Stacey Ballis's Blog

Hello Chickens, long time no see!  I hope you have all managed to follow me elsewhere for updates.

I am poking my head up here because I am doing an auction fundraiser as part of the national bake sake for Bakers Against Racism.



OFFICIAL #BAKERSAGAINSTRACISM AUCTION IS NOW OPEN! 
Winner must either reside in Chicago (or have a friend or family member or business in Chicago to gift the package to), or be willing to travel to Chicago to pick up monthly, shipping is not possible. The winner of this auction will receive over the course of one year, beginning July 2020 and ending June 2021:A monthly package of baked goods (suitable for a minimum family of four) from a Black-owned bakery here in Chicago, which may include: Brown Sugar Bakery, Schweet Cheesecakes, Justice of the Pies, Downstate Donuts, Frosted By Ope, Cooking with Curves, Laine’s Bakery, Shawn Michelle’s or others. A monthly loaf of sourdough bread baked by me. (OPTIONAL BONUS: If the winner would also like a piece of my sourdough starter, that will also be included, along with my care and feeding and baking instructions.)A copy of Cheryl and Griffin Day’s “The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook” so that you can be making your own fabulous baked goods.A signed copy of one of my books.A $500 value!
TO BID:Go to my Facebook Author page Place your bid in the comments section. 
Bidding begins at $300.
All proceeds will support:My Block My Hood My City“My Block My Hood My City offers opportunities for young people in under-resourced neighborhoods to access amenities not typically available to them. Their programs encourage youth to explore different neighborhoods, cultures and cuisines. The organization also offers opportunities for young people to get involved in STEM programs, volunteering, civic engagement, and community development.”

Hello Chickens, long time no see!  I hope you have all managed to follow me elsewhere for updates.

I am poking my head up here because I am doing an auction fundraiser as part of the national bake sake for Bakers Against Racism.



OFFICIAL #BAKERSAGAINSTRACISM AUCTION IS NOW OPEN! 
Winner must either reside in Chicago (or have a friend or family member or business in Chicago to gift the package to), or be willing to travel to Chicago to pick up monthly, shipping is not possible. The winner of this auction will receive over the course of one year, beginning July 2020 and ending June 2021:A monthly package of baked goods (suitable for a minimum family of four) from a Black-owned bakery here in Chicago, which may include: Brown Sugar Bakery, Schweet Cheesecakes, Justice of the Pies, Downstate Donuts, Frosted By Ope, Cooking with Curves, Laine’s Bakery, Shawn Michelle’s or others. A monthly loaf of sourdough bread baked by me. (OPTIONAL BONUS: If the winner would also like a piece of my sourdough starter, that will also be included, along with my care and feeding and baking instructions.)A copy of Cheryl and Griffin Day’s “The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook” so that you can be making your own fabulous baked goods.A signed copy of one of my books.A $500 value!
TO BID:Go to my Facebook Author page Place your bid in the comments section. 
Bidding begins at $300.
All proceeds will support:My Block My Hood My City“My Block My Hood My City offers opportunities for young people in under-resourced neighborhoods to access amenities not typically available to them. Their programs encourage youth to explore different neighborhoods, cultures and cuisines. The organization also offers opportunities for young people to get involved in STEM programs, volunteering, civic engagement, and community development.”

Chickens-

It has been long time since I have chatted with you all here, so I have no idea if any of you are even still reading.

But if you are, HI!  I've missed you.

In part I have missed you because I have been writing so much elsewhere that it hasn't left me any time or bandwidth to keep up with you here effectively.  For any of you who do not currently follow me on other outlets, I have been doing a tremendous amount of food writing for outlets like MyRecipes.com and Food&Wine Magazine and The Chicago Tribune and others.

And yes, I am also working on a new book.

Charming Suitor and I are rattling around most happily in the house and still marveling that we actually got it finished, and catching up on hosting friends and family.

I've gotten very involved in an organization of women leaders in the culinary fields called Les Dames D'Escoffier, and am proud to be serving as the President-Elect of the Chicago Chapter.

So my ability to maintain this site with any sort of consistency has been enormously compromised.

I'm not shutting it down because I want the archives to live on forever, and I never know when I might have something I need to get off my chest that requires a more personal touch. But as you can see, it is not going to be with any regularity.

But I am writing every day, and if you want to read all the musings and recipes and cooking and entertaining tips?  You can keep up with me at the following social media outlets:

instagram @stacey.ballis
facebook.com/staceyballis1
twitter @staceyballis

My work for other places gets linked and often cross-posted on these.  If you want to know what I am cooking and eating in real time, Instagram is the place for that.  Facebook will always have all of my articles posted and linked for easy access as well as any book appearances.  And I'm still occasionally being snarky over on Twitter.

I hope to see you all at one or more of these outlets, and I promise, for anything really big like a new book release will still populate right here.

Thanks for being out there, and I hope you are all well.

Yours in good taste,
The Polymath

Chickens-
Can you even believe it??? It is the final house post.  This is it, after four years and three months, we have all made it through together.  Like college, but without the bad dating decisions and over-consumption of cheap booze.  We have graduated, and before I show you the final pics, I just want to thank you all for taking this journey with me.  It's been huge fun to have you all along for the ride.  And now that the house focus is done, I’ll be back to periodically offering recipes and entertaining tips, and whatever other flotsam floats through my little head.  If you have any requests, just let me know!  And if you are not already, please take a moment to follow me on Instagram @stacey.ballis  since these days the majority of my daily connections are happening over there.  
So, the third floor.  Or as I think of it, SANCTUARY.  When Charming Suitor and I realized that we were actually undertaking this insane project, we knew two things.  One:  we wanted our home to be a gathering place for friends and family, a home away from home for those who wander, a safe haven, and a place for celebrations large and small.  We have dear friends who sometimes need to come stay for weeks instead of days, and we are looking down the road at the possibility of having family in residence for a certain percentage of the year.  So we planned the spaces to accommodate that easily and comfortably.
The second important thing we knew we would need was a direct response to the first. 
An escape hatch. 
Because as much as we love our friends and family and filling the house with people?  We love each other more and needed to be certain that whatever insanity was happening here, we would have a place that is just ours.  While CS likes to joke that he wishes I had fallen in love with a two-flat and not a three-flat back in 1993, the “bonus floor” meant we could create an entire level of the home that has no public spaces at all.  The third floor became our focus, and we started to think of it in terms of an oasis.   We knew the bedroom and master bath would be up there, and the closets obviously.  We decided on a laundry room for ease, and then put CS’s office/music room there as well, since rocking out is a nice way for him to relax and unwind.  We put a cozy area for two to sit and watch TV, and a comfy place to curl up and read.  A beverage center, so we don’t have to go back downstairs for a drink once we have gotten into our jammies.  An escape for us is also a measure of comfort for our guests.  We are a whole floor away, so they never need to worry that if they want to watch TV late into the night, or if they are early risers that they will disturb us.  Proximity is lovely as long as you can choose it and not have it foisted upon you!
So here is our master suite level.  We designed it in the mode of a luxurious hotel suite.  We went with calming colors and soft fabrics and generous sizes. 
This is the bedroom, which is separated into three areas, the sleeping area, the TV area and the turret, which we think of as the reading/relaxing area.  It’s the first time I’ve ever had a TV in the bedroom, and while I would never want one facing the bed, it is nice to be able to cozy up and watch something before bed.  I love this soothing blue-gray color, North Star from Sherwin-Williams.  It changes with the light, getting bluer in sunlight and grayer in the dark. 






This is the top of the stairs.  





