This one is going to be packed with photos documenting the past few weeks--easily the most beautiful spring I've witnessed since I began living here. Jeff and I have been trying to improve our driveway garden over the past couple of years. Last fall I planted a few dozen tulip bulbs and was so excited to watch them bloom. The frilly ones in front are parrot tulips, and I painted the pink one recently. Backing them up are two rows of regular tulips that were supposed to be purple. I think my bag of bulbs was incorrectly marked.
But that's okay--I like these better. They're so cheerful!
We have lots of roses on the other side of this garden and are unsure about how to tame/contain them. The two large rose bushes throw out tentacles that climb up to the sky and then arch down, like dozens of this thing overlapping again and again.
The recent flood washed up a lot of logs in our neighbor's yard, and he set them out by the side of the road to be removed by the city. Jeff saw one of them and thought it might make a nice display element in the roses, so the two of us rolled that heavy thing down the street (Jeff did 90% of the work while I gave it a few kicks here and there) and installed it. We like how it looks semi-human, and I can't wait for those roses to bloom.
This is the east side of our weirdo house. The redbud trees are in bloom!
I love the redbud-blooming week the most.
It's followed by redbud-confetti week.
We have other flowering trees on the south side of the house.
This one is almost embarrassingly gorgeous.
Crab apples and dogwoods decorate the west side next to the garage.
Needless to say, Bun is a very happy little girl.
She mostly stays on the path during her supervised walkabouts.
And when it's sunny, sometimes she'll just lounge.
On rare occasions she becomes SUPER FIERCE MIGHTY HUNTING JUNGLE CAT;;;;
Ohh, the colors. I still can't believe I get to live here...
...with this amazing creature...
...and my sweet girl.
Too. Much.
PS Mom cut three inches from my hair a few weeks ago, diminishing that grizzly-bear-living-on-my-head feeling. Now it's more like I have a grizzly cub up there.
Jeff and I met on Match.com--ain't no shame in it!--and one of the things he liked about my profile was that I had answered the "What was the last great book you read?" question with The Grapes of Wrath. It was one of those books that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading life, and I remember finishing it while sitting on a bench in Chicago's Union Station. The devastating ending made me cry, and then I just stared at things for a while, a character Edward Hopper had forgotten to paint: Heartbroken Lonely Woman Crying Over A Book.
Anyway, one of the characters in that book is named Rose of Sharon, and I always thought that was so unusual--she has a preposition in her name! Last year we were shopping for plants to decorate our new patio, and I flipped out when I came across a rose of Sharon. The man who sold it to us said it was blue, which is not as common as the white and pink version, and after planting it, we waited for about a month for it to bloom. It's in the center of the above photo.
I took a photo of the first rose and saved the picture for a future painting. I started it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't all that revved up to paint it at first, but after a day of work I was excited. I loved the light on the petals, and the variety of blues and purples I used to create the bloom was challenging.
I fine-tuned the white thing and added more details and texture to the petals.
Then I filled in the background with some bloopy, blurry colors, and I started the rocks in the lower-left corner. Most of the white areas would become leaves and branches.
Next
up: I spent a lot of time with that dry grass on the left side. It had
lots of different blurry colors going on. I texturized the rocks with purples, blues, pinks, and browns. Finally, I did some yellow underpainting
on the leaves, masked off the major veins (seen above as yellow lines) and added an
additional green glaze over the top.
More leaf work...
I
added a lot of details to the leaves and attempted to soften and refine
the veins. Leaves in direct sunlight called for bits of blue, permanent green light, and a whole lot of no-paint. The bigger/closer leaves required some micro veins. This process reminded me of the way I painted the colorful leaf from my Mushrooms painting a year and a half ago. The colors in the photo above are a bit too bright--I took the picture during a thunderstorm and got aggressive with it in Photoshop.
On my last day of painting, I added a branch and some grassy shapes in the center. Those were surprisingly complex and colorful. And then, as if on cue, our new scanner arrived in the mail!
Eleven years ago I bought a kind of so-what HP scanner that did a wonderful job with my watercolors and cartoons, and Bun liked to sit on it, too. When it died in 2009, I assumed it would be easy to find a replacement. But that was not the case--the ones we've tried since then can't handle subtle color changes or things like pastel colors outlined in black pen.
Last month Jeff did some research (and great things happen when Jeff does some research). He found a used Epson Perfection V30 for only $30. A watercolor artist had blogged about this scanner and showed how to configure the settings to work for watercolors. It seemed like such a great deal, especially when you consider that I tend to pay $12-$15 per big scan at FedEx. The only problem was that the vendor was in Hawaii, and the scanner had to endure a month-long boat odyssey and cross-country road trip before it reached us.
We set it up and scanned my painting (which was too big to fit) in two sections. Photoshop miraculously pieced them together--seamless! We were impressed at how the scanner even managed to pick up on the texture (or tooth) of my watercolor paper. Terrific!
And you can find prints of this new painting if you click here!
Imagekind has finally gotten its act together, and now my other new-ish floral paintings are available as prints, too!
