May 2010

canal house cooking: fast, in-the-pod peas, artichoke-style

Christopher Hirsheimer

It is peak pea season and we can’t think of a better, easier, more delightful way to eat them than this simple recipe from Canal House Cooking Vol. 3

“The idea is to pull the peas out of the pods with your teeth, just as you would eat an artichoke leaf. The charred bits of the pod and the salt sticks to your lips, flavoring the tender peas.”

Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton got the recipe from Niloufer Ichaporia King, who wrote My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking. We’re thinking Niloufer’s down-and-dirty approach would work just great with fresh green chickpeas as well.

Serves 2 to 4

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound English peas in their pod (preferably organic)
Maldon or other coarse, flaky salt

Pour a little extra-virgin olive oil in a large cast iron pan. Wipe the pan out with a paper towel, leaving the thinnest film of oil. Heat the pan over high heat. When it’s very hot, add the peas in their pods in a single layer, turning them with a spatula until they turn from bright green to a blistery blackened olive color. Work in batches. Transfer to a plate, sprinkle with salt and serve right away.

With thanks to our friends at Canal House Cooking!

05.13.10 | comments (4) | in family + friends, food, recipes |

canal house cooking: home cooks as indie publisher

The other day, Maria Robledo sent over some cookbooks with a note: “2 women are doing this lovely diary type home cooking book and one is CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER.”

Maria and I both worked with Christopher years ago when she was the food editor of Metropolitan Home and then Saveur. Christopher is famous for having become a superb photographer, with no formal training, just…like…that! having been a highly regarded editor and writer. (How she did it is a story in itself which we’ll post later.)

Christopher, along with her friend and colleague Melissa Hamilton, has again defied the usual notions of how things work and created an ongoing series of utterly charming, absolutely usable cookbooks without a mainstream publisher. It’s called Canal House Cooking.

“We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks…Everyday we cook. Starting in the morning we tell each other what we made for dinner the night before. Midday, we stop our work, set the table simply with paper napkins, and have lunch. We cook seasonally because that’s what makes sense. So it came naturally to write down what we cook…”

The books are so compelling and such a pleasure, and so beautifully produced, that I called Christopher up to find out the story behind them (which I want to know whenever someone does something amazing, in a completely unexpected way). read more…

05.12.10 | comments (4) | in community, family + friends, food, gifts, how-to, inspiration, paths + processes, people, recipes, resources books + zines, strategies, why not? |

“always turn shit over”

Draplin/Flickr

The other day Reference Library posted an image from the Flickr archive of a brilliant junk collector and “seer” of things. It was of the UNDERSIDE of an old light bulb package: the red-striped ends of its six sides folded into an elegant overlapping “star” like some beautiful Japanese Packaging. The only editorial comment was in the form of the posts title, “Always Turn Shit Over”. Now there’s a life principle! Turn stuff over, on its side, inside-out, upside-down… to get a view you didn’t expect or might not have imagined on your own.

You can do the same thing with ideas: turn them over in your mind, every which way…

05.11.10 | comments (10) | in inspiration blogs + sites, paths + processes, principles, projects + play, reimagine, rules for living, strategies |

davinci’s wings (self-portrait)

Robert ParkeHarrison/Bonni Benrubi Gallery NYC

05.11.10 | comments | in leaping + flying, surprise box archive |

inspired makeshift: a year of personal fashion

Makeshift is a wonderfully expressive term for “making a shift”: shifting your thinking to come up with a creative solution that accomplishes the task at hand in a unexpected way. When you find you don’t have something you need, you improvise a substitute or “shift” what you are making to accommodate it. Makeshift is one of our favorite words.

So, of course, we LOVE the blog Makeshift, which documents the daring, ambitious art-and-research project of Natalie Purschwitz. For an entire year starting September 1, 2009, she’s wearing ONLY things she has made herself: clothes, socks, shoes, underwear, coats, jackets, hats, bathing suits, accessories, and…

“….anything else I might need to protect my body from the elements while trying to lead a fulfilling life. It will be an investigation into the relationships between ‘clothing’, ‘making’ and ‘living’.”

Even her shoes! We can’t begin to imagine the amount of work and thought that goes into each day’s outfit but we love seeing the results: everyday a new picture of her standing there forthrightly in her new outfit. We also love seeing the evolution of ideas, some of which Purschwitz writes about…like these amazing yellow shoes, which evolved out of a technique for making Christmas ornaments: read more…

05.10.10 | comments (6) | in apparel, identity, inspiration blogs + sites, paths + processes, people, soft |

on things “not looking good while you’re working on them”

Ralph More/Time-Life Pictures

In a 2008 New Yorker profile, artist John Currin said something about the process of painting that knocked us out because it is SO much about improvising, about making anything where you’re not entirely sure where you’re going:

“…a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. “

A really big part of improvising/making/creating is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. We suspect that is one of the reasons why improvising is difficult for some people:

dance for friday

We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last jump onto the laptop, we found this amazing video on our friend Peggy Markel‘s Facebook page. She travels the world leading culinary adventures and has an eye for wild beauty of all sorts…like this…

…which became the perfect Friday post. TGIF….GIFT…

That is the improvised life!

