(Video link here.) We LOVE manifestos – in fact have one of our own (click “about” in the right sidebar), so were delighted by the very cool, fun Holstee video manifesto to live your life by. Here’s a version you can put on your wall: read more…
November 2011
6 thanksgiving wines to toast the turkey
photo: maria robledo/trunk archive
If ever a meal were improvised it’s Thanksgiving, where cooks from tested to terrified face off with one common ingredient and end up with something completely different than practically everyone else’s. That’s because turkey challenges our sensibilities and confidence, from its oversize anatomy that cooks at different speeds, to its flavor spectrum that ranges from chicken-like white meat to pheasant-like dark meat. How to dress it? To brine or not to brine? Deep fried? What kind of gravy? How many sides? Just thinking about it either excites or exhausts most cooks, depending on their sense of adventure.
I look at pairing wines with Thanksgiving feasts as an Olympic downhill ski run with lots of obstacles; a herculean effort that, if done well, should be both fun and exhilarating. To keep it fun, however, is to know that it’s not really the Olympics, and the choices far outweigh the obstacles. The place to start is understanding the universal truth that food and wine belong together, and that it’s far better to have them alongside each other than to be caught without one or the other. On their own, each should be delicious, but together they should make each other taste even better.
Pairing is essentially all about either complementing or contrasting tastes. read more…
foolproof roast turkey recipe + brining strategies
photo: helvetia west virginia archive
I know of very few people who don’t get anxious at the prospect of roasting a turkey. Because the breast cooks more quickly than the dark meat thigh, it is often dry and overcooked by the time the bird comes out of the oven. Nobody seems to be certain of what, exactly, the best roasting method is, whether high heat or low, tented with foil, or roasted breast down.
Brining, submerging the bird in a salt-and-sugar solution before roasting it, is one of the most foolproof ways I know of to insure a succulent, flavorful roasted turkey. And the best brine I know of for turkey was created by Alice Waters, the inspired, inspiring founder and guiding light of Chez Panisse in Berkeley California, from whom this recipe was adapted (and published in A New Way to Cook
The only problem with brining are the logistics: read more…
the scar project
photo: david jay 'the scar project'
We can’t stop thinking about The Scar Project, a series of photographs by fashion photographer David Jay of women under 40 who have survived breast cancer; they openly reveal the dramatic scars left by surgery. The photos are completely arresting: very beautiful and at times difficult to look at.
But it’s that difficulty that makes them important. They challenge the usual view: of what’s beautiful and what’s private and what’s sexy. read more…
run with style!
We found this beautiful gif of a running scrapwood horse on dvdp, with the caption “horses know how to run with style.”
That’s what we want to do.
(…It’s a clip from the Chemical Brothers video ‘Horse Power’, which we find curiously thrilling watched with the sound off; we felt like we’d been riding a galloping horse…which always shakes things up).
Related posts: salvaged-wood bathtub, headboard, island, floor…
yikes, it’s-almost-thanksgiving recipe compendium
Today we got a Comment from a reader about a riff she did on our Roasted Chestnut How-To from last year’s Thanksgiving. OMG, we thought, it’s next week!. If you’re still mulling over what to make – or bring – for your Thanksgiving day…here are are our greatest hits.
As for the inspired chestnut riff, it’s here:
“Well, nearly a year later and I’ve finally tried smoking chestnuts. I scored them sort of randomly (wherever I could get a purchase on the skin- some on the flat side, some on the round, always a crisscross), soaked them, and smoked them on the stove top over apple wood chips and a few dried sage leaves. It took about 45 minutes before the skin peeled back. They’re delicious!”
(To rig a stove-top smoker, read more…
powerful words: devise, invent, create, change…
H-m-m-m. This high-design elevator installation reminds us our favorite words that have been at the top of ‘the improvised life’s page’ for 2 + years. Wonder if ‘the improvised life’ passed through the designer’s field of vision at some point and had a subtle influence, or if it is just the zeitgeist…
Wouldn’t it be great to walk into a staid office building and ride in an elevator like this..?.
via Core 77
Related posts: signs on walls: ‘how to work better’
‘don’t say yes. be yes.’
yes
myeongbeom kim’s forest bed
reader’s improv: street tennis
photo: lauren malkasian
Film Maker/ProducerLauren Malkasian recently sent us this email:
“We love your daily inspirations and have very much been taken, moved and forever changed by ‘the improvised life’; it’s like a magic tonic everyday. So here is a little something from us, all the way from LA, that we thought you might enjoy.