After a month of gray-dominated paintings involving grandparents, I was overjoyed to return to vivid colors. In August I'm going to have a one-person show at the Decatur (IL) Area Arts Council. I had applied for a 2014 exhibit, but their August 2013 artist had to back out due to--I think it was a house fire...? Talk about one of my greatest fears. If our house was burning down, I know which paintings I'd try to save first, but I definitely wouldn't be able to rescue all my work. I can't even imagine how that would feel.
Anyway, the Decatur people asked me if I could display my work in just a few short months, and I said yes. So between now and then, I'll be producing as many new paintings as I can to bulk up my body of work. That kind of rules out creating month-long paintings like Treasure or Ruby Liberty Dragonfly, although I plan to paint more jewelry still-lifes for the show. But each of these paintings will feature four or five sparkly things instead of something like eighty.
But back to the flowers! This is a wilting parrot tulip after I had worked on it for a couple of days. I planted ten of these frilly, fancy tulips a year and a half ago and was beyond excited to watch them emerge last spring. They were even more beautiful as they wilted, and their petals created interesting and dynamic shapes. I took several dozen photos and saved this one, the queen of them all, for the next time I felt the urge to paint something floral.
That super-hot red is a combination of opera (out of control pink) and cadmium red light (stupefying orange). I can't tell you how pleasing it is to mix those two colors. Something scientific/magical happens.
I tightened up the petals a bit and added some freckly spots. The background came together quickly, and I painted some of that during my watercolor workshop a few weeks ago (also at Decatur). It's been a while since I've had an audience, and it took me back to my teaching days when students would watch me work. I took some photos of people at the workshop, and here is my favorite one:
On to painting two! This is a passion flower I spotted at Kevin and Natalie's home in Orlando. Jeff and I visited them last month, and as soon as I saw this strange blue flower/mini-spaceship, I knew I would paint it. To create its dozens of stringy blue petals, I masked off those parts and painted the petals and leaves behind them.
Next I worked on the flower's amazing center, a fun combination of magenta and acid green, and painted the petals a flat blue (with dark purple and white areas). I don't even want to know how many petals are on this flower.
I added shadows to each petal (painstaking!) and lifted some highlights with a combination of tiny brush/water/paper towel. That took the better part of an afternoon, and I fell into assembly line mode. Done, done, on to the next one.
And here's the finished product!
It was smooth sailing once I finished that flower, although I began to suffer from dark green fatique. The bud/pod and the little springy things provided some relief. Both of these paintings are 10.5"x13.5", and I'm eager to pop them into frames.
We've reached the part of my new-painting posts where I link to Imagekind and beg you to buy prints, but Imagekind has been having site-wide technical problems for several weeks (!!). They've assured their artists that they are working on solving the problems, but many of us are understandably disgruntled. I make most of my money in November and December with a little Mother's Day bump in the spring. So the timing here is bad for me, especially now that I'm in portfolio-building mode and not painting people's grandparents for cash.
While we wait for Imagekind to get its act together, I have this gifty alternative for you:
It's my CafePress merchandise store, and last night I spent three hours uploading images and creating new products for you to peruse and enjoy. I'm sorry, but I want that bag so damn much! Please consider supporting me by picking up a thing or two, and I'll let you know when Imagekind is back to normal.
Please like my Facebook art page if you haven't already! I update it every few days with in-progress paintings, and let's face it, commenting is easier there than it is here. No stupid Captcha thing, and I respond to just about everybody, too!
Oh, it was tornado watch weather for sure. Wednesday afternoon Bun and I went outside to take in the hazy, finally legitimately warm weather. I took some photos, including this one of our sort of flooded backyard stream. Normally this stream is easily jumped or even stepped across, but thanks to a wetter-than-usual early spring, the stream has been wide and boggy for about a month. I've enjoyed watching Canadian geese, blue herons, wood ducks, and even beavers swimming and nosing around in it. Near the top of this photo and running from right to left is the Salt Fork river, and beyond that is our town's wetlands area. It's about the size of six football fields (totally guessing).
Bun lounged in the mulch near our daffodils.
I took photos of pretty blooming things. This bush was humming with honeybees.
These little guys were finally coming up. I'm so happy that spring is here!
Later on Jeff and I took a walk uptown. I wore a dress that showcased my unapologetically pasty white calves to motorists on Main Street and route 150.
While we were on
our relatively short walk, Jeff and I experienced the
following: a sauna-like humidityfest (seen above in red), a few steamy romantic sprinkles but no
clouds overhead (blue), a cheeseburger break while monitoring alarming new clouds
in the northwest (end of blue), some uneasy double-time walking towards home (purple), followed by flat-out
running from a very dark squall line and a sudden 20 degree temperature
drop (green). It was awesome.
It rained all night and Thursday--nonstop thunderstorms with torrential rain. I didn't take any radar screen caps while this was happening. Basically a massive, seemingly endless, chicken strip-shaped blob of yellow, orange, and red doppler radar was working its way up Illinois from soutwest to northeast. Here, let me illustrate that for you.
(The red dot there is our house. The chicken strip radar shape was even bigger than this, too.)
