Google+ Pamela Stewart | UsedEverywhere

UsedEverywhere Blog

Posts from Pamela Stewart
http://paminottawa.wordpress.com/

Mom of twin toddlers, social media strategy gal, public servant, athlete when there’s time, amateur sommelier and lover of food. Passionate about life. Twitter: @usedottawa | @paminottawa

Cheese & Wine on a Dime

Cheap cheese: Ick.  Cheap cured meats: No thank you. Cheap decorations – ok, well, maybe, or maybe you have your own…regardless they all add up.  And so where is your best chance to save when you’re planning a wine and cheese event?  Well, the wine of course!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m a BIT of a wine snob.  And by that, I mean that I know a bit about wine, I love my wine, and yup, you guessed it; I have a cellar and will sometimes spend a decent amount on certain bottles and age it to the ‘perfect year’.  HOWEVER; I will NOT generally spend more than $50 on a bottle of wine (unless, you know, it’s an incredible Barolo or something) and I take GREAT PRIDE in finding those exceptional ‘value’ wines that cost $10 but taste like they cost at least double.

In the not-too-distant past, I helped coordinate a little UsedOttawa focus group event when the head honchos (What up, Jenn? What up, Erin?) were in town from UsedEverywhere that was masquerading as an insight-gathering event, but c’mon – was really an excuse to eat and drink good stuff.  The budget to put on the wine and cheese? $100 bucks.

Yup, my eyebrows DID go up, I admit, but then, like the perfectionistic masochist I am, I was titillated at the idea of trying to make this happen for so little.  The result?  Done and done, for $102!

The cheese

I said it before: don’t scrimp on the cheese.  My strategy was to get some delish big bold cheeses from around the world to pair with the reds, and some creamy goodness for the white.  Kept it nice and simple – I had no budget for rosés, sparkling wines, ports…nope – red and white.  With a cool selection of nice cheeses, no one would miss ‘em.

For the white, I picked up a triple-cream brie.  But as luck would have it, the grocery store had some on for half-price.  Guess it was getting a bit old, but I was serving it up the next night, and so no worries, right? And to make the brie a little special, (and spice things up), I decided I would use two jellies I just happened to already have in my pantry – a sparkling wine and basil jelly and a meyer lemon habanero jelly  - that my contact, and old next-door neighbour Derryl at West End Chilies  had given me. (P.S. His BBQ rub is incredible too.)

To complement and enjoy the red, I had some fun.  Here’s the breakdown:

  • Manchego  - A Spanish cheese, and you know…anything from Spain is okay in my books.
  • An aged Gouda – A dutch staple…I got the oldest possible and boy, was it yummy!
  • Grana Padano – very similar to a parmigiano reggiano with a grainy texture.  Italian.
  • An applewood aged smoked cheddar – this was my fave. The smoke was just so delicious infused throughout the cheddar. Yum.
  • A regular aged cheddar – Once again, chose the oldest they had (think it might have been a 15 year) and asked the deli to cut the chunk for sale about half the size and repackage. Saved a bundle, and really didn’t need ALL that much so…

The extras

Ya gotta have more than just cheese and wine, if you are going to be the person everyone looks at and goes – “Holy COW – YOU did this?!”. So here’s what else I picked up:

  • Lindt 70% dark chocolate (I’m a woman. Enough said.)
  • Three types of bread
    • Art-Is-In Garlic Rosemary loaf (OMG good, and if you are an Ottawaan and haven’t headed there for their sandwiches; go. GO NOW.)
    • A ½ price cranberry and walnut ciabatta loaf
    • A standard French baguette
  • Cured meats (salty goodness)
    • prosciutto
    • hot and regular Genoa salami
    • A Hungarian cured pork of some kind (another salami). Was yum.
  • And I picked up a roasted red pepper & artichoke antipasto that was also ½ price – turns out it was great.

The setup

It was so easy, and looked (I think) so good AND it was so cheap.  Here are a few shots:

The Spread
the wine jelly
cheeses and meats
The spread 2 best
cheesefeature
The Spreadthe wine jellycheeses and meatsThe spread 2 bestcheesefeature

What do you think?  I was in inspired by a post I saw online, and harkening back to my days as an editor of a magazine, I happened to have an old roll of paper hanging around (had an ‘in’ with a printer dude who hooked me up).  The fun part is being able to customize the layout of the table, connect the foods to the wines they would go best with, and make notes to let people know what they are eating. And in this case? Also to list the cool, low price tags on the wines!  So without further ado, the WINES….!

The wines

Those of you reading from Ontario will be super-stoked, as these wines are CHEAP and available at your local LCBO.  They were hand-picked by a personal and dear friend of mine, Stacey, who is a sommelier and works, alongside her hubby on their fantastic business, Groovy Grapes  (Nothing but the best for the UsedOttawa focus groupers. Betcha wish you had made it now, eh?)

  • The full-bodied red: TRAPICHE RESERVE SYRAH | $10.95 | Argentina
  • The medium-bodied red (this is now a total fave of mine): PASSION OF PORTUGAL RED | $7.85 | Alentejo, Portugal
  • White: KWV CHENIN BLANC | $7.95 | South Africa and
  • White: CASAL THAULERO PINOT GRIGIO IGT LCBO 73163 | $7.95 | Abruzzo, Italy

Three of these delicious wines were under 8 dollars.  EIGHT DOLLARS.  And that included a red that is now on the top of my “must have on hand for parties” list.

