Crafting Creative Expression

My blog hasn’t seen much attention this past year. Every now and again I get a follow notification, or think up a new post idea, and just sigh. Because when you and your family are going through something hard, the last place you want to put your creative exploits is in the public eye. Instead I’ve been throwing myself into the other half of my life, my university course, and though things happen out on our little patch every day, my tapping away has been on less consumable subjects.

But I have found other opportunities to share myself. My course this year contained an art journaling component, and I’ve been happily turning my life grievances into doodles, collages, paintings, and whatever other self-expression I can squeeze between two pages.

Before this project, I had little reason to believe art journaling could come close to the thought clarifying and cathartic nature of traditional journaling. For a long time I’ve found solace in notebooks. In recent years I picked up the habit of writing Morning Pages. This is where writers produce three consecutive A4 pages of uninterrupted free writing daily. It’s everywhere, The Guardian’s headline leads you to believe it will change your life. It’s pretty great.

 

“Pages are meant to be, simply, the art of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind.”

– Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 10th edition. New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2002. Pp. 4.9-1

 

Giving my unconscious unrestricted range to churn out imagery has led me to some surprising corners of my own mind. My thoughts and opinions in free-writing can be almost unrecognisable from the palatable, dolled-up versions I allow in conscious thinking. The emotions that come out are often young and defensive, in need of acknowledgement and some nurturing. When these parts of myself get to have a voice, it is painful realising just how much I’ve neglected them. So I keep coming back to hear what they have to say.

There was no boundary on the art journal assignment; it could be whatever we wanted it to be. This is usually death for me, I like clear questions and hoops to jump through; years of studying have made me scared to test out my own interpretation for fear of going in the wrong direction. So I picked up a copy of Cathy Malchiodi’s The Soul’s Palette, and hoped it would tell me what to do. Cathy had some interesting things to say on creativity, but my easy-out was an over-complication of something I already knew how to do. I took the same approach as I did with my morning pages, I kept moving my hand on the page until I was moved myself.

Over the months I became used to the idea of using the imagery in my mind’s eye to find a beginning on a blank page. In going about my day I’d notice a persistent phrase or image creeping up on me, and have to dash to my craft desk to capture the fragment. Sometimes I could yield to the urge for spontaneous art making, other times settling for making unintelligible lists instructing future me to ‘draw lots of hair’, or ask ‘why wasn’t I happy to find the [metaphorical] knife’.

By the deadline I had an illustrative record of my emotional life during a time of deep heartache and unmatched personal growth. As I look through and touch the pages I feel connected to the artworks in a way I’ve never been able to experience my work before. I don’t see errors or wish for something different. I’m too distracted by how moved I am, too compassionate towards myself in those captured moments.

Term has now come to an end, and only a few days into the summer holiday I’m already twiddling my thumbs, itching for a new project to consume my attention. But I’m also trying to hold back from that urge a little and honour the efforts I’ve already made. This year has helped me find something genuine within myself, and with it a way to put something meaningful into the world. Whether I pick up the lined or the plain paper I’m expressing something far closer to myself then I ever have before.

Not Another Granola..

I promise we aren’t becoming a breakfast blog.. or even a food blog. But when I called mum to tell her the cardamom granola recipe was up for her to try, I had a total head-smack moment, because of course I hadn’t made sure to use ingredients my mum typically has on offer.

Bonus, Mum. I used the lemon mixing bowl for the shoot, it’s adorable!

It wasn’t too much hassle (ok, none) to get through that entire batch of granola in only 4 days, and give myself the excuse to whip up another batch, this time using brown sugar. I actually prefer this, especially since I feel that brown rice syrup is just not as sweet as some of the others I use, and lacks any depth of flavour. As for maple, it can be plain expensive, and when I buy it in the more reasonable 1L jugs it always disappears before the pancakes get a look in. Somehow the large plastic jug renders all portion control and personal limits void.

I managed to pick up a large bag of madagascan vanilla pods on Amazon a little while ago, and I’ve been scraping them into just about every sweet thing I’ve made recently. The leftover, scraped pods smell incredible so I’ve been loathed to chuck them out. Instead I’ve been popping them into a bag of caster sugar, but I might look into some of Food 52’s ideas instead, vanilla fleur de sel sounds like a handy new granola ingredient.

If vanilla pods aren’t something you have in the pantry, 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract will do, or substitute for a flavour extract or spice of your choosing (cinnamon, perhaps).

