strategies
Maria Robledo
Although we’d tasted many wondrous dishes in restaurant-going lives, there is only one that we felt compelled to order three times during the same meal, eating it as appetizer, main course, dessert. Fresh fava beans, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a fine dice of young Pecorino cheese, were offered as a “special appetizer” one warm spring night at a Tuscan-style restaurant in New York City. We knew that such a dish is a rarity on restaurant menus because fava beans are work to prepare in quantity; they require both shucking and peeling.”We’ll start with the favas” we said, “and then figure out the rest.”
We were stunned by that first simple dish of beans with their buttery, slightly bitter, “green” pea-like taste. So we ordered it for the next course, and then the next, without restraint or care for propriety. THAT was the dinner we needed. (When we returned the following evening hungering for more, we were told by our waiter that the favas were no longer available: “They were a losing proposition; the staff kept eating them…”)
This is the season for favas and it’s worth the effort to mine yourself and your loved ones a plateful. A fine solution to their laborious-in-quantity prep is read more…
05.20.10 |
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in family + friends, food, recipes, share, strategies |
The other day, Maria Robledo sent over some cookbooks with a note: “2 women are doing this lovely diary type home cooking book and one is CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER.”
Maria and I both worked with Christopher years ago when she was the food editor of Metropolitan Home and then Saveur. Christopher is famous for having become a superb photographer, with no formal training, just…like…that! having been a highly regarded editor and writer. (How she did it is a story in itself which we’ll post later.)
Christopher, along with her friend and colleague Melissa Hamilton, has again defied the usual notions of how things work and created an ongoing series of utterly charming, absolutely usable cookbooks without a mainstream publisher. It’s called Canal House Cooking.
“We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks…Everyday we cook. Starting in the morning we tell each other what we made for dinner the night before. Midday, we stop our work, set the table simply with paper napkins, and have lunch. We cook seasonally because that’s what makes sense. So it came naturally to write down what we cook…”
The books are so compelling and such a pleasure, and so beautifully produced, that I called Christopher up to find out the story behind them (which I want to know whenever someone does something amazing, in a completely unexpected way). read more…
05.12.10 |
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in community, family + friends, food, gifts, how-to, inspiration, paths + processes, people, recipes, resources books + zines, strategies, why not? |
Draplin/Flickr
The other day Reference Library posted an image from the Flickr archive of a brilliant junk collector and “seer” of things. It was of the UNDERSIDE of an old light bulb package: the red-striped ends of its six sides folded into an elegant overlapping “star” like some beautiful Japanese Packaging. The only editorial comment was in the form of the posts title, “Always Turn Shit Over”. Now there’s a life principle! Turn stuff over, on its side, inside-out, upside-down… to get a view you didn’t expect or might not have imagined on your own.
You can do the same thing with ideas: turn them over in your mind, every which way…
05.11.10 |
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in inspiration blogs + sites, paths + processes, principles, projects + play, reimagine, rules for living, strategies |
Ralph More/Time-Life Pictures
In a 2008 New Yorker profile, artist John Currin said something about the process of painting that knocked us out because it is SO much about improvising, about making anything where you’re not entirely sure where you’re going:
“…a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. “
A really big part of improvising/making/creating is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. We suspect that is one of the reasons why improvising is difficult for some people:
read more…
05.09.10 |
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in art, before + after, learn, paths + processes, strategies |
Jim Dine "Optional Autostar"
The sentiment around Mother’s Day is a nice one but we’ve never been crazy about all the marketing of flowers, cards, candy that can go with it; they often seem in contradiction to the gist – of honoring and thanking your mother – by blending in the desperate shelling out of $$ to buy a token, fueled by guilt and/or obligation (We’re talking about grown-up kids, here; the little ones seem to delight in making breakfast-in-bed and homemade cards and gifts…)
We were delighted to see The Robin Hood Foundation‘s great idea for an alt-Mother’s Day gift that is easy-to-send, personal, and speaks volumes: a beautiful card telling your mama that you’ve given a donation in her name to a charity. read more…
04.28.10 |
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Andrew Nixon
Of late we are smitten with a rather homely blog whose content is so good, and its straightforwardness so compelling, that it overcomes its strangely distracting design and ads for cutting down belly fat. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is Hank Shaw‘s site about being just that:
“I fish. I dig earth, raise plants, live for food and kill wild animals…But most of all I think daily about new ways to cook and eat anything that walks, flies, swims, crawls, skitters, jumps – or grows…Honest food is what I’m seeking…I am especially interested in those meats and veggies that people don’t eat much any more, like pigeons or shad or cardoons.”
