Eating the Void: On Making a Raw Café Gratitude Chocolate Hazelnut Pie

I have a small collection of odd cookbooks that have, for the most part, gone unused which is probably a good thing. One that’s collected dust for years is I Am Grateful: Recipes and Lifestyle of Café Gratitude. Friends who have been to this oh-so-California restaurant say that’s it’s good while simultaneously a parody of itself. As the intro to the cookbook notes, The Café Gratitude menu gives you the opportunity to start practicing saying somet...

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I Spent a Year Making a Bed

How’s that for a click bait title? But I really did spend almost a year on this with most of that time eaten up teaching myself how to do marquetry and inlay work. As I mentioned before, my first attempts didn’t go well and I spent a lot of time searching for advice on how to do this particular style of Art Nouveau work that almost nobody does anymore. Sanding and finishing metal and wood right next to each other also proved difficult and I’m not...

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Everything Must Go Part 3: Clothing

Cats love the chaos of cleaning In this post we continue the tale of our tidying up using the KonMari Method discussed in this post. Clothing is the first category Marie Kondo (KonMari) recommends for sorting, presumably because her clients find it least confusing category to tackle–and also, I suspect, because it is the most immediately rewarding as well. It’s really pleasing to see your shirts hanging in a tidy row, your drawers brought to orde...

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Essential System #5 – First Aid Kit

...t of other things Any prescription medications that you take Syringe – for cleaning out wounds – you can also improvise this with a water bottle Antibiotic cream If you already have a first aid kit you can pimp it out with a few of these items. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of large bandage material such as the sanitary napkins. One acquaintance of ours who was unlucky enough to have been severely cut by falling glass in the Northridge...

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