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Mouthwash in a crystal bottle

crystal bottle with mouthwaterWhat better way to spend a lazy sunday morning than walking around on a flea market, if possible abroad, like Paris or London? And how ugly that bottle of mouthwater looks in your bathroom, surrounded by your favourite perfume and shower lotion.

How about combining the two? What you get is a beautiful solution:

  • Rummage on a flea market until you have found a perfectly sized vintage crystal bottle, like the one they used to decanter liquor and perfume in
  • Clean it like crazy
  • Then carefully empty your ugly bottle of mouthwater in it and put it in your bathroom.

From now on you will smile every time you have finished brushing your teeth…

PS Thank you, Emily Henderson, for this wonderful idea!



Manicured hanger

Manicured hanger by Mimimou
This must be the easiest DIY on earth. Inspired by Sali Hughes and every perfectly manicured woman on the planet.

You will need: nailpolish in your favourite color (mine is Colour Lacquer by Guerlain in La Parisienne red), a plain white ceramic hanger with finger like hooks (you can find a similar one here), a steady hand.

Manicured hanger by Mimimou step 1

With small strokes, paint a small nail shape, as if it was a miniature version of your little finger.

Manicured hanger by Mimimou step 2

Let it dry.

Manicured hanger by Mimimou step 3

Voilà!

And just because I love to gif…

manicuredhanger_mimimou

Lovely items used: 1 Colour Lacquer by Guerlain in La Parisienne • 2 Ovenwant roze by Tas-ka • Koira Ja Kissa yellow tea towel by Lapuan Kankurit, designed by the amazing Japanese designer Makoto Kagoshima (check out his work!)



After-dinner coconut bombs recipe

COCONUTBOMBS_2
Food is one of the nicest things of life. It’s something which fuels my curiosity, it’s what makes my travels worth while and also one of the main topics when I talk. As a child I used to devour my mum’s cookbooks and food magazines. As a student I owned just as many books about literature as I owned books about food. Since the last few years Ottolenghi has become my hero. Not just because of the richness of flavours, colours and wonderful combinations of vegetables which he is a master of. No. A very important reason why his cookbooks are always on the kitchen cupboard when I cook, is that he uses the food and spices that I already own and love.
I think it is very important to find inspiration that is similar to your style. That is also why I love food blogs. It’s so much easier to find someone somewhere who loves the food you love. My favourite blogs are David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl’s Green Kitchen Stories and Josephine Malene Kofod’s A Tasty Love Story.
COCONUTBOMBS_1
I haven’t changed much to the original recipe. To me coconut is already very sweet, so I have omitted the coconut flower sugar but go ahead if you like it sweet. It’s a super easy and tasty ‘dessert’, I must have made it fifty times, especially when time was short. Use your imagination when creating your rainbow bombs or just whatever you have in your cupboard, as long as you have your coconut butter, you will be fine.
COCONUTBOMBS_3
Coconut is very good for you, It’s packed with magnesium, selenium, potassium, zinc, iron, phosphorus and vitamin C and E. This makes it a great friend for your skin, it helps fight infection and a lot of other good things. The fiber and fat content helps stabilise your blood sugar, which makes it a perfect after-dinner sweet. Plus it is lactose free so perfect for those with lactose intolerance. And that is just the coconut… just add fruit and nuts, and you will be eating a sweet that is also sweet to your body.
COCONUTBOMBS_4

COCONUT BOMBS recipe

COCONUTBOMBS_5 recipe

PS Now rush to Josefine’s blog. It’s filled with an incredible amount of delicious recipes which are very easy too.



Star your day with a smile, eat granola

Granola intro image When you live in a big city, you start doing things which your friends who do not live in a big city, might regard as odd. In London my weekends were filled with farmer’s markets and swimming: I started my day at 6am with an hour swimming after which I rewarded myself with a big bowl of granola from La Fromagerie. Upon leaving the city, I begged them for their recipe, and upon this day, although I have tweaked it a lot since, I still make a big batch of granola two times a week. My boyfriend starts all his days with it, it’s so healthy and filling that it keeps him from snacking until 1pm.
Mmm_post2As I make so much granola, I usually buy my ingredients from a miller; you can also get good quality nuts at a reasonable price from one of those lovely Arab supermarkets where they are sold per weight. Mmm_post3It doesn’t matter which sweetener you use but do experiment with it, as it changes the taste of your granola. Family and friends usually prefer the maple syrup granola so I tend to use that. The only thing you need to keep in mind is the ration between your grain of choice, oil and sweetener. Other than that, you can go as crazy as you want.Mmm_post4



What to do with a carrot?

