Janine and I were invited to the Powerhouse Museum last week for a special announcement event. There was free wine and a meal, so of course we went along. 🙂 The Powerhouse Museum recently received a substantial bequest, It was announced that 3 glass artists and 3 ceramic artists have been awarded the inaugural Willoughby bequest award.These artists were chosen by the Powerhouse Museum curators to be included in the museums collection because they are or have been making a contribution to Australian artistic culture through their research and creative work. I am very lucky to be one of the 3 ceramic artists chosen. Among all the Australian potters, I can’t yet reconcile that I am one of the 3 lucky ones chosen. It was quite a shock to me I must say. I can only guess that it is because of my 20 years of consistent research and exhibitions enquiring into the nature of native sericite porcelain around the world? I have known about the award for a couple of weeks, but was unable to say anything about it until now, as there was a media embargo until the presentation awards ceremony last night. I’m humbled, surprised and elated to be chosen. The other 2 ceramic artists chosen are; Renee So, a ceramic artist born in Hong Kong, raised in Australia, and now working in London. Nicolette Johnson is a ceramic artist born in London and raised in Texas, but living in Australia now for 5 years.The 3rd ceramic artIst is me. Wow! How could this happen to me? I don’t know! I don’t have a social media presence on facebook, twitter of watsap. I don’t go to openings and don’t do any networking. So I still don’t know how they found out about me and my research. It’s a mystery to me.The other two ceramic artists are young, talented, hip and sassy women, making terrific cutting edge work, who are winning awards and being represented internationally. On the other hand, I probably represent the old fashioned approach to making pots. Fossicking, digging, processing, then ageing the mica based stones that make my work from. It’s not really done that much – if at all, anymore. I grow most of my green food in my garden and orchards. I also grow most of the wood fuel that I use to fire my wood fired kiln and the kitchen stove and home wood heater. I try and do every step in every part of these processes myself, and do it sustainably.
The selection of such varied and different artists certainly illustrates a depth of research and breadth of scope in the curator, Eva Czernis-Ryl’s decision making process. I’m very grateful and pleased to be honoured. I really hope that I can make something that lives up to this onerous responsibility of receiving my small part in this amazing bequest award. It’s such an honour!I did notice that there are 3 men and 3 women, 3 glass and 3 ceramic artists, with Adelaide, Brisbane, Wollongong, Mittagong, Canberra and London represented, spreading the selection around. Because this is called the Barry Willoughby ‘Inaugural’ Bequest Award, it hints at the possibility that there may be other awards at some time in the future…However, I got the impression that it will not be a regular event. Best wishes Steve
I was recently in China doing some research. I have written a little bit about that, intermittently, in the last month or so. While I was there, I arranged to get my hands on some new and different sericite samples. These have now just arrived here last week and I have done my first tests with them.
I now have 4 different Chinese sericites to compare.
Although it isn’t immediately obvious from the image above. If you look closely, there are 4 different colours of rock samples from top to bottom, white, cream, grey and pale buff. They all look more or less white, but they each have various tints or shades of colour to their whiteness. They all do have one big thing in common. They all throw badly, the palest ones being the least plastic and most difficult. They feel a lot like my local Mittagong porcelain stone, only better behaved.
I felt like I’d gone all the way around the world and come home again when I threw these tests. They felt so familiar.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the results fired. I had a bit of trouble with the usual shrinkage and drying cracking problems, but I did get some of them through successfully. But I lost quite a few. Still, nothing that I’m not used to, and I’m getting good at recycling the turnings and failures.
I almost filled the tray on my old wooden kick wheel with turnings after trimming just 12 small bowls. I must be removing at least half of the weight of the original material to get them thin enough to look and feel like porcelain. I aim for 2mm at the rim and 3 mm lower down, graduating 5mm at the foot. This tapered wall thickness allows the best translucency at the rim and higher up the pot, while retaining sufficient strength to hold the pot up against gravity while it sits at 1300oC in the kin to develop enough glass in the body to be come translucent.
