In the autumn and winter, it’s J Brand jeans, cashmere crewnecks, and Kule tees.
In the spring, it’s borderline seasonally-inappropriate floral dresses given that I pull them out in March and it’s rarely warm enough for them until May.
In the summer, it’s white dresses and basket bags.
A roundup of excellent LWDs I’m eyeing for this season:
I’ve recently had occasion to re-stock some of the less glamorous categories of products in my life: cream for dry hands and feet, facial cotton, underwear, makeup setting powder, running socks and shoes, and the like. I love doing research into these seemingly boring purchases because — why not get the best or ferret out the secret wonderproduct with a cult following? Today, thought I’d share some of my latest finds in this category…
RUNNING SOCKS: TESTING WELL-HYPED BOMBAS AND FEETURES (THANKS TO ALL THE MAGPIES WHO WEIGHED IN ON THIS SUBJECT)
RUNNING SHOE: NIKE FLYKNIT EPIC REACT — WOULD LOVE TO TRY THESE BUT AM HAVING A HARD TIME TRACKING DOWN IN A COLOR I LIKE IN MY SIZE
BOLL & BRANCH SPA BATH TOWELS — WE NEED MORE PLAIN WHITE TOWELS IN OUR LINEN CLOSET…WE HAVE RUINED A TON OF FANCY ONES BY LETTING OUR CHILDREN PAINT/EAT/ETC WITH THESE AROUND AND THESE GET GREAT REVIEWS
I SEEM TO HAVE MISPLACED MY BELOVED MASON PEARSON BRUSH AT SOME POINT IN THE LAST YEAR (IN THE MOVE?)…THEY ARE 25% OFF AT BLOOMIES IN A POCKET SIZE, BUT HAVE ALSO HEARD GOOD THINGS ABOUT THIS LESS EXPENSIVE BRAND
THE VERDICT IS IN: MUJI’S INEXPENSIVE FACIAL COTTON IS JUST AS SOFT AS MY LONG-STANDING FAVORITE SHISEIDO — FOR ABOUT HALF THE PRICE…THE ONLY DOWNSIDE IS THAT MUJI HAS A KIND OF NATURAL “GRAIN” TO IT THAT ALWAYS MAKES ME FEEL LIKE THE PAD IS “USED” BEFORE IT ACTUALLY IS
THIS “LIGHTING POWDER” IN THE ETHEREAL FINISH IS UNBELIEVABLE — COMPLETELY LIGHTS UP YOUR FACE
FOOT CREAM: LA ROCHE-POSAY — MY FEET ARE SO HORRIBLY DRY AND I NEED TO GET THEM INTO SHAPE WITH SANDAL SEASON AROUND THE CORNER
THESE CRACKERS IN THE CAYENNE PEPPER FLAVOR ARE SO, SO GOOD
And, unrelated to the above, I field lot of inquiries for chic finds in the following categories, so thought I’d offer a round up more regularly…
MATERNITY: I wore a black dress like this (also love this scoopneck style) about every third day of my third trimester — so comfortable and so easy to style up or down. I love this brand and one of my favorite maternity/nursing dresses was from here. Also love this $28 jumpsuit in the black for the same reason. Pair with huge black shades and statement sandals/slides/flats.
NURSING: I wore this button-down Sleeper dress all the time while nursing Hill last summer, and it’s currently on sale! Also obsessing over this (might order for myself though I am NOT nursing) — the smocking and shoulder ties make access easy — and this button-down maxi in crisp white (ignore the weird styling on the site — this would look so Grace Kelly chic with brown leather slides).
UNDER $30:This weekend tee dress, which I’d wear with Golden Goose sneakers or leather sandals.
PLUS: This dress is beyond gorgeous (goes up to size 20) — love the print! — and this white dress is elegant but on-trend with those full sleeves and bracelet cuffs.
BRIDAL: Still love the Self-Portrait vibe, and this is a showstopper.
P.S. My favorite beauty products here and my favorite affordable beauty products here.
By: Jen Shoop
Because Mr. Magpie does most of the cooking in this house, I do most of the dishwashing. I used to rush through this bit of the evening, eyeing it as an impediment between the joy of the dining hour and the relief of bedtime. On more than one occasion, I would glance back over my handiwork and notice a waxy section on the interior of a pot — oil residue I’d missed in my haste — or items teetering precariously in the fridge, evidence of my careless hurry.
