(Video link.) We recommend checking out “One of the Nicest Places on the Internet”, a website doling out virtual hugs. It’s mission: “turn the sad into happy and the happy into celebration.” We find it brilliant, curiously heartwarming, beautiful, strange, sweet, healing, sometimes a bit creepy, effective, and finally, if we stay too-long, overwhelming. But what’s amazing is: you can feel the hugs.
You can have as many hugs as you want and you can also post your own hug. On YouTube, you’ll find an endless, ever-growing chain of hugs.
With the holidays soon upon us, I thought I’d post one of my very best cookie recipes. Or perhaps I should say cookie dough recipes: in addition to being able to fashion it into all sorts of cookie shapes and flavors, it also makes a great bake-ahead tart crust. Fleur de Sel Cookies, Earl Grey Tea Cookies, Coffee Vanilla Bean Cookies, Shortbread Pastry Lids and Shells for Tarts, and Brown Sugar Lime Curd Tart are just a few of the creations it easily morphs into. Once you know the basic thinking behind it, you can improvise endlessly with it. read more…
Keeping perspective during the holiday season’s flurry of buying can be difficult. While gift-giving is a lovely tradition, so many of us get caught up in the “keeping up with the Joneses”-style of shopping: buying the newest, neatest toy/appliance/Apple product to keep pace with our consumption-centric world. The shopping-cynic in us was thus delighted by “The 5 Best Toys of All Time” featured in Wired’s GeekDad column. They include:
a stick
cardboard box(s)
string
cardboard tubes
dirt
Both funny and true, full of examples of the amazing things you can make out of these simple elements, the piece reminds us that the holiday shopping frenzy isn’t actually necessary. While we’re not suggesting anyone fill a Christmas stocking with dirt (although it would make a mean mud pie), it doesn’t take a fancy new toy to give someone a meaningful gift. This is why we love to give presents people can make things with or use, like. Here’s a list of 12 favorites, swell given singly or in combination: read more…
Our apologies for the ‘Our Friends with Benefits‘ PayPal link getting wonky, which a reader alerted us to last weekend. We hope it didn’t pull you into PayPal hell. It’s fixed now. Thank you all who returned to subscribe or made single donations. We deeply appreciate your support. –The Management
Two years ago, I started ‘the improvised life’ based entirely on the feeling that it needed to exist. Many people I knew were in critical transitions in their lives and facing the risk involved in new endeavors. A website about improvising as a daily practice—living more resourcefully and thinking outside-the-box—seemed timely.
Creating this site was a risk for me as well: using savings to fund an unproven project in the unfamiliar medium of the blogosphere. But since its start, ’the improvised life’ has gotten a wonderful response, and to my surprise, an amazing community has grown up around it. Readers write daily to say how much the posts inspire them to take small (or big!) steps toward new ways of doing things. read more…
We rely on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture - current stories told through powerful photography – for a periodic reality check. The latest of the desperate famine situation on the Horn of Africa, centering around Somalia. As we find ourselves focused on HOME here, we were struck by images of makeshift shelters made out of sticks, rags, little else, there. They are at once valiant, imaginative, beautiful and tragic. read more…
It is high season for ramps, the pungent wild leeks that grow throughout the Appalachian and Catskill mountains. Ellen Silverman sent us photos of the sublime ramp butter she was given by a friend, with an utterly simple recipe that will keep you in ramp heaven for days. She wrote this in her email:
“Cyd McDowell is an amazing food stylist and lover of all things food. She picked the ramps on her property upstate she lives near Great Barrington. All she did was chop the ramps put them in the food processor with good salted butter (I think she used Plugra)… and process. She brought the butter to me when we met for a coffee; it was in a little glass bowl with a round of natural wax paper placed on the top.
We ate it on everything for three nights…on fish sauteed one night and panko-fried another, roasted chicken, steamed clams, bread, asparagus, potatoes; we licked the remains off of our fingers! Now, very regrettably, we have finished it…”
What a gift!!! We could imagine ramp butter in risottos, on pasta, on grilled meats, to cook scrambled or fried eggs in, and of course, on toast…
Here’s a rough little recipe that allows you to gauge the “rampiness” of the butter, and calibrate it as you wish: read more…
When the news becomes abstract, we turn to the Big Picture’s slideshows to help us GET what is really going on. We recommend their current slideshow of the flooding Mississippi: at once frightening, heartbreaking and beautiful.
All week long, we’ve been getting Mother’s Day gift ideas in our email box…mostly deals on cornball flower arrangements. Then we got one from Doctors Without Borders, the great international aid organization, about sending one of their e-cards for Mother’s Day, and using that $20/$50/$100 worth of short-lived-flowers money as a donation that will really DO something, in your mom’s name. We’re going with that. (It’s also another way to support Japan Earthquake relief.)
“The act of humanitarianism comes down to one thing: individual human beings reaching out to others who find themselves in the most difficult circumstances…
one bandage, one suture, one vaccination at a time.”