If I’ve done it right, the whole finished, fired, ceramic mass, has the correct quantity of primary and secondary mullite crystals to glue it all together, while becoming glassy enough to allow plenty of light to pass through.
Too glassy and/or too thin and it slumps. Too thick or not fired high enough and it stands up straight, but isn’t very translucent. It’s a bit of a fine line to tread.
not too bad.
As I sit and grind away at this damp, ground-up rock dust with my tungsten carbide tools, I realise that I’m truely happy doing just this. There is a gusty wind outside, but I’m in here sitting in the sun and I don’t want for anything more at this moment. This is fun. I can’t wait to get them into the kiln.
It has all the promise of something special about to happen.
After I had such a terrible firing a couple of weeks ago. I got stuck in and remade all the work. I’ve filled the shelves and had 2 solar fired biscuit firings and I am almost ready for the third. Then I can pack the wood fired kiln again. Hopefully this time with more success.
I had slaked down all the turnings from the last work session and made half of this work from the recycled sericite bodies. I have made test batches of 5 different sericite this time round. I have 2 Chinese minerals, 1 Korean, one English and one Australian in this batch. Although strictly speaking, the local one is a complex mixture of Illite, kaolinite, quartz and felspar.
I’m always looking for something that I don’t know, so the search is a bit difficult as I’m working semi-blind. I know more or less what I want and how to achieve it. After all, I have been doing this research for the past 40 years and more. But getting what I consider excellent results is always elusive and difficult. It doesn’t help when the kiln shelves break and collapse… Still, I’m over that and all the new work is made and drying. I’m just turning the last of the throwing today.
Sericite is funny stuff. It isn’t plastic like other clays, it’s quite short in most cases and has to be coaxed along to get any height in the form. I learnt to throw the inside of the form as I want it, leaving a thick wall to retain the form without it squatting. I then have to turn quite a bit of material off the outside to realise the finished form from the thick lump at the base.
Although sericite isn’t plastic, it still shrinks quite a lot and has a terrible tendency to crack in drying where it is thick. I have developed a few techniques to cope with theses peculiarities. I’ve learn’t to throw everything on batts, as lifting the pot with my fingers causes a memory distortion in the body that shows up later in drying. I’ve learn to ‘polish’ the out side of the clay after I have finished throwing, to seal any possible defects or weak spots that might start a crack during the early stages of drying and stiffening. I have also learnt to turn the bases in stages. Thinning out the clay as soon as it is stiff enough. This stuff can’t be turned like ‘normal’ clay based bodies. It has to be very firm, almost dry to get a smooth finish. If turned too early, it chips and tears, making an awful mess of the fine surface. It’s a bit like cutting soft goats cheese, it just tears.
Trimming the base of this pot almost bone dry
I’m getting better success rate these days with each variation and improvement of these techniques. It’s a little frustrating to loose so many pots, but they slake down quickly and can be stiffened in plaster tubs out side, then re-thrown within a week.
It would be better to leave the body to ‘age’ in a cool dark place for a month or two, but with so many variations of sericite porcelain bodies in constant testing and development. I’d loose track. As it is I really have to concentrate and keep very good records, marking every bag with a permanent marker, identifying every bucket of turnings in the same way and carrying this over to the slaked recycled material in the buckets and in the plaster tubs. It’s quite a paper trail of provenance, keeping track of it all. I also keep a daily diary in the workshop of what I’m throwing and what I’m throwing it out of. Every pot gets inscribed with the batch of body and later identified with oxide as to which glaze I used. I also keep log books for the glaze and the body ball mills, so that I know what I made, the date it was done, and what it was made from. I always seem to have a dozen different batches on the go at any one time and they all need their own bucket and bag storage space. It’s organised chaos.
I’m nothing if not thorough. I have to be. With over 3,000 glaze tests and hundreds of clay body tests. I need to keep track. I really want to make simple, elegant, beautiful things. But things with a particular character that I admire. Just a little bit ‘damaged’ or altered by the process of their making. Perhaps I should say ‘enhanced’ by its process and journey, plus the unique quality of its material. I like my pots to have a story embedded in their form and surface. I can pick them up years later and ‘read’ that story. I like that.
