There once was a beautiful collection of handmade children’s accessories by Jen List and Stacy Waddington. The story began with The Three Little Pigs, but those little pink piggies aren’t the only adorable animals in Storybook Land. Before we get to the part where everyone lives happily ever after, we’d like to introduce you to some more cuddly creatures, the stars of chapter two of our uncommon fairy tale, The Three Bears. (And their friend, Goldilocks, of course!)
We swear our pants got tighter just looking at the entries to our Cooking Local Pinterest Contest. We asked you all to combine fabulous food and hometown pride in a Pinterest board showing your favorite things to cook and eat where you live, and you delivered bigtime. Big, as in, we’re going to need bigger pants soon.
Lori Smart’s board highlighted some of Eugene, Oregon’s superfoods: salmon, blueberries, chard, wine, and beer (don’t tell us that Sweet Cheeks Chardonnay and Ninkasi Believer Double Red Ale don’t look super). It’s kind of a shame that Eugene Beliebers are, no doubt, too young for Believer.
The pins collected by Greenville, NC’s Allyson Rideout featured some racy southern food items generally not seen here in NYC: cheesecake that drinks creme de menthe, shrimp and grits all hot for each other, peanuts reverting to their base legume-y natures, and various flaming meats. Heavens to Betsy! We had to fan ourselves while ogling this board.
On to Melanie Feigl of Spokane, WA. Melanie! Why, oh why, did you torture us with your pins of delectable fresh-baked cupcakes, huckleberry cake donuts, and even better worse, beer-battered onion rings? Have mercy, woman! We are only human! Not to mention how you filled us with envy; Spokane has a restaurant with a ceiling made of two humongous stained-glass peacocks, and a diner that’s a converted rail car. We have zero of those in New York.
Like our runner-ups, winner Katie Selman of Tampa, FL made us salivate. Scallops in gumbo and polenta, or paired with roasted squash. Florida orange cake and cookies. All yummy.
But seriously, Katie, how do you expect us to look at the following without breaking down sobbing?
1) Reese’s Peanut Butter Banana Bread
2) “The Brewski” cupcake (“moist chocolate cake marinated in Maduro Brown Ale, blended with chocolate ganache filling, topped with whipped Kahlua icing, garnished with chocolate and toffee bits”)
3) “The Pumpkin Bomb” (“similar to an Irish Car Bomb, “ this lethal-sounding beverage combines Cigar City Brewing’s “Good Gourd Imperial Pumpkin Ale, brewed with Ceylon cinnamon, Jamaican all-spice, Zanzibar cloves and nutmeg, with a shot of Baileys Irish Cream and Pinnacle Whip (whipped cream flavored vodka), sprinkled with cinnamon”).
Through our tears, we managed to note how artfully Katie put her images together, a collection ranging from fifties vintage Florida orange juice, to a palm tree scene made entirely of Florida fruit, to funky local street signs. They were diverse, and yet all conveyed the Florida theme, including the UncommonGoods products she chose, like our Rowboat Salad Bowl, our Toast Glasses filled with orange juice, Cantaloupe Bowls, and Spanish Sangria Pitcher.
Join the foodie lovefest by checking out these fabulous Pinterest boards, and help us congratulate winner Katie!
Show us your eco-side this October on Instagram. Snap a photo each day inspired by the day’s prompt and post it with #UGphotoaday. We will be sharing our favorites on the blog and Facebook.
We will be posting as well so be sure to follow along (@UncommonGoods) to see what we come up with!
We’re not the only ones with tech on the brain. With the launch of the iPhone 5, the whole world has been talking about operating systems, hardware and accessories. And how about that map app!?! Well, UncommonGoods has been stirring up some exciting news alongside Apple and we’re happy to announce that our Artist iPhone Cases are available for preorder so you can dress your favorite gadget in fine art.
Check out some other ways we are talking about tech this week!
Laura from Customer Service takes the Portable Magnetic Speaker on a camping expedition in Upstate New York.
Maggie Ryan, blogger of Very Pretty Please stops by to get inspired by our Artistic iPhone Cases.
Systems Administrator Jonathan shares his favorite UncommonGoods tech and gadget picks.
