Just before Christmas, I posted my best-ever butter cookie recipe: Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies, along with many variations. The versatile cookie dough recently inspired yet another improvisation on the basic theme. Actually, it’s an improvisation on my Tuscan Herb Salt Recipe, that I then used on the butter cookies, to make a double-improvisation: Brown Sugar Butter Cookies with Thyme-Rosemary-Lavender Salt…
I used the essential Herb Salt method to make a fragrant salt using classic Herbes de Provence: rosemary, thyme and lavender (instead of the usual garlic, rosemary and sage). After I cut out the raw cooky dough, I sprinkled each disk with some of the aromatic salt, hoping that the combination would make for a subtle, surprising and delicious cookie. It did, and has become a new favorite.
That’s what happens when you start improvising: one idea links and layers with another, until you have improvisations made of improvisations…
We recently stumbled on a cool Japanese site that will instantly transmute any photo you upload to an aged version “like over 100 to 150 years old.”
On the upper right corner of the site you can ‘English’ to see a translation. You choose the file where it says to, and then click the blue box below it to upload. Wait a minute and you’ll your photo transformed.
The photo above is the vintage-ized version of this one we took of Palais Royale in Paris a couple of years ago:
A satisfying find from the recently-redesigned Remodelista: Anthropologie’s Ephemera Clip. Made of distressed iron (wonder if it will rust…then it might get REALLY beautiful), with a hole in one handle so you can hang it, it is like a little sculpture…Endlessly useful for clipping together receipts, papers, closing food bags…
(Our strategy for being “on hold” is to wear an old-fashioned telephone headset - an essential tool – so we can write, scan blogs, surf…as we follow one thing to another… draw….and make cups of tea…cook. It’s not so much being “on hold” that we mind, it’s the irritating music that’s the problem. Take away the music, and it wouldn’t bother us much at all.)
(Video link here.) A reader sent us this lovely little video her friend Julia Warr made. It is about 95-year-old Maia Helles, a former Russian ballet dancer who she met on a plane four years ago. Warr became convinced that Maia “remains resolutely independent, healthy as a forty year old…through the benefits of her daily exercise routine, which Maia perfected, together with her Mother, over 60 years ago, long before exercise classes were ever invented.”
Towards the end, Maia reveals the keys to her long life:
“My secret for a long life is simplicity and work and enjoyment. “
Like everyone we know, we have a growing pile of books that we’ve been wanting to sell, to cut down on clutter and make a few bucks in the process. We recently discovered BookScouter, a website that tells you how much your used books are worth to a variety of online retailers.
The best part is that they pay for shipping (book rate) and provide labels, making selling books fairly simple—you just have to pack them up and drop them off when you are making a trip to the post office. We decided to test the process out to see if it’s really that easy. If you’re looking to sell, here’s the deal, start to finish: read more…
A few weeks ago we wrote about the concept of “pulsing and resting,” throughout the work day; actually taking breaks from work in order to get more done (and do better work!). One of our readers introduced us to the Pomodoro Technique, (names after a tomato-shaped timer) which is based on this very idea and provides a specific method:
Choose a task to be accomplished
Set a timer for 25 minutes
Work on the task until the timer rings
Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
Every 4 cycles take a longer break
We decided to try it out, and it so far it has been a wonderfully useful technique. We’ve found that the 25-minute work cycles allow us to package together work in a way that makes sense, so we aren’t cramming a big bunch of unrelated tasks together. The result: we’re calmer, and feel more organized. Getting up and getting away from our desks is also extremely refreshing, and allows our heads to cool out throughout the day.
It’s so simple that it’s definitely worth a try. read more…
This evening marks the start of Chinese New Year – the Year of the Dragon. We think this poster from Singapore design firm pupilpeople would make a fine, fluid set of reminders for the year: glow-in-the-dark, too, for about $24. read more…
At dinner parties these days, everybody seems to be drinking lots of water, in addition to or instead of wine. Rather than plunking a pitcher of water on the table that will undoubtedly need several refills, we’ve found another solution. We decant filtered water into great-looking wine bottles whose labels we’ve soaked off. We keep 4 or 5 of them in the fridge to have chilled water readily available. They look great on the table, and seem to make non-wine drinking guests feel like they are included in the pouring of something special.
During an ordinary day, we find them a simple, useful pleasure: chilled water to pour from a lovely vessel.
Once you start really looking at wine bottles, you’ll notice all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors, some more beautiful than others. We go for the most austerely sculptural we can find. read more…
For all the wonderful ice creams that are commercially available, I find myself turning to a simple approach I devised years ago for whipping up vividly-flavored tropical fruit ice creams with much less cream and sugar than usual. When pureed, ripe bananas, papayas and/or mangos achieve the creamy silky texture that quantities of cream and egg yolks normally achieve. The resulting faux ice cream reminds me of the tropical-flavored ice creams I’ve bought from stands in Chinatown or when traveling in Mexico. They make a great antidote to winter blues as well as a fine midnight snack.
Last week Mondoblogo posted two photos taken at Art Basel of wonderful geometrically-painted walls with doors (they are part of the blog’s illuminating challenge to identify what is actual “art” and what is not). The top is “Final Cut” by artist Ernst Caramelle. The second “a random door”…
We’re putting them in our file of cool ideas for painting a room with a door. read more…
Today, many of the blogs we visit went dark in protest of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) proposed legislation that could potentially destroy the stunning innovation that has defined the internet. BoingBoing described it best:
“…the US Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever. The legislation is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement.
This would unmake the Web, just as proposed in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We don’t want that world.”
“MUG fully supports the intellectual property rights of artists and companies but SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is ham-fisted and inept legislation that would have far-reaching, deleterious effects to sites like MUG. Today we join the SOPA boycott and urge you to fight this proposed legislation.”
We urge you to sign a petition in opposition to these two acts, in advance of the Senate vote on January 24th.
It only takes a couple of minutes to make your voice heard. Help protect the ability of sites like ours to continue to bring you illuminating content. (Just scroll down our home page to see what’s in jeopardy. Imagine it GONE.)
- an essential tool – so we can write, scan blogs, surf…as we follow one thing to another… draw….and make cups of tea…cook. It’s not so much being “on hold” that we mind, it’s the irritating music that’s the problem. Take away the music, and it wouldn’t bother us much at all.)
. It’s read by 
