A chair of bowlies

Remember the Mary Engelbreit craze in the early 90′s?  Little collections of pleasant thoughts and gentle reminders to look on the bright side to share with anyone who needs a little pick-me-up on everything from greeting cards to fabric to ‘home accents’?  I’ve always remembered this one -

I love the Co-op market in our village.  It was refurbished just before we moved to Moretonhampstead, looks very smart and has a pretty good selection of food and wine.  Although it can be feast of famine at times.  For instance, there were no bagels for weeks, but there is currently a special on 500 ml squeezy bottles of Heinz Ketchup which can be bought by the caseload.  So we’re flexible in our menu planning and when we go shopping.

The other day, punnets of cherries were reduced to 50 pence!  From £4.00.  So I picked up four of them and made our first meal at home, as husband and wife, based around cherries.  I love cherries!  The saying ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’ means that life is pleasant and simple – just make sure not to swallow the pits and you’ll be fine.

I’ve made a cherry sauce for pork before with dried cherries and port, which was great and had a slightly tart twang to it.  But I looked out a few fresh cherry recipes and cobbled this one together.  It was very juicy and fresh  .  .  .  .  .  .   succulent!  I got the pork medallions sliced to order from Michael Howard, the butcher over the road from us.

Pork Medallions with Fresh Cherry Sauce

• 2 -3 pork medallions per person, cut from a pork tenderloin
• Sunflower oil for frying
• 1 cup flour
• ½ teaspoons salt
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper

For  the Cherry Sauce:

• ½ cup red wine
• 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar
• Salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup of cherries, pitted and halved

Cut the pork tenderloin into 1/2″-3/4″ medallions and place inside a zip top plastic bag one at a time. Pound with a rolling pin until the medallion is 1/4″ in thickness. Repeat with remaining medallions.

In a large skillet, add enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan and heat over medium high heat.

While oil is heating, mix the flour, salt and pepper to a plate. Dredge the pork medallions in the flour mixture and place in the hot oil. Brown on both sides, cook for about 5 minutes and remove from pan. Keep cooked medallions warm under a foil tent while preparing the sauce.

Add the wine and vinegar to the skillet, stirring constantly and loosening up the bits on the bottom of the pan. Add brown sugar and salt and pepper to taste. Toss in the fresh cherries.  Cook until slightly thickened. Off heat, add butter and stir until melted.   Spoon over the pork medallions.

We had this with roasted potato wedges and steamed haricots vert.  Boy, was it ever good!

For dessert, I made a clafoutis.  A clafoutis (cherry flan) can be made from other fruits, but it is traditional in the Limousin during cherry season – peasant cooking for family meals and about as simple a dessert to make as you can imagine.

Clafoutis

• 1 ¼ cups milk
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• ½ cup flour
• 3 cups cherries, pitted
• 1/3 cup sugar
• powdered sugar

In a blender blend the milk, sugar, eggs, vanilla, salt and flour. Pour a 1/4 inch layer of the batter in a buttered 7 or 8 cup lightly buttered fireproof baking dish. Place in the oven until a film of batter sets in the pan. Remove from the heat and spread the cherries over the batter. Sprinkle on the 1/3 cup of sugar. Pour on the rest of the batter. Bake at 350 degrees for about for about 45 minutes to an hour. The clafouti is done when puffed and brown and and a knife plunged in the center comes out clean. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, serve warm.

"It's showtime!"

“Life is just a bowl of cherries, dont take it serious, its mysterious.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, so live and laugh and laugh at love,
love a laugh, laugh and love.”
- Bob Fosse

PS I probably won’t ever base a meal around Ketchup

Grounded

The fourth and final runner that I made for our wedding feast was the element of earth.

From ‘Water, wind, earth, and fire: the Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements’ by Christine Valters Paintner:

“Earth stands for what is material and solid in our being.  It is the element our bodies are made of, breathed into, lit on fire, with blood and water flowing through our veins.  It becomes the container for the other elements.  Earth as an element symbolizes the commitments and necessities of our lives.  It represents our limitations as well as our possibilities.  When we are deeply rooted, our branches can reach far and wide.”

When Steve and I were in London purchasing his trousseau, I found the perfect brown silk dupioni to use as the base.  I used cream twill for the backing and added a middle layer of cotton wadding.  I wanted my earth runner to be very solid.  I screenprinted gold leaves with metallic fabric paint onto the silk.  The runner was 130″ x 13″ and made for a table to seat eight people.  This photo was taken post-wedding feast and has the impressions from someone’s wine glass on it.

When it came time to do the stitiching, a single line of gold metallic thread was all that it needed.  I wanted to keep it very simple, restful and quiet.  The design felt Japanese.

simply elegant

O Earth! O Earth! When will we hear you sing,
Arising from our grassy hills?
And say: “The dark is gone, and Day
Laughs like a bridegroom in His tent, the lovely sun!
His tent the sun!
His tent the smiling sky!”
How long we wait, with minds as dim as ponds,
While stars swim slowly homeward in the waters of our west?
O Earth! When will we hear you sing?

