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soupapalooza!

the stories
the kitchen
the market
the proof (party pics!)
the food porn
the recipes
the about
the drop me a line part
the resources
the full list
jewelry alchemy

honey almond bee cake: a boozy baby shower for the bomb of a great friend

Miss Maria Hold-the-Eggs did not, as her pseudonym suggests, actually “hold the egg”, and went and got herself all kinds of up the duff. As in preggers, mit kinder, knocked up, in a family way, riding the baby train, all blowed up on baby... in any event, she failed the rabbit test, all right, in a big, bad kind of way.

Which is great for a lot of reasons, the least important of which being that it gives me a fabulous excuse to stop with the dour posts about OCD, antidepressants & other mental mishaps not otherwise specified/diagnosed. So it’s a win-win for you, dear reader, too; A soft pink palate cleanser to wash away the existential soup pain.

Because Miss Maria Hold-the-Eggs is one of my all-time favorite people on this planet, her pregnancy gave me a great excuse to co-host a Sunday party-- like I’ve ever needed an excuse to do that-- and with a tremendous amount of help from her lovely sisters, we threw the parents-to-be one really fun fete. No games, no crustless cucumber sandwiches and no estrogen-only requirements for admission, oh no. It was rock and roll, a burger bar, a boatload of beer and champagne punch and boys and girls from all sorts of creative provenance. In short, it was a really fun party to welcome our newest future ‘poloozian to her fold...and we all seriously cannot wait to meet her.

I’ve been asked before how it is that I throw parties for large amounts of people without killing myself (and, more often, the cat), and I think this party made for a really great template anyone can follow to have an easy time of it. Here is a list of some of the things I have on hand and some of what I have learned from a year and a half of steady on-the-job training...

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PostedApril 19, 2011
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriesparty planning, gear and miscellany, desserts & sweet treats
Tagsit's a girl!, special pan, mit kinder, boozy baby shower, williams sonoma, party tips, nutty, burger bar, baking, honeybee almond cake, Maria-Hold-the-Eggs, baby shower, honey bee
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roasted beet, cabrales, dried cherry and toasted walnut arugula salad: rock out, whatever

A bird pooped on my head and down my shirt this last Sunday, which only further bolsters my long brewing animosity towards nature. I’m not a happy camper, quite literally, and I’ve never understood why sleeping outside of four walls and a roof is any more magical than driving out to a location well beyond the lights of the city to marvel at the stars and then returning to a place with a hot shower and clean sheets. I don’t need or have any desire to wake up, dirty, with a creaky back and caffeine withdrawal, only to hike back to my overheated car, no thank you.

Two of my fellow ‘paloozians had milestone birthdays within two days of each other this week, and though I will not repeat that scary number (scary at least to single girls with pet children), it rhymes with worty, which no one wants to be except Madonna who, in a fit of good Kabbalah luck was “enlightened” at worty. 

Anyway, in an impromptu celebration of these two women, a few of our rag tag crew drove up north of Santa Barbara to a very beautiful state park and went glamping. No, that was not a typo; we went “glamorous camping”, which I would argue, is as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp. What exactly is glamping you ask? Glamping basically consists of a few steps. One: drive to a very nice campground in your Prius  (for the record and as I stated earlier, the environment and I are not exactly facebook friends, so obviously the Prius belongs to someone else-- I prefer my cars to get less than 14 MPG) which will be weighted down with three ice chests full of such necessities as carrot cake, israeli couscous salad, artisanal goat cheese, truffle sausage and fig jam. Next, pay the nice lady in the log cabin the cost of a very nice piece of furniture for two nights, spend the next hour unpacking the car and then apply bug spray before settling in to your posh camp house, which is really just a re-branded mobile home made to look like a log cabin. And finally, after all this, order your BBQ kit consisting of hamburger, fixins, tools and ingredients to make s’mores, to be delivered directly to your fire pit for dinner. 

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PostedJuly 21, 2010
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriessalad, vegetarian
Tagssalad, glamping, dried cherry, recipe, roasted beets, worty instead of 40, walnut, the great pothole of 39, blue cheese, beets, cabrales, not a friend of mother earth, Leggsy McGhee, a bird pooped on my head, Innercity Velvet, Maria-Hold-the-Eggs, Jihad Jenni
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goldsmith, sometime costume designer and badass cat owner. 

goldsmith, sometime costume designer and badass cat owner. 

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Why? Because soup is cheap, delicious and easy. Kind of like me.

a weekly attempt to eat well and to savor life. or to see how much food I can get on my clothes.

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