So northern Illinois was getting hammered, and we eventually got hammered as well. All of that water had to go somewhere, and flood watches and warnings were popping up left and right. Jeff and I usually shrug off flood alerts, but this seemed major, like one of those 100-year floods that we've started experiencing every five years or so. We live in the lowest part of the lowest part of Champaign County. Back in January 2008--Jeff and I had been dating for almost a month!--a combination of major snowfall and epic thunderstorms caused flooding so severe that Jeff and his daughter Melissa had to evacuate the house that Jeff and I live in now. There was a rescue with boats and everything. <--I'm making that more dramatic than it was, but still. Boats were involved.
Thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey, we were able to monitor the situation online. They have some charts that show how high the river is near our house--so glad that this site exists. Jeff knew from experience that anything over 19 feet meant that our sunken living room would flood. Anything over 20 feet meant that the rest of our house would flood. We went to bed on Thursday night looking at this chart.
And we were feeling like bad, bad things were going to happen in the morning. Jeff set his alarm clock for 2:00 a.m., saying we'd probably have to get up and start moving furniture and books out of the living room. At 1:30 we were awakened by a bumping sound--I'm not sure what that was, but Jeff sprang out of bed to look outside. I got up, too. The water level had risen considerably over the past few hours. Throbbing with adrenaline, we abandoned the idea of going back to sleep.
Thinking it might be a while before he could do it again, Jeff took a shower while I rather insanely put on some makeup (I'd taken my shower before bed). I guess I didn't want to be one of those bagged-out storm survivors you see on local news reports. I wanted to look like I at least had my act together once the cameras inevitably descended upon Jeff and me, area homeless flood victims.
During the pre-dawn hours we moved as much of our living room furniture and books as we could upstairs to my studio. Oh man, we have too many books. The cats were bewildered. As I went up and down the stairs 400 times, Jeff did what he could to rig up a sump pump outdoors in the dark. He monitored the rate at which the water was rising with a tape measure and did a lot of heavy lifting. At around 3:00 it seemed like we had done all we could do, and we were able to sit down and watch everything that was happening in Boston. What a surreal morning.
As the sky started to brighten in the east, this was what we saw.
The water was about ten feet from the most vulnerable corner of our house. "We're fucked," Jeff concluded, and we called both sets of parents. My folks wanted to come help us in some way or another, but they live on the west side of the state, where a number of roads were closed due to flooding. So they couldn't reach us. Jeff's parents live 45 minutes away, and they drove over in their truck. Jeff moved my car to higher ground (the school parking lot). Meanwhile, I promised myself that I would cry about this later and started packing a couple of go-bags. I couldn't get this silly but great song out of my head:
Jeff's dad drove to Champaign and purchased another sump pump--Jeff had the idea to set it up near the corner of the house along with our other smaller one. They eventually got it going, and then all we could do was monitor the situation. It was an awfully helpless feeling.
But happily the curve on the graph made it seem like things might be slowing down. At around 9:00, Jeff's parents didn't feel like they could stay much longer, as the one road out of our neighborhood was flooding. All we could do was watch and wait, and I called my parents about every half hour to let them know what was going on.
And I took some photos.
I fed the squirrels who are bottomless pits of seed-want no matter what's going on.
Yeah, there's no hopping across this thing.
Bun: WHERE ARE ALL THE STUFFS;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Freaky!
Sometime during the late morning hours, and after coming within a couple of feet of the house, it seemed like the flood had stopped rising. Bun wanted to see what was happening, and she sat on our deck in the cold watching the water for five minutes as if hypnotized and bewitched.
Slowly over the next couple of days, the water receded. We both felt so relieved.
Meanwhile, one of my paintings was in the Skip Watts Memorial Exhibition in Springfield. I even won an honorable mention along with some money! The reception was Saturday afternoon, but Jeff and I were too wiped out to drive all the way over there to attend. And anyway on Friday I had informed one of the people in charge that we were dealing with flooding, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to leave the house. So I was sad to have missed the show, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Instead we watched a lot of teals and coots glide around our backyard, and that was pretty wonderful. The light was always lousy while this was happening, so I didn't get any photos.
And here's what our backyard looked like this morning. After the flood all the colors came out, as somebody once said. I didn't have my promised cry, as it turned out, but Saturday morning I enjoyed a celebratory post-traumatic-stress migraine. It's a fun little custom of mine. We also went out and had pizza.
Jeff and I learned about Roger Ebert's death last Thursday about an hour after everybody else did. We had spent most of the day away from our computers and were enjoying one of central Illinois' first truly springlike afternoons, reprising our role as The Couple That Walks Around St. Joe Holding Hands.
Jeff found out first. We were sitting in the living room and getting set to watch Justified when he gasped. "Roger Ebert died," he said, looking up from his iPad sadly. Oh no. Instinctively my arms and legs bent in toward the center of my body--sort of a seated fetal position--as sadness swept over me.