And last, but never least, check out our Tech, Gadgets and Geekery Pinterest board. Have a tech-related Pinterest board of your own? Leave a link below so we can check it out!
Do you look to your favorite pinner when it’s time to make dinner? Are you always hungry to share your love for your city or state? Then our latest Pinterest contest is for you. We’re combining fabulous food and hometown pride in the UncommonGoods Cooking Local Contest.
Cook up your best board and leave a link and an email address in the comments below and/or on the original pin in our Cooking Local board and you’ll be entered to win an UncommonGoods prize package featuring designs from CatStudio.
The package includes a Hand-embroidered Pillow, a Geography Apron, and a Geography Towel. We’ll announce the winner on Friday, October 5 on our blog.
Follow us on Pinterest for more updates. Good luck and happy pinning!
Entries must be received by midnight on Thursday, October 4.
Open to US citizens only.
Meet Pasqualina, Executive Director of Recycle-A-Bicycle and one of our judges the Bike Lovers Design Challenge.
What is one uncommon fact about yourself?
I’ve traveled to 47 of the USA’s 50 states
What is Recycle-A-Bicycle? Recycle-A-Bicycle is a community based bike shop and grassroots non-profit organization that utilizes the bicycle as a resource to foster youth development, environmental education, community engagement, and healthy living. Through retail storefronts, social entrepreneurship, innovative programs, and an annual Youth Bike Summit, Recycle-A-Bicycle empowers the youth of New York City and beyond.
What kind of bike do you ride?
I ride a Fuji touring bike that fits like a glove. From the mountains in California to the city streets of NYC, this bike is both speedy and solid, good for distance riding and strolls.
Where is your favorite place to ride?
The Rockaways!
How do you define good design?
When every part informs the whole.
Cast a vote for your favorite Bike Lovers Design Challenge design and leave a comment to help Pasqualina and Emily decide the winner.
I had a bunch of leftover cooked jasmine rice in the fridge and a new UncommonGoods gadget I wanted to try, the Garlic Rocker. So I did the math and came up with Garlic + Rice = Garlic Rice. Clever, eh?
Googling “garlic rice” in search of a recipe led me to the discovery that in the Phillippines, it’s a breakfast staple called “sinangag” in Tagalog. Garlic for breakfast?! I was on it like white on rice.
Because fried rice doesn’t require exact measurements–you can judge just by looking how much of each ingredient you want to add to it–I looked at several recipes and more or less winged it from there. (The recipe links are at the bottom of this page.) I also consulted UncommonGoods’ two Filipino software developers, Albert Tingson and Orlando Geronimo.
Orlando (right, in photo) said, “How about if you bring the sinangag to work and we’ll have a good breakfast with some tapa and fried egg. We call it ‘Tapsilog.'” All three of us were enthused about this idea until we remembered that we have no way to cook fried eggs at work.
With any kind of fried rice, you want to get all the elements (except herbs, if you’re using them) cooked and chopped before the “frying” begins (actually, sautéeing in my case, as I used a flat pan instead of a wok).
I put some “fancy” generic store brand frozen peas in a bowl and defrosted/cooked them in the microwave. When they were done, I set them aside.
I started scrambling a couple of eggs. The secret to good scrambled eggs is low heat, minimal scrambling, and removing the eggs when they’re still slightly underdone, because they’ll cook a little more from their internal heat. That way, the eggs turn out soft and delicious rather than rubbery and tasteless.
When the eggs were done, I sort of stab/chopped them into irregular, bite-size chunks with the plastic spatula I was using in the non-stick pan. Then I set them aside.
I took my leftover rice out of the fridge and broke up the stuck-together hunks so that it’d be ready to be scattered into the pan when the time came. I set that aside, too.
Then I cut each garlic clove in half lengthwise so that it would lay flat and stable.
Now I was ready to ROCK. I pressed the rocker down onto a nice, fat garlic clove and rocked it back and forth to cut through the whole clove.
Oh, how beautiful the results were. Perfect little bullets of garlic that resembled part of a honeycomb. Without bothering to scrape off the “bullets,” I put another couple of cloves underneath the tool and pressed/rocked them, too.
