CHARMED

Hersheys. Ghiradelli. Godiva. Lindt. German chocolate. Belgian chocolate. Swiss Chocolate. Haut-Designer Chocolate to generic store-brand chocolate chips. Chocolate fondue to chocolate syrup. Chocolate chip cookies to chocolate cake. I'm sorry, but some days I really do believe chocolate - of any brand/lightness/darkness/texture......is the answer. Who cares what the question is? Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever (proclaimed by me) 2 sticks of butter at room temperature (vitally important!) 3/4 cup granulated sugar 3/4 cup brown sugar 3 teaspoons vanilla extract (I'm big on flavor) 2 eggs 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 2 cups chocolate chips (plus a couple extra handfuls for good luck!) Simple enough, the run of the mill blend the butter with the sugar, once creamy add the rest of the wet ingredients, slowly add the dry ingredients until all incorporated - then dump in ALL OF THAT CHOCOLATE. Extra handfuls necessary. And why not throw in som...

CHARM by Tasha {professional photography}

Today is indeed the day my lovely mother borned me into this world - 25 years ago. VINTAGE ME 25 years on this earth I have lived, and it's quite extraordinary to think of what a human can experience in this amount of time. What realizations are reached, what things are learned, what people are met, what situations we're faced with, what range of emotions we feel, what level of self-awareness and world-awareness we achieve. Growing up in a wonderful town, a beautiful state, surrounded by an endlessly kind, loving, and supportive family, making lifelong friends in elementary school, living in Germany with a marvelous family, traveling all over the world, moving to New York and living my big city dreams, graduating college with a degree I'm passionate about (public relations&photography), meeting my perfect match and falling in love, landing my dream job in my hometown of all places in the world, buying a home, achieving what I've always worked hard for.... I couldn...

There's nothing I love more than the warmth and smell that permeates your home when something yummy is baking in the oven. The thing about baking is the general consensus is it's time consuming - to schlepp all of your needed materials out - measure, mix, beat, add, mix more, add more, let sit, put in the fridge to chill, mix again, add more, finally get baking. My friends, THIS IS THE ANSWER. The answer to all the times you fall through the door, home from a long draining day at work - and have zero effort left for crafting anything fancy, but have an insatiable craving for something sweet and not from 7-11. This is the answer to that diet you're on - where you think you can't have a cupcake! And this is the answer to all of you lazy @$e$ out there who can make this, and insanely impress people who underestimate you. This is all it takes to make some freakin delicious (& healthIER) cupcakes! 1 box reduced sugar store-bought cake mix 1 can (12oz) of diet coke THE E...

A sandwich bag full of baby carrots is a staple in my lunch pail. Just kidding, I don't use a lunch pail, I usually just throw stuff haphazardly into a leftover plastic grocery bag. Which needs to change because that's no kind of stable support for food swimming around in Tupperware containers. I'm holding out for one of those fancy neoprene designer BYO lunch bags. Such as below: In any case, as usual I digress. Baby carrots. Now my first thought when it comes to carrots brings me back to Gerlingen, Germany. When I was a young eager girl (hey wait, I still am!) - well, back in the earlier 2000's - I wanted to live in a foreign place and assimilate completely into the local everyday life. So I participated in an exchange program and lived with a family in southern Germany. A family of four, the Boehmlers, complete with a doggie and elder Oma living just down the street. I have to say, grandparent's houses are universally alike. They all have some type of musty old-p...

IT'S dreadful, unpleasant, periodic, involuntary, unavoidable, and at this point we can all deduce that IT'S an inherent part of basic human nature. "It" is: being engulfed in a SLUMP. A slump, or “trudging through a valley on my way back up to the hills” as I like to call it, generally lasts a few days. You know the onslaught has occurred when you encounter a handful of select telltale signs, one being when you wake up and begin ready-ing yourself for the day you all of a sudden feel like a lazy-aimless-slow-moving Zeppelin, looking down into the stadium of rallying ill-fitting-clothes, shouting, shaking their big #1-SLUMP foam fingers at you. Or rather, perceived to be “ill-fitting” clothes at the moment, because I’m pretty sure it’s virtually impossible to gain 5 pounds in a 24 hour period. (however, I always say never underestimate the core-shocking habits of Americans – need I point to the latest TLC show: “My Monkey Baby”….documenting a Tennessee couple who are...

And we're not talking about Christmas. We're talking about the REALLY most wonderful time of the year. At least in the book of Haddad. It's the yellow-electric-hues, the neon orange hues, the blood red hues. The crisp wispy air. The perfect chill that makes snuggling under a blanket just THAT much more enjoyable. The pumpkins. The corn. The crispy leaves. The costumes. The CREATIONS! It's my birthday month. It's mysterious, full of fright, full of family memories, and full of annual apple picking. Jack-o-lanterns. Black cats. Witches. Candy. Hay-rides. Haunted houses. Seriously, can someone name me a month and corresponding-happenings that could ever possibly beat this? Admittedly, I've fallen off of the costume-band-wagon in recent years, however the discovery of the following astounding design by a MAC make-up artist has truly inspired me. I've never seen anything like it. Speechless. Additionally, I've done some serious research on a subject vitally i...

Life is a funny bastard. It's just donned on me in this past year. I was always the girl who had a mapped out trajectory for my life. 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. I was researching college in junior high, I was looking up average salaries for my career in high school, by the time I finished six internships and Hofstra University graduation rolled around, I had landed my "dream job". Everything went perfectly according to plan. It's the age old story - that hard workin' determined gal gets everything she's wanted for years, and whoops! Ends up loathing every aspect of it. The reality FAR from matches the fantasy in your head. What to do with life now? One year later I look at where I am sitting and the adventure I've been on, how drastically a human life can change in 12 months. ONE YEAR AGO: I was working as an entry-level (aka slave) Publicist at MS&L Worldwide. One of the top PR firms in....the world. I skipped along to work in Times Square, 52nd ...

I love raspberries. I love lemons. I love fruit in general. I always eat my daily dose of fruits. However that can get quite boring fast. Same old apple. Same old banana. If you haven't caught on by now...I'm a person who prefers pretty much everything in life to be spiced up - somehow. Unfortunately for me, the majority of things you can make fruit into have to do with either: adding tons of bad-for-you-ingredients ......or.....no, that's it. You can only make fruit into a dessert-eqsue item. Apple pie. Bananas Foster. Raspberry Buttery Scones. Lemon Meringue Pie. Peach Melba. Sugar. Flour. Butter. Clogged Arteries. Completely counter-acts any good-benefit of eating fruit in the first place. So it's my ongoing work to find SWEEEEEET healthy recipes....that actually taste amazing! Where you bite into your concoction and do the happy-food-dance (we've ALL DONE it) and the farthest thing from your mind is how you're amazed that it's healthy.....it's just G...

There's a lot of chairs in the world. Zillions of them. A chair is a chair is a chair. They all have some type of leg-system, some type of large expansive flat surface for your butt to spread out onto, and generally some type of back support. My personal thought is if a chair works, and really it doesn't take a lot for them to "work", then what's the point in perpetuating and buying into the manufacturing of NEW chairs to add to the excessively overhwhelming pile of already-made chairs. Already-made chairs that are even being given away for FREE! Imagine that. Just go to craigslist and type in free chairs, you'll be overwhelmed. Most likely initially overhwhelmed by their ugliness - INITIALLY I said. Here's my tip -- boil it down people. Look past the pooey brown 80's wood, look past the pukey green 70's plastic, look past the moldy 60's fabric...look past all of that and boil it down. Legs attached and sturdy? Check. Acceptable butt-holding-a...