CarrotsYes, you can prepare it in many splendid ways, like Green Kitchen Stories’ baked carrot cake oatmeal, Aida Mollenkamp’s delicious carrot hummus or a simple carrot juice with some grated ginger. It’s supposed to work wonders on your skin too, just type in ‘face mask carrot’ on youtube and you will get hits like this. But did you know a carrot’s magic does not end there? If you live in a city you never stop wondering at the little glimpse’s of nature strength: this is what happens if you put a carrot’s discarded top in some water.Carrot plant from top | Mimimou
Isn’t it wonderful? It’s like a lesson in never giving up.



Where do I store all my fruit and vegetables?

Frutteria | Made by Mimimou
Growing up in Italy, I was brought up with vegetables and fruit. As a child, I was thought how to to pick up the ripest tomatoes (smell) and the sweetest melons (smell, look, weight and tap). We were also supposed to know all different variaties of a tomato and which one to use when (salad, pizza, pasta).

With that background, it’s impossible to enjoy a cold and sterile Dutch supermarket so I feel lucky that Jan understands my need for buying 35kg of fruit and vegetables a week, at a wonderful Turkish supermarket called Helal et Gida. He has learned to pick the loveliest aubergines and zucchini, how to smell and look at things. How to lift 8 bags up to three flight of stairs weekly…
Frutteria close-up | Mimimou & Leew
We only buy ‘products’ with one ingredient (except cheese, pasta and bread which are allowed to have a few more, but only natural ones) and make everything ourself. This is wonderful but it also requires a lot of space. After months of using pans and plates to spread out our weekly groceries, I came up with the idea of making a small vegetable stall for the kitchen. Jan loved it and we started designing.
Frutteria | Mimimou & Leew
The idea is very simple: get yourself enough crates to store your veggies, choose the length of your sides accordingly AND make sure there is enough space between the crates to take out a melon or a pumpkin, a wooden bar for bananas, a few boards for the bottom and wheels (it makes it so much more practical). How cute would this look in a Jamie Oliver or Ottolenghi restaurant, but more importantly, EVERYONE with children should have one. It’s so much more fun to choose what you want to eat when all is displayed in such an inviting way.

shopping cart frutteria
I have called it the Frutteria. In Italian you usually call a vegetable shop a fruttivendolo (frutta + vendolo = a seller of fruit); the suffix -eria means that it is a shop so I liked that option more.

Anyone interested can contact us but you can go ahead and make this yourself, I would love to see this in every household one day.

A few tips for everyone interested:

  • Recycle a magazine or use teatowels to cover your crate. It absorbs moisture and if you happen to miss a rotting apple, the wood from your crate is not infected.
  • We did not paint of varnish the frutteria as we wanted to keep a rustic look and it keeps contamination to a minimum
  • The part of the fruit or vegetable that is attached to the plant, always tells you the most about its freshness. Keep those visible and choose accordingly
  • If you want to make sure you get enough vitamins, minerals and other good things from your food, vary in color.
  • Keep the frutteria out of the heat or sunlight, it helps keep it all fresh
  • An old farmer on Tenerife taught me to keep your potatoes in a towel, they do not like light (well, actually they do but it turns them into a plant)
  • Anything leafy should be eaten first
  • Melons can ripe after picking but will rarely get sweet. Choose the right one by smelling (should smell sweet), touching (never soft, never hard, always a bit elastic), looking (no weird patches and around its leafstalk you should see a small crack) and tapping (it should be heavy and give a muffled sound).


Make: Kokedama

Kokedama_AuraScaringi
Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Little Prince came from a planet scarcely any larger than a house. He shared his little planet with good plants, bad plants, a couple of vulcanos and one beautiful rose.
The image of this small asteroid covered in green with one magnificent flower sticking out of it, has always made me smile: wouldn’t it be magical to live on such a planet?
One day, while on an urban exploration of Amsterdam, there it was, my first string garden: a little ball of soil, covered in moss, with one, tiny plant growing on top. I wrote about the moss ball, or Kokedama as it is called in Japan, in a previous post but I have waited the whole winter before venturing on making one. In the end I even turned this event into something special by inviting friends and teaching them too how to add a bit of magic to the world: because that is truly what they do. That’s why I want to teach this to you too. (more…)