One of the biggest rewards of writing recipes is discovering the pleasure they’ve given people, or how folks have taken the recipes and made them their own. I was delighted last month to hear from reader/blogger Lucinda Keller of Cobalt Violet, who has been making my Chicken, Corn and Pumpkin Soup in Chipotle Lime Broth since she first cut the recipe out of Food and Wine Magazine in 1999. She wrote:
“It is my hearty, go-to soup for fall and winter. You can substitute pumpkin for butternut or another sweet squash. It is also hearty enough to skip the chicken (I usually do) or even make it vegan/vegetarian soup with vegetable stock.” Lucinda adds extra garlic and avocado.
It’s a great winter soup so I’m glad to hear it’s resonated over the years. The chipotle lime broth is a fine thing unto itself; you can use it as a base for improvising other soups – say leftover roast pork, spareribs or chicken with grilled onions… or shrimp with fine egg noodles. I’ve been known to poach an egg in it. Here’s the original recipe and the story behind it: read more…
(Video link here.) This inspiring TED Talk by Britta Riley recently introduced us to the world of Windowfarms. These vertical hydroponic gardens allow city-dwellers to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits in the windows of their otherwise cramped apartments, all year long. Think ‘strawberries’!
But what’s most intriguing about Windowfarms is the community behind them, constantly refining the product and experimenting with new possibilities. This isn’t a community of traditional scientists or farmers–it’s just a bunch of folks who are passionate about an idea.
Riley describes the process of what goes on at our.Windowfarms–the Windowfarms open source community platform–as “R&D-I-Y” (research-and-develop-it-yourself). read more…
We switched over to homemade food gifts for the holidays many, many years ago, and each year we find ourselves in the kitchen with the same tried-and-true recipes. But the repetition doesn’t come from a laziness or a lack of inspiration—over the years we’ve found that our friends and family look forward to these gifts, enjoying the tradition rather than hungering for something new. We’re getting ready to make this year’s batch, and hope some of these recipes and ideas serve you (and your loved ones) well, starting with our favorite: alt-malted milk balls (above)… read more…
Our friend Anthony Giglio is a journalist, sommelier, and the author of many acclaimed books on wine and cocktails, including the Food & Wine Magazine’s Wine Guide 2011. He travels around the country leading wine tastings and helping people navigate the vast world of wine, cocktails, and “what goes with what”. He does all of this with a sense of humor that borders on irreverent, often shocking connoisseurs with his candor. A great cook, he is also one of the best dinner party hosts we know – invitations to his parties are coveted! – largely due to his ability to put himself in his guest’s shoes and think of ways to delight them from the moment they walk in the door. (He taught us Mama Lucia’s Insalata di Pomodoro, THE best approach to real summer tomatoes, which he’s dishing out in the photo above.)
We’ve been so impressed by his smart, simple strategies for entertaining that we’ve asked him to guest blog for ‘the improvised life’, starting with read more…
Our friend Ellen Silverman traveled twice to Cuba in the past year, and came back with some amazing photographs of daily life there, in particular the kitchens of families she met. They are invariably improvised, deeply makeshift spaces, reflecting extremely limited resources coupled with extraordinary resourcefulness and spirit. Ellen’s images tell the story. read more…
Faced with the months-long renovation of their New York City coop kitchen, Josh Eisen, Ellen Silverman and their son Luca – who take eating and entertaining very seriously – devised a clever make-shift kitchen in their walled-off-from-the-construction living room. They had the workmen move in the read more…
Every since we saw the videoAndrew Carmellini, mastermind of the great Locanda Verde, made to build buzz in his soon-to-open NYC restaurant, Dutch, we’ve been FEELING the restaurant as it comes together in the crazed couple of weeks before opening. Maybe that’s because Sally actually worked nearby at the old Soho Charcuterie on Sullivan Street; she made pates and terrines all day in the basement prep kitchen and would take breaks in the bocce court next door (now long gone, along with the neighborhood’s Italians). Restaurant memories live in the bones.
Maybe it’s because the video (possibly even better with the sound off) conveys a sort of chef head of late night foraging around town, of all the things that fly IN to that head that end up becoming a dish.
We were so intrigued, we took a screen shot of the quickly uncrumpling blueprint in the video so we could take a closer look at the new restaurant: read more…
Faced with the possibility of camping in a kitchenless space, we’ve been thinking about ways to forge a makeshift kitchen. Lately, we’ve come across a number of kitchen islands made out of sawhorses and a slab of wood. Although they have a pleasingly ad hoc feeling, sawhorses naturally seem to possess a low-key architectural aesthetic, as witnessed by our many posts on saw horse tables (more below). Unique slabs of wood make for compelling surfaces, like this massive slab of cypress featured in a recent Dwell slideshow. read more…
William Morrow, the publisher, has been busy blogging, tweeting and facebooking about Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook, newly launched in paperback. They recently blogged a “Conversation” with Sally, with questions like “What’s your Mantra”, and “If you could have dinner with three people, living or dead, who would they be?” They are tweeting it as the “juicy details of her culinary private life”. You can read it here.
