Saturday Link Love

 

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At Piebox, they create raw pine boxes designed to transport a 9 inch pie safely and easily.  I may well be investing in one of these.

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Inaki Aliste Lizarralde draws incredibly detailed floorplans of the dwellings in famous TV shows. The post I wrote several years ago about Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment still gets hundreds of hits a week.

 

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In Fictitious Dishes, Dinah Fried recreates iconic food of literature in her food photography.  Here’s the grilled cheese from ‘Heidi’  that sounded so delicious when I was a child.

 

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Sheri Silver has been making fruit leather from all the excess fruit sitting in her fridge and I must do the same, since we’ve been going a little crazy picking wild blackberries recently.

 

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Lotta Jansdotter is launching a new line at Fishs Eddy.  The above invitation is from her Facebook page.

Have a great weekend!  I will be going to the North West Chocolate Fest tomorrow. Anyone else got some exciting plans?

   
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WTF Friday: Prada Spring 2013 Shoes

 

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Here are Miuccia Prada’s latest shoes.  Apparently the ‘socks’ are soft leather booties to which you can strap different shoe platforms. I’m not sure that makes them better or worse.

I have to admit that though my first reaction to these was ‘WTF?’ as I’ve been putting this post together I’ve come to appreciate them more as, I dunno, performance art or something.

And if I were very tall and very skinny and very rich, I might be tempted to wear the pink ones with skinny jeans and a simple cashmere sweater.

What do you chaps think?

   
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Father Rabbit

 

Why oh why oh WHY isn’t beautifully curated online shop Father Rabbit based in the US?

 

father-rabbit-onlineIt is incredibly unfair.  The good news though is that the New Zealand-based shop, run by husband and wife team Claudia Zinzan and Nick Hutchinson will shp worldwide at flat rates. 

Don’t tell the Husband, but I may have placed a teensy order today.

   
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Adventures in Cooking: Oven Dried Tomatoes in Oil

 

It’s been the most incredible warm, dry, sunny September here in Seattle and the whole place, even my little sidewalk veggie patch, is overflowing with ripe tomatoes. (If you’ve ever been to Seattle in September before you’ll know that it’s usually green tomato central round here).

 

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The farmers’ markets are teeming with fragrant ripe toms of every shape, size and hue and I’ve been desperately roasting them, drying them, making sauce and jugs of gazpacho (on the blog soon) until it comes out of our ears, in a frantic race against time to make the most of the bounty.

One quick and easy way to use up great tomatoes, particularly any pretty cherry or small tomatoes you can find, is to dry them in the oven.

Pick off the stalks and calyxes and wash the tomatoes.  Pat them dry with kitchen towel.  Put them in a bowl and add around a tablespoon of olive oil and a little pepper and good salt (I usually use Maldon Sea Salt). Swish everything around with your hands until each tomato is coated with oil and seasoning and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. You could add some chopped fresh herbs at this point.

 

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Heat the oven to its lowest possible temperature – my oven goes down to 180 degrees F (around 80 degrees C) – and then bake the tomatoes for a number of hours until they reach the level of dryness you want. 

These have been cooked down to a medium level of squishiness (mi cuit),

 

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Some of my mi cuit tomatoes have been stored in Ziploc bag in the freezer, ready to be slipped into sauces, casseroles, soups, stews in the winter months, but I also experimented in preserving some of them in oil.

Sterilise a pretty jar and pack with dried tomatoes.  I added my tomatoes hot from the oven so as to the flavour the oil as much as possible. Pour some good olive oil over the top leaving around an inch of headspace and tuck in garlic, herbs, spices or small chilis for flavour. I used branches of rosemary and slivers of garlic in this batch.

 

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I’m not sure how long these will last as they have not been properly canned.  I suggest you use yours up with two or three weeks (this will not be a problem as they so utterly delicious).  I’ve had mine for two weeks now and they are still perfect and taste mindblowingly good in salad or as an accompaniment to charcuterie. When you’ve used up all the tomatoes, the flavoured oil will be fabulous on salad or pasta.

Last night I chopped some of mine up fairly finely and added them to some melted butter and lemon juice as a topping for roasted halibut and they truly were exceptional.

   
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Go Fug Your Room: Nina Garcia’s New York Apartment

 

This month Architectural Digest is featuring the Upper East Side apartment of legendary fashion editor and US Project Runway judge Nina Garcia.

Which I was very much expecting to like as I enjoy her personal style very much (check out Sirs T and Lo’s ‘Judging the Judges’ columns for some examples). 

 

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And at first I thought I did. The light airiness of the apartment itself is lovely and the colour scheme seemed refreshing and unusual.

 

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But oh, Nina, Nina.  The more I looked at it I realised that I didn’t really like it at all. The colour story is only interesting because the stylist brought in some hot pink flowers and green leaves.  Look more closely and you’ll see that it’s a rather bland combination of white, grey, terracotta and camel, with some powder blue accents.

It also all seems rather uptight and uncomfortable – I think due to the lack of personal items beyond busts and artwork, and the spiky, brittle, skinny, fashion model legs on nearly every single piece of furniture. These are chairs and sofas made for perching, not for cosy snuggling.

