Over the past few months, we’ve seen a spate of paint-dipped wooden spoons, with instructions to diy or just buy, like these Etsy ones from Living Embellished. Wanting them for ourselves, we realize that they’d make great inexpensive gifts. Here is all you need to know to diy or buy.
Read Morehow to speed clean silver
Desperate to get a mountain of sliver polished for a photo shoot, we abandoned silver polish and tested an easy old-fashioned speed cleaning method, which worked brilliantly.
Read MoreRemodelista’s New Book is Full of Good Ideas
Remodelista’s new Manual for the Considered Home is chock full of practical info and stories reminiscent of the early Remodelista. One favorite: The Reinvented Rental Kitchen.
Read Moreessential kitchen tool: your hands
Some of the most beautiful images of hands we know of are by Tessa Traeger, photographed in the Vivarais region of France. They remind me what just about every good cook I know swears by: hands are the very best kitchen tool.
Read Morediy or buy: not-plastic beeswax food wrap
Just about everyone we know wants to cut back on using plastic wrap and ziplock bags but are having a hard time actually doing it. One way is with clever Abeego food storage sheets: cotton sheets that are coated with pure beeswax, jojoba oil and tree resin, known for their preservative properties. The sheets are…
Read Morepaint bright colors inside your white kitchen cabinets
As much as we love white, we’ve been getting a bit weary of the generic Ikea-esque kitchen cabinets we see a lot. That is until we saw these simple cabinets with the INTERIORS painted bright colors, the brainchild of Italian architects Marta Laudani and Marco Romanelli. Open a cabinet door and SURPRISE!: a pleasing blast…
Read Morepaint-dipped wooden spoon
Heather Chontos puts her colourful spin on a fleamarket find, dipping an old wooden spoon in tangerine paint to transform a low-tech stirring implement into something…fab. It’s from a selection of homewares chosen by Will Taylor for The Simple Things. We’ve painted new wooden spoons this way but somehow hadn’t thought to do it with oldies-but-goodies. Why not…
Read Morepaint test: beautiful hardworking flat matte Aura
Encouraged by our friend Bruce McKenna, we tried Benjamin Moore’s flat matte Aura paint in The Laboratory’s very hard-used kitchen, instead of the usual oil-based eggshell, which we’d assumed was the only really washable paint. But even eggshell would have shown up the really ugly imperfections in this wall. So, in desperation and against our…
Read Morediy minimalist stainless steel pot rack
For many years, I steered clear of potracks. I disliked the feeling of having things hanging above me when I cooked, the visual busy-ness they created, and the generally clunky lines of most commercial ones. In my old place, I hung my pots on wall racks made from sleek shower bars, in a nook that…
Read Morevideo: sally makes fragrant herb salt + other goodies
(Video link here.) Before I moved up to Harlem, the great Lynne Rosetto Kasper, host of public radio’s The Splendid Table, visited me in my old Chelsea apartment to film me making Tuscan Herb Salt. It’s one riff in The Key Three — three recipes I consider essential in every cooks repertoire — featured on…
Read Morelife lessons from an exploding egg + roz chast
This morning while engrossed in redesigning ‘improvised life’, I forgot about the eggs I was boiling on the stove. Suddenly, I heard what sounded like a gunshot in the kitchen. When I explored, I discovered firm little pellets of egg yolk scatter-shot across the kitchen. Once the water had boiled away in the little copper…
Read Moreil reader julie houston’s brooklyn renovation
We are always thrilled to hear (and see) how ‘improvised life’ resonates in our readers lives. Sometimes it’s a “shift” of mindset, sometimes it’s a daring diy. In Julie Houston’s case, it was a major renonovation of the back parlor of her Brooklyn brownstone, transformed into kitchen/dining area. When children and pets leave — as…
Read Morecorian + composing food right on the worksurface
Truth be known, I have been composing food right on my kitchen worksurface for many years. As a food writer, I enjoyed the big palate the worksurface offered, perfect for combining elements and creating new combinations, both visual and gustatory. So when I renovated ‘the improvised life’s laboratory kitchen, I chose white Corian for the…
Read Moreladders as pot racks in wood or copper (diy)
Recently, Design Sponge featured the three-level Copenhagen apartment of Camilla Ebdrup, half of the Danish duo behind LuckyBoySunday, and her husband, photographer Andreas Stenmann. Their style is a mix of modern and vintage, with many items foraged from the nearby canals, where interesting items are washed in from the sea. We especially loved the wooden ladder…
Read Moregift: diy color-block wooden spoons + baskets
‘the improvised life’s former assistant Sarah M alerted us to this easy-to-make gift for the holidays: color block wooden spoons, along with a link to A Cozy Kitchen showing how-to. It could not be easier: buy some wooden spoons (they’re cheap), use painter’s tape to mask-off a striped design, then paint the spaces left and allow…
Read Morescrabble tiles for kitchen or floor
This surprising kitchen is the brainchild of Austrian conceptual artist Thomas Feuerstein. It is an artwork, but like many artworks we come across, it contains wonderful ideas to be had and used, like scrabble tiles on the walls. Just for the hell of it, we started hunting down scrabble tiles. We didn’t find any ceramic…
Read Morebook giveaway: ‘canal house cooks every day’
We’ve long been fans of Canal House Cooking, the groundbreaking cookbook series created and published by Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton. We are totally smitten with their latest effort: Canal House Cooks Every Day, a bright red, 385-page tome documenting a year of cooking from Canal House, based on their popular daily lunch blog. The book offers…
Read More‘improvised life’s emergency pantry
The wind has picked up in the huge trees in the park across the way. TV news is reporting mandatory evacuations around the city, as the confluence of full moon, the jet stream and hurricane Sandy’s massive size threatens major flooding and power outages. The sky is straight our of a Ghostbuster’s movie; we’re waiting…
Read Morekitchen-testing chilewich floor mats
Having admired sleek, modern Chilewich floor mats, we decided to do a test to see if they would really clean easily despite our abuse.
Read Morestrangely chic water crate garbage can + the garbage bag question
Recently, quite out-of-the-blue, we contrived a surprisingly chic garbage can. In the course of moving apartments, we had found 6-gallon bottle of “emergency” water stowed away in the back of a closet. It was housed in a rectangular black plastic crate . When we pulled the bottle out, the box suddenly looked wonderfully Bauhausian, a perfectly-designed…
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