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Gingerbread Men Ice Cream Sandwiches - C. Rule

Make Gingerbread Man Ice Cream Sandwiches

How to make yummy ice cream sandwiches using gingerbread men—both scratch and cheater versions.

Gingerbread Men Ice Cream Sandwiches - C. RuleHOLIDAY 2012 | Forget lettuce, tomato and leftover turkey stuffed between toasted ciabatta. The sweetest, most memorable holiday sandwich—the one that screams You Need to Eat Me for Christmas—is pictured at the top of this story and is made from a layer of chilly ice cream and chewy gingerbread men. Read more

sliding house-nova scotia

Out Of The Ordinary Vacation Rentals

This curated catalog of VRBO (vacation rentals by owner) is an invaluable resource for chic nomads wanting cool places to hide and play.

sliding house-nova scotia

 

TRAVEL ADVISORY | If you are a great fan of architecture and interior design and want to stay somewhere visually interesting when you travel, you’re going to love boutique-homes.com, a website that features a collection of thoughtfully designed accommodations (both private homes and wee hotels) that you can rent around the globe for a wide range of prices.

“Temporary housing for the incurably stylish nomad” is how Californians Heinz Legler and Veronique Lievre describe their curated cache of creative digs—everything from a trailer in Texas to a palace in Italy—which you can view and book online. The couple’s handpicked assortment of VRBO (vacation rentals by owner) is a testament to their impeccable taste and investigative eyes.

CLICK THROUGH to see a few of the awesome lodgings they’ve discovered both near and far away. You’ll want to start packing now. We know we do.—Eds Read more

Roma dress - Icebreaker

Icbreaker’s Roma Is The Ultimate LBD

The perfect little black dress will take you from dawn to dusk, office to dinner—oh yes, and even around the world.

Roma dress - Icebreaker

 

BUY RIGHT | The perfect little black dress is to women what a well-tailored suit is to men: a garment that works in a range of situations. And the most perfect little black dress of all may be the Roma wrap dress from Icebreaker. Read more

Big Sur Highway - Irven Rule

When Nature Calls Big Sur Is The Place To Be

Jump into the wild by cruising Big Sur, one of the all-time great North American road trips.

Big Sur Highway - Irven RuleTRAVEL ADVISORY | Want to drop off the planet for a few days, ditch the cellphone, skip the Starbucks, take a break from recreational shopping? One of California’s most beautiful and elemental places to get away from everything urban in the fall is Big Sur on the central coast. Big Sur isn’t an exact spot on the map, it’s a road trip: 90 miles of two-lane blacktop that zigzag around the edge of the wind-wracked headlands of the Santa Lucia Mountains mere yards, it seems, before they nose-dive into the Pacific Ocean. Cruising along this jagged, Amalfi-like coastline is—to borrow words from hippie vernacular—a mind-blowing head-trip. It’s impossible not to feel spiritual or to reflect on your place in the cosmos when a natural setting this powerful is shoving itself in your face. Read more

Santa Picture

Shooting Santa: A Print Photo Has its Place

In this age of age of digital photos displayed in electronic flip frames, a print photograph taken as part of a tradition definitely has its place.

Santa PictureHOLIDAY SHOTS| My longtime friend Elyse is an incurable romantic who still lives in the big, old house she grew up in surrounded by furnishings that belonged to her mother (who had exquisite taste), and interesting, idiosyncratic things she and her husband, Ben, have acquired over the years.

While both Elyse and Ben have careers that distract them, they are determined to stay focused on family at Christmas, making time for (at least a few) rituals that result in strong memories that contribute to their family’s story. For as long as I have known them, one of the things they do every year is take silly Santa pictures, and I love visiting their house over the holidays to see them set out in individual frames, their three kids, who are now young adults, looking progressively more sheepish as the years go by posing on some random department-store Santa’s knee—and then finally reaching an age where you can see in their pictures that they have embraced the tradition and find the experience kitschy good fun. Read more

Truffle Puree Appetizer - C. Phaisalakani

Easy Appie #4: Gruyère With Truffle Purée

Like nothing you’ve tasted before, this decadent truffle infused hors d’oeuvre is made under 10 minutes.

Truffle Puree Appetizer - C. PhaisalakaniENTERTAIN SMART | When she isn’t busy shooting portraits or working as Frugalbits’s photo editor and chief photographer, Casey Phaisalakani loves to eat and then blog about it on fingerlickineats.com. Phaisalakani grew up in Hong Kong, a city rich in culinary diversions, in a family jazzed about eating good food. Her mother, a keen amateur cook who enjoys entertaining, first whipped up this appetizer—a dead easy three-ingredient affair made of truffle purée and gruyère on toasty bread—as an amuse bouche to enjoy before a soup course at a formal diner she was hosting. It proved so popular her family now serves it as an hors d’oeuvre at cocktail parties or for tea time. Read more

Kraft Paper Christmas Wrap

Make Your Own Kraft Paper Gift Wrap

Simple white kraft paper offers infinite wrapping possibilities. Here are three to get you started.

Kraft Paper Christmas WrapWhite kraft paper, the kind that comes in big rolls from art supply stores, is the perfect blank canvas to use for wrapping  gifts. I like it plain, dressed up with beautiful ribbon topped off with greenery such as sprigs of holly or bits of twig. I also like it decorated in the ways I’ve shown here. Read more

Live, Potted Christmas Tree - Clinton Hussey

Super Sources For Eco- Friendly Christmas Trees

A symbol of life after winter, the greenest tree is real, fresh, local and even organic.

Live, Potted Christmas Tree - Clinton HusseyLast year in an effort to simplify my life, I looked into buying an artificial Christmas tree, preferably one that came predecorated and opened and shut like an umbrella: I could pop it up before Christmas, then collapse and store it till next year. Then I discovered that the whole point of a Christmas tree is to bring evergreen trees or branches indoors as reminder that winter will eventually end and the world will turn green again.

Real Christmas trees are green in more than colour as they are a renewable crop and often grown on land unsuitable for growing much else. And like any crop, there are different shades of green.

3 Ways To Get A Real Green Christmas Tree Read more

Easy Appie #3: Herb & Pepper Goat Cheese

Stellar food stylist/writer Béatrice Peltre makes goat cheese look amazing.

ENTERTAIN SMART | Some things are so stunningly beautiful that you just want to eat them up—like the arresting food photographs taken by Béatrice Peltre, a French expat who lives in Boston and writes, styles and shoots a food column for the Boston Globe. Peltre also shares her adventures in cooking and eating on her seriously addictive blog, La Tartine Gourmande, which has been (among its many well-deserved accolades) recognized as the best special interest food blog of 2010 by Saveur magazine. Read more

Gift-Wrap That’s Easy, Quick And Reusable

Forget gift paper and ribbon, traditional Japanese wrapping cloth is easy, quick and reusable.

WASTE NOT | The first Christmas morning my husband spent with my family was a culture shock. Before we opened our presents, my mother handed each of us a knife, which we used to carefully slit the adhesive tape instead of ripping the paper off in the mad frenzy my husband was used to. When all the presents had been opened, my mother collected and folded the paper to save until the following year. We would no more have thought of throwing it out than tossing the Christmas ornaments after dismantling the tree. Read more