My Facebook and Twitter notifications started erupting with "you're the first person I thought of when I heard" posts, and I responded to them for a few hours. Thanks so much to those of you who contacted me--Roger would have appreciated the immediate, easy way people were able to reach out to each other. I would love to see a map of the world dotted with those whose lives he affected and the amazing web of connections he spun between us.
As some of you may know, Roger and I were Twitter and email friends. Not wanting to waste The Great Man's time, I only communicated with him when I had something on my mind that I thought he would appreciate. And he would contact me as well. My Gmail says we had 92 conversations.
One of my favorite exchanges with him was in 2011 regarding the movie Crumb, a documentary I've loved and rewatched on VHS countless times. I had received the Blu-ray edition that included Roger's commentary track for Christmas. I listened to it as I painted one day and told him about how I appreciated his insights and how great it was to hear his voice for a while. We talked about R. Crumb's brothers and their "stupid mother" (Roger's words). It was fun and more than a bit surreal to talk about one of my favorite movies with Roger Freaking Ebert.
He especially liked it when I sent updates about nature, farming, and the weather in this part of the state. I live a few miles from his boyhood/college hometown, and I'd let him know when the corn was sprouting and show him photos of things like a cluster of mushrooms I'd found growing beside a tree stump in the yard.
As time passed, his email messages became shorter--sometimes just a
sentence or two, but always cordial and often humorous. Ignatiy Vishnevesky explained why his notes were so brief in his
wonderful letter to Roger from a few days ago:
"You communicated largely through your computer, but you typed slowly,
your hand hovering over a key before pressing down. It could take you
thirty seconds to type out a sentence."
He wanted to include it in a blog he was writing and credited me there, mentioning (incorrectly) that he owned two of my paintings. I sent Roger a quick "I'm pretty sure you just have the Art Theater" message, and he responded with,
I believe I have that one and the child with the book shelf. I've been in the hospital so it's hard to say…
Anyway, I feel like I have 2. And it sounds better :)
Cheers,
R
Sometimes
he'd send emails to me accidentally--meant for other people--and I'd
let him know. In February I got one containing some
confidential information regarding Ebertfest and his health. He had some big, wonderful plans for the last day. I told him his secret was
safe with me and he called me a dear friend. Imagine!
It's hard to describe what it's been like to have known him even in my minor way. He had over 800,000 followers on Twitter and followed 255. I had the extreme good fortune to be one of them. Whenever I tweeted something, I asked myself, "Is this Roger-worthy?" So there were no "going to the library LOL" tweets from me. He was my writing's conscience, the little voice I heard and continue to hear before I hit "post."
Just when I thought he wasn't reading this blog anymore--the man was beyond busy--I'd get a comment (!!!!!!) or a retweet. He even read at least one of my recipes. He made my month when he told his Twitter followers that "damn it, she's right" when I ranted about how most fruit crisps contain too much fruit and nowhere near enough crisp. Roger Ebert cared about the fruit-to-crisp ratio!
So the past few days have been loaded with Roger memories.
I was in the right place at the right time when he discovered my watercolors. He gave me confidence to pursue my dream. I've made new friends because of him. I've sold watercolors and prints because of him. He gave me the idea for one of my best paintings. He sent me messages from the hospital asking me how I was. He told me "I'm there with you--thank God for Jeff" during my cancer scare.
I was lucky to have met him in person two years ago. He looked at me and applauded. He wrote in his notepad that I was an artist and underlined it. I'll never forget it.
Roger did so much for me, and he didn't have to do any of it. But he did. He did, and I'm one of many, many people who have been saying things like this over the past few days. I can't thank him enough, but I think the best thing any of us can do to remember Roger is to try to be as kind, thoughtful, and appreciative of beauty as he was.
For the first time in two years, a medium-sized snowstorm hit our town yesterday, and today as Jeff and I wolfed down our lunch, I mentioned that I wanted to make a snowman. Surprisingly, Jeff was into the idea--"Let's do it now!" Of course, we couldn't do the same old played-out normal snowman. We made a snowBun.
It took us a little while to get on the same page as to how this snowBun would come together, but soon enough we established the Garfield-ish main form and began fine tuning it.
I messed around with the photo settings on this one to make the profile more visible.
We took turns making the face--I roughed in the main shape and eye sockets while Jeff refined the ears and added the features. He was charmingly businesslike while I emerged as the project's cheerleader.
It's my belief that if Bun had existed during Biblical times, people would have created golden idols in her image. So it was all too appropriate for Jeff and me to make a snow sculpture of a creature that we basically worship every day.
That face cracks me up.
This is the view of our snowBun from the house. She's not long for this world--this weekend we'll have highs in the fifties with a good chance of rain.
But this was so much fun, and for about an hour we felt like a couple of kids. We came inside soggy and gleeful. Bun groggily hopped downstairs, glanced at her giant likeness out in the yard, and demanded some wet food.
The photo above is a shot of our side-yard one afternoon last week, back when we had a dusting and a half of snow. The light seems to be changing just a bit now that December is over, and spring is obviously just around the corner.
Not really.
I'm going to spend the next ten weeks enveloped in various fleeces and plan to amuse myself with new recipes, including two you'll see below. But first, I wanted to show you a couple of photos of Poof from Christmas at our parents' house.
