On Quilting (And Other Things I Don't Do)

Bird tells a story about one of her cousins, the one everyone knows makes the best pie crust in the world.*  Before the female relative's mother died, her mother made the best pie crust in the world.  Everybody knew it.  She had the ribbons from the fair to prove it.  The cousin never made pie, because everyone knew her mother's was best.  Until her mother died, then she started making pie, and now she has her own ribbons (and a grandson whose first word was "Pie").

I only mention this because I come from a family of accomplished seamstresses and needle women. My aunt makes quilts that are like beebop jazz played on a French horn -- inventive, exuberant, and elegant all at once.  My Mom makes quilts that are more like Bach-- precise, meticulous, classic, and still playful.  Both of them make amazing clothing.

Mom tried repeatedly to interest me in sewing as a girl.  She failed miserably.  I would begin with good intentions, and get frustrated half way through and go run around in the woods instead.  It didn't help that Mom's sewing machine was on its last legs, and jammed whenever anyone looked sideways at it, and in my case whenever I looked directly at it as well.  Mom eventually gave up. My younger brother took to sewing more readily than I did.  (He also knits, and makes a mean chocolate chip cookie, while discoursing learnedly on political philosophy.  As brothers go, I think he's pretty cool.) I decided that I did NOT sew.  I was accursed in the mechanical department, and too impatient for anything beyond rudimentary mending.  And that was that.  For years.

At the end of my high school career, a friend of mine invited me to her house for a couple of weeks to make a quilt.  She had owned a quilt store at one time, and her stash filled rooms.  So together we pulled the fabrics for a log cabin quilt, in shades of red, turquoise, and blue (balanced by shades of cream and grey).  I didn't do most of the sewing. For reasons neither of us could explain, her ordinarily reliable machine jammed crazily whenever I went near it. So I pressed the blocks, and marveled at the evolving relationships between color and pattern.

Fast forward another four years.  Mom had taken up quilting, bought a new sewing machine, and I had a pregnant friend.  So I decided to make a baby quilt. My one experience with quilting was by this time, a few years old, and I didn't actually know how to use Mom's machine, but I went ahead and bought fabric anyway.  I made a split rail fence quilt (which was ridiculously easy to piece, even though I didn't know what I was doing).  However, just as I was putting the borders on the quilt top, my friend lost the baby, and the quilt went on the shelf. 

Fast forward again, another seven years, Mom found the quilt top on the shelf, and said, "Hey, Sarah, what do you think of finishing this?" And I looked at it, and I could see that it had some problems, but was withall a functional quilt on which to set a baby.  And lo! in the meantime many of my friends and relations were in their early thirties, which meant that there were babies and pregnancies all over the place, and the real problem was deciding who got the finished quilt.  So Mom and I went and bought some fabric for the back and I quilted the sucker while watching the evening news (and an extremely laudatory documentary about James Baker saving the Reagan administration, which I found peculiarly amusing in its bias -- I am sure that James Baker was a fine person and an able diplomat, but the way the documentary went on, one might have thought he invented glasnost and the internet as well as being Secretary of State). Mom helped me with the binding (which is another way of saying that she was the one who put the binding on).

I presented the finished product to a friend of mine, to general acclaim, and thought, "that's it, I'm done.  Never doing that again. I do NOT sew, and this is a fluke."

I came home for Christmas break, and I had still more pregnant friends and relations, and I wanted to do something creative that was nothing like a design class.  So I looked through Mom's quilt books, and came up with the idea that Mom and I would make a quilt for one of the imminent cousinlings in two weeks. My idea was that I would pick out the colors and the design, and maybe occasionally approach the sewing machine tentatively, but Mom would do the real work.

