Once again, evidence that avoiding work is a true art. 

I’m off to Red Hook (upstate, not Brooklyn) to spend a few days sipping champagne in a hot tub and loving on Mr. Stuart Munch, my friend’s daschund.  It’ll be my last little break for a long time…around this time next week I will be closing on my co-op and becoming an adult a home owner! 

The Monsieur Dressup collection from design collective Loyal Loot is the type of simple, kinda obvious, functional designs that make me want to be a designer and acknowledge I never could.  Really, why didn’t I think of this?  These is so much design here and so much usefulness with virtually zero footprint.  I can imagine this making a perfect landing strip for a super small apartment.  I imagine I would mount it on the back of the front door – hang up my coat on the collar, put my keys in the pocket and my purse and umbrella on the cuff.  This could be my solution for finally remembering to take everything I need when I leave my apartment!

Unfortunately, it appears that Next Modern Home is the only store, online or otherwise, that’s selling any part of the set in the U.S.  While we wait for the full collection, you can see the group’s other work at www.loyalloot.com.

I always look at my WordPress stats, since I find it fun to obsess over metrics. A few days ago, I got a hit off the search terms “women in sweatpants and socks.”

I don’t have any images of women in sweatpants and socks on my blog, do I? I’m not sure I’ve even mentioned sweatpants or socks…or wearing sweatpants and socks together…and I definitely wouldn’t allow myself to be photographed in such an ensemble and exposed to the intertubes. I wonder, is this a phrase that gets more traffic than one might expect? It’s impossible to think there’s a fetish out there that hasn’t been pistol whipped and unconsciously dragged out of the closet by Jaime Buffalino, Dan Savage, Nerve.com and (eek) Fleshbot.

I figure the only empirical test that will yield an answer is to keep repeating the phrase “women in sweatpants and socks” and see if I get any more clicks.

I’ll reveal the results in a week. I know you’ll all be holding your breath.

Every few weeks, I find these gorgeous postcards mixed in with my mail. They come from my friend Ian K., an extraordinary calligrapher, designer, artists and juggler. And even though they’re from nowhere more exotic than Stamford, CT, from a man with whom my relationship is deeply affectionate and sturdily defined, their appearance does strike me with all sorts of romantic feeling because…well, how often does one receive the real gifts of friends?

I say romantic in the sense of big, generous feeling, in the sense of being deeply felt, in the sense of what’s rare and precious. When I picked up this card above, it connected me with the scenes of Florentino Ariza, setting up shop in “Love in the Time of Cholera,” typing out the love letters of thousands of illiterate strangers in love.

It’s an act of tremendous generosity, the actual giving of words. Physically writing something down for another person is as close as we can get to literally giving someone the immense, intangible value of our time. And I think it’s equally valuable if one has only the words or only the power to write, so long as you’re a part of getting them combined. Spoken words are largely fast and thoughtless. The intentionality of picking up a piece of paper and writing down an idea gives words a strength that air and sound do not. The written word is a thing that can be seen and touched, a sturdy token of the love that is inherent in wanting to be understood.

So, thanks Ian. Expect something in the mail soon.

In celebration of the Yes We Candidate’s swearing in today, I made an arugula focused dinner: whole wheat pasta with sausage and wilted arugula.

Simple, hearty, relatively inexpensive, and pretty lo-cal, which is becoming more relevant as 20 degree weather induces visions of Caribbean vacations and attendant bikinis. Despite all of the bold, basic flavors and textures in this dish, the wilted arugula and the time that you let it sit adds a layer of depth that makes it worth eating.

For 4-5 servings:

- 2 cloves of garlic, sliced
- 2 tbs oil
- 1 bag of whole wheat egg noodles, very al dente
- 1 tube of Gimme Lean! sausage
- 1 box of arugula
- 1 jar of Newman’s Own marinara
generous salt and pepper

Satuee the garlic, then brown the sausage (or snausage, which my girlfriend calls it to distinguish from the real stuff) until it’s a deep golden brown and is very firm. Season with salt. If you don’t cook it thoroughly enough, it wont’ make you sick but your leftovers will have the taste and texture of Play Doh.

