Coming up this weekend on Food Sunday and Saturday Art:

• On Saturday Art, Mitchell Frye has work entitled "Texas Corral"
• Bill Egnor has the latest from his novel
• Jake Remington has "redhanded"
• masaccio writes about David Hockney’s American Collectors
• And Art Threat has a post on art and urban revitalization
• On Food Sunday, Bill has a recipe for chocolate bread
• alanaclaire will teach us to make corn on the kabob
• And Toby Wollin has the news!

If you’ve got art to share or discuss, post with us on Saturday. Got a recipe? Post Sunday. Either way, bring your eyes and your stomachs and join us this weekend for wonderful food and art!

In case you missed us this weekend on Food Sunday and Saturday Art, here’s what you missed…

Art Threat started us off with an artistic response to the G20:

That the hundreds (at last count 900+) of G20 protesters (and random civilians) held in pens at a detention centre in Toronto also happen to be extras in a former movie studio should come as no surprise to those who took part in this summer’s biggest blockbuster hit. This production note is but one piece of a larger spectacle of fascism recently carried out in the streets of Toronto.

While tens of thousands of us peacefully marched and did so as representatives of every strata of diverse Canadian society, we witnessed the most cynical, unprovoked and violent police and state actions rarely—if ever—seen at such scale in this country. Walking down one of the main Toronto arteries yesterday as the march got under way, I was horrified to see an elderly man beaten by six riot police. Several friends—mostly organizers of civil society groups and independent mediamakers—have been arrested and many have been beaten and have had their personal belongings searched, including cell phones (still others had all their pictures and video deleted or destroyed). In the detention centre, reports are emerging of sexual harassment and the segregation of queer activists and countless abuses of the Geneva Convention.

nagaura had more originals:

masaccio dipped into non-representational art:

Composition VI by Wassily Kandinsky is currently hanging at the Amsterdam Branch of the Hermitage Museum, as part of a special exhibition on the origins of modernism. Some of the images are here. They range from representational, like Lucie and Her Dance-Partner, by Kees van Dongen, to abstract, like Composition VI. Abstract art is a special challenge to amateurs. It isn’t hard to look at Lucie and get a pretty good idea what the author wants to convey. Two dancers are shown, both fully dressed. Lucie also wears a quilt or cape, and holds a book. Her partner holds an orange. The weight of these extraneous things is at odds with the description of them as dancers. They seem so conventional, so gravity bound, an idea reinforced by the black line that covers them both.

Bill Egnor had the latest chapter from his novel:

Chapter Nine

Walking into the house Tyrone met the Shadow coming down left hand set of stairs, and the man stopped and gave Tyrone a top to bottom look. Rising both eyebrows the Shadow said, “That look can only mean women. Or should I say woman?”

“Well, there was a woman here, but I really think that it has nothing to do with my look,” said Tyrone, “If I am happy, it is because I am fairly sure that in this basket is a skin of wine!”

“Hmm, yes, I know what a devoted coinsure of wine you are,” said the Shadow. Tyrone did have the decency to flush slightly at this comment but doggedly changed the subject.

“We should find the good Brother, and share this with him, don’t you think?” he asked.

The Shadow nodded and said, “Aye, Carli would be very put out if we did not share the food with him. Do you know where he is?” Tyrone had little hope that the Shadow had been completely deflected from the topic of women, but he would take any postponement of the teasing that he could get. No doubt it would gain interest for being delayed, but who knew, they might all be dead tomorrow and he might escape completely.

And Phoenix Woman posted the latest chapter from her novel:

The good thing about being a homeless drifter, Bethany thought as she weaved into the leftmost lane on the Kennedy Expressway as the sun was coming up, was that you didn’t end up owning loads of stuff. Loads of stuff just complicated things.

The day before, Bethie had hauled her furniture down to the Goodwill on West 63rd where she’d bought it in the first place, and there wasn’t much left after that besides her clothes. She left the apartment in better shape than she’d found it, and even managed to get her security deposit back, all eight hundred dollars of it. Which was good, because it seemed like she was going to need it all just for the toll roads out of Illinois.

