maison d'être is a wonderful coffee house found at 154 Canonbury Rd, London N1 2UP.
The chalkboard pretty much sums it up and they do it so well. Kim and Kostas who run maison d'être set the tone as they are so friendly and sweet and you feel that throughout the two rooms of the cafe. You can find Smy Chutney preserves within some of their delicious sandwiches and yoghurt dishes. You can also buy jars of Smy Chutney to be found in their shop.
I prefer it when a YouTube weekend wandering take me to interesting
videos like these rather than New World Order videos that always seem
about three clicks away.
Here's j.viewz (musician Jonathan Dagan) cover Massive Attack's Teardrop hooking up some fruit & veg to his Novation:
I was trying to capture a bit of grinding action while making some Smy Chutney apple and pepper chutney at my cousins house for an upcoming tutorial. Here's a minute-long sneak peak featuring her stunning antique mortar and pestle. I love the differing depths of imprints left from thousands of times when the pestle has met its mortar. I am quite happy with my own mortar and pestle which is not an antique but solid, sturdy and large enough to hold rather a lot of herbs, spices and more and keep them in place as I pummel them to pieces. I am so used to the rhythm of grinding pink peppercorns in my own m & p that when using my cousin's I felt as if it was gently laughing at me for trying to rely on brute strength rather than the finesse needed when using hers. It has a basin worn smooth through use and I found I needed to alter my technique to get them to break apart. The pink peppercorns were a perfect contrast to the creamy mortar and their intense aroma would form the basis of a fantastic perfume.
I also love imagining who has used these tools and for what purposes, what is its history, what time is its place? That last phrase is a slight amendment to the phrase that one of my historic preservation professors, W Brown Morton III, used to ask us when studying old buildings, sites and items, "What time is this place?" It has stuck with me and while the people below aren't using the same exact type of mortar and pestle as my cousin's the images capture the differing uses from inside to outside, for food, science, art and more.
A Vanitas still life with an adder in a pestle and mortar, a
sculpted head, an astrolobe, an anatomical sculpture, a musical pipe, a
skull, a violin, a globe, musical scores, manuscripts, a paint pale. Antonio Cioci, Italian, 1722—1792
Source: unf.edu via Smy Chutney on Pinterest Woman pounding rice using a wooden pounding tool and a hollowed out log on a British East Florida plantation.
Swedish project Atelier Food seeks new solutions and innovation through food. International chef Stefan Eriksson began the new project in Stockholm which aims to explore the relationship between food and society. Fellow chefs, artists, designers, business leaders and more gather to examine the future of food and its symbiotic relationships with culture, sustainability, transportation and development through workshops, food labs and discussions.
Still Life by Petter Johansson Art Direction And Design
I am
currently thinking, researching and writing about food to an extent that
my conscious and unconscious are wandering a plan much like the one in
Petter Johansson's beautiful images above. I am unable to read Swedish to fully understand everything on the website but the interviews in English are fantastically eclectic and the ethos of the project makes me want to march to Atelier Food Lab and get involved. I look forward to following their work closely.
I have been fascinated with all manner of classification charts since I was a small girl and spent what felt like hours, but was probably twenty minutes, in a doctors waiting room. There was a poster on the wall of edible and poisonous mushrooms and I got lost in a small world of colourful mushrooms; some edible, some dangerous. Neither of these arethe psychadaelic 70s one I saw many years ago but they have the same effect...making me want to eat the correct one in order to shrink and play amongst them with fairies.