Shaw blogs his “wanderings in the edible world” and explorations of foods that strike his fancy – explorations that invariably lead to improvising and figuring things out himself. The blog is a good place for learning about what’s REALLY in season, and what to do with foods you’ve foraged one way or another, or have just wondered about. We like his step-by-step instructions (with photos) of how to break down a (game) bird, and make bottarga (salt-cured fish roe), and are impressed with his thoughts on Wild Game Fat and Flavor, which we haven’t seen written about elsewhere. And even though we can’t get with his use of garlic powder and Instacure No.2 (sodium nitrite) in what looks like an otherwise fine recipe for Lardo, we love his original voice and take and insights into the process of sussing out a new ingredient; the guy is game to learn and get his hands dirty.
The blog is a fine reminder of what is out there, from acorns and borage, to elderflower and shad: all the fabulous possibilities for eating in the natural world… read more…
04.20.10 |
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in food, garden, how-to, nature, outside, recipes, strategies |
Hans Namuth
Lately, we’ve noticed several odd and very expressive permutations of the word “fling”. Fling/flang/flung aren’t about flinging some THING across the room, but rather describe a PERSON being catapulted, by life…allowing ourselves to being flung, learning lessons, making discoveries, really living. First we read Anne Herbert’s wonderful post in Peace, Love and Noticing the Details:
“Jackson Pollock’s paintings were painted in a time and place where it often seemed that the job of being human was to walk along a straight line that already existed and that other people had walked on.
There was more than one straight line one might choose to walk on, but not many more than one.
Maybe you are trying to find your straight line when actually you are about curving, wiggling streams of many different colors and about drops that are nothing like a perfect circle and exude beauty.
Jackson Pollock didn’t micromanage paint. “Lighten up” can mean let more of the colors in that white light can break into, if asked. Finding your lines, your squiggles, your life might include inventing a new skill and getting good at it, as Jackson Pollock was good at flinging paint.
Fling and be flung and find the life in your life.”
…It reminded us of the incredible use of “flang” we read years ago read more…
04.19.10 |
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in inspiration blogs + sites, inspiration books + zines, paths + processes, rules for living, signs, strategies |
We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’s Green Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
“To create the gown, more than 1,800 flowers were individually cut and sewn from 600 Peanut M&M wrappers, a time-consuming process that took over 100 hours of labor. (Five yards of silk charmeuse and silk shantung were used for the lining.)
Liedtke’s wearable artwork depicts flowers in bloom: The top of the dress displays the initial budding, while the middle portrays a ‘landscape of blooming vibrant poppies,’ according to the designer. ‘Finally, the bottom of the dress expresses a collage of fully bloomed mature flowers,’ she adds.
Terracycle is a company who makes useful products out of garbage, like an Oreo Wrapper Kite and planters made out of crushed computers and fax machines. They package the products in “garbage” as well: used/recycled bottles, boxes etc. Terracycle seems to have figured out ways of recycling that have stymied city governments.
Says CEO Tom Szaky: “Garbage is opportunity.”
Check out this video about Terracycle: read more…
04.18.10 |
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Maria Robledo
Dana Joy Altman of Real Food Rehab blog emailed asking for a couple of recipes she’d heard Sally mention on public radio’s The Splendid Table recently when she was talking about ways to improvise with miso. We’ve come to view recipes as notations of ideas, examples of ways to use an ingredient or a techniques that can inspire other improvisations…And since we only posted two miso recipes, we thought it couldn’t hurt to post the ones Dana Joy requested, to help give a sense of the possibilities in this wonderful long-keeping staple. So here are: Roasted Almond Miso Spread and Orange Hazelnut (or Walnut) Vinaigrette. Both started as improvisations on the idea of using this traditional Japanese ingredient in a more Western mode… read more…
04.13.10 |
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Our friend Fern Berman told us how she’d gone into a sunglass store and started trying on glasses; like everybody, her mind got boggled by the selection. So she devised a way to get advice from her spouse, Faith Middleton who was in another state preparing to host one of her in-depth interviews on public radio. With each new possible candidate Fern tried on, she took a picture of herself with her mobile phone and emailed it to Faith at the studio. Every few minutes an email would interrupt Faith with the latest emailed photo of Fern in a different pair of glasses. “No, honey” those aren’t quite right…”Naahhh”….”Keep trying”….Faith emailed back several times. Fern’s strategy of instant-eyeglass-store-photo-consult-with-a-trusted-advisor seemed to be working until it was air-time and Faith couldn’t be interrupted for the next two hours; Fern was left on her own… read more…
04.12.10 |
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in apparel, family + friends, identity, outside, strategies |
Emma's Design Blog
A couple of years ago, we started a file called “bad ideas”. These are ideas featured in shelter/style magazines that look really good, but practically speaking, are really bad. They’d come back to haunt you in no time. Stacked magazines seem like a perfect, charming solution for a table leg, but have you ever TRIED to stack magazines more than a foot high, which, with their glossy paper, are nearly impossible to keep from sliding around, much less as a 2 1/2 foot support for a slab of glass? (Unless, maybe, you bore a hole through them and put a pipe through the center to secretly hold them together).
