[ Lost in the Landscape ]

up the coast in the rain

Last night was the offi­cial open­ing of the exhi­bi­tion I’m in at the Can­non Gallery in Carls­bad, but the nice gallery folks had a lit­tle break­fast event for the artists ear­lier in the morning.

It rained lightly both head­ing north and back. Since rain is such a rare event in these parts, I got out my camera.

These two shots are of the wind­shield on the way back. Don’t worry–John was dri­ving. The first is with Inter­state 5 in the back­ground. The sec­ond is while we were being passed by a truck.

They’d set up a nice break­fast spread for us. With the meal being served at ten in the morn­ing, how­ever, we were all starv­ing artists. We dis­patched the edi­bles in almost no time.

And then it was finally time to go inside and pre­view the exhi­bi­tion. Here’s my wall in the exhi­bi­tion. Tonight there’ll prob­a­bly be a few hun­dred more peo­ple at the open­ing, so it won’t be so easy to doc­u­ment the exhi­bi­tion view.

The gallery itself is part of the com­plex that houses the Carls­bad Pub­lic Library. Land­scap­ing there is a mix of native sycamore trees and exotics–spiky sedges, bio­mor­phic hedges and myopo­rum for ground­cover. Like the library and gallery com­plex, it’s mod­ern with­out try­ing to be par­tic­u­larly avant-garde. Nicely done, I thought.

Run­ning around the perime­ter of the build­ings is a screen wall that is set sev­eral feet from the main walls of the com­plex. Join­ing the two are these over­head screens cut out of pati­nated metal. The branches on the screens curve in arabesques that reminded me of Art Nou­veau, but the tri­an­gu­lar frames give them a geo­met­ri­cal edge that joins them com­fort­ably with the architecture.

Isn’t it a shame most peo­ple are so busy look­ing down they never notice the branches–or artwork–overhead?

Post on the work in the show
The Can­non Gallery

December 14 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: exhibitions • food • Interstate 5 • rain • William D. Cannon Art Gallery | 2 Comments »

bacon is not a vegetable

“So you’re a veg­e­tar­ian? No prob­lem! Peo­ple brought five dif­fer­ent veg­etable dishes!”

For any veg­e­tar­i­ans out there: How many times have you heard this bit of reas­sur­ance, only to go to the table and be faced with plate after plate of beautifully-grown veg­eta­bles that have been trans­formed into some­thing other than a veg­etable dish?

Green beans and onions cooked with chicken stock and sprin­kled with bacon?
Spinach with…bacon?
Mashed pota­toes with…bacon?
Brus­sels sprouts with…bacon?

For­tu­nately I’m not the strictest of veg­e­tar­i­ans. If the only options are veg­gies with bits of meat incor­po­rated into the dish, I’ll try to leave the meaty bits on the plate or eat around them. But there are plenty of folks I know who would decline the offerings.

We veg-heads are used to bring­ing our own dishes to these gath­er­ings. We also try to help out in the kitchen and tact­fully try to make gen­tle sug­ges­tions for sub­sti­tu­tions. But at a time of year when peo­ple focus on tra­di­tions, this is a del­i­cate issue that risks frac­tur­ing a fam­ily into upstarts and traditionalists.

There’s one easy sug­ges­tion that might please almost every­one at the table: Instead of putting bacon in every dish, why not fill a condi­ment dish with crunchy bacon bits that peo­ple could heap on top of their veg­gies? The veg­e­tar­i­ans would avoid it, leav­ing even more for every­one else! Also, you could offer a fla­vor­ful sauce on the side that could keep the bacon fans happy.

And of course, try­ing new prepa­ra­tions could come up with new fam­ily tra­di­tions. This Thanks­giv­ing prob­a­bly the most unusual dish was some­thing Olinda next door shared with us: a sweet and aro­matic prepa­ra­tion of sweet pota­toes and guavas. The plate looked sim­i­lar to tra­di­tional yams, but every­thing was heady with the aro­mas of fresh-baked guavas, some­thing that reminded me of the per­fume of flowers.

Olinda ran a Mex­i­can restau­rant until her recent retire­ment. Although sweet pota­toes and guavas is a tra­di­tional cel­e­bra­tory dish in Mex­ico, it unfor­tu­nately wasn’t one that ever showed up on the menu of her restau­rant. And I doubt that you’d ever see it offered at any main­stream Mex­i­can eatery.

I’m work­ing on Olinda to get her to divulge her recipe, but until I’m suc­cess­ful here’s a link to a recipe in the Texas Monthly that looks very sim­i­lar. Yes, it looks like a lot of sugar. This is a sweet dish, but I’m sure you could adjust the sugar to your lik­ing. But what­ever you do, don’t scrimp on the guavas!

(If you don’t have access to fresh guavas, there are a num­ber of recipes on the web that use the some­what eas­ier to find guava jam.)

December 03 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: bacon • Camotitos Potosinos • food • guavas • recipes • sweet potatoes • vegetables • vegetarians | 2 Comments »

grow your own!

Yesterday’s BBC News had a com­men­tary by Peter Baker tak­ing an economist’s view of food pro­duc­tion. It sounds like an excel­lent argu­ment for grow­ing your own food. Here’s an inter­est­ing excerpt:

The order­li­ness required to plant, grow, har­vest, process, pack, store, mon­i­tor, admin­is­ter, trans­port, dis­play and sell the pro­duce in a super­mar­ket is sim­ply stag­ger­ing, and the expended energy intense.

