cook & clay: the search for pâté and window shopping as inspo

I forgot all about Cecilia baking baguettes and grilling Vietnamese pork for bahn mi sandwiches this weekend. And so I shopped at my favorite produce shop for cilantro, jalapeños, Persian cucumbers, daikon, and carrots. Since I was downtown, I stopped at the fancy grocery store for pâté since the French grocery store would have already been closed. We are all set for this evening’s Saturday supper. While at Draeger's, I also browsed their awesome kitchen goods store and their floral department.      

I love the hand lettered text look of the cookbook on the above left, and I love the idea of no-recipe recipes or of cooking without exact measurements and improvising with the ingredients you have on hand of the cookbook to its right. And definitely my cooking has gotten a lot more relaxed and casual since returning to in-person learning and work in this pandemic. 

The cookbook above left encapsulates what's important to me while cooking: flavor, and I aim for beautiful food when I try to incorporate color. And of course, I adore Jack Pepin--both his philosophy of not wasting food and being resourceful as well as his watercolor illustrations. I’m on a journey to someday publish my own cookbook, and so the plan is to put all these cookbooks on hold at the public library and incorporate what I love into my own. I love a cookbook with heartwarming personal narrative or an interesting backstory and sumptuous photography. I want my cookbook’s pages on thick paper that’s almost card stock (Chronicle Books has that down pat) and sturdy binding. I would love for a cookbook to lay flat, but I hate those plastic spiral bindings. I’m particularly interested in the Filipino American cookbook below.

I’ll have to find an Eggslut when I go to Pasadena and Anaheim next month. There were planters in the floral shop downstairs that I’d like to try my hand at making in the ceramics studio.            

Okay the vase above is glass, but I like that the rim which resembles the curves found in Cala lilies. Surely I can build that rim and then score and slip it on to a coil pot? And the fluting on the vase below is fantastic.                              

I’m wondering if I could handbuild such a vase, or do I have to get good enough to throw large and then carve? But today my ambition is only to make some pots like the ones below.                    

I need to seek out patterns for rolling texture or carving. Okay lunch time and then off to the clay studio.