I Want To Be A Part Of It - New York, NY

I went to New York City with my friends Kira, Rachael, and Terri this weekend. It was a last minute decision, but I was glad to join them for a quick Girls Weekend trip.

It was about a 7 hour trip each way including rest stops, but we made it to NYC on Friday night around 7 or 8pm.

The food was incredible, of course.

We went shopping in Soho for most of the day, and checked out Dash.

 Also, we stopped at the Ground Zero Memorial, which I have always wanted to see.

25 Perfect Pies

Call me basic, but I'm pretty into Martha Stewart. Last week my boyfriend's mom, The Contessa of Westmoreland County, asked me for the recipe of some cookies I brought to a party. They were a lemon cookie with a lemon glaze from MarthaStewart.com. I know from being around during the holidays that she already has about 15 solid cookie recipes, so it was cool that she liked these ones enough to add them to her collection.

So this weekend when a long standing desire to learn to make a pie went from "I should learn to do this eventually" to "I need to make a pie today," I turned to the lady whose recipes have never let me down. Annnnd of course I went on the internet to find a pie recipe and ended up choosing an article called 25 Perfect Pies.

Not to pull a Julie & Julia here, but I think I'm going try to make all 25 pies in the next year. It would work out to be one pie about every other week. Every other week might not seem too frequent at first, but if you think about it, that's a lot of freaking pie! I plan to knock a few off the list at a time during the holidays and hopefully that will get me ahead early on.

Below are the 25 Perfect Pies I plan to make this year