Friday, February 5, 2010

Waffle Dress-up & Nicoise Redux


Today was a fun food day for me. Above is my lunch, a not-so-traditional Tuna Nicoise. I added avocado and used a balsamic vinaigrette in place of a Dijon dressing. The tuna is a low-mercury, wild-caught, canned variety. It's really expensive for canned tuna ($3.59), but really healthy. Here's the brand.

Anyway, I mixed it with a little bit of olive oil and Eden Shake. Eden Shake is great for people with sodium issues. But I just like the taste of it. It's made with toasted black and white sesame seeds, nori and red shiso. I inhaled this salad, btw. It was one of the most delicious things I've eaten in a long time.


For breakfast, I made what I call Apple Spice Waffles. I simply dressed up my mulit-grain toaster waffles with some baked apples I made recently. They were stuffed with raisins, dried cranberries, pecans, cinnamon and clove. (This breakfast made me think of some of my favorite little people who love waffles. Maybe I'll get to taste test it on them soon.) No waffle is complete without real maple syrup, so a little drizzle and down the hatch. Yum!

Shiner-Favorite Find at The NY Gift Show


It was Gift Show Week! The NY International Gift Show took place at the Javits Center and I want to talk about my most exciting discovery-Shiner. Shiner is a 1 month old furniture company whose designs are out of the ordinary and ethics are extraordinary.


Making furniture from off-cuts is not a brand new concept. The company Scrapile was founded in 2003 in Brooklyn, NY (I'm actually not sure if their still in business). However, I was impressed with Shiner's level of effort given to using and re-purposing materials destined for the landfill. And they don't stop there. The off-cuts of their off-cuts are used to fuel their timber kiln or are used to produce bio-diesel.


Shiner is connected with big industry, like companies who use sheet plastic. Often those sheets are protected, top and bottom, with carboard. In comes Shiner to take it off their hands. And the same with Styrofoam. This is the first time I've seen a pendant light made out of Styrofoam. And it's pretty cool lookin'. Go Shiner!

Shiner is based in Atlanta. For more information, please visit their website.