BEACH IN SUMMER 2018

Greetings friends! 

It was a wonderful summer. This summer, my parents got to be here for longer than usual, Ken's mom was here for a great long stretch of time, Logan turned 3, I turned 35, Sloane turned 6, we hosted parties, and we swam, a lot. This summer will be marked as the summer when Sloane began swimming, really swimming, and that meant that the girls swam in the pool almost everyday.  The girls became even better friends and playmates, and Ken and I became better friends and partners. 

We saved our beach trips for the middle of August because we knew we would make a couple of trips down to Virginia Beach with Ken's mom, and we had a really lovely time both weekends.  Below are pictures of both! 

We stopped by Handsome Biscuit in Norfolk for lunch because of a recommendation from a friend, and it was well worth it.  The fried chicken was delicious and I loved the sweet potato biscuits!

The girls got some of their homemade watermelon soda, which was perfect for the hot and humid weather.

My obsession with shibori extended into Sloane's closet where I found a white dress I had thrifted for her a while back. I turned it into this blue number!

We were eager to get to the beach and made our way over with plenty of toys and snacks to last us all day. Unfortunately, we got rained out about 30 minutes in but it was wonderful while it lasted. 

This spot of Chick's beach is dreamy and reminds me a little of Nags Head.

We got a few moments of soaking in the sea and playing in the sand before the skies opened up and dumped rain all over our beach day. The rain then turned into a thunderstorm!

On our drive back home, we stopped by Rally's for fries and ice cream. Those fries were soo good!

Later that night, Ken and I went out to Esoteric to meet our friends for drinks and I was inspired by this garage door while we were out.

Their manhattans were fantastic. 

The next morning we met our friends again at the playground at Mt. Trashmore. It was one of those beautiful days after heavy rain, where everything is glistening and colors look like they are in high definition.

The next weekend we went back down to Virginia Beach again, resolved to get more beach time. We decided to kick off the day by waking all of us at 5:15 AM to make it to the beach for the sunrise! It was glorious and so worth it.

Utterly beautiful. 

"Mom, we should do this everyday!" - Sloane 

Amy and Ken's mom and aunt met us at the beach and we took turns burying the girls in the sand while the sun made its way up the sky. 

She was my little fairy of delight that morning. 

After our sunrise excursion, we went to May's Parlor for pastries.  

Their everything croissant was superb.

Me and my girls, covered in sand, pleased as punch. 

We went back to the spot on Chick's beach and were ecstatic about getting in the water. The beach stays shallow for yards and it felt marvelous. I didn't want to get out. 

"Wow! This is amazing!" - Logan 

I loved how much the girls loved being in the water. 

Three little brown nuts! 

It was a lovely morning. I wanted to stay all day, but we had to leave in order to have lunch with old friends of Ken's. 

My sweet darlings discussing their next play.

We headed back to the playground at the boardwalk and planned to play there for a while before dinner, but Sloane fell asleep in the car so Logan and I spent a few moments on the bench people watching, eating cherries we had packed. 

We met our friends at Big Sam's Raw Bar for dinner.  I am happy to confirm that happy hour drinks, shrimp and fries tastes so much better when your skin is tingling from saltwater and sun.

MEETING VIVIAN ROBINSON

Those first few weeks with the newborn baby is the best. It may not always feel like it because it can be hard/rough/sleepless, but looking back, I also remember a dreamy haze and a slowness of pace that I look back on with nostalgia.  That time of beholding your new little one, figuring out who she is, how she fits in with the family and making a new rhythm feels magical.  Which is why I loved getting to spend some time with my friends, Martha and Ian, to capture some of this magic with their new addition, Vivian!  Here are some of the photos I took that afternoon (and these photos I did of them four years ago!) 

SUMMER SALADS

My 2018 summer salad round-up! By which I mean, a few of the salads I tried this past summer that I am lassoing into one blog post here for future reference.  I love a good salad and could live on salads all summer. The bounty of fresh and good produce is so inspiring! 

(Have you seen this list of 101 simple salads by Mark Bittman?! He is a master and I can't wait to try some of them.)

The first photo above is a salad from Sam Kass's cookbook, "Eat a Little Better", via Cup of Jo.  It's white beans, celery, hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, feta cheese, olive oil, lemon, and pine nuts mixed up all together in this gloriously flavorful and salty combo.  I had leftover mushroom orcchiette from the day before, which I mixed into this and it was divine.  

This is a avocado and cucumber salad that I saw on Smitten Kitchen, which I thought was good but not obsessively good.  I think it was partly due to the fact that I didn't love the mayo and siracha combo as the dressing on this - next time I'm going Japanese style with the miso, sesame oil and ginger!

Sometimes I just throw cucumbers, tomatoes, avocado, and red onions into a giant bowl, dress it with balsamic and olive oil and call it a day. 

