Building My Dream Craft Room

I've been a crafter for years. I love the idea that you can start with almost nothing and make something. My grandmother taught me to crochet and embroider as a child. I am not a great seamstress, usually more "stress" than anything else, but I do try to make homemade pj's for my family most Christmases. And I was hit hard by the scrap-booking craze when my children were little. Recently, I fell in love with chalk paint and painting furniture. The space scrap booking needs compared to this is nothing. And now I have inherited my mom's collection of stained glass and tools. The trouble is most crafting takes space -- space to store all your materials and a space to work. Space has been at a premium, that was until my nest emptied of children.

We are working on building my dream craft room. After asking my son, if I could use his old room, we started by painting it yellow. My favourite colour for a room but one my husband is less than fond of.

It's quite a big room with loads of angles so painting it was a big job.

And unknown to me, yellow is a difficult colour to get to cover.

After two coats of paint, we were still not completely satisfied with the walls.

The idea of my craft room was not only to have a space to work on projects and store materials, but also to have a place to showcase my crafting work. The goal for this room is to organize my "stuff" and to put the room together at a minimum cost by either re-purposing things I already have or to take thrift store finds and revive them.

I hope that you will follow my posts and see how my craft room comes together.

Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Monday night I finished The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire looks at four specific plants; the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato, and how their cultivation has influenced and been influenced by cultural history. Pollan chooses these plants as he believes they capture the "four fundamental human desires -- sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control" (Botany, n.p.). This well researched book masterfully blends history with science and reads like a novel. I simply love his writing style. His work is interesting and intelligent but approachable. You can see Pollan's English literature background in his writing, not only his style but what caught me was his use of literary forms such as the literary conceits (a literary conceit* is like a metaphor or simile in that it compares two items but conceits pair two unlikely things together in a complex manner, something Pollan does well) and the use of the pastoral to describe food.

I love books that make me think about things in a different way and The Botany of Desire achieves this as Pollan moves the plant from the object position to the subject position in that rather than the action occurring only to the plant, in Pollan's argument the plant is creating the action; "[a]ll these plants, which I'd always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn't do for themselves"(Botany, n.p.).

I also love writing that introduces me to new words, there is nothing I love more than to have to look up the meaning of a word. The Botany of Desire fits this to a tee as it is filled with words like "concatenation," "pomocentrically," and "heterozygosity".

My introduction to Pollan's work was in Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. It's a smallish book that outlines 64 rules for eating better. Within his humor, Pollan posits some poignant rules for eating better such as "don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk" and "it's not food if it's called by the same name in every language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles)" (p. 79 and 45). None of this is rocket science but it serves a good reminder.

Later I tripped across Pollan again in my graduate classes, in his TED Talk, A Plant's Eye View. Very much like and based off of The Botany of Desire, Pollan's talk looks at gardening, soil, animals, and bees from a different perspective -- you guessed it, the plant's perspective. What causes us to choose to plant grass over trees, potatoes over another type of plant? He suggests it is the plants that are manipulating us rather than people manipulating the plants. And he does it very convincingly. Later in graduate school, when teaching Writing and Communication Skills, I used one of Pollan's essays, "Supermarket Pastoral" as a great example of how to write descriptively without using cliche. In the essay, Pollan shows how organic food is sold with a narrative and how that narrative is often pastoral. The use of the pastoral in literature highlights the serene, idyllic, simple, and beautiful life and was often used as a juxtaposition to the Industrial Revolution. It is an apt way to describe the organic food market. The trick with the pastoral though, and this is something, Pollan wants us to recognize, is that the pastoral often purposely overlooks or focuses our attention away from the reality of harshness or the dirtier side of the serene. The other lesson I wanted my students to take away from Pollan's writing is his straightforward writing style that doesn't pander to the reader but also doesn't write in a complicated way to simply sound intelligent. His intelligence shines through in this analysis and criticism, his ability to ask interesting questions and then attempt to search out the answers. I've always believed that to become a better writer requires a good measure of reading good writing.

If you want to read a snippet of The Botany of Desire, it is available from the website and I have linked to the excerpt here.

I will leave you with a quotation from the book:

"There are flowers, and then there are flowers, I mean, around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers with an empire's worth of history behind them, flowers whose form and color and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people's ideas and desires through time like great books" (Botany, n.p.)

*The Flea by John Donne is illustrative of the literary conceit in which Donne compares love to the flea -- something beautiful with something ugly.

Carrot Soup and "Homemade" Focaccia Bread

Here's a great and easy fall dinner -- homemade carrot soup and "homemade" focaccia bread.

