This wonderful house was designed by Lopez Duplan Arquitectos, more specifically by the architect Claudi Lopez Duplan, and is located in Mexico City, Mexico. It was completed in the year 2015. The rectangular shape of the terrain made its designers seek to adapt to it in order to use most of the available space. For the main finishing of its exterior, stone was used, which is always a good choice,..
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10 Cooking Tips For Beginners To Help You Master The Kitchen
A recent survey showed that almost a third of the US population cannot cook. Decades of TV dinners and ready meals have left many of us unable to find our way around a kitchen. However, with some basic skills, you can find that cooking can be an enjoyable and healthy pastime.
Follow these cooking tips for beginners and easily become a master of the stove- even if you have never cooked before.
How to boil an egg
Let’s start with something simple- a perfect boiled egg.
It’s great for a quick snack or as an add-on to your salad. It is one of the simplest things to cook- put on a tight lid if you know how.
Cooking an egg to the perfect level of hardness can seem like a mystery. The trick, however, is in timing.
Put a pan on the stove with enough water to cover the eggs. Bring the water to a boil and then turn down the heat slightly to a simmer where the water bubbles gently. Add the eggs carefully and then start a timer. You need to leave them for 6 minutes if you want a runny egg yolk. Leave them for 8 minutes if you want the yolk to be set softly or 9 minutes if you want a hard boiled egg.
Cook a perfect steak
Similar to a perfect egg, cooking a perfect steak is a matter of timing. You need to heat a pan to be smoking hot. Don’t put any oil in the pan. Instead, rub your steak with some oil then some salt and pepper.
Place your steak in the pan and leave it alone! Resist the temptation to move it about. Wait for a minute or so until it is ready to be turned. Depending on the thickness of the steak, you need to cook it for about 1½ minutes per side for rare, 2 minutes for medium rare and about 2½ for medium.
However, rather than just relying on time, here is an additional test. Pinch your thumb and first finger, if you feel the flesh between your thumb and finger, this is what a rare steak should feel like. When you touch your middle finger to your thumb you will get the feel of medium rare and your ring finger will give you the feel of a medium cooked steak. You can use this as a way of telling if your steak is cooked perfectly every time.
Remember, allow your steak to rest for a few minutes before serving to allow it to reabsorb the juices and be totally delicious!
Handle a knife safely
Your kitchen can be a dangerous place. It’s filled with hot pans, sharp knives and more. Because of that, knowing how to handle a knife is vital. You also need to know how to select the correct knife for the job.
Your knife must be sharp! A blunt knife is more likely to slip and cut you. Treat your knives well and keep them razor sharp. Wash them by hand as your dishwasher will blunt the blades.
Remember that you always need to keep your fingers clear of the blade when cutting. Do this by curling your fingers so that the knife is guided by your knuckles and your fingertips are clear.
Speed is not essential. Practice will allow you to work faster and more accurately with your knife.
How to cook rice perfectly every time
Rice is a staple for many meals. However, wet or burnt rice will easily ruin a dish.
For perfect rice, you need to wash your rice until the water runs clear. Take a medium sized pan and put in about ½ a cup (90g) per person. Cover with water so that it’s about an inch above the rice and bring to a boil.
When it’s boiling, keep an eye on the rice as you need to look for holes in the surface of the rice. As soon as you see this, put in a tight lid and switch off the heat. Leave the rice for 10 minutes and serve immediately.
Make a pasta sauce
A tomato ragu is a simple pasta sauce which you can use to create a delicious and quick pasta dish, meatballs or some grilled chicken. It is a very versatile addition to many dishes.
Finely chop onion, carrot and celery and place them in a pan with a little olive oil. You want to gently heat this so that they soften without browning. Patience is everything here!
Add a tin of plum tomatoes, a sprinkle of basil, a bay leaf, salt, pepper and water. Mix well and simmer for at least 30 minutes or longer if you can. Make sure you stir it every so often and then serve with your favorite pasta or meat.
Become a BBQ master
Mastering a barbecue is a great skill and there is more to it than firing up the grill and hoping for the best.