Dump the sauce into the pan and turn the heat up a little until it’s bubbling. Keep the cover on it so it doesn’t explode all over your kitchen. Salt and pepper again. When it’s good and hot, also dump in your undercooked noodles. They’ll soften more in the sauce, so you don’t want to pre-cook them too much. Stir, turn the heat to low, then add in the arugula, and stir again. Put the cover on the pan and let it all hang out for about 8 minutes, with another stir or two to make sure it’s even.

Spoon the pasta into a big ol’ bowl and enjoy.

I’m forever battling to find balance between surrounding myself with things I love and drowning in piles of crap. Just this weekend, four friends and I schlepped eleven bags of clothes, shoes, and interspersed housewares to the Astoria area Goodwill store. (And then spent a very long, very boozy brunch at Sunswick. More on that another time.) Today, I did laundry and spontaneously pitched some old sweatpants from college and socks with holes in them. I was looking on Etsy for some high quality, locally made replacement socks and…welll……I got overwhelmed by the cuteness:

There’s really no reason for why this even exists, except that Americans love tiny things, cozy things, and lots of packaging on their food. If I could eat apples (I’m allergic), I’d probably buy one of these and tell myself that it’ll help me remember to bring fruit to work for a snack. Maybe they come in sizes for clementines….

For Hanukkah a few years ago, my father bought me a book. “Low Fat Jewish Cooking.” I’m still pretty certain that this came from the Barnes and Noble humor section, which is where he has selected every Hanukkah. I’ve never felt a need to refer to it, as my primary Jewish cooking duties come once a year for a tradition my friends estabished when we all moved out to Astoria a few years ago: The Annual Feast of Fried Foods (FoFF).

Last year I made some wicked gingered apple sauce. This year, I was requested of to make kugel. I didn’t want to make the typical cheesecake-with-noodles version, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to slice 4 lbs of potatoes, even if my Cuisinart is my third-best friend (after my girlfriend and the Kitchenaid Artisan she gave me). I did some searching around Epicurious and came upon Browned Onion Kugels.

Noodly!

1. Double the recipe. Kugel is not supposed to be made in small amounts. You will always want more, and you can eat it for breakfast by itself for a week.

2. Substitute the onions with 4 large leeks, sliced thinly. I had 2-3 tbs of garlic butter in the fridge, which I used to sautee the leeks at very low heat for about 40 minutes until very translucent and about to caramelize. If you don’t have garlic butter, use about 3 tbs of oil and 3 cloves of diced garlic, and sautee that gently for about 5 minutes before adding the leeks. Season along the way with salt and pepper.

3. I traded out the cottage cheese for part-skim ricotta. Cuz I’m watching the calories. (Psht.)

4. I took the muffin pan option, and divided this up easily into 18 individual servings and a 1 quart Pyrex dish for my personal breakfasting.

Recommendations on what I’d do differently next time:

1. Up the volume of noodles by a few handfuls and cut back on the dairy by about 3/4 of a cup on the sour cream and ricotta. These came out eggy and fluffy, but might’ve been just a little better if they’d had more texture.

2. Don’t overfill, which is what I did. If you have another muffin pan, or if you want to bake in batches, do it.

3. Lube the top of your pan and put something in your oven to catch the drips. These guys will almost definitely overflow a little, leaving you with some unattractive burnt edges and a loud smoke detector.

I’m going to check out the ITP (NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program) show tonight to see my brother’s piece. The work from the crazy genius artist builders is always mind boggling. I’ll be shooting to post some photos tomorrow. WP is screwing up my embedded video today, but you can be old school and click on the link to see a preview of my brother’s contribution to the show:

http://www.vimeo.com/2452074

I want to put my flag in the ground now: data portability apps, the applications that allow your profile information and activity to be shared between sites, will become a fundamental part of social networking in 6 months to a year.  Right now, Facebook is awash in third party apps that will share some information between two accounts, but dependability and actual usefulness varies a lot.  The best apps are coming from partnerships where both halves support a lot of activity.  Equal in my heart are the Flickr and the Vimeo Facebook Connect apps, which automatically update my Facebook page with my uploads and *some* activity from the other sites.  I see them working out a lot of the kinks (like they delay of several hours to update between the two) fairly rapidly, and a strong following developing from socnet users who are currently becoming overwhelmed by multiple online identities and trying to share information among all their associated networks.