Alizarine

Slipstream

Here's a new addition to my series of Burano buildings reflected in water. Coming up with titles for paintings like this is difficult, and I enjoy bouncing ideas off Jeff. This one stumped us for a long time, and as I type this Jeff is still playing around with words like turbulence. But as of 5:28 pm CST, I'm calling it Slipstream. It's a word I rarely have the opportunity to use but have liked for 18 years thanks to its inclusion in this song (at around 2:35), which is currently the best thing about U2's set list this summer.

 

Below: this is what was going on above the head of the little man who was awkwardly grooving.

 

OK, enough of that stuff. Here's the painting again, in case you've forgotten what it looks like.

If you look at this upside down, you can see a lineup of half a dozen homes. It's 21"x25", and it took me six days to paint. Slipstream also features a boat with a snazzy gold insignia. My sister Emily has a special term for what the boat is doing in the picture: creeping. This boat is a creeper.

Some of the colors here are bright, but most are muted, especially compared with those of my last painting. For some reason these colors reminded me of those you might find in a J. Crew catalog, colors with names like "creamery" and "sap." Most of the upper-right quadrant is in shadow. I painted that entire area a flat blue-gray before adding the other colors and details, and doing so helped establish that section as darker and cooler than the rest.

I painted the lower-left section, where the sky is reflected on the water, in about five minutes. I flooded the space with clear water and dropped in lots of diluted turquoise paint. This is the only way I know how to produce a large flat wash that's free of streaks. The paper went into shock and wanted to buckle, so I had to keep my eye on the paint for a while to keep it from pooling. It took over a half hour (or maybe closer to an hour?) before the paper calmed down and was flat again.

When I started this painting, I didn't think I would fall in love with it as much as I have. I can't wait to see it matted, framed, under (plexi)glass, and up on a wall.

PS Can you find the Italian flag somewhere in the water? It's not an exact Italian flag, but it's pretty close.

Blueberry Muffins

Blueberries are on sale now--what to do with them? How about muffins?

Since I was a kid, I've been making the same old muffin recipe, and while it creates reliably good muffins, I wanted to try a more grown-up recipe. I found one in The New Best Recipe, a jumbo cookbook from Cook's Illustrated. Jeff got it for me for Christmas, and I haven't begun to scratch the surface of this 1,028-page whopper. It's loaded with great, classic recipes that have been tested and reworked until they are perfect, with drawings, sidebars, and obsessive-compulsive introductions for each recipe. I love it.

These muffins did not disappoint at all, but the blueberries were a little bland. You know what would have made the muffins better? If the berries were chocolate chips. And here's a warning: do not serve these, fresh from the oven, at some brunch get-together. The warm berries turned my teeth a horrifying shade of blue/purple, with awful dark bits clinging to the nooks and crannies of my mouth. Not attractive! I immediately brushed my teeth with a vengeance, thus rinsing away any good muffin aftertaste, but my tongue remained zombie blue for a while.

These muffins are less likely to ruin your mouth after they're cool, but who wants a cool muffin? Okay, sometimes I do, but they're better hot. If you're going to spend some time alone, by all means make these and eat them, one after another, as soon as they're done baking. Just brace yourself the next time you look in a mirror.

A note about the muffin batter: it is absolutely delicious. The recipe makes more than enough batter to fill the muffin tins, so dig the heck in.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 tablespoons melted butter, cooled slightly
• 1 1/4 cups (10 oz) sour cream  <-- I only had 8 ounces of light sour cream, so I used milk for the other 2. Muffins still awesome.
• 1 1/2 cups (7-8 oz) frozen or fresh blueberries

DIRECTIONS

Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a standard 12-cup muffin tin (Pam) and set aside. If you have a couple of standard muffin pans like I do, and one has slightly deeper cups than the other, go with the deeper one.

Whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl until combined. Whisk the egg in a second medium bowl until well combined and light-colored, about 20 seconds. Add the sugar and whisk vigorously until thick and homogeneous, about 30 seconds; add the melted butter in 2 or 3 additions, whisking to combine after each addition. Add the sour cream in 2 additions, whisking just to combine.

Add the berries to the dry ingredients and gently toss just to combine. Add the sour cream mixture and fold with a rubber spatula until the batter comes together and the berries are evenly distributed, 25 to 30 seconds. (Small dots of flour may remain, and the batter will be thick. Do not overmix.)

