Impressions, daydreams and ramblings on art, food, life and other obsessions.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Edible Prints

Sawa Tanaka has sure gotten my attention with her edible prints!
She prints on rice paper using only food such as: cream, flour, fruit juice and food coloring.

While this is not a new idea, that is, printing with food items...I believe making the entire print edible is a relatively new concept. I love it!
Ed Ruscha was painting with food items back in the 60s and 70s. He was using things such as caviar, egg whites, ketchup, chewing tobacco (well that's not food), and hot sauce. My personal favorite of Ruscha's is his piece titled "Chocolate Room." It was an installation that consisted of 360 shingle-like sheets of paper, silk-screened with chocolate. Heavenly!

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Happy Pancake Day!

Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day — all four terms refer to the same day. Anyway, Matt and I decided to celebrate this morning with a big stack of fluffy pancakes. Tasty!

Monday, February 23, 2009

Obama Eats

Ah yes, I found this photo on Obama Foodorama over the weekend and could not help sharing it! Mighty impressive don't you think? A Japanese chef has made American President Barack Obama into delicious sushi."Obama's skin is small shrimp," the chef says. "Hair is black sesame, fish paste teeth." If you can read Japanese, the story can be read here. If you do not read Japanese you should go to the link anyway to see the other photos within the article.

There is also artist Zilly Rosen's 5,900 cupcake installation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum last week of a double portrait of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. A video can be seen here on the process. This is not her first project along these lines. Way back on Election Day in November '08, Zilly created a 1,240-cupcake artwork of Barack at Obama's Buffalo headquarters. An informative interview can be read at Cupcakes Take the Cake.
I'd like to know who got to eat all these cupcakes?
Photo below is by Shasti O'Leary Soudant


Friday, February 20, 2009

Futurefarmers and Edible Landscapes

Upon returning to cold and dark Alaska last month from a vacation in sunny and warm Mexico, I felt a little uplifted as I was able to attend an inspiring lecture by Amy Franceschini at the Blue Loon in Fairbanks, sponsored by Alaska Design Forum. Amy is an artist working with notions of community, sustainable environments and a perceived conflict between humans and nature. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 and continues to maintain a balance between art and design. In 2005 she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners. Amy is also the creative mind behind the first edible Victory Garden at San Francisco Civic Center Plaza since World War II. (Photo above is by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America)

A few months ago an architect with similar interests,
Fritz Haeg, spoke as part of the Design Forum lecture series as well. His main focus was to explain "Edible Landscapes", an ongoing agricultural project that replaces suburban lawns in the United States and England with highly productive domestic edible landscapes. I do find the website to be bit frustrating to navigate but it is worth looking through it to see the extenisive number of photos of the projects he has initiated. Haeg challenges dwellers to rethink their idea of what a front yard should be. I just wonder, if only everyone who had the space or property to do so tried to grow some of there own food in this country, what an amazing difference that would make! Even only one tomato plant, or a small bed of lettuce can produce a lot of food.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Looking forward to Spring...

After Valentine's Day passes in Fairbanks, AK, people start to feel much more cheery because light has noticeably returned to make days longer. Today, the length of day is 8h 45min with visible light being 10 1/2 hours. This is amazing after enduring 4-5 hour days over the dead of the winter. We are gaining over 6 minutes of light each day. I am not feeling so anxious about making sure that I go outside around noon each day to stare at the sunlight. So I am celebrating by ordering my first set of seeds for the year to share with my dear gardening friend Jenny. You can't imagine how happy this makes us. I am glad I have someone here to share that kind of joy with. I have spent the last few weeks thumbing through the Fedco seed catalog, making lists of delicious heirloom veggies that I want to grow in my garden this year. We need to start our tomato and pepper seeds in March here in order to achieve summer fruit so I am ordering them first along with a couple of herbs. Here is what we have decided to order:

Applegreen Eggplant
Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper
Early Jalapeno Pepper
Long Red Narrow Cayenne Pepper
Ida Gold Tomato
Cosmonaut Volkov Tomato
Pink Brandywine Tomato
Peacevine Cherry Tomato
Vincenza Blue Lavender
Rosemary

Thursday, February 12, 2009

CHEESE!

I have a few obsessive loves in life. One of those is cheese. It can be argued that I am simply in love with food but I would like to focus on just cheese for today.

I find it to be quite unfortunate and frustrating that I live so far away from acquiring the delicious gourmet cheeses that I used to. I feel deprived but I do from time to time bring some cheese home with me from a vacation. For instance, right now, I find myself hoarding some English Stilton that I bought recently on a weekend trip like I won't ever be able to get any ever again! I think that is a bit pathetic and I am ashamed. I usually am a firm believer in eating what is in front of you and available, not saving it for a day that will never come. Perhaps I will decide to eat the whole chunk this weekend with my hubby, wine included. Now, I don't want it to seem like all I can eat here is chedder. I can buy some yummy cheese: aged gouda, real parmesan, a delicious smoky blue from oregon and a cheese called parano that I love. I just miss perusing the cheese counter at Dean and Deluca in New York City for example. I'd like to get my hands on some Valdeon (a spanish cow/goat milk cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves), Cabrales (another spanish cheese - very tangy) or some Humbolt Fog (one of my favorite goat cheeses). I miss learning about new cheeses.

One of my plans to alleviate my problem is to is try to make some cheese this summer from local raw milk. I'll be sure post about the experience. I don't know if I will have the patience to age the cheese but we'll see.

The image above on the right is a print I created last summer (2008) while at Penland assisting John Risseeuw's letterpress class. It is created on handmade paper using letterpress and collagraph. I have many other ideas for prints and books related to cheese and I consider this to be only the start of my new series of work about food. Ideas are brewing and I have been sketching like crazy. I will start with etchings. My mouth waters.

Here is a link to an article about cheese that was in Gastronomica's Winter 2009 issue. It's really great, you should read it...especially if you love cheese.

I almost forgot to mention The Cheese Nun! Mother Noella Marcellino of the Abbey of Regina Laudis is one cool lady. The Abbey is only a 15 minute drive from where I grew up in Litchfield, CT. I discovered this AFTER I moved to Alaska. My family and I visited the abbey a few years ago to hunt down some cheese and my dad bought a whole wheel! It was delicious. There is a great PBS DVD documenting her story if you are interested. Also, here is a shorter YouTube video about her.