She was sitting there looking so blissfully content that I had to ask her to freeze while I took a photo.
I like how her senior photo seems to be peeking at her happy future self. What a beauty. I love her so much.
And now, the recipes!
This is a Pinterest recipe I found and made almost immediately. It's from something called "jujugoodnews" and is a black bean salad with corn, red peppers, and avocado-lime vinaigrette, minus the avocado for now. It's shockingly tasty and healthy to boot! I've tweaked it a bit (see italics).
INGREDIENTS
2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed and drained
3 ears fresh cooked corn, kernels cut off the cob <-- I used a bag of thawed frozen white and yellow corn, something like 12-16 ounces, so yeah, I went *heavy on the corn.* I've adjusted the lime juice, onion, salt and olive oil amounts below to accommodate the extra corn.
2 red bell peppers, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
generous 2 teaspoons salt
generous 2 tablespoons minced red onion
generous 2 tablespoons sugar
10 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon lime zest (be sure to zest limes before juicing them) <-- I zested 2 small limes
7 or 8 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro, plus more for garnish <-- I used Italian parsley because I have a problem with cilantro
2 Hass avocados, chopped
DIRECTIONS
Combine the corn, beans, and peppers in a large bowl and mix well.
Mince the garlic and mash it into the salt until it becomes a paste. Put it in a small bowl along with the lime juice, lime zest, olive oil, and onion. Whisk and pour over the corn mixture. Mix well.
Cover and chill for a few hours or overnight. Right before
serving, add avocados and mix gently, being careful not to mash
avocados.
Serve at room temperature.
Jeff and I decided to turn this salad into some tacos. He has a quick guacamole recipe that he likes to throw together (avocado, traces of lime juice--he had a bad experience with too much last month--a grated clove of garlic, a tablespoon of jarred salsa, and salt to taste). So: it's a smear of guac and a little pepper jack cheese on a blistered corn tortilla topped with the above salad.
This made a fun 1:30-ish kinda-lunch! Also there's no meat here, although this made us want to add some carnitas into the mix, but not enough to actually get in the car and drive 10 miles into town to our favorite carnitas provider.
Next up: spicy brittled peanuts from that Smitten Kitchen cookbook I've been talking about lately. Oh man, these are incredible. That amount of cayenne down there is perfect, and it quietly buzzes around in the sweet-salty background. If you're not allergic to peanuts, you will find yourself saying lots of double-negative things like, "Life would not be worth living if I couldn't eat peanuts."
You're going to have to work for these way-better-than-CrackerJack peanuts, but not too much. It's mostly just a lot of stirring over a medium-hot pot, and some of that stirring is very interesting because science.
INGREDIENTS
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon flaky sea salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup water
2 cups shelled raw or roasted unsalted peanuts, papery skins removed <-- I used blanched peanuts
DIRECTIONS
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicon mat. If you don't have either, coat your baking shee with a thinslick of vegetable oil.
In a small bowl, whisk together the baking soda, sea sat, and cayenne, and set aside.
In a large saucepan, the heaviest one you've got, heat the sugar, butter, and water over medium-high heat until it just begins to turn golden, about 7 to 10 minutes. Add the peanuts and start stirring, coating them with the sugar mixture.
After a minute or two, the sugar will sieze up a bit, making the peanuts look grainy and crusty, and it will be harder to stir them--you'll be convinced that it's gone irreversibly south, cursing me under your breath [This cookbook is so conversationally awesome and you need to go buy it--K], but fear not, keep stirring, and in about 3 minutes it will melt back into a golden caramel.
That part actually took more like 5 minutes. I'm sure this was because my idea of medium-high heat is a little low, as I am afraid of heat.
Keep stirring, breaking up any clumps with your spoon, until the nuts are evenly coated, then remove the pot from the heat. Stir in the baking-soda-spice mixture as fast and evenly as you can, then spill the caramelized nuts out onto your prepared sheet, spreading them in a single layer and breaking up any clumps that you can before they set. Cool completely.
Once they're cool, break the nut clusters into smaller pieces and put them in a serving dish. The nuts will keep in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks, but rarely do because they are habit-forming.
She's not kidding. These were gone in two and a half days.
In other food news, yesterday I tried one of David Leibovitz's recipes for a flourless chocolate cake that was great but, disappointingly, not awesome. I already make a coupleof F.C.C.s that beat it handily taste-wise and are a lot prettier to boot. So we're off to a disappointing start on that cookbook, but I'm nowhere near giving up. You should see some of the photos in that thing.
Finally, Jeff and I spent last week watching Mad Men's directors' commentaries for season five, and I was amused to discover this not-at-all-Photoshopped! insert in the packaging. I love how ticked off Betty looks.
PS Jeff thinks that Jon Hamm has an enormous head, especially in the image above, and he asked me to tack on this video.