Using a large spoon sprayed with nonstick cooking spray to prevent sticking, divide the batter among the greased muffin cups. The batter will come close to the top but will not go crazy and overflow while baking. Bake until the muffins are light golden brown and a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes (mine was closer to 25), rotating the pan from front to back halfway through the baking time.

Invert the muffins onto a wire rack, stand the muffins upright, and cool 5 minutes. Serve as is or roll in melted butter and dip in cinnamon sugar. I merely brushed the tops with melted butter and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Good stuff.

Popular Searches

Today I've decided to give the people what they want: search results. Listed below are items that people have tried to find on this blog recently but failed. Some of them make me feel guilty: I should have a carbonara recipe on here by now, damn it! Some of them are nobody's business. And some are just strange and random. Hopefully this post will answer some of your nagging questions about me.

1. Tampax. Somebody keeps searching--many, many times!--for information about Tampax on this blog. I have no idea why. To the best of my knowledge, I have never mentioned tampons at all on Alizarine...wait. One time Jeff and I did blogs about packing for a trip to Italy, and I complained about sacrificing valuable carry-on real estate for a week's-worth of tampons. What a pain in the ass, am I right, ladies? But I'm not some kind of spokeswoman for Tampax. If you want to know about Tampax, please go here.

EDIT: One of my friends has suggested that the post this Tampax person is looking for is I Was Girl X, where I discussed sex education and periods. I don't think I mentioned Tampax, though. It was now-extinct Modess pads.

2. Panda Cupcakes. People come here 30 times a week to read about panda cupcakes, which we made a year and a half ago. I assume they find my recipe and go away happy and/or disturbed, so this is not a failed-search item. I included it here because it's my #1 traffic source from search engines, and it blows my mind that people care so much about making panda cupcakes.

3. Expectation. I don't know what this search means. Expectation about what? If you are the one who keeps typing "expectation" in my search box over there -->, please leave a comment and tell me what you want! In the meantime, please enjoy this Gustave Klimt painting called The Tree of Life. The very cool triangle woman on the left is called Expectation, so hopefully this will help you in your search.

4. Carbonara. I made it for lunch a couple of months ago following this recipe from Giada di Laurentiis, except I substituted chorizo for the usual bacon/pancetta (was desperate). It was pretty good but not blog-worthy. I do want to make a proper spaghetti carbonara for Jeff in the future, though, in order to re-create the classic scene from the movie Heartburn where Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep eat spaghetti carbonara in bed (at around :44 below).

 

5. Wife. Um, yeah, I'm a wife now.

6. What color are Bono's eyes? Blue. With tiny light blue flavor crystals.

And now, here's the one you've all been waiting for, if my search box is to be believed...

7. Infertile. Months ago, one of you searched for this. When you type something in my search box, the searched-for word becomes a semi-permanent part of the list of other words people typed in. The more a word is searched for, the larger it appears in relation to the other words. For example, "cake" is my most popular search right now, so it's a lot bigger than the rest of the words. Here's what I think happened with "infertile." It's a juicy, juicy word, isn't it, even juicier than "cake." Other readers saw "infertile" with the rest of the searched-for words, clicked on it, and made it bigger each time. That caused more people to notice it, and they clicked on it some more. It got to the point where over on the right side of my blog you'd see my face, a few links to recent posts, and followed by a huge, screaming

INFERTILE.

Which is depressing! I'm a lot of things, but is "infertile" really chief among them, you guys? I hope not! I was so annoyed by looking at this giant word every day that I blocked "infertile" from appearing in my list of popular searches. You could still search for it, but it wouldn't appear on the list anymore. But every week without fail since then, at least one of you searches for "infertile" and its good buddy "infertility." And the reason you couldn't find any stories about it was because I didn't want to write about it.

But your whining has been heard. HERE'S THE STORY.

[deep breath]

Almost 20 years ago, Jeff had a vasectomy. Amy, his first wife, had health complications following the birth of their daughter Melissa, and in order to protect Amy from a potentially dangerous second pregnancy, Jeff had a vasectomy. They divorced when Melissa was in her early teens, Jeff married Nicole (who had three children of her own), she sadly died from cancer, and eventually Jeff married me.