We call this the domino nook.  As in one domino fell and took the rest with it.  It started with CS needing hallway access on his side of the bed.  We realized halfway through construction that since we couldn’t move plumbing to create an en-suite bathroom, that the toilet was halfway down the hall.  But the way we did the bedroom, and the placement of the sleeping area meant that CS would have to walk twice as far to get to the bathroom just to get out of the bedroom!  Since we are middle-aged people with nocturnal needs, and that won’t lessen as we age, we realized that a second method of egress from the bedroom was necessary.  Which meant adding a door on his side of the bed.  Which I hated, because then you would walk up the stairs and be faced with a random door.  So I suggested we do one of those hidden bookcase doors.  Which CS liked.  But then we realized a random mid-hallway bookcase would also be suspect and strange, so we would need to build out a larger unit of which the secret door would be part.  Then we had this lovely unit, but in a very narrow hallway.  So I asked if maybe we could bump out the hall over the stair for a larger landing, so that we could put in a small sitting area facing the new bookshelf unit….you see what I mean about dominos???? At the end of the day it was a smart move, CS loves both the function and form of his secret door, the nook at the top of the stairs is lovely, and while it turned out to be a not inexpensive solution to a basic problem, it also became an architectural feature that we both love.  And it allowed me to hang and highlight this painting that my grandparents received as a wedding gift.



Here is CS’s dressing room.


And here is mine.  I still love getting dressed in here, it just feels like shopping at a little boutique full of stuff that already fits me!


Here is the commode room.  Two things I don’t love about bathrooms…I don’t love having to do hair and makeup in a room filled with shower steam, and I don’t love the toilet sharing space with the rest of the bathroom.  So an independent room that deals with both issues in one fell swoop seemed a great idea.  Because it is dual function, it is a bit bigger than the usual “toilet only” half-baths, which is nice, and it gives me a place to indulge in girlie primping without accidentally spraying CS in the eye with hairspray. 



This is the Master Bathroom, my personal haven of long bathtub soaks and spa-like showering, and the extra benefit of his and hers vanities.  The vanities area special because the sink creates its own counter or seamless cleaning and the generous drawers meant no need for any other storage needed in this room, both from Duravit.  We put in heated floors in the wet area of the room, and because this section of the bathroom is all marble and tile we didn’t have to put a door on the shower. 






This is the laundry room.  As a place devoted to an annoying and endless bit of life maintenance, it is bright and comfy and has a lot of storage.



This is CS’s office/rocking out room.  We gave it a closet and a full bathroom, just in case someday we need full-time live-in help, we can convert it to a caregiver suite.





Here is the bathroom for CS’s office, we were able to use up the extra tiles from the first and second-floor bathrooms in here for a very affordable yet stylish space!





That’s it!  The whole kit and caboodle!  Thanks for hanging in there with us…stay tuned for posts about how we are actually living in the spaces now that it is finished.
Now for some thank yous and acknowledgments.  
First and foremost, our General Contractor Patrick King and Project Manager Dennis Leary.  They are family to us, and this house is a testament to their skill, passion, commitment and extraordinary hard work.  We know we couldn't have done it without them, and we wouldn't have wanted to.  Chances are if you spot a special detail anywhere in this old girl, they had a hand in devising and executing it.  
Our architects at 2RZ, Bill and Colette Rodon-Hornof for listening to what we said we wanted and giving us what we needed.  I think sometimes there is nothing worse for an architect than a client who claims they just need someone to draw the vision they have devised in their head.  And which is worse, I'd been living in this building and dreaming of this conversion for over 20 years!  But they heard us, went with us, and helped guide us to a plan that was exactly what we needed.  We'll be forever grateful, especially for the places they nudged us away from our own ideas into things far more practical!
Our friends and family, who put up with dinner parties surrounded by boxes and racks of coats in the dining room, and dusty visits, and endless conversation.  While we made every effort to have things to talk about besides the project, we know you all have put up with a LOT of house talk and we appreciate your patience and look forward to getting back to movies and TV and books and frankly anything except construction and politics.  And special love for our dear friends Amy and Wayne Gould, whose generosity can be seen in pretty much every room in the whole house!
Our guru of all things soft-goods, Beth Laske-Miller who showed up like a miracle one day to do clothing alterations and ended up in a constant stream of upholstery projects and window-treatments and ENDLESS throw pillows.  And her partner in crime Gregg Fishman and the team at Fishman's Fabrics for providing all the materials, and always finding us the perfect fabric to execute a vision.
Rachel and Rick Boultinghouse for the upholstery work on the walls and ceiling of my office...every day when I go to work it is like getting a hug from you guys!
Larry Cabay at Studio 41 for getting 5 1/2 bathrooms kitted out with just what we dreamt of, and within our budget.
Rachel Abramowitz and her team at Fine Line Tile, and New Ravenna tile company.
Kais Zaiane and Gaggenau for helping us with the warming drawers, induction cooktop and in-counter steamer.
Leah Kalemba and the team at Aga/Marvel/La Cornue for assisting with the downstairs stove and hood, all refrigeration, and our miraculous rotisserie.
Jeff Roberts, Marcy Tucker and the team at Poggenpohl for helping to make the all-important main kitchen exceed our every expectation of both functionality and beauty, and literally saving us from ourselves.  I shouldn't do math.  That's all you need to know about that.
Tom and the fabrication team at StoneMasters countertops for performing miracles, and Robert Oraha for talking me off the ledge and being the best possible lunch companion.  
All of the people we worked with at Cosentino for the countertops for all of their support and guidance, Cosentino came in on this project at the very beginning and stuck with us all the way thru.
Blanco for helping us with all kitchen and utility sinks and faucets.
Our painter Jesse Velez and his team from Different Strokes, we know this project was complicated with paint colors and finishes and a lot of new stain work that had to blend seamlessly with stain from over 100 years ago.  We won't even mention the high gloss dining room or purple staircase.  We love you guys and your work was impeccable always.
Molly and the team at Ely-Wyn for custom furniture.
We worked closely with the following companies on finishes and fixtures, and cannot recommend them all highly enough.  Vinotemp, Bluestar, Gaggenau, Miele, La Cornue, Marvel, Aga, Duravit, Blanco, Wetstyle, Cosentino, Silestone, Dekton, Poggenpohl, World Flooring, To the Top Elevators, Sherwin-Williams, StoneMasters, Different Strokes Painting, Fine Line Tile, New Ravenna Tile, Kohler, Toto, 2RZ Architects, Fox Valley Stairs, and of course, King Konstruction.
If you are doing your own renovations?  You have our unqualified recommendations on all of these fine companies and their products and services.
Yours in Good Taste,The Polymath

Chickens-
Welcome to another installment of the final house reveal!  Today will be mostly pics, since the second floor has been fairly exhaustively covered on the blog previously, but I wanted to give a quick run-down of the main elements for you.
For starters, it is finally time to reveal the staircase!  As you all know, when this was a three-flat, the stairs were not ideal.  There was one long run going from the first floor to the second, and another from the first to the basement, and winders everywhere.  As my klutziness is well documented, winders are a very bad idea, especially as I get older and my footing becomes, god help me, even less sure.  She is no nimble-hooved mountain goat, your Polymath, and falling down the stairs is not a nice way to spend one's golden years.  And stairs are important in this house.  In terms of design, literally the one element that transforms it from three apartments into a single cohesive home is the staircase, so we needed to get it right.  And which is more, we needed it to look original. 