I’ve just made a few more white tenmoku bowls. They are slightly bigger, fuller and rounder, more generous in feeling, less austere. I haven’t finished turning them yet. They still need more work over the next few days, but I have high hopes for them.
Unfortunately high hopes are not enough. It’s long term, steady, pains taking, thorough and often boring, consistent research that makes progress for me.
We visit a potter in the Longquan region who specialises in the dark bodied celadon wares of antiquity, but not guan ware. However, he has been and still is a great fossicker and has the most amazing collection of authentic old Chinese shards that I have ever been lucky enough to sit and handle. It’s like being invited into the back room of a museum by the curator and allowed to see all the little gems that never make their way out in the glass cases.
A lot of these shards look to me to have been excavated from out of river beds or streams. Many of them appear to have been water ground on the edges. I see this exact quality on my pots after I have tumbled them in the ball mill to ‘age’ them.
It’s the white impregnated crackle of the crazing lines that give it away, and the soft matted surface, also the rounded edges on some pieces. It all fits. I saw pieces like this in the museum collection in Malaysia. They have a whole section of pots of Chinese origin that were recovered from ship wrecks off their coast, by archaeologists, in recent decades.
Pots that were packed inside other larger pots were left with their glazes largely intact, but pots that were spread out from the cargo hold and scattered around on the sea bed in the sand, were completely relieved of most of their glaze surface except in the crevices around the foot ring. I saw one pot that was only half exposed because it was retained inside something else. The exposed surface was cleared of its glaze, just as if it had been sand blasted.
This private Longquan collection also had a lot of shards that had split, shattered, and for want of a better word ‘delaminated’. That is, the pot had been split down the centre of the clay body, more or less evenly between both layers of glaze, when the thick coating of glaze on each side of the pot exerted massive pressure on the glassy body from each side. The glassy nature of this dense, vitreous, proto-porcelanous clay body was forced to seperate, or shatter, down the centre into two parts. I suffer this exact problem in my work occasionally.
It’s somehow reassuring that the Song Potters of ancient China experienced the same issues that I am grappling with. They managed to solve all these problems in the thousand years that they have been potting. I have just 50 years. I need to work harder.
The problem shows itself, if or when, I apply the rock glaze celadon glaze too thickly over the body. The problem isn’t apparent immediately, but only shows itself after firing, as the difference in the coefficients of expansion and contraction is expressed differently in body and glaze on cooling. At around 230 oC the exotic ‘cristobalite’ form of silica, that is often created in the clay body at high temperatures, undergoes a beta-alpha phase change and shrinks 2 or 3%. This sudden shrinkage at such a low temperature exerts such tremendous pressure on the body-glaze interface, that something has to give and sometimes the pot shatters into pieces. However, in this specific case, the glaze shrinks more than the body and the glaze tears the brittle body asunder.
There is a dramatic variation of this problem that occurs when the glaze is applied to the raw clay pot when it is bone dry. If the pot is glazed on both side simultaneously, the water based glaze entering the pores of the clay is drawn in by capillary attraction. This forces air in towards the centre of the body of the pot. There is such a build up of pressure that the pot can explode with a quite loud ‘POP’! A piece sometimes flies off, or at other times a coin shaped disc flings open, left hanging, with a slight hinge on one side, allowing the air pressure to escape. It really shocked me the first time this happened to me, when I was a student at art school, as I was still holding the pot in my hand, having just lifted it out of the glaze bucket. The solution is to glaze only one side of the pot, let it dry and then glaze the other side. Thus allowing the air to escape harmlessly each time, out from the other side of the surface.
Guan ware on the other hand, has more or less the same glaze, applied even thicker on occasions, but the shattering problem is avoided in this traditional ware because the body is porous and friable. The porosity of the clay allows the cracks that form due to the glaze cooling stresses to dissipate into the porous cavities and terminate quickly without passing straight through the body, as they do in vitrified and glassy porcelaneous clays.
A shard of guan-like crackle glaze.
