Apple Pie

So, I've got pie fever. Ever since I made the pie for our 4th party, all I can think about is making more pies. I haven't had a chance to do so until today, and so that's what I did today! I decided it'd be fun to do a step by step post about it:

Started off with apples (fuji and pink lady, my two favorites) as well as the nectarines, frozen mango and strawberries for the reduction.

I peeled and sliced 6 of the apples and put them in a large sauce pan


i then added cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, vanilla and honey to the apples,
and started to cook them over med-low heat


this time i ended up making my own crust because i forgot to buy some
i made it with butter, flour, salt and water, and it may suck, but this is it



next i popped the three nectarines into some boiling water to loosen the skins


then under cold water to peel


then chopped up the nectarines



and put them in a pot with the frozen strawberries and mangoes
(which had been defrosting)

i added a little vanilla to the fruit and covered the pot,
letting it cook down and eventually simmer



because i was having a hard time getting all the fruit mashed,
i poured it through a strainer and finished the sauce that way


meanwhile, the apples have been cooking on low heat


and i've rolled out the top crust and cut it into strips



then i filled the pie with the apples and some of the sauce


and then i covered it with the strips


and then painted some sauce on top and sprinkled a bit of cinnamon


baked it too high at 425 for 20 min, then 325 for 20ish
et, voila



Next up, banana bread!

Good Morning, Spider

Review Board Review, Months Late

So, in the spirit of updating this thing until it bursts, here's post #2 of the day. Months ago - May 7th or so - I had my review board. You'll remember, of course, when I posted the pre-review board lineup, and so here I am, months later, showing y'all what it really looked like. I made a cherry torte and fruit salad to munch on (I am a huge fan of food bribery!!!) and brought some lemonade and seltzer to drink. It took me about an hour to hang (all the time I had) and it ended up lasting about 2.5 hours. Because I didn't have the time, I was only able to take pictures after the board was over and had been gone through, so it's a little disheveled in these pics. But here they are!

anne pelikan, my favorite teacher ever, by the about mixtapes installation

i tried to hang all the doodles i'd done that year, and/or
during my time away from smfa

this is an installation i'll detail in another post, but
i had just finished it a few days before my board - i really
loved how it came out

a table with calligraphy, my icon, and some odds and ends

some of these little transparency guys i made a while ago

some photobooth shots from a year+ ago, pinned
to a prototype i made years ago

the cherry torte aftermath - it was sooo delish!

wall of calligraphy

one of my favorite text pieces

sample sheets

It was an amazing board, probably the best one I've ever had. Old loops came full circle, my eyes were opened, and I walked away from it feeling proud, accomplished, encouraged, and excited. I hadn't realized just how much I had made until the whole thing was hung - and I'll tell you that we didn't even get to look at all of it. My mentor and total inspiration, Anne Pelikan, was one of the faculty, and Kurt Ralske was the other. There were three student reviewers and they were all talkative and awesome - two of them really got my work and it was really wonderful to hear how they felt about the work and the inside the had to share. By the end of the board I started thinking about how much I love making work, and how important it is to me - and feeling encouraged enough to sort of maybe a teeny bit entertain the idea that maybe, maybe, maybe, it wouldn't be so bad to put myself out there more, to try and imagine going forward with art making, in a serious way, after graduating from smfa. We'll see what happens, but i'll tell you that it really made me think...

July 4th

Oh hey, long time, no post. Woops.

So, this past weekend was July 4th and we had a full house all weekend. We threw a party saturday night and had a big cookout to kick it off - tons of cheddarwurst, hot dogs (turkey and beef!), and homemade burgers (mmm, brian's idea to toss in some chopped olives was BRILLIANT), as well as homemade pasta, tuna pasta, and potato egg salads! But the best part of the feast was this beauty.


Sadly, no sexy pictures as we were all much too ravenous for me to even think of getting my camera - but luckily my palm was near by and so that's just what we've got. It was an apple nectarine pie, and it was my first pie ever (at least to my recollection). I cheated and bought the crusts because the reason I never make pie is that dough and I don't get along well, but everything else was made by me and melanie. We peeled and cut up 10 apples and 5 or so nectarines. Put the apples on the stove with some soy butter, lots of cinammon, maybe two tbsps of brown sugar, a tsp or so of vanilla and a pinch of nutmeg and clove. As they cooked I threw the peeled (pop them in a pot of boiling water for 50sec and and run them under cold water, skin comes right off!) necatrines in a small pot with a little brown sugar, vanilla, nutmeg and clove and covered them, letting them cook down to a sauce. Once the apples were cooked just right, we threw the apples into the pie crust (piled nice and high) and then poured the nectarine sauce all over the top. I cut up the second crust into strips and covered the pie. Baked it at 400 for 15 or so minutes, then down to 350 for 25+. The pie cooked but wasn't browning right, so anna had the brilliant idea to broil it for a few minutes. And that was perfect! It came out golden brown and shiny - although looking back I wish I had painted some sauce on top of the pie for a really beautiful finish.

