Latest Paintings

16"x20" Oil on Canvas

Last fall I showed you the start of this painting and now I'm happy to show you the finished piece. It's all done and even framed because I'm entering it in the Student Art Show at the college.

12"x16" Acrylic on Panel

I'm also entering this landscape that I did last fall.

18" x 24" Acrylic on Panel

And this Indiana Jones hat I painted recently.

36" x 48" Mixed Media Collage

And this large collage which I just finished. And if I get REALLY busy over the weekend, I may also enter the piece I'm working on right now. Which is due Thursday. Which is nowhere near ready. Sigh.

Mixed Citrus Salad with Escarole

We've been having this salad a lot lately and I thought you might enjoy it too. I wish I could upload a pdf file to Blogger, but I can't so here's the recipe in a jpg. Not nearly as nice, but if you add your email address in your comment, I'll send you the pdf version which will print out all pretty.
Basically it's an escarole salad with any kind of citrus segments, red onion, blue cheese and a vinaigrette dressing. The bitterness of the escarole is perfectly balanced by the sweetness of the fruit and the savoriness of the blue cheese. I usually peel the membranes off the grapefruit and oranges because they look so much prettier, but you probably don't really have to do that. Either way, it's delicious.
Enjoy!

Limoncello

When I made those limoncello cookies a while back, I used the last of my limoncello. So Friday night I started a new batch. First I picked 30 lemons and washed them in hot water.

Then I sliced off the little bumps and the stem ends to make the peeling easier.

Then I put on some Italian music and started peeling. You want only the yellow part of the peel with no pith on it.

Sometimes you get a long one. Anyway you drop them all into a huge glass jar into which you have already put 1500 ml Vodka.

Remember I told you we'd moved our kitchen table over to the window? See it there in the background. Here's a better picture of it. It's quite pleasant to sit there watching the squirrels and birds.

Anyway, just keep peeling until all thirty lemons are done......

and the lemons look like this.

Wrap plastic wrap tightly over the top of the jar. Now get a calendar and find the date 40 days in the future and the date 80 days in the future. Write all those dates on the plastic wrap and put the jar in a dark closet.

You probably should note it on the calendar too because in 40 days you will need to add the next ingredients to the limoncello. Then 40 days after that you will do the bottling so start saving clear bottles with lids.

The ingredients you need after 40 days are up are: 10 Cups of Water and 9 Cups of Sugar, boiled for 5 minutes, and cooled for 30. And another 1500 ml of Vodka. You add all that to the lemon peel mixture and let it sit for the second 40 days, then you discard the peels and strain the limoncello into clean bottles, cap them tightly and store them in a cool place, but always keep one in the freezer for immediate use. In Italy it is served after dinner (instead of dessert) in a straight sided liqueur glass straight from the freezer. It is so refreshing on a hot summer evening.

And here's what we do with all the lemons: cut them in half, juice them, bottle the juice, and use it for cooking or for lots of lemonade.

If you would like this recipe sent to you in pdf format, please leave your email address in the comments. I can't figure out how to attach a pdf file to Blogger.

Lemoncello Cookies

I made some really yummy cookies the other day. Here they are cooling on the meat block. I guess I need to tell you about the meat block, don't I? We've had it for almost 40 years and it's really old. It was in our first two kitchens, but it didn't fit into our last two kitchens, so it's just been in storage. Well, when the kids moved out I wanted to use it again so we made the kitchen table smaller and put it against the wall under the window. That made room for the meat block in the center of the room where the table used to be.

Here it is in all it's battered glory. And we are quite pleased with it here. When we had our gourmand dinner the other night, everyone gathered around it for appetizers, but (here's the best part) they couldn't sit down so I could still make my way through the kitchen to work. Used to be, folks would sit around the kitchen table blocking my access to the frige and the dining room with their chairs.

So now, not only do we enjoy looking out the window while we eat, we have a better arrangement for entertaining. It's a win-win situation. Speaking of win-win, those cookies were delicious. Lemon zest in the batter, lemoncello in the frosting. Can't you almost taste them?

Pork Tenderloin with Orange Sauce

Here's the recipe for that pork dish from my last post:

Citrus Season Gourmand Party

We've joined another Gourmand Dinner group and it was our turn to host last weekend. Since it is citrus season I decided to make it a citrus theme and every dish contained citrus of some sort.

To decorate the table I made a yellow tablecloth using 108" wide fabric from the quilting section of the fabric store. Folks us it for quilt backs and it is just a thin cotton, but with a nice hem and a plain white undercloth, it looked pretty good. There was enough fabric left over to make napkins too so I made eight of them. Then I found these nice red, white, and yellow striped place mats to pull it all together.

Instead of flowers I decorated the center of the table with citrus fruits. Most of the guests brought citrus from their trees to help. I had to buy the ruby grapefruit and the blood oranges, but I found plenty of lemons and leaves, and even a few flowers. I was quite pleased with the table when we were all done.

Blood oranges are not very pretty in the stores, but they are so beautiful inside. And they make a gorgeous addition to a winter salad.

Here's the ruby grapefruit. I like them in salads too and sometimes in the winter we make a grapefruit and avocado salad with a lemony dressing that is just delightful.