Step one, preheat your grill. Placing meat on a cold grill will leave you with undercooked food. Heat the grill for ten minutes or so before you place your first items, ensuring it is searing hot.
Check if your meat is at room temperature. You should take it out of the refrigerator at least 20 minutes before you start cooking. You can use a meat thermometer. It may cost a few dollars, but it will save you from having burgers that are burnt on the outside, raw in the middle.
For ground beef, you need to ensure that you have an internal temperature of at least 160℉ to ensure that any bacteria is killed. There is nothing worse than being remembered for poisoning your guests!
Oil the grill using a brush so that nothing sticks. Use wood chips to add a smoky BBQ taste. You can wrap some corn on the cob in foil with butter to add to your steak and burgers.
Bluff your way with wine
There has never been a better time to enjoy a good wine. There is such a great selection available at affordable prices.
If you know nothing about wine, you should start by trying out a number of different wines. Many specialist shops will have taster sessions to help you understand wine better. While you are there, remember to jot down the names of the bottles you enjoyed.
Start with some classic wines, such as a Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot, and Rioja. From there, build your selection as you try more new tastes.
Make life simple with batch cooking
We have all been there. We get home from work and want something to eat but we can’t be bothered to cook. So, we reach for a take-out menu.
If you keep on experiencing this issue, then the answer is batch cooking. It’s the art of creating additional portions when you cook meals. It is perfect for dishes like chili con carne, casseroles and soups. You can portion them off into plastic boxes and freeze them until you need them for quick dinners.
Remember to package the meals carefully. There should be no excess air in the packaging as this can cause freezer burn.
Make your own bread
Making bread is something that’s deeply satisfying, particularly if your home starts getting filled with the delicious scent of warm bread. It may not be something you want to do every day, but it’s a great thing to do on the weekends.
The recipes are pretty simple. Basically, you’ll need yeast, warm water and flour kneaded together.
Enjoy cooking
Probably the best tip for anyone who wants to get into cooking is to enjoy it. Look at your time in the kitchen not as a chore, but an opportunity to chill out after work or as a weekend activity. Put on some great music, grab a beer or a glass of wine and enjoy creating some great dishes!
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Architectural Firm RIMA Arquitectura Designed a Project Located in Mexico
Architectural firm RIMA Arquitectura has designed a project in an area of 500 square meters located in the north of Santa Fe, in Mexico City, Mexico in 2015. The home was designed specifically by Ricardo Urias, Rodrigo Espinosa, Yolanda Bravo, Maria Martinez, Daniela Pereyra, David Castillo, and Luis Animas, and consists of a interesting office complex, which attempts to cover both the functional and aesthetic needs demanded by the client…
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How Physical Clutter Negatively Affects Your Productivity
You’re reading How Physical Clutter Negatively Affects Your Productivity, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Face it – clutter happens anywhere, and it happens to you too. You just can’t resist collecting certain things; whether it had sentimental value or it was expensive so you feel obligated to keep it – either way you’re creating clutter with things you haven’t touched in months or even years. In reality, you don’t need all that stuff – you already read that book and we’re pretty sure you’ll never going to wear that pair of shoes (nope, not even on a special occasion).
Recently there’s been a rise in popularity of ways of increasing productivity – and it’s no wonder because entrepreneurs and business owner all around are looking for ways to get things done as fast and as effective as possible. There are many kinds of methods, from relying on technology to not snoozing your alarm in the morning. But that’s just half of the solution. We have to look around in order to make things better for us and increase productivity.
Clutter Affects Your Life Negatively
It’s true – many researchers have proven to us until now that physical clutter in home or at workplace affects productivity in a negative way. A cluttered desk or office can negatively affect your mood, resilience, and ability to work productively, and disorder creates stress which can cause low mood. Very cluttered homes can provoke emotional and mental distress, mainly because its occupants feel like they have no control over their spaces and therefore lives.