I was almost 39 when I met Jeff, and I wanted to have a baby. Tick tock tick tock, went my uterus. After our wonderful first date, I was floating on air and beginning to imagine our bookish, brown-eyed, lushy-eyebrowed future child. Twenty-four hours later, Jeff called me and told me the vasectomy news, which he said was difficult for him to deliver, but he was serious about me and wanted me to know before things went any further. I thanked him for telling me something that would've been a dealbreaker to so many women my age.

After I hung up the phone, I cried on the couch for about an hour. I called two ex-boyfriends, and they calmed me down, especially Jeff's predecessor (and unlikely Jeff enthusiast) James. He said this about a woman he knew in a similar situation: "She just went ahead and had a genius baby." That is, she browsed through anonymous genius sperm donors, picked one, and nine months later: genius baby. That became a sort of Plan B mantra for me over the following months: "I can always have a genius baby." It would be just that easy.

IF Jeff and I were even going to work out, that is! I had about a week (the days surrounding Christmas) to think about how I felt before our second date. I kept coming back to the fact that we seemed to click in a way that felt absolutely right to me. I had spent years searching for this man. Even then, I knew he was The One.

We quickly fell in love. We quickly got engaged. We quickly got married. Marrying Jeff was the best decision I have ever made. It wasn't even much of a decision. It was utterly obvious, even with the vasectomy problem. Every once in a while during the first year that I knew Jeff, I would mourn the fact that I couldn't have his child. As our love grew, I decided that I didn't want to have a random genius child. I wanted Jeff's child, no exceptions. I dug deep and also realized that I didn't want to adopt, either. Right or wrong (and I know several adoptive mothers who disapprove of my decision, so join the club), I wanted Jeff's baby or no baby. I chose my husband over a child, basically after one date, and I have no regrets.

Sometimes I find myself reminising about The Woman I Could Have Been (watch this later; it's awesome).

 

That woman would not have been able to quit her job and devote all of her time to painting. That woman would not paint at all--at least not the kinds of pictures I feel the need to produce. That woman would spend her newlywed years stressing out over hormone injections, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, and obsessing over a theoretical being who is not Jeff. That woman's body would never be the same and her life would be turned upside down for good, and so would the life of the man she loves.

I didn't want to be that woman.

Also, what about the very real possibility that our dream baby might turn out to be an asshole? Or even worse, two assholes?

 

I love our life. Honestly, when we walk hand-in-hand beside the baseball diamond a block away, all I can think is, "I am so glad I don't have to sit with these parents watching those kids play ball." I love how quiet our house is. I love being able to read anytime I please. I love cooking whatever Jeff and I want and not having to cater to somebody's oddball allergy or childish preference. I love going to the movies and traveling with Jeff. I love painting all day and not having to teach everybody else's children how to do it anymore. If loving these things makes me a bad, selfish person, I guess I'm a bad, selfish person. But I am also a blissfully happy, bad, selfish person. And it's my choice.

So there's your information about infertility.

8. "my cookies crust is burnt but not baked entirely." [sic] Maybe you should turn your oven down to something more like 350 when you bake them next time. 

Shrimp Rolls

This sandwich is a smash hit. Jeff and I ate these shrimp rolls for four consecutive lunches/suppers over the past couple of days, and we still want more.

Plus they're healthy and easy to make.

Plus they're refreshing for summer.

Plus they're cheap ($1.50 per sandwich, probably) if you're willing to stretch the shrimp component a little.

Plus the shrimp component can sit in the refrigerator for a couple of days, possibly more, with no difference in taste.

The recipe is from Ellie Krieger's So Easy cookbook, in which some great recipes are interspersed with some too healthy and/or sucky to justify the cover's claim of "luscious" recipes. For example, the chips pictured above were just OK. Maybe we weren't slicing the potatoes thinly enough, but most of the chips did not crisp up, so I'm not going to include their recipe here.

But these shrimp rolls have become a new go-to sandwich for us.

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 cup plain Greek-style nonfat yogurt
• 3 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1 stalk celery, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon chopped scallion greens
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1 pound cooked, shelled medium shrimp
• salt and pepper to taste
• hot dog buns

DIRECTIONS

In a bowl, stir together the yogurt, mayonnaise, celery, scallions, and lemon juice. Fold in the shrimp and season to taste with salt and pepper. Chill until ready to use.

Just before serving, open the hot dog buns and brush the inside with olive oil. Heat a grill pan over medium-high heat and grill the breat, cut side down, until toasted, about 3 minutes.