From a design perspective, that meant strong woodworking elements, like newel posts with a lot of trim detail, elegant handrails, and an all-wood stained staircase.  This is a complicated thing.  If you are carpeting your stairs, as most new construction homes do, the staircase just needs to be functional, the wood sturdy not necessarily pretty, and they can go up in a couple of weeks.  Not so for a custom artisanal staircase where the wood has to be gorgeous and pristine, where the stain has to be an exact match to the woodwork in the rest of the house.
Fox Valley Stairs to the rescue.  They have been doing these kinds of staircases for years, and the moment they presented their design to us, we knew they understood the project.  They were able to match the design of the original newel posts we had removed, incorporated generous width to the stairs and large landings, so no more winders, as well as lovely details like gooseneck railings.  It was very disconcerting to live with a 40-foot hole in the middle of my house for a few months, but the end result could not have been more spectacular.  Our painter Jesse and his terrific team did a layering effect with several colors of stain to match the depth and patina of the original woodwork in the house, and our flooring guys at World Flooring gave the landings some punch with custom inlaid patterns.
When it came to our part, we had one major design element to address.  Way back, in the beginning, I had said to my Charming Suitor that the grand staircase is usually where the chateaus and manor houses hang all those gilt-framed oil portraits of the ancestors.  He asked politely if I had any of those lying about, which I had to confess I did not.  He was equally bereft of Old Masters capturing his people back in the day.  But we both loved the idea.  So we started collecting other people’s ancestors to hang in the stairwell.  We were going to need a backdrop color that really highlighted them, and we knew we wanted some real depth of color in the stairs, and CS suggested eggplant purple, which is my favorite neutral.  It just goes with everything.  The color, Majestic Purple from Sherwin-Williams, really shows off both the stairs themselves and the artwork to great effect.  On both the first floor and second floor we installed these gorgeous console tables that were a gift from dear friends.  They are the perfect spot to drop the little items we are forever moving from floor to floor.  We topped it off with a large brass dome pendant light.








This is my office, the main highlight of which are the walls, which my bestie Rachel and her husband upholstered in moss green velvet.  It makes the room super cozy, and deadens all outside sound.  I confess to doing most of my work on the antique daybed.  I schlepped the stripe fabric back from Paris, and our upholstery guru Beth Laske-Miller made the cover for the mattress.  The antique hospital bed table works wonderfully for my laptop.  But despite working mostly on the bed, I do love my desk.  The piece is from the 1830s, and has all the fun cubbies and hidey-holes that anyone could want.











The den is the room we live in the most, it serves as our daily hangout spot and where we entertain for casual evenings.  I loved doing the custom sofa in the turret, it is a great spot for pre-dinner cocktails and the big gray sectional is a terrific flop around couch.  And all of our little trinkets and treasures like to live in the converted architectural file table.












This is the Paris room, our guest room for single people under 5’8”.  That’s the thing about an antique bed, people were much shorter then.  I’m tempted to put up a sign that says you have to be LESS than this tall to ride this ride.  But it is a cozy fun little room, and the people who have used it seem to have enjoyed it so far.








This is the Hampshire room, the other guest bedroom on this level, and the scale is quite a bit grander. 








Here is the bathroom on this floor, CS designed it as a meditation in white, mostly reproductions of period tiles and fixtures, and a very zen place to make one's ablutions.  The fixtures in here are all Kohler.





And of course, the kitchen, which we have covered to the nth degree here, so I will let the pics speak for themselves. 
















As a reminder, on the big ticket item front, the cabinets are Poggenpohl; the countertops are Dekton from Cosentino; the ovens, gas range and hood are all BlueStar; the induction burner, steamer and warming drawers are all Gaggenau; the rotisserie is La Cornue; the refrigeration is all Marvel; the dishwashers are Miele; and the sinks and faucets are Blanco.
Stay tuned and we will head up to the fourth and final floor…
Yours in Good Taste,
The Polymath

Hello Chickens, and Happy Monday!  Hopefully none of your brackets are busted...
Now that you have all seen the most formal space in the house, I thought we’d pop downstairs to the basement for the least formal spaces!
A lot of this will be a repeat for those of you who have been with us since the beginning, but since the basement was the first level we completed, it seemed worth revisiting.
Here is the landing at the bottom of the stairs, which became a very convenient little museum of odd things. 




The stairs also created this little nook that we made cozy.


The media room, as you might recall, was one of the more energizing projects. 




Two and a half years later and we still love hanging out down here with pals.  It is an ideal spot for movie nights and game nights and sporting events.  The color on the walls is Sherwin-Williams Peppercorn, which might be my favorite charcoal gray ever.  And the Walter E. Smithe red couch still looks new even two years later.  The beverage center is Marvel, and we are always shocked at how much it actually holds.   The Chicago flag is vintage, it used to fly over Navy Pier when it still belonged to the Navy!  And the painting which inspired the whole design of the room is an original by my dad. 
The work out room continues to be the nicest possible place to do the least fun thing.


Charming Suitor, as you all know, is a serious wine collector, and so the wine cellar was a space we really needed to get right!






Vinotemp did all the custom racking as well as providing the equipment that maintains the temp and humidity.  All the bottles are sleeping happily, as is the country ham.  Our contractors did all the details like reusing the lath from other areas of the space that got demoed for cladding the ceiling, and creating trim and wainscoting out of the old staircase we removed.  Geniuses!
We loved having this bathroom as our primary bath for eighteen months while we waited for our Master Bath to be done. 



Guests really like this bathroom, with the giant soaker tub and walk-in shower.  I love the long Wetstyle trough sink, which gave us the functionality of separate faucets without the look of two bowls, which isn’t my favorite.  
This is the smaller of the two guest rooms down here, and we went with something of an Indochine look, starting with a British iron and linen campaign bed, and then bringing in lots of Asian touches.




This is the larger guest bedroom.




The rest of the basement is devoted to storage and mechanicals, but we love that it is almost like a little apartment down here for when friends or family need to come for extended stays!
We’ll be headed up to the second floor in a few days, so stay tuned!
Yours in Good Taste,
The Polymath

Chickens, my dearest darlingest chickens, I have the best possible news.
The house?  She is finished.  Done, finis, fin, stick a fork in her, and in us.  Four years and three months of dust and debris and never really being alone in our home, and we survived!
We could not be more delighted and are thrilled to announce that this year we won Preservationists of the Year from the Logan Square Preservation Society for our work on the home, a humbling validation of this project.

So I will be devoting the coming posts to introducing you to our freshly refurbished old girl, room by room.  There is no way to capture all of what the house has become in one post, not without losing the details, so I thought the best way to handle it would be to go floor by floor, so that you are taking the grand tour in manageable bits.
Today we begin at the beginning…




This is the vestibule.  The tile floor, marble wainscoting, and plaster crown molding are all original to the building.  To the left of the Italian Arts and Crafts hall tree is where there used to be a door to access the upper apartments.  Luckily for us, our tile guy was able to carefully remove the marble from behind where the hall tree now is and shift it over when we eliminated that door, so it looks seamless! Above the little settee are the original speaking tubes, one of which is reconnected and actually can talk to the wine cellar!



This is the foyer with the new entry closet which was carved out when we changed the stairs to enter into the living room instead of the vestibule.  Both Charming Suitor and I have an insane volume of outerwear, because, Chicago.  So having this generous front closet is a godsend.  The pier mirror was salvaged from another local building from the same era, and fits right in!  Almost everyone thinks it is original, which is what we love.
As you all know, when I fell in love with this building in 1993, I had no control over it being a three-flat.  CS would have much preferred a two-flat, but the “extra” floor allowed us to do two things that now we wouldn’t have wanted any different.  The first was giving us this first level to be devoted to formal entertaining space.  You know how much we love to host, and this allows us to do so at scale and without impinging on our day-to-day living.  We can have a big party down here, and then disappear back upstairs and put the first floor back together at our leisure and not feel like we are having breakfast in the detritus of a party.   The second is that it allowed us to create a private bedroom level with no public spaces, more on that in a future post.
This first level is comprised of the formal living room, dining room, library, large and small butler’s pantries, prep kitchen, bathroom and powder room.

This is the formal living room.  












