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February 11, 2006

Studio Saturday : exhausted, and spending a few days thinking about anything but the studio

1. Most of my week was spent working on some letterpress projects that had to be done by Thursday, and the grad print class spent two afternoons over in the gallery critiquing our show. Jessica and I were up until 3 on Tuesday night trying to get the @#$%^&* Epson printer to work properly for us (and I had to get up at 6 the next morning to get on the Vandercook to print my text). Gah. Some images of the letterpress stuff are over on my flickr page, but I'm just too lazy right now to upload them here.

2. For Cari Luna:

I had tostones for breakfast. And that reminded me:

Here is the recipe for butter tarts that I promised you ages ago and then forgot about. It's the one my mom always makes, and comes from the Five Roses Cookbook. I guess I'm probably not supposed to publish a recipe from a book, but I like to live on the edge. Heh.

Prize Butter Tarts (Five Roses Cookbook Edition 24)

1 pastry recipe
1 egg(beaten)
1/3 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 cup raisins, currants or chopped pecans (optional; my mom often leaves them plain and they're fantastic that way, and I've never tried a butter tart with currants. It sounds gross, though)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put pastry in tart pan.
Mix all ingredients together, fill tart shells 2/3 full. Bake in a hot oven (450) for 8 minutes, then reduce temperature to 350 and bake 15 to 20 minutes longer or until pastry is delicately brown.

And that's it! Butter tarts are pretty similar to pecan pie, but are way better without the pecans. Also, because they're small you get a much nicer ratio of crust to filling. You could also try them with maple syrup if you want to ramp up the Canadianness a little. Mmm!

3. I'll be putting my beautiful Spike aside for a little while to concentrate on achieving my personal best in the Knitting Olympics, but here's a picture of where she's at right now.

I'm using the handspun cashmere that Claudia sent me last spring, with some bits of Kool-Aid dyed recycled lambswool as accents. This yarn is so soft and so lovely; when I had the first half of the scarf off the needles I wore it around the house for a while and I can't believe the feeling of it around my neck. When Peter first felt the yarn he suggested making underpants, and although I still think that's kind of silly, I also sort of wish I had made underpants now that I know what cashmere feels like against skin. Um, sorry. TMI.

4. I've started dividing up my huge stash of badges into sets of four and photographing them, and as soon as I hit "post" here I'll be uploading them onto flickr, as well as some shrink plastic bracelets and hair pins. We're still working on banging out the shop pages, so for the time being I'll put merchandise up on flickr so people can e-mail me to purchase; I accept paypal, but am willing to make other arrangements as well. Also, for those of you still patiently waiting for the shirts, I'm ordering some new silkscreens this week. So there really WILL be shirts here, and soon.

5. My evil plan to convert everyone I know to the dark side is chugging along at a marvelous pace. I'm teaching some of my colleagues to knit, and we've started meeting up and knitting at Hot Corner on Monday nights. Apparently there are some people who knit on Mondays around the corner at the Manhattan, and we'd only been meeting for three weeks when someone from that group said to someone from our group, "oh, you're one of the Hot Corner knitters". How they knew about us I haven't a clue, but it might be fun to start up a rivalry. We're going to need to get matching bowling shirts, and a logo. Heh. All will be assimilated! So if you're in or around Athens Georgia, come knit with us, Monday nights around 7-7:30 at Hot Corner. You know you want to.

Here's Jenn last week, wearing her newly finished scarf:

And Euni had only known how to knit for about twenty minutes when the photo was taken; look at her hands fly! She's one of those fibre people who can do anything, so I'm sure she'll be putting me to shame in no time.

6. There is olive bread in the oven, nearly done. The smell in this apartment right now is divine.

Posted by jodi at February 11, 2006 12:43 PM | categories:  food : in the studio : sticks and string

Comments

Posted by: cari at February 11, 2006 05:56 PM

Posted by: claudia at February 11, 2006 09:57 PM

Posted by: Jillian at February 11, 2006 10:23 PM