On Christmas day, I received a totally unexpected and mind-boggling gift: an email alerting me that my 2001 cookbook A New Way to Cook is included on the Guardian’s “The Best Food Books of the Decade” list. It is such an honor; please bear with me for tooting horns and telling a tale. From UK foodwriter Richard Ehrlich:
“This is the intelligent person’s guide to healthy cooking. The New York based Schneider has rethought the culinary use of fats, sugar etc from the ground up, and this vast book is all about how to go on using them but using a bit less by deploying techniques that maximise their impact. One of the few truly original cookbooks of the last decade; I wish it had made more of a splash on this side of the pond.”
A New Way to Cook is where I first starting testing the idea of writing recipes that encouraged readers to improvise (with some sometimes radical techniques I’d improvised for cooking healthfully); it took nine years to bring to publication (a long story)… The theme of improvisational cooking resonated so strongly with people that
I often bundle the the charity gift cards I give for Christmas with another teeny-but-potent gift: like this $4 tasting spoon from Branch. It is my idea of the perfect all-purpose cook’s spoon: long and thin, and slightly odd, similar to a treasured spoon a friend bought me from South America many years ago.
Time-lapse videos allow us to see processes too subtle for the human eye, like flowers blooming and clouds moving across the sky. They are great for instant perspective: a reminder that the world is going on around us, doing its own creative thing, that the constant is change. One of my favorites is Eirik Solheim’s One Year in Two Minutes which you can use as a sort of video meditation. (If you don’t have much time, his One Year in 40 Seconds is pretty great, too, though the transitions aren’t quite as subtle or alive.)
Chad Richard’s site Time Traveler, has lots of cool time-lapse videos, including a nice, rather boisterous compilation. It will make you hurry up, while Solheim’s calm you down…
I started thinking about using my hand as a notepad, as I did when I was a kid, and began noticing people with notes scrawled and scribbled on their hands. The manager of the local fish market had phone numbers running up the back of his hand in blue ball point. At the Bauhaus show at the Museum of Modern Art, a teacher ushered in a group of four young women and started talking about a weaving by Anni Albers; one whipped out a razor point pen and started taking notes on her hand. It’s a convenience that I overlooked for years until I needed to remember to take my laptop’s powercord to a meeting, and couldn’t find a post-it, so I wrote a note on my hand… read more…
If you pile a bunch of washed and stemmed greens like chard or spinach or kale in a shallow skillet with a few tablespoons of water, cover them and set over high heat, they’ll steam just fine without a proper steamer; most of the water evaporates by the time they’ve become tender, so they’ll be no loss in vitamins. Then, you can add some olive oil or butter to the bottom of the pan to saute the greens.
The problem is that the bulky greens defy the lid, lifting it up, making it impossible to have the seal necessary for steaming. I recommend keeping a rock handy for weighting down the lid. read more…
The New York Review of Books recently ran a surprising article about paintings made by the artist David Hockney on his i-phone, using an app called Brushes. It allows the user to fingerpaint, smear or draw on the screen using a full color-wheel spectrum. (Hockney likes to use his thumb rather than forefinger to manipulate the paint.) You can fashion brushstrokes, making them more transparent, or thicker or thinner. And you can email your finished image to friends.
Hockney described why he is so taken with Brushes, which he uses anywhere he has the urge, even upon waking, when he is inspired to paint the sunrise he sees from his bed: read more…
Just about every cook I know has a favorite fork or a spoon that they use for all sorts of purposes in the kitchen; they reach for it before any other tool when they need to toss or stir or shift something in a pan, because it feels right in their hand, makes them feel right in the kitchen, and able to deal with whatever comes up.
Ellen Silverman took a picture of mine. I am certain that each utensil in this odd assortment HELPS me to cook. Each has a unique feel of its own. All are balanced, attuned in some special way that helps me to listen to whatever I am making. These implements are so much a part of my cooking that I am often not aware of all the different things I do with them.
