celebrations
Last week, we posted our best recipes for how to brine a turkey, make side dishes and freeform tarts, and some suggestions for wines to serve at the feast. If you’re having a crowd, now’s the time to figure out what to serve all this on, and where the guests will sit…
We went back into the Archive to dig out links for how to make big tables both round and rectangular, and a variety of makeshift seating options, including our favorite bench made of chairs. We’re posting it early, in case you need to stop by the lumber yard for plywood of planks.
The essential liberating rule of thumb: nothing needs to match…neither tableclothes, nor napkins, nor dishes, nor chairs…nor glasses… read more…
11.21.11 |
comments (2) |
in celebrations, cheap + great, d-i-y, family + friends, furniture, solutions |
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…
11.18.11 |
comments (1) |
in celebrations, family + friends, food, gifts |
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 seasonings in the brine bring out the turkey’s natural flavor, and make it taste more like a farm bird with subtle herbal overtones.
The only problem with brining are the logistics: read more…
11.17.11 |
comments |
in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes, strategies, tools |
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…
11.16.11 |
comments (1) |
in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes |
Over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, we found a how-to for a swell group Halloween costume: a traveling exhibition of modern art… Here, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and Jackson Pollock are represented because…
“… the best choices are iconic artists whose distinctive styles may be recognizable even in third-rate attempts (like ours) to mimic their styles.”
The only tweak we’d make to the concept is to wear some sort of face mask, which is much of the pleasure of Halloween: being anonymous…or someone/something other than yourself.
They suggest other alternatives to making a copy of a painting on a piece of canvas. Our favorite: “Have everyone dress up with a blank canvas and carry colored ink squirt guns.”
COLORED INK SQUIRT GUNS?!!!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a trove of Halloween d-i-y costume, decor, and fun, including bat wings made from broken umbrellas…
Related posts: happy halloween!!!!! (2010)
happy halloween!!! (2009)
halloween inspiration: cardboard box as the empire state building
10.31.11 |
comments |
in apparel, art, celebrations, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, resources blogs + sites |
?
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to live our lives in a way that honors our spirits, however you might define the word. But even though some may find it a bit grim, we also find ourselves thinking about how we honor each other in death as well. Sometimes we come across some truly beautiful ways to pay tribute to one another (and ourselves) that switch the focus on death from the sadness of loss to the beauty of memorial.
Take for example the enormous public chalk memorial for Jack Layton, former leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party. Toronto citizens covered the public square in front of city hall with messages for Layton, who passed away last month. While obviously the memorial isn’t permanent – it is as ephemeral as life – it’s the participatory and collective nature of the tribute that’s most touching and meaningful. It’s something any one of us could do.
We were also intrigued by the idea of some rather interesting biodegradable/ transforming urns for ashes, very different from the usual, homely vessel normally provided. You plant one in the ground, and it grows into a tree read more…
10.05.11 |
comments |
in celebrations, family + friends, identity, materials, nature, outside, resources |
photo: kim sykes
We’ve long been fascinated by Burning Man, the annual “art event and temporary community” in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Every year our friend Kim Sykes participates in the infamous festival firsthand. This year she sent us photographs and a report.
To those that aren’t familiar with it, Burning man might seem like a 70′s style hippie gathering full of drugs and body paint, but Kim found a great deal more: “There are large scale art projects, unique and wonderful art cars, small intimate art pieces, a camp for everyone - young and old, amazing, loving, people to meet! It is a wonderful array of inspiring creativity, some planned some improvised.” read more…
10.03.11 |
comments (2) |
in celebrations, community, outside, paths + processes, people, projects + play, sightings, travel |
Yesterday we stumbled on this beautiful image of decoupage scanned from the 1948 Modeles de Decoupages, les Albums du Pere Castor. It was part of a series of cheap children’s books published by Flammarian. We thought: wouldn’t that make a swell virtual ‘flower arrangement’ to send someone via email…just to say hi or wish them an immediate, special greeting. So we emailed it to our friend Suzanne Shaker, whose birthday it is today, a virtual HAPPY BIRTHDAY that we will follow by a REAL celebration and gift (since we’re of a mind that you should celebrate your birthday for MONTHS after the fact, in many ways, with many friends…)
Then we found this wonderful birthday cake from another of the Pere Castor series, and sent it to our friend
Tom Fallon, to wish him HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
read more…
09.29.11 |
comments (1) |
in celebrations, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, family + friends, resources |
photo: anthony giglio
Practically every wine-loving American I meet – even those who say they don’t know much about wine – is sure of one universal “truth” that couldn’t be farther from it: Red wine should be served “room temperature.” What does that mean? And who said so?
Poking around in old British wine books from the Victorian era, I can only imagine that our wine-loving forefathers, taking every viticultural word from Europe as Gospel, embraced the idea of “room temperature” from men wearing wigs and capes in freezing-cold London. Before modern heating, few homes reached today’s “average” room temp of 72°, except during summer months. Especially in London.
But ask any sommelier worth his or her spittoon what the proper serving temperature is for red wines, and they’ll tell you between 55° and 65°. Where’s the disconnect? It seems to be a translation error: somewhere along the line, “cellar temperature” morphed into “room temperature.” Proper wine storage is around 55° -“cellar temperature” – which also happens to be a great temperature to serve light-bodied reds, like Pinot Noir, Gamay/Beaujolais and Cotes-du-Rhone. The maximum serving temperature for the most full-bodied reds is 65’, well below modern-day room temperature. All red wines of all body weights taste best when served in between those two numbers.
What does all this mean? You can, and should, chill your wines read more…
08.29.11 |
comments (3) |
in celebrations, cheap + great, copy this!, family + friends, food, how-to, people, strategies |
We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the author of The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table
, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
Even though we’re telling you about this event after it’s happened, you can actually bring a few of the exhibitions directly to your own home. The Smallholding Festival website features four free pdfs with step-by-step instructions for read more…
08.03.11 |
comments |
in celebrations, cheap + great, community, d-i-y, food, garden, gifts, how-to, outside, projects + play, recipes, resources, resources books + zines, strategies |
and 
that has a strangely stylish quality. We’ve also found streamers in apple green, aqua blue, black, buttercup yellow, red, tons of colors…at 
