With shopping and the holidays well underway, I’ve seen some really great items that I’m pretty sure I just can’t make it to spring without:
1. Estwing Camping Hatchet, $43, 2. Stanley Flask, $15, 3. Riedell 117 Red Ribbon Ice Skates, $102, 4. Mackinaw Cap, $50, 5. Bulleit Frontier Bourbon, $32, 6. Anonymous Ism Deer Socks, $28, 7. Staghorn Steak Knives, $198.
Nothing says essentials like simple, pragmatic beauty.
Get what you need from Brook Farm General Store, full of wonderfully simple things posessing the hand-made, time-tested qualities you’ll cherish for years to come!
I LOVE deviled eggs! And I was so disappointed this year when my family didn’t serve them at Easter brunch, that I’ve been craving them ever since. Deviled eggs are quick and easy and served chilled, are a great summertime snack.
I saw this recipe the other day and have finally decided to address my unrequited craving. Let’s face it–anything with mustard and bacon is right up my alley.
Here’s the recipe from Design*Sponge:
Deviled Eggs
Makes 10 pieces
Please use these measurements as a general guideline, and feel free to vary them to fit your palate. You may prefer a different consistency, or more of one ingredient and less of another.
Ingredients
Preparation
1. Cover the eggs with cold water in a pan, bring them to a boil, then remove them from the heat, cover and leave them for 15 minutes. (Thanks Christine!)
2. Drain the water from the pan, and run the eggs under cold water for a few seconds.
3. Peel the eggs, slice in half and carefully scoop out the centers into one bowl with the yogurt, mustard and capers.
4. Mix until the yolks are creamy and uniform. With a small spoon or a pastry bag (or plastic bag with the corner cut off), fill each egg with the yolks mixture.
5. Sprinkle with bacon and chives.
6. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
Have a great weekend!
We’re headed to the Cape in less than ten days for the week of the Fourth, and with a weather forecast barely breaking 70 in the day / 60s at night, I’m thinking I need a good cable-knit fisherman’s cardigan, and a few other things to vacation in laid-back, tomboy-esque style beyond the requisite preppy swimsuit and plenty of reading materials.
You can’t really go anywhere on the Cape without a sweater at night, its a year-round necessity. I’d prefer a classic fisherman’s cable knit cardigan (lots available on Etsy).
The Downeaster small sport duffel (L.L. Bean Signature, sale! $16.99), the perfect bag to swing over your shoulder for a bike ride to the beach or the Nantucket Ferry.
Old Man and Sea by Joan Drury Cox is a recently released contemporary visual interpretation of Hemmingway’s timeless novel that preserves his punctuation to emphasize the ebb and flow of language across the page. Read a review here.
Exceptional sundries of the kind they just don’t make anymore, that’s what you’ll find at Kaufmann Mercantile – More of What Matters. A few minutes on this website and who cares if I don’t have an heirloom tree from which to hang that beautiful carved oak swing or a branch to prune with my Japanese fox pruning saw, the visual-emotional pleasure derived from the idea of it is therapy enough for now!
I especially love that they have a category devoted to Tools & Outdoors.
I’d take one of everything, especially:
The Camping Hatchet
The Stronghold Apron
The Canvas Tool Bag
The Japanese Pruning Saw
The Carved Oak Swing
Unbelievably rich and floodlit photographs displayed in a minimalist ‘only what matters’ approach really gets The Cabinologist in me dreaming of the life I would live heading to Kaufmann Mercantile for my bi-annual supply run before retreating into the woods again.
I’m hoping to find that Camping Hatchet in my stocking come Christmas!
With summer most definitely on the way, I find myself searching for a season-inappropriate Hudson’s Bay Point Blanket. I’ve been wanting one for years, but don’t have pockets deep enough for a brand new Six Point (Queen-size) blanket, which retails for $479 at L.L. Bean (though I just found one at Cabela’s for $319). The Point blanket is a classic outdoors item with a historical tradition in Canada and parts of the upper US, when they were used as items of trade and utility by new North American explorers, trappers, and native tribes people and are often handed down generation-to-generation.
Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, is Canada’s oldest corporation and has been making high quality blankets for more than 200 years. Though I don’t have any HBC heirlooms to look forward to in my family, thankfully, this long history means that there are a good number of vintage versions out there, and I’m thinking if I start looking now, I might be able to pick one up for a price that won’t leave me high and dry. My awesome Mother-in-law read this post and informed me that indeed, there is an heirloom blanket in the family, and would I like to have it?!? Would I!
Below are a few bedrooms that reinforce my desire to cuddle up with one of these incredible blankets this fall:
via marion house book (left) and design*sponge (right)
above and below via pinterest
Its Friday! I’ll leave you with this gem of a vintage performance clip featuring Lester Flatt singing “My Little Cabin Home on the Hill” with Bill Monroe.
Happy weekend!
Is it terribly irresponsible of my husband and I to be hatching a plan to buy and build a cabin before we have a house or a 401K? Maybe. Probably Yes. However, we do believe that we will be metropolitan center dwellers for many years to come, which, our career paths not laid with golden bricks, will necessarily involve remaining apartment-renters for a long while yet. Before you judge us as irresponsible dreamers, you should probably know that as long as what you want from a cabin is truly a rustic natural getaway, this can be had for remarkably less than you might guess. My personal tastes do run a bit high; I would love to find a squared-log frontier cabin circa 1790 (see the mountain listing near Bald Knob for just $1.1M), but there are some really beautiful modern (and green) designs out there that get the rustic-union-with-the-land thing just right. I really like the modern lines and extreme simplicity of this structure. It works beautifully in the forest setting amidst the tall trees.
via Sunset magazine
This Oregon couple managed to buy and build this cabin for $57,000 including a small wilderness parcel of land. This little abode, the Signal Shed, is off the grid with views of Wallowa Lake six hours northeast of Portland. Mariah Morrow and Ryan Lingard designed the building to be a simple one-room outpost nearby Forest Service trails and surrounded by wilderness; perfect to hike and bike in summer and snowshoe or cross-country ski in winter. The cabin features an 8-foot tall barn door that slides open onto a porch, creating additional living space. The structure cost them just $10,000! Mind you, Ryan happens to have a background in architecture. I do love to swing a hammer and use a table saw, but this project might require some schooling (and a posse of handy & constructive friends and family)…
They sell plans for the cabin for $1000 or a prefab version for $18,000. See the plans at Signal-Shed.
Here’s how they did it:
color images by Thomas J. Story for Sunset
So, if we follow this couple’s lead, we’ll be driving the dirt county roads out to our cabin from our rental apartment in the city before too long! Little DIY Cabin, here we come!
What do you really need?
Cabins are truly about the essentials. In small quarters, spaces take on multiple functions; close proximity forces formalities to fall away in favor of camaraderie and intimacy. In this way, cabin-life is not so much different than living in a small urban apartment.
And yet, cabins are also fundamentally about escape, self-sufficiency, connection with nature, solitude. While big cities can be lonely places, the urban experience fundamentally lacks this old freshness, this sensation of things being at once new and ancient. Cities, places of sociocultural evolution, are not (alas!) this kind of primordial frontier.
As a city-dweller, I am working on a project to transform our humble Chicago apartment into someplace that achieves this warm, cozy, cabin feeling in all seasons. I’ve been grappling with this concept of what makes a cabin, well, a cabin. Currently a list of Cabin Essentials is in production (I’m open to your suggestions!) and I’ll be posting some images of the transformation and projects along the way!
The tent cabin above is on the Kawuneeche Valley Never Summer Ranch at the Holzworth Historical Site in Rocky Mountain State Park.
