End of season on the patio, tool talk, Indian treats and stitch design

 Sunday morning, another brilliant day, I did some fall cleanup, took out dead foliage from the pots, cut back the ever encroaching lemon balm, trimmed the butterfly bush, swept and tossed and generally got carried away. 

No cutting back here, just letting the cosmos and wildflowers do what they want.

And I watched a cool Atomic Shrimp YouTube video, foraging, inventive cooking of whatever's around. 

I notice he's now using the back of the knife blade to sweep off the cutting board. I boycott "cooks" who use the sharp edge as a broom. No good can come of such brutality to their precious tools. Shrimp was firmly taken to task a while back by a teaching chef, and, credit where due, he did better when he knew better.

I've been in this convo before and few people responding seems to grasp why it matters. They're more oh, you can just get it resharpened. Some restaurants have a regular sharpening service. Not the point. 

The sharpening is for regular wear on the blade from cutting and slicing. Not for repairing damage done by people who don't respect their tools as partners.  A craftsman probably designed and maybe also made the tools. 

The notion of respecting and caring for your tools is about more than cooking or making anything. It has to do with your relationships, too, the way you move through the world. It's a metaphor.

 I  stepped down from my Sunday soapbox to start drawing my design for the Bayeux stitch page in the fabric book.

Here's my model

and here's my drawing, 

ready to trace into the muslin page.

And here's the muslin page 

As you see, the drawing was a starting point, not the whole idea. Now I have to find yarns to stitch with.

 Shortly after, Gary showed up with 

His next door neighbors just came back from India. Not to his taste, he's more of a Wendy's guy. 

Happy day everyone! You're all entitled to my opinion! Speaking of which, I tracked my ballot. Safely received.

Rain, better than ice

 I made a determined attempt to keep up my flagging spirits, feeling left behind in my inability to secure a vaccination slot, everything here so fully booked with people with higher priority that they're not even taking appointments, and the failure of the Covid relief $$ to show up in my bank account.  Deadline now past. IRS says they've finished doing direct deposit.  If it doesn't appear, claim it on taxes.  Meaning I have to file a tax return, despite being below the income threshold to do so.

So, anyway, I decided that a night of rain is better than a night of ice.  And that the trees wearing diamond necklaces are worth noting.

Then, after finally realizing my knives were little better for cutting than chunks of cardboard would be, hauled out the knife sharpener and got to work.

I now have two decently sharpened knives and a resolution to do this more often, despite not liking it.  Not a good cook if you don't keep your tools in good trim.

?

If you're asking why not get a sharpening steel and give the knife a few swipes before use?  Or, like my mom, give it a few left and right swipes across the back doorstep? because that takes a skill I don't have, is why.  You have to swipe at exactly the right angles on both sides or you knock the edge right back off the blade.  And I'm a person who was very challenged trying to keep a violin bow straight on the strings, definitely can't be trusted to work a steel any better.

The point of this sharpener is that it has magnets which place the blade in the right relationship to the sharpening steel inside.  And it's designed to make you insert the blade right each time.  On the left is a presharpening device, which gets the worse of the blunt off before you proceed to the sharpening on the right, then the honing slots on the far right.  For me this works.  So I'm hoping for better cutting with fewer curses for the next little while.

It's safer to work with a sharp blade than a blunt one, anyway, because the sharp blade grips and doesn't jump up and bury itself in your hand.  True of Xacto blades, too.  And ice skates, if it comes to that.  Although I was such a timid skater that I would lose my grip before the blades did, but moving along from there.

And another thing to be thankful about is that I have food to cut anyway.

Espe Brown, Knives, Procrastination and Dollivers

The title is a bit shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings, to mangle a quotation. But it all makes sense, stay with me.

The decision to frame all the planets in the planet suite, as explained in http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com
led inevitably to several other conclusions.  One is that I need to take a little break from headlong work in the studio, just to digest what's been happening in a very productive period, and to find my feet for the next pieces that need to happen.  This is while awaiting the frames on order and on their way.

So that meant learning to procrastinate a bit.  I'm not very good at this mostly, except where knives are  concerned.  I got into considering knives via Quinn, owing to a reference in her blog to Edward Espe Brown, a Zen priest and food person.  Not that I'm blaming anyone.  I'm just saying.

I do look on food as a meditative experience, and cooking as a process, not just a way of getting meals made.  So my attempt to just be, and to read a meditation/cookbook and kick back, seemed just about right for now.

So I checked out this book,  nice little essays interspersed with recipes some of which I already make, thought I'd invented, heh, nothing new etc.  But as I read, I realized after reading his chat about knives and sharpening and why you should, how can I do the process with blunt tools?   I thought, oh well.  No use just thinking about sharpening, I should just do it.  My kitchen knives are as blunt as anything. Not very Zen.

But Inner Self insisted that it's too much to do,there are tons of knives in that drawer, can't manage, sharpener too noisy, special snowflake and so on.  Outer Self said, oh shut up and check.  How many knives to you actually use?  welllll, chef's knife, one, poultry knife, one, paring one, breadknife one.  Whereupon Outer Self pointed out that means sharpening TWO knives.  Two.  The parer is sharp, the breadknife doesn't need sharpening. All the others can go to goodwill, never used.

So Inner Self heaved a sigh, got out the sharpener and in about four minutes give or take, the knives are sharpened, put where they won't bang into anything, the drawer is sorted, and there's a batch of knives to give away.

This is all your doing, Quinn, you and Brown.  The Dollivers were happy to pose with the book, far away from all the knives flashing about in the kitchen.  Anything for a quiet life.

However, learning to procrastinate has now been put off for a while..but the Ds probably have a few plans afoot regarding Valentine outfits, or maybe jewelry.