OR. Open the buns, flatten slightly, and put them in the toaster. Ours has a bagel setting that heats only the cut side of the bagel, or in this case, the hot dog bun. Toast without olive oil. Toasting the buns really is the way to go here. Do whatever it takes.

Fill each with 1/8 of the shrimp mixture if you want to stretch it, or 1/4 of the shrimp mixture if you just don't care and serve immediately.

Mini Pavlovas with Custard Sauce

My meringue obsession continues with these dreamy little pavlovas from Nigella's How to Be a Domestic Goddess. They couldn't be easier to make, and today I decided to pair them with raspberries and a recipe for custard sauce I found in Gourmet's Sweets.

But please know that you can simply make the pavlova bases and eat them unadorned. They are almost shockingly lightweight, with a fragile, slightly powdery outer shell. I bet you could blow on that shell and parts of it would fall away. The interior is marshmallow-y but somehow better, and way more complex than a Peep. It's sweet and a tiny bit chewy as it dissolves in your mouth, and I am not doing it justice here. Trust me: you just have to make these and see for yourself how marvelous they are, especially when you consider their ordinary ingredients: egg whites and sugar with a few add-ins.

Nigella's recipe, designed for a bake sale, produced 18 of these. I reduced her measurements to suit our needs, but this resulted in some slightly wonky amounts for a couple of items. But having said that, they could not be easier to make. The only slightly annoying aspect of this recipe is tracing 4-inch circles on parchment paper, which is not 100 percent necessary if you're good at eyeballing things.

Perfect summer dessert recipe, people! Give it a shot!

INGREDIENTS

• 5 large egg whites
• pinch of salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
• 2/3 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/3 t white wine vinegar <-- red wine vinegar also works

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350.

Whisk the egg whites with the salt until they're holding firm peaks but are not stiff. I use our stand mixer for this, but you could also use a hand-held electric mixer or plain old whisk. Gently add in the sugar, spoonful after spoonful, still beating, until you've got a bowl full of gleaming, satiny, snowy meringue.

Sprinkle the cornstarch, vanilla, and vinegar on top and fold in to combine.

Draw 6 circles of approximately 4 inches in diameter on two parchment-lined baking sheets. Spoon the meringue onto the parchment into the delineated circles, and spread and smooth to fill. I usually stay inside my circles by a fraction of an inch. You want to make the meringue slightly higher at the rims, or just use the back of the spoon to make an indentation in the center to hold the custard sauce and fruit later.

Put into the oven, turn it down to 300 degrees, and bake for 30 minutes.

Turn the oven off and leave them in for another 30 minutes, then take them out of the oven to cool. I just transfer them, on their baking parchment, to wire racks.

Makes 12 regular-sized meringues or 9 jumbos.

And now, moving on to the custard sauce!

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cups half-and-half (or 1 cup heavy cream and 1 cup milk)
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

DIRECTIONS

Have ready to go a large bowl of ice and cold water.

In a heavy saucepan bring half-and-half just to a boil and remove pan from heat.

In a bowl whisk together eggs and sugar until well-combined and add half-and-half in a slow stream, whisking. Return mixture to saucepan and cook over moderately low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon until thickened and an instant-read thermometer registers 170 degrees (do not boil). Remove from heat and add vanilla.

Note: do not expect this to become pudding. It's a lot more like a gravy. It becomes a bit thicker when you chill it.

Pour the custard through a fine sieve into a metal bowl. Set bowl in ice water and cool sauce, stirring occasionally. Chill sauce, covered, until cold, at least 1 hour and up to 2 days.

To assemble: top pavlova with a few tablespoons of the sauce--you'll know when to stop--and berries of choice. You can also nix the custard sauce and use whipped cream instead. Or, like I said, just eat those supercute pavs.

Home for Lunch

...At least that is its tentative title. I can't quite figure out what to call this new painting (want to help?). It's an 18"x24" watercolor of Burano, and I loved the variety of colors I was able to work with: basically the entire spectrum plus some neutrals. It's not often that you get the opportunity to put hot pink next to blazing orange in a realistic landscape, and the colorful boat reminded me of something Vincent Van Gogh would enjoy. I'm pretty sure Burano would have sent him into a painting frenzy.

I'm trying to incorporate Vincent or Van Gogh into the title, as a matter of fact and am having problems. Here's an unrelated idea that Jeff shot down because it was obtuse: Light and Variable. Because you can see a breeze in that striped curtain/door...? Eh, I've just always liked the idea of light and variable winds.