Brown Sugar Granola

600 g jumbo oats

200 g unsweetened coconut flakes

150 g pecans + 50 g cashews + 100 g walnuts (or 300g mixed nuts) roughly chopped

2 tsp salt

1 vanilla pod (optional)

125 g light brown sugar (or light muscovado)

160 ml olive oil

2 Tbsp tapioca starch or corn flour

60 ml soya milk

1. Preheat the oven to 125C
2. Mix the oats, coconut and nuts, and salt in a large bowl until salt and spices are well distributed.
3. Use a stand mixer or stiff whisk to beat all the remaining ingredients, until the mixture isn’t grainy, this will take a few minutes.
4. Add the wet to the dry ingredients. Mix well (with hands if you don’t mind getting sticky) until everything is well coated.
5. Distribute the mixture over two shallow pans lined with greaseproof paper, do not pat down, but allow it to collect into clumps.
6. Bake for 55-75 min, turning the granola over gently every 10-15 mins. Remove from the oven when toasted light golden, test a few flakes for crispness by allowing them to cool on the counter before tasting. The soy-milk means this granola needs a low and slow bake, so keep turning and testing it.
7. Cool completely on the trays, before store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2-3 weeks.

Cardamon olive oil granola

I’ve been on a crazy granola kick lately. So much so I’ve been buying jumbo oats by the 5kg on our subscribe and save, and our house has such thing as a Only On Weekends cereal rule. We both dodge this one by conveniently not counting non-breakfast servings, or handfuls grabbed on the fly, the latter of which this granola is astoundingly good for.

It’s incredible what a bit of salt does for a mainly sweet thing, somehow it transforms something I’ll generally leave or moan about it being too sweet, into a rave-review repeat recipe I’m diving into upon each passing. I’m a bit of a salt fiend, but this recipe doesn’t over-do it. In any case your cookies need a little salt to cut the sweet too, believe me. Olive oil is a another weird one for a sweet breakfast cereal, but I urge you to try it over subbing for a flavourless oil (e.g. sunflower oil, refined coconut oil) which would work equally well, but you would certainly miss out not trying the olive version at least once. We go as far as to use Extra Virgin Olive Oil, for a big flavour impact. Go light if you wish, or half-and-half, I’ve done all on occasion and it comes down to preference. This is something I stuck to from the original recipe I’ve been switching up to my own granola fantasies for a while. There are more than a few variations on http://orangette.net/

If cardamom conjures only Indian recipes in your mind, I hope you’ll find this opens you up to the amazing idea of putting cardamom in sweets. I really got put onto the idea through my recent addition and new favourite on my recipe book shelf, The Homemade Vegan Kitchen. Miyoko uses cardamom in her sweet pastry dough, and it’s fantastic. I can’t wait to have an excuse to make it into a chocolate babka again, cardamom and dark chocolate are a great combination.

I smash the heck out of my hazelnuts in a bag with a rolling pin. It works well when I’m feeling too lazy to set up the food processor.

Of course the cardamom is completely optional, cinnamon is another one we like. Equally, the maple syrup can be easily subbed for brown rice syrup (which is cheaper, but has none of the flavour), or any other similar natural liquid sweetener, this is one of those recipes you can keep playing with. This is a fairly large batch, and you will need two shelves in your oven to bake it all at once. Sometimes I’ll up the batch to 900g of oats, but demand is getting crazy in our household so I’m only time-saving. Just as easily you could half this recipe and fit it all on one tray.

Cardamon Olive oil Granola

600 g jumbo oats

150 g unsweetened coconut flakes

100 g pecans + 100 g hazelnuts + 100 g cashews + 100 g walnuts, roughly chopped

2 tsp salt

1 tsp ground cardamom (optional)

240 ml  maple syrup (or brown rice syrup)

160 ml olive oil

150 g mixed raisins and cherries (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 150C
2. Mix the oats, coconut and nuts, salt, and cardamom in a large bowl until salt and spices are well distributed. (Do not add the raisins, these are added after baking).
3. Mix the maple syrup and olive oil, then add to the dry ingredients. Mix well (with hands if you don’t mind getting sticky) until everything is well coated.
4. Distribute the mixture over two shallow pans lined with greaseproof paper, do not pat down, but allow it to collect into clumps.
5. Bake for 45-55 min, turning the granola over gently every 10-15mins. Remove from the oven when toasted golden, and allow to cool on the trays.
6. Once cool, add the mixed raisins and cherries if using. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for 2-3 weeks.

Ghosts and toast

Isn’t it always when you have plenty to do, that you end up being swamped by some ghastly flu. This was meant to be quite a full weekend, we had a far away funeral to attend, and then time visiting my parents, something I’ve been desperate to find the time to do after our last visit got rained off by flu! But isn’t that the way, all the worry that comes with making the big trip is enough to let those nasties take hold.

I did get a last hoorah before succumbing to a shivering, wheezing mess. My bestie, Nat, her mum and 2 year-old met up with Rob and me in Hastings for the day. I’d not been before, and Rob hadn’t done the sites, so we were enthused to find it was both quaint and quirky, just our kind of town. We’ve actually got a soft spot for sea-side towns, and with all the hills it was strangely reminiscent of where we went to university together.