-Thomas Merton

Be here now

Today is the day that I will receive the 200,000th visit to Inspiraculum.   I thought of what to write about, how to mark the occasion, what to give as a special offering.  Yet it is really just another extraordinary day.

Yesterday, when I was at work, I turned to pick up my glass and have a drink of water.  A shaft of brilliant sunlight had fallen on the spot where it sat.  The glass and the water and the sunlight all played together to make a beautiful sculpture transmitting concentric rings and beams.

It was so beautiful.  I paused and looked and felt grateful for the brilliant sunshine after a cold, rainy week and the coming of spring and the beautiful luminescence cast by the water and glass and sunlight.  Then I had a drink and went back to my task.  But somehow more in the present.

So this is my gift to you, today and everyday.  A reminder to stop and be wherever you are  .  .  .  now.  To look and see what wonderful thing or moment or person, plant or animal is right in front of you.  Yes, maybe it is ‘just another day’, but there is extraordinariness to be found if you look for it.

Nothing is worth more than this day.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our Wedding Quilt

The wedding quilt has had a long, significant role, especially in America.  Such a quilt would be given to a newly married couple as a wedding present, or a bride to be would piece a special quilt top for her marriage bed.  In the 1800s, quilting bees were popular and were often held to mark special occasions, particularly engagements and weddings. Girls were expected to sew several quilt tops for their dowries; these quiltings were often equivalent to engagement announcements.

The ‘traditional’ wedding quilt pattern is a Double Wedding Ring, contructed from a series of interlocking circles.

Double Wedding Ring quilt, c. 1940

For part of my dowry, I’m making a wedding quilt which will hang at the altar during our soul wedding ceremony and afterwards, at the head of our marriage bed.  The design is based on my photograph ‘Cleaved’ which I’ve written about here.

The background and slate pieces are silk dupioni and the rose petals will be printed onto cotton.  My first step was to make a full-sized cartoon.  I put the image into Photoshop and produced an outline drawing which I printed onto acetate.

I borrowed an OHP from work and used some huge sheets of brown wrapping paper I scrounged from IKEA to project and draw my cartoon onto.

I had some screens made from some of the emails and hand written letters that Steve and I exchanged in the weeks after we had met and were living 200 miles apart  .  .  .   .   .   .

and these words written by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I had sent to Steve when he asked me for my favourite quote.

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”

I ordered my screens from Thermofax Screens.  They have an online custom screen ordering service, in which I email my text/image as an attachment.  Claire Higgott is an absolute gem and gives very helpful advice, often suggesting how I can order a slightly smaller screen to get the same result. The turnaround is super fast and they have a good selection of pre-made screens to choose from too.

Steve helped with the leading (vertical spacing between the lines of text), line breaks and how the lines will fit around the rose petals.

My first step was to screen print the quote onto the fabric.  I had three screens made, each with four lines of text.

I made guides from freezer paper with staggered cut outs so I could screen four lines of text at a time.

It really took a lot of planning and even so, I accidentally screened one line of text two inches lower than I should have.  But I managed to scrub the fabric paint off with a nail brush and Fairy liquid, thus averting disaster.  Whew!!

I’m very, very pleased with the result.

I chose a font called ‘ Dali’ that I found on dafont.com and used Argent Moiré Setacolor fabric paint.  I’ll probably use the screens of our love letters to make shadows and texture on the background fabric.

My next step will be placing the slate pieces and printing the rose petals.

Gratitude

On the last day that I rode the bus in to work before the Christmas break, the mist lay along the river valleys and the bare winter tree branches filigreed the grey sky.  My heart caught and I breathed thanks for the beauty all around me.

I remembered a time when I didn’t really notice the natural world around me.  When I was a child and adolescent I was too wrapped up in survival to take much notice outside of my tight little sphere, plus I was living in suburban Los Angeles.  Yet as I got older and started to go camping and out into nature, I fell in love with and found my spirituality and my deepest self in the natural environment.  I did notice and celebrate the seasons, subtle as they were in Southern California.

The point I’m rambling up to is that if we aren’t grateful right where we are and with what we have, then we won’t be when we get the things we think we want or to where we think we want to be.  Just over two years ago, I had left Devon and moved back to the US in a mis-guided attempt to find home and a sense of family.  After a few weeks I realised the futility of my quest and that I felt more ‘me’ in England.  So I returned and spent the better part of the year finding home inside and learning to appreciate my life now, not when or if.  I did have a pretty clear idea of my ideal life and instead of feeling the lack and chasing after it, I decided to be still and make a tiny change in my life every day to expand it and contain what I wanted more of.  I settled into my life in a way that made sense and fit in with who I am.  I gave up the search for where I belong, but shaped the world around me, my world, to belong to me.  It was a big relief and it works!  PS it’s nice for the people around me too.

One of the paradoxes about gratitude is that when one becomes grateful, one isn’t stuck with or settling for their lot.  What happens is that when you feel gratitude for all the good that you have in your life, without even making any efforts you are throwing open wide the doors to bring even more abundance of good things into your life.

I like this quote which seems to be about being grateful always.

“Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”
- Satchel Paige

Barmy Art