Lindsaycdavison

From The Kitchn → Make the Most of Kitchen Drawers By Organizing Diagonally

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After an amazing night's sleep in a luxury hotel, Rich Fulop asked about purchasing the sheets he slept on. The hotel quoted him $800. He and David Fortune started Brooklinen, a brand that brings you luxe linens at a fraction of the cost via Kickstarter. Sheet sets are at the $100 level, and for an extra $50, you also get a duvet and shams.

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How stressful is business travel? Very. Especially if you’re a female vice president. We know this because Michael Segalla and Dominique Rouziès of HEC Paris teamed up with Catalin Ciobanu and Vincent Lebunetel of Carlson Wagonlit Travel to survey thousands of business travelers about the stress they felt at every stage of a trip.

When mapped on the timeline of a standard business trip, the data offer a view into who’s stressed out by what. VPs hate expense reports. Senior executives have a surprisingly high fear of flying. And, yes, women are far more stressed by business travel than men.

Click here or on the image below to interact with their timeline and learn more about their travel stress findings.

Ann Ueno and her husband, Rick,  spend most of their time thinking about hotels. Actually, they spend forty-plus hours a week thinking about hotels. Ann is the director of marketing for Starwood Hotels and her husband is the general manager of Sheraton Chicago.  So when it came time to decorate their own Chicago home, they kept the feeling of a hotel firmly in mind. From the subdued palette to little vignettes throughout the home, Ann always plays with ideas of symmetry and contrast that she picked up from hotel designers. But in the three and a half years that she’s been living in the apartment, the biggest lesson Ann has learned is to go slowly when creating a home. She’s let the design evolve gradually without making rash decisions or rushing anything. The outcome is a space that feels personal, flexible and is welcoming to family and friends. In fact, Ann is so serious about people feeling welcome that she says that she’s an advocate of spilled wine and broken dishes – because that’s when you know that things are truly relaxed! Thanks, Ann and Rick! -Amy

Photography: Kristyna Archer

Image above: Having a guest bedroom was important to us. We love hosting and we’ve even had people live with us for weeks and months at a time. I wanted this space to be simple, neutral and comfortable. The sheets are just yummy (and are actually just from Bed, Bath & Beyond) and I saw this quilt at Pottery Barn and it screamed my great-grandmother, Anne. It has a vintage feel with incredible texture and pattern. My favorite parts of this room are the vintage typewriter and camera artwork that I snagged up from One Kings Lane a couple years ago!

Image above: Ahhhh, our dining room. This is my favorite space in our entire home as it is where we gather, break bread, clink glasses, laugh, cry, pray and eat delicious food! I love entertaining and the table – pairing antique solid reclaimed elm doors and cast metal achieves the “form meets function” industrial appeal – is from Restoration Hardware and is the perfect piece to entertain. The chairs, which balance with a softer, gold-ish tone, are such a value from Z Gallerie! The gallery wall is made up of artwork from Madrid, Paris and Uruguay, along with my own graphic design and photography – it truly reflects our personal life and brings out so many amazing memories we’ve had while traveling.

See more of Ann’s Chicago home after the jump!
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Recipe from Bon Appétit

mememolly:

it is so thin.

ride a hamster on a hand.

A one-year experiment to decriminalize marijuana in a borough of London led to 40% to 100% increases in rates of hospitalization, mostly of young men, for illnesses related to use of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin, say Elaine Kelly and Imran Rasul of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK. The increased hospitalizations from the experiment, which removed possession of small quantities of cannabis from a list of prosecutable offenses, led to additional annual costs of about £80,000 per year. Past studies have suggested that cannabis use may lead users to consume harder drugs, the researchers say.

Mary-Kate Olsen and fiancé Olivier Sarkozy are moving to Midtown. The 8,000 square-foot, five bedroom home in Turtle Bay Gardens was formerly owned by painter David Deutsch. The $13.5 million property has a garden promenade, hall of mirrors, and a ballroom ceiling covered in French quotations.

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Guess what? The land of the free has the highest mass incarceration rate in the world.

The 2.2 million people who fill America's prisons exceed the entire population of Qatar. Yet, somehow, the fact of our mass incarceration rate tends to fade into the fabric of the everyday. Not so with a new tool from software engineer Stuart Sandine, who used data from the International Centre for Prison Studies to build a map of the world's imprisoned population.

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One little letter can bestow instant status and smarts.

