Tea for Two

To celebrate Mother's Day weekend, my mom and I went out to brunch at a local tea and scone shop.

It's a very ladylike place, decorated with shelves of traditional teapots that they actually take down and use to serve. It makes for a very homey atmosphere, like you just stopped by a tea-loving friend's house.


Besides light, flaky scones, they also happen to serve a really good breakfast on Saturday mornings- fruit blintzes and goat cheese omelets, complete with pomegranate tea and homemade chai.


The place was packed with groups of ladies who had the same idea as us. This meant that the scone case was pretty sparse by the time we were finished. Luckily we had ordered a box to take home as soon as we arrived, so we left with plenty to devour later on.

Out of Print

After having my eye on them for quite a while, I finally ordered one of Out of Print's vintage book cover t-shirts. Choosing one was such a hard decision. Should I base my choice on the book that I like best, or on the design?

It felt a bit sacrilegious to not pick one of the Austen or Bronte shirts...


...but then, the kitchyness of the Nancy Drew cover was tempting too.

In the end, I decided to go with Tales of the Jazz Age since it combines an author I love with a design that I like.

Which one would you pick?

Credit Where Credit is Due

For this post, all the credit belongs to Matchbook magazine's Daily Spark blog, where I came across a couple of lovely little finds.

First are these letterpress portraits of famous authors. Wouldn't they look great hung in a grouping near a bookshelf?

Next are the only Royal Wedding souvenirs I've seen that manage to look charming, not cheesy.

I could even imagine some of these being a cute wedding token for any girl and her prince.

1+1= Too Easy

In the past week, I've whipped up a couple of quick, homemade desserts that only require two common ingredients each.

When a milkshake craving hit, I picked up some milk and chocolate ice cream to try making my own. After some pretty self-explanatory blending of the two, I ended up with a cool and refreshing treat.


Another day, inspired by an idea from sterlingstyle, I decided to make my own peanut butter chocolate bars.

Melt together some semi-sweet chocolate chips and peanut butter.

Spread onto some wax paper and refrigerate for a bit.

Break into wedges and eat. The result is like a slightly fudgier version of a chocolate bark.

I'm sure I don't have to point out the danger of the easiness factor here. It makes it hard to resist indulging in dessert when both of these require only slightly more effort then, say, picking up a piece of fruit or opening up a Greek yogurt.

Away

It's been a couple of days since I read the last words of Away, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

Amy Bloom is an amazing writer. She conveys so much by saying just a little, or by using an unexpected description. And to say that her writing is ambitious in its scope would be a vast understatement. Like the stories of hers that I've read, the characters in this novel are so widely varied yet so vividly drawn that it's hard to believe they all came out of the head of one author.

In Away, we meet Lillian Leyb, a Jewish immigrant who flees to America in the 1920's after her family is killed and her daughter is lost in during a siege on her Russian village. While working as a seamstress in New York, she learns that her daughter may still be alive in Siberia and makes the decision to travel back to Russia, heading across America, through Canada, via the Bering Strait. Along the way, Lillian, a basically good character, falls into one bad situation after another- serving as mistress for both father and son in a prominent theater family, falling in with a prostitute in Seattle, and inadvertently killing a man. By the time she ends up in a Canadian women's prison, about 2/3 of the way through the book, I really felt like I was hitting a wall with her story. All of the things happening to Lillian just started to feel like too much and made me wish that I could just put the book down rather than continue the harrowing journey. I had to push myself to make it to the end.

I think I'll have to settle for admiring, though not necessarily liking, the book. Has this ever happened to you?

And by the way, I'm officially accepting recommendations for any decidedly lighthearted books that I can pick up next.