Anyway, was this ever time-consuming! Three weeks. There was so much fiddling. Those awnings just had to be striped. The walkway just had to be tiled. The plaster walls just had to be textured. The water just had to have that soft-edged, shimmering quality. Those ubiquitous shutters again...argh. I didn't mind painting all of those things--I love the challenge of pattern and texture--but it seemed like whole hours would pass and all I had painted was a couple of square inches, and the entire painting was like that.

At the end of each painting day, when I'd normally take a photo of my progress, I was so tired of the picture that all I wanted to do was watch the juvie* Decorah eagles play in their nest. Have you seen them lately? They're about to fledge! The juvies are currently hopping around from branch to branch, gaining strength before they take their first flights. Sometimes they remind me of Joshua Tree-era U2 as they perch on the cottonwood tree's limbs, often dead serious and often facing in different directions.

 

* Juvie is my favorite word to describe anything young, small, and/or cute these days, e.g.: "Aww, look at juvie U2 up there!"

Illinois Watercolor Society National Juried Show

Every year the Illinois Watercolor Society invites artists across the country to enter their juried exhibition. Simply entering this show is no guarantee that you'll be accepted--it's a hundreds-will-enter-60-will-win kind of contest. This spring, as I got set to mail the appropriate forms and fees to the IWS for this competition, I kissed the self-addressed-stamped-envelope that would come back to me in about a month, hopefully with good news.

Each artist can enter two paintings for this show, which are sent to the juror as jpegs, and he or she accepts one or the other or neither. I thought Abandoned Knowledge and Dale's Super 400 had a chance, even though this year's juror, Robert Lee Mejer, is an abstract expressionist. The jurors are different each year, so it's impossible to know what kinds of paintings will please them. You just have to go with what you feel is your best work. If you and the juror share a similar aesthetic, don't expect that person to be impressed with you. Judging art is so subjective, and as an art teacher sending student work to contests year after year and now as an artist entering my own paintings in shows like this, I've learned to keep my expectations extremely low. If I don't get accepted for a show, it's no big deal. If I do get accepted, it's no big deal.

But I got accepted for this show and it was a totally big deal!

Mr. Mejer selected Abandoned Knowledge, which I FedEx-ed up to The Next Picture Show art gallery in Dixon, Illinois. Dixon is just down the road from Oregon, the small town where I taught art for eleven years. Last year I was part of this IWS show, and I described the weirdness of seeing my former home and school here.

The show opened on Saturday with a watercolor demonstration by the incredible Robert Krajecki followed by an awards presentation. My parents met Jeff and me there. Since we live on opposite sides of the state, I rarely get to see them, so we had a nice reunion with plenty of time to chat. It was also nice to see some locals I remembered from my teaching days and IWS head honcho Tony Armendariz. Last year I gave him some chocolate chip cookies to thank him for doing me a favor, and this year I felt the need to make him some more. Over the past year I have found a new recipe that has me making the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever tasted, and you just can't keep that kind of thing under wraps.

So there's my painting on the gallery's long wall next to the woman in blue.

And there's the best-looking man in the room.

Above is the other end of the long wall.

And here is a chunk of the short wall.

Janet Doll, another painter with work in the show, sat next to Jeff and me while Robert Krajecki created a watercolor landscape in about thirty minutes. Janet is just about the sweetest person imaginable, and she reminded me of any number of beloved teachers I've known. We started chatting about technique and things like the current "in" watercolor shade, which I've indicated below:

It's a blue-green that's too green to be turquoise. Janet claims she's been seeing it everywhere this year, but she doesn't know the exact name of the color or who makes it, and I was thinking, "It is so awesome to talk shop with somebody else who paints."

Janet won one of the three "Award of Excellence" ribbons for her painting The Collector (scroll down), and I received one of the three honorable mentions, and I was told that the juror thought my work was one of the best "from the get-go." I was so happy! IWS favorite Ken Call--he seems to win a lot of awards, and deservedly so--won Best of Show for A Late Night, below.

