I live in South Korea now!
When did that happen? Sorry, I had to completely abandoned this blog while preparing for the big move. I currently live in Wonju, South Korea, and I'm teaching English as a second language to middle school students. KABAAM, here I am.
Feel free to follow me on my new blog.
http://www.barbequedrabbitfood.tumblr.com
Recently enjoyed a great asian-inspired meal:
Simple Tofu Stir-fry
It was great paired with Matty G's most excellent Kombucha:
There has been quite a bit of Kombucha brewing going on in our little house the last few months. I feel spoiled, considering that thanks to The Lindsay Lohan/ Whole Foods controversy, I can't find it sold anywhere! Perhaps a bit of good will come from the situation and more people will begin to home-brew the nutritious elixir of yum.
I recently came to the realization that I've neglected one of my favorite artists here on le ol' blog. Her name and her work have popped up in my writing from time to time, but the caliber of her artistry has yet to be properly examined.
So, without further adieu, here is a sampling of work from one of my all-time favorite artists. Endearingly known by her fans as MMF, I give you the amazing work of Ms. Melissa Madison Fuller.
As well as growing up and growing closer with Melissa over the past five years, I've also watched the progression of her photography. As evidenced by these photos, Melissa's work has become something truly spectacular. Her confidence both behind the camera and as an individual are elements that make Melissa's work so captivating. I've watched her dive through hoards of people, drive across the country and back again, climb up rickety old buildings, and enter a bull-inhabited, decommissioned missile silo to get her shot. Melissa's confidence and enthusiasm are infectious; she has an indescribable ability to bring people out of their shells and enter a whimsical world of possibility.
This is a photoshoot from the last time she visited Kansas. My friends Matt, Dan, and I dressed up as monsters and romped through a beautiful Kansan field exercising our fearsome animal natures. The whole experience felt very "Where the Wild Things Are."
Check out this color too!
As lovely as I think they are, these photos don't even begin to dent the scope of Melissa's work. I simply chose them because A.) she makes me look good B.) many people in my life heard about our photo-shoot and asked me to post about them here.
Here are a few more of my favorite photos:
You should CLICK HERE to check out Melissa's flickr page and visit more of her work. From capturing the beauty of the landscapes in which she travels, to examining the nuances of the face-scapes of the people around her, to simply creating beautifully composed and magical photographs, Melissa is a master of her craft.
Melissa Madison Fuller currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she works as a freelance photographer. Her portfolio is ever-expanding, including images of musicians, artists, products, food, and of course, her friends. All images © Melissa Madison Fuller 2010.
The majority of my food now a'days has centered around the incredible produce I receive from volunteering at Spring Creek Farm. Along with an overflowing fridge of some of my favorite veggies, I've noticed a really interesting change in the way I think about meal preparation.
Local Gazpacho
I believe that when one begins taking an interest in cooking, one (and I'm really talking about me here) may be seduced by foreign ingredients and complicated recipes. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think the allure of exotic flavors is a wonderful way to learn about foreign ingredients, their histories, and the way they are used in current cooking trends. Not only is one's palate able to experience a whole new world of flavors, but one may learn a bit about the cultures from which the ingredients and recipes hail. After experimenting with many kinds of cooking styles and flavor combinations, one usually ends up becoming a pretty decent cook too.
A rainbow of a garden salad made with local ingredients!
Having said this, I'm really enjoying my recent shift toward utilizing local ingredients. The local food movement is an idea I've been interested in for a long time. It's an interesting challenge. Rather than thinking, "Okay, I want to make this recipe, so I'm going to run to the store and buy this-and-this-and-this," my musing now falls along the lines of "Here are the ingredients I have available to me right now, how can I combine them to make something delicious?" It has been an entirely new outlet in which to be creative. Finally, I have an incredible sense of pride in knowing that I helped grow the food that I'm eating, or -in the case of the food I buy at our local farmers' market- that I'm supporting the livelihoods of local growers.
To wrap up my examination of the happy marriage of food and art, I give you:
A sculpture that eats salad!
Anselmo, Giovanni. Untitled (Structure that Eats Salad), 1968.
Image from Ikon Gallery.
Giovanni Anselmo was a member of an art movement known as Arte Povera. Taking place primarily in Italy during the sixties and seventies, this group of revolutionaries were described by their founder, Germano Celant, as portraying "an asystematic way of living in a world where the system is everything." These artist poked fun at the art world, using materials like earth, steel, rags, trash, and propane flames, along with "acceptable" sculptural materials such as marble, silks, gold leaf and even fragments of classical sculpture.