Jeff and I took Melissa (his daughter) to New York a few weeks ago. This was Mel's first visit, but Jeff and I had been there multiple times. Mel had been putting in untold hours cooking at a restaurant in downtown Champaign--one of those deals where people keep quitting but no one gets hired to replace them, so the remaining crew has to work nightmare shifts for weeks on end. Mel was seriously exhausted, but you can't tell it in the photo above because (a) she is beautiful at all times, and (b) she was positively joyous at the prospect of escaping her restaurant captors for almost a whole week.
We took a late Saturday afternoon drive up to Chicago to our hotel near Midway. Our flight was at 6:00 the next morning. The sun set on an congregation of windmills--they really are a sight to behold in such a flat landscape--and a full moon rose in the east.
Near our hotel was a Five Guys. Mel had never tried one of their burgers and was duly impressed (just look at that cheese oozage). We were all starving, so that made the food even better. Back at the hotel, Mel and I laughed at the lobby's truly awful Helpful Waiter sculpture, whose bulbous ass greeted all parking lot visitors. We slept for a few hours before our phone alarms sounded at 3:15. We were out the door by 4:00, shuttled to the airport by 4:30, and hustled through security at 5:00.
We decided to get some breakfast before finding our gate. Our only food options at that hour were Gold Coast Dogs and something called Pegasus, where Mel had a breakfast sandwich that she does not recommend. But as for the hot dogs, I will never not want one of them. Breakfast of champions. We flew on Southwest for the first time (loved it) and watched the sun rise extra quickly as we headed east. We were in NYC by 9:00 and had a full Sunday itinerary ahead of us.
Happily, we were able to check in early at our hotel (the Westin on 42nd Street). Jeff and I are crazy about their yummy beds. I also happen to like the way all Westin lobbies smell great. And outside our window: the beautiful Chrysler Building!
Jeff, who managed to pay for our hotel and flights with points, wanted to introduce Mel to New York via walks to various landmarks and restaurants. We only hit a couple of museums on this trip. I thought this was wise because the first time I went to NYC it was one nonstop museum slog, something like six in two days, and while I loved them all, I came home with only a cursory feel for the city itself.
That morning Mel took photos of Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, St. Patrick's Cathedral (very much under construction), and Rockefeller Center, among others. She was wowed by the windows at THE Sax Fifth Avenue and Louis Vuitton.
The Louis Vuitton windows featured an eye-popping installation by dot-obsessed Japanese artist Yaioi Kusama.
The weather couldn't have been more beautiful--this was the first time I'd been there in the fall. Perfect jacket weather! Mel and Jeff took the bulk of the photos you'll see in these New York posts. "If I have to write about this, you guys have to take the pictures," I told them. If you're a fan of the show, it's impossible not to hum the 30 Rock theme song while standing in front of it.
That Sunday morning's walk made me particularly happy because every half hour or so we ate something sweet. Near 30 Rock: the Bouchon Bakery, home of the incredible macarons I enjoyed with Poof when we were in New York last year.
I swear I have not stopped thinking about those macarons, and I will be so bold as to say that they were better than any I had in Paris. I tried a summer berry macaron (the big purplish one in the middle), the same flavor I'd lost my mind over last year, and it was just as amazing as I'd remembered. I gave Jeff and Mel little--little!! mine!! grr!!--bites and we shared a very good baguette while doing some people-watching.
One advantage of having a third person with us: for the first time ever, we now have vacation photos of the two of us together, and they're not the usual self-portraits-holding-camera-at-arm's-length, either. Thank you, Mel, and I apologize in advance for any unappetizing mushiness you readers may see. Above: Jeff is telling me about the good old days of vaudeville, probably.
Ack!! The mushiness! Make it stop!
Next up: Momofuku's Milk Bar, home of the Crack Pie, the Compost Cookie, and the cereal milk milkshake. This place has a cookbook I've had on my Amazon wish list for over a year, but no one will buy it for me, and that's probably for the best.
There's something disturbing--and I have to think it's intentionally disturbing--about this place. We got a subversive, druggy vibe from it. It's the kind of bakery Lou Reed and Andy Warhol would come up with.
SONG TIME
The treats came prepackaged in a way that reminded me of the McDonald's fried cherry pies of yesteryear. There was no seating at the Milk Bar, so we sat on a window ledge and tore into our treats like a bunch of junkies. Pictured: the cereal milk milkshake, which tasted exactly like cereal milk because that's what it's made of. Jeff's holding the candy bar pie, and I've got the crack pie. Not pictured: the compost cookie, which we saved for later. The crack pie is like a pecan pie without the pecans, and it has an oatmeal cookie crust. Very sweet and delicious. If that was the crack pie, the candy bar pie ought to be called the meth pie. It has a chocolate cookie crust, housemade nougat, a thick, gooey layer of toffee, and a pretzel smothered in chocolate ganache. We talked about it for days. Somebody had better get me that cookbook; that's all I'm saying.
Shiny building, historic building, building from some movie...hey, how about some pizza?
Jeff led us to Angelo's Coal Oven Pizzeria, where we shared a small margherita pizza. I was swooning over the sauce. Gah, I want some so badly right now! Why do I have to go all the way to New York for this, why? I can't write about this pizza. It was perfect in every way and it's making me sad.
