Archive for March, 2009

Still life – Vitis vinifera

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Tudor Grape Study

Grapes make a wonderful still lfe exercise. This variety is called “Tudor”, straight from the grocery store and piled into the bowl Aunt Loris brought back to my parents from a trip to Denmark in the sixties.  I did this set up in our hoophouse on cloudy days in the early spring. The light was cold and very even, filtered through the fiberglass cover in late afternoon.

I counted five varieties on sale today at the store. Green, purple, giant red “Royal”, blue Concords – must be South American? – bunches of tiny black Champagne grapes that I’d love to paint but don’t want to write myself a check I can’t cash, and some rather brown, sad bunches that would be perfect for a set-up on mortality. I think I’ll buy a small bunch of two or three kinds and do a study in the green glass bowl this weekend.

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Primavera

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Seeds out. Planted the first seeds out today. The thermometer registered 50 F but you’ll notice there is still quite a bit of snow on the ground (that little drift is right below the thermometer).

Today’s seeds are: Cracoviensis Lettuce (47 days), Space Hybrid Spinach (37 days) and Bull’s Blood beet, grown for its lustrous red leaves (60 days).

The soil should warm up quickly under the row cover. Below, heath, heather, ground sand cherry and sedum as the alpine garden emerges  from the snow.

alpine garden, March

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New food – Rasgullas

Friday, March 27th, 2009

rasgullasIt was Tibetan dinner night up at the West Eden Village Improvement Society Hall, so the Boy and I made rasgullas. They’re delicious. They are also something of a pain to make, or at least to write down how to make, so this post will be more of a description than a recipe. As always, Wikipedia is your friend:

“The rasagolla is a very popular cheese based, syrupy sweet dish that originated in Orissa. It is supposed to have been a traditional Oriya dish for centuries. Arguably, the best rasagollas in Orissa are made by the Kar brothers, the descendants of a local confectioner, Bikalananda Kar, in the town of Salepur, near Cuttack. Another variant of this dish that is made in the town of Pahala, located between the cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, is also very popular locally. One theory pinpoints the origin of the rasagolla to the town of Puri in coastal Orissa, where it is a traditional offering to the Hindu goddess, Lakshmi, the consort of the Puri temple’s main deity, Jagganath.  In fact, it is an age-old custom inside the temple to offer rasagollas to Lakshmi in order to appease her wrath for ignoring her, after the commencement of the annual chariot festiva Rath Yatra.”

Rasgulla are made of chhenna – a light cheese made of whole milk cultured with lemon juice and allowed to drain.  You can use farmer cheese or ricotta if you don’t want to go through the several steps and waiting time to make a batch, but you didn’t hear that from me, okay? Knead the chhenna (or whatever) with a little semonlina, form into balls and cook in light sugar syrup (2 to 1) flavored with rose water and 5 – 10 whole cardamon seeds. When the balls have puffed up and the outside surface is smooth, ladle them out into a heavy syrup (1 to 1), again flavored with rose water and cardamon and serve. I generally tint the final syrup pink and serve in a large white porcelain bowl to set off the color.

Thrifty Yankee that I was raised to be, I save the cooking syrup and use it to cook apples down into applesauce – incredibly good. Remove the cardamon pods first.

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Other avenues. . .

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

I keep a notebook of places to paint, eventually, some day when I have more time out of doors.  Some of these houses and trees will wait till I return and some have been torn down or “restored” out of character. The images are  glossy 4 x 5′s taken with an ancient auto-everything Nikon and worked over with a Sharpie and photo retouch markers.

Page 2, snowstorm

Page 8 - Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor

Page 3 - Cromwell Rd.

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Weather post – First day of spring

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Sambuca candensis "Good Barn"

This is not what the garden looks like right now. Today, the max-min thermometer in the (unheated) hoop house registers -7 and 111 degrees. That will have to even out over the coming months to make a fine crop of elderberries. This particular bush is from Fedco, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners (MOFGA) seed co-op. It’s called “Good Barn” because it’s a descendant of “that good bush down by the barn” at the Nearing homestead. It is disease-free, gives a bountiful crop and the deer don’t seem to like it even enough to nibble at the blossoms, which are beloved by the bees. My only complaint would be that it grew wildly beyond the predicted 6′ tall and wide, and when it hit twice that I had to relocate it from the dooryard (where it’s cool shade was our old dog’s best friend) to the lower garden. Where the Russian crab, below, will be in bloom in a month or two.Russian Crabapple

Also in this picture: horseradish, Chinese forget-me-not, valarian, calendula and day lilies – all the robust volunteers of early spring.

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Three-fold Brownies

Sunday, March 15th, 2009
The ingredients

The ingredients

This is the first receipe I memorized. I don’t remember how old I was, but I remember reading the original recipe myself, from the pre-War copy of Fannie Farmer that included lots of advice about boiling canned green beans and making individual custards for invalids, that they might seem more appealing.  The proportions have changed over the years, but this remains a very dependable recipe for excellent brownies. It will survive your landlord’s crummy oven that won’t keep a steady temperature and can be baked in any flat pan or even (on one memorable road trip) in a folded piece of aluminum foil reinforced with wet string.

They are “three-fold” brownies because many of the ingredients can be easily memorized in threes, by a five-year-old girl, for example.

Melt 6 Tbs (3 x 2) butter with 3 oz. unsweetened chocolate.