The MVP of the summer is the green sauce, that can do no wrong, that should go on everything you eat.  I ate it over greens, avocado, grilled corn and hardboiled eggs and it was a home run. I love this combination.

Speaking of the green sauce, I wanted my birthday meal to be this dish because of the green sauce and also because of the sous vide method of cooking steak that we had recently tried. It was accompanied by sauteed garlic kale, and roasted carrots and mashed potatoes (courtesy of Mignon).

I first had this sort of broccoli salad with yogurt dressing at my friend Laura's house (who said she got the recipe from the Wellness Mama cookbook) and I loved it so much I tried to recreate it.  I based it off this recipe here and made a huge batch to eat as a meal or as a side.  Here we are having it with buttered toast, sardines, grape tomatoes and peaches.

Not really a salad... or is it?? While my mom was here she made us bibimbap (a Korean dish of various vegetables and meat over rice) and it was so delicious. 

While my mom was here, we went on the hunt for good tomatoes and hit the jackpot at the farmer's market.  We got a bunch of vegetables there, including these beautiful cranberry beans, which we added to salad and rice.  We used all these vegetables to make one of my favorite dishes to eat in the summer: Panzanella sald. Along with green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, cranberry beans, I added salmon, red onion, mozzerella, and croutons from french bread...all topped with a homemade vinaigrette of olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper.  

SLOANE TURNS SIX!

In a stunning turn of events (it always does feel stunning), my baby turned SIX! We think she is fabulous. She is smart, determined, caring, and makes me laugh all the time. Her thoughtfulness and creativity astounds me and I'm floored at how well she cares for her sister. I miss her when I'm not around her, and love doing things with her by my side.  What a glorious six years it has been with my girl Sloane!

For her party this year, we combined forces with two other lovely girls who have August birthdays - Loah who was turning six and Eden who was turning five - and had a joint birthday party!  It was fun, easy. and we avoided making people come to three separate birthday parties....and the girls loved it! Shout out to Mignon who made the girls these darling cupcakes and my cousin Lois, who helped put up all those streamers. I included a video I took with my phone of some of the festivities below if you want to see!

Triple birthday party ! from Christine Lu on Vimeo.

WHAT I'M READING V.34

1. You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld 

I read her book, "Prep" a while ago, liked it okay, but I like this collection of short stories so much better! The stories are delectable, because she has a way of getting inside the character's mind to reveal all the inner thoughts of a person, including the embarrassing and vulnerable, and couch it in observations that are humorous and comment on topics like motherhood, women friendship, and politics. 

2.  The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

We read this one in our book club last month, and it was a difficult read because of the subject matter, but I appreciated the sharp and skillful writing and the conversation we were able to have about it.  Whitehead writes in a way that is reminiscent of trauma - swift and descriptive, almost emotion, but in a way that is powerful exactly because of the delivery.  I wondered what additional stories there were to tell about the Underground Railroad, but Whitehead as a specific agenda. Underneath the stories of the horrors of slavery, he writes about the ways in which black history has been taken over by white narrators and about how the power belongs to the one who is able to tell the story, on their terms. 

3. The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky.

 I loved this one. I was instantly captivated by the sharp turns her writing to describe the most ordinary and mundane. It was refreshing. I was deeply intrigued about a quarter through the book, I couldn’t put it down after the halfway mark, and I cried reading the chapter called "The end of forever."  It is sort of a self-absorbed book, almost like a journal turned novel - if you know what I mean by that, but I didn't tire of it, and was deeply satisfied by the whole thing. It takes you through the adult life of a woman, through her relationships, doubts, career, etc. and one of those books that make me want to journal more.  A sample of the writing: "What she loved most about sitting at the coffee shop was not the coffee or the shop but the brief, listless feeling it gave her of having her life together. She could sit beside the richness and warmth and see herself as something so divinely competent. This is what it is to be an independent person, and she’d take a sip. This is what it is to be a cosmopolitan person, and she’d take a sip. So easily could she lose herself in the sense." 

4. A Gentleman of Moscow by Amor Towles

Another book club read ! It was a delicious read - I recommend this book if you love food, drink, and historical fiction. It tells the story of a man - Count Rostov - who is sentenced to house arrest in 1922 (for writing a poem!) in The Metropol Hotel in Moscow, Russia.  It's a lovely, sweeping read, and I underlined so many passages because of the lovely writing that described the pleasures of life. Count Rostov, although imprisoned in the hotel, enjoys the finer things and makes a whole world for himself within that hotel, making lifelong friendships and even a career as a waiter.  The descriptions are elegant and clear, and the sentences are not overworked. Towles wrote another book called, "Rules of Civility" that I'm looking forward to reading because of how much I liked this one. 

WEEKEND ROADTRIP TO NYC & DAD'S BIRTHDAY - VIDEO

As a follow-up to my previous post with photos from our 24 hours in NYC, here's a little video I made with clips I took on my phone that weekend!