My taste in colors can run up against the bounds of good taste, and go reeling off in directions that are even more unsuitable. So Mom had a job convincing me that Purple, Blue, Turquoise, Red, Orange, and Yellow, might not be the most graceful combination of colors ever conceived. In fact, she failed.  The quilt is so...vibrant, that it took me until recently to realize that the block I'd used, was ordinarily called Buckeye Beauty and one I'd admired greatly in more traditional settings.  Despite this, the quilt was not dire despite the fact that I did all of the piecing and most of the quilting, although possibly a bit more stimulating to the visual centers of the brain than one might expect. It all went together in a fashion almost devoid of sturm und drang.  But I was clear, I do NOT sew, and I don't quilt.  I just really love my cousins. 

So this summer, again home in Alaska, I found myself poking through Mom's stash, and thinking that a quilt might be a fun project to take on.  Once again, I had an excess of pregnant people, but they all knew each other, and I worried about hurt feelings if I only made a quilt for one of them.  But I really wanted to make a quilt. (A clear sign that my anti-sewing resolve was crumbling.) As I was flipping through Mom's quilt books for the millionth time, admiring things that are clearly not for someone as scatterbrained and imprecise as I am, I found something I liked in one of Marsha McClosky's books, a nine patch. Nine patches are unintimidating. The sort of thing that I could do with minimal supervision, even if I wanted to do something kind of scrappy, which would not allow for strip piecing.  And those colors in that pile over there were Bird's sort of colors.

I'm certain Bird needs another throw for her couch.

Next thing Mom knew, her sewing room was awash in hundreds of 2.5" squares (approximately -- among my quilting handicaps is a failure to fully grok the zen of a rotary cutter, with the result that at least thirty percent of the time, I fail to cut straight lines, despite the assiduous deployment of a really large ruler) of blue, teal, cream, and the occasional burst of red.

I discovered that coming home and sewing was a nice break from the general public at work, and suddenly hundreds of squares became a slightly more reasonable number of blocks, then rows of blocks, and then slightly inexplicably a nearly twin size quilt top (since a nearly twin size quilt is pretty perfect as a throw on a couch).  Not long after that it became a full blown quilt, in which many of the seams matched more or less.  I did in fact operate a sewing machine in the process, but it still seems astonishing and improbable to me that I must use the passive voice. 

There are problems with making a surprise quilt for a really close friend.  One of them is that people like that are prone to asking dangerous questions like, "what have you been up to this week?"

I am terrible at dissimulation.  "Um, I've been quilting. (OfcourseasyouknowIdon'tsew.)"

Bird, knowing about the bumper crop of babies in my social circle, asked,"Do you have a recipient in mind?"

"Er, yeah, but I might decide to keep it." (Which is always theoretically true, but not very.)

"I see."

After I get off the phone, "Mom, I blew it, Bird knows what I'm up to."

So now Bird has a quilt, and I seem to be planning a quilt to tackle when I go home for Christmas.  I'm thinking of combining log cabin blocks with little tiny variable star blocks (the aunt that does wild and elegant jazz quilting is going through a phase that involves sending Mom books by Gwen Marston, who has interesting ideas, even if her taste in colors is even more over the top than mine).  Which means that I will have to figure out how to make variable star blocks, and well, it should be interesting.  And if I get bored, I can call it a baby quilt and hand it to someone who's pregnant. Or if I really decide I'm in over my head, it will be a wall hanging and I'll give it to someone who has a wall.  I guess I might sew after all, or at least I quilt.  Even if I make quilts like punk rock -- sloppy**, loud***, and finished quickly.****

*Everyone is wrong about this.  Mom makes the best pie crust in the world.  Everyone is invited to practice, especially if I get to try the results, but Mom's crust is best.
**Although I'm getting better at sewing straight seams with practice.
***Although actually, Bird's quilt is closer to the quietly elegant end of the spectrum than one seeing my more normal output might expect.  Anything that is mostly cream, is probably elegant.
****Inarguable.  I will probably never hand quilt anything bigger than a pot holder.