Your ability to focus will is restricted in cluttered environments, as well as your brain’s ability to process information. Clutter makes you distracted and unable to process information as efficiently as you do in an uncluttered, organized, and serene environment. Simply put – clutter competes for your attention, and it may be exhausting to fight and resist it all the time, which increases your annoyance, all the while wearing your mental resources down – ultimately making you frustrated. And of course, there’s nothing more unproductive than a frustrated worker.
Unaddressed clutter can spiral into mental and emotional discontent, as your self-esteem is spiraling down. The effort required to address clutter seems burdensome, but if you avoid facing the clutter, chances are you’ll increase the mess. As it builds, so does your stress levels build; Feeling consistently unproductive negates one of your fundamental psychological needs: competence, a major factor of self-esteem.
Break the Endless Cycle
- Think about your workspace. How many things are piled up on your desk and around you? All those things are the cause of your brain having to work overtime during work day every time you need to focus. As long as you have a messy desk, your productivity won’t see any positive changes. Take some time of the day, skip a few lunches and stay a little longer to dedicate your time to organize your desk better. The main thing is to go through everything you don’t need anymore and stop holding on to it. You will be relieved at how much better your desk will look – which will also give you a motivation boost along with the feeling of accomplishment.
- Clutter isn’t only physical – it can be digital, too. That implies to your computer, phone, and tablet, anything digital you use on a daily basis. Your files, notifications, or better yet anything that comes with a “ping” sound is competing for your attention and you need to take care of it immediately. Your work computer has to be functional and easy to use. How can you be productive if you have to dig through a mountain of files to find what you need? When your brain has too much on its plate, it splits its power up and it results in you doing your job poorly or taking too much time to do it properly.
- Forget about your phone and office, focus on your mind. Your mind can also get cluttered and you have to find ways to get rid of the extra information you don’t need. We often hold onto lists, information, and problems – uselessly crowding our brains with too much thought. Mental clutter is often caused when you clear physical clutter, but don’t necessarily deal with it. This couldn’t be truer for business owners who find themselves multitasking endlessly. For solving this problem try having a mental dump every few days. This translates into creating a to-do list each morning and prioritizing it. It’s impossible to do everything in one day – that’s why you need to keep everything contained and deal with it only when you are ready.
- Ultimately – it all comes from home. An uncluttered home is the best way to start clearing your mind and improving your mental health. It may sound daunting at first, but there are many methods for uncluttering a home which you can take on. You can start room by room, or clear out by categories, whichever you prefer. Sort things into ones you’re going to sell, give away and throw out. Don’t worry about piling things up in your front yard, Pink Junk is the best way to get rid of them, and recycle them, too. Besides, when you sell the things you don’t need, you can earn an extra bit of cash for something like a vacation or a new car.
Staying productive today is one of the main priorities of our society. Clutter, whether physical or digital, is something you’ll always have to deal with, but it can be controlled. By taking a few extra minutes out of our day to organize ourselves physically and mentally, we will find ourselves making up for those minutes when we become more productive.
You’ve read How Physical Clutter Negatively Affects Your Productivity, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Clothes That Don’t Need You
Walking mesmerized through the Rei Kawakubo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum was the closest I’ve come since to the feeling of Noh theater. Without always understanding what I was looking at, I was gripped by the kind of melancholy that seems to accompany the toughest, most searching and demanding levels of beauty.
Lee Markham: Horror Beyond Boundaries
I suspect I might be breaking the rules here, but I’m also fairly confident I’ve got a technicality with which I can get off my own hook, and breaking the rules is in my nature — my book The Truants breaks several rules of its own. I’ve been asked for a list of my favorite works of horror. The key word there (which provides the aforementioned technicality) is works, because my list is not a list of books alone. Apologies . . . but tough. It is doubly fitting to bend this unspoken “books only” rule because The Truants is actually a bastard child of all these works (and of course plenty others, but you don’t have all day. Nor, in fact, do I), I’d argue, as much in form as it is in function. I’d even go so far as to say that The Truants is, to my mind at least, as close to being a concept album as it is a novel — a collection of tracks that come together to form a narrative whole . . . but that’s probably just me.
