Baptism by Mandoline

Sarah, meet India; India, Sarah.

my flavor base

One of my morning rituals is watching Sarah Carey's Everyday Food video that comes via email. I love her fresh, shoot from the hip style of cooking easy elegant meals and it inspires me to cook delicious food even when I've used most of my creative juices elsewhere. Today I started a pot of green lentils and as I peeled my red onion and carrots I realized they were both candidates for eco dye (that's where you come in, India). oooh! Food and color, color and food. Sarah talks about building a flavor base, so I grabbed a silk scarf and started building...first the red onion and carrot (skins and peels), a salad (deep red lettuce leaves from Carlene and Byron Mayes' garden...they call me "Lady Dye", and  purple slaw shavings from a hapless cabbage) and finally a beverage (freshly ground coffee beans). It was after I shaved the lovely purply cabbagy thingies onto the silk that I saw the nubbin from the carrot. Mandoline in hand I sliced one too many slices off the nubbin. I mean, everybody eventually does it, right? The skin graft of the thumb I mean. So as I'm arranging and rolling another organic colorant found its way into the piece. Blud. Everyone is always trying to get blood out of fabric, so why not put it in? That's what makes it art, right? A little of one's lifeblood.

close up of cabbage, beans and lifeblood

As I bundled, I mulled over how to apply heat. Realizing that everything in the bundle was on our daily menu, I decided to put it in the microwave...not my dye nuker out in the shed

but the actual kitchen wave. I hit the 30 second button and let it sit for a minute as I was watching my lentils come to a boil (ABP, right Sarah), felt for temp and repeated four more times with resting periods in between. Now my lentils were happily boiling, so I wrapped the bundle of silk and veggies in plastic wrap, gave it one more zap and carried it out to my studio thinking it might smell kind of funny in the house. But no. In fact, it smelled so good that I thought Sarah had followed me to the studio. As the fragrance wafted towards Monk, he started to get up for his morning meal, checking me out to see if I was now serving in the studio instead of his usual place in kitchen.

I'm posting this on Tuesday. How long do you think I can wait till I unwrap? Hopefully I'll forget about it for the rest of the week. Yeah, right. Stay tuned.

gud enuf 2 eet