Adventures in Applied Color Theory

Last night I helped K, my Viking Cousin, and G, his sister-in-law, paint the living room and dining room of the Viking Residence. It was Sunday as the "Work Party to Get the Viking Residence into Shape before the Arrival of Small Viking #2" was winding down, that A, the Viking Wife, said quietly that she would kind of like the living room and dining room painted before the room got put back together. G and I looked at each other. Then we looked at A who is eight months pregnant and a very good sport about having her entire house torn up while the floors were refinished and the windows on the south side of the house replaced. We both thought, "this needs to happen." 

Yesterday G asked if I wanted to come to the Viking Residence and paint last night. After a bus trip that took almost an hour longer than it needed too on account of Seattle traffic, I arrived just in the nick of time for dinner.  Initially things did not look good for getting the painting done. Colors had not been decided on. Paint had not been bought. K was in a funk because of all the stuff that needed to get done. A was worn out. Small Viking #1 was beginning the evening meltdown. But G and I were determined.

I made noises that implied that I had ideas about the colors, so K told me to go look at the paint chips and make some decisions.   So I did.  I picked out a slightly brighter sunnier yellow for the living room, and a rich grey for the dining room (which is open to both the kitchen and the living room).  I have long felt that the dining room needs to be a darker calmer color to mark a still point between the activity of the living room and kitchen*(which is bright green). I have felt this so strongly for so long that my mind insists on remembering the dining as a much darker color than it actually was. K was a little dubious about the grey.  I spouted off with color theory**, but what really decided things was that A looked at the colors and said, "those are just what I want."  Possibly she meant, "I want people to make a decision. Anything is fine as long as it's fresh paint."  However we chose to take her at her word, and sent K off to buy paint, while G and I wiped down the walls and taped.  A took the Small Viking #1 upstairs and put him to bed and then fell asleep herself.

K came back with the paint, and shortly after nine o'clock we started painting.  When it came to the grey, I had several moments of fear because the paint came out of the can much lighter than I remembered and a slightly off color, warmer than I wanted.  Advising other people on what to paint their houses is always slightly harrowing because what if it doesn't work?  What if they hate it?  Et cetera.  Fortunately the grey dried to match the chip. We finished shortly after midnight with the caveat that the grey in the dining room needs a second coat (but it's such a small space that that will take no time).

We sat around drinking beer, eating goat cheese sandwiches, and feeling proud of ourselves.  I crashed in the office. The goat cheese sandwiches were amazing.  However I will not offer a recipe because unless you have scallions fresh from the garden, and equally fresh lettuce, and home made goat cheese cured in jerk seasoning, you just won't be able to replicate it.  Alas. 

When I got up this morning A and Small Viking #1 were up and A said that she liked the new colors.  I do too.


*I may have read The Not So Big House one too many times.
** To wit, cool colors recede, and darker colors, depending on the context, also tend to recede.  So the very small dining area should feel a bit larger with a darkish coolish color on the walls.  And it would provide a point of contrast to balance the yellow and the green of the living area and kitchen.  (The old dining area had been sort of a light orangy tan. It did not work.)

Confessions of a Busy Blogger

School has eaten my brain again.  I know I ought to write something.  I even planned out a long post about color and its emotional associationds.  I am afraid that after thinking out this very long post while walking too and from school, I instead went and spent a weekend with my aunt and uncle, and did not once look at my computer. The post has thus disappeared into the brain fog again.

I will tell you quite frankly that it was a marvelous weekend, and that if you ever find yourself in Everett, Wa. you should go to Scuttlebutt's and order the fish and chips and a pint of porter.  

So Tired

An online thesaurus offers these synonyms for tired: all in, beat, bone-tired, bored, burned out, bushed, dead tired, dead, dog-tired, done in, drained, drooping, drowsy, enervated, exhausted, fagged, fatigued, flagging, out of gas, overworked, pooped, punchy, ready to drop, sleepy, spent, taxed, wearied, wearing, wiped out, worn out, zonked.  Most of these are applicable.  I am once again facing the reality that if I were getting paid for the time I spend at school, I would be pulling some serious overtime, and that's not counting the night when I was up until one am doing research.