We love her juicy details but we were most interested to read about the experience that changed her life:
“Waking up from a dream KNOWING that I should cook professionally. I quit my job and started working as a prep cook, eventually becoming a restaurant chef…running a catering business…working as a food editor… as a food stylist…magazine columnist…contributing editor….radio commentator…cookbook author (three times)…”
One thing led to another and then another and another, eventually leading her HERE: ‘the improvised life’.
We’ve just added this image to our file called “Bad Ideas”: ideas that look great, but practically speaking, are impossible to maintain. Most seem like a good idea for about a minute, until you try imagine the harsh realities of living with the them (which is our test for anything we put in our home…)
It would be lovely to have that gorgeous view as a backdrop while we’re cooking…but when we look at that pristine window abutting high-btu burners, we foresee it covered with a film of oil, spatter, and steam drips in no time…that is, IF anyone is really going to cook on that serious stove (We’ve discovered that a lot of high-design kitchens are owned by people who do not cook). Cleaning the window would mean leaning over the burners, or climbing onto the counter to reach the top half…?
We use bad design like this to teach ourselves about good: a practice of envisioning the impact of using something beforehand, in order to build insights about “real use” into the design.
The photo shows one of her half-done billboard paintings on the kitchen table, in a living space that is clearly in action, work and living woven together. Even though Zittel could try discipline herself to work in her studio – a shipping container fifty feet from the house – she doesn’t. She works where it feels best, and things happens organically…
“When I was twenty and studying art in undergrad, I house sat for my parents one summer and built my entire senior show in their kitchen. I remember the feeling or horror one day when cutting out a shape with the jigsaw and accidentally making a slice into the tabletop that my mother had hand stained when I was an infant. Three decades later and I’m still making most of my work in the kitchen…”
We wonder how many BIG THINGS in the world were figured out at the kitchen table?
(In the background, you can also see the cardboard shelving we were so taken with…stuff beginning to be stored in it.)
A couple of weeks ago, we started posting about Lydia Wills’ former studio apartment in New York City; the 600-square-foot space had so much going on, we had to make it a series…
Here’s her renovated kitchen which, when she moved in, was the most generic of New York City apartment galley kitchens (there’s a gratifying “before” after the jump). A few years ago she ripped it out and rethought the original space. The question: How to create a pleasurable, efficient kitchen without moving any walls or spending a fortune?… read more…
We are always amazed by how we’ll have an idea and start thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and then start to stumble on echoes and iterations of it. We’ve been thinking about modular shelving that looks good and sleek and is sturdy but do-able, not too expensive…Why not stack boxes in various ways, we wondered, why not CLIP them together? In the course of a week, we came across some interesting versions of the idea, from chic http://muuto.com/##mce_temp_url#‘s architect-designed – and expensive – shelving to shelving units made with clipped-together crates, and even cardboard boxes (see pt 2). What figure we can find the box pretty easy to find or make; what we want is the clip so we do this our own way, on-the-cheap.
The problem with this great idea is that we haven’t been able to find affordable clips – or any that would work on 1/2 or 3/4-inch thick boards (two put together). So we’re calling on you to help us find them, by expertly or uniquely googling, or keeping eyes peeled in hardware stores or websites that might sell clips for a totally other use that would work here. We’re asking for HELP…
Twenty years ago or so, I designed a kitchen for a space I thought I’d be in forever. I had cabinets made in a Shaker style that I hoped could walk the line between classic and modern for a long time, and bought myself a restaurant stove. Ten years later, life changed, and I had to leave that space. Having designed the cabinets and seen them installed, I knew that they were basically boxes bolted to the wall. So I took them with me, and reconfigured them on-the-cheap for the smaller space I was moving into. The cabinets that could not fit on the kitchen wall became freestanding furniture. read more…
. He travels around the country leading wine tastings and helping people navigate the vast world of wine, cocktails, and “what goes with what”. He does all of this with a sense of humor that borders on irreverent, often shocking connoisseurs with his candor. A great cook, he is also one of the best dinner party hosts we know – invitations to his parties are coveted! – largely due to his ability to put himself in his guest’s shoes and think of ways to delight them from the moment they walk in the door. (He taught us 