And I’ll say this again… All the above only cost me $102.  So, what do you think?  What are your favourite inexpensive wine finds in your neck of the woods?  Please share.  Pretty please with wine (and a little cheese) on top?

A Bright, Bold and Deliciously DIY Nursery

I could go on, for a LOOOOONG while, about my back story, and how I came to have two beautiful little toddler twin girls, now healthy and happy and 18-months-old, but as you may gather, this isn’t my personal blog, and so…on to the real story here, and that is how I came to reconceive a brutally ugly room and transform it into a clean, crisp, funky and bright nursery for my girls.

But first…a shot of my girls.

There.  That’s out of the way.  Alex is on the right and Hailey is on the left.

Now for what you came for

Here are a couple of before shots.


Here are a couple of after shots because life is short and so why wait for dessert?

The Details

First, let me state that I SHOULD have photographed the room on a day when the sun wasn’t streaming in so blindingly that it affected the interior shots.  My bad.  The room was, to the naked eye, sparklingly crisp and white as white could be – I shopped around for the purest white paint I could find. Other caveats: I was still waiting for my shutters to arrive and be installed – long stressy story – and I also didn’t have the leather glider (our indulgence) in the corner at the time of taking the photos. The glider, really, isn’t the ‘deal’ I believe you came here to find, but it was pretty swank in all its white leather glory!

The IKEA Hack (a.k.a The Closet)

The old closet was that standard one bar jobbie with the floor to ceiling cheap sliding door – standard issue stuff.  We removed the doors, removed the bar, and then had some fun with fabric and these standard-issue IKEA Expedit shelves. We then purchased inexpensive expandable curtain rods from Home Depot (at about $6 each) and some inserts for the Expedit shelves, attached the units to the wall, and the curtain rods to the wall and the shelves. We even spaced the rods so that you could simply eliminate the middle one as the girls grew and needed more space for their clothes.


I shopped everywhere for fabric (*any other Mom out there remember having all the time in the world to go from store to store, and even other cities looking for things like fabric? Yah…I miss it too.), finding it finally at Ottawa’s Rockland Textiles, and had a friend sew them, adding the grommets as well (she also sewed the custom lime green crib skirts, which looked amazing).

 

The Hand-Me-Down Dresser

I think my favourite DIY project ever has to be this dresser.  I turned it from this:

To this:

The dresser, a free gift, was old and ugly; however it was solid wood, so we knew we could do something cool with it.  I wanted originally to have it done professionally in a laquered white, but then discovered that it would be very likely in our climate to split and have ‘veins’ in it.  So not worth the money.  And regardless of the outcome, it STILL wouldn’t have been worth the money.  It looked amazing when I was done and all it cost was sandpaper, time and effort and a bit ‘o paint (we used a high gloss to give it a nice shine). BTW the knobs and pulls were purchased from Lee Valley Tools.

DIY Artwork

I have ALWAYS hated pastels (pink in particular) and LOVED bright, bold colours. To infuse the room with natural, saturated colour, I decided to develop macro photos of various flowers and put them in these great, inexpensive frames from IKEA, hung gallery-style around the room*.  A few were my own from my garden and the rest were downloaded from Flickr from generous amateur photographers around the world. FYI, Costco only charges $1.99 per 12×12 reproduction.

Mini Cribs

We love our cribs.  I searched far and wide for these cribs. These cribs rock.  They are mini-cribs.  They are slightly smaller than a traditional crib, perfect for a small space, and the best part?  They are convertible to TWIN beds.  Not double beds, like other convertibles. (That always seemed weird to me. A toddler doesn’t need a double bed. That’s just crazy. He/she needs space to play and run around.) And with twins, I wanted them to sleep in the same room, even when they graduated. These fit. Two double beds? Not so much.

So yes.  The cribs were bought from Lasso Baby in Vancouver and shipped here (looks like they don’t have my model anymore. Boo.). I bought the twin bed kits to go with them (these cribs are hard to find in Canada) and then had to buy the custom crib sheets from a US source and have them shipped to a US address. See note above about time to shop.

All worth it, of course.

 

 

The rest

The rest is all the little stuff. I had a lot of fun. So quickly:

The hanging shelves were from Home Depot for under $20 each. The little mirror from Bouclair Home – love their accents and price points.

 

 

The change area was even more fun. Free change pad hand-me-down from another Mommy (never underestimate the value of befriending and helping out new moms leading up to starting your own family. I didn’t do this strategically, per se, but one COULD DO THAT and benefit greatly. Just sayin’.)

 

The colourful basket to hold all the diaper supplies turned out great. I shopped for what seemed like forever (sensing a theme yet?) and finally found a white square basket of the right height and then painted it myself to have it tie in with the colour scheme.  About $14 from HomeSense if I recall…

 

And finally, the laundry hamper I picked up at Home Outfitters – it was white as well, and then I painted the lid and the middle section.

 

When you crunch it all together, there were a lot of hand-me-downs, a number of fun little cost-savings projects, a lot of DIY and a few splurges to make it special. Call it hybrid design?  What do you think?

 

*Note that the frames are NOW hung very securely with strong wire and hook fasteners, but we originally tried to use the 3M Command picture hanging strips. We put MORE than the recommended amount on the frames, followed the instructions carefully, and in the middle of the night, on two separate occasions, the frames FELL OFF THE WALL, smashing the glass in them and denting the cribs in the fall.  If I had had my newborns in there…well, I really don’t want to think about it. Needless to say, I don’t recommend this product.