Fried Green Tomatoes

“Yuck” my colleague Ann, who gardens, said when I told her what I intended to do with the green tomatoes she brought me.  In the UK, people make chutney from the early autumn green tomatoes that never get around to ripening.   But I’m a Southern girl at heart and know about Fried Green Tomatoes.  Even though I grew up in Southern California, my parents were from the South – my Mom, Nell Rose, hailed from North Carolina and my dad, Frank, was an Okie from Muscogee.

Before

After

Steve and I are hosting a Samhain (pronounced SOW-in) feast on Saturday night.  Samhain is a festival held at the end of the harvest season in Gaelic cultures. Principally a harvest festival, it also has aspects of a festival of the dead and is a time to honour the ancestors.  We’re cooking a huge pot of cassoulet as the centrepiece of the meal and we’ve asked each of our guests to make and bring a dish that some of their ancestors would have eaten.   My contribution will be fried green tomatoes and okra.  More on the whole Samhain thing in another post, now let’s have something to eat!

Fried Green Tomatoes

• One or two medium green tomatoes per person
• Salt and pepper
• Cornmeal or polenta
• Bacon drippings, sunflower oil or sunflower oil that streaky bacon has been cooked in

Slice the tomatoes about ¼-inch thick, season with salt and pepper and then coat both sides in cornmeal.  In a large skillet, heat enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan and fry tomatoes until lightly browned on both sides.

Steve says, ‘Surprisingly, tasty!”

When I made these the other night, I fried up some boneless chicken fillets, Southern style, made a pan of buttermilk biscuits and boiled some green beans for a Southern meal.

Last night I made BFGT sandwiches for dinner.

BFGT Sandwich

• Three slices of streaky bacon
• Three slices of fried green tomato
• Welsh Rabbit cheese sauce or Mature cheddar cheese
• Ciabatta
• Butter
• Jalapeño peppers

Cook and drain the bacon slices.  Fry the tomatoes in the fat.  Split the ciabatta lengthwise and toast under a grill  Butter it and spread with cheese sauce or thin slices of cheddar.  Grill until brown and bubbly.  To assemble the BFGT, layer bacon and fried tomatoes on one half of the bread, add a few sliced jalapeño peppers and top with the other slice.

Pretty dang good!

CRAZY

Wow, this is an awesome song and music video I encountered for the first time a week ago.

Crazy is is the first single from Gnarls Barkley, a musical collaboration between Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, and is taken from their 2006 debut album St. Elsewhere.  It’s a great song.  Going along with the psychiatric theme of the song, Gnarls Barkley’s music video for “Crazy” is done in the style of the Rorschach inkblot test. Animated, mirrored inkblots morph into another, while taking on ambiguous shapes.  The inkblot illustrations were done by art director and motion graphic designer  Bryan Louie.

Crazy

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
In so much space

And when you’re out there
Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that’s my only advice

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are,
Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you’re in control

Well, I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember is thinking, I want to be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it’s no coincidence I’ve come
And I can die when I’m done

Maybe I’m crazy
Maybe you’re crazy
Maybe we’re crazy
Probably

Caws Pob

Since the clocks have turned back, my bike ride after work is when it’s starting to get dimpsy.  Dimpsy is an old Devonian word for twilight dusk.   I notice the smells and sounds so much more when I can’t see the colours and details of things.  The sleepy songs of roosting birds, the smell of woodsmoke from chimneys and bonfires, the pungent cedar tree by the old stone bridge and owls hooting in the apple orchard at my bus stop.

I normally have a 15 minute wait for the bus and haven’t been sure about how I’ll feel sitting in the dark (in the spring and summer, I can catch up on my reading).  But, I like watching the night settle in.  There are no street lights for miles around and the few houses at Farrant’s Cross have warm, yellow glows in their windows, so I have some company nearby.  Last night I remembered that when I lived in L.A., when the darker, silent days of fall and winter arrived, the city would get even brighter and noisier.  In the country and in a still rural part of England, the villages and people adapt to the season – tearooms and pubs reduce their opening hours and people stock up on wood, eat warming foods and move their activities indoors.

The trees were sillhouetted against the deepening blue sky.  In a few weeks at this time, the sky behind them will be black and they will have stars caught in their branches.

Steve was due home after me, after a long drive from a meeting for his work, so I decided to make something quick and warm and comforting for dinner.  Welsh rabbit, or Caws Pob isn’t rabbit at all, but a thick cheese and ale sauce spread over toast and grilled until it’s bubbly and browned.   Quick to make and really yummy.

Caws Pob

• 2 llwy fwrdd of fenyn
• 2 llwy fwrdd of flawd
• 1 llwy de of fwstad Dijon
• 1 llwy de o saws Worcesterchire
• ½ llwy de o bupur du
• 60ml o gwrw porter
• 200g caws Chedda
• bara

Yn gyntaf dylid todi’r menyd mewn sosban cyn ychwanegu’r blawd a’i gogino am ddau funud (heb losgi’r blawd). I’r gymysgedd yma dylid ychwanegu’r mwstadd, y saws Worcesterchire y cwrw. Wedi cogino’r cymysgfa am tua pedwar munud dylid ychwanegu’r caws wedi ei garfellu ychydig wrth ychydig gan sicrhau and yw’n llosgi ar waelod y sosban. Tra mae’r caws yn toddi dylid tostio bara ar un ochor a phan mae’r caws yn barod dylid ei dolldi ar ben ochr amrwd y bar cyn ei roi o dan y gradell i liwio pen y caws.

buddha

Welsh Rabbit

• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• ½ tsp black pepper
• 60ml porter beer or brown ale
• 200g Cheddar cheese, grated
• sliced bread

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour. Cook this mixture for about two minutes, ensuring that the flour doesn’t burn. Add the mustard, Worcestershire sauce and the beer. Cook for about four minutes then begin adding the grated cheese little by little, ensuring that it does not burn on the bottom of the pan. Whilst the cheese is melting slice your bread and toast on one side under the grill. When the cheese has all melted turn the part-toasted bread over and add the cheese mixture on top of the uncooked side of the bread. Place back under the grill until the cheese has coloured a golden brown.

