Rhubarb is such a delicious treat made all the more special by its short season.  While growing up I didn’t really appreciate the sweet-tart flavor of rhubarb but these days I can’t get enough of it!  But rhubarb and pastry crust can be a tricky combo to bake with, all of those who have had a soggy mess when trying to bake with rhubarb pie raise their hands!

I recently came across a brilliant solution to getting a perfectly crisp crust with a lovely rhubarb filling and have to share this most simple addition to the rhubarb + pie crust baking process.  It is as easy as stirring the rhubarb with sugar, putting in the refrigerator for several hours to rest and then straining.  Yup, it is that simple.  And it ensures a nice flaky crust that isn’t bogged down by all of that juice that the rhubarb let go over while resting in the fridge.  You can then use that juice to boil down into a pretty little syrup to drizzle over the rhubarb in your tart or pie.

The rustic tart recipe I found this trick in is perfect for a farm to table dessert.  It is so simple that it allows the ingredients to shine, so pick out some super fresh rhubarb while it is still in season and enjoy!

Rustic Rhubarb Tarts
Adapted from Canning For a New Generation

Makes 4 generous individual tarts

• 1 1/2 pounds rhubarb, cut into 1/2″ slices
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 vanilla bean
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 3 tablespoons all purpose flour
• 1/2 recipe of your favorite pie dough
• unsalted butter
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 1 tablespoon turbinado sugar

Put the sliced rhubarb in a larger bowl and add the granulated sugar.  Split the vanilla bean, scrape the seeds into the bowl and nestle the pods in the rhubarb. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.

Turn the rhubarb out into a colander set over a small saucepan and stir gently to drain as much of the liquid as possible.  Return the rhubarb to the bowl and add the lemon juice, flour and cinnamon (if using).

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.  Line the baking sheet with parchment paper.

Divide the dough into 4 pieces and roll them out on a floured work surface until 1/8″ thick.  If you prefer your edges a bit more polished, cut an 8″ round from each.  Divide the rhubarb mixture among the rounds, piling it high in the center.  For each tart, fold the edges of the dough up over the filling towards the center leaving about 2 inches circumference, pleating it and making sure any tears in the dough are pinched closed.

Dot the exposed filling with butter, brush the edges of the dough with milk, and sprinkle all over with the turbinado sugar.

Bake for 40-50 minutes, until well browned and bubbly.  While the tarts are baking, put the saucepan with the liquid from the rhubarb over high head and boil until the syrup is reduced by half (careful to not cook too long or it will harden!), set aside to cool.

When you remove the tarts from the oven, spoon some of the reduced syrup over the filling in each tart.  Let cool for at least 30 minutes before serving.

Optional: serve with a touch of plain Greek yogurt that has been sweetened with a bit of honey.

Many of my friends consider me their color guru, and I’m the one they call when they have dilemmas and/or paralysis about interior painting. They’d say this is because I’m good at it, but I’d say that it’s really because I’m not scared of paint and I have a process. In general, I think many folks are afraid of paint, and I’ve never quite understood why. I see paint as the quickest fix out there, an immediate and inexpensive way to completely change a room. Even better: if you don’t like the results, you can just paint over it again. So easy, right?

Well, no. Over the years friends have told me that paint intimidates them, or that there are too many paint colors to choose from at the store. I’ve heard stories of buying a gallon of paint in a panic, then coming home and realizing that it’s all wrong. I’ve heard stories of endless trips to the store with the intention of buying paint, but paralysis preventing a purchase every time.

I tell these friends my paint color process, and I’ve written it out here, with examples from our new house. If you’re also stricken by paint phobia, maybe you’ll glean some insight into my tried and true method. Happy painting!

1. Relax and gather inspiration. If you have paint phobia and are therefore reading this, I’m going to assume that you need to take time to make a good color decision. So that means no impulse paint buying at the store, then feeling like you have to coat your entire house in said horrid color in order not to waste $40. We’re taking it slow. We’re noticing rooms in magazines and catalogs, on tv shows and movies, and in friends’ homes that inspire us. We’re looking into our closets and noticing the colors that are there, or out in our gardens. We’re thinking about color in a relaxed manner. We are breathing.

2. Bring home paint cards. No, I didn’t stop at ‘paint.’ At this level in the process, we are simply going to the paint/hardware store with our inspiration ideas in mind and collecting every color card that looks like it might fit the bill. There’s no limit to the amount of cards you can stash in your purse, so go for it. Anything and everything that peaks your interest in that big color card display needs to go home with you.

View from my paint card drawer, this morning. I told you I know how to fill a purse with these things.