It's been a typical wet, gray beginning to November. I say wet because while it's been rainy downtown, it's been trying its very hardest to snow up on the hill at the university. So when I spied those big beautiful bags of locally grown carrots, I knew what was for dinner this week Martha Stewart's Curried Carrot Soup. And I knew that I had homemade turkey stock in the freezer from Thanksgiving.

I am often complimented on my cooking but truly everything I make is easy and most of it is quick.

Here's Martha's recipe with a few tweaks. The soup is pureed so you don't need to worry too much about making the onion or the carrot too small but you do want them to be uniform so they cook evenly.

Curried Carrot Soup

2 Tablespoons butter (I often use olive oil)
1 cup chopped onion
1 teaspoon curry powder
Coarse salt and ground pepper to taste.
2 cans (14 1/2 ounces each) reduced-sodium chicken broth (about 3 1/2 cups of stock - I use my homemade chicken or turkey stock)
2 pounds carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch chunks
1 to 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
2 Tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh cilantro for garnish (optional)

Heat the butter or olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add onion, curry powder, 2 teaspoons salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper (or to taste). Cook stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft, about 5 minutes.

Onions, curry powder, salt and pepper

Add broth, carrots, and 3 cups of water (you can add more broth and less water if you would like); bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and let this simmer until the carrots are tender -- about 20 minutes.

Add the carrots.

Add the stock and water.

In a blender, or using a handheld blender, puree the soup until smooth. Don't forget that hot soup is a. hot, and b. expands so don't fill your blender too full. Transfer to a clean saucepan. Add more water if you need to adjust the consistency. Reheat, if needed. Stir in lemon juice. Serve garnished with cilantro, if desired.

Martha advises that if the carrots aren't sweet enough, you can add a teaspoon of sugar while the carrots are cooking but these carrots from the farmer's market are perfect exactly as they are.

Now for the bread! On the weekend at our local Christmas artisan fair, my friend introduced me to the Ultimate Gourmet and her Flavourful, Fail-Proof, Fantastic Focaccia bread mix. All you need to add is some olive oil and a can of beer. Sounded too good to be true to me. I have never been able to bake yeast bread. My mother-in-law makes amazing bread from scratch and my husband adores homemade bread so I thought "what do I have to lose". Assured that it was simple from both my friend and the Ultimate Gourmet, I set out to bake the bread to accompany my homemade carrot soup.

Fresh from the oven ... you can't believe how amazing it smells.

True to its packaging, it was flavourful and only required an easy 1-minute preparation that involved a room temperature can of beer (any kind, or you could use soda water) and some olive oil. It baked in 20 minutes, roughly the same time it took to prep the soup and was delicious. Bonus, helped me spoil the husband who always spoils me.

And we're ready to eat ...

Homemade Chicken or Turkey Stock

I use a lot of chicken or turkey stock in my cooking and whenever possible I try use homemade. Whenever I cook a turkey or even roast a chicken, I make stock. I used to think it took a lot of time and effort but it's really quite easy and one of those things that you can easily multi-task.

My original recipe comes from Michael Smith (a wonderful Canadian chef) with, you guessed it, a few tweaks.

The recipe makes about 3 or 4 quarts of stock and I often freeze it to use later in other recipes like One Pot Pasta or the beginning of a quick soup.

Chicken or Turkey Stock

Ingredients:
Chicken or turkey carcass
1 large onion, peeled and rough chopped
2 large carrots, peeled and rough chopped
2 or 3 celery stalks, rough chopped
2 or 3 bay leaves
Fresh thyme, if I have it
Salt to taste (not too much)
8 or 10 whole peppercorns
4 or 5 whole cloves

Directions:

• Toss everything into a stock pot or large pot and cover with cold water. Begin to heat to high and when it is just set to boil, turn the heat down to a simmer. 
• Let the water simmer for about two hours. Don't worry about the impurities because these will be skimmed off at the end.
• After two hours, skim the foam off the top. 
• Strain the broth. Best to do this over the sink to avoid messes. 
• Discard the boiled carcass, vegetables, and spices/herbs. 
• Let the broth cool to room temperature before refrigerating. 
• After the broth reaches room temperature, I usually put the pot into the fridge to chill allowing any remaining fat to harden on the surface making it easy to remove. 
• Then I divide up the broth between freezer containers usually freezing in 4 cup portions.

Lately, I saw a great suggestion on MarthaStewart.com on freezing stock in muffin tins. Once the stock is frozen, just pop them out and store in the freezer in a resealable container. This easily accommodates those recipes that call for just one cup of stock. It's also a great way to save an leftover store bought stock.