But that's me whining.  Have some random bits and pieces instead. 

1. To your left you see the doodle that happened when I was supposed to be paying attention to a lecture about paper.  Those of you who have "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" burned into your brains may notice that there are two problems with this quotation.  One I figured out on my own, and one a friend* pointed out to me.  Only the latter was fixable.  

I should try to remember to update the image tomorrow with the fix.  I should also try to remember that I now want to do a gigantic Prufrock poster when I have time and energy.** 

2.  The second item is vaguely related two the first.  My shoddy memory dropped "sirens" into Eliot's deathless verse in place of "mermaids".  I drew a mermaid anyway.  (I like drawing mermaids, and have been drawing more or less rubenesque mermaids since sometime in high school. This may be because I don't particularly love drawing feet.)  A quick google image search, which I don't actually recommend, will show you that most sirens in the popular imagination are fish tailed temptresses (or else scantily clad women lounging on motorcycles).  However, the ancient greeks, imagined the Sirens as bird women.  Often just a woman's head on a bird's body.  Sometimes a winged woman with duck feet.  The webbed feet are fairly constant though (or possibly, they are the most memorable).  Temptresses with duck feet.  Get your head around that.  

Now consider this, the Ancient Greeks adorned their funerary monuments with images of the Sirens. Yes, at least some Greeks apparently hoped to be conducted into the afterlife by duck footed women.  This fact is not mentioned enough during the acquisition of a liberal arts education.   

3. Today is the 110st anniversary of my great grandmother's birth.  Today I learned that she, like me, loved canned peaches.  I also learned that, unlike me, her first name was Alvira (I've probably been told this fact before).  For reasons that are probably obvious, she went by Belle instead.  

4.  The strangest search term to find me in the last 24 hours was "Happy Giant poems."  Apparently this search points you at the Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day post, which does contain links to poetry.  And yet somehow I don't believe it was what they were looking for, although what they were looking for puzzles me.   

5. Breyer's ice cream at my local safeway is $2 a carton this week.  They have found my Achilles heel.


*To the best of my knowledge, this friend does not have Prufrock burned into his brain.  The fact that there are people in the world with perfect pitch for scansion would be the a cause of much teeth gnashing if I were not all of the things the thesaurus claims I am.  

**I do have Prufrock burned, however imperfectly, into my brain thanks to a college habit of dramatic reading duets with my roommate.

Baleful Chickens and Other Things

The Buff Orpington is not amused, neither am I.

Since this post devolves fairly quickly into me ranting about people doing health food badly, I thought I'd mention up front that I passed a very pleasant Sunday with my Viking cousins and their chickens.  The chickens are charming and dopey until you look them in the face and realize that not only are they dinosaur relatives, but also they probably remember being tyrannosaurs in previous lives.  The chickens are biding their time.  (Mostly by making daft noises and begriming their living space, but still.)

The Viking fed me squash and kale soup that was so good I think I have added another brassica to the list of cabbage family members that I adore.  He also sent me home with a tub of homemade coconut butter cream that he made for the Little Viking's birthday cake.  I'm supposed to come up with something fantastic to do with it.  I did.

However, it's spreading the butter cream on peanut butter cookies (which are surpassingly moist and chewy several days after baking.  I may have to revise my initial assessment of the recipe as nothing more than inoffensive).   I think the Viking had more spectacular things in mind.  Against that, I am toying with ideas involving crab apple sauce.  (It's a little known fact that crab apples and coconuts are friends.  I'm not even making this up.  JVW's crab apple and coconut tart is objective verification of my assertion.)

Secondly,  ginger ale mk. 2 was so good that it is almost gone now.  Heating the ginger and adding lemon seem to be the things that ginger ale mk. 1 was missing.  I'll probably have a definitive recipe ready to go soon.

Now that the preludes are out of the way, I come to the reason that there is an angry dinosaur descendant headlining the blog tonight.