Now, when I feel that surge of hastiness rising in my chest, I pause and tell myself: “Slow down. This is time to yourself.” And so with considerable mental effort, I have learned to view this segment of the evening as relaxing rather than burdensome. I take the time to put on an audiobook, or music I like, or a show on the TV Mr. Magpie mounted in our kitchen wall–curiously, one of the most satisfying indulgences of my adult life, as I always begged my parents to install a television in our kitchen as a child, mentally configuring it as the ultimate in luxury.
But sometimes — as I did just last night — I poured myself an extra half-glass of wine and, in between sessions scrubbing our saute pan and rinsing our glasses, looked out the window by the sink of my Upper West Side apartment kitchen and took it all in, listening to the hiss and hush of the rain punctuated now and then by car tires and taxi horns and ambulance sirens. I looked down at the beautiful little courtyard at the foot of our building, where neighbors have stationed a broad teak table and twinkle lights and an ivy-trimmed trellis–a small and perfect secret garden that Mr. Magpie and I often discuss in tones of overt envy. As I dried the steak knives and wine glasses, I noticed silhouettes in windows: neighbors putting children to bed, clearing tables, preparing for sleep. Mainly, I stood at that sink, letting my thoughts wander as I appreciated the sounds and shapes of this city, and when I crept past my son’s nursery a few minutes later on my way to bed, I found that my slow and deliberate pace had given way to a feeling of tranquillity.
Consider trying this next time you find yourself sprinting through a chore. I mean: we can’t lollygag around and chase rainbows all day, and I don’t mean to gild the ungildable (dishwashing is still a chore), but sometimes you can transform the daily or even the detested into something winsome by adding music–or an extra pour of wine.
Post-Scripts: Simple Clothes I Love.
I veer toward the feminine, floral, and frilly in my fashion taste, but I have the deepest appreciation for a woman who dresses with restraint, like the gal above: Levis and a white linen blouse, no earrings and barely-done hair. Below, a few of my favorite “simple clothes” — no prints, lots of neutrals, in modern shapes — that pack a powerful punch:
My Latest Snag: Lattes, Crackers, and Kids’ Stuff.
First: I really wish I was seated at the table above right now. I can almost taste that croissant. Instead, my bottled latte will have to do — which brings me to a random assortment of recent purchases:
I have been missing my parents terribly, and with Mother’s Day tomorrow, I particularly enjoyed this illustration of “Classic Mom Advice.” My mom would definitely say all of these things, along with the following, which I have heard so many times throughout my 36 years of life, I can anticipate their arrival in our conversation:
“If you’re stomach is upset, stick to the BART diet: bananas-apples-rice-toast.”
“One thing a day, Jen. Just set out to accomplish one thing a day.”
“Always keep a couple ginger ales and saltines in the pantry.”
“Go to bed early.”
“Write your thank you notes as soon as possible after receipt of a gift. And make those notes personal.”
“Call if you will be late — even a few minutes late.”
And from my Dad:
“Never look back. Keep moving forward.”
“Never go anywhere without reading material.”
“Never leave until tomorrow what can be done today.”
Every other morning, Mr. Magpie rises with the children at six, permitting me an extra two hours to doze, or luxuriate in that nether-world J.M. Barrie called “the place between sleep and awake, where you can still remember dreaming,” or lay in bed, thinking.
These early hours by myself moor me. I wonder, I read, I pray, I close my eyes and remember that in spite of the tremendous upheaval around us, the feel of my head on my pillow and the silky-cool of the sheets beneath me will not.
+The cut of this $88 dress feels very LoveShackFancy or Ulla Johnson. Into it.
+PSA: I have been stocking our activity supply bins with materials from Michael’s — Amazon is sold out of so much, or boasting absurd prices, but you can still buy washable paint at a reasonable price at Michael’s.
+Just ordered mini some of this wash-off nail polish so we can do a manicure morning some time soon. I just know she’s going to go wild over the blue color — “blue is my FAVORITE COLOR,” she says, at least three times a day. I am honestly not crazy about my three-year-old wearing nail polish, but this stuff washes off in the bathtub!
+OH – and in my hunt for Cientas in Hill’s tiny foot size, I came across a bunch of amazing pairs on SUPER sale: I love these green ones and these red ones (sadly neither small enough for Hill).