After the show, Jeff and I loaded up my parents' car with eight paintings in anticipation of a one-woman show I'll be having at Culver-Stockton College at the end of the summer. Mom and Dad live a lot closer to Culver, which is in northeast Missouri, so this summer is going to be all about us getting as many paintings as we can over to their house before the show. They'll store the paintings and help Jeff and me haul them to the C-S gallery in late August. Because of their glass or plexiglass, framed watercolors can be fragile and difficult to transport. You can't just stack a dozen on top of each other like you can with, say, acrylic paintings, so this is going to be a major operation.

As we were transferring the paintings from our car to theirs, Janet Doll came over and admired my work, saying, "Why didn't THAT get in?" to my Dale painting. So that was gratifying and awfully kind of her, and I hope I see Janet again next year, if I'm accepted for that show.

Earlier in the day, during the always-boring drive up to northern Illinois, I amused Jeff by reading various Yelp restaurant reviews for Peru, Illinois. To celebrate our anniversary, we had booked a hotel room in Peru, where we would spend the night before exploring Starved Rock state park the next morning. Everybody on Yelp was raving about Ripp's Tavern, home of "possibly the best fried chicken I have ever had," according to one reviewer. It sounded like a mom-and-pop kind of place, and it served chicken and only chicken to an endless stream of customers, with french fries or fried mushrooms as sides. Feeling adventurous, we decided to give it a try for supper.

Ripp's was a small place with two main rooms for customers: the bar and the seating area for the restaurant. As we stood in line for a half hour in the bar, we were able to watch teenagers working the tiny kitchen's fryer through a window at the far end of the seating area. Waitresses emerged periodically with paper plates loaded with chicken (either light or dark meat), fries, and mushrooms, which were good but not life-changing.

The place also offered "crispies," i.e. lost nuggets of fried chicken breading. The lighting was a little on the dim side with unflattering bluish undertones thanks to the various Miller Lite and Chicago Cubs neon signs. A haze of grease filled the air. Our chicken arrived flaming hot about fifteen minutes later, sans utensils. Everyone in the place was forced to use their hands, a primitive set-up that made a certain amount of sense.

Boom:

Note the piece of white bread placed underneath the chicken to soak up vital chicken juices.

The fries were merely okay, so I gave the chicken my full attention, starting with the wing. I removed one of the wing bones and used it as a utensil to protect my fingers as I pulled the breast meat apart. The breading was almost tempura-like, very light and crunchy, but kind of one-note in terms of flavor. The chicken was tender, juicy, and not a bit tough, which made me think that maybe Ripp's partially cooks the chicken before frying it. Whatever they are doing, it's a real achievement, but we couldn't help feeling that for the 45+-minute wait, this chicken had to be stellar, and it just wasn't quite there. By the end of our meal, we were wiped out. I felt that grease had infiltrated every part of my body. It's the kind of fried chicken that makes you want to take a shower with some unforgiving soap.

Look at us, all tired, greasy, and in love.

We got up early the next morning to hike at nearby geological oddity Starved Rock state park. For once the weather was on my side: partly cloudy, not humid, 72 degrees. We climbed formidable stairways to enjoy views of the Illinois River like this one.

Then we went way, way down to investigate Wildcat Canyon, which boasts a waterfall, a rare sight in Illinois.

We were pleased with the waterfall...

...and other formations and plant life.

After about three miles of uphill and downhill hiking, we were ready to tackle the two-hour drive home and see what amusing surprises the cats had in store for us. Bun, for example, left two and a half surprises for me to find, Easter egg-style, throughout the living room, but for the most part the cats handled our absence like champs.

And that was our anniversary weekend of art, chicken, and nature. If you're in the Dixon area during the month of June, you should definitely check out the IWS exhibition at The Next Picture Show (it's on 1st Street).

 Update: You can see all of the IWS winners here.

Hawaiian Sandwich

Every Memorial Day, Jeff and I like to visit the peony garden in Allerton Park, the place where we were supposed to have our rained-out wedding. The park is about 45 miles away in Monticello, a charming small town, and in late May the huge variety of peonies in this garden is dazzling and a visual feast for anyone who enjoys painting florals. Such as me. So I took over a hundred peony photos under semi-overcast skies, looking for future paintings. Here is a trio of peonies I liked, but the light was a little flat. Don't worry, though. I took plenty of photos I'll be able to use.

I'm going to say the peony garden is about 1/4 the size of a football field. But I don't know. Does that seem about right?

About half of the peonies had bloomed and wilted by the time we saw them this year, but there were still plenty left, and we could smell the garden long before we entered it. So that's one of our Jeff-Kelly traditions.