I loved pulling this room together.  The color on the walls is Sherwin-Williams Hearts of Palm, a soothing celery green color that brightens the space and provides a great backdrop for the art and deeper colors of the furniture and rugs.  The armoire was the first major piece of furniture CS and I bought together, on a trip to New Orleans, and it holds much of my entertaining equipment, and a ton of table linens and the like.  The furniture is mostly consignment store and flea market finds, all beautifully reupholstered.  Our pal Gregg Fishman at Fishman’s fabrics was always on deck to help up find the perfect textiles for every project, and everything you see in this room from the furniture to pillows to window treatments all came off the bolts at Fishman’s.  Our soft-goods guru Beth Laske-Miller was in charge of doing the hard part, thank goodness!  I can’t sew to save my life and my upholstery skills are remedial at best.  Beth gave much of the furniture new life, dressed up all our windows, and CS dubbed her our personal pillow purveyor!  The light fixtures were originally giant lampshades that we converted to pendants.
This is the library.  










For me, it serves two essential functions.  One, it houses the magical collections of words.  I haven’t yet been able to really get in here and organize them, it is a major project that I will tackle eventually.  But they are all here with room for more, which makes me super happy.  Second, it provides a lovely ante-room for the bathroom.  I have a personal pet peeve about bathrooms that open into dining spaces.  The entrance to the bathroom was originally in the hallway, but when we reconfigured the dining room, it would have essentially opened right up on the table!  So we moved the entrance into the library so that guests have that extra bit of privacy, and anyone waiting for their turn has a nice place to sit.  We found the antique light fixture online, and CS was a rock star installing my collection of vintage Florentine gilded wood trays on the ceiling for an unexpected pop of interest.
I love this bathroom.  







It is so over the top, the colors are so saturated, the space is just crazypants in a great way.  The sink was the starting point, a gorgeous brass art nouveau piece called Lilies Lore from Kohler, and the custom marble tilework is all New Ravenna, found for us by our tile magician Rachel at Fine Line Tile.  The wall color is Oceana from Sherwin-Williams, in a high gloss finish.  The vanity was an antique dresser gifted us by dear friends.  Who says bathrooms have to be boring?
This is the dining room...



















The dining room is the first room I ever really imagined in a new configuration when I moved in 25 years ago.  The built-in china hutch was just a staggering piece of craftsmanship, and knowing that it had a twin on the second floor got me dreaming of a long dining room flanked by the two.  In order to achieve this dream, we absorbed what used to be the master bedroom in this unit into the exisiting dining room, and removed the second china hutch from upstairs and reinstalled it opposite it's brother.  The table we had to have custom made, since 18 feet is a lot more than you can find at your local furniture store. Thank god for the Amish!  They have big families and recognize the need to seat everyone at one table.  It also allowed us to have the table made on the narrow side, since while the room is verrrry long, it isn’t terribly wide.  The table is actually just a 6 foot table with 12 one-foot leaves, so it is very flexible in terms of seating.  You might also notice the mismatched chair collection.  The table seats 24, and frankly, I think a giant table like this with 24 matching chairs would look a lot like a conference room.  So we have gathered pairs and sets to suround the table, all wood base with some upholstery, all the same general height.  Once we find all of the right ones, (some of these are not really perfect or as comfortable as we want) we will have Beth reupholster them in matching fabric.  The color is Obstinate Orange by Sherwin-Williams in high gloss, and while it reads a bit red in these pics due to lighting, in real life it is a deep true orange and a totally energizing color.  The tray ceiling is a burnished metallic gold from Benjamin Moore to reflect the light from the chandeliers with a warm glow.  The chandeliers themselves CS found at Columbus Architectural Salvage on a business trip to Ohio, and they were originally installed in a private Catholic school in the 1890s.  We love the drama of them!

And no, before you ask, CS and I have not had dinner at opposite ends of it a la War of the Roses!
This is the large butler's pantry.









This room was originally a small back bedroom that over the years served as everything from a guest room to an office to kitchen storage.  Needing as much storage for entertaining gear as possible, we converted it to a large butler’s pantry, bar and buffet.  We can use it to stage for parties, serve buffet style, and be the main bar.  But the pocket doors mean we can close it off if we aren't using it for an event.  The wall color is a favorite of mine, Black Fox by Sherwin-Williams, I think it looks like really good dark chocolate, and we extended it into the small original butler's pantry and kitchen.  The pocket doors our contractor made from regular doors that were original to the building, and he made the transom out of scrap trim.  It looks totally original!
This is the small butler’s pantry that is original to the building.  




The sink is also original, we just reconnected it to the plumbing so that it is functional again!  The little desk underneath is an antique salesman's sample that my grandfather gave to my grandmother as a gift, and is a good place to store hand towels and small supplies.
Powder room:


This used to be our food pantry!  I love this tiny powder room, and it is great to have a second bathroom on this floor for big parties.  The color is Perfect Gray from Sherwin-Williams.
This is the prep kitchen.  

















I still have trouble believing it was my only kitchen for 23 years!  We decided against doing any cabinets other than the sink base, since we didn’t really need the storage, and wanted the room to be very usable and flexible for myself and for caterers or guest chefs.  We splurged on the Aga stove and hood, since that gave us five burners and two ovens plus a broiler.  And, I mean, COME ON!  Look at it.  Yummy.  We did the single sheet of back-painted glass as the backsplash for ease of cleaning.  We love our Blanco Sinks and faucets upstairs in the primary kitchen, so we reached back out to them to kit us out for this one.   We did a commercial three-drawer refrigeration unit, and topped it with a custom wood piece from our friend Tim.  The marble island is a treasured antique, originally the counter in a bakery in France, it has surprisingly good storage, with two small drawers and open shelving behind, and three long drawers on the side, the top one contains a bread guillotine, in case you want to buy half a baguette!  And yes, it is sharp as the dickens.  British stove aside, we have lots of French touches in this little kitchen, things we have brought back from our travels, especially our copper pots and pans.

That is the whole first floor!  Stay tuned for a trip down into the basement….
Yours in Good Taste,The Polymath