Our rental for early July was cancelled — I am sure because the house has been occupied since the dawn of quarantine and a family has arranged a way to extend their rental through the end of summer. Or maybe the owner decided she didn’t want Manhattanites up there and is leaving it vacant. Or maybe she moved into the house with her own family for the long haul. Or maybe she discovered she could charge much more by breaking our agreement and reposting the house with a higher rate and a longer minimum stay.
Why I sit here and muse over the possibilities is beyond me. The point is: our plans have been canceled for us.
Possibly a gift? In that we no longer need to negotiate with the pros and cons of leaving the city, or fretting over whether we will be out of “shelter in place” order by then?
Mainly, though, a heavy sigh. I have been clinging to the naive, irrational, and unfounded belief that our week away with our best friends and our children would mark a turning point in all of this. That talk of “a second wave” would disappear; that life would somehow, miraculously, “return to normal,” even though I comprehend that no such thing will take place. July was — for whatever reason — meant to be a turning point. Curves flattened, normalcies resumed. “A nasty business,” I imagined us saying to one another, dusting ourselves off, grieving–but moving.
And, selfishly–pettily, I will admit–I have been desperately hungry for that July trip if only for a view unhemmed by buildings and blessedly vacant of other people. For space.
At the same time, I have been desperate, like everyone, for companionship: “When I see you, I will hug you and never let you go again,” my sister texted me earlier today.
But now the summer extends before us, flat and unmarked, and the virus persists and numbers climb, and I must continuously remind myself to count my blessings, to remember that this, too, shall pass, etc, etc — all the things we must tell ourselves to shore up against these ruins.
I have been lingering, in the face of this, over an excellent pair of stanzas in an otherwise mildly cloying poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I will be the gladdest thing Under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds With quiet eyes, Watch the wind bow down the grass, And the grass rise.
When I read this recently, I found the use of the future tense cheering: I will be. Not “I want to be,” not “I would be.” I will be. Never have I felt a verb tense so electrically encouraging.
On second reading, I found the tense newly evocative of a pledge: “If you let me see this, I promise I will…” Also resonant for me. I’m game for such vows at the moment.
On a third reading: is it supplication…? “If you would only give me this, please please please please–” A tone not alien either.
But mainly, across all readings, I clung to the speaker’s appreciative spectatorship of nature — no ownership, no manipulation, no interaction. She does not pluck the flowers. She watches, with quiet eyes. She lets the wind work its magic. And the recursion of the word “grass” in such close — almost irritatingly close — proximity in that final couplet: you feel nature’s movement in the very structure of verse, sense its unbrookable force. That second “grass” is there because it must be there, not because Millay couldn’t have found a more artful way to avoid such close repetition.
I admire, in short, the speaker’s reserve and self-control: I will let these things move around me, she is saying. And I will be glad about it.
And so I will, too. I will watch with quiet eyes from the inside, gilding my desktop with lilacs and hydrangeas from the corner bodega, writing as I wait for the grass to bow down and rise again.
+Prettiest ribbon to pair with simple kraft paper for a summer birthday.
+I swapped out the steel wool you can buy from any grocery store for this chain mail scrubber and WOW! Obsessed with it, and it doesn’t get all frayed and raggedy and clotted with random debris. (Dishwasher-safe.)
I have seen the stunning Zimmermann dress above a number of times on ultra-chic ladies and I have to share that it has finally gone on sale here and here, but is going very quickly!
I also found this pretty floral for a fraction of the price, which is ULTRA-similar in shape/style with that frilled neckline!
P.S. Shopbop also has some incredible Zimmermann in its new sale section: this dress is a showstopper, and who doesn’t need this happy sarong in her life?
At one point in my life, I considered myself “a runner.”
Not a hardcore runner, or a marathoner — in fact, marathons have never been for me, a startling discovery I made in my mid-20s whose logic continues to elude me given that I am highly competitive and that my father has run marathons his entire life and that I am drawn to most things my Dad likes, his even-fleeting interest sparking my own, transforming — Midas-like — the formerly mundane into the fascinating.