There is such a lot of chemistry and physics to be learnt in making ceramics! I was at the Royal Society meeting last month and heard the speaker tell the audience that in science, there is only ‘physics’ and everything else is ‘stamp collecting’ or applied physics. A mathematician claimed that there is only ‘Pure’ mathematics and physics and chemistry is just applied maths. It seemed to me that there was some agreement that biology was stamp collecting — except from the biologists. Perhaps psychologists could claim that without ‘mind’, there can be no maths?
Anyway, what would I know, I’m just a stamp collector! A stamp collector who applies chemistry, maths and physics in a creative way to ceramics. I also apply stamps to my pots to identify them as mine.
The potter who had collected all the shards, had a big new concrete double story workshop. He was the leading student of the best student of a very important local potter in this region. Sort of 3rd generation celadon maker. I got the impression that the property that he workshop was built on was his parents land. Whoever’s land it was, it has a beautiful tea plantation covering it. The new workshop has a full wall of glass looking out onto the rows of tea.
A view to die for. So beautiful! I wouldn’t mind a view like that when I’m throwing pots.
We get to spend a day in the Longquan Celadon Museum. I am travelling with my friends Len Smith and Robert Linigan. I am very interested in these old Celadon pots, particularly from my point of view of the inspiration that I can gain from the best pieces and equally importantly from what i can learn from the shards and broken sections. There is so much to glean from being able to see inside the clay body and looking at the interface between the body/glaze layers.
I love these rich and sensuous fatty celadons, guans and ‘ru’-like glazes. These are some of my favourite pots. It’s not too surprising that I like to try my hand a making glazes with this kind of influence. I wish that I could make something as good as this. It’s a quest.
In particular, I am keen to make my clay bodies and glazes as authentically as possible, by digging up all my own minerals, rocks and stones, then mixing them with ashes from my fireplace, where I burn the wood from my own forrest. It’s a complete commitment to my philosophy of self-reliance, not just in ceramics, but in my life. This coupled with a keen interest in the soft delicate beauty of ceramics the way I envision it. Not just the look, but also the feel of the surface. Equally important to me is the tactile impression -‘feel’ and balance of the pot in my hands, as well as how it will function when I eat or drink out of it.
My favourite coffee bowl at the moment, for my morning bowl of coffee, is a small white tenmoku bowl that is very translucent and very white, made from one of the Chinese sericite bodies that I have experimented with. It gives me a lot of pleasure just seeing it and handling it, even before I drink the coffee from it. It is beautifully balanced, only slightly weighted to the lower half for stability. It looks and feels gorgeous. I’m particularly fond of the slightly out-turned rim that is an essential quality of the tenmoku form. I’ve been using it for a year now and I’m still not bored with it.
Some of the unique qualities that I find I really engage with, are all its ‘faults’ – if that is what they are. I prefer to think of them as being part of its unique character. You can’t buy this bowl from Aldi on special for $2. Their white bowls may look superficially similar, but this pot has a story embedded in it that is only very slowly revealed over time as you get to know it.
For instance, because I’m not a very good potter, I don’t go to all the trouble of trying to make things perfect. Simply because I realised long ago that perfection only exists in the mind of the beholder, therefore can never be achieved, so why bother. Better to make things with character. This bowl for instance has a slightly mottled surface to the glaze, it has a very gentle undulation where the very thin clay body saturated during dipping and the glaze didn’t adhere perfectly. I have come to love this slight quirk of its appearance more than the very smooth glazed surfaces that I can sometimes make. This is a special part of this pots own history of its making.
Another point of interest for me is the hint of the remainder of the clay slurry on my hands left embedded in the surface of the clay after I finished throwing the pot on the wheel. I left it there as a reminder of the touch of my fingers. It is almost imperceptible, but it remains. I wasn’t aware of it presence initially, but it slowly became apparent to me as I got to use it, handle it and wash it up often. Not all my pots have this effect left in them, sometimes I wipe the inner surface clean with a fine textured sponge. At other times, I turn the inside of the pot with a trimming tool when I turn the foot. It all depends on how I am feeling about the pot as I make it. I never quite know how I am going to feel about what I make on the day. So its a surprise to me to be reunited with my own pots, post firing, and to re-discover their special qualities.
