Art, Books, Cooking

 

 

Art:

 

I just finished a new house portrait, this time in walnut ink; but photos will be unavailable to post for quite a while.  So that's what I've been working on.

 

I have another house drawing to get to work on, and this one needs to be done in the next two or three weeks.  This will be black and white, which usually seems to go a little bit faster.

 

Books:

 

I settled on The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver as my next book.  I'm about fifty pages in and enjoying it so far.

 

Cooking:

 

Today, Erin's class is having their "Taste of Kentucky" celebration, and Erin volunteered to bring an entrée.   She wanted to make burgoo.  Why?  I don't know. Maybe because it's a funny name.

 

We had never made burgoo before, but we sure made it last night.  All recipes for burgoo are big.  I picked out a recipe that didn't seem too difficult and didn't contain any ingredients that I thought were particularly repellent, and bought supplies at the store last night.

 

The recipe didn't say how many servings it made, and I'm a bad judge of quantity, but I should have been a little more prepared for the volume. I knew it would be a lot…but by the end of the evening, we had filled our three largest pots and had them all simmering on the stove.  (The biggest hint that I missed: the recipe called for four large onions.  What kind of recipe calls for four large onions?  If people just ate onions, then four large onions would be twelve servings in and of themselves.  And onions go a long way.  So "four large onions" should have been a tip-off that this was going to overflow a single pot.  I mean, I knew there was a pretty good chance that I'd have to branch out to a second pot.  I thought it was likely, in fact.  But three?  Sheesh.

 

Erin did a lot of work.  I had her peel the tomatoes after I briefly boiled them to loosen their skins.  She also cut up the matchstick carrots into smaller bits, peeled onions, and diced potatoes with a sharp knife until I got so nervous watching her that I made her stop.  And, of course, she dumped ingredients in and stirred.

 

Late last night I decided that it was done enough to sample, and ended up eating three small bowls.