In a medium bowl, beat together: 1 1/2 C sugar (3 half cups) and 3 eggs. There is no leavening in this recipe – the eggs are all you’ve got – so whip this mixture until it’s yellow and airy. Or not, if you’re in a hurry. The brownies will be terrific either way. Stir in the butter/chocolate mixture, stirring as you pour so that the hot mixture won’t cook the eggs. Add 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla (3 1/2 tsps.).  Add 3/4 C flour and 1/3 tsp salt. Before you fully incorporate the flour, add 3/4 C chocolate chips. Spread the brownies in a greased and floured 9″ x 9″ pan. Bake for 30 minutes* at 350 degrees.

My oven requires about 40 minutes for some reason. You want the top to be shiny and crackled and the insides fairly firm after cooling.

This recipe will also support a 1/2 C raspberry preserves and 1 1/2 tsp of Kirsch instead of vanilla.

Eh voila!

Three-fold brownies

Three-fold brownies

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New work – Southwest Harbor

Monday, March 9th, 2009
Road to the Harbor

Road to the Harbor

There are still many small houses here, even with the water so close at hand. It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, and along with a couple walking their dogs and distant flocks of gulls I saw a winter hare, a fox and a racoon.

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Seize the (warm and windless) day.

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

The Seckel Pear, early March

The Seckel Pear, early March

I had an unexpected afternoon at home today and the temperature hit 45 F, which is an opportunity to spray the fruit trees. Today I used 10 Tbs Bonide’s All Orchard Dormant Oil with about a quarter cup of Crocker’s Fish Oil per gallon, as the trees are still in full dormancy. Crocker’s makes everything stick better (so beware getting it on your work area, hands, sprayer, etc.), provides a little pre-foliar nourishment and discourages the deer. As a person who has a dozen or so fruit trees and is away from home an average of 8 hours,  7 days a week, I can’t tell you how much of an advantage it is to spray dormant oil. It is non-toxic and works by smothering larvae and eggs laid by the previous generation of insect pests last fall. It’s fairly easy to get out to the trees right now (well, I did get cold and wet wading through the hip deep snow in places but at least there were no mosquitoes) and with the branches bare it’s easy to see pruning issues and winter damage.  An early season spray session is a great excuse to get out there and have a conversation with the trees.  And if you have the sort of family that doesn’t mind you mixing up fermented fish concentrate and mentholated oil in the kitchen sink, so much the better.

The Seckel pear tree in the photo is 7 years old and produced about 2 bushels of fruit last summer. That’s a lot of tiny pears. I plant standard trees because on an island in Maine the climate and the soil (what soil?) will themselves keep growth to a minimum. They’re all pruned to 10′ to 12′ feet because I like to be able to prune and pick fruit without a ladder. That Seckel pear could go to 60′ in a nice spot in Connecticut. Here, it produces as many pears as I can use at 10′ – which is a good thing because it’s growing directly under the power lines to the house.

Being away from the house so much each day, I tend to spend every hour possible in the garden when I’m home. In June, that means I can be out until 9 p.m. before gardening is called on account of darkness.

“Bye bye, Muma” my son will say as I head out the door in April.  “See you in October!”.  Sad but true. . .

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New work – still life, because it’s still only 14 degrees out there.

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Mason Jar with Cranberries

Mason Jar with Cranberries

Also referred to around here as Nanny Berries (for their awful, goat-like smell when cooking) or Sargent Berries, the upright Viburnum grows 10 – 15 feet tall with narrow twisting trunks. The berries ripen in late summer and exist at all stages at once: pale unripe berries, red, purple and then dried black or blue. Both fruit and feathery white or cream blossoms are very popular with the bees, deer and birds.

I can’t decide if I want to put them in every still life I do from now on, or never draw them again.

Mason Jar with Cranberries, 20″ x 16″, pastel on board

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No school, no work, bake!

Monday, March 2nd, 2009
Makes the whole house smell great.

Makes the whole house smell great.

Mom’s Loaf Cake is represented in my recipe file by a dark and well-worn Xerox of a old index card. I don’t know where the original is at this point. The “Mom” is Grandma Miller, my mother’s mother’s mother. The card is typed (MOM’S LOAF CAKE) with handwritten notes all over it, creases and spots of who-knows-what all reproduced faithfully by the copy process.  My notes are below the recipe, which is as follows:

2 C sugar, 1 C shortening or half butter/half lard, 2 C milk, 1 tsp salt, 4 C flour, 1 egg, 5 tsp. baking powder, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1 C raisins and citron. Cream the S and S, then egg, milk, sift dry ingredients together and add rasins and citron. Bake 350 in loaf pans.

That’s all it says on the card.  I use all butter and add it melted (but I do that for any recipe). I use a little cream or half and half in the milk, because I assume Grandma Miller wasn’t using skim. Instead of raisins and citron I use currants plumped in hot water and a little Grand Marnier.This makes a big batter, so I add half the flour, all the milk, then the other half of the flour, in a nod to “alternative” mixing. My load pans are ancient Pyrex and on the small side and it’s always a toss up if I can divide the batter perfectly evenly so that neither pan runs over as it bakes. Someday I should pick up some normal loaf pans and not risk a messy oven cleanup every time I bake this, right? Right.

This is a wonderful, slightly dense white cake that travels well and packs nicely in a bag lunch. My grandmother made it in round pans and topped it with confectioner’s sugar frosting and  maraschino cherries for Christmas. (One year when I was away at college, Grandma sent a loaf up to me in Vermont. Aunt Bernice’s dog Sarah found it on the back stairs and ate the whole thing, including the wax paper. Sarah was the fattest German Shepard I have ever seen, then or since.)

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