Today I ate an unpleasant thing.  It was a portobello mushroom cap "pizza" picked up in the produce section of my local Safeway. Now this is not an automatically bad idea.  I wouldn't have bought it if had seemed like an automatically bad idea.  I like mushrooms.  I like pizza.  I like food that attempts to be healthful.

I mention this because the experience of eating my dinner was entirely unpleasant.  Everything people, who don't like mushrooms, say about mushrooms was on display.  Grey, faintly rubbery, and ever so slightly funky like toe cheese.  I like mushrooms (I say this a second time, both for emphasis and also to reassure myself that I do still, in fact, like mushrooms) and this was not a happy vegetable and cheese stuffed mushroom.  What went wrong here?  

Firstly, a mismatch in expectations.  There was NO garlic.  I have made and served pizzas without garlic to people with garlic allergies.  It happens.  But if you label a food as somehow being of the pizza nature, unless it explicitly says so in large friendly, neon-yellow letters larger than fourteen point, it had darned well better have garlic.  Even pizza margherita which dispenses with pizza sauce, and can be pretty casual about the cheese has GARLIC.   (These yahoos had dispensed with pizza sauce too.  This was probably a mistake.)

Secondly, as I have ranted before, in an attempt to be healthy, the makers of health food often strip the fat from their foods (I had to buy yogurt today too -- do I even need to mention my disgust at there being no fat bearing yogurt on sale?).  In this case they skimped on the skim milk mozzarella and skipped the olive oil entirely.  Fat in excess is not all that great for you. You know what is excellent for you, and will kill you in excess?  Water.  Fat is necessary.  The human brain is mostly fat.  Human fertility is fat dependent.  Yes, folks, the survival of the human race depends on there being enough fat.  (Not that a badly executed portobello pizza will bring the human race to a screeching halt because of amenorrhea.  Probably.)  And the kind of fat that should have gone into this pitiable excuse for a dinner was good fat, namely olive oil.  Olive oil would have helped the mushroom caps to brown, carmelizing and sealing in juices that would have immeasurably improved the texture and the flavor.  

So this is what I would have done, and what I probably will do later this week or maybe next, because while the execution was poor, the idea was sound, and filling.  I'd probably skip the sausage in favor of more vegetables.  Maybe a roasted bell pepper.  More cheese. Definitely more cheese.  Maybe some sauteed onions. 

Cake -- having it, eating it, analyzing it

Today is the birthday of one of the horde of knee high redheads that make up the current baby boom in my family.  I am probably doomed to come down with the horrible ick the birthday boy has, because germ avoidance would have meant not letting him sit in my lap while I read to him (besides which I'd been playing with him earlier in the week).  Easy choice. 

Now I have successfully managed to drag my adorable baby cousins into my blog.  It's only respect for my family's privacy that keeps me from making the blog wall to wall cousin pictures.  I think they're pretty great, as evidenced by my willingness to risk terrible diseases by playing with them.

I have also proved that I am the sort of person who will look at a perfectly awesome cake -- Viking Cousin's* coconut cake involves a bit more than a pound and a half of butter** -- and start trying to figure out how to make it better.  Or at least different.  I'm thinking fresh raspberries.  And a birthday boy who isn't feverish.

*He's taller than I am, speaks Norwegian, and has a red beard.  Nicknaming him anything else for purposes of blogging is unthinkable. 

** As someone who once described a failed recipe with the damning phrase, "needs more fat" I NEED THIS RECIPE.

Thanksgiving

I'm just home from a long weekend of festivating in a kitchen orientated fashion. Hence the painting. Some people may not see a kitchen's worth of chaos as festive, but trust me when I say that it's one of my favorite forms of fun. Although my faithful readers might not actually be all that surprised.

