Takaezu and food

Today I read the obituary of the ceramic artist Takaezu, and if this name is new to you, please look her up. She was wonderful. Made all sizes of clay vessels and shapes, up to enormous. The picture of her in the New York Times shows her surrounded by some of her giant pieces, wonderful closed shapes bigger than she. I've seen and handled some of the big pieces at the local Grounds for Sculpture, where they're on permanent display, and the atmosphere around them has to be experienced in order to understand it.

In her life, she had a wonderful seamless approach to everything she did, commenting that there was no division between making pots, cooking and growing vegetables. All are a good part of an interesting life. All can be art, too.

Interesting that I should have read this after sitting down for a few minutes after a morning of cooking beef stock soup with many vegetables, baking biscuits, making fresh green salad from a lot of winter vegetables, and creating a fruit salad



for HP, oranges and pears, now in season.

This is one of the ways I approach my own life, to try to live each moment and enjoy it and not let worry about future events cast a shadow on today's pleasure. So cooking from scratch is one of the pleasures, and here it's a challenge, too.

HP has little sense of taste, owing to rx interactions many years ago, and has great difficulty manipulating table utensils. So his food has to be organized in such a way that it can be picked up easily with fingers, or a spoon or fork, look interesting, have varying textures and be pretty spicy, too. Art flourishes within limitations, so those are mine. And he loves color, so I look for color interest in his food, too.




Things like adding chunks of tomato in season to green salad, or red cabbage in winter, and shredding a variety of greens, kale, chicory, chard, scallions, dandelions, watercress, to make interesting salads with varying textures and colors.

The current soup is the first time in many years I've used beef bones to make a stock, since we are not into beef for varying reasons.




But the stock is very good, and the drippings from the bones as they roasted, since we wouldn't eat beef drippings on a bet, I chilled and filled with bird seed and put in a suet holder out on the tree outside for the birds.

I know they liked it, since the empty container, totally cleaned, showed up on the grass under the tree after a few days.I expect the squirrels helped, too, since I saw one dragging it about like a shoulder bag as he worked on the last little bit.

And, since the last report on the Painting of the Closet, the doors of both closets in the bedroom have been removed, which makes the room look surprisingly bigger, and one door is now in the living room on the coat closet, replacing the old one which separated the way hollow core doors do, and I've set to work to make hangings for the openings of the closets.



The material is those plastic things that hold together six packs of cans, ironed together, great fun, and threaded onto a tension rod.