The night before last I was looking for a source for the Alessi juicer by Philippe Starck (below left) after recognizing it in one of the scenes in Food, Inc. The juicer appeared in the kitchen of Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and I was curious about how much it cost (answer, $90). The movie was great for so many reasons. You should see it; I hope it will change the way you think about food. I hope it will change the way you think about a lot of things. Enough with the seriousness, though. This post is here because you should also see this website that I found the juicer on! They have a lot of great stuff. It’s Emmo Home. Emmo is meant to spell out the sound of saying the letters M. and O. M.O. for Modus Operandi (so they say in their FAQ). But that’s not what matters. Check out all of these lovely things!

Juicy Salif Squeezer by Alessi, Kiwi watering can by Alessi, Bread Bag by Stelton, Salad Plant by Black + Blum. Images: http://www.emmohome.com/

p.s. They also carry the Cycloc Bike Rack by IC Design Group (featured here previously).

I’ve read a lot about “IKEA hacks” online but I’ve never attempted one myself. In fact, it’s probably still true that I still haven’t. I had help (the hands you see in the pictures below are my friend Rod’s), and it was more of a careful edit than a hack. Last month I came home with two Frösta stools from IKEA. Though I liked the shape, I was dubious about their quality, considering past experience with IKEA’s wooden chairs (background: Tom bought four Ivar chairs for his apartment while we were still in college. We used them at our dining table here in Minneapolis [see left] until one collapsed under him when we had friends over for dinner last fall… we were able to return them as IKEA’s staff determined they were defective… since then we’ve been using two blue Steelcase chairs I got for $10 each at the University of Minnesota Reuse Center). I brought the Fröstas home with the idea of test driving one; I left the other in its packaging to make for an easy return if necessary. My hope was that they’d make for great extra seating when we have guests, but my hesitations proved correct. With four legs, the stool was really wobbly. And, even though I had tightened the screws really well, the individual legs wiggled badly. With a 90-day return policy ahead of me, I decided to hang onto the stools until it made sense to make the drive out to IKEA again.

The stool and its still-packaged partner sat in the corner of our dining space until I read this post at Door Sixteen. Anna at Door Sixteen has a great eye, and this time she featured several Artek designs, the company Alvar Aalto, his wife Aino, and two others founded in 1935 (Artek meaning Art + Technology). Many of IKEA’s designs are inspired by Modernist classics, but I didn’t know of Frösta’s “inspiration” until I read Anna’s post. It’s pretty clear (Left: Frösta, Right: Aalto 60):

Frösta is made of Birch, just as the 1933 Aalto 60 is; it’s the finish on the Swedish-Chinese stool that makes it differ from the Finnish one as well as the height. Frösta is just a bit taller than the Artek stool. And the price… we can’t forget about the price. When she learned about my project, Anna from D16 pointed out that Aalto also designed 4-legged versions of the stool (the E60) and asked if I might be tempted to leave them as-is. The wobbles were driving me nuts, though, and I kept thinking back to math class: 3 points make a plane! With 3 legs instead of 4, I expected to reduce the wobbles significantly. Then the idea of glue arose as a solution to the wiggles. This is where my friend Rod came in…

Once decided, I asked Rod if he wouldn’t mind helping me make the change, and he very graciously said yes, telling me to bring the stools to him straight away the following day. After seeing the images of the Aalto 60, Rod agreed it would be an improvement to lose a leg on each stool and quickly went to work. First he measured and marked each stool’s seat, using one set of original holes to guide him. We didn’t measure out 120° angles, instead Rod estimated it would end up being about one foot between the points. This turned out to be almost dead-on. With a 1/16th of an inch adjustment we had evenly balanced lines. Next he created the holes. To control the depth of the drill, Rod attached a piece of black tape around his bit to avoid going through the stool’s seat (you can see it in the picture below left). Clever, no?

Once the new holes were finished, it was time to attach the legs. Rod added some Gorilla Glue before attaching the screws to make sure they’d really hold.

The verdict: three legs are better than four. This was a major improvement. Thanks to Rod!