Here is the main course that we made; pork tenderloins with orange sauce, mashed red potatoes, and green beans. That's candied orange zest on top and it was pure heaven. We paired it with a tempranillo wine from Spain. I'd never had tempranillo before and it was quite nice! In fact, each couple did a great job of pairing a wine with their course. Speaking of wine.....

this was the scene on my counter the next morning. It's almost embarrassing, but there were eight of us!

How The 1% Live

We had a bit of excitement last week here in Stockton. This large yacht sailed all the way up the river from San Francisco and docked at our downtown yacht harbor. It will be here about a year whilst the owner putters around the Bay, Delta, and West Coast. He lives in the southern Central Valley, near Fresno.

There were quite a few people out gawking at the boat as it docked. The owner obviously had some friends and family aboard. They were all watching us watch them. Boats are funny that way; it's perfectly okay to stare.

The yacht is 163' long with six guest staterooms, and luxurious amenities everywhere. It also has a large shore boat, plus a few jet skis. And a full time crew of 10 to take care of everything. I wonder if I could get a job; I do have experience crewing a powerboat to Mexico.

In case you are also one of the 1%, (and have 40 million dollars burning a hole in your pocket) you too can get a boat like this. Just contact Christensen and ask for the 160' Millennium Edition.

Toile Lamp Shades

After Teen1 (I need to think of a new name for her since she's not a teen anymore) moved out I was left with a nice freshly painted blue bedroom, new beige carpet and a new off-white Roman shade. She took her bed and furniture so I gathered together Grandmother's stuff again; a brass bed and an Empire style dresser. Then I studied it all for a while trying to think of a more traditional scheme that would work with the colors. I've always loved toile, so I figured black and white toile was the answer.

I'm going to make a toile bedskirt and some pillows for the bed too, but I started with the lampshades. I got those pre-sticky ones at JoAnne's and some sticky trim for the edges too. I also got little black tassels. The lamp shades were very easy to do and I'm quite pleased with the results.

Did you know you could get these fancy little knobs at OSH? You just unscrew the plain brown plastic ones and screw these in their place. Too cute, eh?

So here we are Amongst The Oaks actually making progress on the Guest Room Remodel.

A Day in San Francisco

Teen2 and I had a wonderful day out last Saturday. We went to the De Young Museum to see the "Masters of Venice" exhibition. It was very interesting and we enjoyed studying the paintings. They are from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna so our chances of seeing them in person were pretty slim.

Afterwards, since we were right there in Golden Gate Park, we walked over to the Japanese Tea Garden. If you've never been there I highly recommend a visit. Plan to go when the azaleas and deciduous magnolias are blooming. That would be around the end of February or early March. And then come the cherry blossoms in March and April.

We spent an enjoyable hour strolling through the garden and looking at the koi.

Then we decided we needed a little snack, so we had some jasmine tea, the O-Musubi set, and a Taiyaki. Taiyaki is a waffle batter snack filled with red bean paste. The mold it's cooked in makes it look like a fish. Isn't it cute? It tasted really good too! Teen2 and I really like Japanese food so we were in heaven.

Next we went to the Legion of Honor. What a beautiful building it is. And what a beautiful setting out there in Lincoln Park.

I wanted Teen2 to see Bernini's Medusa. I got a better photo of it this time because I used a real camera instead of my phone. It's just mind boggling that this thing is almost 400 years old and still hypnotizing folks with its beauty.

We also visited many of the other galleries. Teen2 like this room from France. It reminded me of Versailles.

And of course we had to visit Monet's Water Lilies again.

After our dose of culture, we had dinner at Fog City Diner and then we drove home relaxed, satisfied, and enriched. All in all it was a GREAT day out. Thanks Teen2.

The End.

detail Renoir's Mother and Child

Boys and Their Toys

Extra credit to anyone who knows what this is. You can tell it's something a man would like, right? Give up? Ok, I'll tell you; it's a cyclic! But what is a cyclic you ask. Well, it's like the
joystick
on
a
HELICOPTER!

The Lord of the Manor has a friend who just bought this 1967 Hughes OH-6A. It's a Viet Nam veteran; shot down twice, but patched up and sent back into battle. Apparently these Hughes were tough old birds.
LOM's friend wants LOM to teach him to fly it. Can you imagine buying something you don't know how to fly? And these things aren't cheap either!

Anyway, this is the really cool thing about helicopters; they have awesome visibility. And of course they are so cool to fly. You can land virtually anywhere you can get away with it.

It's painted olive drab with military markings...

and has all the original equipment including gun buttons on the cyclics and a machine gun for the guy in the back.

But all this old equipment isn't exactly legal, so there is a debate going on about how to maintain the original equipment (which looks cool and increases the value of the craft) yet comply with modern FAA regulations. For instance, the transponder is totally illegal, and they ferried the helicopter home Saturday using no transponder at all. Under the radar so to speak. The owner is a clever guy and we've made some aircraft parts before, so I'm sure they will find a creative way to install modern avionics yet cover them with the old face plates once on the ground. If we go for a ride soon, y'all will be some of the first to know about it.