An old boss once asked employees to guess his middle name based on his middle initial. After maybe a minute of guessing we gave up, in part having exhausted our collective cache of names beginning with that letter, and in part because he started laughing. The initial didn't stand for anything; he'd made it up. His parents never gave him a middle name, but all his peers in academia had an initial, so he'd chosen a letter more or less at random to fill this perceived professional gap.
A middle initial is like an intellectual tattoo.

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hey guys hope this helps!

(via)

Exciting news in the world of home sous-vide cooking: Anova Culinary has just announced the launch of the Anova Precision Cooker, the first major upgrade to the sous-vide circulator they introduced last year. I visited their studio in San Francisco last week to get an exclusive look at the product, whose Kickstarter fundraising phase is starting today. I played around with it and chatted with its designer Jeff Wu for a few hours, and man, was I impressed.

I can confidently say that when it comes out in September, this will be the best, most cost-effective consumer-grade sous-vide solution on the market.

You may remember when I tested the original model against its closest competitors back in December. It was a favorite even then, with the sturdiest build, the tightest clamp, the best impeller features, the easiest-to-clean components, and perfectly accurate temperature controllers, all built by the company with the longest track record for building precision, long-lasting tools (Anova was well known as one of the two biggest suppliers of lab-grade equipment before launching their consumer-level culinary division).

The old Anova on the left and the new precision cooker on the right.

The new Precision Cooker* puts all of that performance into a smaller, sleeker package, addresses the few issues I had with the first model, and adds some awesome new features (hello Bluetooth control and open-source software!), all at a lower price point. The first 1,000 will get theirs for $99 ($99 UNITS SOLD OUT), the following 1,000 Kickstarter backers will get it for $129, and the remaining backers will get it for $159 (the final retail price will be $169).

UPDATE: Anova has added 500 units each at $135, $139, $145, and $149 price points. They are also offering a "Hacker Special" at $229 which includes a prototype unit shipped in August along with a software development kick, in addition to a finalized unit shipped upon completion (that's two complete units).

The final retail price is a full $30 below their original model's (and the closest comparable competitor) pricing. And as a Serious Eats reader, you've got the story and access here before anywhere else!

*As the new model has been dubbed—I like it, it's a much more consumer-friendly nomenclature than "sous vide cooker" or "water bath controller" or "isothermal circulator.

There was a time when sous-vide cooking was limited to fancy restaurants and large food service operations. That time is past, as precision cooking has moved well into the realm of the home cook, both in terms of pricing, and in terms of increased understanding of how it works, along with plenty of recipes freely available online. With this new Anova cooker, there are really no excuses. It's cheaper than an all-clad skillet, and built to last.

For the record: I'm a strong proponent of modular circulators. That is, the type that you clip to the side of a pot or a cooler. They're smaller, easier to clean and fill, more cost effective, and far more versatile than fixed volume all-in-one units.

Here's a quick look at some of the upgrades on the new Anova precision cooker.

The Interface

The old Anova on the left and the new precision cooker on the right.

The old Anova model featured a touchscreen interface that required a few button presses to turn on and off, and frankly, was more complicated than it needed to be. The new model takes the iPhone approach with streamlined, intuitive controls. It now features two buttons—a power button and a timer button—along with a mouse-style scroll wheel for making adjustments.

The mouse-style scroll wheel.

The LED display is bright and large, and—a key improvement over the previous model—stays lit all the time, allowing you to quickly glance at the unit from across the room to see what temperature you've set it at, and the current water temperature.

Programmable Bluetooth Control

While the streamlined physical interface is great, you may be wondering why they decided to remove the touchscreen and the programming potential it offered. Well, they very wisely realized that practically everybody has a fully functional, networked touchscreen controller in their pockets at all times: their smart phone.

That's right, the new cooker will be fully controllable from your smart phone.

One of the big issues with bringing sous-vide cooking to the general public has been one of education: people simply aren't used to cooking at sous-vide temperatures and times, and thus have no intuitive sense of the process. You wouldn't believe the number of emails and tweets I get asking what temperature and time guidelines to follow for cooking a chicken breast or a fish filet.

By building apps for your phone with all of these temperature and time settings already in place, those worries will be a thing of the past.

It's going to come bundled with an app that has presets for dozens of common foods—chicken breasts, salmon filets, or short ribs, for instance. All you have to do is bag the food you're cooking, drop it into the cooker, hit go on your phone, and the temperature and time will be automatically set for optimal end results.

