cook & creation: chicken pie & painting

I skipped swimming and instead plunged into painting. Here’s how far I got over the past 4 hours.                  

I love it and want to take my time with it in order to limit the color palette. I want to incorporate more black and white and gray and yellow to tone down the busyness of color--because I'm already wanting to ROYBGIV the rings. 

But no maybe just yellow and gray and black like the Ancient of Days by William Blake. And then I think of the beauty of the blues in Blake's Pity. I've slept on it. I want to paint around the stars surrounding the orb of elements as a black ring and then paint the square area around the ring a dark dark blue (Holbein navy or my student grade Prussian blue?)to suggest firmament and then use some of that dark dark blue within the elements for water and sky along with yellow for the flames, black for the void, and gray for crystals or earth and then mix a bit of the same blue with white for a tint to make the sky above the flowers. And yeah use my tiniest brush to fine line all the images in the center. Then more yellow and gray rather than rainbow colors in the rings to suggest a sun.

I'm also wanting to suggest gradations of yellow in my sun rings. More white in the center? And then get more yellow pigment in my brush as I move to the outside rings? Yellow ochre over the flowers instead of light, light blue? And then a sky of blue over the ochre with a dark dark blue around the sun rings to suggest a cosmos with a void that starts with an explosion of sun?

And in between painting, I cooked dinner. I had lots of carrots, celery and turnips still from shepherd’s pie from the Saint Patrick holiday and had sautéed the vegetables in lots of butter and sprinkled flour to then make a roux to then add chicken bone broth and chunks of rotisserie chicken for a gravy and had refrigerated since the weekend--into casserole dishes it went. I also had Cecilia's leftover potatoes which I boiled.                    

While the potatoes boiled, I chopped our garden's bounty of leeks, scallions and Savoy cabbage. Into a cube of butter went the alliums and then the cabbage.

And then heavy whipping cream and milk to get hot and bubbly into which I then riced and added the boiled potatoes to mix into a Colcannon. I topped the potato and cabbage and onion mixture on to the chicken gravy and baked in a 375 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Cecilia loved it and asked for the recipe, but it's my usual no recipe-recipe.

And then back into the kitchen after dinner to make tomorrow's lunch. More savoy cabbage into my seafood salad (I've also got tiny salad shrimp thawing in the fridge to add in the morning atop).

And normally I make a homemade Thousand Island dressing, but broke down and bought a bottle at the supermarket over the weekend. Like I said, art has been consuming me that I'll resort to convenience foods.