I take pictures of the apartment periodically, usually because I’m planning on blogging about something and sometimes because I’d like to share the space via email or my Picasa gallery. Every so often, I go through these photos. What I enjoy about them is that they become this archive of our apartment… what it looked like before I got rid of my sister’s desk, what the wall looked like without such-and-such picture hanging there, etc.

This is a shot of our sink when we first moved in. Totally pristine.

Today I took down something I’d hung (I use the word hung loosely… in this case there was packing tape involved) in the kitchen and breathed a sigh of relief. Yes. It DID look better without that there. Tom’s take? “No comment.” This time, I could take it. I agreed.

A picture of the rice sack-like hanging in place…

Now for the sigh of relief…

As for the pot rack? So far I’m not looking back on that one. Hopefully I’ll have more to share about the sink soon… it was recently featured on Apartment Therapy Boston’s “Good Questions” as I’m working on a sink skirt and needed some advice. You’ll hear about it as soon as I find some suitable fabric!

Living in a city with an IKEA (as opposed to the nearest one being 2 [2006-08] or 6 hours away [2005]) can be dangerous. I may or may not have been there twice in the last 14 days. I didn’t see any of these items when I was there last week… so they must be just coming in to stores. It’s about time they got some new napkin patterns!

Solig paper napkins, $0.99—$1.99

Dyning hammock in assorted colors, $29.99

I’m interested to see what the Dyning hammock is like in person. For its price, it would be lovely if it were light and squished up small so as to be camping-friendly.

And the trays! There are several new trays also part of the Solig line; the price is right too. We have one tray at home with a great black and white striped pattern, a gift from Sarah, that makes for fun food presentation. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to have a couple more?

Solig trays: Left, $7.99; Right, $4.99 each

Lastly, I almost forgot, there are new bags. I still like my ’05 beach bag best… mostly because it was purchased at IKEA Florence and because it’s just generally awesome, but these are pretty great patterns too. Below are the Solig gardening bags in three colors at $2.49 each and the new Solig beach bags at $1.49 each. This is why IKEA=Love.

All images: http://www.ikea.com/us/en

**Update: If you’d like to see the catalog pages check out AT’s “sneak peek” of the summer line.

I forgot to mention (as Sue pointed out in her comment), that Reisenthel baskets make great gifts. More than just gifts, they make great gift baskets. For example, here’s a photo from Tom’s birthday present from a couple of years ago.

If you look closely at the contents, you’ll notice this basket is how Tom came to know harissa. 1.5 years later, we’re still going strong on this jar.

The gift focused around Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. In the section on “Flavorings, Aromatics, Condiments, and Oils,” Roden discusses and defines many ingredients that are key to Middle Eastern cooking but perhaps not typical in the average US kitchen:

Harissa. This very hot chili-pepper past flavored with garlic and spices is much used in North African cooking. It can be bought ready-made in tubes and cans but it will not have the special perfume of the homemade variety. To make your own, see page 464.

I pulled items from this list and filled the basket with them, knowing that a lack of hard-to-find ingredients might inhibit Tom’s creativity when looking through the book for inspiration.

If you’re purchasing a new cookbook for a friend, consider throwing in some key ingredients when you give the gift. I remember the hunt for all of these items being a lot of fun, especially once I discovered a gold mine in Yasmeen’s Mediterranean Foods in Saginaw, Michigan. They don’t appear to have a website, but you can reach them by phone at (989) 791-3082 or visit their location at 3545 Bay Rd in Saginaw, MI if you’re in the area. If nothing else, pick up a bag of dried limes and make yourself a pot of Chai Hamidh, as Roden says, “made by breaking open dried limes [with a hammer] and pouring bowling water over them” (p. 483).

Also in the basket: Bodum’s Assam tea press, a mint plant, roseflower water, dried limes, orange flower water, pomegranate syrup, Mustapha’s Moroccan Harissa and Olives, Gilway Demerara Sugar Cubes, Urban Accents rice, and several large containers of spices including sumac and whole fenugreek and nigella seeds.

In the Home & Garden section of this week’s New York Times, there’s a short article about people who’ve decided to get rid of their refrigerators. 

