One of the best things about encouraging people to improvise in the kitchen is to hear how they monkeyed with one of my recipes.“Wow”, I think, “I never thought of that!” Like my friend Ellen using an herb sea salt, fragrant with dried rosemary, thyme and lavender, instead of kosher salt in a chocolate cake…
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Platform21calls themselves a design platform (“curiously exploring”, “strangely optimistic”) but other people call them change agents, and that definitely describes them. Witness their latest project, Repair Manifesto. In eloquent, energizing statements, it expounds the coolness of repair. (Check out #5 and #7.) It has hit a nerve, racing through the internet like wildfire.
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The N.Y.Times recently ran a story about a couple who bought a house in Upstate New York for $95,000 and fixed it up, beautifully, for $10,000, using pure elbow grease and a eye for scavenged and second-hand stuff. The best nugget of info, to me, was about how to score serious finds on Craigslist: “Using Craigslist…
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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…
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I saw a photograph of one of Jim Denevan’s sand drawings and my head changed: every notion about sand and beach and drawing and playing shifted and opened up. I’d never thought about drawing in sand this way. Then I read the story behind his paintings, which I stumbled on on the artist’s website, and…
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1000 Awesome Things is a great site to check into for a quick reminder of the tiny, daily experiences that are so swell, but that we forget when we’re moving too fast. The Toronto Star nailed it: “It’s less about awesome things than it is about seeing the awesomeness of the everyday.” I see it is as…
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I’m a big fan of rocks, which I haul home from the beach or country to use in various ways around my apartment, for Chicken Under a Brick Rock, or keep the air conditioner from rattling. They make beautiful, rather elemental doorstops. They’re also wonderul to look at with no use at all, piled up…
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Over the course of thirty years, Andy Warhol filled over 600 cardboard boxes with objects from his daily life, from photographs and newspaper clippings to artworks and telephone messages. He used a marker to write the date or contents on the outside, then sent the boxes to storage rooms. The array of boxes, which are…
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My personal Breakfast of Champions is a fried egg on a handful of raw greens – say arugula, dandelion, baby spinach, watercress or even mesclun – lightly dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a few drops of sherry vinegar, salt and pepper, maybe some snipped chives. It is a play on a classic rustic…
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I’ve been smitten with Remodelista for years, checking in regularly to the interior design blog for ideas and inspiration. The editors made sure to include ample amounts of the resourceful and inexpensive amidst the architect-designed spaces and high-end hardware. The only problem with the site was that it was difficult to navigate its archives and…
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I am a farmer trapped in a city-person’s body, torn between love of urban and yearning to grow vegetables, keep bees, preserve food. I know there are a lot of us around. Why should it be either/or? Although I’ve been figuring out country ways in my small city apartment for years, a new book has…
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My friend Steve Hamm is a Senior Writer at Business Week who blogs about innovation, globalization and leadership in his blog Globespotting. He recently had the good fortune to interview the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader whose words and practice resonate globally, especially in the West. Steve asked the Dalai Lama a number of…
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You’ve invited a crowd for dinner and you don’t have enough chairs…So, you take some long planks you happened to have hanging around for a construction project, or bought for just such emergencies, and expand a row of spaced chairs into double the seating with a bench. No matter how chic they become, a bench…
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Although I am not a designer, I decided to try designing a table base myself. Using a ruler and pencil, I made a drawing with the totally cockeyed perspective of an outsider artist (since I don’t really know how to draw) with the exact dimensions. Then I faxed it to a guy I’d heard about…
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For years I’ve been buying the same glass and worrying that it would be discontinued. Marta “Cooler” from CB2 is incredibly cheap ($2.50), has a beautiful, classic shape, and feels great in your hand because the glass is so thin (a rarity with cheap glasses). It is almost identical to a glass that chic design…
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It seems like it might be fortuitous to launch a blog on the eve of Independence Day, so I’ve decided to take my own advice and forgo the idea of it being “done”, “ready”, or “perfect”, and just send ‘the improvised life’ out into the world. Though I’ve been writing posts privately on-and-off for a…
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Laziness and exhaustion are the motivations behind many of my culinary improvisations; the desperate need to make something good as quickly as possible causes me flaunt notions I’d previously held sacred. In past cherry seasons, for example, I’d painstakingly pit pounds of cherries to make a warm stew to spill onto vanilla ice cream or…
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