All the things Bethany decided to take with her could be crammed into her old Chevy hatchback with room to spare. Plus, she’d also got lots of practice in having to move in a hurry, so she could have a suitcase packed in five minutes; this was true even before she was sent off to training, as Mom moved around a lot in the years after she divorced Bethie’s dad and took back her maiden name.

On Food Sunday, Toby Wollin led off with the news:

And another great day! Now that we’ve all gotten over the Clinton Wedding (review: Yes, for all of everything, it really WAS all about Bill and Chelsea – why Vera Wang? I mean, now REALLY?), time to get back on the horse or the bike or whatever to talk about food:

Mushrooms are your friends: “Scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University… suggest that white button mushrooms may promote immune function by increasing production of antiviral and other proteins that are released by cells while seeking to protect and repair tissue. Wu and co-investigators are with the HNRCA Nutritional Immunology Laboratory in Boston, Mass. The study’s cell-culture phase showed that white button mushrooms enhanced the maturity of immune system cells called "dendritic cells," from bone marrow. Dendritic cells can make T cells-important white blood cells that can recognize and eventually deactivate or destroy antigens on invading microbes. “ Mushroom Study

Bill Egnor had a recipe for a wonderful tri-color veggie bread:

Happy Sunday Bread Heads! This week we are going do a recipe that is a little more advanced than some of the others. That said, there are no baking techniques that will trip you up, what is challenging here is the organization. This bread is made by making three completely separate dough’s, then rolling them together. Since all of them have to rise before they can be worked together you will be making dough after dough after dough and then doing the rest.

It is not hard but if you don’t have your bowls ready and don’t stay focused it can be pretty frustrating. So, as always, read the recipe a couple of times. Think about what you need in terms of cook ware and ingredients and plan it out before you start. If you do that you too will be able to make the fabulous Marbled Vegetable Bread!

alanaclaire taught us to make cucumber sorbet and lime shortbread:

I might like cucumbers even more than I like radishes. I might be able to live on cucumbers for a very long time, as long they have just a bit of salt on them. Peeled or not, cut into spears or slices, I’ll eat them with glee until the vines are empty.

We’ve got enough cucumbers to feed a nation around here.  My few meager vines bear ten new fruit every day, and then there is the weekly visit to my CSA, which taunts me with the little sign above the crate of cucumbers "as much as you will use."  As much as I will use?  Can you fathom the depth of my husbands pickle obsession?  My decor is all jars around here–big glass urns of cucumbers and dill flowers and garlic cloves.  Oh, we can use them- no fear on that one.

And Jill Richardson brought us her experiences in Mexico:

"Sometimes we eat, sometimes we don’t," the 23 year old mother of three said to me as we walked up the muddy road to her house. Her husband, also 23, has no land, no job, and probably a 6th grade education. There’s no work in the area. He’s tried to come to the U.S. once, but he wasn’t able to cross the border. They live in a part of Mexico that has lost 25% of its population to U.S. immigration. Their house has no running water or bathroom facilities, but they do have electricity.

"Are you scared for your children?" I asked her.

"Yes," she replied. "Especially my oldest, because she has asthma. She should go to school this year but she is sick. We can’t afford the medicine."

That’s a little snapshot of what I encountered on my recent trip to the state of Jalisco, Mexico.

Check out the posts, leave our contributors a comment, and join us next week for more!

Coming up tomorrow:

• On Saturday Art, Bill will have the next chapter in his novel.
• Masaccio has a post on Composition VI by Wassily Kandinsky.
• And Mitchell Frye and Jake Remington will have more original works.
• On Food Sunday, Jill Richardson will post about the lives, farms, and food of peasants in rural Mexico.
• Bill will have a recipe for Marbled Veggie Bread.
• alanaclaire has a recipe for cucumber sorbet with lime shortbread.
• And Toby Wollin has the news!

If you’ve got art to share, post on Saturday. Food? Post on Sunday. See you this weekend!

In case you missed this weekend’s food and art, here’s what we had on the menu…

Art Threat kicked off Saturday Art with a post on BP and an artistic response:

Last month saw a party of protesters outside Tate Britain, calling on the gallery to cut its ties to one of its large funding partners: BP.

As reported by the Guardian, “A group of artists under the name The Good Crude Britannia voiced concerns about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” and demonstrated outside of a launch party meant to display new art by Fiona Banner and to celebrate 20 years of BP support.

