Displaced

Here’s what you should do today. It’s a little “help the planet” plan that will also mean kicking high maintenance water to the curb. And it doesn’t involve hemp or Al Gore or wiccan rituals or weaving anything.

Get yourself some polished Japanese charcoal briquettes to replace your Brita water filter.

See? Easy.

As long as you can find the briquettes that is, which might take some legwork.

If you need some convincing (and I have to say that that hurts me a little bit – I thought we knew each other and you trusted me by now…), here’s why:

1. Brita tastes funny. Compared to tap water, maybe it tastes better, but it’s still not the tasteless water you’re looking for. Charcoal filtered water tastes like nothing.
2. It’s waaaay cheaper than Brita. I pay $5 for four briquettes, each of which lasts for about four months. You pay $6 each for Brita replacement filters.
3. You don’t need no stinkin’ pitcher. Put your little briquette in a multi-colored bucket for all it cares.

In San Francisco, you can pick up a four-pack at Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building. If you want to really invest and can’t part with your pitcher habit, you can support Design Within Reach and get theirs. I’m going to do some checking around for you to see if Whole Foods or someplace national carries it as well. (If you want to order from Boulettes Larder, you can go here, but be warned: it’s fax-based.)

Old news: I left my corporate job at Williams-Sonoma, Inc.. New news: what did I buy on my way out that I do not regret and will not be returning? I know you’re so excited to find out that it’s getting hard to breathe. I know – it’s super exciting isn’t it?

Before we get to that though, let me set things up for you. Due to my (former) employment by a leading purveyor of overpriced, high-end cookware and related tools, our kitchen is stocked with food preparation equipment that no couple with our skills has any business having. R mentions this often.

I do not enjoy cooking. You spend an hour or more in the kitchen producing something that will then be consumed. How is that relaxing, to see your creation getting all chewed up? I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy munching up food other people have created. I’m just saying I don’t get anything out of prepping it myself.

This state of affairs has made for some interesting conflicts with R, as he’s the one who cooks and I’m the one who buys the cooking stuff. It seems like a charming, if illogical division of labor, no? (Just to be clear, I do the cleaning. It’s all fair and square, so just calm down.)

I purchased a ton of stuff on the way out the WSI door. Here’s what’s staying:

• Calphalon One frying pans. Ooo, baby, are these nice. I love them. I, who would willingly use a whisk as a pastry blender, notice the difference. These are some kick-ass frying pans and you should register for them if you’re getting married or buy them the next time you’re in need of a new set (or just one). Screw Circulon and all the rest of the them. These are totally non-stick and hard as nails. (If you go into one of the Wm-Sonoma stores, they might still have one of the sets of an 8″ pan + a 10″ pan for $70. N/A on the site.)
• Primo Milk Frother. $20 well-spent, my friend. I am not a coffee snob, but years of shelling out $2.15 to Starbucks for my cafe au lait (which they insist on calling a “misto” for reasons not understood by me) has spoiled me for drinking coffeemaker coffee with cold milk in it. I am not going to invest in an espresso machine just to get steamed milk. Primo is my answer. Milk in mug, froth, microwave, add coffee, done. Just make sure you submerge the frother ring before turning it on. Trust me.
• Microplane Graters. Grating cheese with these (we have the medium one for hard cheese and the rasp for citrus) is like swimming with floaties. You never knew you could have it so good. Kick your collegiate box grater to the curb with that hippie wall hanging you scored that weekend in Michigan at the truck stop and move on already.

This guy does not look British or like the kind of guy I’d buy suits from (British ones or otherwise), but that doesn’t affect how much I love his recession plan. Completely rational. My two-pronged plan of simultaneously being very nervous and ignoring it completely hasn’t been working very well for me.

What else do I love? The word “bespoke.” (You have to read the article to get the connection. You can trust me that it’s in there though if you don’t feel like reading the article. Really. Can you be “bespoken”? Like, “I was bespoken but then he interrupted me”? Never mind.)

How do you deal with people’s lack of disposable income?

I’ve got my own little recession plan–everyone needs to make an evaluation of the three little shops that they like, and they need to spend in them. That’s something I’m personally doing. I go to the little restaurants I like, the place I get my glasses. Even though the spirit of the city is shot, if there are things in your neighborhood that you don’t want to see go away, then you have to support them. Otherwise, the big brands will just come sweeping in, and there’ll be nothing left.