Chickens-
It is my most favorite time of the year!  The sweaters and adorable jackets are out, the boots and tights have reappeared and the best food of the season is about to get underway.  For those of you following along on the house progress, I will say that we will be DONE by Thanksgiving (for which I am so thankful I can barely speak) and will be filling you in on everything between now and the new year!  In the meantime, here is my annual Thanksgiving post.  If you stick with me, and this is a long one, there is a really cool giveaway at the end!
I have posted this piece, adjusted slightly year by year, since 2009.  The essentials don’t change much.  The sentiment changes not at all. 
This year is once again dedicated again to the loving memory of my grandmother Jonnie, who left us a year ago August, I’m reasonably certain so that she could watch the Cubs win the World Series with my grandfather, and not ever have to live in a world where Trump is President. 
Jonnie is the reason I cook, the reason I gather loved ones around my table, the reason that when there are four for dinner I make enough for eight because abundance rules and one can always do something interesting with the leftovers.  Jonnie taught me Thanksgiving, in every permutation of that word and holiday and philosophy.  They say that the human body completely renews all of its cells every seven years, every seven years you essentially become a brand new person.  And while my family Thanksgiving has stayed effectively the same, my recipes have slowly shifted from the ones Jonnie taught me, little changes in technique or ingredients, so that now, while the meal is effectively the same, it has also become as much mine as hers.  I no longer do her turkey with the buttered cheesecloth over the breast, and I don’t stuff the bird the way she did.  My mashed potatoes now include sour cream and chives, and there is significantly less brown sugar in the sweet potatoes.  I’ve given up the green bean casserole in favor of creamed spinach, and I make milkbread rolls instead of her yeast rolls. 
Her orange sherbet jello mold recipe has not been changed a whit. 
The various parts of the whole remain the same; the traditions are there, deepened a bit, adjusted, but still full of memory and still honoring what came before. 
This will be the 25th Thanksgiving meal I have cooked.  It will be the second one that I will have to do without eleventy million phone calls over the weeks leading up, going over the menu, telling her about some new thing, some new dish. I still pick up the phone to call her.
Jonnie loved this post.  She re-read it every year, and every year she would call me and tell me that she just loved my Thanksgiving advice.  And I always said of course she did, since most of it I learned from her. 
The world in which we live has changed so much since last year.  It feels scarier, less secure, less connected.  Everyone seems on edge, quick to anger or tears, folding in on themselves.  And the state of our politics has caused rifts and disconnects between family and friends and it becomes harder day by day to remember the good and the happy and the blessings which continue to be many even if they feel harder to touch.
So this year, I’m trying really really hard to be extra-thankful.  Thankful for all the usual suspects, my family and friends, my health, my home, a job I love and all of my lovely chickens who read and connect and keep me going.  I’m thankful that my holiday table will be surrounded by the faces of those I love, and that the buffet will groan with deliciousness, and I’m deeply profoundly thankful that Jonnie taught me how. 
I’m thankful for those who have been challenged and tested, who have lost love and lost loved ones and keep going, the first responders who seem to be even more needed these days, the communities recovering from disasters both natural and man-inflicted.  I’m thankful for those who feed, the people who put food on the table for their nearest and dearest, and for strangers, those who get raucous groaning boards loaded in celebration and those who get basic nutrients to those who cannot source it for themselves.
I’m thankful for those who speak up, who speak truth, who face down bullies and despots and dictators, for those who march and call and write.  I’m thankful for every one of those voices that represent so many who feel unable to speak.  I’m thankful for life and breath and love and light and hope that if nothing else, you all have those in abundance.
Here is the advice I share with you every year.  It is mine, and Jonnie’s, and I hope, now, yours.
As a passionate home cook, Thanksgiving is my grail, my marathon, my Everest. The ability to pull it off well is a source of pride, and no moments of my year are as purely pleasurable as the brief silence around the table when everyone tucks into their plates, followed by gradual exclamations of rapturous delight.   And while there is always something a little bit new or different every year, the basics stay the same, and I’ve gotten a lot of it down to a science. 
But science doesn’t mean clenched perfectionism. 
With all due respect to Martha, you don’t need twenty-four matching turkey shaped bowls for the soup to taste good, you don’t have to grow your own cranberries, or even make your own pie crust (or pie for that matter) for this day to be wonderful.  Good food, prepared with love (or purchased with love), and served with a smile is all anyone needs for the holiday to be sublime…to each at the level of his or her own ability. 
For those of you who are thinking of tackling the big day, I’ve got some tips to help you out.  The most important thing about Thanksgiving is right there in the name, be thankful.  If you burn the turkey, eat all the side dishes and proclaim yourselves temporary vegetarians and laugh it off.  If you are with your people, whatever that looks like for you, then you are doing it right, the rest is just details.  And if at all possible, set yourself up for success with some simple advice and simpler recipes.
Whether you are having a huge event with five generations, a gathering of your best pals who aren’t able to be with their own families, or just a small dinner with you and your sweetie, there are ways to make this day less stressful, and more joyous.
Firstly, know thyself.  Do you regularly make your own puff pastry, serve towering flaming Baked Alaskas, and finish your sauces with homemade demi-glace?  Then find any challenging menu that inspires you and have at it.  But if you burn the toast four days out of ten, this isn’t the time to try anything complicated.  Keep things simple, and don’t be afraid to get help with the hard stuff or fiddly bits. People love to participate, so let guests bring something to take some of the pressure off you.  If you’ve never made piecrust, buy a good quality frozen crust. Look at local prepared foods sections of grocery stores and see who is offering side dishes and do a tasting the week before.  If Whole Foods is making a killer stuffing, there’s no shame in serving it.   Does gravy make you nervous?  Add five or six whole peeled shallots to the roasting pan along with your bird, and simply blend them into the de-fatted pan juices to thicken it easily without all that tricky flour business.  
Secondly, know thy audience.  You might be a major foodie, but is Aunt Marge? No point in fussing over individual pumpkin soufflés cooked in hollowed out roasted quinces with vanilla bean tuiles unless the rest of your guests will think it as awesome as you do, and not wonder dejectedly where the Entenmann’s Pumpkin Pie with Cool Whip is this year.  You can take the essentials and just make them with the best ingredients you can get, and know that you have improved, even if you haven’t monumentally altered.  Or think of it as a retro meal, all the rage these days, and revel in the kitschy quality of making the recipes the old way. 
Thanksgiving is also a great time to connect with your family members who cook…call Mom or Uncle Al and ask for advice and recipes, they’ll be flattered and you’ll be amazed how many great tips they can give you.
So, if you’re getting ready for the big day, here are Stacey’s (via Jonnie) Thanksgiving Commandments:
1.  Thou shalt buy a fresh turkey from a butcher, and dry brine before roasting.              I know Butterball seems like a good idea, and awfully convenient, but they are so filled with preservatives and water and other unnatural stuff, they don’t really taste like turkey.   Call your local butcher and order a fresh turkey for pick up the Monday before Thanksgiving.  The bonus will be that you won't have to thaw it!  Take it home and dry brine for two days, essentially giving it a good salting and slapping it in a large Ziploc bag to hang out.  I recommend the Food52 recipe for this.  Then cook as you usually do.  You’ll be delighted with the moist, well-seasoned results.
2.   Thou shalt discover how easy it is to make awesome cranberry sauce.            Cranberry sauce is not just the easiest part of the meal; it can be made up to a week in advance.  It’s the perfect thing for even a reluctant cook to offer to bring to someone else’s meal, or an easy addition to your own.  (and yes, I know some of you love that shimmering jiggling tube with all the ridges, and if you must, have some on hand…but do at least TRY homemade…you can always serve both)
3.  Thou shalt not be ashamed to make the green bean casserole with the Campbell’s Condensed Soup.            Sure, I’m a foodie-slash-crazy-person, so I make my cream of mushroom soup from scratch before assembling the ubiquitous casserole if I’m going that direction…but honestly, it’s a tradition for a reason, the original recipe is pretty comforting and delicious in its own way, and easy to make, so even if you consider yourself a major gourmet, pull out the processed food version and serve with a smile.  Ditto sweet potatoes with marshmallows.
4.  Thou shalt not overdo the appetizers.            And by overdo, I mean serving any if you can help it.  You’re going to spend at least two days cooking for this meal.  Let your guests be hungry when they get to the table.  Keep your pre-dinner nibbles to small bowls of nuts or olives or pretzels or the like, think basic bar snacks…you just want your guests to have something to nosh on with their pre-dinner drinks, but if they fill up on hors d’oeuvres you’ll all be sad when you get to the table and can’t manage seconds. (this is good advice for any dinner party…either plan heavy hors d’ouevres and a light supper, or vice versa)  If you must do soup, despite the fact that all good Thanksgiving soups are guaranteed to fill up your guests overmuch, plan on little espresso cups or dainty tea cups during the cocktail hour and not bowls at the table.  Serving a soup course adds a level of stress to getting the buffet out that no one needs.  I make soup because if I don’t make the soup my family pouts, and the leftovers are great all weekend.  But I don’t do a soup course, they get just about three to four lovely sips to go with their pre-dinner bubbles, and when we get to the table, it is turkey time. 
5.  Thou shalt not bother with salad.            I know it always seems like such a good idea to make a fresh green salad. But frankly, it takes up valuable space on a plate that should be devoted to fourteen different starches, and you’re just going to throw most of it away, since it will be all wilty and depressed by the time you go to put the leftovers away.  No one will miss it.  Seriously.  Stop even thinking about it. 
6.  Thou shalt not count calories, skimp on ingredients, or whine and pout about how bad the food is for you.            We are all very sensitive to healthy eating these days, and more than a few of us are dealing with the need to lose a couple of pounds.  Or a couple of dozen. THIS IS NOT THE DAY TO DO IT.  Thanksgiving is, at its very core, a celebration of food and the memories that food invokes and the new memories created at the table.  You do yourself, your host, and the day a disservice if you think of it as anything else, or deprive yourself of the sheer joy of this meal.  If you’re the cook, don’t alter recipes with low fat/low salt/low taste versions of things unless you have a guest with medically prescribed dietary restrictions.  Don’t skip meals before, so that you aren’t blindly starving by the time you get to the buffet, and if you’re really concerned, fill your plate anyway you like, but either don’t go back for seconds, or on your second round, stick to the less gloopy veggies and turkey and the cranberry sauce.  Any nutritionist worth their salt will tell you that one meal cannot derail your overall progress, especially if you get back to your program the next day and maybe add a workout that week.  And any counselor will tell you that the surest way to be cranky is to deprive yourself while all around you are celebrating.  Give yourself a break…you’ll be amazed that if you give yourself permission to have everything you want, how easy it is not to overdo it. 
7.  Thou shalt not stuff your bird.            I can hear you crying about it now….you are used to the bird packed with stuffing, you dream about the really crispy good part in the front over the neck, why can’t we stuff our turkeys?  Here’s why….one, a stuffed bird is the best possible way to get food borne illness on the agenda.  If the stuffing doesn’t get up to at least 180 degrees internally, it can breed bacteria, not fun for anyone’s tummy.  Two, in order to get the stuffing to 180, you are going to overcook the crap out of the turkey itself, especially the breast meat.  Three, all that moistness you love in the in-the-bird stuffing?  That is all the juices from the meat that are getting sucked out by the huge stuffing sponge, and you not only dry out your bird, you have many fewer juices with which to make gravy.  Make your stuffing and bake in a separate dish, and if you really miss that dense moistness, buy a couple of extra turkey wings and lay them on top of the casserole as it bakes, and/or melt a stick of butter in a cup of chicken stock and pour it over the stuffing ten minutes before taking it out of the oven.   And get over it.  Stuffing that wasn’t actually stuffed is always going to be better than food poisoning.  We’ve started doing Julia Child’s recipe for a deconstructed turkey cooked over the stuffing, which gives you the perfect stuffing and perfect bird, and in a fraction of the time.  Cook’s Illustrated has the technique and recipe, including video, just Google it.  But be prepared, it means no pan juices at all for gravy (which I don’t mind since then I can just make gravy the week before and freeze it), and no big whole bird to bring to the table.
8.  Thou shalt not test more than one new recipe for this meal.            Thanksgiving is a wonderful meal to add to, but don’t do everything at once.  I know that the cooking mags have all sorts of new-fangled versions of things, but they have to reinvent the holiday menu every year.  Experimentation is good, but if you change the whole thing up at once, people are going to miss their old standby favorites.  Pick one dish that you think is ready for a revamp, and throw in that curveball. If you love it, add it to the repertoire.  But don’t do the chipotle rubbed turkey, sweet potato kale bake, barley stuffing, green beans with fresh ricotta, and sherried fig cranberry coulis all in one meal.  Someone will weep openly, and everyone will have to run out the next day and make a few traditional items to get them through to next year.
9.  Thou shalt be neither The Thanksgiving Dictator nor That Annoying Guest.            If people want to help in the kitchen, let them.  And don’t criticize the quality of their small dice, or the way they wash the pots.  Ditto assigning specific foods to guests who want to bring something…if someone offers to bring a dish, ask them what they love to make or what they crave most about Thanksgiving and let them bring that.  Who cares if you have two kinds of sweet potatoes, or both cornbread and regular stuffing?   On Thanksgiving, more is more, and abundance rules.  Besides, you have a three-day weekend that needs quality leftovers. If you are the guest, offering to bring something, be clear about what you are capable of; make sure to ask how many people you are expected to serve, and DO NOT BRING ANYTHING THAT NEEDS ASSEMBLY OR COOKING ONSITE!  Do you have any idea how supremely annoying it is for someone to arrive with a grocery bag full of ingredients to begin making their dish while you are doing a kitchen dance that requires logistics only slightly less complicated than the opening ceremonies for the Olympics?  Or with their frozen or chilled item that they then need to wedge into your one oven?  If your dish is to be served warm, bring it warm in an insulated container, or in your slow cooker so that you can plug it in somewhere unobtrusive till it is time to serve.  Speaking of serving, my best trick for holidays and dinner parties alike is to bring my offering on a serving platter that doubles as my hostess gift.  Target, Home Goods, etc. all sell very inexpensive serving pieces, and it is a huge relief to your hosts for you to hand off your contribution, already on or in its final destination, and say "The platter/bowl/basket is our gift to thank you for your hospitality."  Nothing is more annoying during dishwashing than making sure everyone's serveware gets cleaned so they can take it back home.  Ditto Tupperware.  I'm just saying.
10.  Thou shalt be THANKFUL.            We are all very blessed in our own ways.  Even if you are going through a rough time, there are those who have it rougher.  The times in which we live are scary and sad, and we all deserve a day to focus on the good.  Take a few moments to think about all of the gifts you have in your life, the family and friends who surround you, all of the wonderful things you may take for granted in the hustle and bustle of your day to day.   Close your eyes, be joyful, and in all sincerity and humbleness thank the universe for your life.
I am deeply thankful for each and every one of you for reading, supporting me and my work, and being kind and gentle ears in the world for my words.  
And now for the giveaway!  I have a lovely new friend, the best kind of new friend, the kind that feels like an old dear friend already.  Nancie McDermott will be familiar to many of you, her food writing has long been a touchstone of mine, her wonderful Southern recipes are one of the ways this Yankee girl can properly give her Kentucky CS some of the food of his upbringing, and her work in the cuisines of Thailand and Vietnam inspire me to the kitchen to challenge myself to work on things outside my usual wheelhouse.  Nancie's new book, Fruit is an wonderful exploration of some of the best fruit-based recipes in all of Southern cooking, and the perfect thing as we face down the winter that is coming.  I have a copy of Fruit to give away, along with a copy of my latest book How to Change A Life  AND a copy of my digital cookbook Big Delicious Life.  Just comment below with your best piece of Thanksgiving advice or holiday recipe to enter to win before 11:59PM CST Sunday November 13, winner announced November 14.  
Yours in Good Taste,The Polymath

