Learning New Tricks

One thing that has seemed to fill a lot of people's time during this pandemic has been cooking. I think that's brilliant as people can only control what they y eat by cooking their own meals. I've often seen a sign on local restaurants 'Don't Cook Just Eat', which infuriates me. Turns out this is a delivery service that restaurants can contract with to do deliveries. I gather it isn't cheap and they collect their money whether or not the restaurant is selling delivered food, though I could be wrong about this. 

In any case, Bill and I have been out of the habit of eating out much for years now. Once I retired, cooking dinner didn't seem particularly onerous, particularly since I had any number of 'recipes' memorised. My favourite involved starting with sauteed onions and then adding whatever vegetables and possibly meats were on hand. Stir fries cook up quickly and you don't have to use a lot of oil. 

However, I must admit it started to get a bit boring and, far worse, I started gaining weight. So I got out my Betty Crocker's Cook Book from 1987, which has calorie counts for each of its recipes. I had at some point circled the calorie count of any recipe under 300 calories and those are the ones I focussed on. Besides calories, I've been trying to cook less and less red meat and more whole grains and vegetables. I frequently substitute yoghurt for sour cream or oil for bacon fat (it is an American cookbook after all). 

Some of Bill's favourite recipes of late have been cream of mushroom soup and Pennsylvania red cabbage (cooked with brown sugar and apples). I've never, in the 30+ years I've owned this book, looked at the vegetable recipes. We've also discovered that bulgar wheat cooks up as easily as rice and tastes something between white and brown rice. 

So, amazingly, some bulgar wheat cooked up with a vegetable stock cube and some red cabbage and some Brussel's sprouts (shredded and stir fried with a diced onion) is a pretty satisfying meal. Who would have thought?

Threads of Life

 I've just finished a book that I found very moving. Threads of Life by Clare Hunter speaks about not just historical sewing but about the experience of women. It's difficult to describe further without quoting long parts. 

I did fold down one page to return to. It lists the textiles Mary Queen of Scots brought with her on her return to Scotland from France:

For her voyage to Scotland Mary had packed ten cloths of estate (the ceremonial cloths which hung above monarchs' thrones emblazoned with their coat of arms), forty-five bed sets, thirty-six Turkish carpets, twenty-three suits of tapestry, eighty-one cushions, twenty-four tablecloths and a variety of embroidered wall hangings. There was her own wardrobe of fifty-eight dresses, thirty-five farthingales (hooped or padded underskirts), several cloaks and shifts, petticoats, stomachers, drawers and coifs. They encompassed thousands of metres of luxurious fabric: embroidered, appliqued, braided, beriribboned, fringed, tessellated and studded with jewels.

Never mind cloths of estate, she had me at fifty-eight dresses. I wonder how many pairs of shoes she brought?

At the end of the book the author lists websites that hold images of some of the things about which she wrote:

Bayeux Museum: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/

Conflict Textile Collection: https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/

(https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/)

Craftivist Collective:  https://craftivist-collective.com

Embroiderers' Guild: https://embroiderersguild.com

Foundling Museum: https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

Hunterian Museum: https://gla.ac.uk ( https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/about/video/)

Judy Chicago:  https://www.judychicago.com/

Peace Museum: https://www.peacemuseum.org.uk/ 

(search for textiles)

Peoples' History Museum:  https://phm.org.uk

(banner-display)

Quilt Museum: https://quiltm.org.uk

AKA The Quilters' Guild Museum

(oh, the shop! - and the close ups of items in their collection!)

Sewing Matters: https://sewingmatters.co.uk

(sadly, this is not a secure site?)

Smithsonian Institution: https://si.edu

(search textiles)

National Museum of African American History and Culture:  https://nmaahc.si.edu

Textile Society: https://textilesocoety.org.uk

Victoria and Albert Museum: https://vam.ac.uk

Visual Arts Data Service: https://vads.ac.uk

(search for textiles and enjoy the amazing close up views)

Sewing a Bit

 My WI Craft group has motivated me to sew where little else has. In the good old days we met each month and I would have a teacher lined up to show people embroidery, needle-felting, patchwork, making wax wraps, all sorts of things. We each would take a turn demonstrating something we knew how to do. I think those are the best groups - where everyone participates, giving and taking in turn.

We still meet each month, but on Zoom. Since the technicalities of demonstrating a craft on Zoom are beyond what most of us have the patience for, we've each been released to do our own thing. Eventually we decided to have a theme for each month, with each of us making an interpretation of that - or not. It has yielded some fascinating results. 

Our theme for January was 'snow'. I couldn't come up with anything but 'make something white' which turned out to be a cross body bag from white scraps. I'm not happy with the finished product: it's too wide and the strap is too narrow. So it's likely not finished but just at a resting point.

Our theme for February was 'red', for George Washington's birthday (cherries), the Chinese New Year (red is an auspicious colour in that culture) and of course Valentine's Day. So I made yet another tote bag. 

I can remember where quite of bit of these fabrics originated. Some belonged to Rita. I have a photo of her wearing a red dress made of the taffeta-like fabric of the front pocket. Others were from upholstery fabric samples. The French toile picture is from having my kitchen curtains made at an outlet in Blaydon. I asked for the scraps left over - I'd paid for the fabric after all. 

The inner pocket has some cross-stitching on it. I lined that pocket to protect the back of the stitches. Both the cross-stitch and the lining fabric came from Jan, a lady formerly in my Thursday night craft group. Jan is terminally ill and no longer crafts so she handed over her enormous stash, some of which came my way. I will share photos of this bag with that group and perhaps it will get back to her. Leslie, another lady from that group, gave me quite a bit of the patchwork cottons. She is a crafter who buys the materials for a project, finishes the project and discards any leftovers. About as opposite to me in every way!

The theme for March is 'Easter'. I've no interest in eggs or rabbits, so will likely make another tote bag...perhaps in green.

Strange Lights

Somewhere around Christmas I read that it was OK to leave the tree and decorations up longer this year as they lifted peoples' spirits. I had a think about this but still opted to take it all down in the first week of January as per usual.

I did suggest to Bill we try putting some lights up, though. We have red lights in the dining room (red is supposed to stimulate appetite, not that ours generally is in need of help) and white lights along the stairs. I had it in mind they would be on the bannister, but Bill put them on the ground.

These have turned out to be rather practical, lighting our way without having to turn on either the downstairs lights (even if I did feel that turning on the upstairs lights produced a slightly better photo).

We may need to keep those even after the pandemic (if such a thing happens). I see the neighbours across the street left some lights up in the doorway between kitchen and dining room, also some on one of the trees in their back yard. Another neighbour has lights up in their conservatory. 

Have you done anything to keep a festive/light-hearted spirit in this dark time?

Cajun Gumbo?

Morphy drank a bottle of Breux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen piece and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux. Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into an iron-based pan over a hot flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn't burn, gradually turning the roux form blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate colour. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring. While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and cayenne peppers, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo sausage. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice on to plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. After that, we ate in silence, savouring the flavours in our mouths.

From Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

No idea if this is a good recipe for gumbo (I thought there was okra in there somewhere) and I'm not sure about cooking roux until it is dark brown, but this sure made me want to give this a go. May do a bit more research first.