My favorite piece from Arte Povera is (Structure that Eats Salad.) Anselmo crushed lettuce between a large slab of marble and a smaller stone, supported by copper wire. As the lettuce wilted over time, the smaller block of marble fell to the ground, originally onto a pile of sawdust. The piece is loaded with references to the history of art and the cultural climate of its time. In using marble, Anselmo is referencing history; the classic sculpture of the Renaissance revered by Italy. The transformation of the lettuce is a comment on Anselmo's interest in metamorphosis (of organisms, government, and culture), and the copper wire is a reference to the transfer of energy and power.
(I also loved the piece because it was always a breeze to memorize for art history tests. Anselmo sounds so much like salad!)
Antoni, Janine. Gnaw. 1992. 600 lbs. of chocolate before biting.
600 lbs of lard before biting.
Image from Art:21. PBS.
In Gnaw, the performance/process artist and sculptor Janine Antoni chewed away at two massive cubes, one of lard and one of chocolate. As she stated in Eating Architecture by Jamie Horwitz, she chose these materials because "while they are both high in fat they elicit contrary responses: chocolate usually elicits oral pleasure...whereas lard often evokes oral revulsion. Antoni played with ideas of seduction and repulsion." She is also using her body not only to mold the huge cubes, but in place of the traditional, masculine tools of art-making. In Gnaw, her teeth become the sculptor's chisel.
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Detail of chocolate cube.
Image from Art:21 PBS
Antoni chewed on these huge cubes, a reference to Donald Judd and the minimalist cube, over the course of a few weeks. During her gnawing, she spit out the mouthfuls and collected these shavings and chunks. She then melted down the remains, the chocolate into an imitation of the plastic trays that house chocolates, and the lard into tubes of red lipstick. Her arrangements of these objects mock displays behind cosmetic counters. This second element of the piece comments on feminine identity, consumer culture, and the irony of the societal views of the materials in their various forms. "What was once inside now holds items meant to be ingested, and what once evoked oral revulsion is now worn as an outer adornment on the very orifice from whence it came." (Horwitz. 145.)
Antoni, Janine. Gnaw. Display with 130 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax,
and chewed lard removed from the lard cube; 27 heart-shaped packages made from the chewed chocolate
removed from the chocolate cube. Overall dimensions variable.
Image and information from MOMA.
You can watch a great interview with Janine Antoni here.
The next few posts will be exciting. I've been wanting to write for awhile now about the intermingling of my two major obsessions, art and food. As the two themes of this blog, I've kept my writing on them fairly separate. I'm not sure why. These two ideas shouldn't be banished to two separate corners of the room; they should be seated side by side at the kitchen table.
There are so many ways these two fields intersect. I'm sure we've all had meals that looked like a work of art, almost too beautiful to eat. I've seen vegetables that looked so exquisite I thought of them as mini- sculptures, and i've wished for a way to preserve and display them in their natural glory. Example: A few years ago I took an entire days worth of tip-money and bought every type of mushroom my grocery sold, placed them in a huge bowl on my kitchen counter, and drooled over their prettiness until they all shriveled away.
Lou, Liza. Kitchen. 1991-95. Glass beads. 168-square-foot installation.
On the flip side, there is so much art-and I mean art with a capital A-about food. I'm always attracted to this subject matter, whether literally about food itself, cooking, either embracing or rebelling from domesticity, feminine identity, and the connection between food and the body. In the next couple of posts, I'd like to give a few examples of some of my favorite art that falls under this theme.
To begin, I give you Liza Lou's Kitchen. I first learned of Lou from Episode 30 of my beloved This American Life. The episode is about obsession, and I think it is the obsessive-quality that immediately draws me to Lou's work. As I've said before, I'm enamored with obsessive, repetitive, process-oriented work, and Kitchen most definitely fits the bill. The 168 square-foot instillation-not to mention the surfaces of all objects housed within it-is covered with millions of hand-glued, itty-bitty glass beads.
Can you even imagine? She applied every single bead individually, with tweezers! She completed the instillation single handedly over a five year span of sometimes 18 hour-a-day labor. The intense discipline, the intricacy, the detail, the colors, the quirkiness...I want to bow at this woman's feet! I look at these photos and I wonder what it would look like in person with a bright light source shining down upon it. All the glass beads reflecting light back at you, flickering and sparkling like millions of tiny gemstones.
Her work goes beyond simply being incredible eye candy. Besides embodying obsessive tendencies (though I don't think of her obsession as a compulsion, the lady knows what she's doing) and the power of human focus and endurance, Lou's work can be viewed under so many other scopes. She's speaking about the imitation of reality. She's nodding to traditional women's work, both the act of a woman cooking in the kitchen and the history of beading and crafts. She's elevating "craft" into high art. With touches like this sandwich, she's glorifying the mundane into something holy...and she's just being funny.
While Kitchen was Lou's first major work, the lady has been incredibly busy ever since. You can read more about her concepts, style, and method, as well as view several newer pieces at The White Cube. There is also excellent information about Lou in this article from W Magazine.