Because I’m a garlic glutton, I rocked a few more cloves. Then it was time to sauté the garlic bullets.
I used peanut oil. Chinese cooks normally use it because it has a high “smoke point” – meaning it can get a lot hotter than, say, canola oil, corn oil, or butter, before it starts smoking and burning. Also, its flavor goes better with Asian food than olive oil’s does. (If you live near an Asian grocery, buy it there. It’s a lot more expensive at typical American groceries.)
I put maybe three tablespoons more into the pan than I needed for sautéeing the garlic, so that there’d be plenty of gloriously garlicky oil left over to fry the rice with.
I’m an impatient cook and I hate to watch over things, which is why I very often overcook my hamburgers and burn my garlic. Burning garlic ruins it. It tastes really acrid and bad. So I made myself pay attention and kept the heat low-ish. I didn’t ruin it! OK, actually a few pieces were overcooked, but I deleted them.
One of the recipes I’d found said to add the rice to the garlic in the pan, but I didn’t want to risk cooking the garlic any longer. Instead, I set it aside with the other prepped ingredients, leaving as much as possible of the now-flavored oil in the pan.
It was time to put together the sinangag. I raised the heat to high and added the rice, stirring it in order to make sure it all got some oil on it. I cooked it for maybe three minutes, not enough to brown it, but sufficient to get it hot and give it some of the character of the hot oil. You can smell when it’s right — it’ll remind you a little bit of popcorn cooking in oil.
I added the peas and eggs and stirred to more or less evenly distribute them in the rice and to get all three elements to flavor-kiss a bit. Then I turned off the heat, added the garlic, and stirred some more. A wave of garlic bliss came over me while putting so much into what was only a couple of servings of rice.
And there you have it. In imitation of the photo accompanying one of the recipes I’d found, I pressed it into a little bowl-type thingy (I don’t know what to call it because it isn’t round like a bowl — mini-crock?) and made it look all nice and photogenic.
I served some of it into a bowl that I know is an actual bowl because it’s rounded, added a couple of dashes of soy sauce, and dug in. It was a beautiful, heavenly, garlic symphony, much more than the sum of its humble parts.
Recipe: Sinangag (Filipino Garlic Rice)
Ingredients
(I’m not giving amounts because it’s up to you and how much leftover rice you have.)
Leftover cooked rice (it should be at least one day old)
Frozen green peas
Eggs
Garlic cloves (lots)
Peanut oil
Salt or soy sauce
Preparation steps
1. Break up the rice if it’s sticking together; set aside.
2. Defrost and cook the peas. Set them aside.
3. Gently scramble the eggs; then break them up into small pieces. Set them aside.
4. Peel and cube (or “rock” – but do not use garlic press) the garlic into quarter-inch-size chunks and saute until golden–not dark–brown.
5. Set frying pan or wok on a burner and set heat to high.
6. As soon as oil has a subtle, shimmery sheen (but before it smokes), add rice and cook for about 3 minutes, until the rice is hot and perhaps very slightly browned in a few places, but no more. Turn heat down to medium.
7. Add the peas and eggs and stir to mix; cook for about a minute.
8. Turn off heat; add garlic and stir.
9. Add salt or soy sauce to taste.
Recipe links
Sinangag – Filipino Garlic Fried Rice
Garlic Fried Rice
Sinangag – Eggs and Peas Fried Rice
How to cook fried rice (Sinangag na Kanin)
When you think UncommonGoods you probably think unique, creatively designed and, well, uncommon products. Perhaps UncommonGoods is even your go-to place for gifts for those hard-to-buy-for family and friends and maybe even the place to gift yourself (don’t we all do that occasionally).
What you may not know is that UncommonGoods is voluntarily meeting higher standards of social and environmental performance through the B Corporation certification. The B Impact Assessment, conducted by the non-profit organization B Lab, aims to look beyond the marketing efforts of a company to assess the true impact of a business on their workers, community, and the environment.
Earlier this year, I led the effort to recertify UncommonGoods as a B Corporation, working with cross-departmental team members to assess how we’re doing. A founding member of B Corp, we’ve now reached our third term and our score of 91.3 shows that we are committed to upholding a higher standard when it comes to our stakeholders, including the environment, our employees, and the community.
