Zinnias (till I figure out a catchier title? On the other hand, “Sunflowers” worked just fine for VG.) 24″ x 18″, pastel on board
Archive for February, 2012
New work
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012Mardi Gras Owl
Friday, February 24th, 2012One of the more successful incarnations of Social Capital Owl, I think:
Previous versions have included:
Ow
Monday, February 20th, 2012This winter has been an odd season in Maine. Every storm that might have brought an insulating blanket of snow has made rain instead, an endless mud season. We’ve had cold nights lately but yesterday it was warm enough to check and feed the bees. It was a little breezier than I’d like, but sunny days with temps in the low forties are rare enough when I’m off from work that I felt I had to take advantage.
This year I’m feeding granulated sugar mixed 1:1 with organic (no GMOs) corn syrup. It’s much easier than cooking just the granulated sugar down to candy, and I’ve read research that indicates some added value in the composition of corn syrup, particularly for spring feeding. This being a discussion involving beekeepers there is, of course, a dissenting opinion or several. I’ve decided to try out this new mixture as long as I have a source for the non-GMO corn syrup and a small number of hives. This would be an expensive way to feed a larger operation.
I brought my equipment down to the hives at 1:00 pm yesterday. The hives were still in the sun – not much shadow with no leaves on the trees – at the temp was 42 F. I went to the first hive and took apart the telescoping cover and the layer of newspaper insulation, popped the inner lid and dozens of bees boiled out at me like water from behind a dam. I was so shocked that I dropped the full baggie of syrup onto the frames and pulled the inner cover back down while I backed up and tried to brush bees off my ungloved hands. I was wearing my suit and veil, fortunately, but I never work with gloves unless I know in advance that a colony has been hostile. “Pistachio” has always been a very social, forgiving colony but with a large population near the end of their food stores they were defensive and easily aroused.
I found my hive tool and used it to brush 8 stingers off my right hand on my way back to the house to regroup. The old adage is true - try to brush the barb away from your skin because squeezing it releases more venom. Guard bees followed me for about 50′, trying to get past my veil and generally harassing my retreat. Now that’s a vigorous winter colony!
I gave them half an hour to settle down and then suited up (with gloves) and returned to the bee yard to put the telescoping cover back on Pistachio and check a few more hives. There were no bees out – it’s possible that they had already found their food. I popped the cover on the next hive, Vanilla, and the insulating layer of newsprint had been chewed on – a bad sign. I lifted the inner cover and sure enough, a field mouse was looking back at me from between the frames. Cute in other circumstances, mice make a mess of the hive innards. Bees can usually defend against rodent invasions but Vanilla had been a rather quirky colony from the start and I wasn’t all that surprised to lose them. I took apart the upper sections to chase the mice out over night and will take the rest of it apart this afternoon to start the long process of making the boxes habitable for a new colony in a month or so.
This morning I’m paying the price for being stung. It’s not as painful as stings I’ve had to the scalp although the swelling limits my mobility a bit. In five years of beekeeping this is only the second time I’ve had multiple stings over a small area, but it does happen. Lessons learned. . .
Edinburgh Tea Squares
Saturday, February 18th, 2012
These crumbly, fruit-filled bars are from an old King Arthur Flour cookbook recipe that isn’t currently posted on their website, which is a shame because this is a tasty, easy dessert that allows for a lot of creativity on the part of the cook. And by creativity I mean that if you’re out of dates, raisins will work just fine. Actually, any combination of any dried fruit will be delicious. Substitute granola for oatmeal, water for orange juice, whole wheat for white flour; it’s all good. I’ve been making these bars for 30 years now (never the same way twice) and we’ve enjoyed all the variations.
Edinburgh Tea Squares Recipe originally from the King Arthur Flour Co.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
Make the filling: Combine 1 1/2 C dried fruit, 1 C water or orange juice, a pinch of salt and 1 tsp lemon rind in a medium saucepan. Mix another 2 Tbs of cold water/juice and 2 Tbs cornstarch in a cup and reserve. Cook the first mixture until the fruit is soft and fragrant – about 5 minutes. Add the cornstarch mixture, stir and cook until slightly thickened, about a minute. Remove pan from stove and allow to cool a little bit while you make the dough.
The original recipe calls for dates, but we’ve experimented with currants, dried apples, dried blueberries and whatever was on the shelf. So far I haven’t found anything that doesn’t taste good in this simple fruit filling. Subbing out the juice is a nice change, too: apple juice with raisins, lemonade with dried cranberries, peach nectar with dried mangoes, etc.
For the dough: combine 1 1/2 C flour, 1 C brown sugar, 1 C oatmeal, 1/2 C unsalted butter, 1 tsp salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the mixture looks like coarse sand. You can use whole wheat or white flour and just about anything goes for the oatmeal: quick or old fashioned oats, granola, and on one memorable occasion, corn flakes. If you use commercial cereal you may want to cut back on the salt.
Pat half the mixture in a lightly greased 9″ square pan. Reserve the rest for the topping.Bake just this bottom layer for 10 minutes while the filling cools a little bit.
Remove from oven but don’t turn it off. Layer the fruit filling over the partially baked crust and then sprinkle the remaining dough mixture on top. Don’t press it down. Put the bars back in the oven for 30 minutes, or until the top is golden and the filling bubbles around the edges.
The original recipe needs to be carefully divided – too much in the bottom and the top will be quite skimpy; too little on the bottom and the filling leaks out. I upped the dry quantities and added baking time for just the lower crust, so the division isn’t quite so critical. The top layer starts out fairly loose and crumbly but firms up and is better for lunch boxes after a day or two.
I’ve made a lot of changes to this recipe – you should, too!
Snow, finally!
