Minimalist Living

  • Brooklyn,  Life in Maison Gezellig,  Minimalist Living,  Photo Post

    Kitchen update:

    kitchen collage

    As you probably don’t remember, my kitchen is pretty tiny and I have pretty much zero interior design skills besides which poses an extra challenge for me.

    I think I may edit out a few things from this shelf arrangement (like, that one bowl on top of the plates is making me serious OCD-crazy looking at it) and I still need something to cover up that breaker panel at the top there, but overall, this shelf unit fits SO MUCH stuff in such a small space that I’m really pleased with it.

  • Being Frugal,  Doing More With Less,  Life in Maison Gezellig,  Minimalist Living

    dinner list > grocery list

    dinner list

    Every week, I write two lists: a grocery list and a dinner list.

    I know a dinner list seems a wee bit fussy, particularly from me and my Zero Tolerance For Fuss… BUT I’d say the half-hour I spend writing the dinner list saves me at least a couple hours a week and saves me money besides.

    Here’s how I do mine:

    Step 1: Assess the state of your pantry and jot down any meal idea based on what you can make with what you have on hand (or with the inclusion of one or two ingredients). For example, at the bottom of my list is an entry for tacos (because I found I had taco shells in one of the cabinets), so tacos went on the dinner list and sour cream and salsa went on the grocery list. I usually try to make this list after I hit the farmers’ market that week, but I’m in a kind of Greenmarket limbo since deciding I need to try shopping at a different one.

    Step 2: Pick something new to make. I get bored really easily with the same foods over and over (to the point that I usually don’t even eat leftovers the next day if I don’t have to) so I try to include some new recipe every week. This week’s list is slightly unusual, due to the fact I bought a copy of Donna Klein’s Supermarket Vegan this weekend, and I’m going through a MAKE ALL THE THINGS! phase with it. My parenthetical page numbers on this week’s list are all from that book.

    Step 3 (optional): Check out the grocery sales. I don’t always do this, but if I’m really hard-up for dinner ideas, I’ll go to the supermarket’s site and see what’s on sale that week. Otherwise, I just pick up some sale items while at the store and they end up as part of Step 1 in this process.

    Step 4, possibly the most important step of all: PUT THE LIST ON THE FRIDGE. I don’t even want to discuss how many times I have made the dinner list and then failed to take it out of the notebook and put it somewhere. Seriously. It’s shameful.

    With the dinner list on the fridge, I am saved my usual staring-blankly-into-cabinets-at-5pm-and-sighing time and can just get cooking without having to think about it (last night was the pasta puttanesca and it was crazy good) AND I know that the items that ended up on my grocery list have an actual use that week, which keeps me from buying perishable items on impulse and regretting it later (yeah, I’m looking at you, flaccid carrots).

    What’s your shopping strategy? One list or two? 

  • Being Frugal,  Make Your Life Gezellig,  Minimalist Living

    So, here’s the thing…

    I’m good at lots of things.

    I can identify nearly any actor just by their voice. I can bake bread without a fuss. I am a stain-removal savant. I’ve fixed the internal working of the toilet tank on more than one occasion. I’ve even revived goldfish won at a street fair from the brink of death.

    I am not, however, good at interior decorating.

    A big part of this is my inherent cheapness; I have a very hard time justifying spending our money on decorative throw pillows and dust ruffles when we could use that money for something like, oh, I don’t know, food or rent. Even if I had no thought for the cost of things, I would still have almost no idea how to put things together and arrange a space in a way I like.

    It doesn’t help that I’ve got incredibly little patience for design magazines or blogs, particularly when “small space” living entails apartments that are at least twice the size of my own, that are then remodeled by an architect and filled with $25K of cabinetry and furniture. (That’s right; I’m looking at you, dwell magazine. You can suck it.)

    So, I’ve got decor ineptitude, congenital frugality, and some virulent anti-consumerist feelings about design resources. This is how I end up with an apartment that’s not exactly spartan, but relatively modest and simple — and with a perpetual feeling of the room being half-finished.

    I want this apartment to feel DONE, like we really live here, seriously, for good this time, no joke… and I don’t really know how to do that. I don’t even know where to start to know how to do that.

    Ideas? Suggestions for books/magazines/blogs that won’t sent me into fits of smash-the-capitalist-state rage?