Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

You have two choices. You can either clean or paint. Which would you pick? This past Sunday I did a little of both. I got the painting finished, and my freezer is almost all cleaned.

Here was the creative process:

1. Come up with an idea. It’s time for the latest KCC, a blog carnival overseen by this creative cook, and I want to submit my sponge cake recipe. But whenever I submit a recipe, I photograph it. I only make sponge cake on Passover. Who has the patience to separate all those eggs the rest of the year? So I decided it would be easier to paint a sponge cake (this is how my mind works).
2. Fine tune the idea and find a method. I email Jill: how do I do that salting watercolor technique again? We end up with a lovely post and include a painting by Jill sort of like a Van Gogh, that I call “Salty Night.”
3. Make some sketches.
   This was my first sketch:
   My husband said it looked like a cake. But on the other hand, he said, one might mistake it for a hat. Sort of like the famous drawing by the narrator of the Little Prince, I said.
4. Second sketch: I go to Google image and look up sponge cake. I’m inspired to draw this sketch:
   
   Can’t mistake this one for a hat. The cake plate helps, too.
5. Set up my space: I print Jill’s email with the salting watercolor directions, tape the watercolor paper unto a piece of masonite, and draw a final sketch. I purposely placed the subject matter slightly to the left, instead of in the center, to increase interest. Note in this photo how I put in arrow to show the direction of light. I later erased the arrow.
6. Wet the area. One usually starts a watercolor by wetting the area that you want to paint.
7. Apply the salt and paint. And I painted. I made one side a little darker. I added bits of alizarin crimson to my shadows, for fun. My son says it looks like mabul cake (you have to know both English and Hebrew to get this joke: mabul means flood and sometimes I make mabul cake for Parshat Noach, you know, the one with the flood). My husband says it looks like pound cake. OK, I’ll take that.
8. Review the painting. Did the salt technique work? I brought it over to Jill this morning. We agree that the painting worked over all, but the salting works better with: 1) more paint 2) darker colors 3) larger area.

Stay tuned for my sponge cake recipe. Coming soon. At least, before April 7.

I’m older than my mother. How can that be? For years, my mother would say she was 21+. I remember when someone asked her age, she would reply: 21+. At my wedding I remember her face grimacing when I attempted to tell someone her age.

I’m 45. I have no problem saying that: I’m 45. No big deal. Why was it such a big deal for mother? As she is no longer alive, I can’t even ask her that question. Could be a generational thing. She was born in 1924; women were more private, reserved. Could be a personal thing. She married late, when she was 35. I don’t think she felt good about it taking her so long to get married.

Here I am, 45, and feeling fine about being 45.

Jill teaches art in Highland Park. Stay tuned for Leora’s attempt at a “salty” painting.

Salting is a fun technique for adding texture to your watercolor painting. It works by absorbing water and pushing away the pigment around each grain of salt. You just use regular table salt, but the larger grain Kosher salt can offer you further texture possibilities.

Salting works best on darker and fully saturated color. You lay down paint on the area, then throw salt where you want the effect while it’s still wet. Working quickly is of the essence, so have all your paints and tools ready to go. The secret is too not over do it with the amount of salt. If you put on too much you won’t see where the individual grains have absorbed the water and pushed away the color around it.

It looks particularly nice for representing snow or ocean spray in a seascape, but also just a good general textural device. You can experiment with larger amounts of salt just to built various textures. Fun stuff.

Enjoy, and I’ll post more techniques soon.

Art Teacher Jill

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifestoby Michael Pollan is a quick read. It was #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list when I reserved it at the library. Popular book, said the librarians.

The book starts like this:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I’m not going to critique the book; I don’t have a degree in nutrition. Instead, I’ll do the snippet-style review, with quotes to give a flavor of the book:

From the first chapter, from Foods to Nutrients:

“…in the 1980s…traditional supermarket foods were steadily being replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles–things like eggs or breakfast cereals or snack foods–claimed pride of place on brightly colored packages…new, scientific-sounding terms like “cholesterol” and “fiber” and “saturated fat” began rising to prominence…the implicit message was foods, by comparison, were coarse, old-fashioned and decidely unscientific things…”

He then gives a history of the science of nutrition and talks about a term called “Nutritionism”. Nutritionism is an ideology, not a science. The term was defined by Gyorgy Scrinis in 2002:

“…namely, that we should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements – the assumption being that is all we need to understand.”