Monday, February 13th, 2012
Pastel on board, 6 x 18″, Light Snow on the Bass Harbor Rd.
Encaustic painting, Act 1, Scene 2
Saturday, February 11th, 2012Last Monday I coated 4 Homasote and gesso panels with a thin coat of wax medium. On Thursday I had a chance to mix some colors and experiment with actual paint.
My experience so far:
- The base coat of wax medium should be thinner and less textured. It really is startling how quickly the wax hardens on the brush. I need to use shorter strokes and not try to “rebrush” into the hardened surface.
- Fusing the wax medium to the board with a heat gun is efficient and makes a slick, hard painting surface. The process does not do as much as I thought it would to smooth out the bumps, however. You’d think the wax would melt flat to the surface, but no. Perhaps I’m not heating it long enough – time for another experiment.
- Wow, the wax hardens quickly. I am learning to hold the brush in the small pot of pigment and wax (heated to molten on the griddle) until I am mentally ready to place that mark on the board. It’s a wonderful disciplinary exercise.
- The painting is always dry – that is, the surface of the drawing is always ready for a new mark to be added. It was also very easy to scrape the wax away. This is a wet media with all the advantages of a dry media – cool.
- Fusing the paint layers to each other is an additional, separate skill set. Too little and the layers stay dry and adjacent to each other. Too much and the pigmented wax blurs as it all slags together. Somewhere in the middle is a chance to overlap translucent layers with distinct edges to really show off the medium.
- Blue jays are noisy thugs, but very entertaining to draw.
Encaustic Painting, Act 1 Scene 1
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012The supplies are corralled on the new, plastic-draped, work surface and I had to take some photos because nothing you see here will ever be this shiny ever again.
The first step is to make the plain wax medium: beeswax and damar resin in a ratio of 8 : 1. Or 10 : 1 or absolutely no more than 9 : 1, or possibly just until the mixture “looks right”. Every source I found had his or her own convictions. Beeswax is the medium that will carry the pigment to the surface and the damar raises the melting point of the wax enough to fix the result. Too little and the painting will react to moisture in the air with a white “bloom” and never fully dry, too much and the surface will crack and peel.
I’m using beeswax from our hives because we have pounds and pounds of the stuff. It’s like a natural resource around here. This first batch is a mix of yellow and white – the lighter wax was bleached by longer exposure to sunlight. It took me the entire summer to figure out that I could get lovely white beeswax simply by forgetting a batch in the solar melter for a few days but by that time it was September and the days were too short to re-engineer the yellow batches. Encaustic painting uses such thin layers that I don’t think the tint will make much difference, but we’ll see. I admit that I like the gold color produced by all those tiny bee feet tracking pollen and propolis around the hive interior like children on Grandma’s kitchen linoleum.
I never noticed that our kitchen drop scale (pictured by the double boiler above) is calibrated in Newtons. Fortunately I was working from a ratio so all I cared about were the markings but seriously, Newtons?
The first batch is done and poured off into small stainless steel “monkey cups” to cool. It did indeed take longer than I thought it would for the damar to melt into the wax. The online boards repeatedly warn not to short-cut this step; “It takes as long as it takes!” The gentleman who insisted that the wax has a different “feel” once the resin is incorporated also had a point. The transition was not unlike testing custard or jelly on a spoon – difficult to describe but easy to see in practice. As with my first forays into beekeeping lore I feel more confident in the source material now that I’ve seen it in action.
Tomorrow I can pop out the solid wax and clean any sediment off the bottom in preparation for melting it again and brushing a thin coat on the painting surface. Act 1, Scene 2 coming up!
Every recipe in the world
Friday, February 3rd, 2012I’ve decided to experiment with encaustic painting. Encaustic is an ancient method of combining beeswax, damar resin, and pigment. It requires some equipment: a heat source to melt the wax (in this case an electric griddle), another to fuse the layers on the painted surface (I’m using a heat gun but a blow torch works too), and some space to lay out paints, boards, brushes and pots near an electrical outlet. One of the realities of living in a 20′ x 30′ house is that a project like this will require moving something else out of the way first.
The space I’m clearing is chock ablock full of computers, CD’s, video games, books, and one of my mother’s metal recipe boxes. I think I have six of them scattered around the house (time to pass some on to the nieces) and this one probably should not have been stored precariously on an upper shelf as a head wound waiting to happen. I levered it down and started to go through the cards and now I’m making a blog post rather than continuing to clear out new studio space. There was just no resisting categories like Dream Cakes, Not-Bad Fudge, and Risin – which turned out to be cakes made with yeast, not misspelled raisins. Or neuro-toxins.
I need snack food for a meeting on Monday, so tonight I’m starting the Connecticut Raised Loaf Cake, below. It is neatly typed on onion skin paper and the folds have worn thin but there’s very little spatter. There was a similar recipe on the next card attributed to Elsie Dresser Barnard but it makes 5 loaves and requires a fifth of brandy so I’ll wait to try that another time. Not that there’s anything wrong with adding 4 C of alcohol to a cake recipe, not at all.
I can already tell that I’ll have to publish a post with all the changes I’ve made to this recipe. I added the shortening – where I used unsalted butter and my mother would have used Crisco – to the scalded milk, both to cool it quickly to a good temperature for the yeast and to avoid having to melt it separately later in the process. I plan to double the mace and nutmeg but then I find myself increasing the spice amounts with every old recipe. Were my grandmother’s flavorings that much more potent? Or her taste buds less spoiled by extremes? I imagine it’s the latter, in the days before candy bars came in flavors like dark-chocolate-pasilla chili-cayenne-cinnamon.
This recipe for “Caraque Cookies” is next in line. Three and a half sticks of butter, 6 egg yolks, filling AND icing – perfect for celebrating Valentine’s Day.