Rob has been bringing up the tale of the Hawkhurt smugglers gang ever since I got to Kent. They are our local historical bandits, so we had to pay a visit to the Smugglers Adventure Experience while we had the chance (and excuse of a child in tow).

The unguided tour takes you through a winding trail of rooms and passages in St Clements Caves. Despite not being much of a fan of being in caves or underground, it was pleasant to feel like a rabbit in a burrow, and little Hu wasn’t worried about the dark (or the ghosts!) at all.

We spent ages looking around, and then took another hilly walk to Eat @ The Park café in Alexandra Park to try out their vegan options. As usual, we couldn’t possibly choose two different things off the menu, the clear winner for both of us was always going to be English breakfast.

That’s some thick toast, fried mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, facon, sausage, beans and a hash brown, and I believe it was £5.50, which is brilliant if you ask me. Everything was lovely. We didn’t get to sample their paninis, but I saw several options, and vegan cheese appeared to feature, so we will have to return another day to try that too.

Here is their page at Happy Cow (restaurant guide).

We can’t wait to go to Hastings again, and I’m so glad we had such a great excuse to take a stroll around. However, maybe I’ll leave the coastal exploring until I’m rid of The Dreaded Lurgy.

Until next time,

Wild Wednesday

It’s still winter, and even though there’s still a bit of snow in the rain (we should be so lucky to get a proper dumping!) the plants are starting to stretch out those new leaves and it won’t be long before we have something more interesting than daffodil after daffodil, though their sunny faces are appreciated when that’s all the colour around.

I shouldn’t bad-talk my national flower, but I’ve always found them too much; too flamboyant. But likely I’m just scarred by association, those big eisteddfod assemblies at school were daffodil-heavy, overstimulating, and didn’t give my crafts the recognition I  at such age thought I deserved! The competition of the whole thing really left me feeling sour, the poor daffodils really aren’t at fault here at all.

We have been working outside a lot lately, putting up the fences for the garden field, and getting things ready for our vegetables this year. Rob has already been busy cutting fell to fill our hugelkultur beds, which we’re hoping to build sometime soon. Lucky for us we had a tin shed that had fallen into disrepair, so we have the perfect recyclables for putting to the job.

The beds won’t be the first re-purposed scrap transformation this month. A couple of weeks ago I built a cold frame from an old window and some scrap wood, and I’ve got the scrap reserved for making cloches too. It’s always that bit more exciting when you get to re-purpose rubbish into something that is useful, bespoke and at little to no cost to our wallets or the environment. It’s not always possible, but where we can, we do, that’s the main thing.

Of course this can be more of a curse than a blessing; with the joy of re-purposing comes guilt throwing anything away (even to recycling), and so leads to a very full house. Whatever space there is, it’ll always end up being filled with stuff waiting to become newly useful. And nobody feels this more than my dad, who has been recently tackling our family’s momentous accumulation of items that have spent decades in limbo, waiting to be useful.

For our family, this limbo is a physical place, a coach house that sits in the garden of my parent’s house. A magical space that despite it’s lack of comforts has always had an air of Aladdin’s Cave. My brother and I stopped using the place as a hide-out/club-house/actual house years ago, and the Aladdin’s Cave imagery only intensified. Luckily, my own salvaging compulsion means I’ve been able to help out by re-homing a few things here. It seems I’ll probably never stop toting wryly to myself, “Surely this will be useful someday!”

This Winter

The wind is howling again outside, but today was bright and almost warm. It’s been a fair winter for us in Kent and we’ve seen very little of the rain the rest of the county had dumped upon them. I’m still longing for spring, although I don’t want to hurry it too much, since my garden has been getting minimal attention and I’m not through planning for the new season.

Thing is, the homestead is quite literally bigger. When Rob’s parents moved into the cottage they started buying nearby pieces of land to graze their horses, but the house and land were never joined up geographically. We’ve since felt like we had a bit of a duty to tie the whole lot together, so last year we approached our neighbours about purchasing the strip of field behind our garden. We’ve just closed on the sale! For a little while we were scared it might not go through, but it all worked out in the end, and we’re so ecstatic.

It’s it’s just over the width of our garden, and runs all the way up to the Paddock, where we are hoping to site our workshop this year. The previous owners have planted a boundary hedge of native hedgerow plants, and I could not be happier to have that to look forward to as it grows. I’ve also inherited a very sad looking orchard of rag-tag fruit trees, but I’m not hopeful that this means lots of homegrown fruit for us yet.

Our business break over Christmas really allowed us to push forward with some of our budding homestead’s responsibilities, and put in place a lot of the land management side of things that’s been begging for attention since we moved in. But I’m positive it’s all going to come together now we have all those big things out of the way. Sometimes it’s coming up with the right solutions that takes the most time, never mind implementing them.

