If you start with the idea that the holidays are about really giving a part of yourself rather than STUFF, and spreading joy, and celebrating what we have, you instantly start to eliminate the nonessential and stressful. These are the things that are more obligation than fun – too exhausting, too expensive, or just TOO MUCH – like shopping for the perfect gift for too many people, or giving the perfect party with a million homemade hors d’oeuvres. Where do we get these notions of how the holidays are supposed to be?
I’m all for deconstructing any part of the holidays that drives you crazy, to strip it down to its heart. read more…
A few years ago, I discovered that the holiday gift my friends treasured most was a simple card telling them that I’d given a donation in their name to a charity. They were happy NOT to get more stuff, and be given something that was helping someone else. It was a way I could give to people who really need it AND the people I care about, without getting into the crazy shopping thing, and spending more money than I have.
It’s really easy: you choose a charity, send them money (via charge card online, or check), select the card you like and fill out a form; they send you the cards. read more…
‘the improvised life’ was going to be dark today, while we move a tiny bit slower AND work on a post for next Tuesday’s special Manhattan User’s Guide 2009 New York Blogger’s Holiday Guide. But while reading Kottke yesterday morning, I came across this swell little video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz from Moving Image Source. It’s called Feast: A Thanksgiving tribute to images of food on film. It’s a perfect apres-Thanksgiving, lazy-dog, savoring-the-day pleasure.
“Food is a uniter, not a divider. Read a political manifesto on the bus or the train and people tune out. Read a list of ingredients for timpano or green bean casserole or quail in rose petal sauce and they don’t just listen, they nod their appreciation and let out subtle little mutterings of pleasure. Recipes are family-friendly erotica. Who doesn’t love to eat?”
Nearly a year ago at the Thanksgiving dinner of friends, Louise Randolph brought me a handmade pot she’d had for many years. The rough-hewn pot, improvised out of a coffee can, some wire and a piece of wood, had belonged to her late great aunt Eva Dahlgren. Eva grew up in a privileged home, and gave it all up when she volunteered to help refugees in France during World War II, an act of sacrifice that almost cost her her life. She refused to leave France when the Nazis began to close in, and held in an internment camp, in Baden Baden, for over fifteen months. This pot was one of a few possessions she brought from the camp upon her release. Even though Louise guards it as a treasured possession, it’s a bit of a mystery. read more…
Some time ago in the New York Sunday Times Style Magazine, Alexi Worth wrote about El Anatsui, an African artist who uses twist-off bottle caps to make shimmering sculptures that look like liquid mosaics. The story of how El Anatsui discovered his unlikely material for art is compelling. It is a fine example of the mindset that can lead to discovery and improvisation, and often fantastic creations: curiosity, openness, listening to materials, a willingness to experiment, patience:
“One day ten years ago in the countryside of southern Nigeria, a slim middle-aged man drove past a bag of garbage. Garbage is not an unusual sight in West Africa; village roads are often lined with a parallel hillock of trash – dusty bottles, spoiled food, tin cans, car parts – out of which small trees sometimes grow. But this solitary bag looked promising. It was a quiet, sunny late afternoon in the dry season. The man stopped the car and walked over to look inside…” read more…
I started thinking about using my hand as a notepad, as I did when I was a kid, and began noticing people with notes scrawled and scribbled on their hands. The manager of the local fish market had phone numbers running up the back of his hand in blue ball point. At the Bauhaus show at the Museum of Modern Art, a teacher ushered in a group of four young women and started talking about a weaving by Anni Albers; one whipped out a razor point pen and started taking notes on her hand. It’s a convenience that I overlooked for years until I needed to remember to take my laptop’s powercord to a meeting, and couldn’t find a post-it, so I wrote a note on my hand… read more…
Years ago my family stopped being nuclear and evolved into an extended and very eclectic family of friends. My Thanksgiving dinners have evolved too, from the traditional menu of my childhood to the wondrous offerings of many cooks who come together yearly, each bringing a different dish, to form a collective feast.