3. Tape paint cards to the wall. Here’s where you’ll begin to make an informed choice about a color you’re bringing into your home, and you’re going to do it slowly, over the course of a couple of days, minimum. Remember how I told you this is a slow process? You’re going to do nothing but live with those cards and notice them, at all times of day and in all different light, for days. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been certain of the right color in the store, then gone home and watched it turn into something terrible on the wall.

Every room and every home is different, and most of those differences are due to light. The colors that looks amazing in your aunt’s kitchen could look like mud in your kitchen, and that’s okay. You’ll find the right color if you go through the process. In our current house, we have rooms where the same paint color looks entirely different on three walls. Light was absolutely our biggest challenge with selecting our colors, and we never would’ve gotten it right if we didn’t live with rooms full of paint cards for weeks on end.

Here’s another reason why living with paint cards is important: you might completely change your mind about what kind of color should be on the wall, but this inspiration won’t strike until your mind is responding to what’s taped up there. This happened in almost every room of our new house, by the way.

Early hallway and dining room visioning

4. Buy paint samples of your favorites and put them on the wall. Nope, we’re not buying quarts or gallons yet – hold your horses. Before you commit to a color, it’s crucial to buy as small an amount as you can of your favorites and see the real deal color on your wall. Home Depot and Lowe’s sell paint samples for less than $3. It’s some of the best money you’ll ever spend. Again: light is a tricky mistress. So many times, I’ve loved the color on a card, but as soon as paint touches plaster, it’s a reject. Por ejemplo: we tried to paint almost every wall in our house a version of light yellow, which I loved on the paint cards, but every time we put it up on the wall it looked abysmal. Our house simply didn’t want to be light yellow, no matter how hard I tried. But I’m so glad I figured that our with samples rather than gallons.

Another reason paint samples are so important is that if you’ve fallen in love with the second shade down on a paint card but it’s not quite right when you paint the sample, you might surprise yourself by buying a sample one tone deeper, that based on the card alone seemed too dark. I’ll repeat a point from #3 here, too: sometimes you’ll surprise yourself and decide on an entirely different color than what you intended. And I’ll repeat again: this also happened in almost every room in our house.

Kitchen wall, covered in paint cards and splotches… first I had yellows up, then grays, then greens, then reds, then blues. And finally, I stumbled upon the perfect blue-green (BM Azores) that looked fantastic with all my bright kitchen accents. It took a month to get there.

Dining room accent wall. Was it going to be Chestertown Buff, like the wall behind it? A beige or lighter yellow? Olive Branch, like the rest of the dining room? Eucalyptus Leaf, like the mantel wall? Nope. It turned out that the wall wanted to be red: Behr’s Dozen Roses, to be specific. After weeks of staring at splotches, we finally got there.

5. Buy your paint! So you’re pleased with a splotch on the wall and you’re ready to commit. Maybe it took you a day to get there, maybe it took you a month. But whatever the timeline, following this sort of process ensures you won’t make mistakes. And as long as you’re willing to live with cards and paint splotches everywhere for a while, the payoff is huge. I’d suggest buying more paint than you think you’ll need, and consider going low- or no-VOC, too. You can color-match your favorite colors to a non-toxic paint almost everywhere that sells paint, and save yourself the painting headache!

Hi everyone!  I know it’s been a couple of weeks.  I just wanted to write to say a huge thank you for standing by for a little bit while EAD Living was silent.  I’ve just been a bit overwhelmed with my job, travel, and the weddings side of Elizabeth Anne Designs, and something had to give.  But things are starting to settle down a bit, and I promise my little scheduling hiatus is OVER!

But I do need to be greedy and ask for something else from you, if you wouldn’t mind?  I would love to hear what types of posts you would like to see on EAD Living.  Do you love recipes? Home decor inspiration?  New baby news?  Parties and entertaining?  Furbabies? Travel?  I really would love nothing else but to continue to build a community here, some of my most favorite women are those I have gotten to know through Elizabeth Anne Designs and EAD Living, and you all are such a part of that, so please let me know what direction you would like to see EAD Living take, let’s do this together!

Thanks to all of you for being kind and patient, it means the world to me.

xo – Ami

Today’s Furbaby Friday features some of the cutest little furbabies around!  I’m a big supporter of the Chicago rescue One Tail at a Time.  They concentrate their efforts on dogs that are in danger of being euthanized, or those that are physically and/or mentally deteriorating in a shelter environment.  They work to rehabilitate them, place them in foster homes (and pay for their care while they are being fostered), and match them with their perfect forever families.  Basically, they do the work of angels. 