Jane Trowell, of environmental arts campaign group Platform, is reported saying “BP is trying to repair its tarnished reputation and buy our approval by associating itself with culturally important institutions like Tate. We hope that, as happened with the tobacco industry, it will soon come to be seen as socially unacceptable for cultural institutions to accept funding from big oil.”

Bill Egnor had the latest from his novel:

Chapter Eight

The Shadow turned and followed his companions into the building. He was not sure what kind of reception they would get, but he hoped that Tyrone and Brother Carlinus would have the sense to say a little as possible, until it became clear what was happening. Not that he thought Carli would, but one could always hope. He had noticed Tyrone’s attempt at charming the people they had walked by, and was happy that he had made the attempt, but it was not his style at all.

Inside, were the first pieces of art that depicted humans that the Shadow had seen since coming into the city. On the walls and the ceiling were paintings, murals and tapestries. They all showed scenes of what the Shadow assumed were the history of the Celesta.

Mitchell Frye had fish in a tank:

Jake Remington posted "Trying":

masaccio posted on "The Signal":

The Signal by Henri Le Fauconnier is currently hanging at the Hermitage Amsterdam in an exhibit of early modernist art. Most of the works on display were collected by a pair of Russian merchants who were friendly with Parisian gallery owners and artists, and bought a good bit of their production, much of which wound up in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. The Amsterdam wing of the Hermitage opened last year. The program of the collection is here, with a better image of the painting, unfortunately subject to copyright.

The central figure is a worker, which we know because his shirt has no collar, and he wears a workingman’s hat. He is walking purposefully, his strong neck craning forward gives him a sense of force, as does his squared-off face. In the background we see a flow of red with a tunnel running through it. The figure in the tunnel is ambiguous. It might be a vehicle, or it might be a huddled mob of people. There are plumes of smoke in the front of the picture, which may or may not be associated with the flowing sheet of red or the tunnel. On the left are the signals, a field of black and white squares and a black pointer against a yellow bulls-eye.

Kally Canfield got a little tongue-in-cheek:

Scarecrow put up a diary about the Titanic mess and Orcfullness mentioned in

Van Jones’ speech to Netroots Nation on Friday.

There was a bit of apologia in it for the Obama administration, which I didn’t care for very much. I really didn’t.

However, there was a huge amount of Progressive policy addressed in the speech which I thought was terrific, particularly the first framing parts of the speech, "hope and despair."

And nagaura had another original:

On Food Sunday, Toby Wollin kicked us off with tips to start a farmer’s market:

I was reading a post on Facebook the other day with regard to farmers markets and one commenter wrote that every town needed one and that her city did not.

On the face of it, that sounds like something out of a ’say wha?" sort of experience. Doesn’t every place have a farmers market? Someplace?

No. Actually, not. And it’s not like one of those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland pictures from the 30s where all the kids get together and gosh-darn, come up with the idea of putting on a show to raise money (for, choose one, the school, the town hall, some poor kid who needs to go to the hospital). It’s one thing for a single producer to pull a truck off the side of the road, put up signs in both directions and set up a display of tomatoes and melons. It’s an entirely different thing to develop a farmers market. And even if all the ‘i’s" are dotted, the paperwork is all filed correctly, etc. etc., the farmer’s market might still not succeed.

Bill Egnor taught us how to make challa:

Happy Sunday Bread Heads! This week we’ll be fulfilling a request for Challa. Now, we have done braided breads before and almost always someone says “Hey Challa!”. The thing is, while all Challa have some type of braid, not all braided breads are Challa. Part of what makes Challa…er..um.. Challa, is saffron.

Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. Below is a picture of what $20 worth of saffron looks like. You can get much better prices buying it in bulk, but who needs that much saffron? Here is the dirty little secret; you can make perfectly fine Challa without the saffron. It makes the bread just a little yellower and it gives only a slight overtone in the overall flavor of the bread. So, if you find that buying saffron is a bridge too far, then just leave it out, no one will ever know.

And Larue posted on tacos:

Ok, these ain’t MY soft tacos, but hey, it’s purty, no?

*G*

Man has and is this week been/being a grand ball of delightful music and phud!

I’ve really been lucky this past two weeks! Jams, practices, hanging with pickers, and more!

