Chili – the cooking begins

While the ground beef is marinading, it's time to chop some smoked bacon:

 

sauté the bacon with a little olive oil for ten minutes or so until the fat is rendered:

 

Meanwhile chop some onions:

 

Chili – work in progress

Hereford beef from Rock Cedar Ranch, Decorah – the main ingredient for the chili.

Kings - ancho chiles

Dried ancho chiles are the kings of the chili world: noble, rich and powerful.

 

Ancho chiles are dried poblano chiles. Their transluscent dried flesh has a cranberry hue and deep fruity aroma. The dark shiny skin reflects and refracts the light.

These woodcuts are from the forthcoming book, Chili: a recipe, to be published by Solmentes Press this Fall.

Roasted with garlic and blended with spices they make an excellent basis for a chili fit for kings.

Disaster – wood-fired oven burns down

Saturday May 12.
The fire-brick hearth was unusually hot and I noticed the 8 x 8 inch oak beam at the mouth of the oven was again smouldering. The pizzas were unremarkable and the base of the crust burnt.

Sunday May 13.
After breakfast Tom ran into the kitchen: "the pizza oven has collapsed, its burning!"

He was right . . . my pride and joy was reduced to a heap of burning oak beams among which lay the hearth of recycled fire bricks, topped by the smashed hard-baked adobe clay dome from which jutted the chimney flanked by the tin roof. Thank goodness we didn't build it near the house.

Sad indeed, but the next oven will be bigger, better and closer to the kitchen and this time I won't build the plinth from wood! (see Recycling the East-side school}.

Papermaking part 4 – paper for sale

 
This sheet of paper, "Spring Medley", made from old nettle, milkweed, hemp, hollyhock and fresh mulberry and iris fibers with floral inclusions of violet, geranium and dandelion petals (19 x 23 ins) was offered at the ArtHaus Auction fundraiser in Decorah on May 4. It was bought for $70.

Spring medley (detail)

Papermaking part 3 – floral inclusions

The Richard de Bas paper mill in France is well known for its floral papers. Less well known are the latest floral papers from Decorah, Iowa.

 Petals from violets and dandelions and young fern frond tips were added to the Zerkall & milkweed pulp. The violet petals were inclined to float to the surface, which made it difficult to incorporate them in the paper. However peristance prevailed and the effort yielded an interesting paper due in part to the contrast between the yellow and purple hues and the different shaped petals and the ferns.

This detail shows the tangled web of fibers and a fragment of dandelion petal. 

Some new fibers have been gathered: bast fiber from old milkweed stems which will be processed separately; and fiber from some hemp which self-seeds itself on the farm, no doubt a remnant of the wartime crops that were once grown for rope.

Papermaking part 2 – milkweed & recycled zerkall

The milkweed experiments demonstrated that the woody stems, if they were to be of any use, needed mascerating. There were plenty of desirable long, bast fibers in the milkweed pulp but they were too long, they needed to be shorter. The solution as exemplified everywhere is to used a Hollander beater or, in this case the kitchen blender.

To pulp the woody stems the blender was run for longer than was necessary and chopped the bast fibers too short. In future I will not use the woody stems and devise a less harsh method of pulping (the fibers were first beaten with claw hammers).

100% milkweed paper

Nevertheless the milkweed pulp made an attractive paper.

I have accumulated many offcuts of paper over the years, including at least two tons of German Zerkall mould made – an acid free paper whose "standard furnish is composed of a mix of cotton fibre and high alpha cellulose" – and decided it was time to recycle. Transforming the Zerkall into pulp in the food blender yielded a neutral white base to which I added some of the finer milkweed fibers. 

Milkweed & Zerkall paper

The results were at once more paper like than the first experiments – magic. These pieces of paper are formed on a 4 x 3 inch piece of fly screen and couched onto plywood, glass or rigid insulation to dry in the sun. The fly screen leaves a distinctive mesh pattern on the "wire side" of the paper.

The plywood yielded the smoothest surface. The glass (of the greenhouse) was not clean and the paper stuck. All the sheets possessed a characteristic "rattle" when dry, the thinner the sheet, the more pronounced.


The paper seems quite durable and a fold test (creased and folding 100 times) showed only slight degradation of the surface along the fold. Rubbing did not raise any fibers. Tear strength was not very good, which is not surprising as the fibers were too short as a result of too aggressive blending.


Next experiments will try different plants.