But not marathons, though I can still recall my reverence and loose, mildly confused concern after finding him sprawled out on the sun-dappled floor of the sunroom of my childhood home, a tarp-like wrap beside him, eyes closed and a look of happy exhaustion on his face after running the Marine Corps Marathon when I was maybe eight. He has run dozens of marathons and thousands upon thousands of miles over the course of his life, usually at around 8 a.m. in the morning, and always punctuated by an entry in his runner’s journal, the sole entrant in his Christmas stocking every year for the past couple decades thanks to his ever-doting Mrs. Claus. As with everything in his life, he has always approached running with unyielding discipline that eventually gives way to non-flashy, unadorned prowess. On a family trip to Aspen four years ago, he led the way up to Independence Lake, a moderate hike at high altitude that we chose to tackle on our first day in town, before we’d fully acclimated to the elevation. My siblings and I were huffing and puffing, pausing intermittently to catch our breath, occasionally masquerading our exhaustion by pointing out some feature of the landscape: “Is that…um…the Roaring…Fork?” Meanwhile, my father — who had risen early to “get his six [miles] in,” barreled ahead, easily taking the summit while barely breaking a sweat. He was 70. We were in our early 30s. With his typical shrugging humility, he didn’t say anything about it, but I remember thinking: “Note to self: run every day for the rest of my life and have the body of a 30-year-old at 70.”
The experience reignited an interest in running — one I have pocketed and dropped with intermittence, usually alongside my sister Christina, since I was maybe 16 or 17. Sometimes, during the longer phases of commitment, I slowly begin to see myself as a runner. My legs take on a different sort of muscle tone. I catch a glimpse of myself running in the reflection of a storefront and I think: “Not a bad stride.” I buy things like running belts. I carve out routes I love and identify stretches I hate — whether because of incline, or too much foot traffic, or an unpleasant view, or the awareness that I am only halfway through my run at that particular milestone and I am always already tired. I push myself to run further, or faster, and I do it.
Since getting pregnant with Emory a few years ago, I have been woefully remiss in my commitment to any exercise regimen, let alone running. I have made peace with this, to be honest. I have long believed that I can only simultaneously juggle three things in my life with any kind of grace or success. For the near-term, exercise has necessarily fallen by the wayside as I focus on family, writing, and this vague but hefty category I’ll call “household administration.” Baby wipes need ordering, clothes need ironing, nursery floors need tidying, diaper pails need emptying, winter clothes need sorting to make way for spring: small activities so slender and second-nature they barely qualify as countable but that consume the vast majority of my day, when I am not nursing bumped elbows, filling snack cups, and soothing my boy back to sleep. If you were to watch a time-lapse video of me in my apartment on any given day, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that I spend a good half of the day in an inverted u shape, washing suds out of little heads in the bath, scooping up duplos off the living room floor, scrubbing stray stripes of yogurt off the mat beneath the high chair.
And so: exercise of the formal variety has fallen by the wayside.
Last week, though, a thought fluttered through my mind: maybe I would start running again, with the return of warm weather. Maybe — maybe my goal would be to be able to regularly run three or four miles every other day, as I did for many years in my 20s. Maybe — with the infancy days behind me, with more of a routine at home in place — maybe I would start, at some point in the future.
I walked around with this pleasant notion for a few hours and then thought of my Dad, who — if Benjamin Franklin hadn’t beaten him to it — would probably have coined the phrase: “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today.”
So I did. I went running. And have been running every other day since. It’s been an ungainly start: I am slow, and sore, and unable to hit my stride, and the mask-wearing thing makes me feel as though I’m suffocating. But it has also felt gorgeous to get outside by myself, to listen to music, to be alone with my thoughts, to challenge myself.
Mainly, it has felt good to do something entirely by myself, for myself.
So maybe it’s not running for you. Maybe it’s needlepointing, or baking, or painting, or woodworking, or gardening, or cycling. But I have been astounded by how grounded and peaceful I have felt after these solitary excursions, reclaiming a little bit of myself.