Juda, another volunteer that works on Spring Creek Farm, shared this awesome recipe for a rhubarb crisp in our CSA newsletter. I substituted half of the rhubarb with strawberries and it was spectacular.
Here is her recipe (with slight variations to make it vegan):
6 c. raw rhubarb * Large pieces will have to be peeled first* cut into 1/2” slices (I substituted half of the rhubarb with strawberries)
3/4 c. sugar
3 T. flour
Mix well, and pour into a buttered or margarine-d (or not) 9” X 12” baking pan.
Combine 1/2 c. walnuts or almonds or both
1 c. oats
1 c. flour
1/3 c. packed light brown sugar (or equivalent of agave nectar, stevia, etc.)
1/3 c. margarine
1/2 t. cinnamon
pinch salt
Sprinkle crumble mixture on top of fruit slurry mixture. Bake in preheated oven at 375 degrees for 45 minutes.
I served it à la mode with Good Karma Rice Divine vanilla ice cream.
Yum!
Over the past three months, I've been volunteering at a really wonderful organic vegetable farm called Spring Creek Farm. Spring Creek is located just outside Baldwin City, Kansas and is run by an incredible couple, Stephanie Thomas and Tom Maiorana. The two started the farm in 2005 and specialize in heirloom melons, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes. They sell to local restaurants, at the Downtown Lawrence Farmers' Market, and host an 18 week CSA, Community Supported Agriculture program.
If you don't already know about CSA programs, read up on them! I'm enamored with the idea of directly supporting local food and farmers, cutting out the middlemen, and receiving fresh, seasonal produce weekly. Perhaps you have a program in your area.
A view of hoop house one. Stephanie and Tom have two hoop houses that shield crops from strong winds, heavy rain, and raise temperatures 5-10 degrees! These nice protective nests create a cozy space where romaine, buttercrunch, arugula, swiss chard, radishes, carrots, turnips, beets, tomatoes, celery root and other tasties flourish. I find it really difficult to work in the hoop houses without wanting to eat up half of what I'm suppose to be watering or weeding!
Big, beautiful heads of buttercrunch lettuce.
Carrots and more buttercrunch growing like crazy. Stephanie keeps improving my knowledge of different type of greens. My favorites are komatsuna (I like to call it "the sexy plant," since it sounds like kama sutra,) her arugula (spicer, and more delicious than any other kind I've tried,) and lamb's quarter (usually thought of as a weed, but really delicious and higher in vitamin A than spinach!)
A field of delicious onions, almost ready to harvest.
The gorgeous herb and flower garden. Fellow volunteer Juda works on the plot every Tuesday morning. We swear, Juda hides some serious fairy dust up her sleeve. Her pixie ways make chocolate mint sprout out of the woodwork, beautiful strawberries ripen, and the chives, oregano, and lemon balm taste a little extra special.
Here is half of the power-couple that makes all this happen. The day I brought my camera out to photograph the farm, Steph and Tom seemed too hard at work to be bothered with a photograph. This photo is borrowed from the Growing Growers website, a great program that connects apprentices with host farms, holds monthly workshops, and inspires the local food movement to grow. Stephanie was both an apprentice of the program and is now a host farmer. Pretty nifty, huh?
What else can I say? Even more amazing than their dedication to growing organically and with environmentally-friendly, sustainable methods, even more incredible than their involvement in their community, Stephanie and Tom are just really great people. They are kind, generous, and infuse their farm with the same happy, inspiring energy.
Happy Memorial Day!
Tangy barbeque, beers clinking, and lots of bug-off - the tastes, sounds, and scents that spell out the beginning of summer!
All the babes gathered up on our front porch to eat, drink, and be merry. Jordan grilled up some delicious barbequed seitan and we were all too happy to gobble it down. Here she is in action, slathering up her babe-backed ribs with some Gates. Cookin' mama.
So delicious! You can recreate your own using this seitan recipe, pouring on the BBQ sauce of your choice (our favorite is this local KC original), and sticking it on the grill.
Anita, Alicia, Jeff, Dan, Robert and I pitched in some side dishes, local Boulevard beer, and good cheer to make for a happy porch party.
Some yummy pasta salad courtesy of Alicia!
Bring on the greens! Local arugula, belgian endive, roasted red pepper and onion, and crunchy sliced almonds make one heck of a salad. Jordan also made a delicious mix of garbanzos, fresh parsley, black olives, and red onion.
No bones about it.
Anita lounging in the good weather.
I look forward to more porch-related activities this summer (potlucks, harvesting the little porch garden I've got going on, and some nice general lounging and reading afternoons away.) Until then, thank you all for bringing on the love and goodies! Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!
artist, vegan, and waiter of tables in a lovely patch of the Great Plains.
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