Milkweed paper: first steps in papermaking from plants

All you need is imagination. This is the very first sheet piece of paper I have made from wild plants growing here on the farm in northeast Iowa. In fact it is only the third piece of paper I have ever made in my entire life! But can you see the potential.

Inspired Russell Maret's visit here this week and the report of his visit to master paper maker and McArthur Fellow, Timothy Barrett at the University of Iowa, I decided to pursue the idea that all the materials needed to make a book were growing here on the farm. I have been looking for a niche market crop we could grow and wondered if kozo, or Paper Mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) might be possible. The common Red Mulberry (Morus rubra) grows here readily and when clearing branches I have noticed the bark is very tough – perhaps it also could be used for paper.

A quick re-read of Washi by Suki Hughes, was further inspiration, except for the description of the pot of warm water into which the paper maker will occasionally plunge his "red, numb hands".

This led me to investigate paper making from plants and as a first step I collected some dried stalks of Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). The stem fibers are long, strong and silky, while the seeds are attached to downy hairs. Soaking and boiling the stems in lye made from wood ash (we have a wood stove) and then rinsing before beating yielded a curious lumpy pulp. Couched out onto a plywood sheet to dry, translucent fibers connect the woody straw pieces to make a suprisingly strong paper – the magic of paper making.

More beating is clearly necessary and perhaps some mucilage in the "vat" or pulp will help separate the fibers. But I think there is potential.

Printing leaves

Luca Pacioli’s instructions for printing leaves are very basic, but with a little modification and the use of polyurethane rollers results can be achieved that look ‘very natural’ even without colouring. Using commercial oil-based printing ink and the hand roller to roll out an even film, a composite blackberry leaf was laid top side down on the ink. The back of the leaf was inked, using the roller, then lifted from the ink and placed on a sheet of paper, top side down.



Another sheet, held in register in an improvised tympan with frisket was lowered onto the leaf. Pressure was applied using a roller and the tympan raised to reveal a print from the top (above) and the leaf adhering to the other sheet (below).



Carefully removing the leaf the more detailed print from the vein side is seen:

Recycling the East Side school – in a wood-fired clay pizza oven

Strictly speaking this blog is about my work as an artist . . . but occasionally the sculpture has other uses, in this case a wood-fired clay pizza oven. The sand dome (above) is standing on a hearth of fire bricks that came from the demolished East Side school in Decorah. An organization was formed to recycle the re-usable building material, Oneota Historic Future Alliance – East Side Material, and I was fortunate to find enough bricks for the hearth among the piles of salvaged rubble. The plinth is made from some of the old oak beams saved from our barn renovation.

We dug some clay and mixed this with sand and water with our feet – a wonderful pedicure – here we are testing the clay to ensure it is the right consistency. 

 

We used the clay to make adobe bricks which were laid over the newspaper-covered sand dome.

A couple of days later . . . an entrance has been cut out, an archway built and a chimney added together with a layer of mud and straw insulation. We made the first pizza before the final layer of adobe bricks were added!

Within a week I had made more than twenty pizzas! We are now learning how to use it, and not just for pizzas, but also for baking bread, sauteing and roasting. Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota was able to restore their abandoned school – the East Side school in Decorah was not so lucky. However, thanks to the Oneota Historic Future Alliance at least the school's very fabric, it's bricks, are seeing a new life.  As I stand over the hearth, with the ferocious heat burning my face, enthralled by the fluidity of the flames, savouring the tantalizing aromas, tasting the magic of the wood-fired oven, it is gratifying to think we are a part of that future.

Cursive hebrew (mostly) and not becoming a Sofer

Learning to read and draw Hebrew letters is a challenge. My initial attempts to copy an alphabet were soon thwarted by my unwillingness to be bound or restrained by the strict laws governing the formal writing of letters. I am not destined to be a Sofer (Jewish scribe). Nevertheless, the letter forms and language remain fascinating. The four abstract drawings here are based on my practice pieces. The first (above) presents a conundrum: while creating a satisfying abstract design, I didn't realize until I was 'finished' that the letters were upside down! This begs the question: how is the reader of Hebrew going to interpret this? Do tell me.

Seeking a more lyrical solution I made a number of composite drawings using a broad brush and nib pen. Again it is the word בְּרֵאשִׁית‎, (Bereshit) meaning Genesis, or 'in the beginning'.

Then I turned to the cursive alphabet that had first confused me. Here I felt there was more freedom for creating adventurous designs. Which, if any of these pieces will be included in my interpretation of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus & Heroes, remains to be seen . . .