Urban Gardner ..Writer's gone Gardening

A Not so Secret Gardner by Copper Penne

The day is bright with the sun beaming  down on the earth.  Puffy white clouds float by like ships, their destination unknown to those of us looking up into the sea of azure blue sky.  I can feel the excitement in the air, as my writing partner Vanilla Bean and I begin to plot and scheme about our shared garden.

I envision Birds flying high in the sky looking down on my garden as droppings rain down, plop, plop, plop, to fertilize my small piece of the earth.  My secret garden of sorts.

There shall grow profusely all manner of vegetable delicacies.  A myriad of fragrant delights, basil thyme. And more.

The excitement is palpable, what to grow?  I do not know!

So stay tuned my amigos for an e-ticket ride through the world of gardening!

Writers.... Gone Gardening

Inkstains is about to get active again!

My friend Copper Penne (KJWilli in the sidebar), with whom I meet up often to write, drink coffee, and talk life, is joining me in another venture-- gardening!!! We have just rented a plot as part of a local community garden and have been sitting here garden dreaming.  Look for more frequent posts and updates from both of us as we have fun putting plants in the ground, as well as sharing bits and bobs of our other daily and creative ventures.

Welcome to Inkstains and Coffee Beans, Copper!

Sketchpad Assignment: Art as Communication

I am taking a (free) class over at Coursera titled History of Art for Artists, Gamer, and Animators by CalArts. If you are at all interested in creative things, I highly recommend it.  This is my sketchpad response to the first assignment- thinking about what art is to us; what art is to the word and providing two images that reflect that for us. 

Mostly I think art is a medium for communication.

 

We want to connect; we want to share; we want to feel; we want to take emotions or difficult to understand things and make something other outside ourselves that we and others can interact with or dialogue over. It can be something created (a book, a painting) or something that simply exists (the sculptural quality of iris leaves under snow). The specifics of what that “art” looks like change based on where the viewer/receiver is in their personal journey.

For myself, as a story-teller, I am in the phase of learning to mine the art/story out of myself and to somehow figure out ways to get it out onto the page, so the art that draws me now generally focuses on either capturing something or transforming something.

The piece Transformations #4 by Karen Thiessen is an example of this kind of work.

http://karenthiessen.com/series4.htm

She started with what she had (a cultural heritage of thread/fabric/quilt; scraps of “failed” earlier attempts at art; a darker emotional thought or issue with which to wrestle). The resulting piece is something finished and beautiful. As evocative and visceral as the majesty and mystery of the night sky.

For how I think the world views art… that is too big and too varied. And fragmenting more every day as art and line and form step out of the more traditional forms of work hanging at an art gallery or a sculpture in the park to take up residence in many other places of our lives. Ads on television. Brand. The covers on our phones. A printed book of hundreds of our own personal photos.

For me a great example of this kind of art, where beauty and story and brand and advertising and film and installation piece and whimsy and emotion and...basically several different individual kinds of art all come together in one to evoke something in the viewer, would be the Starbucks holiday commercial from last year with music (snow day) and snowflake kites over NYC.  It is also an interesting juxtaposition of the temporary (discardable commercial; set outside at a particular moment in time) and the permanent (film).

Sounding

An upcoming art show at church was finally the inspiration I needed to take my wall-hanging backdrop and turn it into a finished piece. I've had the background piece finished and hanging on my wall for maybe three years?, trying to decide what to put on it. This is what came.  The poem is one that I wrote specifically for the piece, as I was trying to find a way to explain what I meant by it as a whole and by all the individual different bits and pieces of stitching on it.  A couple of creating details-- 1) yes, those are used coffee filters stitched on behind the poem  and 2) I used water soluble stabilizer to stitch together the ribbons at the top  (for maybe a third of their length?) before attempting to stitch them onto the piece.

Sounding: God's Sonar

under the roar of waves
that make up
the cycle of every day

a mug of coffee
writing pages
tilting at paper dragons
rumblings of project details
last rays of sunlight over railroad tracks
late night phone conversations

nearly drowned out by the daily routines
of mundane minutiae

there is a beat, always present
like the drumbeat of the heart
in its silence and invisibility

still steady and present
reverberating down the
fault lines of self
reaching to the marrow of
bone

a reminder
a call
a hope

Christmas Wishes

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment.  
~ Mary Oliver

This time of year, of all the holiday seasons, is probably the most special to me.