Thanks, Peggy!

05.06.10 | comments (1) | in art, community, inspiration, media, sightings |

visual vacation: the encyclopedia of life

When we are feeling tapped out and need an instant break, we often turn to the Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative database intended to document the world’s 1.9 million species. It is the vision of biologist E.O. Wilson who was invited to share his “dream” in a moving 2007 TED talk: to catalogue species as a way of protecting and understanding them. His dream is coming true: not long after, $$ started rolling in to fund it.

Although the Encyclopedia is meant for both scientist and layman, we haven’t quite wrapped our minds around its organization. So we just click “More Species” in the Explore section at the top of the page until we find an image that grabs us. Then we discover that what looks like a lovely man-made design is really read more…

05.05.10 | comments (2) | in art, inspiration blogs + sites, nature, outside |

sawhorse table redux: art as table base

A few years ago, I clipped this image from Reference Library, the always-surprising visual blog that rarely gives explanations. It said simply:

“Michelangelo Pistoletto Struttura per parlare in piedi (Oggetti in meno) 1965-66

This is just about my most favorite thing.”

In English, Pistoletto‘s artwork is called “Structure for Talking Standing Up”, part of a series he did called Minus Objects. In one photo, a man is standing by the structure, leaning on it lightly with one foot on rung, as though he were talking to someone over a fence.

I love it as an object, and its amazing concept. I also can’t help but imagine it as a table base, in a slightly shorter scale, say 30 inches high. If I could work wood or iron, I’d copy it and lay a flat slab of something beautiful on top – wood, stone or rusting steel – to make a gorgeous table. I might even hinge the corner so the base could fold. I think “I am a barbarian for envisioning Pistoletto’s work of art as a table base” and then think, “No…

… this is an example of how art can inspire the most mundane of things.”

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s website is full of amazing ideas.

via Reference Library

05.04.10 | comments | in art, furniture, inside, inspiration, inspiration blogs + sites, materials, why not? |

ann herbert: unaccumulate

“The answer is zero.

Let go of everything that can be let go of. Unaccumulate.

Notice a new way of figuring out. If many places are held by nothing at all, more actions are possible.

More actions are likely–all that room.”

Anne Herbert’s blog Peace, Love and Noticing the Details continues to knock us out, remind us, teach us.

sawhorse tables as solution + sculpture

When we need a table in a hurry for a project or a bigger-than-expected-crowd-for-dinner, we pull out a pair of folding aluminum saw horses we keep the closet. We lay on a top made out of a hollow-core door or a slab of plywood cut to whatever size we like (we’ve got a small version and a larger one…) to make an instant trestle table. If you don’t have room to store the top(s) under or behind the sofa, in the closet or in the basement, take a cue from Spanish Designer Tomas Alonso’s 5 Degree Table, and store the top propped against a wall in plain sight, like a sculpture. Alonso laminated the top of his table a bold green. You could laminate or paint yours any color you like. (We’re thinking blackboard paint …so we can create brilliant transient artworks, or our dinner guests could have fun marking up the table…).

And there are all sorts of cheap, cool looking options for folding saw horses. We LOVE these red powder-coated ones read more…

05.03.10 | comments (3) | in cheap + great, furniture, materials, projects + play, resources, tools |

binder clips for d-i-y shelving and other improvised solutions

Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote:

“I have improvised with these binder clips for years. Currently they clamp open a window that won’t stay up, and clamp those brackets flaps on the window air conditioner in place. For those shelves you would but the extra large, clamp them on and them squeeze/remove the wing handles for aesthetics. Voilà!”

…San Francisco Architect Kim Sykes elaborated on removing the handles:

“I agree that the binder clip is a magical tool. The metal wire looking handles not only fold forward as Joan mentioned but can actually be taken off once you position them in the desired place by squeezing the handles and taking them off their hinges. I think this would create a better look from the side at the vertical connections of these shelves.”

Two inches seem to be about the right size; their one-inch opening would sandwich two half-inch (or thinner) boards. Now we’re hunting for two-inch binder clips in white or colors, rather than the usual black clip. read more…

05.02.10 | comments (2) | in cheap + great, furniture, inside, materials, resources, storage, stores, tools |

happy birthday, maria robledo!

Looking for a way to wish our friend Maria Robledo a belated Happy Birthday, we found this clip of Wynton Marsalis and a friend improvising on that simple tune…building and building on until it became some big joy…

(…at the end he says “You see all the many ways we were conversing with each other?“, reminding us the improvising is always a conversation…with something…)

…That led us to other wondrous renditions of that tune, like this sweet little homemade video made by two sisters … read more…

05.01.10 | comments (2) | in celebrations, family + friends, gifts |