Grilled Cheese

I enjoy a good grilled cheese sandwich. While I'm not above having convenience store white bread slathered with margarine and grilled with processed cheese, I really think that the humble grilled cheese can be elevated to the level of high art.

My typical grilled cheese starts with a nice bread from the Georgetown Bakery, old Balderson cheddar, and butter. Usually I dress it up with fresh cracked pepper and crushed, chopped raw garlic directly in the sandwich, and I cook it as slowly as I can bear on a hungry Saturday morning. Sometimes, as a throw back to my childhood indoctrination into Canada's Food Guide, I'll put a vegetable in the sandwich - a sliced tomato, for instance - or on the side. A grilled cheese accompanied by a dish of sauerkraut is truly something to behold. Of course my recipe is all very fluid, depending on what ingredients I happen to have handy, as well as the whims of my taste at any given moment.

Yesterday I had an inexplicable early morning stroke of genius that took my sandwich to another level. After cooking it until both sides were nicely toasted and the cheese inside was a beautiful gooey mess I sliced a chunk of Camembert onto the top. I turned off the heat, but placed a lid on the pan for long enough to soften the Camembert and sinter it into place.

This sandwich is served on a small Alexis Templeton plate. I like the contrasts in this meal. The colours are one thing: the blue in the plate plays nicely off the yellow and orange of the cheese. More than that though, I appreciate the Dali-esque softness of the cheese compared to the staccato crystallization of the glaze. I didn't pause for too long to take in the visuals though - a grilled cheese must be consumed to be truly enjoyed, and the sooner after it comes off the heat the better.

Winter Food

Here's a bowl by Jennifer Shelley-Keturakis that's currently high in my rotation of dishes. It's funny how things go - last spring/summer I was using this piece almost every day. It was still fairly new to me then, and it was often the first thing I reached for when I went to the cupboard. Then it made it's way to the back of the line and didn't come out for a while. Now it's enjoying a bit of a renaissance as winter meals call for large portions and hot temperatures.

To truly appreciate a craft object you have to live with it every day, using it over and over again. Every utilitarian pot is full of nuance - both flaw and virtue - that is only revealed through the familiarity that comes with continual and varied use. Jen's bowl first appealed to me because of the visual depth of the glaze on the interior and the novelty of the knitted texture on the exterior. Now, though, I am enjoying it for another reason. The deep texture on the surface means that less of my hand comes into direct contact with the surface, so that I can hold this bowl quite comfortably even when it is full of boiling liquid. While my my winter soups and stews are keeping my insides warm, this bowl helps keep my hands from getting uncomfortably hot.

The meal here, which is not much to look at compared to the bowl, is moose, mushroom, and vegetable stew. The moose comes from John and Alexis Templeton, and the mushrooms are some chantrelles I picked myself in Kitchusis. The perfect meal to keep the chills away.

Beer and Berries

Not every pot I own has some intense personal connection. Take this stein, for instance: I bought it on a bit of a whim and I honestly don't even know who made it. This is a bit unusual for me, I will admit, and I also have to admit that I don't use this piece as often as I should. It's a really great beer mug!

I happened to be passing through Medicine Hat last October with a van full of my students, returning to Regina from the 1000 Miles Apart ceramics conference in Calgary. We were lucky to get a personalized tour of the Medalta facilities as they were taking down their International Cup Show. Many of the cups were sold, but this one didn't have a red dot next to it and it caught my eye.

I thought only for a moment before taking it. On the one hand I simply wanted it - it's a fantastic ergonomic form with an unusual yellow glaze, and nice but not overwhelming wood fire ash effects. On the other hand I thought of it as a learning experience for my students. I can recall the point in my educational experience where I realized that real people actually want to buy art - it was during a NSCAD xmas sale where some administrator from the college bought a whole selection of one student's work for his collection. That was sort of a watershed moment for me - I hadn't at that point in life thought much about how those things that I was making might fit into the rest of the world. My art experience up to that point had been about me wanting to make things, not about other people wanting to acquire art objects. I suppose it had something to do with my upbringing - there were no handmade or art objects in my family home and I probably hadn't internalized that other people did have them. I don't know how common my experience is but I'm willing to bet I have art students every year who've grown up their entire lives without ever having been around art.

So, in a way, I hoped I could show my students the other side of the coin by buying this piece, that there is a marketplace out there, a community of buyers, aficionados and collectors who want to see great work by new and upcoming artists (and established artists too). I realize this was one simple act on my part, and I was probably not responsible for creating any transcendental moments of clarity among the small group traveling with me. But every tiny action adds to the whole and hopefully I at least reinforced some ideas of where their art can go after they make it. I think it's at least as important to think about where your art goes as it is to think about making it. I suppose that's one of the themes running through this blog, too.

Tonight I'm drinking a Quidi Vidi IPA, and I've half filled the stein with blueberries I picked a couple days ago before I poured in the beer. It's a wonderful late summer way to drink a beer.

