DUMBO Street Art

What I love about New York is the art that is everywhere. Because thousands of artists flock to the city to try their luck, areas such as Brooklyn's DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), home to a lot of artist studios, organizations and exhibit halls, benefit from the talent that just spontaneously produces art for public consumption.

Here are a few prints and random street graffiti on walls of its streets. 

DIY Repurpose: Rolled-Up Magazine Boot Shapers

Aren't you tired of the sad shape your boots take after removing the initial stuffing out of them when you bring them home from the store?

Especially with soft leathers, they tend to just collapse and take on a wrinkled shape, ruining the beauty of the boot and the leather.

Commercially available plastic boot shapers are available for $10 and up, but I like using rolled up magazines because they are free, they recycle paper, and they are heavy enough to keep my boots standing without effort.

Using two or more rolled up magazines secured with rubber bands or duct tape, you can create your own boot shapers according to the shape of your boot. You may also use longer magazines or big shopping bags if your boots are longer.

Now I can store my boots upright, and keep their shape in shoe bins when I store them in the spring. Plus I feel better putting my old magazines to use. 

Alternative Views: New York

Under the Brooklyn Bridge

 Grand Army Plaza and Central Park after a winter storm.

 Queensboro Bridge

Wonton Soup (Filipino Pancit Molo)

What could be better than a hearty soup on a winter night? Pancit Molo is a wonton soup popular in the Philippines, not to be confused with other types of pancit, a term meaning noodles in Filipino. It merges Chinese wontons with the Spanish love for garlic and the addition of milk at the end.  This was a soup often made in my home when I was growing up that I learned to make on my own when I moved away. Now I get to share it with you!

I enjoy making this soup with homemade pork wontons that I mix with vegetables and the perfect crunch provided by water chestnuts. I enjoy how the wonton wrapper soaks up the broth and almost falls apart like in this photo below.

For bit of history, Pancit Molo is a dumpling/wonton soup whose etymology is derived from the seaport in the town of Molo, Philippines. Chinese merchants introduced wonton soup to that area, and locals began calling it Pancit Molo, perhaps for a lack of a term for wontons or siomai (shumai), or their wrappers which only resembled noodles (pancit) at that time. That explains the popular misnomer.

And now for how to make Pancit Molo: