Date with a dear friend.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Goat Cheese and Tomato Tart
Poor Roommate. She’d get home from grad school, open the fridge, and see a covered pie plate where there hadn’t been one before. She’d hope against hope that it would be chocolate pie, or key lime pie, or pecan pie, or anything at all except what it was: a tart starring her least favorite fruit- the tomato.
I’m so sorry, Roommate. I should have put a sticky note on it or something, to avoid shattered dreams.
Because OMG I LOVE THIS THING SO MUCH. It’s savory and not sweet, which I admit is a departure from my usual M.O., but seriously: it’s amazing. I would eat it for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. I love it enough that I’m willing to crank up my poorly-insulated oven and make one even though it’ll turn the front half of my apartment into a Bikram studio. You take a flaky pie crust, layer it with Dijon mustard, sliced tomatoes, rounds of goat cheese, and a mix of fresh herbs, and then you drizzle honey on top before sliding it into a super hot oven. Does the honey give you pause? It did for me, but I was young and foolish to worry. Instead of tasting weird, it tastes magnificent. It’s the sort of thing Imaginary Sweets would whip up for lunch with a green salad and lots of white wine with her Imaginary Dashing European Boyfriend in the charming kitchen of their cottage somewhere in a valley by the sea with a garden and probably also cats. With sassy lingerie drying on a line in the sun, obviously. Imaginary Sweets suffers from no shortage of unrealistic expectations. Continue reading
Sweet Nothing Du Jour 6/27/12
I will most likely wind up spending the night at the office tonight. Alls I’m sayin’ is:
1. If the lawyers/clients eat all the fancy food in the conference room and leave none for me, my vengeance will be swift and mighty. Or at least sullen and sulky.
2. If the lovely people in the mail room knew how much lingerie/lingerie-related shenaniganery I had delivered to me at the office, I’d never hear the end of it.
Busty Girl Comics: the Book! Which I obviously ordered right away. (Also: Sweets’ Desk! Gasp! Thrill!) Tell your friends.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be staring at THIS for the next few hours.
Fighting
I have a confession to make. I’ve told you that when I hear women around me talk negatively about their bodies, I speak up and tell them why I think they’re lovely, just as they are. I do not comment on weight gained or lost by myself or by other people. I do not cast judgment on different body types. Since I decided to do or not do these things, I’ve generally felt more positive about myself. Seeing the different kinds of beauty in other women helps me to accept the possibility of beauty in me. Seeing the strength in other women makes me want to nourish my own strength. Seeing the bravery in other women helps me work to overcome my fears.
I do like you just as you are. Seriously. Mark Darcy agrees with me.
The last week, though? This last week has SUCKED from a personal body image point of view. None of my clothes are fitting. None of the clothes in the stores are fitting. I’m wearing the same five outfits to work every week and hoping no one will notice. I will say “it’s not me– it’s the clothes” until I’m blue in the face (and to some extent this is true– a spaghetti-strap synthetic dress is not high up on the list of things I want to buy and wear in 95 degree heat), but when I struggle to find pants that are long enough, shoes that are big/narrow enough, and blouses and dresses that are fitted enough, and I struggle in all the stores ever. . . yeah, that gets old.
I’m actually feeling better about my body than I have in years. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. My arms are toned, toned, toned, which I never thought I’d see. My butt has never been perkier. My legs are slamming. When I get dressed in the morning and default to the same thing I wore two days prior, I try to hold my head high. I have muscle where I’ve never had muscle before– of course my clothes are going to fit differently. I can swing myself around a pole and upside down and land in the splits without trying too hard.
And then last night I burst into tears in the middle of class. Continue reading
Sweet Nothing Du Jour: 6/25/12
This will appeal to about three of my readers. You know who you are.
Someone at the Royal Ballet is awesome at social media. Earlier this year they did a live broadcast of the entirety of one of their company classes. Did I stay up until 2:00 a.m. watching the whole thing? Yes. Of course I did. Check out the principal dancer who’s pregnant and still taking company class. Ladies: They’re Awesome.
I am in love with the teacher, FYI. She’s so cool. I’m also in love with several of the male dancers, albeit in a different way.
Recommended Reading: Busted! By Ali Cudby
If I had to choose a gift for a teenage girl (or her mom), I’d be that awkward friend who gave her this book. Y’all, it’s so great. It really is. It’s short, sweet, matter-of-fact, and astoundingly comprehensive on the subject of boobs and bras. Ali Cudby is the founder and CEO of FabFoundations™, a bra-fitting service that seeks to empower every woman to understand, love, and fit her breasts, no matter her age or size. There are some heartbreaking personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout (a mother whose teenage daughter had just been fitted into a 32G bra wrote to Ali: “Should I get her a breast reduction?” Ali’s response was much less ragey than mine would have been) and straightforward, easy-to-understand advice. Ali talks about her personal experience growing up with ill-fitting bras, and the life-changing joy she felt when (like me!) she discovered Bravissimo. She went on to develop and market a fitting technique called the FabFit™ Formula that spells out all of the points a woman should check to ensure her bra fits her well.