Anyway, let’s do this thing . . .
By Stephen King
There are probably more obvious choices in the King canon: Misery, The Stand, and The Shining are fairly stock (and, fair’s fair, solid) responses. IT is probably my favorite of his — it’s certainly the one I love the most. But Desperation is, for my money, his most balls-to-the-wall horrifying book. It’s mean. It’s cruel and utterly punishing. Much like the God King has oft stated the book is about. In Desperation, King himself takes on the mantle of the cruel god of his fictional creations with absolute mercilessness and, certainly as an author, it’s awesome to behold. Awful. But awesome nonetheless. And horrifying unlike anything else he’s done.
By Manic Street Preachers
The first of my rule-breaking choices is an album. It’s also a towering work of existential horror. You could probably just pore over the lyric sheet and meticulous art design and photography of the thing and be left in a state of profound existential torpor. This might in fact be the version of the Holy Bible that Colonel Kurtz found out there at the end of his river. The fact that its primary creative force, lyricist Richey Edwards, disappeared (presumed dead) shortly after its creation does sadly add to its creative veracity, but incredibly it doesn’t define it. Calling an album The Holy Bible might be considered a monumental act of chutzpah were it not for the fact that it was so nakedly truthful to its author’s anguished and horrified reality, his gospel.
By Mark Z. Danielewski
By Alan Moore
There are a hundred reasons for each of these to be on the list. But, for this list, and the reason they share a spot, it’s because they’re the only two books that have ever made me quite literally drop them in shock. And, so as not to spoil them, I will only give you the barest details here . . .
In House of Leaves, there’s a long and fairly dry section about the science of acoustics and, specifically, echoes. It’s a rather soporific passage. Interesting if you want to know about acoustics. And echoes. (Yep, me neither.) It’s very thorough. But it lulls you . . . and then it does something. And when it did it to me I dropped the book.
In Voice of the Fire, that moment comes at the end of a book of tales across time. You’ve met characters who’ve endured experiences in Northampton, England, over the span of 5,000 years, each experience becoming a myth that informs the truth of each subsequent character. The true protagonist of the book you learn by the end is in fact time itself, and the horror of the tale lies in the casual way time obliterates all the subjective truths and experiences we believe make us what we are. Time cares nothing for our version of events. And time will write our history, however much we might imagine we’ve defined our own lives and selves. When we go, and we become first a memory and then, perhaps, a story, we don’t get to write that story. Time does that. So, all of these things bring us to the final chapter. To here. And now. And that’s when the author turns and looks out from the pages of the book and he sees you. Looks. Right. At. You. Yep. That happens in this book. Dropped the damn thing when it happened to me. I was in the bath at the time too, which was annoying.
Here’s the next rule breaker, this time a film. Jacob’s Ladder is an anomaly. It’s written by the guy who wrote Ghost — you know, that cheesy after-lifer with Priscilla Presley and Frank Drebin and the pottery . . . no, wait, sorry . . . Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. That. And it’s directed by the guy that directed 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction. It should be rubbish. But it’s not. It’s actually perfect. It’s the story of a Vietnam vet struggling with PTSD in late ’70s New York. He sees demons. He’s haunted by guilt and loss and grief. But then maybe it’s not about just that. Maybe something else is going on. But here’s the thing about Jacob’s Ladder that makes it perfect: it has rigorously stress-tested the motivations of its every moment. The first time through you might think, why did that character do that? Why did Jacob feel this, or think that? On subsequent watches, when you’ve been clued in to the truth of it, you can swim in the existentially internalized construct of its narrative: you’re inside Jacob’s head for every single second. Every character and motivation is defined by Jacob’s own understanding of his own life and the people and experiences that populate it. His insecurities. His guilt. His pride. His desires. The whole thing is a portrait of a very human psyche trying to make sense of everything, and ultimately having to accept that he can’t, that he just has to let it go. By contrast however, the film itself actually adds up more and more the more you watch it. It is absolutely watertight. It is also beautiful and profound — which, I’d argue, all the best horror is. Nothing can confront and explore our fears like horror does when it’s done right, and Jacob’s Ladder does it righter than pretty much anything.