It all leads from a few jams and practice sessions, to sitting in with a band at a Farmer’s Market gig Saturday morning, and then a picking party just up the road a bit from our place on Saturday afternoon until the wee late hours Sunday morning!

Click through, check out the posts, and leave us a comment or two! See you next weekend!

Coming up this weekend…

• On Saturday Art, masaccio will have a piece on The Signal by Henri Le Fauconnier
• Mitchell Frye has a piece called "Fish Tank"
• Art Threat writes on art and the BP oil disaster
• and Jake Remington has a piece called "trying"
• On Food Sunday, Toby Wollin will have the news
• and we have a few more recipes in the works!

If you’ve got art to post or discuss, post on Saturday. If you’ve got a recipe to share, post on Sunday. Either way, join us this weekend, you don’t want to miss it!

In case you missed us this weekend for Saturday Art and Food Sunday, here’s what he had laid out for you…

On Saturday Art, masaccio led us off with a post on "The Musette Player":

The Musette Player by David Teniers the Younger hangs at the Louvre. The painting is simple, an older man is playing what looks like bagpipes and maybe singing, probably in a bar, judging by the noses on the guys in the background in front of what looks to me like a jug of beer. The drinkers are much more interested in the paper the third man is holding than in the music, not unlike the way people talk over the piano player at bars and restaurants today. I love the Chico Marx hat one of the drinkers is wearing.

The player is wearing an interesting jacket in a beautiful shade of green. It looks like leather, with a decoration at the shoulder, and is set off by a lace collar. The instrument looks like it is made from fabric. Probably it is lined with a pig bladder to hold the air.

Jake Remington posted "deepdown":

Art Threat posted a discussion of a documentary and of a political history:

This July 11th marks the 20-year anniversary of the injustice against the Mohawk people of Kanehsatake, known in the media as the “Oka Crisis”. The stand off between Mohawks and social justice advocates against the Quebec police, and the Canadian Army was over the city of Oka’s desire to expand a 9 hole golf course. This expansion was to go into the Mohawk’s sacred land. Including a burial ground.

To respectfully acknowledge this 20-year old conflict at Kanehsatake, and the ongoing struggle that the First Nations of Canada have everyday, the Friday Film Pick is Acts of Defiance by Alex MacLeod. This feature-length documentary focuses on the Mohawk community in Kahnawake (also in Quebec) during the events of the summer of 1990. The film reflects on the relationship between Canada and its First Nations at a particular time in history.

Bill Egnor posted the latest chapter in his novel:

Happy Saturday! Welcome to the seventh installment of my novel Dark Soul. This is one of my favorite chapters, as in it the travelers finally arrive at the City of Rushing Water, the home of the Celesti. As always any input or feed back, good or bad, is appreciated.

Chapter Seven

The Shadow opened his eyes to see that dawn was well underway. A dew still coated their campsite, including himself and the blanket he was sleeping under. He blinked several times to clear his eyes, then rolled on his side and stood. He wondered into the woods to take care of his morning needs, and came back out to see Tyrone adding some wood to the embers of their fire.

Mitchell Frye posted a video, click to watch.

nagaura had more drawings from Asia:

twolf1 posted some of his natural photos:

I have been photographing a family of Osprey in Delaware for a few years now. This year, the proud parents hatched two chicks.

On Thursday, I took a few images of the family while Mom and Dad Osprey watched over their two fledglings as they sharpened their flying skills. Their landing skills still need some work however.

Here are some of my images.

On Food Sunday, alanaclaire waded into canning with us:

I have often spoken about canning as an activity that should be done with others, and I still hold to that. Especially when there is too much fruit to handle, and when the number of jars to fill is so high that you find that every surface in the kitchen is covered with motley mason jars, extra hands to hull strawberries or pit cherries can be the difference between tears and utter satisfaction. But there is another reason why canning with friends is a good idea, especially in your first few years of it all.

I’m talking about reassurance.

Once upon a time (yes, here I go again idealizing bygone days- don’t roll your eyes at me young lady!), canning was how people made sure that they had food for the winter. Everyone knew how to do it. But (and watch me oversimplify the century here) as the grocery store became the place where food comes from, something shifted. Sure, food procurement became a whole lot more convenient when we no longer had to pick the berries, cook them down with sugar, and can them ourselves. But as we didn’t have to do any more, we stopped learning how. And, oddly enough, we became afraid of it.