+Running may eat into my quiet hour, which is mildly devastating. Going to see if I can motivate myself to get up before the children to get my run in…
+Exercise gear I LOVE, starting with these chic leggings seen on Tory Burch herself above!:
LOVE THESE FOR RUNNING — THE SOUND ISN’T AS GOOD AS APPLE AIRPODS BUT THEN YOU DON’T RUN THE RISK OF LOSING THEM (ALSO, THESE ARE BORDERLINE UNBREAKABLE)
JUST ORDERED SOME NEW NO-SHOW RUNNING SOCKS — ARE THE BOMBAS WORTH IT? I AM PARTICULAR ABOUT SOCKS AND DON’T LIKE WHEN THEY SHOW MUCH ABOVE THE SNEAKER LINE…
WHEN I’M GOING FOR A WALK/SLOW JOG, I LIKE MY APLS (ON SALE!) — I PREFER THEIR STYLE, BUT I DON’T THINK THEY ARE AS COMFORTABLE AS NIKE FOR LONGER RUNS
I LIKE TO RUN IN A BLACK BALLCAP TO KEEP THE SUN OUT OF MY EYES AND PAPARAZZI AT BAY (LOL)
ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS RUNNING JACKET — THE POCKETS ARE HELPFUL FOR STOWING KEYS AND PHONE SO I DON’T NEED TO WEAR A POUCH — BUT GET THE LOOK FOR LESS WITH THIS (READ THE REVIEWS!!!)
+ALERT. My favorite puff-sleeved sweatshirt (was just restocked in the colorway I own and love!! This always sells out. (Also available in gray here.) Or, get the look for less with this.
A big one right now — so feminine, so Emma, so grandmillennial. The snap above nails the smocking AND floral vibe perfectly. A few of my favorite finds:
I love putting my little butterball baby in shortalls these days. It’s like he was meant to wear them — he’s sturdy and big and hearty-looking and the vibe just fits him. Sadly, he’s more or less outgrown all of the size 12M shortalls I purchased lovingly for him last summer (and he’s not yet a year and it’s not even summer yet…AHHH!). My two favorite brands for this traditional look are Florence Eiseman and BusyBees (specifically their George romper, which he owns in a few prints), and I layer them over Peter Pan collar onesies from Kissy Kissy and Babidu. (I have tried seemingly ever brand of peter pan collar onesies under the sun and those two are my absolute favorite — I find the collars on other styles are either too big or too small or look cheap to me or are difficult to keep down after washing.)
At any rate, can I let you in on a little secret?! I just discovered the children’s consignment shop BAGSY, where clever mothers consign their lovely children’s clothing, often WITH TAGS STILL ATTACHED. You can find darling shortalls from Florence Eiseman and BusyBees for a fraction of the retail price. If you’re comfortable with gently-used clothing — I mean, these for $25 for the fall are a STEAL.
My first year of high school, I fell into an easy friendship with a bubbly girl who lived not far from my home in Cleveland Park in Northwest D.C. Her interests were — oddly — both more mature and more frivolous than mine at the time, and I quickly borrowed them as my own, trying them on for effect. She liked, for example, to meet at the CVS makeup aisle to pick out face scrubs and eye shadows and daunting depilatories, and then to try them all in the bathroom across the hall from my childhood bedroom, perched on the vanity next to me. She blow-dried her hair and rolled her uniform kilt high and shopped for undergarments at Victoria’s Secret — all styling decisions that startled me with their “adult” mystique at a time when I still wore Carter’s underwear with a little pink rosette on the front and used watermelon-scented L’Oreal Kids 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner. She was the one who insisted I needed to pluck my eyebrows — I’d never done it before, and, honestly, she was right — and I let her, and it was under her tutelage that I tried my first face mask. She had lots of boy friends, most of them from The Heights, which — I hope my readers will forgive me if their male loved ones attended the school — had a kind of offbeat, “alt” reputation at the time, at least alongside the blue-blooded, lacrosse-centric all-boys prep schools with which my high school more routinely consorted. I gamely but shyly hung out with her and with them, a wallflower feeling ill-at-ease in so many ways: I was less sophisticated and less confident than she was, and at the same time, more serious, more academically-minded, more pious. Beyond that, I didn’t understand boys, let alone these “alternative” ones.
One afternoon, while I clung to her coattails among the machismo and awkwardness of a handful of teen boys, my friend sat down at the upright piano in her downstairs living room. She was laughing, flirting, and then, out of nowhere: a Rachmaninoff concerto.
My jaw dropped. I had studied piano since around eight and knew that Rachmaninoff was not a joke. Her skill and speed far surpassed my own and I watched in dazed admiration as she nailed measure after measure.