As an exam­ple, tomato pro­duc­tion in the US con­sumes four times as many calo­ries as the calorific value of the toma­toes created…

Even before its sea voy­age, the calorific value of US wheat is only twice the amount of calo­ries expended to pro­duce it. Com­pare this with cas­sava pro­duc­tion in Tan­za­nia where 23 times the calorific value is gained for each calo­rie of human energy input.

Of course, you can’t derive nutri­tional ben­e­fit from drink­ing diesel fuel or some of the other power inputs nec­es­sary to pro­duce food in the indus­trial Amer­i­can agri­cul­tural sys­tem. But that would be fuel that could be devoted to some­thing more important–or kept out of the atmos­phere entirely.

(The sta­tis­tic on farmed toma­toes has shades of the title of William Alexander’s book, The $64 Tomato, a book I haven’t read yet. It’s on my list…)

August 12 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: agriculture • economics • food | 1 Comment »

naked ladies and tarts

Early last week, while I was work­ing, John had a chance to go up to North­ridge and visit his aunt for a few days. As part of the long week­end he was able to go to the aunt’s sister’s house and raid her plum tree. “You couldn’t tell I touched it,” John said, refer­ring to the num­ber of fruits the tree still had on it. He came home with maybe five or six pounds of them.

When you have a small crop of any­thing you savor every sin­gle fruit. But with this many I could splurge, and break­fast Sun­day included a plum tart. Pho­tograph­ing some­thing purple-black against a white back­ground turned out to be a lit­tle too much con­trast to make the pic­ture look that appe­tiz­ing. But hot out of the oven it wasn’t bad. (I must admit, though, that John might be get­ting tired of this blog­ging thing, with me going, “Wait a minute. We need a pic­ture before we eat it…” I can just see the next tell-all book to hit it big: I mar­ried a blog­ger…)

Out­side, things were bloom­ing. The first of the month brought this big burst of Lycoris squamigera Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna, which along with a pas­sel of other com­mon names is called naked ladies. The plant grows actively in the fall through spring, putting out long strap-shaped leaves, but no flow­ers. The flow­ers come now, in mid­sum­mer, after the plant has gone dor­mant and dropped all its leaves. The lone flower stem comes up from the bare earth, com­pletely unadorned by leaves–hence the com­mon name. Another of its com­mon names is “sur­prise lily,” which also makes a lot of sense–Imagine see­ing this after writ­ing the plant off as a goner. Edit: “Sur­prise lily” refers more to lycoris, which I’ve decided this plant isn’t after all, after a cou­ple discussions.

Because it grows in the win­ter, when it’s wet, and is basi­cally dor­mant in the long rain­less sum­mer, it gets by with min­i­mal sup­ple­men­tal water­ing, mak­ing it a per­fect bulb for Mediter­ranean cli­mates like South­ern California.

Other species in the genus Lycoris are some­times called naked ladies as well, but the plant around here that is most com­monly referred to by that name is the rounder, taller, more buxom Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna.

The rental house next door which often gets zero yard care has a patch by their front door. I couldn’t fig­ure out what I was doing wrong with mine. Why were mine shorter? And why did mine bloom for a some­what shorter (but more intense) period? Then I put the pieces together…totally dif­fer­ent species. I sup­pose there’s some­thing of that grass always being greener thing going on here.

Now that I’ve fig­ured it out I like mine just fine. In fact I think these, my kids, are much more won­der­ful than any­one else’s… See the species cor­rec­tion above. I’ve decided this is Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna after all!

August 05 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: food • in bloom • Lycoris squamingera • naked ladies • plums | 2 Comments »

tomato sculpture

I was brows­ing the web for recipes for cap­rese salad, the clas­sic salad of Capri using plum toma­toes, moz­zarella, basil, olive oil salt and pep­per. I didn’t encounter any rev­e­la­tions as far as ingre­di­ents or pro­por­tions, but I found sev­eral images of a pre­sen­ta­tion method where the tomato was sliced and then reassem­bled with slices of the cheese and basil interfiled.

Cool, I thought. But what if you use two toma­toes of dif­fer­ent col­ors? Here’s a first draft of this idea, using Mr. Stripey with the first fruit from Chero­kee Purple.

Before I add this to the menu at Spago, I’d try to be sure the toma­toes were more sim­i­lar in both size and shape. Also, cleaner, more uni­form cuts through the buf­falo moz­zarella would have made for a neater pre­sen­ta­tion.

July 28 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: caprese salad • Cherokee Purple tomato • food • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr s • recipes • tomatoes | 2 Comments »

red, red tomatoes

I’ve been wait­ing impa­tiently for my plant of the Early Girl tomato to bear fruit, and Sat­ur­day turned out to be the day. There were five in total, small­ish, but a beau­ti­ful red color, with just a flash of green on their shoul­ders. (Greg on Cape Cod also com­mented that this reputed early bearer was tak­ing its time for him as well.)

Here’s the loot from the Sat­ur­day: the first Early Girls, as well as some Mr. Stripeys.

They made for a tasty, quick black bean salad for lunch. But they really came into their own sliced up with some Moz­zarella di Bufala Cam­pana (a.k.a. buf­falo moz­zarella), olive oil, basil, pep­per and a smidge of salt–your basic cap­rese salad.

Sim­ple, uncom­pli­cated foods, fresh and deli­cious from the back yard. Sum­mer doesn’t get much bet­ter than this! If only I had some water buf­fa­los to make my own fresh cheese…

July 14 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: Early Girl tomato • food • Mr. Stripey tomato | 3 Comments »