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There hasn’t been a creative company, process or individual on earth during the past 30+ years that wasn’t in some way inspired, vexed, awed, flummoxed or just plain mesmerized by Steve Jobs and his instinct for innovation. Including us. So thanks Steve, for the inspiration we have taken from your work and for the work it may continue to inspire.
This month Design*Sponge asked us to create a cocktail for their Behind the Bar section and we were thrilled to oblige. After a stroll through the market we came up with a cocktail – the Melon Rumballa. It’s kind of a variation on the mojito except with a twist. You can find the whole recipe and more picture here.
Melon Rumballa
Makes about 8 cocktails
Ingredients
- 3–4 ripe melons, depending on size
- 1/2 liter white rum
- 1 bunch fresh mint, cleaned and stemmed
- 3 limes juiced
- 8 oz ginger soda
- 8 oz coconut water
- whole vanilla beans
- candied ginger (for garnish)
- sugar for rimming the glasses
- ice
1. We made our own vanilla rum and suggest you do, too — it’s fun and allows you to use any quality of spirit you want while controlling the sweetness. Place 1 vanilla bean in a sealed jar or other vessel with rum and let sit. We used our own Issi cruets, which are usually intended for oil & vinegar but work just perfectly for this. Taste frequently until the rum reaches desired flavor. After a week, the rum will be fully infused; however, you can let stand for up to a month for a more intense punch.
2. Use a melon baller to, well, create melon balls and place in the freezer a full hour before serving. If juice from the melons is left over, this can be added to the drink.
3. Muddle mint sprigs and lime juices until well combined.
4. In a pitcher, add muddled mint (and juices), lime juice, rum, ginger soda and coconut water and stir together. Again, a pitcher with a stirrer works best, but you can use a long spoon, too.
5. We love the mad scientist aspect to making cocktails. At this point, taste your drink to see what it needs. Every taste is different, so however you imagine it is how it should be. For more sweetness, we suggest more ginger soda, melon juice or even some simple sugar or pineapple juice. To reduce the sweetness, consider adding a touch more lime juice.
6. Prepare glasses: Run a lime wedge around the rim of each glass and dip in sugar. Add icy melon balls to each glass to fill half way. Place a piece of candied ginger on a pick for an edible garnish.
7. Just before serving, drop in a handful of ice along with icy melon balls and stir.
8. Of course we pulled our glasses, linens and other accessories from our cupboards, all of which can be found at Teroforma. Enjoy!
0 commentsWell, maybe not really cocktail music – more like can of beer and shot of Beam. But that’s not the point. Something about beautiful, clear, blue-sky summer days – like the one we are luckily enjoying today – always make me think of rolling down the windows and loading up the Brothers. Enjoy!
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I go back and forth on the idea of prefab housing. On the one hand, it seems inevitable that as more people jockey for less materials, their use in construction will become more tightly regulated. In that same vein, it makes sense to me to be out in front of that regulation – if it is going to be useful, then work to make it beautiful ahead of time. On the other hand, I find most prefab housing to be completely soul-less – the worst type of minimalism that considers warmth and coziness to be expendable excesses. So it was really nice to discover NORD’s Shingle House in Dungeness. While certainly not a statement in excess, The Shingle House is warm and human in both its scale and use of materials. The spareness perfectly reflects the coastal English desert-scape of Dungeness on the Kentish coast. Perhaps then it is the suitability of the minimalist design to a comparatively minimal landscape that makes the concept less jarring? Wonder what Hemingway would have thought.
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Here’s a great cocktail to slip into Dad’s hand while he’s grilling this Sunday – The Gin Daddy. There’s lemon with hints of Rosemary that play off the gin along with a sneaky shot of limoncello. This one is also a Teroforma exclusive! When we made this one the other day the entire studio smelled of lemon and rosemary.
Gin Daddy
1.5 oz your favorite gin
1/4 lemon juice
1/2 oz limoncello
1 tsp. honey
seltzer
Rimmer & Garnish
sugar
rosemary sprigs
rind of one lemon
Prep the rimmer
Strip a 5″ piece of rosemary 3/4 of the way – save the stripped stem for stirrer
finely chop the rosemary
pour 1/4 cup sugar on a plate and mix with lemon rind and rosemary
wet rim of glass with lemon rind and dip in sugar mixture – voila!