I can just see this swipe of my fingers in the image above. You won’t find that in a pressure cast or jigger-jollied bowl from IKEA.
This bowl also has a single iron spot in the glaze, just below the rim. It’s a bit like a beauty spot. I didn’t put it there, but I’m OK with it. This is a real object of beauty and interest. It isn’t perfect. It’s just gorgeous. It also shows my two stamp impressions. One is my initials, the other is the workshop stamp.
Finally there is the total lack of an obvious foot ring until you turn the bowl over and look underneath. I hid the foot recess inside the bowl form to minimise the weight, so as to keep this delicate bowl as light as is possible, but still have an elevated form that lifts it up off the table in a continuous elegant curved line. This is not true tenmoku form, but I think the it is better on this pot.
In the Longquan Museum we saw a lot of shards with loads chipped edges, shattered rims and broken bases. I loved this part of the display. It was all real. Many of the perfect examples had long ago been taken away to other larger collections, as this is only a smaller regional Museum. What was left in this Museum were all the other pots. I learnt a lot form looking inside the shards to see the very same qualities, problems and faults that I get in my work, using very similar materials and and almost identical techniques.
What I found particularly reassuring was that I am not alone. Someone else, 800 years ago also went through all these technical trials and difficulties to arrive in a similar place. Ultimately, there is the reward of the occasional lovely piece that survives.
This bowl is lovely, but what others probably don’t see, but I did, was what, at first glance, appears to the an incised line inside the bowl. That is easy to see, but it is in fact not an incised line, but a remnant of its making that appeared in the kiln during firing and wasn’t there when it was packed in the setting. It was formed in the fire. That wavy line is the raw glaze surface drying out and cracking slightly. The crack then doesn’t completely heal over when the glaze surface melts, but remains as a line in the glass. Perfectly fused, but hinting at its life before it became ceramic. I get it often in my glazed surfaces. It used to annoy the hell out of me, as there was no way that I could see to prevent it happening, if you fire long and low to make that particular satiny surface, it’s just what sometimes happens. If you fire hot, it disappears in the fluid melt at top temperature. This ‘scar’ is a relic of its process and making. I now look on these healed over cracks as an authentic product of the unique process that I indulge in.
Nothing is perfect. Nothing lasts. Nothing is ever finished, and that includes learning.
I’ve been away for a while travelling and researching in China. It was a very interesting trip and I will have some stories and images to write about here in the next few days and weeks, as soon as I can get around to it. I have been very busy these last few days, since returning home, doing a number of things. All of which needed doing all at once as soon as I was back.
We had some terrible storms and gales while I was away, so there were a couple of days welding the chain saw, wheel barrow and rake, getting the driveway clear and the various fallen limbs off the fences etc.
We had one really big she-oak snap in half and fall, but not quite to the ground, so it was left hanging precariously until I got home. A definite no-go zone for all and sundry, until I could get in there and cut it down to make it safe. Janine and I then cut it up into fire wood sized small pieces to clear the space again. A big job and I’m always relieved when events like this are resolved without damage to property or me while I’m in there and under the branches cutting the wedge out to encourage it to fall into a safe place.
It all went well, but it makes me realise that I’m getting a bit older now and I have think these things through property before I start. It’s probably called risk analysis or some other clever name these days, but it’s what I have always done. Pace it out, measure the space, asses the weight and any bias in the load on the trunk. I want to do this safely.
Sometimes I put a 13mm. steel cable around the tree and winch it over in the right direction using my slow and steady ‘come-along’ hand winch. This tree wasn’t so tall any more, so I just used the tractor to winch it along with a suitably heave load chain. Needless to say, that with a wedge cut out, a slice in the rear and the tractor pulling it along, it fell precisely in the right spot.
I insist on working alone when I’m doing dangerous jobs like this. Any other person on the site is one more risk. The chickens always come running when they hear the chainsaw start up, so luckily for me and particularly for them, they didn’t get to where I was working before I had it felled.
