Maria’s Robledo‘s instagram of ramps reminds us that the wild leek that grows throughout the Appalachian and Catsill mountains in spring won’t be around much longer. Like many truly wild foods, they possess mighty powers to fortify the body and lift the spirit. Buy ‘em while you can get them. If they’re in good shape, they’ll keep a couple of weeks in the fridge with their roots in a jar of water, and the whole bunch covered loosely with a plastic bag.
We’re heading to the farmer’s market Saturday morning to get a mess, to braise them with olive oil or bacon or pancetta fat to serve as a side dish or with pasta OR to whip up a huge batch of Ramp Butter, which we’ll eat now on great bread, or throw on peas, asparagus, pasta, eggs, mashed potatoes or… We’ll freeze the rest, rolled into logs and wrapped in plastic wrap, to enjoy for months to come.
If you don’t know about the wild West Virginia ramps festivals, check out our post here. At one many years ago, a ramp-intoxicated friend was inspired to throw a ramp into a bottle of good bourbon. He brought the ramp-infused bourban back the following year. Under the Appalachian stars, we swigged a strange new moonshine that tasted of onion, chocolate, caramel, earth.
Recently, we went looking for a 24-inch round metal bistro table for our Harlem terrace and hit a dilemma: whether to buy the pricey classic Fermob table (top photo), made in France, (THE table used in many public spaces), whose durable finish we’ve tested in the guise of a rectangular table we’ve stored outdoors for 2 years OR
…a good-looking knockof (bottom photo), made in China and $100 cheaper. It’s 2 pounds lighter, a concern due to the high winds up here, and we have no idea how the finish would hold-up, or how it looks in person as opposed to a photograph. If it looked cheesey or flimsy, sending it back would be expensive. On the other hand, Terrain, the store that sells it guarantees it for a year. Reviews we read for other Fermob knock-offs complain of easily-scratchable powder coating and flimsy construction. Terrain claims their matte, powder-coated finish is really durable.
Part of our improvised life is making the most of our money, and we LOVE finding less expensive routes to well-designed stuff. It’s a personal challenge we find immensely gratifying WHEN we succeed. But we’ve learned the hard way that going cheap can often be expensive read more…
(Video link here.) We’ve written in the past about the virtues of hula-hooping as exercise. But we’ve never seen SUCH an inspiring example as Grace Jones, age 65-ish, performing Slave to the Rhythm at Roseland. Amazing body, energy, joy…
If you crank the music up and have a hula hoop on hand (or just feel like a dance break), it’s the perfect rhythm to be a slave to for a while… read more…
Over the years, just about every place we’ve lived has had hardwood floors. They’ve ranged from prewar bleached and polyeurathaned oak to white “pickled” new oak and lately, off-white, high-gloss painted slightly rough plywood. For all those years, we’ve searched for the best way to clean our floors without damaging the protective surface. Since New York City is a fairly dirty place, a simple dry-mopping won’t do; the dust that settles on the floor needs to be washed away or it will get ground into the surface (and our bare feet). The classic string mop is hard to wring out and doesn’t seem able to handle shoe marks very well.
We’ve written about the unexpected stylishiness of stacked logs before but love this particularly charming and effective storage for firewood and fallen timber: a fence of stacked logs (snapped by Susan Jacobson as she drove by in her car).
In the past month or so, two readers of ‘improvised life’ sent beautiful virtual bouquets in the form of emailed jpgs. You might think that a cyber bouquet would have little of the power or effect of a real one, but we’ve got to say, NOT SO.
Part of the reason they were each so powerful was that they were unexpected: thoughtful, handmade gifts of beauty from people who we’d never met, but are connected to through ‘the improvised life’; they sent them to express concern, care, appreciation for the work we do.
The first were some hyancinths from Sahana, a long-time reader and thoughtful Commenter; it came out-of-the-blue when we’d abruptly taken the site dark in order to recuperate from the flu. We felt like a friend had sent us flowers. In fact, she had.
