Let’s have a little Earth Day chat about a topic I’ve become pretty passionate about over the last few years: reducing food waste! There are a lot of reasons to be conscious about reducing food waste, for me the lightbulb went off when I read that the EPA estimates about 22% of trash in landfills is food waste — more than any other single material in our everyday trash. And when food decomposes in landfills the nutrients in the food never return to the soil — the wasted food rots and produces methane gas. Being someone who writes about food for a living, I had a major realization that I was wasting a LOT of food. My fridge was a graveyard of uneaten leftovers and excess ingredients from photoshoots, and I knew I had to take a look at ways to majorly reduce the food waste I was creating at home.  read more

Last year around this time, I embarked on my first ever foray into gardening. I started with pretty low expectations since I’ve never been able to keep a house plant alive, but I wanted so badly to give it a try and see if I could make it work. We built raised beds, we filled them up with a variety of seedlings, and we started to watch it grow. By the end of the summer I had a bustling veggie garden with some big successes (more tomatoes, lettuce, and jalapeños than we knew what to do with), and some failures (basil that bolted, cucumbers that were stunted, and squash that never produced). More than anything, I grew a totally new, bustling love for the garden and an eagerness to do it all over again bigger and better this year.My favorite resource for figuring out what do to next in our garden is Mary Buri of @MarsKitchenGarden. I was first introduced to Mary’s wealth of vegetable gardening knowledge through my cousin and I instantly became hooked on the treasure trove of tips and tricks she shares on her page. Mary recently launched a garden coaching and design service, on top of being a mom to 4 kids, and somehow also managed to say yes when I asked to her to do this interview! I’m constantly learning from the information she shares in her instagram stories, and am so inspired by watching her business and garden grow — I hope this interview helps spark the same excitement in future veggie gardeners: read more

When we moved into our house we upgraded our bed to a queen size and I ran out that day to grab some plain white sheets to use. They were fine — it was just a simple set to hold me over until I found the perfect new bedding to design a room around. I hunted and hunted for inspiration and never quite landed on a look that I love, so I just put it off — for FOUR YEARS. Until recently when our duvet cover started to rip (like, it’s been washed so many times it’s basically disintegrating) and I realized it was probably time to get that hunt started up again. My friends at Serena & Lily (who just opened the most gorgeous store in Boston!!) offered to help me with a big bedding refresh and I jumped at the chance to finish what I started 4 years ago. read more

Over the past few years, we’ve been tackling projects in our house room-by-room. We’ve taken on some pretty big ones like removing a kitchenette from our bedroom and turning a hair salon (!!) into my office (I laugh even typing those things — we had a LOT of vision to buy this house). We have also replaced lighting, removed more wallpaper than I care to recount, and painted and painted and painted (like 5 coats of white paint to cover all of the wood paneling in our living room). We’re finally getting to the point where nearly every room has come together and what is left is the not-so-fun makeovers of things like hallways. read more

When I’m decorating for the holidays I usually have two goals in mind: 1) Make things look seasonal and festive, and 2) make things comfortable for holiday guests. The first one is easy – we put up our tree this past weekend and the twinkling Christmas lights and my collection of vintage ornaments are giving our living room some major holiday vibes. I also upped my décor game this year and added garland to our mantle, hung up some brightly colored stockings for the first time since we moved in, and have been tucking bottle brush trees and fairy lights all around our downstairs living spaces. read more

I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite pieces for hostess gifts, stylish entertaining, and to make your home look festive during the holiday season!

Our family has become a lot more conscious this year about making an effort to reduce our impact on the environment. As we enter the holiday season we need to be even more diligent about our household’s waste and recycling efforts. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, American household waste increases by more than 25%. Trash cans full of holiday food waste, shopping bags, boxes, packaging, and wrapping paper contribute an additional 1 million tons a week to our landfills. And according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), approximately 80% of that waste can be recycled or reused. It actually boggles my mind to hear those stats, so I was really excited to get to talk to the team at MassDEP’s Recycle Smart MA initiative, which aims to help Massachusetts families determine what does and doesn’t belong in their household recycling bin. I asked them all of my holiday recycling questions and learned so much that I can’t wait to share with you so we can all do our part this season: read more

We just came up on our 3-year anniversary of living in our house! It’s crazy to look around and see how far we’ve come. We converted a room that was a hair salon into my office (yes, really!), we took a kitchenette out of our master bedroom and replaced it with a wall of closets, and we removed a LOT of wallpaper and painted a LOT of wood paneling. After a ton of these big projects, what are left are lots of little projects that are much easier to ignore. I attempted to tackle one of those smaller projects on a rare free weekend recently: our back-door entryway. read more