Cooking: How I Do Lunch on Summer Vacation

Avocado toast is my standard for breakfast.  However, tomatoes are in season, and my friend, Bob tore the baguette he bought at Acme Bakery in half and gave it to me.  Chopped Black Krim tomatoes and mashed avocados atop slices of baguette with sprinklings of sea salt and Aleppo pepper make for a tasty open-faced sandwich.

I also know I'm on vacation when I can imbibe wine with lunch.  I fried a whole package of bacon the evening before for BLTs, which also topped my deviled eggs.

Cobb salad is my favorite, and I'm trying to use things up in my pantry and fridge and prevent food waste and not grocery shop only to discover I already had the ingredient.  However, I did not have blue cheese, and it's de rigueur for this salad along with all the bacon I fried and eggs I soft boiled and rotisserie chicken I thawed prior.

I actually cooked this for dinner to use up frozen Udon noodles and prepackaged broccoli beef in my freezer and baby bok choy in my vegetable bin.

And then I was on a lox bagel kick because there's no better combination than a fresh baked bagel, whipped cream cheese, red onion, capers and soft unctuous smoked salmon.

Ceramics: Reglazing?

I pulled this sushi platter from the kiln room today, and I love it, but....I worry that it's not food safe.  I love the combination of Blue Moon engobe and Marine Blue underglaze, but a touch of warm green or King Tut turquoise engobe with another layer of clear overglaze to fill in those crevices where food might get stuck in its present state.  

Quilting: A T-Shirt Blanket

My t-shirt drawer is overflowing, and I've been wanting to de-stash it but am reluctant to just dump the ones I don't wear to Goodwill for reasons like nostalgia and just plain liking the graphic.  However, I'm reluctant to make a quilt like the one below, which I find just plain unattractive.  I'm not a fan of such a mishmash of colors and graphics and texts though I'm sure the disparate blocks are sentimental for the recipient and owner of the quilt.

I've discovered that I have a color palette when it comes to my favorite t-shirts: black, gray and navy blue, and so I'm no longer averse to making a t-shirt quilt.  This book I spied at Joann's has given me some ideas on making a t-shirt quilt I'll love.

I really love the equilateral triangles below, but I'm wondering if the pattern will work with the logos on my t-shirts which are different shapes and sizes.   

I also love the single letter monogram quilt below, but I'd have to live with the half square triangles truncating the logos of my tshirts and of covering some of them up with the applique.  But note that some of the squares below are not half square triangles and are complete squares, solving the problem of not cutting into a logo.

And I love hexagons, and I see it working as a design for the quilt below.  But my t-shirts are adult sized and not petite children's motifs which is why it coheres in this nautical wall quilt.

I also like the offset blocks interspersed with plaids and stripes below, but maybe I like it more for the bauhaus logo.

To be continued.

Cooking: Yucatán Citrus Pork and Mexican Rice

I wish I had seen Rick Bayless's recipe for Cochinita Pibil, but I had seen this one from Hungry Hounds instead.  I started this recipe because I wanted to use up ingredients already in my pantry.  I also ended up using all the margarita mix too to drink while cooking this meal, and I'll use the rest of the tequila to mix with grapefruit soda for a Paloma.

 What I loved most about this recipe is ALL the citrus and that it utilized just about every part of the orange, lime and lemon--zest and juice made my kitchen smell awesome and was beautiful-looking to boot.

 I used green bell, cubanelle, and jalapeno to spice up the pork.

 And cilantro!  I love me lots of cilantro.

I should have trimmed off the fat cap, but I was worried about the pork being dry.  I needn't have because then I had to drain off a lot of that citrus infused grease.  However, the pork was luscious and delicious.

 I cooked rice to go with my pork dish, and dagnabit, I forgot to use the Azafran to flavor my rice further.

Re-imagining the Book

I'm going to Tennessee.  Arrowmont Arts and Crafts in Gatlingburg, Tennessee specifically to take a workshop called "Reimagining Books."  Below is an example of the instructor's work.

So beautiful and so cool.  Coincidentally, I want to learn how to weave.  The course aims to marry form and function.  And so I think I'm going to take The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden to read on my flight and then literally and metaphorically de-construct it and make some statement about toxic masculinity.

Sashiko Stitching: Wall Quilt Sampler

I've fallen in love with sashiko.  Below is a sampler called Cool Water Surface that I stitched on pre-printed indigo linen I bought from Fancy Tiger Crafts, and I'm already working on a second one.  However, I don't want to stitch these into small pillows and plan on making a sampler wall quilt instead.

I also want to integrate some other linens in the blue color palette below and have already seen light medium and dark blue as well as black linens at the fabric shop on which I want running stitches.

"dusty" blue, azure, bilberry, black, blue-gray, bright blue, bright cyan, color matching, cool shades of blue, dark cyan, heavenly, light blue, monochrome blue color palette, monochrome color palette, pastel cyan, shades of blue, silver blue.

Below is an example of what I want to do with my completed Sashiko samplers.

Ceramics: Design As Subtraction or Addition

Lately I've been obsessed in ceramics with making cylinders and then making lids or bottoms to turn them into basically what is a round box.  And isn't that what design is?  The arrangement of shapes in a composition?  

Above are the salt and pepper cellars I made while playing around one morning with round cookie cutters and some sculpture mix.  I made the lids to the containers by scoring and slipping co-centric circles together to fit into the top .  What stirs me is design at its simplest or its basic geometric form.  I injected contrast into the pair with color: Jim Bob glaze and Stormy Blue glaze.