Month: January 2012

Home Sweeter Home: Part 2

How much do I love you guys? Enough to post the above photo of myself working at my secretary desk as a “before” shot. While the picture isn’t the most flattering of yours truly and I look to be wearing a tunic made of diapers, it is an accurate depiction of the old brown secretary that was/is my desk. This piece used to belong to Buddy and Grammy, my grandparents on my Mama’s side, and in an amazing feat of early 1970’s DIY (perhaps the very first DIY?) they “antiqued” this piece, covering up its nice lines and mid-century-reproduction-quality mahogany with a brown gunk that was meant to look old. It did, in fact make the piece look old. And tired. You can also see that the brownness wasn’t helping the darkness situation in my little “office” corner of the apartment. It was making it darker. Like “locusts covering the sun” darker. This picture was taken around noon, and you can see that four feet in from the window it’s almost pitch black. I might not have feet. After we tackled DAS NORDEN (which you can now see in the background here in all its Gabardine Glory), we now moved this piece into the kitchen for part II of painting mayhem. I love the little details of the inset piece- three curvy drawers, a tiny brown door (my Mama told me she used to say that a mouse lived in there when this was in her house growing up), and you can see where the “antiquing” ends on the inside of the drawer pieces. Yech.

As you may have read here, we had initially planned on painting this piece Martha Stewart Gabardine, and wanted the interior of the piece (the glass curio cabinet and the desk part) to be creamy white. Perhaps that would have worked in an airy loft wallpapered in Cochin from Grow House Grow:BUT, as we’ve established, that is not what I’m working with. SO- we decided that to brighten up the area and to be pleasing to the eye, that our palette would be Martha Stewart Oolong with Pale Yellow (generic paint purchased from the wonderful guys at Clinton Hill True Value). First we took the drawers out, the doors off, the shelves out, saved the burnished brass hardware, and primed the whole shebang:

Then, of course, we let it dry overnight and drank some wine. Are you seeing a pattern? When it was all said and done, it was pretty much perfect:So much brighter, so much lighter, and so much more functional. This is my desk when it’s open, useful storage when it’s closed, and it’s also (by necessity) home to our DVD player/Netflix Machine. I sit at this desk for many hours every day, so, needless to say it’s lovely to love looking at it (I’m looking at it as I type this). The mouse house now houses my mouse and mousepad when I’m not using them:The little curvy drawers that were once yechy are now sweet, lovely, and useful (I lined them with some pages of an old New York City postal-code book I found):And- my favorite part- the curio cabinet up top holds all of my little treasures and miniature inspirations (like my Baracklyn Cyclones Obama bobblehead, an armadillo skeleton found on Cumberland Island, a collection of sand dollars gathered from the Vashon Island mud flats at low tide, a tiny compass from the Marché aux Puces, and the weird little frog watering can that I picked out from my Great-Grandmother’s house when I was 10, to name a few):Pretty darn good.

Home Sweeter Home: Part I

After seeing Jenny’s Mom’s sideboard looking so fresh and so clean (almost as an aside in this post about the lovely green wallpaper), I decided to tackle our identical Ikea NORDEN for my first project. I capitalize NORDEN because anytime I say any Ikea name I say it loud and in a bad/deep Swedish accent. Here is the naked NORDEN:First, let me tell you a few things about our apartment. It is the whole bottom (read: basement) floor of a classic Brooklyn Brownstone. The kitchen is HUGE by New York standards (110 sqare feet) and our landlords re-did it a few years ago, choosing the marble-and-cherry wood finish and stainless steel appliances that were so very popular at that time. All the nitty gritty kitchen functiony things about it are pretty great (storage, counter space, big sink, dishwasher [!!!!!], large gas range with griddle etc.) and we cook in it ALL the time. But… it will never look like this:It will never look like this for a few reasons: a)  I am not Julia Child (sigh) b) our kitchen has no windows, it is, in fact, in the very middle of our apartment which is in the very bottomest darkest basement and c) there are no plugs in the kitchen into which to plug such a thing as a standing mixer and/or a lamp so- no-knead bread and overhead lighting it is. But I digress. Since I couldn’t just up and move to France, it was time to paint my NORDEN. For that I needed my Mama. We had ingeniously scheduled for her to come and visit at the exact time when the need to revamp was reaching a critical fever. With her help and guidance, we had two major projects lined up, first take care of das Norden and second, to paint the old secretary that I use for my desk (spoiler: you will be seeing some pictures of this very soon). We went together to pick out paint and decided on these two colors. Martha Stewart Oolong Tea- a sandy celadon we hoped would read less yellow- for the NORDEN, and Gabardine- a blue-green-grey color equal parts “stormy sea” and “I think the man in this suit is a spy”- for the secretary. Even after many inspiration based e-mails on the subject and lots of in-person discussion spent contrasting the colors of my pots and pans, we still probably talked about it for, like, an hour at the Home Depot on Nostrand Avenue next to the Sugar Hill club. We got our paints mixed, bought a few tools and a fair amount of wine and got to work sanding and priming. We had help the whole time:After our first round of sanding and priming, we had to leave the NORDEN in the middle of the kitchen overnight, so we ordered takeout and started in on the wine. About a bottle into it we looked at each other and said: We’ve got the colors backwards! NORDEN must be GABARDINE not OOLONG! In vino veritas. The next morning we started in on the gabardine, and spent most of the day on the floor. We had a very good time down there:When all was said and done, we loved it. We kept looking at it and saying “It looks more blue than green!”, then “it looks more green than blue”:Do I wish my kitchen were different? Yes. Do I wish it was brighter, airier, and not lit by four recessed floods? Yes. But, honestly, I can’t realistically change those things, so instead of maintaining some sort of bitter renters inertia, the simple act of just painting the NORDEN made our kitchen feel absolutely marvelous. Now the cast iron wok and the red dutch oven are friends, the fruits and strange amaros are close at hand, and we feel a bit more human.