Toby Wollin gave us a kick in the pants to get our gardens ready for the fall:

OK, it’s mid-July here at Chez Siberia and it’s been horrifically hot. And dry. And the garden is not, shall we say, looking its best. We’re still harvesting but there are parts of beds that have been picked over, harvested out. There are lettuces that have bolted. (the photo above is basil – which does not look picked over or harvested out – but I’m going to start taking cuttings anyway so that I have fresh basil this winter)

In short, time to clear the decks to start things for a fall garden.

Even here, in Zone 3 to 4 (on the USDA map, it shows us as 5b; I hedge my bets and call it a 3 to a 4 given the topography), I’ve got a good 10-12 weeks before I give up the ghost on gardening. And with some judicious use of row covers and hardy crops, I can extend things past October as well. There is nothing like eating veggies from your garden on Thanksgiving Day.

Bill Egnor had a recipe for Pesto Bread:

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

It is the time of year for basil so it must be the time of year for Pesto Bread! This is a lovely bread that gives a great pesto flavor without being over powered by it. Plus, it is very easy to make!

Larue had a post for us on sauces:

I’m not much for reposting other people’s recipes diary wise because anyone can google up any recipe known to humans . . . I DO like sharing a special one with a link, in comments . . . when I come across something that REALLY strikes me as special and unique. But I found something recently I want to share.

It’s about this guy.

Here’s the setup and some background on me, and cooking techniques.

I spent 20+ years in the food biz. Most of it in kitchens, cooking, and later on running my own kitchens, doing my own menu’s and such. I was never a full fledged chef, but I became a rabid, passionate and danged good saucier!

And demi posted on picnic favorites for the summer:

Good Hot Sunday To All Y’all! My mister and I have been invited to a big potluck pool party this afternoon, and guess what? We’re going. Who wouldn’t? In the midst of this heat wave we’re having, I thought that it would be a perfectly pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Our friends, Charlie and Deanne have a beautiful home on Studio City, CA, with many large trees creating lots of shade over their huge backyard lawn. And, they have a wonderful pool. The whole back of the house is surrounded by a large wooden deck that accommodates a nice, large crowd of friends. Charlie usually stands at his big barbeque doing the broiling and Deanne makes doing Everything Else look very easy.

Besides eating and swimming and playing croquet on their very large lawn, we will have the enjoyment of chatting with good friends, soda, beer or wine in hand. Many of us knew my friend, Nez Smith, who passed away a week ago and today is her birthday. I already sang the Birthday Song to her this morning. But, I’m sure some of the talk will be about, not her death, but what’s really important in life. Loving and Serving.

So if you missed us this weekend, click through, check out the posts, and leave us a comment! And join us next week for more food and art.

Coming up this weekend on Food Sunday and Saturday Art:

• On Saturday Art, masaccio will post on The Musette Player by David Teniers the Younger
• Jake Remington will have a work called deepdown
• Mitchell Frye will have a photograph of a carousel
• and Bill Egnor has the latest chapter of his novel Dark Soul
• On Food Sunday, alanaclaire will teach us canning
• Bill Egnor has a recipe for Pesto Bread
• and Toby Wollin has the news!

If you’ve got art to share, post on Saturday. Got a recipe? Post on Sunday. Either way, join us this weekend for food and art!

If you weren’t able to join us this weekend for Food Sunday and Saturday Art, here’s all the great stuff you missed!

nagaura brought us another drawing from Asia:

twolf1 posted on big bang big boom:

BIG BANG BIG BOOM

A stop-motion animation by BLU uses graffiti to depict "an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life … and how it could probably end."

After months of work and hundreds of buckets of paint…

Kelly Canfield brought us some music:

All the LeBron James hoohaw this week got me to thinking about how many fabulous gems are thrust aside by great successes; not only that sports so often supplants the Arts, but even in the Arts so much that is famous often eclipses other fantastic pieces which are overlooked.