And right now, there is a contest going on and they are in the running to win $25,000 of food and supplies from Kriser’s.  Can you imagine how many needy doggies they could save by putting $25,000 to use?  If you have two seconds, please help out by clicking here and clicking the “vote” button.  The contest ends Monday and you can vote once every 24 hours.  You don’t have to give any personal information, just click “vote” and make sure you see the number tick up. 

And now some shameless campaigning from OTAT rescues:

Sometimes doing a little good is as easy as clicking a few buttons.

Book Club is hands down the most active group in my Air Force spouses’ group I am in and I am so grateful! Knowing that I will meet with these ladies once a month to discuss a book – good or bad – is great. I highly recommend starting one or joining one if you enjoy reading. I don’t read as much now as I did in college, but book club has gotten me back into reading actively. Because of that – I’m back with some more reviews and books on my to-read list.

Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
One of the women in my book club had already read this young adult trilogy, comprised of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay and highly recommended it. We decided to read The Hunger Games for one of our meetings. If you haven’t already read it or heard the buzz about it, here is a short synopsis. In the future, North America has been destroyed by natural disasters and has risen out of the ashes as Panem. Panem is divided up in 12 districts and the very wealthy Capital. Every year, one boy and one girl (ages 12–18) are selected by lottery to compete in the Hunger Games – a reality-show-style competition where the 24 contestants are forced to eliminate each other until one is still standing while the rest of the nation watches. The first book follows Katniss, who volunteered for District 12 after her younger sister Prim was selected from the lottery. Katniss heads to the Capital with her male counterpart Peeta and we read as they are matched against those who have prepared their whole lives for the Games.

This series – thus far – has been awesome. Although there have been comparisons to the other young adult series – Twilight – that has taken the world by storm, that doesn’t even come close to the fantastic writing and storytelling in the The Hunger Games trilogy. Tons of suspense and a little romance makes for a very entertaining read. I could not put The Hunger Games down. I read a couple of chapters two nights in a row and then stayed up way too late reading the rest in one night. I wanted to immediately move onto Catching Fire, but didn’t want to have them confused for book club, so the night after our meeting I stayed up and read the second book right away. I am currently rereading the first and second books before I move onto the third and final one, which I hear is pretty heartbreaking. I highly recommend. Grade: A+++, a must-read

Saving Ceecee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman
After her mother former Southern beauty queen Camille dies, Cecelia Rose Honeycutt moves from Ohio to Savannah, Georgia to live with her great-aunt Tootie. Cecelia’s life in Ohio had been marred by her mother’s mental illness and her father’s cold personality. While in Savannah, Cecelia becomes friends with the eccentric group of women in her aunt’s life. Ever since The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, friendships between Southern woman has been a hot topic for women’s literature. This book has some stereotypes and is pretty fluffy, but I did enjoy it as did most of the ladies in the book club. We read this following The Hunger Games, so the more lighthearted story was very welcome. Grade: B

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacey Schiff
A much lauded biography of Cleopatra, one of the most famous female leaders of all time. Everyone was talking about this book, so when one of the members of book club suggested we read a biography we all thought Cleopatra: A Life was a great idea. It was chosen as one of Martha’s Picks and it seemed everyone loved it. I am not normally much into biographies of historical figures – those are my husband’s first choice – but I figured we’d give it a go! That’s the best thing about book club, the opportunity to read things you wouldn’t normally and step out of your reading zone. Well, ha! That horribly backfired. I couldn’t get through 50 pages of it, and most of the ladies in my book club stopped right around there. The thing about Cleopatra that no one mentions is that – there isn’t a lot of recorded history about her life. This book was not told chronologically, jumped around from one historical figure to the next and just made for an incredibly confusing read. Only one member read the whole thing – she was a history major and is a huge history buff, and even she didn’t care for it. I’m guessing some might disagree, but this one just wasn’t for me! Grade: D

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana DeRosnay
Another historical fiction choice (which seems to be popular with my group of ladies), this book is a look at the 1942 round-up of Jewish families in Paris. The book is interlaced with a present day story of an American journalist living in Paris who is investigating the details of the round-up for her magazine. She discovers a secret her French husband’s family has kept for years in the process. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, but I have always loved fiction surrounding World War II. If you are into historical fiction, I definitely recommend this book!

I still have quite a bit of reading to do from the list I mentioned in my last book club post, but I still have some books to add to it.

The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganak
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I finally bought the first Harry Potter book and as soon as I am finished with the Hunger Games I will be getting started on it. I am hoping to get a lot of reading done this summer! I also recently joined Goodreads to keep track of books and see what my friends are reading. If you’d like to, you can follow me there.

What books are you reading while you’re on the beach this summer? What are your favorite summer books?