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instagram: the Visual Twitter
an instagramed photo of Joe's dumpster-dived globe. Our new nightlight! Are you all Instagram fans? It’s an app for sharing photos (and using interesting filters) on iPhones. I gave it a try a couple months ago, and didn’t quite catch on, but these days I’m addicted. There’s something very appealing about seeing tiny little snapshots of other’s daily lives. It’s my favorite app to check when I’m waiting for the T.
If you’re on there, you can find me under girlpolish, and I would love to follow you back!
postscript: Of course NYT wrote an article about it yesterday that I missed. Apparently there are 5 million+ users! I only follow 23…
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a wedding art gallery
a friend of mine is getting married and hosting the reception at an art gallery. So there will be art! Love this idea, and this invitation to be part of it.
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A Mapped Day in NYC
Because I’m always haunting the blogs of New Yorkers, I had a list of places I wanted to visit when Joe and I met friends in the city this weekend. I even made a Google map for the day, out of paranoia that we would unknowingly wander right past the best places (which can happen so easily).
After getting off the Boltbus, we headed straight for ice cream. Coolhaus, the LA-based, architecture-themed ice cream truck, was waiting in a prime location. Because Joe went to school for architecture, I spent four years trying to learn all the names, and Coolhaus’s cheesy architecture jokes were a delightful payoff. For your “one story” sandwich you pick from flavors like peach bellini, Guinness chocolate chip, and Nutella almond chocolate (my choice), then you get to pick the cookie from options like red velvet, maple waffle, and peanut butter (my choice). The sandwiches started melting immediately and we had to eat them as quickly and enthusiastically as possible.
Next: I’ve posted here before about the lovely webstore Chance, and they have a pop-up store for the summer! It’s lovely inside, of course, just look at this seashell collection in the window. For visitors, they have handmade packets filled with a saltwater taffy and a cheerful fortune, all wrapped up in a graphpaper packet stamped with a vintage stamp. Wow.
After that, I was getting hungry , so we stopped in at Tacombi, an old garage painted to transport you to Mexico, selling tacos of all sorts. It was cool and breezy inside and I loved their interior painting. Beautiful details were everywhere, and my breakfast taco (egg, avocado, chorizo, hot sauce, $4) was delicious.
Next we headed to Saturdays Surf NYC to see the surfboards, with fingers crossed that their back deck wouldn’t be too crowded.
It wasn’t! I think that back deck was my highlight of the day. It was shaded. They had a sign up asking people to talk quietly which worked and made it possible to sit close to strangers and still have intimate conversations. We each got delicious iced lattes from their espresso bar inside (ice itself would have been delicious at that point). And the other customers milling around were talking about surfing, which was so fun to think about on this 85 degree city-day. We liked it so much, we bought a t-shirt.
We also swung into Uniqlo, home of multi-colored Japanese basics, Muji, the neutral of all neutralshops, Partners & Spade (closed for the holiday, of course), Future Perfect, and Opening Ceremony. If we’d had just a little more time, we definitely would have headed to McNally Jackson bookstore and KIOSK.
If you’re headed to the city soon I recommend all these places! (you could even use my map) If you’re nine months pregnant like me, I recommend taking snack breaks at least every 1.5 hours!
Joe resting in Central Park.
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Enormous Champion for Father’s Day
These designs for Paperless Post by Enormous Champion are wonderful. They’ve done the best stuff for them!
We aspire to do very papery announcements for the baby, but Paperless Post makes me want to come up with reasons to send festive emails. You can see lots more here. Father’s Day is June 19th.
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Albert et Henriette oxfords
What wonderful photographs from Le Dans La for her new shoe line. Her blog is full of scattered flowers, just-finished crafts, planks of wood covered with soft lambswool, children playing under tables, and moments caught just before they passed. I always breathe a peaceful sigh after paging through it.
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Read: Just Kids
I opened up Patti Smith’s Just Kids last week and read it nonstop until it ended and left me flipping back through to my favorite parts. It was wonderful. I recommend it to anyone who is harboring an artistic spirit, or wondering what happened to theirs, or torturously pondering what to do next. It’s about her life with Robert Mapplethorp (both pictured above) as late teens-early 20s in NYC—so poor, so unknown, and yet eager to greet their future. Their belief in their artistic ability and the worthwhileness of becoming artists, the joy they took in their city lives, the way they styled their working habits; it all inspired me to take firmer hold of my own artistic ambitions. It’s also an amazing primer on bohemian Greenwich Village, the Factory, the Chelsea Hotel….basically New York City in the ’60s.
I really didn’t know anything about Patti Smith, aside from her name, when I picked up the book, so don’t let that stop you. This isn’t a fangirl review.