Pollan clarifies:

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.

Food is defined in the book as what’s around the edges of the supermarket (fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, meat) as opposed to what comes in a box in the middle.

He has a great little history of the making of refined grains.

Because for many years only the wealthy could afford refined grains, they acquired a certain glamour. Refining grains extends their shelf life (precisely because they are less nutritious to the pests that compete with us for their calories) and make them easier to digest by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars. Also, the finer that flour is ground, the more surface area is exposed to digestive enzymes, so the quicker the starches turn to glucose.

Toward the back of the book he has more of his pithy sayings, like this one:

GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
‘You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market’, he says. Too bad our farmer’s market is only open in the summer. I hope to write about the Highland Park Farmer’s Market when it comes back to greet us.

Another:
EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS

It would have been much simpler to say “eat organic” because it is true that food certified organic is usually well grown in relatively healthy soils–soils that have been nourished by organic matter rather than synthetic fertilizers. Yet there are exceptional farmers and ranchers in American who for one reason or another are not certified organic and the food they grow should not be overlooked…ideally you want to look for food that is both organic and local.

Here’s a much more in-depth review of Pollan’s book.

I had great fun this past week creating a new header for a popular blog called:
A Mother in Israel

If you are interested in parenting, breastfeeding, interviews with other bloggers, life in Israel, burkas or potato kugel, mom in Israel has a lot going on.

Mom emailed me a variety of pictures; the final header has abundant, colorful fruit in a market, a child’s tricycle, challah, a laundry basket and squeegee, and a boy in a cap at the beach. I asked my children to review the header before forwarding the final version; my daughter remarked the bike looked like it was in the market and the laundry looked like it was on the beach! Bravo, daughter. Great to have assistants like you.

A few of my favorites:

• Teens, Sex and Eating Disorders: An Interview with the Therapy Doc
• Potato Kugel Secrets
• Basic Skills for Children

Finally, here are links to two very touching posts:
My Aliyah Part I
and My Aliyah Part II. In these posts she talks about the sudden death of her mother, loneliness and grief, and making friends in a new place.

She is funny, personable, and informative. I hope you’ll enjoy her blog as much as I do.

What do you do when you only have one potato in the house? Or two? And the potato is a beautiful red potato (called new potato), no little growths popping up at all, smooth-skinned and welcoming?

First, if you have a five-year-old who is learning how to count or add, you play one potato, two potato. (We actually didn’t add potatoes, but we did add Hershey’s kisses. You show the child four kisses. Then you put one next to it. How many do you have? There is too much candy leftover in this house from Purim! Argh! I already threw out the laffy taffy. But I have an attachment to chocolate that makes it hard to throw away. It is the fifth food group, as you may know). OK, no more digressions.

Here was my one potato salad:

Ingredients:

• One or two red potatoes
• One fresh cooked beet
• One hard boiled egg
• Handful of frozen peas (optional, peas are kitniot on Pesach)
• Some chopped parsley
• 1/4 cup chopped onion (or to taste)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Olive oil, enough to coat the salad
• 1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar

Boil the egg with the potatoes. Take the egg out earlier, as it needs less time than potatoes. You can leave the skin on the potatoes or not; up to you. I like them with the skin. Also, peeling is a pain. Chop the potatoes and the egg. I often have fresh cooked beets available, as I make them once a week, but you can 1) skip this ingredient, but it won’t be pink 2) make some fresh beets or 3) open a can. Put in chopped beets. Add parsley and onions. And any other optional ingredients. Coat with olive oil; it is important to do this while the potatoes are still warm, so they absorb the flavor. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss with apple cider vinegar.

Optional ingredients: dill, granny smith apple, pickles, oregano, scallions, peppers, garlic

I was having fun with my camera and decided to try the Color Accent feature. I’m going to call this my kitniot picture, because it highlights the peas, which Ashkenazi Jews are not allowed to eat on Passover: