Following that, the gallery hosted an evening event in late June where Roger further interviewed me in front of about fifty people. I felt glad of a mic which gave my low voice hope of reaching the audience, but gratitude for Roger whose deft friendly questioning kept the room active and listening. To watch someone do this, is a treat. To be the subject, inspires deep appreciation.
Then in July, my email flooded with friends noting that the New York Times Saturday Arts Section—“36 Hours” page on Santa Barbara mentioned the Sullivan Goss gallery and my name (misspelled!) What an entertaining surprise. My second of fame!
It has been a few crazy days in my area. We are close to the border of Ukraine and since the war started we have had refugees coming our way. Some of them are staying for good, some until the war is over and some just go to other countries.
I did not have time to post anything about food or photography. I will try to post it when I have time. I am a volunteer together with my friends for an ONG that helps the person in need. These days we are helping lots of refugees to run from the war, start a new life, or survive the new world.
So, please forgive the lack of recipes or tips about food photography.
If you want to donate you can find the details here:
Our cat, Hopkins, at eleven months, well over thirteen pounds.
When the tiny tabby, just over two pounds, arrived from the shelter, we were warned that he was spicy and bitey. One of the smallest cats we ever hosted, but full of will and want. A silver brown tabby, with eyes turning gold. He was always leaping, bouncing and hopping. In the first days when we needed to keep him separate from our other older cats to start the gentle introductions between them, whenever we entered the room, he would greet us bounding towards us on his hind legs, front arms outstretched as if to grab us in a hug.
Hopkins at the shelter being vaccinated. Note the woman’s hand holding him for scale.
But Hopkins was bitey, yes, frenetic, yes, and we knew while this was cute the cuteness would not last longer than his tininess. To have a grown mid-sized predator on your hands without some calmness and kindness towards humans, who lack fur to protect them from enthused play, is a scenario that loses its humor quickly.
We named him Hopkins, in salute to Gerard Manley Hopkins and his poem ‘Pied Beauty’, for if ever a tiny cat had speckles, dashes and spots, this one did. We had a guest at the time, a young man who was so skilled in animal handling that I wish he had decided to use those skills as his career. This man took on the handling of Hopkins, letting him play ferociously, wrestling his tiny savage self with firm hands, and actually demonstrating for our five-year old cat Watson, how to play with a kitten on overdrive.
Hopkins around three months.
We’ve raised a lot of kittens in our time, but we’d never seen a kitten so hyper as Hopkins. He had a royal presumption about him, a feeling of the feral, the untamable, even though he loved us and wanted to be close and cuddled, and liked to sleep in a padded box by my pillow. Indeed we wondered, was there any chance there was some splash of an exotic breed in this kitten that made him so much more so, than one normally expects?
Watson and Hopkins, early days.
Watson did not know what to do with this scrap of energy, and it took a lot of sessions of our young man demonstrating how to spin a kitten on the carpet and roll or flip him over with a quick hand. Watson showed signs of conflict in himself– he would cry when he saw the kitten bite a human hand like someone objecting “That’s not right!” He would make little essays and charges, then deflect or retreat as though afraid of hurting the miniature monster. Finally, one evening, Watson dashed in and bashed the kitten with a paw, claws hidden. After that, one bit at a time, he began to understand he could play with the mite and hit him, and even gently bite. It took weeks, though, and our friend had to continually encourage Watson with advice and example.
We lost our oldest cat Kitsune in this time period to a cancer of the throat, and again, our young friend demonstrated his skills as an animal handler during that difficult time. But our friend soon responded to a call from his home, headed back through a dip in the COVID numbers, and we missed his kind presence. Hopkins showed the loss, he kept looking for his friend, checking by the door to no avail.
In the meantime Hopkins grew. From just under three pounds he stretched and bulked to six, then eight, then ten. We tried to keep him exercised and much handled, something that you want to do with any young animal who will be a companion. He was profoundly affectionate, attentive, but still rough. It concerned us, but we hoped he’d mellow in time as he reached his adulthood. But when would that be, and how big was he going to be?
I should also mention that this was a young cat who, if you played with him using wand toys, showed a truly daunting ferocity, a dedication and even savagery in his behavior, such that I was concerned that if Watson played too, someone would get hurt, and I was very careful when I put the toy away that I used some sleight of hand, because what if Hopkins seriously objected?
About six months into his life with us, we received news from our daughter that there were two newly captured feral kittens in desperate need of a home. They came from a feral colony near her place, the same colony that had given her a rather problematic but character-ful black cat of her own, all too fittingly named Ravage. It took us no time at all to say yes. The little guys arrived in October, weighing perhaps four pounds each, black with greeny gold eyes. Jinx and Jasper.
Two feral bits of feline.
Our planned careful introduction of Watson and Hopkins (who now weighed over ten pounds at about seven months) to the little guys was not as slow as we’d planned because there was a jail break and the next thing we knew we had a malestrom of cats playing, playing and playing, all over the place. Curiously, it was Watson who made all the noises, sounding like a querulous baby, as if trying to say “I don’t know how to play, be nice to me. don’t bite so sharp. don’t hit so hard,” while the little black kittens and Hopkins were dashing and rolling, play biting and batting all over the house.
What we discovered, was that like some miracle, Hopkins’ roughness melted. He’d needed kittens to tame him. Now he played and rumpused and rioted, but he did no harm. He became far gentler with us. He had always distinguished between my husband and myself and been softer with me, but now we saw him, despite his huge enthusiasm, being even more careful yet, with his new kittens.
Hopkins before the arrival of his new kittens. Wound up and ready.
Is this the cure for some overly energetic and predatory young cats? Find them some kittens to teach them kindness? I don’t know if this would work for all. But in our household over many decades of living with cats, we have seen the falling in love between young fixed male cats and tiny kittens, and it is a marvel when this magic happens. Seeing a young powerful cat contemplating his kittens with a loopy tender affection is wonderful.
Hopkins and Jinx and Jasper.
I could string you a sequence of names of the cats we’ve had who have done this while we watched, and our hearts melted. Hopkins is now over thirteen pounds of cat at approximately eleven months, and we are grateful for his transformation!
Bananas cause strong reactions in people. If you like them, I suggest you may enjoy my personal banana cream pie recipe. If you do not like bananas, don’t waste your time trying this, because it is indeed deeply banana flavored.
Most of the past recipes for this dessert that I’ve eaten have been tremendously over sweet, often using meringue, or heavily sweetened pudding. This one pushes towards a more refreshing note, though it doesn’t lack sweetness. There are three main ingredients, the pie crust, the pie filling and the topping. Chilling is part of the process– though it is not an intensive job to make this, it does need refrigerator time.
First, make and prebake a simple crust. Not a crumb or cookie based or graham cracker based crust, instead a simple slightly salty plain crust pastry.
1 1/2 c all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt,
1/2 tsp sugar
1/3 cup od cold butter, chopped up a bit
2 TB grapeseed or other flavorless oil
1/3 cup ice water with a squeeze of lemon or lime in it
Preheat oven to 423 F.
For fast production, place dry ingredients in your Cuisinart, throw in the butter and zap until finely mealy. Put in the oil with the machine still running. Stop and toss the result into a bowl, dripping or drizzling the lemon ice water in, while tossing the pastry crumbs with a fork. Treat tenderly and toss to combine until the crumbs have begun to gather. With your hands, gently press together this dough into a rough round shape, flatten with a light hand and then roll out on a preferably cold or cool surface. I love a flat circular pastry rolling bag for this, and a French or Chinese rolling pin.
Keep your touch light, and when your crust is round and thin, settle it well into a 9″ pie pan. Prick it all about with a fork — you can use pie weights or beans to keep the crust perfectly unbulgy, or if you are like me, you will simply check on it in the oven after about five minutes and poke any bulging parts with your fork to make them collapse. Place the pan in your preheated oven and bake until nicely browned, roughly ten minutes, then cool to room temperature.
Next, make the filling pudding by taking a stout cooking pot, and mixing together:
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup of sugar
3 tablespoons flour.