By Blake Morrison
This one is tough. It’s the factual account of the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger by two ten-year-olds. Morrison went to the trial, met the families, walked the streets they walked. And it broke his heart. It’ll break yours, too. I’m disinclined to say too much about it because it’s not make-believe, not like The Truants. It’s not imagined. A baby died. And two children lost their lives to the judgment and demonization of a society that longed to believe it wasn’t implicit in the horrific tragedy of what happened. What Morrison manages to do here is paint a portrait of what horror truly is. It’s randomness and purposelessness. It’s grim inevitability. And it teaches us what it feels like to be responsible for it. It is a book so full of love, sadness, humility and empathy that it’s almost beyond description. I held it in my mind when I wrote The Truants. Which isn’t to say that I think The Truants is in any way as courageous or important . . . but I do like to think that The Truants at least honors the value of documentary horror in the way As If does. The Truants is a serious book. A heartbroken one, too. Because horror can every now and then be those things. If we’re not too scared to go there.
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My Absolute Darling
A novelist who summons a monster runs a terrible risk. Bringing one to convincing life can threaten to eclipse the story’s other characters, particularly the people who are his victims. In his grab-you-by-the-throat debut novel, My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent has created such a monster in Martin Alveston, who physically and sexually abuses his fourteen-year-old daughter. Martin is so fully realized that the daughter Tallent conjures would have to be remarkable to serve as his counterweight. The half-wild, vulnerable Turtle Alveston, whose conscience is the beacon of this dark book, proves up to the challenge. She has a center of gravity all her own.
Martin and his daughter live in isolation in a slowly disintegrating house on the Northern California coast, where “rose runners have prized off clapboards that now hang snarled in the canes.” Tallent grew up in the area, and a deep knowledge of the natural world suffuses his book, which is full of stunning descriptions. When Turtle dives into a spring-fed pool, for instance, “she opens her eyes to the water and looks up and sees writ huge across the rain-dappled surface the basking shapes of newts with their fingers splayed and their golden-red bellies exposed to her, their tails churning lazily.”
Martin believes that the end times are near, courtesy of global warming and environmental degradation. In his eyes, survival skills and an intimate familiarity with guns and knives are at least as important as schoolwork. The walls of Martin’s bedroom are lined with philosophy books by the likes of David Hume and George Berkeley. He is a charming conversationalist and liable to spin a monologue on, say, the nature of human consciousness. Yet his erudite mind is cratered by tar pits. Martin leeches a casual, bone-deep misogyny that his daughter has soaked up and often salts into her self-talk (“You bitch, you can do this, you bitch”), and his temper flares unpredictably.
What makes Martin terrifying isn’t so much the violence he metes out — though when it comes it’s breathtaking. It’s the tension that haunts even the quietest scenes. Living with violence means that each moment is inflected with the potential to be rent open. Though he limns a vicious relationship between Martin and his own father, and the ghost of the early death of Turtle’s mother, Tallent , to his credit, doesn’t spell out how Martin has come to be as depraved as he is. As John Steinbeck understood when he created Cathy in East of Eden, a “malformed soul” can never be explained satisfactorily.
Tallent acquaints us with Martin through Turtle’s observant, loving eyes. She desperately wants to please him — whether by hitting the bull’s eye on a shooting target or acing a vocabulary test — and silently wills him to placate school officials when they threaten to intercede on her behalf. Yet there is a whisper of self-knowledge in Turtle that blossoms, during the course of the novel, into a full awareness of what her life with Martin is depriving her of, and the damage it has done.
That journey is nurtured by her friendship with two boys whom she meets during one of her feral roams in the woods after they’ve become lost on a camping trip. Jacob and Brett — cerebral, nerdy, exuberant — admire and accept her. They call her a “ninja.” She is welcomed into Jacob’s resplendent home, where adults sit at the table with their children, drinking wine and making conversation. She develops an innocent crush on Jacob. She starts to envision her life — and her inner self — differently. She begins to want things that life with Martin can never provide.
