The Ultimate Roast Duck

Many years ago, I learned a brilliant, virtually effortless method for roasting duck from Mindy Heiferling, an inspired cook. Five hours of roasting in a low oven renders out the fat and makes the flesh tender enough to eat with a spoon, the skin crackling and crisp. Recently, I revisited the recipe and found myself…

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Need a Road Trip? Here it is…

We can’t remember we what led us to this wonderful image that makes us instantly… chill. We found it at A Life Alive, 26-year-old Forrest Mankins’ 8-months + road trip “from Oklahoma to the Arctic Circle living in my 1984 Toyota Land Cruiser.” Following his Instagram makes for a kind of vicarious road trip that is mighty refreshing…

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Graffiti’s Long Lineage Welcomes You In

At our Instagram SignLaboratory, we post a lot of graffiti: messages scribbled by valiant, expressive, anonymous souls as they move around the city. It is a fine practice: seizing a moment to scratch a subversive message. They are, more often than not, uplifting. We hadn’t thought of the lineage of graffiti until a friend showed us…

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Celery Root Noodles Inspired by a 4-Star Chef

Amid the black Perigord truffles, foie gras and caviar that laced a celebration dinner at New York restaurant Gabriel Kreuther, an utterly simple idea lay hidden. As I carefully deconstructed the “Cardamom Roasted Alaskan King Crab, uni coulis, celeriac, sea cress”, I discovered thin, tender noodles barely swathed in an uni-perfumed cream. When I honed in…

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Charm and Practicality of Odd and Broken Mirrors

Roaming through photographer Christopher Baker‘s online portfolios, we came across this lovely quirky bathroom. We love the long rough surface for double sinks, and the little set of matching vessels to hold toothbrushes, turning them into little sculptures. But what we love most are the mirrors: a couple of vintage rectangular ones and two shards propped…

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Pruning the Old to Allow the New

When we wrote friend and contributor Susan Dworski of many decisions we had were making to change how we worked — limiting some aspects and dreams to focus on others — she likened it to pruning a tree: the essential process of culling and removing branches of a shrub or tree in order to encourage growth. Her words and…

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The Hidden Life of Trees

The New York Times recently reported the research of Peter Wohlleben, a German forest ranger, whose book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate— Discoveries From a Secret World, has become a best seller in Europe. In it, Wohlleben, who has spent his life studying trees, describes trees as social beings with…

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Big Picture Reminder from Heliotown

Our friend Thomas Ashcraft is an artist, naturalist, Electroreceptor, scientific instrument builder and radio astronomer who spends his time looking UP, recording the activity of meteors, fireballs, space dust and Transient Luminous Events — lovely and mysterious emanations of light — that have gained him some renown (bottom image) Here’s a wondrous accidental avian moment Tom’s…

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