Chris Hubbard's Heaven and Hell Car

it is festival time right now!  this weekend i went out to the farmington depot days and chris hubbard had his heaven and hell car there for viewing.  lots to look at!

romanesco cauliflower soup

i always love getting our weekly box of fresh vegetables from our farm.  this week was especially exciting when we opened up our box and saw this amazing romanesco cauliflower.   last night we made some soup with it.  one of many wintry soups to come.

recipe follows

ingredients

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 large onion

2 stalks of celery

1 large head of romanesco cauliflower (or regular if you can't find it)

2 small or 1 large potato, skinned

4 cups of vegetable or chicken broth

3 cloves of garlic

salt and pepper to taste

directions

-dice the onion and celery and saute in olive oil on low for 5 minutes or onions are translucent

-cut the potato, cauliflower, into small pieces, place in soup pot.

-add all ingredients and cook until tender.

-cool

-puree in a  handheld immersion blender or regular blender until smooth

-enjoy alongside a warm baguette

Holiday windows!

the other day rebecca came in and painted our windows for the holidays.  i think that the holidays are here!

leaves are falling

well, my sea of gold in the backyard has largely turned to brown or blown away,but yesterday there was a lovely fog to take its place.  ever changing beauty in the country.

country windows

our friend hope lives out in the country, across the road from nancy and kat & susan.

we visited a few weeks ago and were taken with her sunny kitchen windows, full of rooted specimens & other findings...

we asked hope a few questions about her house and all the lovelies that line her sills:

- how long have you lived in your house?

one year and one half

- which direction do your kitchen windows face?

South

- did the cuttings and specimens move with you to this house? or did you begin your collection of cuttings and specimens because of these great windows?

Many of the cuttings came with me from San Francisco and some came from Etsy. The rest? Our garden herbs. Because of the windows, it continually grows and shifts.

- anything else you would like to share about your lovely kitchen?

Our kitchen used to be a porch but was enclosed by Nancy and made into a kitchen. (we feel so lucky to live in a Nancy house!) It sank a tiny bit lower than the rest of the house when it settled from it's move here so it feels like a really special place - the windows, especially. Because it's sunken only a tiny bit, there is a shift in the architecture that makes the room feel very separate. It's so open and amazing. Easily our favorite room in the house.

hope is an artist, designer, curator, and writer; her *new* husband Stewart is a stand-up comedian.

- here are some of their upcoming projects:

" I'm currently working on a project about a quilter and freed slave from Winterville named Harriet Powers, who has two quilts in public collections at the Smithsonian and M of Fine Arts Boston. Her grave wasn't found until the last few years, and we learn more about her every day. Getting ready to exhibit the project at ATHICA in 2012. Also, my botanical drawings of medicinal herbs will be on view at the Botanical Gardens in 2012.

Stewart will be one of 3 artists featured in a documentary about comics who go on the road in late 2012, by Susan Seizer, an anthropologist at Indiana University Bloomington. He's also performing in Aspen, CO as a winner of the Aspen Laff Festival. "

and,

did we mention that hope and stewart just got married? on 11.11.11...

chanterelle and leek gravy

we hope that everyone had a great thanksgiving!  we sure ate well this year!  i have been so busy lately so i loved spending the entire day in the kitchen, cooking away.  one of my favorite things that i made was a chanterelle and leek gravy.

this year we harvested lots and lots of chanterelle mushrooms, too many to eat.  we thankfully dried a few jars full and now get to eat chanterelles all year round.  if you don't have dried chanterelles in your kitchen, you can also find dried and sometimes fresh chanterelles at your local health food store.  I had a beautiful bundle of leeks from a local farm and they made a great pairing.

click below to read the recipe

ingredients

3 Tbsp organic unsalted butter + 1 Tbsp for leeks

2 Tbsp AP flour

1/2 cup dried chaterelles

1 cup water ( you may need to add more)

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

a bundle of leeks

directions

-make a

roux

with the 3 Tbsp butter and 3 Tbsp flour

-re constitute mushrooms by simmering dried ones in the water.  sprinkle some salt

-thinly slice the white part of the leek and 1 inch of the green part

-sautee the leeks in 1 Tbsp butter

-combine all ingredients including the stock from the mushrooms

-using a hand held immersion blender, puree the gravy until smooth.

enjoy on mashed potatoes....or whatever else you put gravy on!

holiday crafting

i love making holiday crafts.  this year i have been making some card board wreaths and i love they way they are turning out.

rural studio, hale county, alabama

it is hard to get more rural than hale county, alabama. well-known, thanks to the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as well as the photographs of William Christenberry, hale county is also known for being the home of rural studio. founded in 1993, rural studio is a branch of the architecture program of auburn university, one that was founded to give its students working knowledge of the design-build process, but also one that would serve the needs of the surrounding community.

a group of us r.wooders visited rural studio 13+years ago and we helped build the foundation of the bath house shown above (the brick and metal building- i drove the bobcat that held the mixed concrete, hee hee). back then the super shed was just framework; the concept of liveable student housing ‘pods’ just an idea, an aspiration. now multiple ‘pods’ reside underneath and the shed creates a large covered area for communing. when we visited back then, we were lucky enough to spend time with the late samuel mockbee, one of the founders of the program and it’s enigmatic, inspiring leader. utilizing salvaged and recycled materials before it was cool, sambo- as he was known- empowered his students by not only giving them the responsibility of designing structures, but also by allowing them to actually build them. in doing so, the students’ ideas of architecture were physically manifested before their own eyes, by their own hands. they had to work through the problems their designs created, but they also saw firsthand the beauty of a successful, completed concept. but more so, their projects had the additional benefit of helping real people- either by providing needed shelter for a family or just a place for the community at large to gather.

these were some of the early rural studio projects. the butterfly house and the glass chapel are both located in mason’s bend, a community that is rural with a capital ‘R’- located off a dirt road off a dirt road off a dirt road, etcetera. when there, you feel like you are at the end of the earth. the butterfly house is passive solar, and the glass chapel’s windows are fabricated from cast-off car windshields.

the carpet house is made of stacks of carpet scraps- keeping them out of the landfill, but also contributing a high insulation value to the structure. the ‘crushed can’ tower to the side holds the bedroom with a view of the sky and stars.

community projects are the main focus of the program now. the perry lakes pavilion (shown above) and related outbuildings rise up out of the landscape rather than feeling placed there irreverently.

affordable, the houses have always been. many of them were built from donations and/or grants. this home here is from a series of what they call ’20K’ houses- all built for under $20,000. attempting to serve as an antidote to design-less affordable housing, they are each unique.

even though sambo passed away many years ago, the program thrives. a visit to the area will reward the traveler with views of beautiful, ingenious architecture, but you will also feel the power of such a deep commitment to service & community. we will end our (brief) virtual tour, here at the subrosa chapel.

built by sambo’s daughter in his memory, based on his own sketches, it is an underground open-air chamber nestled in a hillock behind a 19th home. welded spires reach to the sky, and a shallow well catches water below. go and here and contemplate what you have seen. or, as mockbee proclaimed, “proceed and be bold”.

http://www.ruralstudio.org/