Taken at the office with my mad photography skillz. On a Sunday. Which I am not melodramatically grumpy about or anything. Sweets: Totally Not Blogging At Work.
Key Lime Pie
I am a giant brat about baking things from a mix or a can or a jar. I get all smug and annoying and sniffy and “I don’t BELIEVE in cake mixes” and am generally charming and wonderful, with my nose in the air declaring that pre-made/pre-packaged ingredients are cheating. That being said, if you try to fancy-up key lime pie, you’re doing it wrong. This is a stupidly simple dessert, and it has been from the very beginning: sailors in the Florida Keys mixed up the juice of the little tiny yellow limes that grow there, egg yolks, and sweetened condensed milk, which didn’t spoil in the heat in the pre-refrigeration days, and let it thicken in a pie crust. That’s it– easy as pie (I AM CLEVER, OH SO CLEVER).
I’ve seen fancier recipes that call for more ingredients and more stirring and more folding and more fiddling and more dyeing than this, and they just don’t sound as good. I’ve also seen recipes that try to simplify an already simple process, usually involving food coloring and pudding. My parents both love to tell a story about taking Julia Lambert and me out for dinner when we were about seven or eight, and when our key lime pies arrived and were discovered to be green and probably jello-based, I turned to the waitress and said “Um, this isn’t real key lime pie.” Sweets: A Joy to be Around Since Childhood. Continue reading
Beating the Heat: All-or-Mostly Cotton Bras
I got a request from a dear friend for an all-or-mostly-cotton shopping guide, and seriously, could the timing be any better? In four days New York has gone from 65 degrees to 95, and the city is just one giant concrete-and-skyscraper heat-trapping hell-hole. Sometimes. Not always. But I am not alone in wishing that more subway-riders took up deodorant.
SORRY. Where was I? Cotton. Cool, lovely, breathable cotton, the fabric of our lives, but not, so often, of our bras. Particularly once you break out of the standard sixteen sizes (32-38 A-D), unlined mostly-cotton bras are few and far between. Cotton doesn’t always give the same supportive-yet-stretchy fit synthetics do, it can be trickier to fit perfectly, and then to top it off cotton prices have risen dramatically in the last few years. We just don’t have as many options. Bravissimo used to stock a bra that was a beautiful cotton eyelet, but the brand (Faubourg) seems to have stalled, and I’ve only seen swimsuits from them this year. There are a few sizes of the cotton bra left in the sale section.
Calvin Klein and some other department store staples seems to stock a regular supply of cotton bras, but they also tend to be padded or molded, thus defeating the heat-relief-seeking purpose. Otherwise, cotton and natural fibers show up primarily in maternity wear, wire-free bras, and bralettes. Bralettes are awesome (see Sandmaiden Sleepwear on Etsy for more pretty, natural-fiber choices), but finding full-bust and full-figure options that are also cute or stylish can be a challenge. Continue reading
Sweet Nothing Du Jour 6/19/12
I’ve been working stupid amounts of overtime, and I can’t drink caffeine. Let’s all laugh instead.
Truth.
If you don’t read Busty Girl Comics yet, you should. The comics are funny, self-deprecating, witty, body-positive, inclusive, and fierce. The wonderful Rampaige’s responses to reader questions, comments, and even attacks are like mini-master classes in standing up for yourself, your body, and your boobs. No matter their size.
Lingerie for Smaller Busts
I am so grateful to people who have spoken to me to request posts on specific bra/boob-related subjects. There have been some excellent and important requests, and unfortunately some of them are just taking more time to research than others. However, I’m happy to start a series of posts today highlighting some different brands, so that we can get a better idea of what offerings are out there for women of all different shapes and sizes. Today’s post is written through a haze of envy, since I would never be able to wear most of these gorgeous, gorgeous things, but I shall press on, somehow.
A friend of mine was talking about the blog with me a few weeks ago, and she mentioned a friend of hers who has a small bust and had recently gone into a well-known Upper West Side lingerie shop looking for a sexy, elegant, adult lingerie set. The store carried a single style in her size that wasn’t hugely padded, and it was a training bra. They couldn’t offer her even one bra that embraced the natural shape and size of her bust and offered her any sense of style or sophistication. I can’t imagine how frustrating and even humiliating that experience must have been, and it makes me angry, because there are some BEAUTIFUL styles out there that would probably have delighted this woman. Here are just a few of the offerings: Continue reading
