Month: July 2008

2007 was the first year I received a R.H. Shumway seed catalog. After ordering and receiving my seeds, I still could not throw the catalog away – it just had these wonderfully retro line drawings of plants and I was hoping I’d somehow find a project to use it.

A few weeks ago, I got the VivaTerra catalog, and they were selling something called a ‘misprint watering can’ which was covered with what sheet-metal factories were rejecting. The minute I saw it, I got the inspiration to use my Shumway catalog and decoupage an old, boring watering can here at home. It turned out great and was so much fun to do!

Materials:
watering can
paper for protecting work surface
decoupage paper – a catalog or whatever you’d like to use
scissors to cut out pictures
decoupage medium – I used Mod Podge matte finish
black foam brush for smoothing on the Mod Podge
waterproofing spray

Directions:

I used the black foam brush, put on a nice layer of Mod Podge, then smoothed on a page of the catalog. For the parts that went around the handle or nozzle, I just used the scissors to make it so that the pages would wrap around them as well as possible.

I kept Mod-Podging, went all the way around the watering can and did the top too, used some of the small pictures to go up the nozzle, used some of the quotes to line the handle. 

Covered it all with a couple more layers of Mod Podge (it dries clear so I use *plenty*) plus it helps seal it all. Once it dried overnight, Av sprayed it all over with a good coating of water sealer spray and it was all done!

Ooooh it’s so much better now!

This past week, I made a rustic tart with Chilton County peaches. This recipe is something I’ve made before with apples, and it would be good with pears too.

This makes two tarts, so if you like, you can enjoy one now and put the extra dough and sugar topping in bags in the freezer for next time. The dough also has to be refrigerated for at least an hour, so I usually make that the night before so it is ready to be used the next day.

Ingredients:
(tart dough)
2 cups flour
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 pound butter, very cold, diced

(fruit)
2 peaches per tart, skinned and pitted, or same amount apples or pears

(topping)
1/4 c. flour
1/4 c. brown sugar
1/8 c. sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 stick butter, very cold, diced
**optional – 1/4 c. pecans, chopped finely

Directions:
First make the dough. In the Cuisinart with the flat stainless steel blade, combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Next, add the butter pieces and combine until the dough comes together. If it’s a little dry, add a tiny bit of cold water a little at a time until the dough forms a ball.

Lay out two pieces of Saran and put half the dough on each. Form into a disc, wrap, and refrigerate (if you’re just making one tart, freeze the other). If you’re making this to be used the same day, it has to refrigerate at least one hour:

Once the dough has been refrigerated at least an hour, preheat the oven to 450*, and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Lay out the disc of dough and let it set out for about 15 or 20 minutes (this gives you plenty of time to cut the fruit and make the topping) so that the edges can be gathered up later.

Cut the fruit into bite-size pieces and place atop the middle of the dough:

Make the topping – in a bowl, stir together the flour, sugars, salt, butter, and pecan pieces if you’re using those:

Use half the topping mixture for each tart (if you froze the other tart disc, freeze the rest of the topping in a separate bag with it) – place the topping mixture right on top of the fruit, then gather up the edges of the dough all around so the fruit is encased:

Bake at 450* for 15-20 minutes. I start checking on it at 10 minutes and it’s usually done somewhere around 17 minutes:

Sooooo good!

Something has been wrong with DFK in Internet Explorer – with the type, with the size of the font, etc (thanks to everyone who emailed me about it – I thought it would be fixed by now) for two or three days.Strange thing is, it looked fine in Firefox, which I use and really like!

It’s fixed now…whatever I did with the header this past week was the problem.

Anyway…are you hungry? It’s time for lunch here and Shug should be waking up any minute. My next post is something I made with peaches last week. Yum!

I had my regular appointment with my doctor this morning, and the new baby’s heartbeat is sounding really good, and I’m measuring right where I should be for being this far along in the pregnancy. Feeling great too. Yay!! Can’t even say how excited I am about all this!!

We went to *the* most amazing art environment last week. It’s Kenny Hill’s Sculpture Garden, in Chauvin, Louisiana. Except Kenny Hill isn’t around anymore – I mean, he’s alive, but one day, he just got up and left. People think he may be living with his brother, but nobody really knows where he is or what he’s doing now.

Kenny was a bricklayer who moved to Chauvin in 1988 when he left his wife and three children. He put a tent up, then built himself a house, and then in 1990 started making figures out of concrete. At first while he was there working on it, he turned down publicity and wouldn’t let people take pictures. In the late 90s, he talked about wanting people to come experience what he had made.

In January of 2000, he left things as they were – some items are unfinished – and moved on. Just left. The parish had been giving him trouble for the upkeep of his yard (grass/weeds), he quit paying his rent for the land and got evicted, and on top of that, he seemed to have lost his religious conviction. In fact, he went to his sculpture of Jesus and damaged it on purpose. In his house, he left a sign above the kitchen sink that read “hell is here, welcome.”

He just got up and left.

Kenny made himself into several of the sculptures. In this one, you can see him being lifted up by angels. Half his face is black and half is white.

This is my downstairs freezer. It has somehow become a shrine to 569/Knoxville-milled White Lily. Which I know, is silly. But I’m just that way.

Shug and I took a quick trip to Target last week to pick up some pics that I ordered through Flickr to be processed. Since we were already there we went over to where the flour was and found White Lily with the new non-Knoxville mill code (if you are new to the White Lily thing, there’s more at the June ’08 archives). The mill code was not 569 (Knoxville), it was 501 – already.

Okay so this is just a quick post for all of you (and I really was surprised there were so many of you who felt like I did, but yay!) who emailed about getting the code for Knoxville White Lily – the stores are already getting in the new product. We went this weekend and stocked up. Which…it was a lot, and it involved three different grocery stores. Um, the slightly embarrassing pic of it all is above! I know it is crazy but there is a part of me that is afraid nothing will ever turn out the exact-same way it used to, so I stocked up for me, for friends, and for family. If, you know, the world comes to an end, I guess we can all survive on frozen White Lily.

Last week, I got both a phone call and an email from Smucker’s corporate in response to the email I sent them a few weeks ago, when I asked for the Knoxville code. The phone call was really nice, and they did verify that 569 is the Knoxville code. The email from them didn’t mention the code but went like this:

With a tradition of excellence that spans our more than 110 years of heritage, we take seriously our role as stewards of our high-quality brands. We acquired the White Lily brand in 2006 from C.H. Guenther & Sons, Inc. Guenther retained ownership of the Knoxville milling facility in addition to their other U.S. milling locations.

Throughout its history the ownership of the White Lily brand has changed hands numerous times. Since we acquired the White Lily brand our primary goal has been to restore and return the brand’s historic standard of excellence.

Does anybody know – when did White Lily lose its ‘historic standard of excellence’? And was lost to the point that Smucker’s needed to make it a goal to be restored and returned?

Okay here I am getting silly. I mean, we are talking about flour, not Russian nuclear bomb briefcases.

But you know.

—
Oh! And I did buy that bag of 501 so I can see if there’s any difference, like the people in the NY Times article said there was…not that I’m running the Consumer Reports test kitchen here or anything. Now, who wants to do some blind taste-testing!?

This weekend, we drove over to the B’ham Museum of Art to see the Charlie Lucas exhibit they’ll have going until this Fall. It’s called “The World Through My Eyes” and it’s a collection of twelve of his works made over the course of the last twenty years.

All the pics from the exhibit here in my Flickr set.