apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Here is something new and exciting - four Microplanes in one! This box grater has four of Microplane's patented stainless-steel cutting blades in one tool.

We are huge fans of the Microplane graters (silky smooth grating for lemons, cheese, and more) and we're curious what you think about this all-in-one tool. More convenient, or too bulky for apartment-sized drawers? Take our survey then read on for a little more about this grater and purchase information.

I just love rosé wines. I get so excited at this time of the year, as the new vintage arrives on the shelves, and I know that I have a whole four to five months to enjoy them.

Over the past four to five years sales of rosé wines worldwide have exploded. Call it the Rosé Renaissance! Whatever, it’s great. Despite this I am still surprised when people tell me again and again “I don’t like rosé wine”, “I never buy rosé wines”. Perhaps there are lingering memories of Lancers, Mateus or even white Zin; or maybe people feel it is cooler to like red or white.

We're ready to hit the Chicago farmer's markets this week and stock up on all the super-fresh local produce we've been craving since last fall. We'll most likely be bringing home as much as we can carry and then faced with the happy task of find ways to prepare and eat it.

This is one recipe we know we'll be turning to, especially because it can be so easily adapted to use whatever ingredients look best.

We obviously have pizza on the brain, because it was just yesterday we posted Breakfast Pizza and now we're practically salivating over this very expensive beehive pizza oven from Williams-Sonoma.

Classic food mag Bon Appétit launched a new website yesterday with a look that was begun a little while ago with their new logo. We're impressed with what we've seen so far; we like that they are organizing it around their top 100 foods, with links to tips and products that related to each recipe. Very clean and well laid-out, too.

But do we need another food magazine online? What do you think? Between this and the new Gourmet online we have so much good reading to do we're not sure how we'll keep up! Take a look at their new website and tell us...

Have you seen this yet? The New York Times Dining Section has a whole piece on knife skills, vegetable carving, and food art. These knife skills are way out of our league...

This morning we talked about scrambled eggs for dinner; now we're going to talk about pizza for breakfast. And no, this is not cold pizza from the fridge on a Saturday morning. Hot and crispy homemade pizza, with handfuls of herbs and scoops of soft ricotta cheese, topped with an oozing egg - this is a breakfast in its own right.

One of the most frequently requested tips in our Cure this spring was advice on cooking a whole meal - each dish balanced to be ready in time and on time. This means that your work is balanced precisely to be finished when your guests arrive, with the entrée hot and ready to serve, each dish at the right temperature. Here's how one reader put it:

In the springtime, sometimes our tableware is our recipe book. We talked about quick dessert recipes yesterday and how cream over fruit is one of the best and easiest desserts we know.

Well, add a beautiful and striking piece of tableware, and you've just elevated even that sublime dessert into something truly special.

Last week we brought you some questions and answers about gardening from kitchen gardener and author Jennifer Bartley. But we haven't yet brought you a review of her book, Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook.

We're going to tip our hand and say that this is one of the most inspiring books on kitchen gardens we've ever read.

We are garden novices, relatively speaking, and this book seems like an odd favorite for a new gardener. It's not the Veggie Gardener's Handbook, and it's not a three-step guide to gardening for the very first time.

No, it's much more than that. Here's a list of some of the things that inspired us from this book.

Chicago's Hanger 18 is one of those stores we turn to when we're shopping for a gift – for a hostess, housewarming, wedding or birthday – all the while wanting to stock up on goodies for ourselves. Located in Lincoln Square, the shop always has a fun mix of cheerful, retro-inspired and slightly kitschy items. And while it also sells a variety of jewelry, candles, stationery and children's products, we always head straight for the kitchenware.

We have limited experience with soapstone; we blogged these soapstone ice cubes awhile ago but we don't know much about actually cooking in soap stone. So we're rather interested in knowing more about these soapstone pots and griddles from Greenfeet.

