Because 2 days is never enough.

I recently finished a fascinating, alarming book by Elizabeth Royte called, Garbageland. I’m haunted by the book; I can’t think about anything that I buy, chuck, or recycle, without obsessing about the consequences.

For Christmas, my mom gave us a new cover for our sofa and it looks great; I feel like we have a whole new piece of furniture. And I wanted to buy some new throw pillows to gussy it up some. But the old sofa cover filled several trash bags. And I just imagined that something perfectly reusable, some worn fabric, would just hang out, in perpetuity in a leaching, ever growing heap of trash.

I was also thinking about how, for every bag of trash we throw away, there are about 36 bags of trash produced “upstream”, meaning in manufacturing and delivery, so I decided to try to stop buying so much stuff. But, instead of just feeling bad, I hatched a fantastic idea.

I decided to hack up the huge pile of heavy twill from the old cover and sew it into three pillows, stuffing them with the shreds. In the end, I was left with just the seams of the old sofa cover, which were too stiff to use.

Then I went to purlsoho and bought some awesome Japanese fabrics and made some great covers.

I’m so happy with myself, if I do say so myself. I made something pretty, and crafty, averted some trash from the land fill, and kept myself from buying something (the pillows) and bearing the responsibility for all the waste involved with that.
Sure, this won’t save the world, but it made my living room look super cute, guilt free!

I baked two loaves of herb bread yesterday - one for Jess and one for me. We ate half of Jess’ loaf with the celeriac soup she made for dinner last night - it was the perfect way to sop it up.

I knew I wanted to have eggs with the bread this morning for breakfast, and for some reason I felt inspired to make croque madame open face sandwiches even though I’ve never made them before. They were not 100% authentic, however, since I didn’t have any ham or gruyere on hand. I substituted sausage and cheddar, which American-ized it a bit. The best part is the dijon-based sauce that I used from the Food Network.

Dijon Sauce

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 rounded tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1 cup milk
• Salt and pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons Dijon style mustard

Place a small sauce pot over medium low heat and melt butter in it. Whisk in a rounded tablespoon of flour and cook 1 minute or so. Whisk in milk and bring to a bubble then drop heat to low. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, nutmeg and Dijon. When sauce coats back of a spoon, turn off heat.