In a cocktail shaker mix all ingredients except for seltzer
Shake for 20 seconds and pour over lots of ice and top off with seltzer
Garnish with rosemary twig
This is a cocktail where the aroma of the rosemary is just as important as the taste of the lemon.
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These days we seem mired in the pragmatics of looking for solutions to our many challenges – as consumers, as citizens, as cohabitants of the planet, as people. So much more the reason that we must remember to dream. Big if possible. And every once in a while, really, really big.
Procrastinating…
Decided it was high time I followed up a link I saw earlier this month on some new minimal wristwatches from superstar German design brand Braun.
They’re very nice – just what you’d expect. You can check’em out here. This is my fav.
But – unexpectedly – I saw some cool new updates of Braun designers Dieter Rams’ and Dietrich Lubs’ perfect travel alarms clocks right next door to the wristwatches and was immediately transported back to about 1985. My father did a lot of travel for business in the 80′s and brought me back one of these from a trip to Japan. Aside from the Japanese affinity for the world of great design and Braun’s obvious inclusion in said world, I am not sure how a trip to Japan resulted in a German clock. Must ask. Anyway, used it non-stop until I lost it during college – I am sure it is still working somewhere. Buying a new one. Now.
And that, my friends, is why it pays to procrastinate.
0 commentsIn that there is a strong link between the emotional, the psychological and the aesthetic, David Brooks’s op-ed today on modesty offers some worthwhile points that can be extended to the world of objects and design. Namely, is there perhaps something in the continuing search for objects that befit our sense of “station” which leads us as consumers – and the producers that try to anticipate their whims – down a path of newer-is-better materialism? Is there really a destination, or is it the pursuit that counts? If newer is not better, how does that change the way we interact with objects and the sometimes enjoyable process of acquiring? Something to think about I suppose.
The Modesty Manifesto
March 10, 2011
By DAVID BROOKS
Go to the original article.
We’re an overconfident species. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2 percent are below average.
Men tend to be especially blessed with self-esteem. Men are the victims of unintentional drowning more than twice as often as women. That’s because men have tremendous faith in their own swimming ability, especially after they’ve been drinking.
Americans are similarly endowed with self-esteem. When pollsters ask people around the world to rate themselves on a variety of traits, they find that people in Serbia, Chile, Israel and the United States generally supply the most positive views of themselves. People in South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and Morocco are on the humble side of the rankings.
Yet even from this high base, there is some evidence to suggest that Americans have taken self-approval up a notch over the past few decades. Start with the anecdotal evidence. It would have been unthinkable for a baseball player to celebrate himself in the batter’s box after a home-run swing. Now it’s not unusual. A few decades ago, pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess; now those songs dominate the charts.
American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests. But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.
Students in the Middle East, Africa and the United States have the greatest faith in their math skills. Students in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have much less self-confidence, though they actually do better on the tests.
In a variety of books and articles, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia have collected data suggesting that American self-confidence has risen of late. College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as “I am easy to like” than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a “very important person.” By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.
In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.
Writers like Twenge point out that young people are bathed in messages telling them how special they are. Often these messages are untethered to evidence of actual merit. Over the past few decades, for example, the number of hours college students spend studying has steadily declined. Meanwhile, the average G.P.A. has steadily risen.
Some argue that today’s child-rearing and educational techniques have produced praise addicts. Roni Caryn Rabin of The Times recently reported on some research that found that college students would rather receive a compliment than eat their favorite food or have sex.
If Americans do, indeed, have a different and larger conception of the self than they did a few decades ago, I wonder if this is connected to some of the social and political problems we have observed over the past few years.
I wonder if the rise of consumption and debt is in part influenced by people’s desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station. I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced in part by a narcissistic sense that, “I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.”
Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.
Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.
Perhaps the enlargement of the self has also attenuated the links between the generations. Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations. But no generation has done it as freely as this one. Maybe people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries. As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the current generation over the future ones, in a way it no longer does.
It’s possible, in other words, that some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.
0 commentsThis has absolutely nothing to do with tableware…
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Mumford & Sons with some nice West London bluegrass/folk/skiffle. Call it what you will. Right now we’re calling it great music to have alongside a Friday afternoon beer – hearty, live, handcrafted drinking music. And we’re assigning extra points for the purple hood. Try not to smile…