More ever-loving thanks to Mama, who- as we’ve already established– never does anything half assed.

Julia Child’s marvelous kitchen from here.

Home Sweeter Home

So, I’ve lived in New York for a while now and, like pretty much everyone I know, I have serious apartment envy. Perhaps envy is the wrong word. Curiosity? Voyeurism? Obsession? I love nothing more than walking down the nicest streets in our neighborhood at night looking into people’s brownstones who left the shades open (look at that molding! what an amazing chandelier! They have PLANTS.). The same is true for online voyeurism- I (again, like pretty much everyone I know) practically refresh Design Sponge on the hour to see if there are new sneak peeks into the apartments of real people, I loved Domino, Martha Stewart is practically pornographic, and my pinterest is pretty much all pictures of people’s reclaimed wood tables, plush velvet couches, whiskey-organization-systems, and (again) plants that the light in our basement apartment cannot support. There are two things that are tough for me, though: unlike most the people who inhabit the amazing gorgeous spaces I suckle, 1) we rent our apartment, and so we can’t paint the floors or mess with the light fixtures or rip out the pre-fab dark cherry kitchen cabinets and  2) at this point (le sigh) Dorothy Draper dressers and/or any sofa that isn’t our trusty futon aren’t in the financial cards for us. The Selby will never be in our place. I think this is why I love Little Green Notebook so much.Unlike so many of the other designey blogs out there, which engender only covetousness, Jenny fosters a grand and wonderful sense of possibility (also, is it weird that I totally feel like we’re on a first name basis?). She has me believing I really could reupholster the victorian settee that belonged to my great-grandmother myself, that careful editing and judicious use of craigslist can make a space look (pretty much) just as good as a space furnished out of Holler and Squall or John Derian, and- most importantly to me- that just because you don’t own your space is no reason not to make it your own. She also always has a bright red manicure when she’s doing semi-manual labor and that’s something I can get down with.After the one two punch of watching Jenny take down temporary wallpaper (!) in her rental apartment and realizing that the kitchen island that Jenny and her mom re-painted here was the EXACT same one that we have from Ikea (but with additional hardware) I thought: I can do this. For the past two months or so I’ve been on a Little-Green-Notebook-fueled, totally low-budget vortex-redux of our apartment. With infinite thanks to Sweetheart, my ever-lovin-Mama, and, of course, Jenny: this week I’d like to share all the changes with you… Stay tuned.

Images from top: here, here, and here.

Lights Out

So this Halston dress looks pretty great, right? Pale celadon, asymmetrical, vaguely Dynasty inspired shoulder pad, open back, all over sparkly. This dress would be pretty good for a party, don’t you think? You don’t know the half of it:

Yes, this dress GLOWS IN THE DARK. Put on Electric Feel, pop the champagne, and turn off the lights, it’s party time.

I think it’s been on the racks since August, so I’m a bit behind the curve. It also retailed for $4000, so maybe this late discovery is a fashion version of trickle down economics- since it is now on sale.

Images and video from Net-a-Porter

Dress discovery from Miss Molly, who may be the only person I know who could actually pull this off.

McDowell’s

Take me to Queens at once! I almost can’t get over how awesome this totally real Yelp page for McDowell’s is. Reviews of the “Big Mick” are mostly positive and apparently the restaurant plays “Sexual Chocolate” over the speakers. No mention of free samples of Soul-Glo in the happy meal.

For a little more awesomeness on a wintry outer borough day, watch the original Coming to America trailer. Zamunda!

 

Thanks to Irina for the Golden Arcs.