The most recent bouquet came from Susan Dworski, who is fast becoming a regular contributor, with this note: read more…
Spotted on Ikea’s Swedish website LivetHemma: a bunch of cabinet boxes afixed to the wall, with space to store a bike. It’s a graphic solution to storing a bike when you have no outside bike storage, and want to get it off the floor.
Of course, bikes are beautiful hung directly on the wall, horizontally read more…
Bill and Julie got married on Valentine’s Day in 1943, 70 years ago today. He was a GI who had managed to wangle a weekend pass to marry his childhood sweetheart. From the get-go,their marriage was an improv.
“We didn’t have a minyan, the minimum of ten people required for a Jewish wedding,” Julie recalls. ”So his brother went to the local movie theater and rousted ten guys out of the balcony and promised them dinner if they’d come. For years afterward, perfect strangers would come up to us on the street and say,‘Hey, I was at your wedding!’”
Today, Bill is 95, Julie will be 90, and they’re still in love. read more…
We love the possibilities inherent in the great valentine DIY we found at Mineco Co UK, made of woven paper. All you need is an exactto knife and straight edge and some nice paper. Mineco’s site tells how-to, but there’s lots of room for improvising (were thinking cut up photographs, magazines, ribbon…)
We stumbled on some compelling photo placemats done as a public art project for Atlanta Celebrates Photography: photos printed onto large size paper, perfect IF you have a big color printer. The standard size of a placemat is 12″ x 18″, bigger we can print, although we suppose, we could have them done at Kinko’s.
Our friends Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton, creators of the wonderful Canal House cookbook series, have a friend in the appliance business who keeps offering to get them a big new stove for their kitchen studio. NO, they keep saying, We love our little side-by-side stoves!
Every great dish Melissa and Christopher come up with is cooked on their two vin-ordinaire gas stoves, which makes for eight burners and two ovens. And those very same plain little stoves appear in photographs of their unselfconsciously stylish, comfortable kitchen.
Which begs the question: What kind of stove will really help you to cook happily and easily? The answer, we’ve found, is read more…
I recently undertook a Sedaris readathon and plowed through all his books in one fell swoop.
To avoid the usual, well-thumbed celebrity-smut at my manicure salon, I introduced the notion of reading several Sedaris stories aloud to Amber, my young manicurist, while she whittles and sands. The whole salon falls silent in rapt attention, and everyone falls down laughing (or weeping) as the stories build to their irreverent and often melancholy climaxes.
In truth, this is secretly self-serving, for I learn a huge amount about timing, dialogue, and structure from the process.
How nice to think of reading to your manicurist. And how amazing that it became, spontaneously, live storytelling at a salon, everyone listening in! read more…
Omar Sosa and Ana Dominguez of Apartamentomagazine, with photographer Nacho Alegre, created a series of still-lifes with balancing bread. They’re beautiful, though I’m a little doubtful they are just balanced breads, no pins or stuts anywhere. To my former food-stylist’s eye, they seem, well….
…possibly faked, though it would be fun to get a bunch of breads and try. Nevertheless, they’re a charming reminder that read more…
The other day, I accidentally knocked a treasured cup off a table and watched, in the slow motion of a car accident, as it crashed onto the stone floor. It was gone in a moment, an object whose beauty I’d enjoyed daily since my friend Suzanne Shaker had given it to me over a decade ago: Ted Muehling’s nymphenburg porcelain ‘convex’ cup, a wonder.
As it flew through the air, I found myself thinking “It’s only an object…Nothing terrible has happened…no lives lost, no illness. An object only.” In the face of all the losses we’ve read about recently, that we’ve all seen in our own and other’s lives, it paled.I thought of the guy who remarked so matter-of-factly in the face of the huge beautiful trees blown over in the hurricane: “It’s Nature.”
I’m contemplating glueing the cup together, not to make perfect mends, read more…
. 
makes for nice big sheets with a ruffled edges where they were pulled off the spiral spine, and white space that invites a drawing, collage, quote or…
in one fell swoop. 