Mix thoroughly. Take 1 1/4 cups of milk and warm in the microwave about one minute, you want it warm but not steaming, or you will cook the flour in the dry mix too fast on contact and make it lumpy.
Take an egg and beat it to break up the structure a bit in a pyrex pint measuring cup using a fork– leave the fork in it.
Slowly blend warmed milk into dry ingredients in pot. Then bring this mixture to a boil, cooking after lowering the heat so it doesn’t stick, for two minutes. Remove from heat. Temper hot mix into eggs, beating fast as you add each spoonfull so you don’t end up with curdled eggs. When you’ve mixed about half the hot material into the egg you can then mix the eggy part back into your pot. Turn stove back on and bring the mixture to a bubble, then remove from heat and allow to cool. While still warm, add a tablespoon of butter and a teaspoonful of vanilla extract. Turn into a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap. When its heat is moderate, let it rest in fridge.
When the cooked pudding is getting quite cool, (close to refrigerator interior temperature,) take three large ripe bananas and peel and slice them, drizzling lightly with lemon or lime juice. Fold into the cooled pudding mixture.
Take a cup and a half of extremely cold whipping cream, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, a package of whipped cream stabilizer and three tablespoons of sugar, and whip together until well stiffened and easily forming peaks.
Fill the cooled pastry shell with your banana and pudding mix, cover with the whipped cream and serve.
Here’s my pie waiting for the whipped cream….
This is a pie that must be stored in the refrigerator and kept cold. With the stabilized whipped cream, this pie will stay in fairly good shape in the fridge for perhaps three or four days. Some people like to add dark rum when whipping the cream for the topping, others like to drizzle some on the pie at serving. I think it’s just fine without! The bananas have a surprisingly emphatic presence in this pie.
Working in the studio during this lockdown seems so unchanged, and yet the news is ever on my mind, challenging my concentration. I cannot believe the latest series I’ve produced is unaffected.
I pulled up a lot of images of persimmons — not the ones I grow, but my neighbor Ginny’s Hachiyas. I also opened up my sketchbooks and found my drawings of persimmons on my passageway counter, plus the dried persimmon leaves I saved from last fall.
This set of three paintings are the results of my staring at these various items and rearranging them in my mind. I plan on at least two more before I go to some other topic….
Here’s an image showing how I start, a rough sketch in colored chalk — complete with rub-outs, and a placement of my darkest darks.
I started some weeks ago looking around to assess which of my neighbors in this raggletag neighborhood might be elderly and in need of extra support in this time of social distancing. Then I realized I’m elderly too…a little, around the edges, you might say. The idea made me smile, because of its sheer absurdity.
I may have arthritis and a skunk-streak of silver in my formerly black hair, but I can swing a pick axe to dig out a new vegetable bed, just fine. I can do hours of field work on my garden, or hours in the studio, or hours at the computer writing a novel, and it’s all work, and feels pretty good until the end of day, when some joints are impolite enough to comment on excessive enthusiasm. Spoilsports.
One thing I figure I can do is to keep my give-away bin streetside filled with citrus and fresh hot peppers. Washington navels, Fremont tangerines, Eureka lemons, Minneola tangelos, Trovita navels and Roberts, kumquats and Mexican limes. Sometimes strawberry guavas as well. I’m picking with disposable gloves on and not washing the fruit, and I put out a short note on the box telling the public I’m using gloves, also requesting people to select with their eyes and take all that they touch.
Now the local hospital is calling for not only factory-made masks, but home sewn ones. Another new job, and so I started thinking about how many pleats I should put in and whether I could insert a new twist tie to help the wearer mold the nose more tightly. Then I read an article https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577 and quote from it here “Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%”. So, no wonder they speak of the false sense of security that anything under a N-95 mask gives.
Thinking the project over, I believe it still makes sense to sew and donate masks. Here’s my thinking– over all, these masks protect not the wearer but the others who meet with that wearer. So if every suspected case upon entrance to the ER dons one, this may help protect the ER staff, our most valued resource. And if I can figure out how to do a fast turnaround, I might be able to create enough of these to preserve half a box worth of medical masks for the medical staff or the intake volunteers. Every mask counts.