The stone bust, vase and fireplace surround also seem rather hard and unfriendly, while the hideous carpet in the dining room, which admittedly is one of the few things with any personality in the entire apartment, looks like some fiendishly complicated children’s board game.

 

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This is apparently the apartment that Nina shares with her young family, and though I’m a great believer in keeping some spaces free of kid stuff, the fact that there is no trace of them in any of the rooms on show – no photos, kid art, toys, clothes or kid-friendly furniture -  seems a little sad. Or perhaps they’re occasionally permitted to play on the dining room carpet when their mother isn’t looking.

All in all the whole ambience just seems too controlled and impersonal, with any hint of quirkiness, personality, warmth, exuberance or life, expertly stifled by layer upon layer of expensive ‘good taste’.  But heck what do I know.

 

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The closet, on the other hand, is completely and utterly to die for.

 

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What do you chaps think?

 

   
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Emmys 2012: Canary Yellow Dresses

 

So you’re an uber stylish mega lady celebrity attending one of the big celebrity bashes of the year and you decide to wear a colour which is rarely seen on the red carpet but which will really make you stand out in the crowd.

Unfortunately for you, you have forgotten that mirrormirror is clearly the uber stylish mega lady celebrity’s fashion blog of choice (which is astonishing since we rarely discuss fashion) and that back in September 2011 we were discussing Caitlin Moran’s maxim that ‘yellow goes surprisingly well with everything’.

 

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So if you thought you were going to stand out in the crowd wearing your canary yellow dress, you clearly had another think coming.

Can you imagine how pissed off these women were yesterday evening?

UPDATE: Oops. Just found another one.

 

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Saturday Link Love

 

I’m trying to be a bit more active on social media nowadays, posting up interesting things I see around and about to the mirrormirror Facebook page and to my Twitter stream.

I thought I’d also start doing a regular Saturday link round up for those of you who inexplicably don’t follow my aimless meanderings on social media, just in case you find yourselves with time on your hands at the weekend

 

Liberty Christmas Crackers

 

Apologies for talking about Christmas in September, but these Liberty print Christmas crackers are too beautiful not to share {via the beautiful new blog from erstwhile British rock chick and now designer Pearl Lowe}.

 

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I went to a class at the Pantry at Delancey a week or two back and was lucky enough to try their homemade roasted pepper hot sauce.  Which was amazing. You definitely need to make this.

 

Gold-Marmite

Marmite has brought out a limited edition gold version with edible golden flecks. I love it. (British in joke). Poor bereft overseas Marmite fans such as myself can order it from the official expat page on the Marmite website, which ships worldwide.

 

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Finally someone has worked out that it would make sense to have differently coloured dollar bills. And making them different lengths to ensure better money management is a fabulously ingenious idea.

I just wish these were real,  I get so confused. {From designboom via the lovely Tula}.

   
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Fifty Shades of Decor

 

Come and visit Christian Grey’s penthouse at the Escala in Seattle.

I have yet another terrible confession to make. I have been reading over-hyped spankbuster Fifty Shades of Grey.

   

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And yes it is excruciatingly badly written, the sex scenes are repetitive and surprisingly dull, the hero is a borderline psychopath and the heroine is gobsmackingly, or rather, bottomsmackingly irritating. But yes I read it through to the bitter end (and, oh the shame, the two sequels) and yes, I will go and see the movie if they cast Ryan Gosling.  I really hate myself though.

 

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As an aside, by far the best thing about it are these hysterical reviews on Goodreads featuring the most inspired use of cheesy animated gifs ever. It’s worth reading the books for these alone.

One extremely amusing aspect of the books, for me at least, is that British author E L James set them in Seattle, evidently without having set foot on the American continent, let alone in the Pacific Northwest, and having seemingly done most of her research from a map (held upside down) and real estate websites.

I can see the fabulous Escala condo building, where Christian has his wicked way with lip chewing, ever flushing, Ana from my bedroom window, and for the delectation and delight of the mere handful of my erudite readers who will have read such garbage, I have found some photos of Christian’s penthouse online.

And it is amazing. Enjoy.

 

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{All photos by Choi Yee Wong from I.C.E Digital Studio}

Inexplicably there are no photos of the ‘red room of pain’ though.

   
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Seattle’s Great Wheel

 

Yesterday was my birthday and for a special treat we decided to take a spin on Seattle’s Great Wheel – the new super Ferris wheel which opened this summer on Seattle’s waterfront. 

 

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It’s not quite the London Eye, but the views over downtown Seattle and Elliott Bay are just as spectacular.  The sun shone for me yesterday and we were lucky enough to board just as the sun was setting over the Olympic mountains.

 

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The Husband treated us to the exclusive, all black VIP Gondola – which was expensive but worth it I think for the super comfortable bucket seats, which for some reason made me feel much less nervous (I’m not so good with heights), the see-through glass floor and the fact that we didn’t have to share with another party.  I think we also got a longer ride than others too (and some super uglyass tee-shirts).

 

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Here’s the view down through the glass-bottom of the gondola

 

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And here’s a gratuitous shot of some folks on the pier watching the sun going down, just because I like it really.

 

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Seattle peeps, I highly recommend this if you haven’t been already.  I understand the light show is pretty major too.

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