friday feast: it’s always better with butter

” If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.” ~ Jacques Pepin

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Ah, butter! Slather it on a slice of warm crusty bread, watch a pat slippy slide down a stack of fluffy pancakes, feel it grease the corners of your mouth as you bite into a cob of corn.

Rich, smooth, creamy yellow — butter kisses your toast and ensures you will rise and shine. Ninety-nine percent of my cookie batters start off with creaming softened butter with sugar, beating till it’s nice and fluffy and ready for vanilla and eggs. There simply is no substitute: butter always promises superior flavor.

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(Click for No-Knead City Bread recipe with Brown Butter Spread via Always . . . Leave Room for Dessert!)

Elizabeth Alexander’s soul-nourishing poem, “Butter,” makes me think about my parents. My mother loves butter, but my father won’t touch it. If you dare offer her margarine, be prepared for a haughty, “I want real butter.”

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hand-stitched delights by maricor/maricar

#47 in an ongoing series of posts celebrating the alphabet

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(click to see more from the “Delicious” project at Maricor/Maricar)

I fairly swooned when I first saw the amazing hand embroidered typography created by twin sisters Maricor and Maricar Manalo. Based in Sydney, Australia, they’re designers, illustrators and animators by trade and refer to themselves as “Makers of Things assorted.”

logoSelf-taught in needlework, they seem to be creativity personified — I love their colors, patterns, lines, textures, and refreshing sense of fun and whimsy. The gorgeous piece pictured above is part of a project they completed for the Hong Kong Airport, where they were asked to embroider the word “Delicious” in six different languages, all spelled out using food from the different regions — pizza, sushi, pretzels, prawns, grapes, onions, limes, hotdogs — too cool!

abcs embroider

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bow wow wowing at gemini studio art

Yes, I’ve gone to the dogs again.

golden cupcake

Recently sniffed out Stephen Fowler’s wonderful illustrations at Gemini Studio Art. His current collection  contains 1000+ designs inspired by the many dogs in his old Wrigleyville, Chicago, neighborhood, his former day job designing labels for whiskey and tequila bottles, and his fascination for big graphic artwork, vintage/urban design and advertising posters. Pretty fetching, I say.

More of my faves with food-related themes:

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the eggstraordinary egg cup adventure

my egg cups

Spring is practically here. You know what that means.

Eggs eggs eggs. 🙂

Boil ’em, dye ’em, decorate ’em, hide ’em.

Don’t know eggsactly why, but lately I’ve become a tad obsessed with cupping them. After all, they deserve due props and pedestals for being so dang versatile. We have several egg cups in the Alphabet Soup kitchen, but I thought it would be fun to acquire a few more.

Hah! When I looked around, the yolk was on me. Those egg cups runneth over! Now I can’t even make up my mind.

Here’s a mix of my faves: retro, vintage, sassy, modern, whimsical, interesting, funky, just plain cool. Most of these are for sale, so click away for more info. Not that I’m trying to egg you on or anything. 🙂

mustache egg cups
Mustache Cups via Lenny Mud
mustache variety cups
Mustache Cups via SunnyDaz5

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here comes the soup! here comes the soup!

It’s all Andy Warhol’s fault that I’m hooked on soupy pop art stuff. The iconic Campbell’s soup cans continue to appear on jewelry, accessories, even fishing lures, and they just keep calling my name. (Click on each image for more info at Etsy.)

soup sign
“Here Comes the Soup” print by Juanjez
soup earrings
Kitsch Soup Earrings by Gin Atomique

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