After lunch we explored Central Park. Jeff and Mel gamboled up an impressive rock overlooking a pond while I rested my feet. Conservative estimate: we walked at least 40,000 steps that day, no joke, and my boots were feeling gravity's pull. Did you enjoy my use of the word gamboled up there, by the way? Because here's exactly what I thought when they scampered up that rock: Look at those two, gamboling like a couple of goats. Then they strutted back down like Richard Pryor in Stir Crazy.
At some point Jeff checked his phone to see how much the Frick (one of my favorites: a mansion turned into an all-killer-no-filler art museum) cost, and he learned that, amazingly, the Frick was free on Sundays from 11:00 to 1:00. It was 12:45. We RAN to the Frick as Mel and I shrieked, "Frick! What the Frick!" etc. We got in by the skin of our teeth and saved 54 dollars. Was it crowded? You bet.
But we still managed to enjoy such hard-hitters as Holbein's Sir Thomas More, Bellini's St. Francis in Ecstasy, a late Rembrandt self-portrait, and many more, but not too many more. This is a nice, bite-sized museum that won't monopolize your entire afternoon.
It was raining when we left, but it was only a passing shower. We took shelter under an arbor in Central Park and ate the compost cookie, which was a "kitchen sink" kind of thing that included potato chips. Unfortunately, the chips didn't have as much of a presence as I thought they might, so that was a little anticlimactic.
We explored the park some more. If you click on this photo and look closely, you'll notice a cluster of frat boys in Speedos beneath the green banner on the right. In what must have been a hazing ritual, they came up to people and sang a capella choruses of pop songs at passersby. "You don't know-oh-oh! You don't know you're beautiful!" and so on. We got out of there...
...but not before I got a shot of Melissa at Strawberry Fields. This photo was taken during the nanosecond that Baby Boomers were not swarming around it.
More walking, more buildings, more photos, and eventually we approached Columbus Circle. Jeff had a lead on a Belgian waffle food truck. I've mentioned this before, but four years ago Jeff went to Belgium on business, and while he was there he had the best frites of his life and street-food waffles topped with Nutella, ice cream, and so on. He can't get over those, either. And I like waffles as much as the next guy, but I never understood what the big deal was...until we hit that food truck and it showed me what's what.
Unbelievable. That thing you see above is a liege waffle, which means it has a thin crust of caramelized sugar. These are tricky to make, apparently, but so special. Warm, gooey, slightly crunchy, complex--an absolute winner. I saw the shot on the right as I was sifting through these photos the other day, and it knocked the wind out of me.
But wait, there's more! We shared a single serving-sized cup of gelato at Grom (which Jeff and I had enjoyed in Florence and Paris). I demonstrated the unique stretchiness of gelato for Mel. Achingly good. The fact that we had shared everything that day made us a lot less bloated than we would have been otherwise, I'm telling you.
We walked down Broadway as late afternoon approached--remember, we had been up since 3:00--and prepared to hit our final food stop of the day, Don Antonio, whose claim to fame is a pizza with a crust that is deep fried before it is topped and baked in a smoky wood oven. We ordered one of those along with a fresh mozzarella and prosciutto appetizer. Mel very sweetly said that dinner was on her. How fabulous of her!
The pizza's crust was indeed incredible, with a crunchy-chewy texture, but I've never had a smokier pizza, except maybe that time when Dad put a frozen pizza on the grill to see what it would do. This felt like I was eating bacon, not pizza, and bacon is terrific but I wanted pizza more. So this place took a back seat to Angelo's from earlier in the day, but needless to say, we ate the hell out of that pizza anyway.
After supper we waddled back toward our hotel, and the Empire State Building came into view for the first time. Jeff created the above self-portrait in an homage to the final episode of this season's Louie, where SPOILER ALERT he flips off the Ed Sullivan theater and yells "F--- you, David Letterman!" I have loved Dave for thirty years, so I do not approve of this photo at all, but that was one stellar Louie episode, and I'm sure Dave got a kick out of it, too. Finally, we passed Grand Central Terminal en route to our yummy, yummy beds.
Heh, I told myself that I was going to keep this short, as several weeks have passed since our trip. Fail! The rest of these will be shorter. Probably. I hope.
The new cookbook from Baked (I've writtenaboutthoseguysbefore) is here, and it is tremendous. It arrived at my doorstep on Friday, filled with a stupefying number of recipes that demanded to be tried. Baked Elements is organized into ten chapters, each starring one of Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito's favorite ingredients, such as banana, malted milk powder, chocolate, booze, and so on. Chapter one is peanut butter. I've already made two of its recipes, with another one in the works for later today. The peanut butter chapter is so compelling that I haven't even read the rest of the book beyond a quick breeze-through.
Why oatmeal peanut butter chocolate chip scones first? Number five in the book, this was the first recipe for which I had all of the ingredients on hand. Any suppertime plans I had went out the window. "Do you mind if we just have these tonight?" I asked Jeff, who had no problem whatsoever with this idea, and he helped me make them.