Of course, this programmability also means that you'll be able to hold cooked food automatically. Say you drop in those chicken breasts to cook at 145°F for one hour. You can then program your Anova to drop the temperature down to 130°F and hold them there; It's a temperature that is hot enough to eat (and to prevent any bacterial spoilage), but cool enough to prevent further cooking. That chicken is ready to serve when you're ready to eat.

Anova is very wisely making the source code open source, which means that where this connectivity is really going to shine is with the custom apps that will undoubtedly be built for it, allowing you to share and follow recipes.

Imagine this: You see me rave and post a photo about a fantastic pork chop that I cooked in my precision cooker last night? Well now you'll be able to cook that exact same pork chop at home at the push of a button.

Is this the future yet? I think this is the future.

New Adjustable Clamp = No Minimum Water Height

Anyone who's tried cooking sous vide at home knows that one of the most annoying issues is that you have to use a fairly large pot with a fairly large volume of water, even if you're just cooking for one or two. The issue is that circulators have a minimum pot height and a minimum water height that is usually pretty high. In the case of the previous Anova model, your pot had to be at least 7 inches high, and the water had to be filled to at least three inches. This was pretty great by industry standards.

The adjustable clamp.

The new model does it one better with a clamp that not only tightens as securely as the previous one (you can flip your pot entirely upside down and the Anova will stay clamped in place), but is now fully adjustable in height, allowing you to use your precision cooker in any pot you have.

Not only that, but because the water intake and output has been redesigned, it will now work with just 2 1/2 inches of water (with the potential to be lowered before the release in September).

Clear impeller head for easy redirection.

The all-metal base of the unit has also been replaced with a transparent polycarbonate cover which you can twist to adjust the direction of the water flow, making it easier to see just where your water is going. As with the previous model, this one operates nearly silently.

The Tech Specs

Wanna get real nerdy? Here are some of the other vital stats. The older model used a 1,000W heater to heat water, while this one has been downsized to an 800W heater. But better programming in its fuzzy logic means that it heats almost as quickly to a set temp as the older model. I timed it heating 1.5 gallons (5.5 liters) of water from a 77°F (25°C) tap to ready-to-cook 140°F (60°C) in just over 16 minutes. That ain't bad!

Its smaller heater also means that its maximum capacity has been reduced slightly from 22 liters to 19 liters (this can be improved with insulated containers like a cooler), while the pump pushes around 8 liters per minute for up to 99 hours at a go.

It's got total dimensions of 2.75- by 2.75- by 14.75-inches, weighing in at 2 1/2 pounds, making it a truly portable device (yeah, this is gonna go in my travel bag for weekend trips when it comes out).

It's been a curious and exciting journey watching home sous-vide cookers come out and evolve over the past few years, and frankly, it's all happened far faster than I ever anticipated. For a while, it wasn't obvious to me who would be the first to crack the home cooking code, but with this new model, with all its features and low price, Anova is pretty squarely in the lead. I predict a lot of these units under the tree this holiday season.

How to Order

Like I said, we managed to score an exclusive first look at this thing, which means that you, as Serious East readers, get first crack at nabbing one of the early pricing units. That's $99 for the first 1,000 orders, and $129 for the next 1,000 after that before it bumps up to the final retail price of $169! Orders are being taken through their Kickstarter campaign (free shipping is included with all orders) and shipping is expected some time in September.

Break out the heavy duty rice cooker. It’s time to feast.

potatochipsarenotdinner.com

kawalingpinoy.com

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Five designers created chic cat beds for a Traditional Home spread, and now the one-of-a-kind furniture is on the auction block. Through May 15, you can bid on the beds via Charity Buzz, with all proceeds from the sale benefitting Rachael’s Rescue, an organization that helps animals in need.

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Your own bonne maman deserves an extra-special treat this Mother's Day, non? Classic French foodie brands Le Creuset and Bonne Maman think so — that's why they've teamed up to create the ultimate midday celebration, featuring the garden-fresh flavors of Bonne Maman preserves and the timelessly fashionable function of Le Creuset cookware. A peek at the recipes proves it: Between the ham biscuits with creamed collards and (hello!) bacon-berry preserves, the whimsical shrimp lollipops in orange-horseradish glaze and the sweet-tooth-satisfying strawberry orange mini-trifles, this is a year's worth of maternal mercis. (And a dreamy way to channel your inner Julia Child.)