The lights sparkling on the trees and in the streets;
The extra time with family and friends from both near and far who are dear even though I may not get to see them very often;
The tantalizing scents of cookies and oranges and cinnamon in the air;
Voices raised in carols in the stillness of the evening;
The space to pause and think about "resolutions" or fun and interesting challenges you might like to tackle in the new year;
The chance, like opening up a new notebook or journal, to open up the cover on the blank pages of a new year crackling with all their possibilities and to daydream about the sparkling gems of hidden days and joyful discoveries that might lie ahead.

As we end the year, I want to wish all of you good health and happiness and a hope that in the new year you will experience the beauty and comfort of God in fresh and special ways. Blessings to you all.

Hark the glad sound! the Savior comes. the Savior promised long...

Homemade Ketchup

 Tomato time! Late summer always brings so many memories of previous harvests with all the vegetables popping with flavor and produce waiting in pecks and bushels and crates to be frozen and canned.  Mostly I remember coming home from school to tomatoes on the stove top, steaming and simmering their way into the tomato sauce we would enjoy the rest of the year, or sitting down at Grandma Weaver's dinner table to a bowl of her canned cherries or peaches.  Summer flavors stretched round to all the rest of the year.  

This year Mom was nice enough to show me the process of canning with a water bath.  We kicked off our weekend of canning by making ketchup.  When I told my Grandma that Mom and I were thinking of making ketchup and tomato sauce this weekend, she told me about the old days of simmering and canning.  When they used to make ketchup, she and her sisters would build a wood fire in the wash house and spend all day stirring the tomatoes in a big copper kettle hung over the fire as they slowly boiled down into ketchup. Her verdict on that ketchup? "Oh, that ketchup was sooo good."  After hearing about all that hard work, flipping the switch on the crock pot for my own ketchup's twelve hours of simmering felt completely decadent and lazy.

For this ketchup we looked up several different recipes online then went with a simpler combination version of those.  On the cinnamon, you may want to add a bit more than we did, depending on the type of cinnamon you are using. We ground up a few small pieces of Penzey's Cassia Chunks Cinnamon, which is quite potent, and we didn't need to use very much at all.

Homemade Ketchup

10 lb. tomatoes, quartered and trimmed
2 onions
1 head garlic, top trimmed off

Place the tomatoes and onions in (un-reactive) pans and roast at 400 degrees for 20 to 30 minutes.

Pour the tomatoes into a colander to drain off the extra liquid (we ended up with about 3 cups of liquid).  Then run the tomatoes, onions and garlic through the food processor to puree them.



Once the veggies have been pureed, mix them into the crock pot with

1 c white vinegar
1 c apple cider vinegar
1/2 c white sugar
1/2 c dark brown sugar
2 tsp salt
2 tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp cinnamon, ground cassia chunks

Cover, and simmer on high for 1 hour. After 1 hour, remove the lid and cover with a splatter guard.  After another 1-2 hours, turn down to low and simmer for another 8-12 hours.

Using the splatter guard allows the excess water to boil off.

Once the ketchup is the desired consistency and taste, transfer the ketchup to glass jars for processing.  Here is a half pint jar of our new tasty ketchup waiting for its turn in the hot water bath.

My verdict on our ketchup? Yum.

Addendum: Having now used the ketchup for a few weeks, I am not as certain about the recipe as I was initially.  I tend to be someone who adds ketchup to many different foods, and this is not a ketchup you can use as liberally as Heinz 57. The flavor profile for the bottle I am using seems to keep changing, and not necessarily in a positive direction. The vinegar taste is becoming a little stronger, and the garlic flavor is now a bit weaker, as is the overall seasoning.   Will need to do some tweaks next time I make this.  Perhaps more garlic, a few more spices, maybe use a different type of cinnamon... Will add more notes once I work my way into a second bottle.

"Redneck Lamp" gets a face lift

Since so many of you have given me a hard time about my shade-less lamp over the (cough) years , I thought you would like to see that  thanks to the beneficence of a friend donating a lamp shade frame to the cause and some left over yarn, the redneck lamp is finally coming into his own.  Still needs a little something (maybe some wire and beads? hmmm.) but at least he is not completely bare anymore.