Here are some of my go-to turkey day recipes.  Follow to the letter or use as a springboard for your own touches…  All recipes are designed to accommodate 12-14 people with leftovers.  And if you have recipes of your own to share, be sure to leave them in the comments section!
Cranberry sauce
2 bags cranberries1 ½ c port1 c sugar1 t salt5 T orange juice1 ½ t cornstarch1 t ground mustard1 t lemon juiceZest of 1 orangePinch ground clovePinch fresh gingerZest of 1 lemon½ c dried cherries-rehydrate in ¼ c port
Cook cranberries and port in a saucepan over med-high heat 10 minutes, until cranberries burst.  Add sugar and salt.  Whisk OJ, cornstarch, mustard, lemon juice in a bowl and add to berries.  Stir to combine.  Add rest of ingredients, cook 5-6 minutes more, cool.
Mashed potatoes
10 lb. Yukon Gold potatoes (peeled, cubed)2 sticks butter, cubed1 cup whole milk, warmed (or half and half or cream, depending on how rich you like it)1 pt. sour cream1 tub whipped cream cheese with chives (or plain) at room temp1 bunch chives, chopped fineS&P to taste
Boil potatoes till soft. Drain completely.  Put potatoes through ricer, or just use hand mixer to mash.  Add butter first, then cream cheese, and then milk to just shy of your preferred texture.  Once the potatoes are almost there, add in the sour cream, cream cheese and chives and season well.  Hold in double boiler or slow cooker to keep warm.  Can be held about an hour in a double boiler or up to two in a slow cooker on warm without breaking.