I’m going to make a little list of my candidate businesses…. I’ll be right back.

Dude. Cheese. Mad cheese. More cheese than you can shake a stick at. (Not that you’d want to in this place because you’d definitely knock over one – maybe two – hundred things.) With a little perseverance, you can get your very own salesperson who will offer samples of anything you want to try and point you in the right direction. Ask about local offerings and cheeses that might be hard – or impossible – to get elsewhere.

We – well, I – went just a tad overboard, buying five cheeses for four people, but we were not disappointed. I grabbed onto a small round of Chaource, which is hard to find in good condition in San Francisco, half a round of Coulommiers (too much: get a quarter round for your average cheese plate), a Manchester hard cheese that had a nutty bandaged cheddar flavor, a Belgian blue (medium strong as blues go) and a lovely creamy Italian goat cheese (Robiola Pura Capra Carlina) that had just enough flavor to hold its own next to the Coloummiers. (Do you think “Carlina” is the name of the actual goat?)

Ihsan and Valerie Gurdal own the place – and sister stores in the South End of Boston and in Essex Market in New York – and stock it with excellent gourmet goods of all types. You can snag the baguette you’ll be wanting (as well as other kinds of breads) at their bakery counter, any condiment from anywhere in the world (try the chili and red pepper jams with your soft cheeses), goodies from their pastry counter (their small meringues with their chewy insides are the best I’ve ever had), wines from anywhere in the world, all manner of olive oils, pâté, crackers, honies and on and on and on.

As with Whole Foods, I wouldn’t recommend doing your general shopping here. It will definitely cost you to score the perfect picnic dinner – that chili jam runs $11 – but it’s worth it for an occasional anti-recession splurge or a mini splurge if you’re after a specific product (or just want to try something new). Also, don’t even think about going at peak times – the place is a zoo. Go on a weekday afternoon or first thing on the weekend when you can get some of their stellar service, enjoy some samples and generally rummage among the goods.

I look in the fridge for butter for my English muffin. This is what’s there: Challenge Butter. A nice rectangular box of butter sticks emblazoned with a throwdown of a name and what looks like a very irritated buck.

Seriously, people? Really? Now? In my last week on the job? With everything shifting, my dairy products are bringing it?

What’s with the attitude, deer? You’ve got a nice view, a calming view, a lake, mountains. What’s up? Anger management issues? Someone cut you off at the salt lick? Or is this just who you are? Seeing red for no reason? Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re just itching for some action.

You know me: I can’t walk away from a fight. I’ll take you down, I swear I will. Don’t push me. Put down that broken bottle and let’s take this outside and settle it like…a girl and a ruminate.

The countdown to departure from my job has begun in earnest. On Thursday evening the light at the end of the tunnel flared enough so I could see it. I think it was because my computer’s hard drive was thrown on the burning pyre.

The drive crashed Thursday morning and I spent two of my remaining six days at Williams Sonoma, Inc., recovering files and rebuilding a machine I will use for four days before returning it to the company stockpile from whence it so recently came. That crash was the last of the last straws, and it pushed me beyond the village of strain where I’d set up camp, shrugging into the land of What Are You Gonna Do?

Now all that’s left is buying the rest of the goods we so urgently need for our kitchen at 40% off. This is driving R bananas. He contends that not only do we need nothing else but we should consider returning some of the things we already have. He is clearly wrong.

What home does not need a Pineapple Easy Slicer? R maintains that the ratio of “pineapples consumed in our apartment” to “space consumed in our apartment by said Easy Slicer” is out of whack. I maintain that the Easy Slicer made its value apparent on the very first demo pineapple and it should not be required to reestablish that value on a regular basis. How would you like it if you were reevaluated every couple of weeks on your utility-to-space ratio when your ability to do your job had not apparently diminished? So what if you were not actually required to do your job in that time frame? You still could do your job if asked. That’s all I’m saying.

The item I will be most certain but sad to leave behind unpurchased is the Electric Vacuum Marinator. That’s right. You heard me. The Electric Vacuum Marinator. It does exactly what its name suggests: “Just press a button, and the marinator creates a powerful vacuum seal (no pumping required) that stretches and opens fibers. This draws the marinade juices deep inside the food for maximum flavor and tenderness.”

