Crafting with Kids: Treasure Box

I love making stuff and what's even more fun is to do it with kids. Lately I've been writing and illustrating zines about cooking and crafting, finding little toys and baubles and school supplies, and then mailing them to a grandniece and grandnephew, which they put into a treasure box and then pick one to open when they've accomplished something at school or performed a chore well. I sent stickers to the girl, and she used them to decorate her treasure box.

I'll have to write a zine on how to decorate a pumpkin to the littluns. Recently I came across these images.

I wanna copy these adorable pumpkins, and so yesterday I bought matte spray paint in aqua, ballet pink, black and white. I've already got acrylic paints. I'm too cheap to pay the $1.50 to download the templates to make these faces, but they're pretty simple no? Easy to re-create yes? And so that's the plan: go buy some pumpkins and paint the town. And then make a zine on how to do it and send it along with some acrylic paints and paint brushes (and maybe even make a template on hard plastic of the faces) to the kiddos, so they can make their own. Halloween is becoming my favorite holiday again because of crafts and kids.

And here's my pandemic pal...

...whose adventures I'm trying to figure out how to capture and put in a zine.

Cooking: My InAUTHENTIC Alabama White Sauce cHICKEN

Somewhere in my big black binder of recipes, I've one for Alabama white sauce from the New York Times. It's a BBQ mayonnaise-based dressing that you drench hickory barbecued smoked chicken in. I cheated. While buying two 32-ounce jars of Duke's mayonnaise, I also threw into my online shopping cart two bottles of their Alabama white sauce. Yesterday was way too hot for baking or standing over a hot stove. And so I poached chicken and boiled potatoes. And chopped. And chopped. And chopped. Red onion. Green onion. Garlic with salt. Dill. Parsley. Celery. Tomato. Lettuce. And mixed in separate bowls. Buttermilk and Duke's mayonnaise for the win in potato salad and green salad with herb garden dressing.

And I really wanted to barbecue chicken on my charcoal grill because I've hickory briquets, but it's spare the air week here in Northern California. Again too hot to bake the protein. And so I put water into my cast iron skillet with the chicken, covered and simmered on low. And then drained the poaching liquid into my jar of bone broth, squirted the Duke's Alabama white sauce on to the chicken and put it under a low broil. The zesty white sauce really tastes like regular barbecue sauce (because it contains apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, brown mustard, lemon juice, horseradish, salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper like you would taste in a tomato- or ketchup-based barbecue sauce), so my eyes and tongue felt a bit deceived.

Hubs put worcestershire sauce on his chicken. Sigh. I thought it tasty well enough alone.

Weekend Cooking and Leftovers for Lunches

My friend, Meral asked me Saturday what were the ingredients in the bottle of Szechuan sauce I made for her and Felice, which I gave along with a harvesting of Japanese eggplant and Anaheim peppers. The Szechuan sauce is so elaborate and I know not everyone has these ingredients in their pantry if they're not Chinese, and so I was happy to share while making it for me and the hubs. I would say the last five ingredients are de rigueuer for making it semi-authentic. I mix soy sauce(both light and dark are called for, but I only had my Filipino sauce), Chinkiang vinegar (can sub it out for rice wine vinegar), Shiaoxing cooking wine (can sub it out for mirin), fermented black bean chili paste (there were a myriad of these jars at the Asian supermarket and I went with the jar that had English as well as Chinese and was made in California), chili oil (I had 2 kinds and used both),

Sichuan peppercorns (and I find them floral rather than mouth-numbing and love 'em, love 'em) and Sichuan salt (because I didn't have Chinese 5-spice and the amounts in this brand are perfectly proportionate without an inordinate amount of the 5-spice)--all of which gets stored in its own bin in my pantry to be used every 2 weeks for my foray in Asian cuisine.

Saturday was slow on the handbuilding because I decided I wanted a breakfast of longsilog.

And then I decided to make shrimp and surimi salad rice noodle rolls for lunch and thereafter. It started with a perusal of my Canyon Ranch cook book for the Thai peanut sauce recipe: peanut butter, soy sauce, fish sauce, Sriracha, coconut milk, garlic, ginger, lemon and lime. But it needed more heat, and I found a Serrano pepper which I de-seeded and chopped finely. And then more tasting and more adding of some more acid, more citrus and spicy coconut vinegar and more peanut butter until it was delicious.

The seafood salad and rice noodle rolls are also a good way to use up the bounty of veggies in the refrigerator bin and the rest of a package of rice noodles in the pantry: cucumber, red bell pepper, lettuce, cilantro (and mint gathered yesterday)

It is fun to make these roll even if I'm still not that proficient at rolling a decent-looking roll which will remain unpictured until then. 

And really all I could do in the clay studio was glaze a bisque mug and re-make a handle for my butter dish. And so home after walking Sadie and harvesting even more peppers and eggplant, it was time to cook my own Szechuan eggplant and pepper Mapo Tofu. I decided to grill the eggplant outside on a single electric burner because it was so smoky last time inside my kitchen. And then have at the ready: minced garlic, grated ginger, chopped peppers.