Basic Stuffing
1 XL loaf country bread or French bread cubed and toasted till totally dry  (2 lbs.) (or 2 lbs of the plain crouton cubes from the store)1 pkg soft egg rolls or hot dog buns torn coarsely2 ½ sticks butter1 ½ c finely chopped onion1 ½ c finely chopped celeryCelery leaves from 2 heads, chopped¼ c chopped flat leaf parsleyDried sage, thyme, marjoram (1 T each)S/P to taste4 lg eggs, beaten1 32 oz box chicken stock…add as necessary to moisten½ c toasted bread crumbs
Saute veggies and herbs in 1 ½ sticks butter.  Toss with bread.  Add stock slowly till moist but not overly soggy.  Taste for seasoning.  Stir in eggs and mix well.  Put in deep foil pan.  Drizzle with melted stick of butter and sprinkle of breadcrumbs.
400 degrees for 25 minutes covered, then 20 uncovered.  If you want extra turkey flavor, lay the pieces of 2-3 turkey wings on top of the casserole for all but the last 10 minutes, and for extra moistness, melt another 4-8 T butter in 1 c chicken or turkey stock and pour over top when you uncover the stuffing, then continue cooking.
Can be made up to two days in advance, and reheated in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes before serving.
Pumpkin/Butternut Squash Soup
If you want this soup all pumpkin, replace the butternut squash with fresh or frozen cubed pumpkin.  If you want it all squash, eliminate the canned pumpkin and add another 2 lbs of cubed squash.
4 small or 2 large butternut squash (or equivalent in fresh cubed or frozen…about 2.5-3 lbs after peeling, de-seeding and cubing)2 large cans pumpkin (29.5 oz organic…not pumpkin pie filling!)3 quarts chicken stock (or veggie stock if you have vegetarians coming)1 pt. heavy cream2 med. (or one large) yellow onions1 stick butterFresh ground nutmegs/p
Prep squash if necessary by peeling, de-seeding and cubing in large chunks.  Sauté onions in butter till soft but not browned, add squash and pumpkin.  Pour in enough chicken stock to cover the vegetables by about 1 ½ - 2 inches.  Cook over medium heat till very soft, about 35-45 minutes. Blend with immersion blender or in batches in regular blender till very smooth, for extra velvety soup strain thru Chinois or fine mesh strainer.  Add cream and season to taste with salt and pepper and fresh nutmeg.
Freezes beautifully pre-cream, I often make a double batch and freeze half without the cream in it.  Is also delish without the cream if you want to be healthier J
Toppings:
½ c heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks8-10 amaretti cookies, crumbled but not powderedBlend together right before serving and garnish each bowl or cup with a generous spoon.
Have also topped with:
Crushed gingersnaps and mini marshmallowsCrème fraiche mixed with crystallized gingerCandied orange zest and toasted pine nuts Toasted gingerbread croutonsCaramel cornWhipped cream blended with cranberry sauceCrouton with melted asiago cheeseFried sage leavesCurried nuts (pumpkin seeds, pecans, walnuts)

Balsamic Cipollini Onions
2 lbs cipollini onions, peeled  (blanch in boiling water one minute, shock in ice water, skins should slip right off)3 T olive oil3 T butter1 ½  T sugar6  T balsamic vinegar 1 T chopped fresh parsley
Preheat oven to 500°F.  Place onions in medium bowl; toss with oil. Arrange onions on baking sheet or in roasting pan.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Roast until onions are brown and tender, rotating pan in oven and turn onions once, about 35 minutes (they will caramelize and be quite dark in parts but, if you have coated them well with olive oil, will not have a 'burnt' taste).  Meanwhile, melt butter in heavy small saucepan over medium-high heat. Add sugar and stir until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat.  Add vinegar. Return to heat.  Simmer until mixture thickens slightly, about 2 minutes. Pour over onions and continue to cook in oven 10 more minutes. Sprinkle with parsley before serving. 

Pickled carrots (great pre-dinner nibble!  A bowl of these and a bowl of nuts are all you need.)
1 large bag baby carrots (2 1bs)1 bottle apple cider vinegar1 large jar honey4 T mustard seed1 bunch dill  Combine vinegar, honey and mustard seed in saucepan.  Add carrots and cook over med-high heat till carrots are cooked but still crisp, 5-8 minutes.  Store in pickling liquid in fridge.  Before serving, drain liquid, add chopped fresh dill.
Jonnie’s Orange Sherbet Jell-O Mold
A family fave, and a bit of old-school fun on the plate.
4 3-oz pks orange jello4 cups boiling water2/3 cup lemon juice2 pt. orange sherbet, softened


Dissolve jello in water, add juice.  Chill till jelly-like consistency.  Blend in softened sherbet with electric beaters.  Put in greased 2 quart mold and chill overnight.  To release, dip mold in hot water to loosen and invert over plate.

Hello Chickens!

I don't know about where you are, but here in Chicago, when I'm all geared up for sweater and boot weather, Summer is making a last-ditch effort to hang around.  We are also in the final month of renovation.

Let's allow that to sink in a bit, shall we?

We began the renovation on the Chateau in October of 2013.  We will finish in October of 2017.  Essentially, our house went to college.  We are deeply grateful that it shows no interest in graduate school.

We are a little delayed in showing off the 99.9% finished third-floor master suite because of that .1%, but I promise that very soon there will be some good glamour shots coming your way and a room by room recap of what we did up there.  But for now, I thought I'd just share a quick pictorial of where we are now with the final phase, the first floor and the stairs.

The first floor is our bonus space.  Otherwise known as our "why the heck couldn't you have fallen in love with a two-flat?" space.  But because we are who we are, it is giving us an opportunity to create our dream entertaining spot.  While a lot of the entertaining we do involves small intimate dinners for 4-6 people, which we can do beautifully and efficiently in our eat-in kitchen, there is still the part of us that loves a big holiday celebration, and a classic old-school cocktail party.  Thanksgiving and Passover and New Years Eve.  A birthday celebration.  We also love to support the not-for-profit world, and while we don't have the means for large philanthropic checks, we do look forward to being able to donate the use of the first floor of our home to those causes as a great location to host small fundraisers.  So we have designed this space with all of those things in mind.  A large formal living room with plenty of seating and conversation spaces.  A large formal dining room that will be able to sit up to 24 people.  A bathroom with a library serving as an anteroom for comfort and privacy, as well as a large butler's pantry that can double as a bar, and a small catering kitchen.  The large kitchen upstairs and the small kitchen downstairs are linked by the elevator, which will be able to serve as a giant dumbwaiter, and there is a small powder room in the back as well.

We are at drywall on the first floor, so you can really start to feel the space come together!

This is the kitchen, there will be a stove and hood here eventually...
Also kitchen, this wall is where the sink and dishwasher will go.
Powder room view from kitchen door.
This will be the dining room!
New hallway
View of the south half of the dining room....
North wall of the dining room waiting for built-in hutch.


Future library
View through foyer and vestibule to front door.

View up the new stairs...nothing like that first coat of paint to show you where the walls need fixing,
one step forward, half a step back!

Elevator foyer off kitchen.Pretty soon we will be able to share some fun stuff like design choices and paint colors, but for the moment we are just so excited to be at this whirlwind stage with the finish line in sight!