But what startled me even more than her previously undetected talent was the way she was playing, her entire body rocking back and forth in dramatic movement, at times her face coming so close to the keys I thought she’d knock them with her teeth. During the allegro bits (and some sections of Rachmaninoff are meant to be played with unbelievable, super-human speed), her shoulders shot up by her ears as she’d move her shoulders in an exaggeratedly choppy motion.
I was, frankly, mortified for her. I couldn’t process this outlandish display of emotion, especially among these affected boys, who looked on with glassy disinterest. And I couldn’t reconcile it with her bubbly, jovial personality either. It was as though she’d transformed into a different person–someone so into the music she was unaware of how insane she looked.
I flushed for her, bit my lip, avoided looking at the boys in the room, but of course applauded her effort and said nothing about her strange theatrics as she suddenly stopped playing and slank back, giggling and shrugging, returning to herself.
A few weeks later, after I’d shared that I also played piano, she invited me to the Kennedy Center to take in a piano concert with her. “My parents buy me tickets all the time,” she shrugged. Aha — she was a musician’s daughter. I cannot recall the music we listened to that afternoon but I remember — distinctly — the pianist who sat down on the bench with flourish, throwing the long skirt of her dress behind her, and then proceeded to rock back and forth wildly herself as her fingers flew across the keys. I looked over at my friend, who seemed entirely unperturbed by the performance and how closely it mirrored her own just a few weeks prior, and it suddenly dawned on me that my friend must have been conforming with norms of musical performance she’d witnessed for what must have been a long time before I’d even known that they existed. I turned this over for a minute. Here, in this concert hall, the pianist’s performativity seemed appropriate — even laudable. Somehow commensurate with the incredible talent. But in my friend’s living room, in front of self-aware boys, it had felt wrong, out-of-place, too earnest, too expressive.
Looking back, the entire sequence reads like a set of funhouse mirrors: there I was, desperately trying to perform my own womanhood in front of her, and a set of boys I didn’t understand, as she projected her own femininity and then coolly slipped into the role of musician, whose norms felt decidedly too loud in certain circumstances and entirely right in others. I occasionally think back and want to applaud her for owning her musical talent and the performative subculture in which she had so clearly been raised, boys be damned. But was it that she was brave or, for the lack of a better word, imperceptive — in that she saw her theatricality was rewarded elsewhere and did not at the time distinguish between the two contexts. Either way, the experience often leaves me tugging at just how performative we are in so many venues of life. How much of the way I behave is learned and projected, and how much is authentic? Are we always performing in some sense?
+If you’re not into the labelmaker (…why?! I LOVE MINE), these are a clever way to label big jars of flour, sugar, rice, etc.
+With the weather warming, I’m beginning to contemplate running again. I used to identify as a runner. Now I don’t even think I could run two miles back to back. I think I need some new exercise gear to motivate, and I’m eyeing these leggings from Tory Burch and these relaxed-fit tanks.
Some of my favorite summer memories of all time concentrate around small outdoor music venues — the kind that invite you to pack a picnic and throw out an old quilt and make yourself at home for a couple of hours: WolfTrap in Northern Virginia, Ravinia in the Chicago suburbs, Summer Stage in Central Park. There is something purifying and timeless about listening to live music while out-of-doors, the grass beneath you only lightly disguised by an old picnic blanket, a stray ant making its way across your plate, the sun gradually putting itself to bed without you realizing that you have been staring into the hazy dark for the past hour or two, just listening. And there is an air of festivity, always, and of loose camaraderie with your neighbors, who might share a slice of Bundt cake or lend a bottle opener or sing along out loud with you.
It is also a delightful excuse to prepare picnic food, which is, in my opinion, one of the best dining sub-categories on earth. Think fried chicken and watermelon wedges and macaroni salad. Or ham and gruyere and cornichon on baguette, the sides slathered in European butter, along with some kettle chips and a bag of cherries. Or a spread of cheese and charcuterie with chutneys and mustards to idle over. Food to celebrate with. Food to celebrate, period.
Maybe this weekend you can treat yourself to a small-scale recreation of this kind of magic. If you’re lucky enough to have outdoor space, wipe down the patio furniture or throw a picnic blanket down with some oversized pillows, put out a lantern or string lights, and turn on a favorite album of yours — preferably one recorded live, just for effect. Or set up shop indoors: push your coffee table out of the way, roll out a quilt, and turn on the Taylor Swift concert via Amazon Prime. Either way, use the arrangement as an excuse to open a bottle of rose and eat picnic food. It won’t be The Real Thing, but I have a hunch you’ll get a whiff of its frivolity.