And also have the canola oil, ground pork and 5-spice tofu nuggets and Szechuan sauce on hand. And then I mixed up some bone broth and corn starch for thickening the sauce.

I can't not have chopped scallions and cilantro to top the finished stir fry.

I didn't smell up my kitchen, but I did have lots of dirty dishes and ingredients to return to their place, which made me then take stock of all the leftovers I need to bring to work.

And I'm eating that leftover Mapo tofu now and am grateful for a relaxing and nourishing weekend.

Ceramics: Onward and Onward

We're all sick of sheltering in place in this pandemic, even we introverts because really we want the choice of withdrawing from people as much as we despise the hypocrisy and insufferable inanity of some human company. Since I'm now in the habit of wearing a mask and doing the six foot physical distancing as much as I can remember to and after weighing the risks of removing my mask, I'm no longer gonna refer to the pandemic in my posts if I can help it. Nesting by ourselves in our homes has also has made us selective of who to include in our social bubbles. Back to chronicling my handmade hobbies in this new routine of isolation and the friends and loved ones who matter most. 

Yesterday morning I was able to load up the kiln with more greenware from my few weekends of handbuilding with Meral.

Bottoms up! I'll have to look for YouTube videos on how to load a kiln, and Meral messaged me that bisque pieces could be touching each other and that she and Patsy sometimes even stack greenware inside each other in the kiln. I just wanna not break the kiln by putting things too close to that thermal coupling thingee.

I poked around the ceramics classroom after loading the kiln. 

Golly do I miss a slab roller. I know that my butter dish cracked in the drying because I did not roll a uniformly flat slab.

That's basically 75 pounds of clay that I took from my locker at the community ceramics studio and brought into my friend's high school ceramics classroom: Frost Porcelain, Electric Brown, and Sandstone Buff. 

And I long to make more pots, so I can decorate more surfaces like the commercial decal-adhered mugs above.

I adore this nautical bas relief, and now I wanna make one too.

Hamsa ! I know I’ve a henna tattoo hand stencil somewhere in my arsenal of clay tools.

And above is where the clay and chemical bags of powder for Cone 6 glazes are stored. Even hazardous chemicals thrill me these days.

Ceramics: Sandstone or Speckled Buff and Beautiful, Saturated Glazes for Contrast

 

Quarantine Weekend: More Sewing, Making with Clay and Meal Prepping

What a great weekend despite the emotional upheaval of a husband in severe knee pain either from arthritis or a pulled tendon. I started the Saturday by cooking an avgolemono to bring to my claymate's home for lunch. 

And while my soup was simmering, I made a little headway with my quilted pillow that had been hanging in my closet for quite a few years, which I'll post when it's finally done. But I've got the attention of a little kid--squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel! and got distracted by this quilt I spied on Instagram.

The quilt made me think of the orange skies in the Bay Area from all the fires in Oregon and Washington and all the bits of ash floating and obscuring our air. How do I render that abstractly in a color palette similar to the one above? 

After a couple weeks of fire, smoke and unbreathable air, I finally got to go to my friend, Meral's clay studio aka her garage. I got to finally behold the finished miniature mug that Meral had thrown and which I surface decorated with Chinese rice paper decals and an Amaco celadon called Downpour. I'm mailing it to the Dani girl because it's so cute. 

 

I also made a butter dish with tar paper that I worked too quickly on, and alas it cracked. However, Meral is hydrating it, and I will hopefully be able to repair it.

I started my Sunday with a Filipino breakfast called Longsilog. I took out from my freezer a package of longaniza, which is a sausage of minced pork, loads of garlic seasoned with vinegar, salt and sugar and deeply dyed red. Silogs are Filipino breakfasts of leftover rice, a fried egg and maybe spam aka Spamsilog or tocino (Filipino bacon) aka Tocilog or tuyu (dried and salted fish) aka Tuyusilog or in the case of breaking my fast, longaniza, hence the name Longsilog. My parents hailed from an area in the Northern Philippines called Pampanga, and I suppose it's common there to eat chopped tomatoes like a salad with our meals and was so glad to still eat the sweet heirloom tomato. Unfortunately, I broke the yolk on my egg because I normally like my rice coated with yellow "sauce" but still I was comforted by a meal from my childhood and made even more special with a spicy or chili-infused coconut vinegar called Pinakurat.

After breakfast and sewing, it was already afternoon! I took the girl dog for a walk to Beresford Park and harvested eggplant and peppers and shared with Meral after making the Szechuan sauce. And then it was a laborious and failure of chile rellenos with all the peppers. 

Edible and tasty enough, but visually a hot mess and hence no pic. The evening before returning to work came too soon and all the meal prepping for my lunches at school: leftover monggo, rice and spinach; beet and goat cheese arugula salad; and chili. Oh and I wanted to make 1000 Island dressing to go with the fake crab and hard boiled egg salads I want to eat too. Here's how: take out your favorite mayonnaise, seafood seasoning which has lots of celery seeds, sweet or not relish, and ketchup and just mix all in the proportions you like. I aim for a very light pink.

But I can never leave well enough alone. I added fresh dill. And then remembered lemon.

Yep, so much more flavorful.

And now I'm longing for a seafood salad of cold boiled shellfish.