One of the things that working with these spaces has done is get us excited about the kind of entertaining we will be able to do.  I am super excited to host Thanksgiving in the new dining room. We are already planning our New Year's Eve menu, although that may be as much about being ready for 2017 to be over as it is about a party.  And we have already planned on our first "donation" event for a holiday party for an organization of which I am a member.

One of the things I love about entertaining is that it is sort of like a muscle you exercise, the more you do it the better you get at it.  You have read some of my tips and tricks on this blog over the years, but the one I get more and more invested in is to really be thoughtful about how I begin an evening with my guests.  And I have become a big believer in not doing big appetizers before a dinner party.  I want my guests to come to the table hungry, and if they are filling up on cheese and crudites and other pre-dinner nibbles, then why did I go to all that trouble to make dinner?  (Nothing wrong, by the way, of having a party that is heavy appetizers followed by dessert, if you love all the finger foods, it can be a fun way to entertain!)

I've talked to you before about our favorite pairing of champagne and potato chips as the perfect start to an evening.  A little salty snack to complement the bubbles, both designed to whet the appetite without ruining it.  But for a lot of people, the start to an evening is more in the cocktail or beer realm, and for those people, let me just say, the best way to go is popcorn.

Those of you who know us know that we are passionate about popcorn.  At least a couple nights a week we have salad and large bowls of popcorn for dinner.  We use a proprietary blend of yellow, white and mushroom kernels, popped in a pot with peanut oil and sprinkled with sea salt.  I think popcorn is a nearly perfect food.

But while that is a great nibble for watching TV, dinner parties need a little elevation in your popcorn game.  There are a lot of recipes for herbed popcorn and truffled parmesan popcorn and other fancied up snacks, I've posted one myself.  Here in Chicago we have our own famous blending of cheese popcorn with caramel corn, you can certainly start your party there, I love me a salty-sweet combo.

I recently went on vacation and when I returned there was a box from the people at GH Cretors for me to try some of their offerings.  Much as I love the corn, how could I refuse?


I will say, while partial to freshly popped, I was pleasantly surprised with the crunch and quality of these popcorn offerings.  I probably wouldn't buy the plain salted, since I can make that myself, but the flavored ones were really good!  We had friends coming by for cocktails the evening I received the box, so I decided we should open a bag as our snack of choice.  And while the cheese flavors would have been an obvious pick, I went for the Dill Pickle flavor instead.

We were all a bit skeptical, but as soon as we started eating this popcorn we became believers. It is the perfect pairing for cocktails.  Sort of like a salt and vinegar chip, with the acid and salt well balanced and giving you that little bit of thirst for your drink the way a great bar snack should, but the dill brought something new to the party that none of us was expecting to enjoy as much as we did!  We finished the whole bag, and kept saying, "It really tastes like a dill pickle!".  As much as I definitely enjoyed both of the cheese flavors and The Mix of cheese and caramel, (I am a Chicago girl after all), of all of these the Dill Pickle will be a new go-to for a quick pre-dinner snack when entertaining, so easy to keep a bag or two in the pantry for a spontaneous happy hour.

Want to try for yourself?  GH Cretors has agreed to send one of my lucky readers a sample box of their own, along with an adorable tote bag and even a cool stainless steel water bottle! (I won't tell anyone if you fill the "water bottle" with cocktails for your portable entertaining!)

What a cool prize!
Snacks and drinks to go!
All you have to do to enter to win is to comment on this post with what you think would be a good cocktail pairing with one of the GH Cretors flavors...you can choose from Dill Pickle, Salted Butter, Honey Butter Kettlecorn, White Cheddar, The Mix (cheese and caramel), Cheese, Chile Jalapeno White Cheddar, Caramel Corn, or Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil.  You don't have to give us the cocktail recipe, but feel free to add it for our drinking pleasures.

Comment by 11:59PM Sunday October 1, and winner will be chosen at random and announced Monday October 2!

You can also enter on Twitter, just follow me @staceyballis and retweet the post, Facebook, like the page and comment there, or on Instagram, follow me @stacey.ballis and comment on the popcorn pic there, so you can have up to four entries to win!

Yours in Good Taste,
The Polymath

Hello Chickens!

How is everyone's summer going?  Things here at the Chateau have been a perfect storm of busy and slow, and eminently unphotographable.

The good news is that we are in the home stretch...we are scheduled to be fully completed by mid-October.  After nearly four years of living in a construction project, you can imagine how thrilling that actual end date is for us.  It has gone from an ephemeral, almost theoretical, future date to a day in a calendar that we can start to see like a pinlight at the end of this long tunnel.

We have moved upstairs to our master bedroom suite, which is about 95% completed.  The master bath, second bath and laundry room are still not fully done, but they are imminent, and I can't wait to share the design details with you as soon as I can!  The bedroom is missing only one window treatment which is coming this week, so stay tuned for a full update on that space by early next week.

You have seen our dressing rooms, which have been working really well.  I think we both are still getting used to the new organization, but generally, it is so lovely to have all of our stuff where we need it and can find things!  The laundry room, while still not fully complete, does have the washer and dryer installed and functioning and that has been a gamechanger.  Since 1993 when I moved into this building, there were shared coin-operated laundry in the basement.  They were expensive and you always needed to put things through the dryer at least twice, towels three times, which required endless schlepping up and down the stairs going through three different locked doors, and praying you didn't run out of quarters.  I figured out very quickly that it was easier and cheaper to just take my laundry up to my family's weekend place ere, or to drop it off at the eighty-cents-a-pound fluff and fold at the local laundromat.  So having a washer and dryer on the same floor as all of our clothes and sheets and towels, where we can just toss in a load whenever we like with ease is beyond exciting.  I'm sure eventually laundry will cease to be such a joyous entertainment, but for the moment, I'm loving it.  Of course, it takes a lot of getting used to, having never had laundry of my own before, so I am currently very guilty of throwing a load in the washer or dryer and then completely forgetting I've done it.  I'm using the 10-minute refresh setting on the dryer a lot!

The elevator is almost finished, it won't get a floor till we do the floors on the first floor, but it is operational and our knees are deeply grateful!  Just in time, because we have officially lost access to our front stairs.  The staircase, which will be getting its own post soon, has to be removed from the basement to the third floor, and then the new one brought in and installed in sections, then trimmed out and finished on site.  This is really the big project, the one thing that will take this building from feeling like three apartments into feeling like a single family home.  So we are very excited to have the process begun.  Our contractors have installed barrier walls, essentially framing with doors and just plastic dust barriers nailed on, on all four levels to protect the finished spaces as much as possible from the mess.  They will demo the the stairwell first getting as much of the mess out of the building before surgically removing the walls on the upper floors to open the space completely.  So while we have access to all of our living and working spaces, it is a little convoluted, and we have to do all of our moving around from level to level on the elevator or up and down the back exterior stairs.  The only thing saving this from being enormously annoying is the knowledge that every day we live with it is one day closer to the new stairs being finished!

We have had a couple interesting discoveries.

This is what we found under the drywall in the dining room.  That is a combination of bordello red paint on top and starburst wallpaper below, which we assume at one point were separated by a chair rail.


This was under the drywall in the foyer, sort of a ghastly 1950s Holiday Inn lobby in Indiana sort of vibe.  

Apparently one of the previous owners had seriously questionable taste!  We were not sorry to see any of this go away.
We are in demo mode for the next little bit, but I will be back as the third floor continues to come together with updates on those spaces and some pictures of pretty things for a change!  In the meantime, continue to enjoy your summer, and if you have not already, do take a moment to pre-order my new book How to Change A Life which will be out August 15!
Yours in Good Taste,The Polymath