It’s a storm, and a long one. It’s a war. Maybe every generation needs a war to start to think more widely about community. I could wish we didn’t need it, but I am seeing some truly inspirational behavior among my neighbors and strangers.
This generation possibly more than any of the past may need to understand this and pass it on to their successors… the evolutionary fact that, that when there are this many of any one species populating the earth, pandemics are inevitable.
We cannot stand alone any longer, believing we can be independent and rugged posing against the sun, because there’s always someone else in sight… hopefully at least six feet away.
I remember my grandmother telling me the story of my father Frederick sneaking off down to the Stratham Town Hall to sign up to serve, as soon as he was old enough. World War II surged on, and he felt he must do his part. My grandmother had already applied for an exemption for him, since he worked the farm– the approvals had come through, she had the documents, and she thought everything settled. Her fury at his signing up was ferocious. Remembering it while she talked to me, she snapped a thread in her sewing.
For my part, I don’t know how Frederick qualified, I’ve seen pictures and he resembled Steve Rogers at that age, including the flat feet, poor eyesight, though minus the consumption.
But Frederick did Basic Training, and took the tests the military gave him, faithfully polished his shoes, ran the courses, flinging himself into anything set before him including training to operate a tank…and the night before his unit was to fly to Japan, got pulled to use his talents in an office instead. Those tests the officers had given had betrayed his real strengths. He’d always loved math, he was a human calculator, and so they put him to figuring salaries for the army. That’s what he did in an office stateside, until his honorable discharge after the war ended.
Frederick never took Veteran’s benefits in any way, shape or form. He never forgot the friends and companions who paid the ultimate price for their service, or ran the risk. He figured he never earned those benefits. I think he did, but I honor his choice, for times for him were not easy.
“What do you suppose I did while Freddy was in the Army?” my grandmother said, snipping off thread from the knot she’d just placed on a hem. The cotton dress piled in her lap, She picked it up and shook out the plaid with more than usual satisfaction, pressing her lips together. She looked at me.
I shook my head.
“I told Grandpa we had to sell the farm. He was ailing and it was too hard on him to struggle on with such hard labor. It wasn’t fair. Grandpa’s brothers never did their full share, except for Ben, maybe. We sold his majority to his brothers.”
She smiled a little to herself.
“That was quite a surprise for Freddy, when he came home from the War.”
How many of you watch ‘The Great British Baking Show’? I do, I’ve been known to binge-watch it, trying to second-guess each move and enjoying myself a great deal. However, I don’t cook like a chemist or physicist, though I believe in the science of baking. I cook with my hands and the touch of my fingers.
Bread is a deep pleasure, and I haven’t used a recipe since… I can’t recall. I throw it together– it’s a lazy bread that I make! The dough can be kept in the fridge for when you want it, for about a week.
There are in my mind five basic ingredients. Gently warm water, dry yeast, salt, olive oil and flour. To this I frequently add dollops of honey and several tablespoons of psyllium husk to up the fiber content and the moistness. The flour content is variable, since I’m fond of mixed grains. Dark rye flour at about an eighth to a quarter of the total amount of flour is nice. With that I often will use about half whole wheat flour, preferably Indian Attah, but almost anything will do. The last quarter is white bread flour. All purpose flour is fine, though given a choice I will head for a bread flour with its extra gluten.
I have a Hobart mixer named ‘Hob’, since none of the non-commercial mixers have the mixing moxie to stand up to the heavy labor of bread making. Actually let’s be honest, I have burned out a succession of Kitchenaids on cakes and cookies (I knew better than to even attempt kneading bread with a Kitchenaid.) I really do try to take care of my machines, never to ‘horse’ them or force them. But even the big Kitchenaid is not a professional piece of equipment, in my opinion. Hobart is the source of the Kitchenaid but the interior housing of the Kitchenaid motor is liable to cracking.
