Red Cedar

I really wish I had taken a picture of the bread I made for NYE – because I made the **BEST BREAD EVER** hands down. Even though I cannot get my oven to appropriately hot temperatures (we’re replacing it in the near future) – my sourdough is still winning, and in particular the Smoky Chili bread recipe from the book Sourdough by Sarah Owens – is amazing.

If you would like to see for yourself how great that bread is, you can find the recipe on her corner at thefeedfeed.com and try it for yourself. As soon as I have recovered from all the bread I ate over the weekend, I will be making this recipe again as a sandwich loaf – and then making grilled cheese sandwiches!

I have now made several recipes from Sarah Owens’ book – including the Sun-dried Tomato Shortbread, the Walnut-Quince tea cookies, and the Brooklyn Sourdough bread – and they are all excellent. The book has a great many recipes for bread, with an equal or greater number of recipes for using up sourdough discard (such as crackers, cookies and pastries) – and she focuses on whole grains and keeping sugar low while not creating a weird cult around “healthy eating”. That is, the book is full of tasty and healthful recipes, without any cure-all nonsense. (Can you tell that I’m feeling really done with food gurus these days?)

Over the last several months, Brian and I have been investing in new cookbooks for the first time in our relationship. Although we both love to cook for ourselves and others, we have found the need to purge our collection since coming together – to make space on shelves for other things – and any need for radical experimentation was met by going out to eat in the diverse food jungle that is East Vancouver. But since moving to Gabriola Island, our options have become a bit more limited, and after a full year of living here (and eating at the same two places over and over) we have embarked on upping our cooking game – and so have been deepening our knowledge about Chinese and Indian cuisines, Japanese cooking, and (now) Middle Eastern dishes.

In addition to consulting many splendid recipe books – I’ve also just finished reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat who is both an inspiring cook and an excellent writer. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is not really a cookbook – it’s a technique book – with recipes at the back that allow you to practice the techniques and principles. I have so far only made two of the recipes from the book, but I have been practicing many of her tips regarding properly salting my food while cooking, and heating pans to the right point before adding oil. I plan to read this book again shortly, as I only gleaned the top layer of information from it, and I feel like more reads will lead to a richer understanding the whats and whys of cooking. Oh – and there are wonderful illustrations in this book also – of the helpful kind! I plan to copy some of them on my printer to tape up inside my cupboards for inspired flavour combinations and quick ideas.

For his part, Brian has decided to learn to make cheese – which I think is very smart, given all the bread I’ve been baking and my desire for grilled cheese sandwiches. We made a paneer in the Instant pot a couple of weeks ago (and then made saag paneer with it) – which was our first foray into the world of cheese making, and today Brian has a Gervais on the go which I am eager to try. One thing we have no shortage of here is high-quality raw ingredients between the farm-raised meats and eggs, the organic buyers club for grains and nuts, and all veggies and fruits I preserved in the summer. Our fresh produce is somewhat pricey and not in great shape at the moment – but that *is* the season and it makes me anticipate the return of our CSA box in May that much more.

While I don’t want to *over* eat in 2018 – I do plan to eat well and with whole, nourishing ingredients at the forefront of everything we do. Let 2018 be the year of (homemade) bread and cheese!

Often when I post projects on instagram or facebook that utilize my photos on fabric – I get asked how I print on fabric. There are half a dozen ways to do this – but this method has always worked for me and I haven’t seen it written up elsewhere – though it’s very similar to the freezer paper method. I don’t love the idea of sending waxed paper through my printer and I find this to be a more stable technique. Likewise, you can purchase printable fabric with stabilizers or backing paper – but that really limits your choice in fabric.

What you will need:

• an inkjet printer
• Avery shipping label sheets #8165 – 8.5 x 11
• Plain cotton fabric you wish to print on
• A digital image that you want to print

First off – the Avery labels are the largest size shipping labels – one sheet is one label:

Take your shipping labels and fabric over to the ironing board and iron your fabric flat. Once you have done that, unpeel one of the labels and put it, sticky side down on your fabric. Make sure that it is really stuck onto the fabric, the corners in particular. I usually finish off a piece by flipping it over and ironing it lightly (and on the dry/no steam setting) on the fabric side as well.

Next, trim your fabric from around the edges so that your sheet is a cleanly-trimmed 8.5 x 11 sheet.

Now what you have is fabric with a stiff paper backing, which your inkjet printer will treat like a heavy stock paper. To print on it, put it fabric side down in the printer and then print your image as normal. You can put more than one sheet at a time in the feeder, I usually don’t – because I don’t want to risk fabric/sticker jams which can happen.

I recommend, before printing – that you make some test prints on paper so that you can see what your image is going to look like on the fabric. If you are using a plain cotton fabric, your image will print identically to what you see on the blank paper.

Once your fabric is printed, peel off the sticker back:

Iron your fabric on the dry setting again – several times to get it nice and hot. This will heat-set the ink which allows the fabric to be washed without losing the print.

You can print in colour just the same – note that the ink comes out a bit less crisp on fabric so you might want to saturate your images more in the prepping process.

And yes, it is that simple.

(Note – the fabric I used for these samples was dyed with berries which is why it is pink – that has nothing to do with the printing process.)

Autumn moonlight

–a worm digs silently

into the chestnut

Basho