Fancy Feasts: Sunday Brunch

I love to cook and bake. There is nothing more satisfying than enjoying something that you've made yourself, whether that item be edible or wearable. Recently I picked up Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess, one of her first cookbooks. My sister had this cookbook a while back, but it seems to have gone missing, so I was determined to replace it last weekend, easily finding a copy at Barnes & Noble (and using mom's membership card for a fabulous 10% off, thank you very much!). It quickly became my goal to cook just about every recipe in the book, which is going to mean hours and hours of upcoming baking. Thankfully work starts up again soon and that means I can pawn all these cakes, cookies and brownies that are detrimental to my own new healthy eating lifestyle (though there's room for everything in moderation)!

On Sunday afternoon we had old family friends over for brunch (another fabulously fancy concept!). I had planned to make Nigella's 'Simple Almond Cake,' but - alas - did not read the recipe beforehand and therefore didn't notice that it called for marzipan, instead of just ground almonds (as I assumed). I flipped a few pages until I found a recipe that did use ground almonds (aptly named the Lemon & Almond cake) and proceeded with my baking. The fabulous results:





While we're on the subject, here are some other photos from the brunch, showing off yet another fancy, satisfying thing to do to take your table from mundane to special. Plating your food in a beautiful and creative way not only makes the table lovely, it somehow makes all the food taste better. It's not scientific, but it's true!



Perhaps I'll embark on a Julie & Julie-esque project as I bake my way through this cookbook. I've never actually cooked my way through an entire cookbook, but as I'm not a person who get easily frustrated by cooking (and who, in fact, finds it incredibly relaxing), I can't imagine that a blog about me cooking would interest too many people very much. So I'll save the posts for when I create something particularly pretty (for I also love photography, just to add to the growing list of things I like to do!), and for those times when we take meals and we make them extra-special!

On that note, be sure to stay tuned for Friday afternoons, when I will try and post "Fancy Feast Thursdays." Family members and I will be getting together on Thursday evenings for a homecooked meal (made by either yours truly or yours truly's little sister) and a not-so-fancy viewing of The Office.

Fancy by Definition, Part One

This morning I was contemplating just what it means to be fancy (and believe me, I really do think of these things while I’m making breakfast, or working on a project). To me, the word means doing things a little differently, “classing them up” for lack of a better term. However, I don’t think that being fancy is something that is difficult to achieve (it’s all in the small things, which is likely to be a post very shortly). In any case, these musings made me want to see what the word “experts” (a.k.a. the dictionary) had to say on the matter.

Dictionary.com provided the following TEN definitions of the word fancy. Bear with me here, because – yes – we are going to go through them one by one. Before you moan and groan about that, just be glad that I didn’t pick the Webster’s version – they have three SECTIONS of descriptions for the word fancy – one as a transitive verb, one as a noun and the other as an adjective (did I mention I teach English?).

Okay, okay. To be fair, we’ll break them down in to separate posts, beginning with the first definition.

imagination or fantasy, esp. as exercised in a capricious manner
Imagination is probably one of the top three words I would use when asked to list what was important to me. I have always been imaginative, often preferring a fantasy world to a real one. I love authors like J.K. Rowling and Stefenie Meyer (that’s right, this Fancy Girl reads Twilight!) or directors like M. Night Shayamalan or Baz Luhrmann. To me, these people are geniuses because they have done the near impossible. They have managed to create their own worlds, an alternate presentation of the world we live in that seems almost plausible. It’s so easy to get lost in these worlds that you tend to feel bewildered when you resurface into the real one again (at least I do!).

One day I will emulate them. In many ways I already do. Designing costumes is my way of creating my own little world. I was recently watching an episode of Project Runway (the all-stars version, when former contestants come back to compete one final time), and Mychael Knight probably put it best when he said, “Seeing my collection on the runway is a really amazing experience just because you’re working so closely with your pieces and you get kinda connected with them, but to see them move, to see them come to life, it’s really like ‘Wow, I’ve created magic.’”

I think this applies to a lot of what I do. I like to create something from virtually nothing, connect it in ways that probably only make sense to me, and to watch it all come together in the end. There’s always a method to my madness, even if it’s not clear to other people. I like that – I don’t always make a lot of sense to most people, but I always make sense to me, and that’s what matters!