The “no pumping required” note still baffles me after 2+ years with the company. Was this product preceded by the Hand Pump Vacuum Marinator? Or is it a reference to other vacuum products requiring pumping? My vacuum cleaner is not hand crank, is yours? I guess the Swedish penis enlargement pump works on the same principle, but that can’t be what they’re referencing, can it?

At first, I thought, “If you have time to discover the EVM, earn the $200 to buy it, learn how to use it, use it and then clean it, you probably have time to marinate meat in a Ziploc as God intended.” But then I thought, “Who am I to stand in the way of progress? This is a wondrous application of modern vacuuming / pumping technology to a problem no one knew they had! What’s not to love?”

Even if R would let me buy it for our home – which he won’t – I almost certainly would not use it for its intended purpose. I would put cheese and olives and hard drives and other things that don’t need marinating in it, just to see what would happen and no doubt it would be broken in a weekend, so he’s probably right to veto it, but it’s still a sad loss for our crowded cupboards.

So I will live on without my beloved, intriguingly useless and surprisingly compelling Electric Vacuum Marinator. Farewell! Adieu! I’ll be over here with my unmarinated but smoothly cored pineapple.

The Dexter coat finally arrived from France a few days ago. I love it like a child. Like my child. If my child were toasty warm (in 25-degree NYC winter), dramatically stylish outerwear. I love this coat. And I paid about half what the Cop Copine store in San Francisco was asking for it. That cost was so absurdly high for an unlined wool coat, I wouldn’t even consider it despite my deep and abiding love for its perfect French lines. So I ordered it from France. For about half the price. Hooray, France!!

I was a rabid fan of Cop Copine before, but this coat has taken me to a new level. It fits like a glove and has a wide collar and tapered waist that make me look curvy and dramatic like a forties movie star. Get one if you can find it. They run true to size, which for me is a wide-shouldered 40 to my usual 8/10 jacket.

I asked for an iLap for Christmas. It’s possible I didn’t get one because I referred to it as The Lapinator. Which is not what it’s called. But it should be.

Anyway, the week after Christmas I ordered one for myself because I could not imagine living one more day without one. (I am very susceptible to marketing. I prefer to characterize this as “charming” rather than “gullible” and I hope you will join me.)

The iLap(inator) is all I hoped it would be. Its brushed aluminum makes the lazy circumstances under which I use it seem a little less uncool. It tilts my laptop towards me at a typing-friendly angle. And, most essentially, it magically protects my lap from my toasty laptop. This is why I got it in the first place. I can only stand about an hour of laptime before I get super-heated. The iLap(inator) is the crazy simple solution to this problem. Hooray. Seriously hooray.

The only negative I have to report is that either the round pad on the front has an unstable design, or I am mechanically challenged / blind. Even though the latter is quite likely true, I’m settling on the former for now. I’ll keep you posted if I sort it out one way or the other. In any event, this “defect” does not materially diminish the excellence of the iLap(inator). You should definitely run out and get one. Or, more in keeping with the whole product, lie down and order one online.

I got a package today from Athleta. Check out the opening instructions on the envelope. Am I the only one who finds the wording charming? “Gracefully”? Not just, “Tear along dotted line,” or, “Open with care,” or even, “Do not open with knife.”

I know the comma’s after “open” and not “gracefully,” but I prefer, “To open gracefully, tear along perforation,” to, “To open, gracefully tear along perforations,” as if grace is a gentle suggestion rather than a direction. But I’ll take it either way.

The lovely ladies of Athleta feel that even when opening what is basically a plastic bag in the privacy of my own living room, I will want to do it gracefully – or at least that I ought to do it gracefully. Right they are.

Ingenious. The butter bell. Keeps butter at room temperature without letting it spoil. Not that it does spoil at room temperature. Not for a while anyway. But boyfriends who shall remain nameless insist that it does, so butter bell it is. Also, the bell looks nicer than room temperature butter in a melty brick.

Not so ingeniously, Lucky is discontinuing my favorite jeans, the Easy Rider, so get ’em before they’re gone. And don’t let the salesperson tell you that the Classic Rider is the same because they’re not: no button fly means Not. The. Same.