Oh, and did we mention the sweepstakes?

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Getting some shuteye in an airplane seat is not easy. If you're determined to get your beauty rest, book a flight on Etihad Airways' new Airbus A380 fleet. "The Residence" features a living room, separate double bedroom, ensuite shower room, and a personal butler.

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fire-dad:

miss-melancholy-usa:

oldfamiliarway:

themarsultor:

behold-my-procrastination:

voyagebysexualdiscovery:

Uh oh

uh oh

If this is true, I’m going to die laughing.

Whoa.

what a time to be alive

#atheist

check mate, atheists?

Man, the world sure needs more armchair tumblr atheists.

Have any of you looked for any actual news story about this? Go ahead and look for one. You will find lots of news articles that link to cool places to buy hoodies and snapbacks.

The Gospel of Barnabas has been around for hundreds of years.

Believe what you want to believe, but man, don’t rag on a bunch of people for believing in a book because it was written thousands of years ago and then get behind an unlinked screenshot of a blog post.

There may be nothing more daring than painting your walls black. I was surprised to find such a wide variety of blacks, from deep dark greys to blue toned blacks. Painting your walls such a deep hue works especially well in sun-filled rooms where the black can reflect beautiful light. It can also turn a room very masculine, so it works best balanced with textural and more feminine details. Here are some shades to get you inspired!

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Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The history of the anti-fat crusade:

Americans have been told for decades to avoid butter, cheese, red meat and other fatty foods because they cause heart disease. But do they really? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade

Travel booking hasn't changed all that much in the past decade, and Zeev Sharon wants to change that. Hotelied is a boutique hotel search and booking site that rewards you for being you. Connect your social media and loyalty programs, and competing hotels will offer you upgrades, lower prices, and amenities for switching to them.

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From the editors of The American Scholar, the ten best sentences. Presumably in all of literature? Here's one of them, from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Why are these the ten best sentences?

Tags: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man   best of   books   James Joyce   lists

Fresh spring asparagus and peas add a sweet, tender crunch to this simple frittata. [Photographs: Daniel Gritzer]

I learned a valuable lesson about priorities this past weekend. You see, in the days leading up to it, all I could think about was the fresh local asparagus and peas that are due any moment. In particular, I was dreaming of making a simple frittata with them to celebrate their arrival. On Sunday, I headed over to my local farmer's market hoping to find what I needed.

But I had decided that this was going to be an extra-productive outing, so I also took along a massive bag of coins I'd been saving for the past several years to exchange for cash. And since the coins were heavy, I went to the bank first. When I finally got to the farmers' market, I made a beeline for the main produce stand, where I spied a little white paper sign that read, Asparagus. And below it, a pair of kindly-old-lady hands lifting the very last bunch from the table.

Clearly, I'm doing something wrong when even the elderly birds are beating me to the worm.

Unable to shake my longing for those spring vegetables, I loaded up on some beautiful pea tendrils as a consolation and then headed to the supermarket—disappointed, but not defeated—to buy everything else for my frittata.

The thing I love most about frittatas is that they're unfussy. You can cook them from start-to-finish in one pan, they're as good a breakfast as they are a light lunch or dinner, and there's no rush getting them to the table because they're also as good at room temperature as they are hot (actually, I think they taste best at room temp). Plus, you can easily feed several people all at once with a single frittata, but you can also make a whole one for yourself and enjoy it in slices throughout the day and, if it magically lasts, into the next.

Making my frittata was a relatively simple process. As I recently learned, beating salt into eggs in advance can actually help make them more tender (or, at the very least, doesn't hurt them), so I did that first and then let them sit while I prepped the vegetables for the frittata.

Once I had all the vegetables ready, I sautéed diced onion in a little olive oil until it was translucent, then added peas and diced pieces of asparagus.

The peas can be fresh or frozen, but I'd suggest fresh only when you can find really small sweet ones (generally, that means peas that have very recently been picked). Otherwise, frozen usually taste better. I cooked them all together until they were tender, but still had a fresh pop when you bit into them.

Then I added the eggs and begin stirring, just like making scrambled eggs.

Stirring is important for two reasons. First, it helps distribute the fillings throughout the frittata (otherwise, they're likely to sink to the bottom). Second, it helps cook the egg more evenly than if you were to just let it sit on the heat and cook from bottom to top. The key, though, is to stop stirring the eggs while they're still moist enough to set like a pancake; otherwise you'll end up with scrambled eggs, not a frittata (the good news is that's a mistake that still leads to delicious).