Our founder David Bolotsky has been making a continuous and strong effort in running a sustainable business ever since the company was founded in 1999. We are passionate about changing the way business is conducted by making sustainability a part of every decision we make. An important focus is to have a positive impact, not only in our own work place but in the world at large. For example, some benefits available to employees are that 80% of health insurance premiums are paid by UG (50% for families), whenever feasible alternate work schedules like part-time, flex-time or telecommuting are an option, there is a health and wellness program in place, including offering fresh organic fruit in the break rooms and incentives are given to encourage low-impact commutes to and from work.
A positive impact also means offering our customers creative and exciting merchandise that is built to last and made without harm to humans and animals; giving talented artists and designers a platform to sell their unique and often handmade product on a larger scale; making truthful and substantiated claims around all our products and avoiding the pitfalls of green-washing; and making smart packaging decisions when we ship the goods out to our customers and their friends and families.
While not always an option in every product category, we prefer to work with local, sustainable, and fair trade suppliers. As a matter of fact, 14% of sales last year was generated with local and independent suppliers alone, ‘local’ meaning suppliers within a 200 mile radius. About half of our sales came from items made in the US, a little over a third from handmade products and about a fifth from products made of recycled content.
Being an internet and catalog retailer, we understand that producing a catalog uses the earth’s resources. Our goal is to minimize that impact by shifting more business online, limiting how many catalogs we mail, and continuing to print our catalogs on either recycled paper or paper sourced from FSC certified forests.
We love to give back to the environment and the community whenever we can. In 2011, we helped plant hundreds of trees (1,400 to be exact!) in Marine Bay Park as part of the MillionTreesNYC initiative. After over a year of tenacious persuasion tactics we also convinced city officials to make the landscape more appealing by planting street trees around Brooklyn Army Terminal (our offices) and we are volunteering our time and resources to help keep them in good health. I’m happy to report that so far they look quite happy!
Through the Better To Give program, UncommonGoods supports the mission of local and national non-profits. The Better To Give program gives our customers the opportunity to have UncommonGoods contribute to a non-profit organization each time they shop with us. Also, a portion of the sales of our Plates with Purpose, the Be The Change Paperweight and the Pelican and Sandpiper Nightlights is donated to non-profit partners – each item listing tells our customers exactly how much is donated and which organization it’s donated to. Last year we donated about $120K through our Better To Give program as well as $75K in product donations!
On an ongoing basis, employees from all areas of our company are given the opportunity to discuss how we can make UncommonGoods more environmentally friendly, socially responsible and an ever-more rewarding place to work. Our four company goals serve as our guiding principles to be a responsible company; these goals are to be a great place to work, to be our customer’s favorite place to shop, to have a positive impact on the outside world, and to produce strong financial results.
The great thing about the B Corp seal is that it certifies the company as a whole, not just an individual aspect. It gives a customer insight on how a company is doing overall, from providing a living wage, to employee wellness, to lessening the environmental impact, to giving back to the community.
Fellow B Corp BBMG conducted a study on why B Corps matter and found that 73% of consumers care about the company, not just the product, when making a purchasing decision. Another interesting finding is that less than 1% of consumers actually trust company advertisements or statements when assessing a product or company. The more consumers know about the concept behind the B Corp certification/Benefit Corporation, the more consumer-spending will be influenced by this knowledge.
The bi-annual assessment and re-certification process is an excellent way to share our achievements with our customers and team members. More important, it helps us to set benchmarks for the social and environmental impacts of UncommonGoods and identify opportunities for future improvement.
We strive to be a driver of positive change and are convinced that collaborating with fellow B Corps and other industry leaders will have a positive impact. The certified B Corp community is made up of over 550 companies from 60 different industries and represents about $3.1 billion in revenues. It’s a large community of value-driven companies wanting to make a positive impact that are open to sharing advice and insights.
The holy grail of 100% sustainability is no small task to achieve – after all, the most sustainable product is the one that was never made – but we are very dedicated to making responsible, thought-through and well-informed decisions in everyday operations and to leading our business with integrity.