To Maximize Ramps, Make Ramp Butter

We’ll be heading to the wild ramp supper in West Virginia this weekend to celebrate one of the first wild foods of spring. On the way, we’re stopping to see a friend who may not be able to go to the supper. We’re packing a frozen block of ramp butter in our bag to leave with him in case. It’s one of the best ways we know to make the most of a small amount of ramps,

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Iron-Skillet Smoked Salmon

One of my most pleasurable challenges in the kitchen has been to cook like a farmer in a city apartment, curing hams, aging cheese, making butter, and best of all, smoking food. Hungering for the flavor of wood smoke but having no fireplace, years ago I devised a way of smoking in an iron skillet. The spectacular results belie its ease: it requires no special equipment and can be easily improvised.

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Tried-and-True: Cool, Crisp Percale Sheets

Some time ago, we went on a hunt for great sheets. The sheets we love feel cool and crisp when you climb into bed. Combed or jacquard cotton won’t do it, neither does linen nor most of the million thread-count sheets we’ve tried. The only way we’ve found to guarantee ‘cool and crisp’ is with Supina cotton percale bedding from Garnet Hill. We wait for their 25% off sale, which is NOW…

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Super-Quick Sweet or Savory Citrus Jams (After Mario Batali)

At Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo, I had a simple, astonishing dish: a whole roasted fish served with Lemon Oregano Jam. The jam was a marvel, at once sweet, bitter and herbal in perfect balance, an inspired match for the fish. I decoded Mario’s brilliant recipe, extracting an essential formula into which I plugged different citrus fruit and flavorings, to take it from savory to dazzling sweet and back.

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Practice Losing Farther, Faster (Elizabeth Bishop)

The other day we came across the shorn trunk of huge tree that had been taken down by the Parks Department. We looked close and tried to count the rings but got lost in the swirls and changes in its three-foot span. It is one of those everyday losses that reminded us of others, and of the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art”*, in which the antidote to loss lies hidden.

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Ancient Trees: Portraits in Time, Change, Survival

“Ancient Trees: Portraits in Time” is one of the most beautiful and instantly transformative books we’ve seen in a long time. Photographer Beth Moon spent fourteen years traveling the world photographing ancient trees She describes her images as “Portraits of Change. Portraits of Survival. Portraits of Time” and interleaves them with the occasional perfect poem. It is a book we will leave open, to keep in our field of vision as we go about our day. 

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Silvery Woods from Low to High

We did a double-take during a virtual tour of a monochromatic home in Risskov, Denmark designed by haute-architecture firm Ardess: The luxurious silvery custom-made interior of Douglas fir, linoleum, and concrete looks curiously like the weathered silver-painted plywood door we spotted in Chelsea a couple of years ago, and fell in love with. 

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Aretha: How to Be A Soul Survivor

Soul Survivor, David Remnick’s moving profile of complex, mysterious, brilliant, notoriously infuriating singer Aretha Franklin, sent us looking for videos of the great diva in action. We stumbled on this rough beauty of seventy-something Aretha playing piano herself, in a mode that was more churchlike gospel – her roots — than theater performance. If you’re tired or troubled, or need uplift to your day, her groove will hearten you.

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Weakness of Strength + the Stength of Weakness

(Video link here.) This short animation describes the incredibly useful “Weakness of Strength Theory”: the flip side of a person’s strengths in one context—the qualities you love or admire them for — are often irritating weaknesses in another. “Every virtue has an associated weakness”; one can’t exist without the other. And no one is ALL strengths and virtues; we are…

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