For those of you who have been reading this blog, you know I’m serious about hosting large parties, and working with massive amounts of ingredients. Wedding cakes for a hundred fifty guests, that sort of thing. The Hobart is up to my lifestyle. Before I had one, all yeast doughs were mixed and kneaded by hand. This makes for good shoulder muscles, by the way. I can mix a dough in fifteen minutes without my Hob.
I throw in about two to three cups of warm water (not hot, or it will kill the yeast,) a scant tablespoon of yeast, 3/4 teaspoons of sea salt, three tablespoons of olive oil, optional dollop of honey, five cups of flour and put the kneading hook on low until it’s all mixed. No, I don’t bother to check my yeast– I cook so often that I know already that my yeast is alive!
Look at the dough, touch it with a dry finger tip. If it clings to your skin and doesn’t rub off easily, slowly add another cup of flour, any kind of flour, while running the machine or kneading by hand. If doing this by hand, have it out on your counter for the kneading process.. If still sticky, add more flour and knead more But if there is an elastic resilience to it and it doesn’t adhere longingly to your finger, unplug your mixer, take off the dough hook and turn the bowl on to whatever surface you use for kneading, if you’re not already there. Keep your flour duster close to hand. The dough should be a little sticky, but it should be possible to rub off your fingers. Knead it and slap it on the counter for fun, adding a little flour when it starts to come apart and cling. Five minutes, possibly eight. Let rest under a clean tea towel.
Now in my kitchen when I had the counter re-tiled ten years ago, I chose square tiles, big enough to roll out a whole pie crust on or knead bread dough on. Most kitchen designers make the error of planning little tiles, four by fours, for example, for their counters. If you can stop them from doing that to your kitchen, do it. Big tiles mean far less upkeep, a pleasantly simple aesthetic and no horrid bits of grout grunge in your kneaded doughs.
You can let the dough proof (or rise) for an hour or up to two, under the tea towel before you shape it. But if time presses, just form your loaf without bothering with that extra wait. The bread texture will be coarser, but it will still taste good. Leave your shaped loaf in its greased pan to rise between an hour and two and when it retains the impression of a finger poke, bake it in a preheated oven at 375 or 400 degrees Fahrenheit until it sounds hollow when rapped with a knuckle. I find I get my best rise when I roll the dough. So make a flattened rectangle once you have kneaded your dough, and roll it up firmly before fitting it into your baking pan to rise, covered with a tea towel.
If you do the slower method and let the dough rise for an hour or so before progressing to the shaping, knead it down before your shaping of the loaf. When shaped, let the loaf rise until the dough retains the indentation of a poking finger. Then bake, and test doneness by rapping on the crust as above.
Let the loaf sit about five to ten minutes before turning it out of its greased pan; it should come out easily.
If you want a fast lunch, try pan bread. Take a double fistful of dough and pat it into a rough circle, to fit the bottom of a middle sized cast iron pan.. Heat that pan, well-oiled, on the stovetop and when hot, place the dough in the pan. (Sometimes to be dramatic, I throw it. That’s fun.) Turn the burner down to the low setting and cover with any lid that fits. Leave to rise and cook in this improvised oven for about ten to fifteen minutes or until the upper surface is no longer sticky. Then flip it over and continue to cook five to ten minutes more, until lightly browned on the bottom. Eat hot with butter, or with sauteed vinegared red peppers and onions with fresh goat cheese or pickled artichoke hearts or… whatever you like. I’ve been known to sit down with peanut butter and this hot bread for a fast lunch. It tastes different from oven baked bread, and while it can be a little sticky inside, or dense, it has a lovely immediacy and nuttiness.
Want a particularly spongy soft interior texture in your bread? Take the water from boiling potatoes and use some in your warm water when you make the dough. That will give you a softer resilient crumb in the final loaf. Love a soft crust surface? Rub butter over or spray the crust with oil when you take it baked, from the oven.
And yes, before you ask, you can stretch and roll this dough out to make a pizza if you like, but if you’re doing that, crank your oven to 500 degrees, do a full pre-heat, don’t overload the crust with sauce and additions, and do use a perforated round pan for a crisper crust… I recommend caramelized onions and gorgonzola with a crumble of walnuts and rosemary across the surface.
robinwinter 