Smoke & Oak.

There may be snow on the ground and slush in the streets, but thanks to this gorgeous - and very intriguing - recipe by Beth Kirby of the blog Local Milk, I'm suddenly dreaming of ice cream. Ice cream flavored with toasted oak chips, smoked sea salt, and a drizzle of black tea caramel, that is.  

Beth originally posted the recipe to Local Milk in late September, writing, "This is a spectral time of year, romantic and eerie and crisp...This ice cream tastes like it." I have a hunch it'd be the perfect treat for the moody-gray days of winter, too. (I'd eat it inside, by the radiator, of course.)

Find the full post at Beth's blog, Local Milk, here. (And be sure to click around while you're there - everything is stunningly beautiful.) See more photos by Beth in her portfolio, here. 

Poetry, Prose, Pork Posole.

In many ways, Paper and Salt is the blog of my dreams. Written by a young avid bookworm and foodie, the blog "attempts to recreate and reinterpret the dishes that iconic authors discuss in their letters, diaries, essays, and fiction." Examples include Walt Whitman's cranberry coffee cake, Agatha Christie's  scones and Devonshire cream, and John Steinbeck's pork posole.

See more at Paper and Salt, here. 

And speaking of the written word, what have you been reading lately? It's been a slow year for me thus far on the book front. On my list for when time permits: Zadie Smith's "NW," "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain, and Eddie Huang's "Fresh Off the Boat." What's on yours?

Handwritten Recipes.

Hats off to Handwritten Recipes, a site paying homage to recipes found tucked inside books.  (The third one below, which is a little hard to read, is a recipe for something called "Charlie Chaplin Cocktail," discovered in the "Thesaurus of Humor.")

Also, this one in particular made me scratch my head - it's a recipe for "condensed milk salad dressing" found in Donald R. Griffin's "Echoes of Bats and Men." Hmm.

Via the Paris Review. Have a happy Monday!

Open Houses.

Three cheers for Victoria Hannan's Other People's Houses, which offers a look into, well, the houses of other people. The black-and-white kitten over the mantle in Anabela Carneiro's beautiful Toronto home caught my attention first (for obvious reasons),

and I love this charming collection of clocks, at photographer Hilda Grahnat's Swedish residence. The mismatched gallery wall is wonderful, too.

Visit Other People's Houses, here, and Victoria's blog (one of my favorites), here. Found via moxee.