We’re got nothing against cool-for-the-sake-of-cool design. But we really mind design that masquerades as a practical idea and has a lot of back-end problems. read more…
04.06.10 |
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in learn, media, outside, paths + processes, principles, reimagine, strategies |
Anders Adermark via Flickr*
We read that the decorating of Easter eggs came about in the 13th century, when the church prohibited eating of eggs during Holy Week. They couldn’t stop chickens from laying however.
How to identify those “Holy Week” eggs after the fact? Paint em’!
Soon the eggs, which were already an ancient symbol of new life emerging, became a symbol of the Easter.
It’s not too late to decorate an egg or two. You can do it the usual way by submerging hard-boiled eggs in a bowl of vinegary colored dye. But we’re wondering why not view an egg shell as a blank canvas, and draw or paint right on it? (Be sure to hard boil the eggs first).
Here are some pictures and resources, including read more…
04.01.10 |
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in copy this!, family + friends, inspiration blogs + sites, resources, strategies, wheels, why not? |
We wish there were a way to beam ourselves (a la Star Trek) to a conference taking place in Lahti, Finland on March 24 to 25, called “Designing Slow Life”
“…international experts of design, service design and wellness talk about and develop services under the main theme of better, slower and more meaningful life...The Slow Life conference will try to solve how to develop our surroundings in future in order to support slower life.”
We’re dying to know where the challenge will take them, and how design (and designers) can help “support slower life”.
Are there ways to create environments to help us slow down? (Isn’t that what a park is?) We’d like some software that would limit our computer use for a start…because that’s something we feel powerless over, and we love the internet so much! Or is SLOW really something that each of us has to figure out for her/himself, a practice or discipline to be consciously embraced?….
A commenter at Core 77, where we read about the Slow Life Conference, wrote: “Can we offer ‘slow life’…suggestions? e.g. slow life sport = yoga?”
Good question!
Although we’re (sadly) not going to Finland, we’re going to mull the this idea of designing a slow life and see what we come up with.
What are your ideas? How do you….slow……down………..?
via Core 77
03.23.10 |
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in community, family + friends, paths + processes, strategies |
Right after news of Gourmet Magazine’s demise hit the food world like a missile, Lydia Wills sent us an article written by Stefany Ann Golberg, an artist, musician, and founding member of the art collective Flux Factory. She writes really smart, thoughtful, acute articles for The Smart Set and is worth following. Buried within her article about Gourmet and the American way of eating, is a perfectly-contained piece about M.F.K. Fisher, perhaps America’s greatest food writer. In writing about food, Fisher wrote about love, hunger, and real life with an stunningly original voice. In two paragraphs Golberg GOT what Fisher was doing, and why she resonates so strongly today. (And why she’s been a major influence on ‘the improvised life’.) read more…
03.09.10 |
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The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is.
The reason most people don’t keep a real sled is that it takes up too much room for most of the year when there is no snow. That means resorting to make-shift which can yield unpredictable results (see list below for ideas). OR you can buy a Rocko Flake Sled from Sweden for about $12 bucks. It about exactly fits your butt with your legs in the air or tucked in tight, as you pull up the handle slightly to insure a good slide. It weighs next to nothing, so it’s easy to carry to a sledding hill or hide unobtrusively in the back of a closet while you wait for snow. Perfect design!
They’re available by mail-order at the fabulous Kiosk. We sent one to friends who just moved near Prospect Park… read more…
02.17.10 |
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