As you can see from the photo above, this is only kind of a scone. It's more like a cookie. Scookie? YES IT'S THAT. The oatmeal gives the scookie a nice chewiness and provides a speed bump for those of us who might be inclined to inhale it otherwise. The peanut butter has a definite presence, and the beyond-generous amount of chocolate chips will have you muttering things at it like, "Oh you son of a bitch."
And they're easy to make and not all that messy! Reportedly good with coffee! Less butter than you might expect! Buttermilk binder instead of cream so whoop-de-doo!
Make them and then buy the book. Matt and Renato deserve your love.
1 cup semisweet or milk chocolate chips <--we cobbled together some chunks and regular chips
2 tablespoons raw sugar <--we used granulated sugar instead
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 400 and position the rack in the center. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and oats. Add the butter and use your fingertips or a pastry cutter to rub or cut the butter into the four mixture until the butter is pea-size and the mixure looks like chunky, coarse sand.
In a glass measuring cup or small bowl, whisk together the buttermilk and egg yolk until combined.
Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the buttermilk mixture into the center of the well. Add the peanut butter. Using clean, dry, lightly floured hands, gently mix and knead the dough in the bowl until it starts to come together. Add the chocolate chips until just incorporated. Do not overwork the dough.
Turn the dough out directly onto the prepared baking sheet and shape it into a disk 8 inches in diameter and about 1.5 inches high. Beat the egg white slighty, brush the top of the dough with the egg white, and sprinkle with the raw sugar, if you wish.
Cut the dough into 8 wedges--but do not seprate the wedges--and bake for 18-22 minutes (mine took 22), or until the scones start to brown, rotating the baking sheet halfway through. Alternatively, check for doneness by inserting a toothpick into the center of the scone. If the toothpick comes out clean or with just a few crumbs clinging to it, the scones are done.
Remove from the oven, let cool for 5 minutes, and re-slice and separate the scones. Serve slightly warm or transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Scones taste best when consumed within 24 hours of baking, but you could store these scones in an airtight container for up to 2 days.
Did you notice my fancy new plate up there in the top photo? I bought it for $1.50 at a garage sale in Jeff's tiny hometown last week. Jeff grew up about 35 miles south of our house, and 95% of the drive looks like the photo above.
When I taught my beginning art students about perspective, that was the scene I described when introducing the concept of vanshing points. "You know how when you're driving *basically anywhere in Champaign county* and you look at the road in front of you, and it seems like the sides of the road come together at a point on the horizon? And it looks like the road just disappears?" [nods all around] "That's an example of a vanishing point." [Huh! That thing has a name.]
Anyway, the harvest is happening, and the corn looks particularly sad this year thanks to the summer's drought. Some farmers were hit so hard that they didn't even bother to harvest--they just plowed everything under. But most are in the fields now, getting what they can from the stunted corn with its sad little ears.
Someone with happy big ears is Hypatia. Very Renee Zellweger on the pose there, Pache.
And Bun would like to thank everyone who had nice things to say about her supervised walkabout post a while back. She came into my life almost 11 years ago, and her ability to pose with maximum cuteness at all times and in any situation continues to stun all who encounter her, even in the dark.
Make no mistake, this is The Summer of Bun. We've been taking her outdoors once or twice a day on what I like to call "supervised walkabouts." We don't let her out of our sight and stay within a few yards of her--she seems to want us to follow her around and act as her entourage. Bun mostly noses around the patio, where she monitors the comings and goings of chipmunks and our big fat woodchuck. (Heh: nosin' aroun'.)
Our other two cats don't get to go outside. Hypatia becomes confused, and Quixote simply bolts and gets lost. Bun is the only one we trust, and she's been microchipped. I feel bad about the unfairness of this situation because it calls to mind the opening scene from The Royal Tenenbaums. If our cats were Tenenbaum children, Bun would be Richie (ff to 4:19 to see what I mean, although you really should watch all of this).
So I guess that makes me Gene Hackman. Back to the adorable kitty pics.
Bun has spotted a chipmunk!
And I am ruining her chipmunking experience.
Bun spends a lot of her walkabout time lounging in the grass. Please enjoy this Jeff-filmed video of Bun rolling around in the dirt like a grub (sorry it's vertical).
This never gets old. Seriously, I could watch that all day.
I wish that blade of grass wasn't blocking her eye!
Impromptu grooming session.
She is so little!
While I took these photos today, something like four mosquitoes bit me, so I wanted to at least get a blog entry from my time outside. Also, for each half-hour that she spends walking about, Bun devotes an equal amount of indoors-time to standing by our patio door and wailing like a banshee because she wants to go out again. It's awful.
But Bun's just so cute when she's outside doing stuff!
All rollin' around on the rocks and everything.
And we're back on chipmunk watch. She pays attention to every sound and movement around her. She spent her kittenhood (before she decided that I should be her mama) outdoors fending for herself, and I often wonder how much she remembers from that time.
After a successful walkabout, Bun settles into her "happy pose" and takes a nap.
Jeff says Bun is more than just a pet. He calls Bun my "animal familiar," and witchay-woman BS aside, I love that idea and know that it is true.