The Future is Now

On our recent visit to London, Steve and I saw quite a bit of artwork.  Sculpture at the Royal Academy, Turner and the Masters at the Tate Britain, the shortlisted nominees for this year’s Turner prize and an installation by Miroslaw Balka at the Tate Modern.

The Anish Kapoor sculpture in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of the Arts was terrific to photograph.  An arrangement of 76 shiny spheres bubbles up to the level of the surrounding Palladian buildings.

Anish Kapoor – ‘Tall Tree and the Eye’

My favourite piece of art was in a show we stumbled across in Spitalfields.  The Future Can Wait featured the work of over 30 artists in a derelict, industrial space on the top floor and roof top of Brick Lane’s Old Truman Brewery.

Not only was the setting fabulous, but I fell in love with a sculpture called Family Portrait by Marilene Oliver.

Family Portrait

The piece was made from a series of sculptures of the artist’s family made from MRI scans. The scans where printed onto acrylic and stacked in correct order give the illusion of a ghostly figure, which appears and disappears depending on your view point.

This is Oliver’s artist’s statement from her website:

“The virtual world created by the computer is one that provides no place for the physical body. As communications technology and the use of the Internet is becoming an integral part of our lives, the absence of the physical in the virtual space is destined to provoke changes in the physical body and in our relationship to it in the real world. My work centres around this relationship, seeking to explore and create ways of intimately representing the physical body.

My relationship with the body is nostalgic and romantic, based on an anxiety that the body is becoming redundant. New technologies, especially communications and medical imaging alienate us from the bodies that we have. They promote a decentralisation of the self – they allow us to project ourselves into different spaces and offer us new views of our bodies that belittle being contained in a physical body.”

Annie Kevans – Oils

Angela Bartram – Performance Writing

Self Portrait

Chocolate covered cat

Rooftop detail – as tweaked in Photoshop

View to the west

look

London, outside the Tate Britain

Beannacht

A couple of weekends ago I went to  Alicia Merrett’s 2 day Text on Fabric workshop in which I learned how to print on fabric using Thermofax screens and acrylic paints.  I’ve been hearing about and seeing this technique for awhile now and frankly had thought it would be a lot more technical and complex than it actually is.  A Thermofax screen is basically a stencil and quicker and cheaper to prepare than a silk screen.  It can be used with acrylic & textile paints, discharge media or adhesives to use with foiling.  I was impressed with the level of detail that can be achieved. There are a lot of ready-made screens about and Thermofax Screens based in the UK has a custom screen service.  I have a little shopping list of a few screens to buy – feathers and the Chartre labyrinth AND I am going to have a couple of screens made with an alphabet font so that I can incorporate some of my writing and poetry into my fibre art.

Alicia had brought several screens to the class for us to practice with, along with some of her beautifully vibrant art quilts. Day 1 was spent printing and on the second day, most of us started working on a project.  Alicia also showed us her fine line magic piecing technique.

The workshop took place at Cowslip Workshops near Launceston, Cornwall.  At lunch on the second day, Alicia’s husband Steve joined us and told us about a very romantic book that they have just published.  Darling Alicia chronicles their written exchange of love letters in 1966 and 1967 (between Argentina, where they met, and India) which culminated in a reunion in India and their now forty-plus years of marrriage.  We talked about really living life and taking risks.  Regrets are for those who never took the chance in the first place and a creative person can always make something new from their mistakes.

The food was excellent by the way – homemade, locally sourced and organic whenever possible.  Lunch was butternut squash or parsnip soup, fresh bread, quiche, cheeses, coleslaw, beetroot salad and a greenleaf salad.  We also had cake and/or scones and jam with afternoon tea, coffee, cappucino or hot chocolate.  You can just go for the food at their cafe and they have a few special food events.

I just finished making a piece called Beannacht from some of the fabric I screenprinted.    I used a brown and plum palette with highlights of gold in the fabric, stitch and printing.

Beannacht

Detail

and more detail

On the back, I attached a blessing written by one of my favourite writers, John O’Donohue, called Beannacht.  I painted handmade paper with a wash of gold Stuart Gill fabric paint and printed the words onto it in brown ink.   

Beannacht is a Gaelic word for blessing or benediction.  Here are the words -

Beannacht

On the day
when the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble
May the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you.

May a flock of colours
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens
beneath you
May there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

- John O’Donohue

And here is the blessing read by John shortly before his death in 2008.  Such beautiful, healing words and what a voice!

I made Beannacht for my friend and finished stitching the hanging sleeve on at work.  At lunchtime, I took it outside to the copse to photograph it.  I made a circle from some sticks and placed it in the middle.  To let the land and the autumn and the now thin golden threads of light bless the piece.