They are the opposite of kitchen catalogue offerings; all except one are cheap and beat-up. They all have stories. read more…
Every great invention, from the Murphy bed to the bicycle, started as an improvisation: an elegant solution to something someone needed or just plain wanted. But an improvisation never stops there. The improvised invention gets improvised upon, and that improvisation gets improvised upon, and so on, and so on. Viewing the everyday objects around us as improvisations makes for endless inspiration.
Take the safety pin, the ultimate emergency tool that holds up hems without thread and makes possible all manner of instant repairs. read more…
Gever Tully started a Tinkering School for kids, an exploratory curriculum designed to teach kids how to build the things they think of. By exploratory he means setting kids loose in a shop full of tools and materials (with supervision) and encouragement to “fool around”. In his wonderful TED talk, Tully describes the “deep internal realization” kids have from the experience, which happen to be the same ones you get (at any age) from improvising:
“that you can figure things out as you fool around”…
…nothing turns out as planned – ever…
…all projects go awry…
…success is in the doing (failures are celebrated and analyzed; problems become puzzles)…”
As I watched Tulley’s talk, I thought: I want to go there! I want a tinkering school for grownups! read more…
After reading ‘ted muehling and the inspiration journal’, designer Pamela Hovland wrote about the many kinds of visual journals she’s kept over the years: “one for my garden, one for my house, one for my summer cabin in Minnesota (all of which are ongoing projects). I keep a visual journal for art and design inspiration, another for wardrobe inspiration (as sometimes I’ll attempt to make a skirt I’ve seen or ask a tailor to do the same). I even have a journal devoted to all things black and white.”
Pamela mentioned Jessica Helfand’s wonderful book Scrapbooks: An American History. That sent me on a path that expanded my view of what journals and scrapbooks can be. One of Helfand’s own scrapbooks commemorates the ritual cleaning of her graphic design studio; it includes bits of dead insect, chicken meat, angel hair pasta, a Prednisone prescription, and Clementine peel into glassine envelope. read more…
When I’m camping in a borrowed or rented house out of town, I love the challenge of cooking in the invariably rudimentary kitchen with whatever is there. It’s fun to devise solutions to small dilemmas: making roasting pans out of tin foil, or rolling pins out of wine bottles. I’ve made cheese souffles in cast-iron skillets, and used the same skillet to smoke trout using dried twigs from a nearby apple tree. These small challenges are somehow gratifying.
The one thing I always bring with me, though, is a good knife – NOT a set of chef’s knives bound in a leather roll – but a simple, inexpensive, picnic knife from France, the Opinel. read more…
I was just imagining how my friend Matthew, who is a gifted paper artist, might design a light out of a paper shade and hanging bulb were he given the challenge, when I came across some free, origami-like down-loadable plans on the internet. They are the “gift” of Arash and Kelly, an industrial design studio with a mission “to help to re-connect our global culture”. A video of their Octopus light being made gives a sense that this is really something an anyone might improvise upon.
But even more inspiring and full-of-info is a video of a light for which they don’t give exact plans, but do show the assembly of: plastic leaves with perforations along the edges that “zip” together to make a number of configurations. It made me think: “There’s a great approach to d-i-y lights and shades”: read more…
I am blown away by Andre Michelle’s awesome visual music synthesizer, an instant d-i-y way for anybody to make charming syncopated Steve Reich-ish music that repeats endlessly. The more boxes you touch with your cursor, the more complex the tune becomes. If you get tired of a tune, continue to build it, listening as it evolves.
The synthesizer is the antidote to the workmen hammering outside my office window, providing a gorgeous meditative background sound that, along with ear plugs, blocks out the pounding on walls going on around me, and is perfectly conducive to working.
I have a lot of sewing projects I’d like to do – making pillow covers our of sari fabric, aprons out of gorgeous linen, for example - but didn’t know where to begin. So I asked my friend Lydia, who is the absolute best and most gifted textile person I know. (She’s masterminding some projects that I’ll be posting, with patterns and pictures for d-i-y. ) Here’s Lydia’s advice for beginners: read more…
. That sent me on a path that expanded my view of what journals and scrapbooks can be. One of Helfand’s own 
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