It smacks of Paltrow’s friend Mario Batali’s influence (He is one of the best cooks we know). In lieu of the traditional and somewhat time-consuming cream sauce and grating of American cheese, Paltrow uses marscarpone as a base for freshly grated Parmigiano (easily bought) as the sauce for the macaroni. Fast and furious, with those big-guns ingredients, it cannot fail. You’ll find the recipe at the end of the post… read more…
Every once in a while, when we need a little perspective, we check into the Scale of the Universe website, created by Cary and Michael Huang. Move the slider from left to right and back to be reminded where you stand in the scheme of things, and of just what mysteries are out/in here. Here it is in flash.
Easter is next Sunday, and we’re planning on dyeing Easter Eggs, the holiday’s totally fun, messy activity that invariably yields charming results. Eggs become our blank canvas on which to improvise all sorts of gorgeous colors and designs. We love Ambatalia’s post on making your own plant-derived egg dyes out of ordinary foods, like onion skin for sienna and orange; turmeric for deep golds and pale yellows; blueberries or red cabbage for blues; coffee for browns. We’ve found that beets give lovely shades of pink and red. You can layer the dying process to mix colors: red cabbage dye followed by grape for purple…turmeric followed by red cabbage for lavender.
“my basic principle is: i start from an idea and from the material. it is not fixed which of the two comes in the first place. for me, sculpture begins before design. when i speak of sculpture i think of material, form, mass, process and the location.”
Rückriemon’s is a slightly different approach than Albers’ perhaps; it also requires the ability to LISTEN…to hear and follow ideas.
We view listening as a practice, something that might not come easily at first. It can be like identifying a sound in the distance…gradually, through practice, it becomes clearer and clearer, as we cultivate our ability to hear … read more…
For some time now, we’ve been mulling the idea of pop-up, temporary “rooms” that we could put in place easily in a smallish apartment. The idea started with wanting to provide out-of-town friends camping in our living room with privacy, and evolved when we were trying to figure out a way to separate our sleeping area off from our office, which shares one big room. Lately, as we’ve thought about the things we could do with one huge loft-like room, we thought it would be great to be able to devise a separate office, without building anything in.
Although this could be done with imaginative use of room screens, we imagine an impermanent structure that would define a space: a moveable, temporary room within an apartment…We found quite a range of possibilities from the seriously-designed and expensive MultiScreen Shangrila, above, with screens that move up and down to Display Hut’s 8′x8′ Canopy Tent. read more…
Her name is Katie and here’s the kitchen improvisation she sent in:
This recipe is a riff on The Splendid Table’s Lynn Rossetto Kasper’s Sweet Sicilian Sauce recipe, found at this link.
I make this late in the fall when the tomatoes need to be picked so they don’t freeze, but are a bit green yet. I mix the green-ripening ones with red ones and the result is a more “soupy” sauce than Lynn describes because of all the fresh juices. So I take an immersion blender and blend it to a smooth, creamy consistency.
This is to-die-for sauce for pasta and people beg me for the recipe. The vinegar and sugar offsets the greenness in the tomatoes and the blend of tomatoes gives it a richer flavor than canned ones. It works!
Katie’s sauce is just one example of the many truly inspiring stories and improvisations we received (you’ll find them as Comments at the end of the post)…well worth reading for their many good ideas.
99% recently published a compelling post called the Power of Uncertainty. The gist (though it’s worth reading the whole thing):
Projects fail all the time because we unwittingly bake the end solution into our initial objective. Rather than enduring an uncomfortable (but highly necessary) period of ambiguity, we fall into the trap of limiting our creativity by setting a project goal that is too narrowly defined from the start.
Ambiguity. We’ve been feeling that A LOT lately, as we find ourselves on the way to something but aren’t sure where we’re going. It made us google “ambiguity/ambiguous” (It felt a little like googling “what are we doing?”). We stumbled on a couple of nuggets of gold, like the quote from Gilda Radner, above, and this great play on the Creative Commons Licence… read more…
We were interested to see Ikea’s blog Livet Hemma‘s recent take on an idea we posted months ago: clipping boxes together with big binder clips to make somewhat freeform and sculptural shelving. We looked at their iteration of the idea, wondering if they’d seen our post, or if they’d just thought it up themselves. We were reminded of the startling way that an idea can shoot up like spring crocuses in many places at once, as though it were in the air. And that part of the nature of creating things is culling ideas that already exist and tailoring them to suit your own vision. To quote film maker Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonated with inspiration or fuels your imagination…” (Check out the full quote in the previous post.) The Ikea shelves are a great example.
What ideas would we steal from Ikea’s version of clipped-together shelves (that they may have stolen from us)? What would we change? read more…
We clipped this great design of Jim Jarmusch‘s famous quote years ago, not knowing who created it. If anyone knows, please let us know; it’s too good to go uncredited. We’ve just learned it’s by Mark Malazarte.
We stumbled on this lovely 3 minutes with Laurie Anderson, and found it calmed us and made us THINK. (We also loved seeing her cooled out, very real space). It was made by Dropping Knowledge.org, a website that “invites you to question yourself and the world around you. Every time you ask yourself a question, a new dialogue begins…”
Anderson frames her question so perfectly, we won’t give it away. Here’s the book she mentions if you’re interested in pursuing the ideas: Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow. Read it online here.
For some time now, we’ve struggled with the plastic bag problem. Not shopping bags – we’ve got that figured – we just carry a cute fold-up bag in our everyday bag. We’re talking plastic food bags. What is a really feasible bag for collecting messy things like bunches of grapes, piles of cherries or loose mesclun from the market? It needs to not take much room so we can take a bunch with us on our daily forays out, AND be washable.
Every since we saw the videoAndrew Carmellini, mastermind of the great Locanda Verde, made to build buzz in his soon-to-open NYC restaurant, Dutch, we’ve been FEELING the restaurant as it comes together in the crazed couple of weeks before opening. Maybe that’s because Sally actually worked nearby at the old Soho Charcuterie on Sullivan Street; she made pates and terrines all day in the basement prep kitchen and would take breaks in the bocce court next door (now long gone, along with the neighborhood’s Italians). Restaurant memories live in the bones.
Maybe it’s because the video (possibly even better with the sound off) conveys a sort of chef head of late night foraging around town, of all the things that fly IN to that head that end up becoming a dish.
We were so intrigued, we took a screen shot of the quickly uncrumpling blueprint in the video so we could take a closer look at the new restaurant: read more…
A recent issue of New York Magazine featured The New York City Apartment: A Biography, a trove of slideshows and features about the inside of living in New York. We especially love the slideshow called “The Perpetual Garret”, the apartments of some once-not-so-famous artists. Flavorwire took the idea and ran with it, to include the spaces of the acutely famous as well, like Marina Abramovic and Francis Bacon.
Our favorite is Beat writer William Burroughs’, a former locker room at the 222 Broadway YMCA, which he called ‘the Bunker: a typewriter on a table, chair, bed, coat.
We culled some swell decorating ideas, like Karl Lagerfeld showing how to make a HUGE book collection graphic and beautiful rather than overwhelming: read more…
down the line. Next one slotted: Kate Payne’s
by George W.S. Trow. Read it online 