In the realm of piano concerti, a King is the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1. Particularly since Van Cliburn won on the Russian’s home

masaccio discussed Rembrandt:

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait of the Artist at his Easel hangs at the Louvre. All through his life, Rembrandt painted self-portraits, and as a result, we can see him age as he saw himself. He was 54 when he painted this self-portrait. To get an idea of how he saw himself as a young man, look at this one, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, painted when the artist was aroung 18 or 19. It was sort of an advertisement, designed to show off his skills, and it is easy to see how wealthy Dutch people might have been impressed with the tremendous detail, and close observation. This was a group quite willing to pay to preserve their likenesses for posterity, as those of us whose seventh grade art teachers loved the Dutch Masters can attest.

Mitchell Frye had a storefront in VA:

Bill Egnor had the latest chapter in his novel:

Happy Art Saturday!

Here is this weeks installment in Dark Soul. I’d like to thank those who have read and commented on this draft of my novel and once again invite everyone to voice their opinions on it. If you have not been following this serialization, you can find the first three chapters at the following links:

Dark Soul, Chapter One
Dark Soul, Chapter Two
Dark Soul, Chapter Three
Dark Soul, Chapter Four

Dark Soul, Chapter Five

Chapter Six

The first thing that the Shadow knew was that the sun was shining. It may sound funny that his first thought was not ‘I am alive!’, but in fact it takes a super-human sense of self to think so clearly. Instead the Shadow asked, “When did it stop raining?” Moving his head slightly, the Shadow could see that he was lying on the ground under a shelf of rock. To his right was a flickering object that he guessed was a fire. Raising his hand to wipe the sleep from his gummy eyes caused such a symphony of muscle pain that he let out a long groan.

twolf1 had another on oil:

Photographer Jane Fulton Alt’s latest project: Crude Awakening

Living on the shores of Lake Michigan, I am acutely aware of the disastrous toll the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has taken on all forms of life, especially as our beaches opened to the 2010 swimming season. This environmental, social and economic catastrophe highlights a much larger problem that has inflicted untold suffering as we exploit the earth’s resources worldwide.

We are all responsible for leading lives that create demand for unsustainable energy.
We are also all responsible for the solution and we must work together to protect the balance of life.

cuddlefish had one for the people:

Jake Remington posted "pigonaspit":

And Jim Moss finished us off with Radiohead.

On Food Sunday, Toby Wollin led us off with the news:

Well, after struggling through the heat of this past week I’m ready to go out in the garden again (OK, I realize to readers from places like Texas and Arizona, I sound like a whiner – and I AM a whiner but I’m from Upstate New York. 99 degrees, heavy humidity and no AC is a combination that I find really uncomfortable. Today, it’s dry, and at the moment, it’s 81, so I’m a pretty happy camper).

We are bbq-ing an arm roast (with which I am not terribly familiar. It looks like a large chunk of meat that happens to have a thin layer of fat on both sides. I rubbed in a combination of cracked pepper, rosemary, a little sea salt, basil and the three biggest cloves of garlic I could find in the freezer, chopped up fine) for dinner later, accompanied by kohlrabi slaw (just replace the cabbage with peeled, shredded kohlrabi with the carrots) and whatever else I can rummage out of the garden. Which has been discovered by a ground hog. There is nothing as destructive as a ground hog. I’ve even seen ground hogs pull carrots out of the ground, look at them in dissatisfaction and move on down the row (just as if they were in the produce section of a supermarket) until they found something they felt was worth eating.

OK, but enough of that – to the news!

Bill Egnor had soft pretzels:

This week we are going to fulfill another request (keep those cards and letters coming kiddies!), this time for soft pretzels.

If you have been making even a few of the breads in this series, then you have the chops to make great soft pretzels at home. One of the things that you hear from other on-line recipes is that you need special pretzel salt to really make a true soft pretzel. This is hogwash! A nice Kosher salt will still give you the salty counterpoint to the slightly sweet dough of the pretzel and you don’t have to search for it.

This recipe was originally from Alton Brown of the Food Network. I like the recipe he offered, especially the technique for giving the crust a nice shine and browning just right. However it was not quite what I was looking for. After a couple of years of trying this and that change, I decided that the pretzels needed a little darker flavor note.

alanaclaire had a recipe for Gooseberry Fool:

Two weeks ago, I had my appendix out. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to recommend emergency abdominal surgery, but it has had its benefits.

For one, everyone else has been doing the dishes.