For some this means switching to a freezer-only or a mini fridge in lieu of the “normal” giant American fridge, so they’re not totally giving up cooling food. Still, it seems like a decent idea given the energy suck that is the refrigerator. I grew up in a house with not one but TWO of them, so it’s also a pretty radical idea to me.

Today, we have a new fridge in the apartment because I requested that the landlord install one. While the new fridge still has issues that more expensive ones wouldn’t (running water down the back, caking ice in the freezer), I don’t miss the old fridge. Like the one of the women quoted in the article, we do the “easy” environmentally friendly things well-known to most people. I try to replace our incandescent bulbs with the squiggly energy saver ones (even when it looks awful) and we recycle all glass, plastic, cans, and newspaper. Most of the time, we use reusable bags at the store… and when we do get the crappy most-people-throw-away plastic bags, we reuse them instead of buying trash bags. While it’s easy to “do our part” in these ways which don’t inconvenience us too much, I’m not sure I could give up the fridge. In fact, I really wish we had another debatably earth-friendly appliance: a dishwasher. 

Could you get by in a household of 2+ people with just a college dorm fridge?

A friend recently asked me how I choose items for the apartment. I didn’t have a very good answer—and I still don’t, but part of one is this: As most people are with clothing, etc. I am drawn to certain brands and more broadly to certain countries’ aesthetics. After making a mental list, I realize you could probably describe my tastes as very Eurocentric. I’m also drawn to a wholelottathings that are all very much out of my reach because of their cost. Let’s just say I have a long list of bookmarks in my web browser of the *sale* sections of various modern housewares companies. Sometimes a purchase is knee-jerk—this is true particularly for estate-sale or thrift-store finds for obvious reasons. Other times I have admired an item for a long time before finally going for it (and/or saving for it). Much of the time though, I want something or I get something because it just goes nicely with something else that I already own. This is why I get myself into color ruts. Many of you know of my love for red. There was a black phase (over. so over). Here is an instance where two lovely greens were brought together:

While at the Lansing Volunteers of America Thrift Store as a Michigan State student, I discovered a set of four green enamelware bowls. 

These are a great size; each fits in the palm of your hand. I love to serve sorbet in them. Made of metal, they can be placed in the freezer to chill which makes for an even better treat. I wish I had a picture of the raspberry sorbet (Talenti’s Roman Raspberry) we ate in them the other day. The color combination was amazing.

From what I have found, they are either actual Cathrineholm bowls or decent enough knockoffs; they lack any imprint on the underside as many pieces from the actual line would have. This is not that important though—I didn’t buy them for resale purposes. I think I paid somewhere between $0.25 and $1 per bowl… a bargain either way. You can see more examples of Cathrineholm designs on Flickr. An older post from H is for Home also details a bit more about enamelware, its Norwegian origins, and offers more photos of Cathrineholm pieces.

So… this brings me to my point. I own these bowls. Yesterday I found this at the downtown Minneapolis Salvation Army Thrift Store:

Having easily figured out the maker of my bowls, right away I wanted to learn of the possible origins of my new green pot. This has not been so easy (I haven’t found anything exactly like this), but I have a few clues. I think the wooden handle is teak. Scott Lindberg of sllabs studios identified a similar red enameled pot as a Jens Quistgaard design (1956) part of the Dansk Købenstyle line. He even found it in Bloomington, MN (to the immediate south of Minneapolis). This gentleman had one advantage over me… an actual manufacturer’s mark with designer’s initials. No such markings on mine. Plus, the lid bears no resemblance to the typical Købenstyle lids.

Will we actually cook with this pot? Another blog author is horrified by the idea. Enameled cast iron, of Le Creuset fame, is fantastic for cooking in because of the wonders of cast iron; enameled steel apparently wins no awards for even cooking, conduction, etc. The important question for the moment is: is it lovely and squatty and nice? Yes. I like to think we might at least serve food in it. Perhaps it would make a nice planter…

Oh! The price? $1 (that includes tax…). Can you identify this pot? What would you do with it?