly the go-out-and-meet-new-people type. I was more the stay-inside-reading-all-by-myself type.
But when I was in middle school, I came across a poem (an old Irish folk song by Thomas Moore) that made me sure of one thing: the kind of flower I wanted in my wedding bouquet. The song is called “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and it goes a little something like this:
As a 6th grader, I hadn’t read a lot of love poems, but I’d read enough to know that they almost always fixate on the youth and beauty of the beloved. This one was different. It was about how those qualities will fade, but the lover only sees it as an opportunity to show how deep their love really goes. I realized this was what I wanted to find some day. And that’s what sunflowers came to mean for me: constancy, devotion through time
When the Mister and I decided to get married, I knew I’d found someone I was excited to get old with. I still wasn’t that worried about the dress and the cake, but now I knew why: the wedding day is just a single day. Yet, it’s the beginning of a marriage, which goes on for the whole rest of your life. Weddings aren’t about being young and beautiful. They’re about creating something that will still be there when youth and beauty are gone.
Legend has it Moore wrote the song for his wife, after she contracted smallpox and locked herself away from the world, ashamed of her scars. It’s said he sang it to her outside her door, and it gave her the strength to face the world again.
I still have the flowers in the picture, but they’re not fresh and young anymore. My mom dried them for me, and I keep them in a mason jar on our bookcase. They’re frail and withered, and they fade a little more each year.
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. 🙂
As you may recall, we made roasted turkey legs for our Christmas Carol menu this time last year. However, the Marchs’ Christmas turkey features so prominently in Little Women that I decided to pay turkey another visit. This elegant turkey breast roulade (a variation on one I found at The Cozy Apron) is very different from last year’s simplistic recipe. The bread, apples, nuts, and sage are ingredients that the impoverished Marchs could have grown or gathered themselves. When paired with a small amount of luxurious dried cranberries and cider glaze, the dish is elevated to something truly special…and it stretches a simple turkey breast a long way, something a large family like the Marchs would have no doubt appreciated!
December is here, and with it all the trappings of Christmas. Since I moved in early November and didn’t get a chance to decorate for Halloween, I was determined not to let that happen for Christmas. On the first night of Advent, I set the lights low, turned on a CD of Christmas hymns, and finished almost all my decorating in one night (I saved the tree for the next day). I was so ready for it, and it was actually really relaxing. I even found that it has been a lot easier to remember the “reason for the season,” I guess because it gave me a chance to think about why I was decorating. I know I won’t always get that, so I was grateful to have it this year.
Happy December, folks! How was your Thanksgiving? I was home sick from mine 🙁 , but I was able to send the Mister with a batch of homemade applesauce I froze a few weeks beforehand. Yay!
In much more pleasant news, I FINISHED MY NOVEL FOR NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH! Not gonna lie, I spent almost 20 minutes last night dancing around and singing. I’m extra excited because this was my very first time doing NaNo. It was tough, but I made it!!! I definitely want to try it again next year. I already have an idea for the book I want to write! 😀
Of course, since we’ve come to the end of our November menu, we also have a new tea blend available through Adagio Teas. In honor of our Divergent menu, I created Tori’s Peppermint Tea. It’s the perfect blend of peppermint, spearmint, and lemongrass with a lemon balm and marigold inclusion: refreshing and full-flavored without the menthol sensation being too overpowering. I love it both hot and iced. In fact, it’s been one of my few comforts while I’ve been sick (nothing like mint tea with a touch of honey to soothe a sore throat). Totally my new favorite green tea!
What have we got planned for our December Book of the Month? Here’s a hint:
All the items in this picture play important roles in our new Book of the Month (some of you may remember this picture from a guest post I published on another blog. If you can figure out which one, you’ll know the new book right away!).