After stuffing our faces and drinking a thousand beers we all went up to the roof (safe, yes!) and watched the Boston fireworks, which were awesome.



The rest of the weekend was fantastic - mel and den took me to my first red sox game (first baseball game ever!) and we had a BLAST. Sunday night old friends of mine in a trillion gallons of gas came in for a visit on their way to Maine and we had a really wonderful time catching up and just being with each other.

Okay, so there's update #1 after laziness hiatus. Watch out, #2 is coming momentarily!

Mass Market Spring '09

Mass Market was great. While I didn't feel totally prepared and still sort of wish I had made more hardcover books (especially more with the bike cover!), my table looked great and I had more than enough stuff. I sold a decent amount of stuff although didn't make much money, but got rid of a few really old pieces and that felt great. Gave away a lot of cards, talked to a lot of interesting people, possibly made some good connections and really appreciated all the nice things people had to say. I sold about four or five hardcover books, like fifteen notebooks, only a handful of cards (grrrr), one charm bracelet and a bunch of other stuff. Sold two old cameras to a good home and got rid of almost all of the about mixtapes books (finally!). Here's some pictures of my table:

Mass Market Spring '09

SO! I am a vendor in the spring Mass Market this year which is.... SUNDAY.



i wanted to share some pictures of my room turned print studio / tornado victim, but it's late and blogger is being slow with uploads. hopefully, will do tmrw, but i think we all know how great i am at keeping this thing well updated...

Massachusetts Festival Alamanac

So, I've been working this summer with the Massachusetts Cultural Council's Folk Arts & Heritage program, and I wanted to share what I've been doing. The initial idea behind this internship was to compile a listing of annual Massachusetts public celebrations, as comprehensive as possible. This project stemmed from a paper assignment from David Guss' Festival and Politics in Latin America class - we were asked to write an ethnography of a local festival, and as my classmates and I tried finding festivals to attend (in October) we realized how difficult it was to find a non-commerical festival that would be of interest to document. A year or so ago, a project called WorldFest was sponsored by the Mass Govt. to try and do this very thing, but only for the summer months. My professor and I discussed at length the need for a comprehensive festival calendar - not only would it be a service to the public who attend, as well as the communities and organizations that put on these festivals, but it would be of great service to people like me and him who are interested in documenting local custom and practice and sharing it with others for posterity and to gain a better understanding of that which surrounds us.

As of now, the calendar has become a much smaller part of the internship than I initially expected. The gears started turning and we realized we'd be better to expend our energy on documenting festivals that haven't been researched by the MCC yet. While I'm stoked on being able to actually go out and get my feet wet with fieldwork, I'm still determined to get this calendar fully fleshed out and worthwhile. For now, since I don't know how else to share what I find, I've made a google calendar that will detail all the celebrations I discover. It's a lot of work to get all the details up about everything, but I'm determined to do it. We're hoping to find some funding to produce a full-color wall calendar, featuring the full year's listings as well as photographs from festivals my partner Signe and I have attended throughout the summer.

So, I'm going to embed the calendar in this post. I gotta try and figure out some way to keep it up on the front page of this blog - but I'll figure that out later. In the meantime - here it is! Please look around and let me know what I'm missing! I know there are hundreds of festivals I have yet to discover, and while I'm still searching, any leads would be AMAZING!

Test...?

So, the semester is over, I've started my internship, job starts on wednesday and summer is already proving itself to be worthy of some serious documenting, and so in that spirit I'm going to test out posting non-art related things in this blog. So, here we go.

Lil' Mo is the shit. The other day I pulled exodus off the shelf to put a song on a tape and I couldn't take the damn thing off the table. I ended up putting TWO songs on there! TWO in a ROW! Unheard of but it was so good it was literally irresistible. Anyways, one of those songs was put it on me (as if you hadn't guessed that already) and I was totally taken back, feeling Lil Mo's vocals (she raps AND sings!!!) so hard and so my one track mind is drawing many Lil Mo jams my way (guesting on most of them of course). Here's the playlist I made so far, I wonder if I could make it so other people could add to it. If you remember some shit I forgot tell me! And when I get my tape player all nice and better I'll make it into a tape and you can have one.

satisfaction

Seriously, though - these songs are ridiculous! And she's on them all! Also, I bet half the time people think they hearing Ashanti cause they know it's a murder inc yang and they probably airbrushed A's face over some LM a few times, right? Anyways, can't let you go???? She may not have had many of her own hits (any?), but her jam-hit record is pretty freakin flawless... I mean, unless you bought her albums, who's heard a bad Lil' Mo joint? (edit: Honestly, I bet most jawns on her s/t's are bangers too, gotta look into that...)

I wish that more of Missy's side projects (read: 702) had gone further than they did. That bitch knows how to spot a fly gurl!!!!

(btw, anyone think this b looks like mandy??)

So that wasn't bad right?