Setting a Purpose

Ever since putting up my first post, I've been wondering just what to write next. While sitting around tonight doing not much of anything, it occurred to me that maybe - just maybe! - there should actually be somewhat of a purpose to the ramblings I put here, on the off-chance that anyone becomes particularly interested enough to keep reading and see what I'm up to. However, since I started this out as a way to simply offer my own commentary and try to explain why I am the way that I am, I had to think about a good purpose.

The only thing I managed to come up with was the idea of making everyday just a little more special. I suppose I'm going to start using the term "fancy" very loosely, because I'm sure a lot of the things that I do with myself are not fancy at all, just slightly more elaborate versions of something everyone does. Essentially my goal will be to do everything that I do in the best way possible. Instead of using my dining room table as a surface for debris, I might actually consider using it to eat on - with real plates, real napkins, real silverware and real glasses! In fact, today I took a step towards that by clearing all my fabric and sewing paraphernalia off of the table and actually adorning it with some flowers and placemats.

For some people, the things that I accomplish will seem unnecessary and for others they will probably seem too simple. I expect there's a wide range of thought in this department. Well, that's why this is a learning process! I'm not trying to be Martha Stewart or anything, though I suppose being somewhat Martha-like wouldn't hurt anybody!

It's late now, so I won't go into more detail than this for now, but I've been rethinking some values and various other things, and I'll likely start sharing that as the days go by. Stay tuned.

A Fancy Girl Introduction

What is a girl with a love of way too many things to do with herself? Write a blog about it of course!

I suppose the question at hand is how I came to consider myself fancy and, I suppose, why I have decided to write a guide to the universe. Both questions are answered simply, but I’ll start with the latter. I’m very affected by what I read and experience in movies. (At the risk of admitting THIS embarrassing fact about myself, I researched the Titanic in an OBSESSIVE manner after the movie came out years ago.) I get whims based on what I read and see, and it just so happens that I’m reading the Julie & Julia Project, by Julie Powell right now. For those unfamiliar with it, the author embarks on a one year project to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of Fine Cooking. It’s supposed to be about finding yourself.

Well, I don’t really feel the need to “find myself.” I’m pretty comfortable with me, actually. So I guess you could say the purpose of this is nothing more than self-indulgence: a diary that just happens to be public, I suppose. However, I will strive to present my take on things or, as I guess you could say, the “fancy” way to do everything.

Which brings me to the first question: why do I consider myself fancy? For starters, I have always been different from my peers. Many would say I’m years ahead of my time or, depending on how you look at things, years behind the times. Rather then go out on Saturday nights and drink myself into oblivion or flirt with every man in the room (or any – I am a hopeless case in that department, but we’ll save those stories, should I ever want to share them), I would rather stay home and domesticate myself. I taught myself to sew, got my grandmother to teach me how to knit, started practicing the art of photography and, in my spare time, perfected my cooking skills. (And did I mention that I also read and write an obsessive amount.) An aunt (for there are many in my life as you will see if you keep reading) once told me that I was the “perfect housewife in training.”

Well, that just wasn’t really what I was going for.

Don’t get me wrong. The image of a 1950’s housewife is actually very appealing to me. Sure, I’m an independent person. I can take care of myself when it all comes down to it, and I have and enjoy a job (most of the time!). But the option to stay home and work on my fancy talents and one day take care of a whole brood of children calls to me. I am almost embarrassed to admit that these are the things I want out of life, especially when I speak to other people in my age range (the twenties, or 26-35 on most checklists), and they cringe and look at me like I'm some kind of deranged mental patient for even considering "settling down" before 30.

But I'm digressing here.

The term fancy all began, very simply, as a nickname. A friend coined it, after being subjected to conversation after conversation of my outlining my very specific ideas for things – projects, work, etc. and trying to make everything just a little better with a few small touches! She started to call me Fancy and the name stuck with a few others.

So, here it is (for no one’s approval): The Fancy Girl’s Guide to the Universe, to be updated whenever I have something useless to say!