We were truly inspired by Dana's post on Sunday about choices, constraints, and wild salmon. It made us think about leftover salmon and making good choices with our leftovers in general.

What are you making for dinner tonight? We are thinking of something light - salads, radishes, greens and deliciously cool protein like the tuna in this photo. This is a rather elegant salad, don't you think?

One of the most frequent questions we've noticed during Garden Month is a general one about cutting herbs. Since herbs are one of the easiest things to grow indoors or in a container, we expect that many of you have small pots of basil, rosemary, or other herbs.

But several of you have wondered something like this:

A lot of my recipes require fresh herbs. But I hesitate to cut too much off my herbs for fear of killing them. How can you harvest enough herbs to cook with without harming your plant?

A little while back the New York Times reported on these new Pickle Pops from Texas. Sour pickle juice seems to have hit a sweet spot, because these are getting really popular. We've never tried them, but we always have gazed speculatively at all that pickle juice at the end of a jar, wondering if there was something productive to use it for.

What do you think? Freeze pickle juice for warm-weather licking? Or is that just...gross? Tell us!

As we talk about cooking without recipes and cooking by feel, one thing that tends to fall by the wayside is dessert. Cooking dinner without a recipe is simple; anyone can make a pot of pasta, toss with fresh garden herbs, olive oil, Parmesan, and lemon zest (as we did last night), and call it dinner. But when we think dessert we think complicated baking and finicky cakes - we think recipes.

The post below from Kristin made us sigh for French flea market treasures. It would be so nice to roam French flea markets and find small treasures to make our kitchens more beautiful. Fortunately for us there is eBay (remember those vintage linen towels?) and little boutiques like The Blissful. The Blissful is in Canton, Ohio, and it's owned by a Francophile who stocks all sorts of vintage and new French treasures.

Fortunately for those of us in other places, she just opened up an online shop as well. Here are a few of our favorite French kitchen pieces from The Blissful...

Whoa! Look at our little seeds and their sprouts - we are surprised by how fast these have shot up! Looks like we need to get these in the ground (or pots) really fast...

We're excited about the little beets we're growing in our container garden; you can see the knobbly seeds here and the new fuschia seedlings here.

Now here's one more thing we'd like to make with those new beets: beet ice cream!

Top posts from last week included a chef's real home kitchen in Brooklyn, food for all those summer vacations you're about to take (right!?) and recipes for a completely addictive cabbage salad with almonds and sesame, fast fresh tomato sauce, and creamy frozen yogurt.

To see these and more of last week's hot posts, read on...

So, we've been bitten by the garden bug. We are gazing dreamily at little flats of greens and herbs, thinking about how productive they will be (we hope) all summer. Working in the container garden is priority one this weekend; we're transplanting beets and some lettuce to more permanent homes. Here are some more good ideas for cooking, reading, and gardening from The Kitchn this week:

• Week 8 of the Cure already! Plan a party!

• Are you trying to win this Veggie Gardener's Answer Book? We're reading all your good gardening questions with great interest!

• What are you doing for Mother's Day on Sunday? How about some poached eggs.

• Have you checked out this real chef's kitchen yet?

• All the spring greens make us feel virtuous. How about some dessert?

Are there spring berries yet where you live? We're still not seeing fresh, local berries here, so our plans for a dessert with fresh berries was foiled last weekend, and we had to turn to overwintered pears instead.

We also had a chunk of that white Stilton with lemon we wrote about last week; we didn't want to serve it as a dessert cheese again, and we were curious how it would work with the pears. Turns out we stumbled into one of the quickest, easiest, and most elegant desserts we've had lately.

We were really interested in this kitchen, part of a recent house tour at AT:Chicago. This kitchen is tiny, and the owners could have simply been dismayed by the closed-in shoebox and ordered takeout every night from then on. But no, Susannah and Jeff are cooks, and that wouldn't do.

Read on for more photos and their story of how they renovated this kitchen from an unusable butler's pantry into a very functional space.