clay: glazing

A dude t-boned my car, and it's now in the body shop. I'm driving a 2021 Mazda Miata, and I've never driven such a sporty car. I requested just the cheapest vehicle that's fuel-efficient to get me from point A to point B, but there were only SUVs and mini-vans in the lot to which I said ugh and despaired to the rental agent over my maneuvering a large vehicle. Fine, I said, I'll take the Dodge Caravan, but then as we approached the office door, which was blocked by this dark gray, two-passenger roadster, he said, want the Miata instead? Hell yeah. The engine is so loud, but it's been fun zipping in and out of lanes to pass slower cars. I realized though this afternoon that I can't fit my ceramics tools and planks of clay slabs in the rental car. I took a picture of the license plate in order to call my gym and tell them not to tow or ticket this rental, but I wasn't feeling all that great even though my Covid test was negative. I was exposed at school and have to test again tomorrow, and so decided this afternoon to do Clay Club for 1 instead of swim or spin.

 

Plus I had this stack of plates I wanted to glaze.

I put white underglaze into my maker's mark and waxed the bottoms, which made for less glaze to clean off after pouring glaze into the plates.

 

5 Speckle Buff dinner plates, 1 Obsidian salad plate,

1 Speckle Buff planter, 2 Speckle Buff cocktail cups, and 1 Frost Porcelain dinner plate (glazed with Fire Opal to join the Opal and Oxblood glazed porcelain plates) add up to a day of glazing 10 pots.

Today's glazing has to be enough to fill a kiln.

I'll be happy if at least my butter dish, Cecilia's niece's planter, and my plates successfully fire. Pray to the kiln gods.

cook: loaded pizza

I know we just ate pizza a week ago and probably the weekend before that, but Cecilia was on a mission to make breakfast pizza too. Again she started the dough a few days before Sunday morning, and again I couldn't refuse to bake the dough on the charcoal grill. Before she came over, I sliced summer squash on the mandolin, crushed a couple tomatoes, dressed arugula in Meyer lemon juice, crushed and pounded a giant clove of garlic in olive oil in preparation. She made and brought over 12 individual dough rounds! As well as ricotta cheese, mozzarella, herbs, and eggs. She said she needed to clean out her fridge before leaving for Hawaii.

 

I ignited both briquettes and natural charcoal and then moved the coals to the perimeter of the grill. Cecilia made me drizzle olive oil on the dough which made the flames climb higher and added more smoky flavor to the pizza. Par baking the pizza probably took only 8 to 10 minutes.

   

When I brought the baked bread (and that scent got my mouth watering) inside, Cecilia brushed the garlic oil I made on them followed by ricotta and mozzarella and thyme and oregano and an egg. I didn't want an egg because it was too close to lunch time for me and opted for crushed tomatoes and summer squash instead. On impulse, I made her add prosciutto.

We then popped the pizzas under the broiler for 3 to 4 minutes after which Cecilia added torn basil, more olive oil...

 

and arugula dressed in lemon juice.

Our neighbors oohed and aahed over the finished pizzas....

and then ate with gusto. T'was a fine Sunday brunch with leftover dough rounds, which made for a satisfying weeknight dinner tonight.

cook: preserving summer bounty

Home grown tomatoes just can't be beat for ripeness, flavor, and color, but it doesn't make me sad when we can't eat them all because that means I get to put them into my pantry as marinara sauce. Instead of sautéing the garlic and onions with the tomatoes, I merely put them in the blender along with the de-seeded tomatoes and some basil. If a few seeds end up in the blender, that's okay, because I don't peel the tomatoes either. The Vitamix is powerful enough to pulverize just about anything. After the vegetables are pureed, I boil it until it's reduced by at least half or saucy in texture. I don't bother skimming the foam from the boiling sauce but just stir it into the pot. 

 

See? The foam goes away, and my sauce was boiling down nicely.

 

I took out 2 quart jars and 2 pint jars for processing my sauce, but I boiled the sauce enough to make one less jar.

 

One of my favorite things about the preserving process is the satisfying pop when the jars emerge from the boiling water bath and make that airtight seal. I see spaghetti and meatballs, lasagne, baked ziti, chicken parmesan, cheese manicotti, pepperoni calzones, sausage and pepper heroes, ravioli this winter.

cook: crab garlic noodles

I’ve never eaten at Thanh Long, the quintessential Vietnamese-American restaurant in San Francisco, and so I don’t have that point of reference for the best garlic noodles. However, tonight I cooked a recipe as the baseline combination of butter, garlic and MSG.              

 

I'm not married to an Asian who likes to get his fingers dirty and pick crab for dinner, and so, for the white guy in my life, I bought a pound of lump crab meat to fold into or put atop the garlic noodles.

I've all the Asian ingredients and the pasta, alliums and grated Parmesan in my pantry as well as the mortar and pestle I bought during the pandemic, but I think I'm going to add a teaspoon of Maggi sauce for that MSG umami bump.