In this way Thanksgiving has become the ultimate pot luck dinner, a fabulous array of the “best of” each cook. We enjoy innovations of the traditional themes – stuffing, cranberry sauce, side dishes, pies – that always seem to embody the originality and generosity of the makers. Favorite dishes are requested the following Thanksgiving, to become a newly time-honored custom.
Purees using the season’s produce – chestnuts, winter squashes, and root vegetables like celery root and turnips - make appealing plays on the classic Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. Their velvety texture and rich, spicy flavors seems to unify the other elements of the feast. read more…
A rich chestnut puree, fragrant with bay leaf and fennel seed, is a wonderful alternative to mashed potatoes in the traditional Thanksgiving feast. But roasting enough chestnuts to make a puree for ten or twelve is laborious work. Instead I often use bottled vacuum-packed chestnuts (available in gourmet shops and many supermarkets), or frozen peeled chestnuts, both of which are excellent for cooking (very different from mushy canned chestnuts in water). When I find great chestnuts at the market, I oven-roast them to serve as-is, right out of the pan, for a surprising hors d’oeuvre. Years ago I figured out a way to make peeling easy: read more…
In my Inbox this morning, the ever-illuminating Manhattan User’s Guide alerted me to a new blog called Pop-Up Lunch. It explores ways New York’s nontraditional public spaces, like sidewalks, steps, and fire hydrants can be transformed into places to eat lunch. Writes blogger AP:
“This blog follows a series of Pop Up Lunches I have staged (some big, some small) and my development of mobile eating tools designed for the sidewalks of NYC. Ultimately, I hope that my efforts might inspire even a handful of my fellow urbanites to reconsider the potential for lunch – to be a joyful daily event – and for the sidewalks of NYC to serve as more than just pathways.”
Pop Up Lunch is totally after ‘the improvised life’s heart. You could easily apply its innovations – and certainly its thinking – to just about any city, and expand the uses for make-shift, jerry-rigged or impromptu surfaces: read more…
Could the planet finally be ready for Thomas Ashcraft? He’s been called an “artist-scientist-philosopher”, “inventively creative almost beyond belief”; a “scholar-mystic“; “a romantic visionary”; “inveterate experimenter, artist and extrapolator”; none of these words do him justice. I’ve known him for many years and followed his work closely, so I was happy to hear a profile of him on NPR. Long considered “an artist’s artist” because his work so defied description, Ashcraft has pushed the envelope so far that it has twisted into the eighth dimension and re-emerged on the other side of the cosmos. This is not really an exaggeration. read more…
Bathroom reading is a specialized and very personal genre of literature. I imagine everyone has his/her idea of what passes muster for bathroom reading, what its essential qualities must be. Of the books that have had a place on my makeshift bathroom shelf (a pipe) for some time - as opposed to magazines or newspapers that come and go- I look for books that I can open anywhere and find something entertaining, illuminating or educational. Proper beginnings and endings don’t matter. A folding aluminum camp stool (yikes!) I bought at the flea market serves as a book stand.
As a way of finding interesting new things to read and share in the unique sensibilities of ‘the improvised life’s readers, I invite you to join in our first reader’s survey. Please take a few minutes to list your favorite bathroom reads in the Comments.
I’ll start with my current line-up (and an excerpt I came across today): read more…
When asked to contribute to Burt Wolf”s pot-luck dinner, my boyfriend, a relatively new cook and homemaker, offered to make the Celery-Root and Apple Puree he mastered from The Improvisational Cook. “Don’t forget the double-boiler so you can heat it up at Burt’s” I said.
He sounded perplexed. “How do you think I should transport the puree?”
“Well, you need to make sure it won’t spill in the car…maybe just put the puree in plastic containers with tight lids and then dump it into the double boiler when you get there.”
That evening he arrived with the whole double boiler assembled, with the puree inside, and the lid battened down with duct tape. read more…
. “Don’t forget the 