Below, one of my absolute favorite picnic dishes: a steak and penne pasta salad dressed in tangy balsamic vinaigrette. Tastes even better after soaking up the dressing after a couple of hours, and sometimes (can I say it?) best scooped right out of the serving bowl standing in front of the fridge.
Picnic Pasta Salad.
1 steak around 1 lb — I use New York Strip or Bohemian cut for this
1 teaspoon mixed dried herbs — Italian Seasoning or Herbs de Provence work great, but you can also kind of mix and match what you have if you don’t have either of those mixes (crush up dried thyme, rosemary, basil, parsley, oregano, tarragon, marjoram together, for example)
1 garlic clove, minced
3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus 3 tablespoons
1 pound penne pasta
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup chopped basil leaves
1/4 cup chopped parsley leaves
2 cups chopped arugula
Season the steak with salt and freshly ground black pepper, dried herbs, and minced garlic, pressing the latter into the steak on both sides (kind of studding the meat). In a skillet, heat 3 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Cook steak about 7 minutes per side. Remove the meat from pan and let it rest for 5 minutes. Thinly slice the steak against the grain. Set aside.
Cook pasta, reserving 1/4 cup of the starchy pasta water.
In a small bowl or jar (I like to prepare vinaigrettes in jars and shake), whisk together the balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, and 3/4 cup olive oil. In a large bowl toss the pasta with half of the salad dressing and 1/8-1/2 cup reserved pasta water (eyeball — you don’t want it too watery; this is just meant to help the sauce adhere to the noodle). Add the arugula, fresh herbs, and steak, more dressing, and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper, as needed.
Post Scripts.
+I bought a proper picnic blanket when we first moved to New York because we spent so much time in Central Park. It was this exact style from Target, though mine is in a broad blue and white stripe no longer available. It is SO perfect — big, machine-washable, and rolls up into a tidy parcel that can be hung off a stroller hook. Genius!
+Love this bamboo butler tray, should your indoor picnic turn into a lets-eat-dinner-on-the-couch tradition. It folds up! And the tray can be removed and used for coffee table styling if not in use! Love all the fun colors.
+Cutest summer hat for a little gal. I am so into these Liberty London-esque florals these days; this (20% off!) is one of my favorite dresses of mini’s right now, and she wears it even on days we won’t be seeing anyone else.
+Speaking of organization: all my favorite org gear. I also was starting to go crazy with the overflow of all of mini’s new craft and activity gear, so I ordered these cubby bins with lids and will be organizing paints in one, crayons/markers/scissors/glue in another, pom-poms and stickers and pipe cleaners in a third, etc. I am so excited to get it all organized and labeled with my handy labelmaker.
+OK, this is brilliant. And $25?! Looks so much more expensive — even Scandi-style — and can be used for so many purposes. Right now, I know my son would LOVE this. His favorite “toy” at the moment is his older sister’s bathroom stool. Loves to climb up it / remove the letters / dump them in the tub / etc.
+And speaking of that roundup, I recently added these cars to our stash of PicassoTiles and THEY ARE AMAZING. Emory’s mind was blown. She has been playing a lot with these, building buses that then ferry her Maileg mice around.
+I also underestimated the staying power of kinetic sand. Mini and I play with it at least once a week and I have to say I’m impressed with mini’s growing dexterity while using it. At first, she couldn’t ever use the molds to make things — now she’s building blocks and all kinds of stuff out of them. She also loves to move it into and out of small bowls/scoops, to bury her sea animals in it, etc. Just ordered a second bag of it so we have more to play with.
+Have been wearing this blockprint dress A LOT lately. So comfortable, and just the cheeriest print ever.
+And along those lines: P.S.A.: my beloved Frances Valentine caftan is available again!!! I bought this as a present for myself to wear home from the hospital after Hill was born last May. I have to be honest and say it wasn’t the wisest choice for that day because it is not nursing-friendly (womp womp), but I have gotten a ton of mileage out of it since, including on my first excursion out to dinner after he was born. It was loose and easy-fitting and chic. I still wear it constantly.