-Dr. James Orbinski, Former President, Doctors Without Borders International Council
One of the reasons that we so look forward to the latest issue of Canal House Cooking, the ongoing cookbook series by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, is that the recipes resonate so deeply with the way we live. In other words, they completely cut the $#*!@, providing us with ideas and recipes that are of the season and senses, do-able in our insanely busy lives, AND which work from the inside out: each recipe seems to ask “what do our spirits REALLY need? What do we need to be fed?”.
Take for instance our favorite chapter of the newly-released Volume 6: Crax & Butter for Dinner. Crackers and butter is our secret perfect meal; although it seems unmeal-like, it is somehow utterly nourishing and satisfying. Volume 6 presents endless plays on the theme of crackers + ______, from homemade Pimento Cheese to Anchovy and Lemon Butter, not to mention a lovely recipe for Tender Cheese Crackers: butter and cayenne-dusted Parmigiano held together with a bit of flour to make little savory bites that melt in your mouth (it would make a swell pie crust for an apple or pear tart…)
But Volume 6′s recipe offerings range to many compelling, simple dishes that we could imagine making for a heartening lone supper, like 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.
The Improvisational Cook free giveaway ends Thursday at midnight so you’ve got a couple of days left if you haven’t entered. Click here for the super-easy entry requirements and to find out about Sally’s award-winning cookbook. Scroll down to the Comments to read some truly inspired improvisations. We’ll announce the winner on Friday afternoon.
We were wandering around 20×200, gallerist Jen Bekman‘s site of limited edition work for sale and stumbled on this painting by artist Jane Mount, who paints people’s ideal bookshelves. Right in the center of it is Sally’s striped A New Way to Cook, among very good company. Wrote Mount:
This set is actually a “Super-Ideal” bookshelf, in a sense. It contains all the cookbooks most often included in people’s sets of favorites, plus a few of my personal favorites I couldn’t leave out.
It made us wonder: What would be on your ideal cookbook shelf? (And then there’s the question of Why? What does a good cookbook do?)
From Sally: The first book I’d put on my shelf is the cookbook that has influenced me the most: Simple French Food by Richard Olney. Olney was a spectacularly good writer, and could describe the inner workings and logic of a dish – and it’s possibilities for improvisation – better than anyone I’ve ever read. He believed that a cook’s creativity could be unleashed by their understanding of how things worked; he was meticulous in conveying ‘the rules-’ the intricate framework of limitations’ – essential to cooking creatively and freely. In his mind cooks, like artists, need constraints to push against. If I could have one cookbook on the proverbial desert island, it would be Simple French Food; the writing is as nourishing as food.
Our neighbor Stuart Williams, who lives down the hall from us, sent us a holiday e-card that he designed : a great example of swell d-i-y greetings makable with design, drawing, or photo software. Use photos or graphics to design your PDF and SEND IT OUT via email, to say HELLO to lots of folks easily.
Stuart’s card also reminded us about the connectivity of ideas that happens in an apartment building or a neighborhood, when folks start talking to each other and asking “What are you up to these days?” On elevator rides in our building, we’ve gotten make-up lessons from a professional make-up artist, and learned about the Secrets of Paris Department Stores. We became friends with Couturier de Cardboard Matthew Sporzynski, and the recipient of his stealth gift-giving.
Stopping to chat one day, we discovered that our neighbor Stuart is a site-specific, environmental artist. He created the Luminous Earth Grid, a vast array of 1,680 fluorescent lamps, which swept over the undulating landscape north of San Francisco (in an expanse equal to eight football fields), like an immense electrified quilt: read more…
The past couple of years, quite a few people we know lost their jobs and were faced, suddenly, with a big life change. Most discovered that losing their job actually brought all sorts of good things into their life, even as it meant financial uncertainty. They started doing the things they loved and hadn’t had the time or focus to do, taking more risks, putting themselves “out there” in new ways. This transitional path is not an easy one though, and it helps to connect with other people in similar circumstances, and find ways to affirm the positive.
Cards of Change is designed to do just that. It’s a website that posts the annotated and retrofitted business cards of creative people who have been laid off.
Our mission is to collect as many business cards and stories of positive change of people who have recently been laid off and connect them with new opportunities from potential employers, business partners and people who make the effort to look on the bright side of life.
…Cards of Change is a place where the glass is always half-full. A destination where all the bad news of the day takes a back seat to stories of individual success.
The cards are quite amazing, like therapeutic little artworks.
Cards of Change is the brainchild of Tom Van Daele, a former creative director at advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day who, having been laid off, started his own studio, Unknownlab.
down the line. Next one slotted: Kate Payne’s
by Richard Olney. Olney was a spectacularly good writer, and could describe the inner workings and logic of a dish – and it’s possibilities for improvisation – better than anyone I’ve ever read. He believed that a cook’s creativity could be unleashed by their understanding of how things worked; he was meticulous in conveying ‘the rules-’ the intricate framework of limitations’ – essential to cooking creatively and freely. In his mind cooks, like artists, need constraints to push against. If I could have one cookbook on the proverbial desert island, it would be Simple French Food; the writing is as nourishing as food.