And also, the girls have finally begun to understand that since I cannot bend over, they should probably pick up their toys before they are stepped on. Maybe this will stick, and I will never have to step on a cap-less marker again. We shall see.

But really, I’ve got to say that it’s done wonders for my speed.

Phoenix Woman brought us a video of cooking in the winter:

Watch as Roberta Avidor makes stewed chicken and cornbread in a solar oven outside on a January day in Minnesota when the temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either.

demi had a touching remembrance:

I was awakened at 4:30 this morning with the phone call I knew was eminent, telling me that my friend Nez Smith had just died, passed on, let go of her mortal coils. I wasn’t surprised as she has been suffering for the past week in the hospital. She would have turned 90 in a couple of weeks. She had a long and good life.

I met her when I was two years old and she was my Sunday School teacher. She said she fell in love with me then and I have never met anyone else who knew me, understood me, supported me and loved me as deeply as she has. I used to call her my fairy godmother. When I needed a little financial support, she was there. When I was angry about something, she let me talk it through. When I was happy, she shared my joy. She fed me all the right information.

Larue brought us Green Goddess dressing:

Recipes are a dime a dozen anymore, short of the one’s YOU make up yourself.

The rest of the most low brow canned peanut snack bowl to the ultimate fusion fad of molecular gastronomy can be found on the intertoobz, and most folks COULD do it all at home, with a little experience.

Doing it in kitchens to feed hundreds or more nightly, that’s a different story and a different post for another time.

But this Green Goddess dressing from the chef at Waterbar in SF is off the hook lovely.

And Jill Richardson posted on immigration and food:

In a little over a week, I’m headed to Mexico. The Iowa of Mexico, as I’m starting to think of it. My trip begins in Guadalajara (OK, that’s more of the Chicago of Mexico than the Iowa) and then continues within the same state (Jalisco) to rural areas where primarily corn is grown. Corn, corn, and corn. (Here are some stats on the place.) In preparation for my trip, I’ve begun researching the impacts of NAFTA on Mexican corn producers. At a glance that might seem rather random to pick one industry – and one crop within that industry – to focus on.

But corn is more than just "a crop" to Mexicans (particularly to indigenous people in Mexico). To protest NAFTA recently, Mexicans said "Sin maiz, no hay pais" ("Without corn, there is no country.") Truly, corn is even more central to Mexican agriculture than it is to American agriculture. And unlike the U.S. where we export our corn, put it in our cars and soft drinks, and feed it to our animals, the Mexicans eat much of theirs in the form of tortillas and tamales. All in all, 8% of Mexicans (40% of Mexican farmers) depend on corn for their livelihood. (To put that in perspective, only about 2% of Americans farm, and even fewer grow corn.) A whopping 60% of cultivated land in Mexico is planted in corn. And very much unlike the U.S., some of those corn farmers are subsistence producers, growing just enough to feed their families throughout the course of the year.

Click through, check out the posts, and leave us a comment. Then join us next weekend for more food and art!

Coming up this weekend…

• On Saturday Art, Bill Egnor has the latest chapter of his novel for us
• Art Threat posts about a film in recognition of the 20th anniversary of the Oka crisis
• and masaccio is writing about a Rembrandt self-portrait
• On Food Sunday, alanaclaire has a recipe for gooseberry fool
• Bill Egnor teaches us how to make Guinness soaked soft pretzels
• and Toby Wollin has the news!

If you’ve got art to share, share on Saturday. Got a recipe? Post on Sunday. See you there!

Coming up this weekend on Food Sunday and Saturday Art:

• On Saturday Art, Bill Egnor will have the next chapter in his novel, Dark Soul
• masaccio has a piece on a painting of William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury by Hans Holbein the Younger
• and we’ll have photos from Mitchell Frye and junkandfume from Jake Remington
• On Food Sunday, alanaclaire will teach us how to make elderflower vodka
• Bill Egnore responds to popular demand and teaches us how to make pizza, both deep dish and thin crust
• And Toby Wollin has the news!

If you’ve got art that you make or art you want to share with all of us, post a diary on Saturday. If you’ve got a recipe to share or a food issue to discuss, post on Sunday. Either way, join us this weekend, leave us some great comments, and enjoy!