The painting is Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Joachim Beuckelaer. This worthy Flemish master took great delight in mounding his paintings with foodstuffs. This panoply of roasts and fowl is rather restrained. I cannot remember the name for the genre of painting that has a scene of ordinary life in the foreground, and a scene from the Bible as a vignette in the background. There is such a word. I wish I could remember it. At any rate, this is one of them, and one of Beuckelaer's favorite subjects, since it gives him an excuse to show the uproar in the kitchen that prepares to feast an unexpected guest.*

But enough self-indulgent noodling about art, lets talk about food. Thanks to the magic of some really sharp scheduling, I managed to attend three Thanksgiving dinners taking in both sides of my family as well as my friends' families. My weekend did not feature enough snoozing in a turkey induced coma, but it had laughter, fat babies, happy toddlers, and enough good food that I don't think I actually need to eat again until I fly home to Alaska for the holidays. Not that I am going to let that stop me.

Despite the good times, I did miss my immediate family fiercely. At home Mom and I collaborate on Thanksgiving dinner. I usually make the sides, and Mom deals with the turkey, the stuffing and the gravy. Dad gets the short straw and potato mashing duty. It's chaotic, loud, and the Ervine family kitchen can't actually comfortably hold four full sized adults (my brother may or may not cook anything but he definitely wanders through to snitch tastes). Then the guests start arriving.

I usually end by making elaborate plans for how it is all going to be different and sane next year.

This year I wanted the crazy, the off-key singing, and the squabbling over oven space. To say nothing of Mom's stuffing. Mom makes the best stuffing, and I don't have her recipe. However I think I have figured out the secret to the excellence of her stuffing and consequently her gravy. Judging from the evidence before me, most people do not cook the stuffing in the turkey. An understandable choice-- turkey cooks faster and theoretically more thoroughly without stuffing. The secret to Mom's stuffing is a bunch of fruit, and apple juice to moisten the bread crumbs before it goes in the bird. The stuffing is good whether it was the in-bird stuffing or the large casserole that is cooked on the side to meet demand. However, the in-bird stuffing flavors the juices from the bird. Hence the best gravy ever.

Gravy is extremely important. The entire Thanksgiving meal is an excuse for the gravy. You may ask my grandmother if my word is in doubt.

Without my mom's stuffing recipe, you and I have no hope of making a truly superb gravy, but despite this good gravy is within easy reach.

The secret is making a proper roux**.

Turkey Gravy

Take all the rendered juices from the turkey and pour them in a glass container. A Pyrex measuring cup of appropriate size is dandy. This is a tricky operation, if you're a klutz like me, you may want to get someone else to do this for you.

When the liquid separates, you should have at least a couple of tablespoons of fat floating on top. Pour the fat carefully into either the pan you roasted the turkey in (if it's suitable for stove top use), or a shallow, not non-stick skillet. Reserve the rest of the turkey juices.

Place the pan over medium heat and add an equal volume of flour. Stir constantly with a fork or a spring whisk as the paste forms. Attempt to squash out all the lumps. Keep stirring as the paste turns golden and begins to smell of toasted grain. It's not an altogether bad thing if the roux gets a bit burned. This takes five -ten minutes depending on your burner temperature.

Pour in the turkey juices. If the result is too thick, add some water, wine, or broth. The result should be fairly thin. Continue stirring and bring the proto-gravy to a boil. Allow it to reduce to the desired consistency. Check the seasonings. If it's too salty add more water, wine, or broth (assuming that the broth is low or no sodium). Resist the urge to get fancy. Keep it simple. Good gravy is zen gravy.

Pour it into a pitcher, a gravy boat, or -- if all other containers are in use -- a candy dish. Pour it on everything and jealously guard it from all comers.

Bonus Casserole

One might also make chicken gravy and pour it over a casserole dish of leftovers, and bake for half an hour at 350. Serve it with lingonberry jam if you've already run out of cranberry sauce.


*The story is here: Luke 10:38-42. It's one of those stories that makes you wonder about how the Puritans came up with their famed work ethic.

**a cooked paste of fat and flour. The language of cooking is often French and "roux" sounds better than fat and flour paste.