This is our new pony-alternative, a flail mower. Rob and I talked at great length about getting a pony, or other grazers, but in the end we just couldn’t make the leap to large animal owners yet. The financial burden was reason as much as any, so I was so excited when we came up with what turned out to be a very cost effective way of keeping the fields mowed. We tow the flail with our second hand quad, Gertie. We didn’t know just how useful this little beast would be, not only is it fantastic fun ripping up the lane, but we can get everything done so much faster now we can just load and hitch up the trailer. We’ve been using Gertie to pull out saplings over at the far field, and I’m sure I can think up many more jobs for her.

Kaylee left to stay in Cardiff in November, and we certainly all miss her cuddly playful self. My parents looked after Kaylee for a long time while I was busy being in university, and honestly I was shocked to get her back at the end of it! My parents absolutely love Kaylee, and I can’t bare to think of them without some dog-therapy. Nyxie is actually becoming a bit of a cuddler too now, and this month she’s started sleeping with her head resting on one of us. She’s still reluctant to play with toys, though she used to when Kaylee was here, but I’m hoping it’s just one of those things rescue dogs can take come coming around to.

She ripped her dewclaw a few weeks ago, so I’ve been feeling very sorry for her. She was so good with it all though, and even holding up her paw for us to put clingflim over her bandages to go outside.

 

That’s all from the homestead for now. Until next time wildlings.

Christmas in Pictures

Closing the gap

One year ago tomorrow, having decided to settle in Kent. I didn’t know I’d only take another month to close the gap, not the 4 more years I was expecting!

Our stint as a long distance couple was a chaotic time for both of us, situated at opposite sides of the EU. This quote goes someway connote my feelings looking back on those early months where we could do nothing but talk.

“Intimacy is not who you let touch you. Intimacy is who you text at 3am about your dreams and fears. Intimacy is giving someone your attention, when ten other people are asking for it. Intimacy is the person always in the back of your mind, no matter how distracted you are.” —Unknown

Flowers in the window

Grown in the garden,

Rescued from a gale.

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Recipe: Apple cider syrup

You are really going to have to excuse the Halloween theme of this shoot, it was a lot closer to the day when I was working on this one, and I couldn’t not share because the result was fantastic. I’ve got an autumnal recipe here; a spiced sweet cider syrup. This I used in an apple variation of the Vegan Brunch Coffee/Crumb cake (not that there is any coffee in the recipe fyi).

Our Halloween was a fantastic but totally unplanned. I’ve always been big on Halloween, and hosted a themed party most years in my teens. These were always huge creative efforts, with games and decorations, and homemade costumes. I’d love to start that again here sometime, but after hosting the wedding there was nothing that could make me want to organise a large group of people for a while at least! All that Halloween party planning did come in handy there, I’m lucky my parents were willing to go along with my crazy whims back then.

My parent’s house is very set up for Halloween. It turned 100 years old this year*, and thanks to my Dad’s influence on the décor even has a gothic look that just needs a few fake cobwebs to bring it up to haunted house appeal. Better still, there’s a coach house in the garden which was kid-domain back then. It was the perfect location for our spooky get-togethers until we were too tall for the attic eves.

*it’s actually younger than our cottage in Kent, but still!

This year we took a much more relaxed approach, and went walking in the dark with the dogs. The ambiance was working with us as a fog had rolled in, so I was even a little jumpy, not my usual cool considering how used I am to the blackness up on the fields at night. We huddled in Rosie’s stable and listened to spooky podcasts over our night-picnic of tea and cupcakes.

As with most things this was the result of a household surplus; a bag of apples from my aunty, and a seemingly bottomless box of uninspiring cider left over from the wedding. The syrup is as versatile as any syrup, and we’ve been putting it on sweet and salty popcorn (recipe and technique to come soon), but if we had ice cream it would be going on that too. I anticipate that it should store well, so I’ll be looking into putting it into my cider doughnut recipe when I’m next craving. I baked the apples in a light toss of the syrup until dry, before tossing them into the regular VB recipe. As always, I added oats to my crumble recipe, and if I’d had some nuts those would have gone in too. I really love the crisp edges you get on the oats, and they work really well paired with the apple cake.

Autumn Cider Syrup

Ingredients

Cider of any variety

White sugar of equal volume as cider

Cinnamon stick

Whole cloves

Add equal parts cider and sugar, and bring to the boil. If you have a food thermometer, this may be helpful as the temperature wants to stay below 112C, a medium heat keeps things slow. You don’t need to stir, just wait for the mix to reduce by half, adding a cinnamon stick and whole clove towards the end. Once it has reached the viscosity you are after, take it off the heat and transfer to a clean jar (I sterilize mine with campden tablets).

Use wherever you would use a simple syrup; on ice cream, popcorn, in cocktails, in hot drinks. How about as the sweetener in a chai tea latte? Yum!