It’s a Lemon

My mother keeps a meyer lemon tree in a glass room off the back of our house in Virginia and every winter it yields exactly one lemon. This year she brought this singular bounty with her up to New York for the holidays and we had big plans for it. Maybe we’d make meyer lemon hot toddies, maybe we’d put the zest over braised fennel bulbs (a recipe cut from the New York Times Magazine five years ago and so loved the paper is almost literally see-through from having been groped often by olive oily fingers), maybe we’d… make lemonade? But, alas, the lemon got repeatedly passed over in favor of Chinatown Dim Sum and Staten Island pizza. As of yesterday, it was still just sitting there. Beautiful, a saturated yellowy orange the color of organic egg yolks or fiestaware, solitary, special. So…. what to do? I did some light googling and came across this article from the LA Times, 100 Things to Do with a Meyer Lemon (ahhh California, where such lemons are so uproariously plentiful that suggestions #35 is “Throw a Meyer lemon for your dog to catch and play with; you’ll lose the lemon, but your dog’s breath will smell fantastic.”). And though I only had one lemon, I decided to make Marcus Samuelsson’s Shrimp piri piri with quick-preserved Meyer lemonsThe quick preserving of the lemon peel was absolutely fantastic- yielding a sweet-salty-sour-somewhat pickled-somewhat candied-sort of bitter-sort of crystalline zest that is making my mouth water now just thinking about it. The preserved lemon was perfect with the cilantro-and-pepper spice of the shrimp, but really, it would be fabulous on many things in many flavor directions- pricking into the slow heat and sweetness of a curry, in lieu of lime on adobo roasted chicken and rice, sprinkled over fresh pizza with thyme and ricotta, marinated with fresh fish and olives, over pasta with just a little hard cheese… So, at its heart the solitary lemon traveled up from the south to yield something even better than a hot toddy (if you can believe it): a new easy, cheap, and delicious trick to turn the usual mundane recessionary meal into something truly spectacular. Here’s the recipe for the quick preserved lemons, find the rest of the shrimp piri piri recipe here.

Quick-preserved Meyer lemons

6 Meyer lemons
1/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup sugar

1. Using a vegetable peeler, peel the lemons, trying to keep away from the white pith. (If necessary, scrape any pith away from the peels with a small knife.) Squeeze the juice from the peeled lemons into a bowl and reserve: You should have about 1 cup. Add water to bring the liquid up to 2 cups; set aside to reserve.

2. Place the peel and 2 cups of water in a saucepan and bring to a rolling boil. Drain. Repeat this procedure once more. Return the drained peel to the pan, add the reserved juice, salt and sugar and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. Makes about three-eighths cup.

Since I only had one lemon, I used 2tsp each of salt and sugar and it made enough preserved lemon for Sweetheart and I to totally enjoy. Good to know. When life gives you lemon, quick preserve it.

Piri Piri image via Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

 

Forteana

Today on Design Sponge, a little nugget about printmaker Michelle Butler described her prints as being influenced by “folk traditions, dark tales, mid-century design and Forteana”. Hmmm. As someone who loves words, who loves bizarre pockets of arcana, and who loves folk traditions, dark tales and mid-century design, I couldn’t help but wonder wha wha what is Forteana and why don’t I know about it?Oh, the power of the internet. The multitude of sites based on Forteana tell me that it is a pseudo scientific collection of knowledge based on the writings of an American named Charles Hoy Fort, a man obsessed with inexplicable phenomena and human weirdnesses such as bio-luminescence, exploding animals, biblical miracles, Atlantis, levitation, mysteries of ancient civilizations, strange clockworks, alchemical formulas, trances, crystals and runes, dreamwine, trepanning, fortunes and portents, harbingers and lunar eclipses, satyrs, fawns, and dog-faced-boys, specters, ghosts, subtle knives, mermaids, and magic. Holy Moly.
Forteana=way up my alley.As someone who suckled first on the Disney mysticism of leprechauns and banshees of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, the feline reincarnation of Thomasina, and the substitutionary locomotion and general marvelous magic of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, then went on to be weaned on Hogarth, The Royal Academy, Blake and Milton, The National Enquirer and Jonathan Strange I don’t know how I missed Forteana but… isn’t it marvelous when you learn something new?

Images from here, here, here, and here

Here’s to the simple things for the coming year

HiHat’s father Jake infamously once said “I think everyone should do what they want all the time” at their family dinner table (and then got up to watch football). On New Years eve, as we presided over the beautiful kitchen full of wine and recipes, as the boys played music, and as Janelle shucked oysters, I had a conversation with dear Sara (who is my personal guru even if she doesn’t know it). She said: “You know what? When Jake said ‘I think everyone should do what they want all the time’, that’s basically the translation of the chant we do: Om lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu– may all the beings in all the worlds become happy with simplicity and intention”. First of all, any friend who can weave sanskrit interpretation into cocktail conversation and have it come off as moving and relevant is a real keeper. Secondly, living simply with intention focusing on the things that truly make you happy? That seems like a good way to go. I usually don’t make resolutions just for the sake of New Years, but this year I’m going to resolve to continue do what makes me happy with who makes me happy. For Example…Then you’re set. Promise.

Thanks to my other dear friend Sara, from half a world away, for the first quote.