We had lunch at the Brown Bag deli, a local favorite on the square in Monticello. Overwhelmed by the number of choices, we decided we'd try one of their specials, the Hawaiian sandwich. That's my pizza of choice, so how bad could that be? We found a secluded table, dug in, and were blown away by the sandwich's perfect marriage of sweet and salty, rich and tangy. "I could eat this sandwich all day long," I said between mmphs.The nice thing about deli sandwiches is that they're usually pretty easy to re-create at home, and this was no exception.

Since this isn't much of a recipe, I'm not going to list ingredients, just instructions.

1. Cut a croissant in half.

2. Mix about a tablespoon of room temperature cream cheese (or microwave cold c.c. for a few seconds) with a small squirt of Dijon mustard in a tiny bowl. The Brown Bag was extremely liberal with its cream cheese, so feel free to double, triple, or quadruple those amounts based on your cholesterol numbers and your conscience.

3. Spread cream cheese and mustard on the bottom half of the croissant.

4. Stud the cream cheese with (canned or fresh, drained) pineapple. A couple of pineapple rings cut in half seem to promote even pineapple coverage.

5. Top with whatever amount of ham you think you're going to need. Our magic number: four thin slices. We've tried smoked and maple ham with this, and both of those are great.

6. Devour while moaning.

Mom's Crazy Cake

See that little wicker recipe box back there? In my extended family, when a young woman gets married and leaves home (preferably right out of high school or college if necessary), my female relatives customarily put together a recipe box for her. Everybody writes a favorite recipe or two on cards, and the box is given to the bride-to-be at a wedding shower.

Except I didn't get married. I just left home.

Probably (and justifiably) feeling sorry for me as I set up housekeeping on the top floor of this awful bunglow...

...Mom and my sister copied about a dozen Eddington recipes and gave them to me in that wicker box, which I have kept for eighteen years.

Mom must have realized that single women sometimes require a fast and dirty, emergency chocolate cake from time to time, one made from cupboard staples only. No uptown ingredients such as eggs or buttermilk come into play here, you'll have it in the pan before the oven heats up, and best of all, the cake is really good!

Let's get this straight, though: it's not going to blow your mind. You will not double over in chocolate ecstasy like you did with these cupcakes or this Yule log or this flourless mousse cake. But those cakes take hours to make and use up stick after stick of butter. Sometimes you want your mama's cake, and you want it NOW. And sometimes you just want your mama.

 

(I cannot stop watching that. I sent it to Poof and she crystallized its appeal perfectly: "The more I watch this, the worse I feel for the dog, yet...the more I laugh!")

This cake is as close as it gets to seeing my mother materialize in my kitchen, whether I am single and living in squalor or married and very much in love. And my sister pops up with this recipe, too, as it is in her age-10 handwriting. I'm just going to use her card instead of re-typing it here.

Notes: that's vinegar, which I think makes the cake "crazy," along with 1/3 cup of vegetable oil, and 1 cup of water down there. I don't know what purpose the three holes serve, but they are kind of fun to make.

The timings were written by me in black, and I'd check all of those a couple of minutes early. Since we got our new oven, it seems like baking times are a bit faster. Regarding that last bit: I wouldn't recommend dividing the batter between two pans. I tried it once, and it was kind of a bust.

Oh--the frosting is a Pup original. I made it up a few weeks ago, and it is similarly fast and dirty.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cups powdered sugar (eyeball it)
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• healthy pinch salt
• heavy cream--about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup

DIRECTIONS

Combine the powdered sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium-small bowl. Add heavy cream a bit at a time, stirring until you reach frosting consistency.

Too thick? Add more cream.

Too thin? Add more powdered sugar.

Not chocolatey enough? Add more cocoa.

Not salty enough? Add salt. :)

 

Happy Anniversary Kelly!!!

[Kelly doesn't know that I'm posting this...]

Happy Anniversary, Kelly. I love you !

Today is our third wedding anniversary. We're going to celebrate this weekend by attending the Illinois Watercolor show, which includes her Abandoned Knowledge painting, then we’ll travel over to Starved Rock park for a night and day in the woods.

And, yes, she is just as kind and just as beautiful and just as funny in the real world as she is in her virtual domain. I thank---well, I don't believe in any great scorekeeper for the universe--so I thank Kelly for marrying me.