A Full Spread

I haven't posted in a while due to busyness, but I assure you I do continue to eat. Here is a recent meal for two of vegetarian tacos with fresh made salsa, and green salad with balsamic dressing. Big meals are always a bit of an exercise in eclecticism at my place, as I obviously don't have sets of dishes and I've generally chosen my pots based on their individual aesthetic qualities. That means I don't have pots that fit into any sort of planned functional role, and that many typical utilitarian niches in my kitchen are vacant. For example, I don't have specific salad bowls, or cruets, or serving platters. My meal servings tend to be created in a hodgepodge fashion where the presentation is a function of contingency (whichever dishes happen to be clean) and whim (however I decide to work around the functional shortcomings of my pottery collection). The results, I think, are generally pleasing.

Abandoned Treasures

One of the great pleasures of working in academia is the end of the school year. Not in that "thank goodness it's over" kind of way, although I have to admit I'm not above a certain sense of relief when the middle of April rolls around. What I mean is when the school year is over I get to sort through all the junk and detritus left in the classroom. And when my classroom is a studio (and also by turns a hangout, a kitchen, and very much a home) inhabited by some of the craziest, funnest, most creative people I have ever met I find all sorts of wonderful abandoned things.

Now these things left behind are never the masterpieces, and not the works that students are most proud of. Students always come back for those ones. The things left behind are the failed experiments, the technically misdirected, the pieces that got made in the desperate all-nighter pulled prior to the morning critique. They are the teapot without a lid, the bowl with the unturned foot, the vessel with no obvious purpose. They are a track record of the learning process, mostly dead-ends in an expressive, investigational journey. These are the works with personality, world-worn and abandoned, but still kicking. They are my favourites.

This one here is a cup by Katy Furness. She would be the first to say it's not her best. And she'd be right - I've seen her make some great work. In fact I have another *perfect* one of hers, but I'm posting this one first. It is heavy, has an awkward handle, and I had to grind the daylights out of the bottom of it because it took no small chunk of the kiln shelf with it when it was unloaded. But the shape is a dream. With its mass and small opening it can keep my hot honey lemony beverage warm forever. And if I'm lounging on the couch or in bed I never have to worry about it tipping over when I place it on a soft surface.

These last couple weeks, since the weather's gotten nice, I've begun eating breakfast outside on my tiny deck. I like to take this cup out with me. It deals well with the old uneven boards and isn't likely to have an accident or get dust or other wind-blown debris in it. It's a great pot.

Rainy Monday

It's an awfully miserable late June Monday morning in St. John's, about 7 degrees and pouring rain. It's the kind of morning where I need an extra few minutes and some indulgence to get on with my day. This is the breakfast I've made for myself - it's a bowl half full of green seedless grapes, topped off with hot oats and smothered in real maple syrup. This should do the trick.

The bowl comes from King's Point Pottery. I bought it at the Christmas Craft Fair in St. John's in 2003. It is one of the very first pots that came out of their soda kiln, and as such I feel it has a bit of historical significance. That kiln, built with so much care and passion by Linda and David, is the first and still the only soda kiln in the province. In fact, it's the only reduction kiln of any kind that's ever been in consistent use here, a testament to the vision and ambition of its creators. The bowl is two-toned in that way that only an atmospheric fired pot can be: one side, licked by flame, has a characteristic orange peel surface, while the other, sheltered from the most direct heat, is a speckled grey stony matte.

I use this bowl almost daily and have ever since I acquired it. It has traveled everywhere with me - to Regina, Red Deer, Corner Brook, and the Grey Islands, becoming along the way one of the most useful things I have ever owned. It is always at the front of my cupboard and has been filled with food literally thousands of times. Take a moment to think about that number, because one doesn't have that kind of tactile relationship with just an everyday ho-hum object. I have cradled this pot full of food in my hands almost every single day for ten years. I have washed it, always by hand, each and every time. I have held it to my lips to sip or slurp more times than I could even guess at. I have this type of connection with very few objects, the only other one that comes to mind right now is my beloved bicycle.

Well, enough procrastination, breakfast is done. Off I go into the elements.

Spicy Soup in a Jack Sures Bowl

I want to start off with something special, and this is probably the most special thing I have. It's a bowl by Jack Sures, a legendary artist who taught at University of Regina for decades before retiring in 1999. I remember meeting Jack during my first month in Regina in 2004, and being somewhat intimidated by his reputation. The intimidation became more of a mortifying terror when I got trapped alone in an elevator with him one day. But it all turned out ok, because Jack's a pretty good guy. I went on to do a little studio work him, helped him ring in his 70th with dim sum, and got to know some of his family a bit as well.

Last year I was back in Regina again, this time teaching at the university myself, and Jack was still there. He's a professor emeritus and basically a lifetime artist-in-residence. He's in the studio almost daily, and is perhaps the busiest octogenarian I know. Jack gave me this bowl, though I can't exactly remember why. (Perhaps I helped him load a kiln?) It's one of Jack's classic forms but it's wood-fired in the (at the time) brand new wood kiln they have on campus. There are not a lot of things like this in the world.

I most often use this bowl for soup because it's big and enclosed. I like to make a citrusy, garlicky, savoury concoction that some former roommates of mine had taken to calling Bhopal Disaster or Chemical Burn Soup, on account of its intensely aromatic spiciness. Jack's bowl is the perfect soup bowl - it can hold a full serving with no worries about spilling, and the foot ring is deep enough that the bottom is cool to the touch even when full of boiling liquid. The chopsticks, by the way, are a pair that I carved out of an apple branch a few years ago while living in Corner Brook.