1. Get in your head something you want to cook and eat.

2.Read a bunch of recipes, write down all the stuff you need to buy at the grocery.

3. Say, oh hell, I’ll just roast them in olive oil and salt; what could go wrong…

I was going to make stuffed onions. All the recipes had a different method for removing the center of the onion where the stuffing would go. Cut a half inch off the tops, cut a bit from the bottom so they would sit flat, poach, boil, cook halfway..All I did was peel the skins off, cut off some of the top and bottom, then rolled them in plenty of olive oil and sprinkled with Maldon coase sea salt, put them in a 370° oven and basted them a couple of times, for about 35 minutes. Turned the oven down to 350° and turned the the onions over. Much to my surprise when I opened the oven door 25 minutes later the centers had popped up, so cute and how easy it would have been to pull the roasted centers out, put in a stuffing and put the little hat back on top or use the roasted goodness as an ingredient in the stuffing. But I ate them out of the pan standing up in my kitchen, happily.

Eric is everything I’m not: male, young, tall, and ok… thin. It follows that his designs are almost the complete opposite of mine, but I love them just the same. We’re going to start printing some of his stuff to run parallel to mine, or maybe to crash into it and explode. Either way, it’s Eric’s World and I’m just pleased to visit.

(Pay no mind to the chaos behind us, it’s just another day at the office!)

Here’s some of Eric’s work, which should show up in the (almost fully re-designed!) store tomorrow.

ABOVE: “California Dryin’” Guest Towels
BELOW: “Yours / Mine / His / Hers / Whose? / Booze!” Napkin Set

I’ve been 30 years in California and am moving to North Carolina in July. It’s got my mind refocusing on things like…visiting Baltimore and the American Visionary Art Museum for the first time..visiting New Orleans more often to see mom…and hiking and canoeing, especially canoeing. Peter Doig’s canoe paintings are so lush. So, all this canoe talk made me think of my favorite camping recipe…

Bring a box of Bisquick. Break a branch off a tree and
using your pen knife scrape off the bark until you get to the green part. Add water to Bisquick. Form dough around bottom of stick.

Cook over campfire. It will contract and fall easily off stick. Fill with jelly. Eat. Be a satisfied outdoorswoman. Lets call them Jelly Sticks.

I saw these on the so interesting site boing boing and found them so smile inducing i decided to share. As Lisa Katayama describes them:

“A cool new way to keep tabletop plants in the house without the hassle of fallen leaves: Domsai, or little light-bulb-shaped bipedal plant-people with ceramic legs and a variation of plant-heads by Italian artist Matteo Cibic. The artist imagines they could double as virtual pets, Tamagochis that don’t whine if you don’t play with it.”

And then, looking further into Lisa Katayama’s blog I got a good laugh from this one. She quotes “John Kostiuk” as saying:

I took this photo with my iPhone on the Hibiya line in Tokyo. I patted the guy on the back and said Naka-Meguro a few times (the station was coming up) but got absolutely no response.

Maybe we Americans shouldn’t try to work as hard as the Japanese afterall.