Turtle’s awakening, as she continues to hold her father’s love in her heart even as she comes to recognize his ugliness, is the arc of Tallent’s story. My Absolute Darling is full of dramatic events, including a harrowing account of her and Jacob’s self-rescue after being washed out to sea by a giant wave. What makes the novel riveting, though, is Tallent’s gift for describing the psychological terrain Turtle traverses. The dynamics between abusive parents and their children are written about much more often than they are understood by their authors. Tallent captures the nuances.
Scene by scene, he builds the scaffolding for Turtle’s self-realization through gleams of insight. When her father cavalierly chips the blade of a knife she’s been gifted, she thinks, “I need you to be hard on me, because I am no good for myself, and you make me do what I want to do but cannot do for myself; but still, but still — you are sometimes not careful; there is something in you, something less than careful, something almost — I don’t know, I am not sure, but I know it’s there.”
Turtle’s determination to take care of her few possessions amid chaos, her warring impulses to protect her father and exploit his weaknesses, and the cruelties she deals to well-intentioned people who threaten to breach the levies she’s built between herself and the world ring true. The violent climax of the book, spectacular as it is, is less heart-stopping than the moment when Turtle makes the irrevocable decision to break away, determined to protect someone who is even more vulnerable than she is.
Comparisons between My Absolute Darling and another novel published earlier this year, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, by Hannah Tinti, are inevitable. In Tinti’s tale, a retired gun for hire is raising an adolescent daughter, Loo, in a small New England town. Strikingly, both books open with a father coaching his daughter to shoot a gun, and in both the death of a mother haunts the characters. Yet Samuel Hawley is no Martin Alveston. He’s a father with good intentions, trying to escape his past, and his attempts at parenting Loo are loving, if crude.
Tinti’s novel, fine as it is, illustrates the perils of writing a story about larger-than-life parents and their children, for it is Samuel who dominates Twelve Lives. Loo’s coming-of-age struggles are overwhelmed by her father’s turmoil and exploits. In My Absolute Darling, Tallent has created — to use a shopworn but apt description — an unforgettable heroine, whose greatest challenge is to recognize the good and the bad within her and to choose the good.
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Flash floods send Texans into ‘survival mode’ as…
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
The author of fifteen works of fiction and nonfiction, Jennifer Finney Boylan may be known to most readers via her bestselling memoir She’s Not There. As she tells Barnes & Noble’s Miwa Messer in this episode, her new book Long Black Veil also draws on events from her life — but here Boylan weaves them into a droll, offbeat thriller in which the unexpected consequences of one night kick off a tale about secrets and lies, silence and truth, and the triumph of love and friendship.
On a warm August night in 1980, six college students sneak into the dilapidated ruins of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, looking for a thrill. With a pianist, a painter and a teacher among them, the friends are full of potential. But it’s not long before they realize they are locked in—and not alone. When the friends get lost and separated, the terrifying night ends in tragedy, and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences reverberate through the survivors’ lives. As they go their separate ways, trying to move on, it becomes clear that their dark night in the prison has changed them all. Decades later, new evidence is found, and the dogged detective investigating the cold case charges one of them—celebrity chef Jon Casey— with murder. Only Casey’s old friend Judith Carrigan can testify to his innocence.
But Judith is protecting long-held secrets of her own – secrets that, if brought to light, could destroy her career as a travel writer and tear her away from her fireman husband and teenage son. If she chooses to help Casey, she risks losing the life she has fought to build and the woman she has struggled to become. In any life that contains a “before” and an “after,” how is it possible to live one life, not two?
See more from Jennifer Finney Boylan here.
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Kenya: The Election & the Cover-Up
Another rigged election in Africa is not news. But that US election observers were so quick to endorse it is shocking. Perhaps they believed that wrapping the election up quickly would prevent violence. A far more troubling possibility is that the US wants Kenyatta to remain in power, at the expense of democracy.
Sig Nordal 