Just Kids won the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction. In her weepy acceptance speech she said,
Publishers: never abandon the book….There is nothing more beautiful, in our material world, than the book.
Next up: Netflixing the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
Photo by Katie Simon, 1979.
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Project action shot
Posting from the iPhone using the new WordPress app! Fast! Fun! No control over photo size! (bookmark-as-business card project)
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You Could Order
I was visiting Starbucks.com to find out how much caffeine is in my occasional order of a chai tea latte (100mg, babysafe), and was reminded that one can order a Caffè Misto (coffee with lots of steamed milk) or espresso con panna (espresso topped with fresh whipped cream). Both chic options if you’re tired of old brewed coffee, don’t you think?
Photos from Starbucks.com
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An Afternoon at America’s Test Kitchen
It was so fun to find out we won the blog-the-recipe contest. I loved seeing posts from the 50+ bloggers who submitted and meeting a few of them via Twitter and comments. Blogging bakers are obviously some of the nicest people one can hope to encounter in the internet world.
On top of being delighted to win, it was an unexpected perk to get to read the judges’ comments. In typical Test Kitchen style, they took the contest seriously and had several judges from different backgrounds rate the posts. Here’s what they said about our post:
- “Simply put, brevity is the soul of wit, and the vintage-tinged ‘Brief Guide’ photo essay bridges that sexy line between straight-forward utilitarianism and a lyrical portrayal of the kitchen. ”
- “Her opening paragraphs perfectly capture what we do at America’s Test Kitchen, and the photos are great. They illustrate the most important parts of the recipe— and her final batch looks picture-perfect.”
Geez, thanks guys.
I say “we” because my husband Joe was my creative partner for the post and the photographer. So luckily I got to bring one guest with me to the set. It was an easy trip on the T over to Brookline where ATK is based.
All of the ATK efforts–Cook’s Illustrated magazines and cookbooks, Cook’s Country, the recipe testing, the radio show, the product testing, the television show, the website—come out of one relatively tiny space that they’ve been in for years. The kitchen they film the show in is also the actual test kitchen. It’s remarkable to imagine the enormous variety of work and projects that come out of that little space.
Spotted! Chris Kimball. Chris and his partner for each show don’t have memorized lines, they just really know what they are talking about. Sometimes they have to do several takes of a certain shot and they come up with new, better approaches each time. It was amazing to watch in real time.
The crew was so friendly and accommodating even though there was no room at all. I had an eight month pregnant belly to add to the mix, so it was a tight fit.
Joe particularly hoped we would see this helpful guy:
Serious mise en place. Secretly wish we would’ve showed up on Nutella bread pudding day.
One of my favorite parts of the visit was seeing the enormous cookbook library. When you read a recipe that’s been remade by the Test Kitchen, they always reference the dozens of recipes they examined before they began. This is how they do it! They estimate that their library is the largest cookbook library in the United States. It takes up all the walls of the largest room in the office, and is meticulously organized.
The library had just recently gotten in Modernist Cuisine. Now that I think about it, I can imagine the ATK cooks loving the scientific examination of cooking that Modernist Cuisine pursues, but I was still impressed to see it on the shelves. (Also, considering the $625 price tag, I had not had a chance seen it in person yet.)
On the day we visited, one of the recipes they were filming was chocolate pudding.
I don’t even like chocolate pudding, and I couldn’t stop eating this. All the food they make for the show gets devoured almost immediately, by the crew, staff, cooks, extras…everyone takes part in the labor and gets to appreciate the results. I was lucky to get my own bowl.
Everyone we met obviously loved their job and wanted to do it very well. I think you get that vibe when you read Cook’s Illustrated, but it was even better to encounter in person and great to see the inner workings of such a unique company publishing company. Thanks for letting us visit, ATK!
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the Rome album
We’ve been enjoying npr’s First Listen of Rome. But I just saw the album cover for the first time. Nice.
In fact, it’s truly remarkable how much work went into the making of this album — we’ve heard tales of bartering bottles of wine for vintage equipment, recording with analog tape in the famed Ortophonic Studios, calling out of retirement the elder statesmen who played on the soundtracks of films like Once Upon a Time in the West. Yet all of that fetishism is quickly and completely eclipsed by the jarring presence of the distinct voices of Norah Jones and Jack White (each of whom appear on three tracks) and the plodding, midtempo modernity of the songs composed by Luppi and Danger Mouse.
-Paste Magazine’s review of Rome
I didn’t think “plodding” (a serious word to throw around) but I did think “soundtrack.” And, “Norah Jones is the best when dolloped in small doses.”