And away we go. I never did get around to braiding the harvested garlic, but two bulbs ought to give me 20 cloves and then some. I saw that the box of spaghetti wasn't full, and so I pounded about 15 cloves in the mortar and pestle.                     

 

Per the recipe, I mixed teaspoons of oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, and because I was using low sodium soy sauce, I felt okay adding another teaspoon of Maggi. I set all my ingredients by the stove.

First things first, make the sauce. I sautéed the garlic in butter for 2 minutes, and gawd it seemed like A LOT of butter, before then adding the brown sauces. 

After the sauce was cooked, I cooked the dry spaghetti in a 12-inch pan of boiling water. I didn't salt the water because I figured there was plenty already in the sauce.

I cooked the spaghetti for 8 minutes instead of the 10 minutes suggested on the box. Using tongs, I put the spaghetti in the brown butter sauce, not even bothering to drain the pasta. 

Fold in the crab meat and grated Parmesan into the hot pasta and sprinkle the chopped scallions. Dinner done. Without having cooked a vegetable. Of course, I shared the dish with Cecilia who said it was fantastic. She loved the crab which helped, she said, to cut the richness of the noodles. Yup, this dish is on my rotation.

clay: evolution of a pot

Yesterday I had 45 minutes in the afternoon for clay. I put the three speckled buff plates in the kiln, painted wax resist into the text of two cocktail cups, and glazed a porcelain bisque plate with pink underglaze in the maker's mark on the bottom and fire opal overglaze on the top. While pulling out bisque, I noticed my sea mugs and pulled them out. Here are two mugs I did not sell at the Christmas show.    

In the photo above, the mug at the left is just Jim Bob overglaze while the mug at the right has been under glazed with medium blue and sky blue and then overglazed with a clear matte and fired to cone 5. Someone at the Christkindl said her surfer son will like his new waves sushi platter, but likes coffee mugs that don't have handles. I thought, oh yeah, I like to just cradle my coffee in two hands too. I also like the look of no handles. 

I under glazed both mugs in ultramarine blue and sky blue and probably touched the crests with white white underglaze and then clear matte glaze before a cone 5 firing. I've one mug in the bisque cupboard that's been under glazed in the same colors as above but set aside for a cone 10 firing. And so I'll continue evolving these sea mugs for a higher firing with Bmix with sand and play with cobalt oxide, which I think will be more subtle.

cook: laotian curry

My neighbor, Cecilia said she used two whole jars of green curry to cook a Laotian green curry of chicken and tofu and choy sum (similar to gai lan but thinner). Besides a jar of the green curry sauce and a container of the green curry meat and vegetables, she also gave me rice noodles the same size as chow fun. And when I reheated it, I saw that this dish was a soup with coconut milk and chicken broth as its base. 

I had run out to the garden to snip Thai basil and a little bit of mint to add to the soup.

The spiciness or fieriness of the green chilies was bracing, and the noodles very comforting.

I had also added some extra kaffir lime leaves to the broth. And oh my gosh, an hourlong swim followed by this nose and sinus-clearing soup felt absolutely CLEANSING. Chicken soup of any culture is so good for whatever ails you.

cook: making lunch as therapy

My Sadie is not long for his world, which has me prematurely crying and grieving and then cuddling and kissing her. Sadie was at the pet emergency hospital, and I had no choice but to wait at home for her tests and a diagnosis before bringing her home. While agonizing over my dog, the leftover jasmine rice, half a jar of kimchi and the remnants of gochuchang called for being used up in fried rice which I had not made in a few months. Kimchi fried rice is a no-recipe recipe. Massage a few drops of sesame oil over grains of stale rice. Chop kimchi and then squeeze all the fermented chili juice out of the cabbage into a bowl into which you also add soy sauce and gochuchang sauce.  With no recipe for amounts, taste and adjust to your liking.  

  

I had also chopped a few cloves of garlic and added it to the rice and found some Portugese linguica sausage in the fridge to include in the mise en place next to the stove. Don't forget to also chop some scallions, and while I was at it, Green Zebra tomatoes to add more sweetness and make the rice more vegetal.

 

While cooking, I impulsively added the rest of a Trader Joe's healthy veggie mix of broccoli, carrots, green cabbage, red cabbage, jicama, green bell pepper, radish, celery as well as the gochuchang, kimchi juice and soy sauce mixture to the crisping kimchi. Continue cooking until all the steam is driven off over medium high heat.

Next the rice and the rest of the gochuchang, soy sauce and kimchi sauce.

 

Don't forget to garnish with the scallions and chives. I also impulsively fried a can of low sodium Spam.

And if I'm going to brown Spam, then I might as well fry an egg, over easy please.

T'was a delicious lunch despite my worry over my poor dog.

I gave fried rice and Spam to Cecilia and still have enough leftover lunch for another dinner this week.