In a Nutshell: Site Launch, Cookie Ring and Tacos

T-G-I-F-F. I’m counting down until 5 o’clock when I can throw on some sweatpants and just Netflix and Chill. Just kidding. Of course I already have sweatpants on, it’s a work from home Friday. It’s been almost a month since my last Nutshell recap, yikes! But fret not, I am chock full of great excuses why it’s been a few weeks since my last update. I sifted through my pictures on my phone recently to figure out what I’ve even been up to for the past few weeks. Here’s the high level summary before we dive into the good stuff: the newly redesigned TheSaltedCookie.com launched! I continued to feed my old coworkers some baked goods, Mom came to visit and we ate lots of tacos, more babies! Donuts, muffins, and bridal showers! 

So I’m going to do my best to keep this less verbose than normal and try to at least show you the pics, but we all know how that ends up 3,000 characters later.

• NEW SITE! Insert jazz hands here. You my friend are reading this post on the brand spankin newly redesigned TheSaltedCookie.com – a project that has been on my to-do for a long time, but was on a long wait list to work with one of the best in the biz Lindsay from Purr Design (and the mastermind behind Love and Olive Oil). You’ll notice a lot of new features on the site like a totally revamped homepage with more recipes featured, the email signup, and a better navigation where you can easily find what you’re looking for. The Recipe Index is one one of my favorite features where you can search by category (i.e. Gluten-Free, Cookies, Muffins) or by ingredient! So if you’ve got a hankering for a peanut butter recipe you can click on the peanut butter ingredient tag and it will show you all of the recipes that have peanut butter in it. How cool is that? The only thing is that I need to go back through all 200 posts that I’ve written to date and update them so that the right ingredients and categories are all tagged, which will take some time. Luckily I’ve enlisted the help of my favorite former intern Abby who mastered complex pharmacy Visio flows and excel spreadsheets last year, so I knew she’d be the right lady for the job. Plus we have our meetings over donuts so who wouldn’t love that? In fact, we both had our first visit to Blackbird Doughnuts in the South End a few weeks ago, which was amazing. I don’t even like donuts (thankfully) but I could easily throw back a dozen of these AMAZINGLY delicious donuts without even blinking.

• Summer’s Over: It’s true. As much as I don’t to admit it fall is upon us in the Northeast and we’ve taken the boats out of the water, and are slowly accepting the darkness creeping up earlier and earlier each day until winter arrives and we all die. Hopefully not, but if this winter is even half as bad as last winter I am packing up my things and flying south like a Canadian goose following Anna Paquin. I recently joined SnapChat as @TheSaltedCookie if you were so inclined to follow my daily musings beyond the world of Facebook and Instagram. I can’t say I have anything interesting to put up there yet, but I’ll try to snap some good in progress recipes for you soon. I did capture this depressing shot of Skip waving goodbye to summer as we drove the boats out of the lake for the year.

• The Boston Cookie Ring: So I recently saw Black Mass, which if you haven’t seen it yet you definitely should because Johnny Depp will scare the living bejesus out of you playing notorious Southie gangstah Whitey Bulger. Apparently Billy Bulger lives a block away from me on my same street today where several  of the bodies of Whitey’s victims were buried in the basement. I’m not sure 2 bedroom condos were selling for $700k back in those days. But it did inspire me to get back into my cookie ring – which is just a series of cookie pushers I have around the city to keep my favorite test tasters addicted to the sugar. My old coworkers are still eager for a hit of the good stuff, so I have a few runners in the Back Bay – like my friend Gabby who picked up the drop of these Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk cookies the other day. Now that my new site is up, I have a lot of baking to catch up on, so I put out a note on Facebook asking for volunteers to take the goodies off my hands as soon as I finish photographing them for the blog and I’ve got a list of reliable runners now. My empire is slowly expanding.

• Babies and Bridal Showers: While I’m sitting here racking up airline and hotel status, my friends are all getting on with their lives and currently in the pushing out babies phase. Luckily, I really enjoy visiting babies, buying baby gifts and talking about babies, so I’m always happy when I see a new little peanut arrive. My friend Lauren recently had beautiful sweet baby James who I got to visit when he was only a week old. Hopefully this guy likes Doritos as much as his mama.

I’m in NYC for a few weeks for work, so was really excited to be able to be closer to my FAVORITE little peanut, my perfect little nephew Carter who recently turned two months. This is Carter showing you how to whip, nae naeeeeee. What a hip little Brooklyn baby.

Two weeks from today my project manager partner in crime Allie walks down the aisle and I will embarrassingly tear up the dance floor with my finest moves. We showered her with gifts and mimosas at her shower in September.

• For Boston, For Boston! We sing our proud refrainnnnnn. That’s all I remember of the BC fight song. But I did have a few opportunities to go back on campus recently to try to consult the young’ns into the wonderful world of consulting. Be a consultant, they said, it will be fun they said ….

• And the beat goes! So I am not much of a concert goer due to my old lady tendencies of not enjoying to stay out really late, battle crowds, traffic, and pay $150 for a ticket.  But, I do really enjoy smaller shows of lesser known artists at cozier venues. My friend Bridget is one of my favorite friend to go to concerts with and we went with friends a few weeks ago to see Ben Rector at The House of Blues in Boston, which was AMAZING. Back in 2007 when we first became adults, Bridget and I saw Gavin DeGraw and this guy Matt Wertz opened for him, and we fell in love with Matt Wertz. Then we started following Matt Wertz around and a few years later Ben Rector opened for him, and we decided we loved him more. Well Ben put on a really great show in Boston this year, and his opener Judah & the Lion was so great that we already have plans to see them in the spring.

• Taco time with Mom: So mom came up to Boston the first weekend of the month to visit and help me with some little house projects. It’s always so much easier to check things off the long-list of homeownership if you have someone to help. It first started with a chirping smoke alarm that we couldn’t identify which one it was, me ripping all of the smoke alarms in the house out of the ceiling to replace the batteries frantically, before realizing it was a carbon monoxide alarm in a drawer that was the issue. We finished all of our projects in time to have some fun, and some tacos. First up were these delicious sweet potato and avocado and pork tacos from The Paramount on Broadway.

Then on Saturday we had the most delicious tacos from Loco – Blackened Swordfish with Mango and Shaved Pork. I don’t know why we were on such a taco kick, except they are always a good gluten-free go to. Little did we know that the Sunday she was in town was National Taco Day.

• BRUNCH: If you’re looking for a delicious brunch in Boston, try Tremont 647 in the South End. Colleen and I indulged  in some delicious skillets of eggs and a homemade apple pie poptart while soaking in the sunshine on Tremont street last Sunday. The waiters also wear pajamas during brunch so showing up in your yoga pants is totally acceptable and even encouraged.

So that’s it, in a nutshell! I am sure I left out some major things over the past few weeks, but I am determined to get on a more frequent posting cadence now that the new site design has launched. And if I don’t already have your name as one of my Boston taste testers, let me know and I’ll make sure to get you some baked goods soon.

Happy Friday!