Stop stirring the eggs when they're still wet enough that the frittata will set as a solid mass, and not end up like scrambled eggs.

A lot of recipes have you turn the half-cooked frittata onto a plate, then slide it back into the pan to cook the other side. In my mind, that's a frittata-on-the-floor waiting to happen. Instead, I turn my broiler on and slide the pan under it to firm up the top side. Once the frittata is set on both sides, I generally find it pretty easy to turn it out onto a plate. It's a good idea to check that it isn't stuck to the pan by gently sliding a spatula around and underneath the frittata before executing the plate-flip.

Frittatas don't always come out of the pan this nicely. When they don't, just flip them over to hide the damage.

I served my frittata with a light, fresh salad that I made with shaved asparagus, mint leaves, and the pea tendrils I'd bought. Those can sometimes be hard to find, but any tender lettuce would work well in their place.

Get the Recipe!

[Photographs: Rosco Weber]

My husband was a very enterprising child. He grew up in Long Island and, like any good New York Area resident, practically sprung from the womb understanding the street value of a bagel. At school, he'd make leveraged trades, exchanging them for combinations of gourmet sandwiches, cookies, and premium sodas.

I, too, often had a lunchbag filled with enviable treats because my mother let me pick out my own snacks at the grocery store. For a while I asked her to buy Mint Milanos because they traded at a 1:3 cookie ratio, but eventually I gave up; Mint Milanos seemed to get extra cold in the school's commercial fridges and if I ended up without a good replacement, I was sorely disappointed.

Another factor was the introduction of Soft Batch cookies. Oh, how I hated hard, cold, brittle cookies. After a long morning of Green Eggs and Ham all I wanted was a soft, warm cookie. With Soft Batch, I could finally get the soft part, and if the teacher on lunch duty was especially nice, they'd microwave them for me too. In my mind, chocolate chip cookies are meant to be soft—even if, as in the case of Soft Batch, soft means bendy, and there's an added artificial vanilla twang.

A few years ago our treat-replica specialist Bravetart made Mock Soft Batch cookies which had the taste and feel of the original Chips Ahoy product. But she also made a recipe for Better Batches, which maintained the original layered, pliable texture of a Soft Batch but upgraded the flavor to something closer to a true homemade chocolate chip cookie. The unexpected ingredients are cold cream, dark corn syrup, and Frangelico, but don't be dissuaded by the slightly unorthodox cookie recipe. They're a fun project that leave you with a cookie that's laced with nostalgia and actually tastes good.

Get the Recipe!

Ingredients:
1 2 1/2-lb spaghetti squash, halved lengthwise
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 onion, small dice
3 cloves garlic, minced
16 oz gnocchi*
1 cup roughly chopped Italian parsley
1/3 cup shaved Parmesan
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Scoop out the seeds and discard. Place the squash cut side down on the parchment. Bake for 30 minutes or until the skin is easily pierced with a fork. Scoop out the insides. Set aside.

Meanwhile, prepare gnocchi according to package instructions. Drain throughly. Heat the oil and butter in a large skillet. Cook the onion and garlic until the onion is soft and translucent, about 8 minutes. Stir in the gnocchi and cook until just starting to brown. Add the squash, salt, and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until warmed through and all ingredients are evenly distributed. Stir in the parsley. Cook 1-2 minutes until the parsley starts to wilt. Remove from heat. Stir in Parmesan. Serve immediately.



*You can make your own but for this dish, the self-stable kind in the air-tight tray is just fine.

My thoughts:

This is another one of those surprisingly good recipes. I picked up a spaghetti squash on impulse at the store and brought it home with no idea what I wanted to do with it. I was trying to think of a hearty side dish that would be filling enough to act as lunch the following day and remembered I had some gnocchi from a mega-sized Costco purchase a while back. I had parsley and Parmesan on hand and voila, a meal was born! It is easily now my favorite way to eat spaghetti squash. I don't think it as a pasta substitute (who are we fooling here) but it is tasty on its own and really absorbs the flavors of anything it is tossed with. I like pan-fried gnocchi the best but some times it is hard to know what to dress it with but tossed with squash was wonderful. No need for a sauce. The whole thing just came together in a really surprising and satisfying way.

Like I said, I served it as a side but it could easily be a (vegetarian!) meal onto itself.