We live on a street just out side Griffith Park. Our house is set on a hill and our daughter along with most of the kids in our neighborhood have little or no yard space to play in so she came up with this… read more…
dada-esque ‘extreme repurposing’: postage stamp nail polish
reuben miller
At the end of designer Reuben Miller‘s clever riff on the extreme repurposing movement, some readers commented that that a fly swatter face protector and a paint brush door stop were “stupid’; other’s thought Dada. Some, like us, dug the IDEA that you can make something out of just about anything.
But we fell in love with one repurposing idea for real: stamps as nail “polish”. We’d just come back from the post office where we’d bought some pretty groovy stamps: a tiny Edward Hopper sailboat scene: read more…
how leonard cohen found his song
We always love hearing about where artists find their inspiration, and though this video of Leonard Cohen runs a little long, he has much to say about the process of cultivating an authentic “voice”. At about 5:26, he tells the story of how he went from fumbling around on the guitar to really “finding his song.” (You can also simply read the transcript here; start about 6 paragraphs down when he talks about Garcia Lorca.) Cohen recalls visiting his mother in Montreal and happening upon a young Spanish flamenco guitar player. He convinced the guitarist to give him lessons, and the young man showed up at Cohen’s home for three consecutive days. For three days they worked on the same six-chord progression, and Cohen, though he still couldn’t play as beautifully as the guitarist, finally had the building blocks of a song.
The story ends with tragedy, when the guitar player did not show up on the fourth day and Cohen learned that the young man had committed suicide. The guitarist’s few lessons would prove to have great impact on Cohen: the six chords he was taught that summer went on to be the foundation of all of his songs. (And there are many songs.)
For us, it is a key lesson in improvising: read more…
nature walk: the transforming owl
(Video link here.) Every once in a while, if we can’t actually get a dose of REAL nature, we turn to a video of some crazy wonder of the natural world to shift our view. This owl’s identity changes radically depending on his perceived threat level – kind of like many humans we know…
What’s your disguise?
Thanks Holto!
Related posts:
nature walk: aurora borealis
divine inspiration: design via butterfly
weekend nature walk: ant architecture
mimimalist book bar/paperweight (d-i-y or buy)
Recently, Manhattan User’s Guide featured a chic cast iron book bar from Beekman 1802 in a round-up of gifts under $21. It’s designed to hold open the pages of a book, while providing a horizontal guide for reading. It is 7 inches long by 1/4 inch square and weighs 4.4 ounces; with shipping, it costs $23.
We thought it was a great idea, being non-fru-fru, elemental and totally utilitarian, qualities we value in our attempts to keep things minimal. We wondered if we could fashion one ourselves out of a softer metal – say copper, which would oxidize nicely but presented no danger of rusting. read more…
fab hairdo with balloons, via myeongbeom kim
myeongbeom kim
We’re back, our space stacked with drawings and notes of new projects (almost ready to get off the ground), books to tell you about and give away, and ideas to start flanging again. We feel like artist Myeongbeom Kim did us a fab balloon hairdo: seriously uplifted.
Thanks for bearing with us!
Related posts: myeongbeom kim’s forest bed
christopher rehage’s time machine
hair as apparel, identity, art (man ray)
how to see what’s there
find your alter ego while we’re gone!
We’ve got so many ‘improvised life’ projects on the burners that we need to take the week off to focus on them. While we’re on our tiny hiatus, we recommend poking around our attic/archive of past posts (type a word into the search box and see what appears)….
OR check out this illuminating anagram-maker that Editor-at-Large David Saltman got lost in recently. Just type in a name or phrase and see the thousands of anagrams it yields. Like the New York Post’s daily horoscope, it’s amazing how curiously apt many are, as though revealing hidden identities… read more…