So now all that heavy work is doneAll the wood cut and stacked in the wood shed, it is time to give the vegetable garden a bit of a work over with plantings of spring vegetables, seeds and seedlings to get it all ready for the summer. The soil temperature is almost up to 15oC, so a good time to get started. The asparagus is up and we have had a few meals already. That’s a good sign that spring has sprung.
I have been pulling out wheelbarrow loads of red ‘Flanders’ poppies. The come up wild, like weeds everywhere that the soil is disturbed. I love them, they are so delicate, beautiful and very short lived. Each flower wilts the day it is picked. They are only good for one day in a vase. However, they come up absolutely anywhere and everywhere that I have gardened or worked the soil the previous year. Of course that usually means in the garden beds. We like them so much that we usually have a lot of them overwintering in the fallow beds.
Well, the time has come to thin them out. I remove them from each part of the garden as I need the space to plant out the new vegetables. I leave as many as I can along the edges and in the paths. They will flower all through the spring into early summer and set seed in the autumn to replenish themselves again for next year.
Beauty and frugal practicality in balence. The cycle will go on, as long as we’re here to keep tilling the soil and creating that fertile environment.
It’s another blowy, blustering cool day, with a wind that is bringing down a few branches. Luckily, it was quite still yesterday evening, so we decided to burn off our pile of garden, orchard and vineyard prunings. We manage to assemble quite a pile of these prunings during the autumn pruning period. We pile them up to dry out for a couple of months and then burn off the pile at the end of winter, just before the spring fire bans come into force. In the past we have waited for a cool damp night after rain, but it just hasn’t rained at all for months, so the pile just sat there. Last night was forecast to be damp with the possibility of a slight shower. That was good enough, After dinner we went down to the burn pile site, next to the Pantryfield garden and lit it up. It was a very slow quiet burn that took 3 hours to get through all the sticks, twigs and branches. By 11 pm it was just a pile of white ash and a few glowing embers. It’s a good feeling to get the fire hazard out of the way before summer, otherwise it would have to sit there for another 8 months. Fortunately it started to rain ever so gently later in the night, just half a mm. in the rain gauge this morning, but enough to settle it all down.
Today a fierce, gusty wind has settled in, so we are back inside, after doing all our jobs, collecting fire wood and stacking it inside ready for tonights fires, watering the small seedlings and cleaning up. Now the sun is fully up, we drove the car down to the high amperage charging station down by the kiln factory. The kiln shed has 3 phase power installed, so we placed the fast charger down there, as there is no electricity in the car port. The kiln shed roof also has 6kW of solar panels on its roof, so direct access to the solar power for charging the car and firing the kiln. As we’re inside, we decide to deal with kitchen duties. We held our second marmalade making workshop at the weekend, so there are numerous small jars of marmalade to be washed and dried , then labeled and stored away in the pantry. We made 3 batches, each slightly different, but all of them centred on Seville oranges, of which we have a beautiful crop this year. Hard to fathom, as we are currently in a drought. But we have been watering the citrus grove regularly.
Each large boiler, makes between 7 to 10 jars of marmalade, depending on the size of the jars. Our very good friends Toni and Chris turned up and the afternoon eventually wound it’s way into evening and dinner.
The other job on the kitchen list is to make a stock out of the bones left over from a duck that we have in the fridge. I start by browning some onion in olive oil, then garlic and water. Our organic garden garlic is getting close to the end now as the winter peters-out. What we have left is stored, hung up, outside on the back verandah in long plaits. This is starting to sprout now, but it still gives us the good garlic flavour. The new crop of garlic is filling out in the garden, but is still 3 months away from maturity.
I add water, the bones, a lemon, chillies, the very last of our late season tomatoes that we picked 6 weeks ago when they were still a bit green, as the bushes had been burnt off by the frost, and some pepper. After simmering for an hour, I pass it thorough a sieve to separate the bones and mirepoix from the stock. I add a bottle of ‘fume’ wine and return the clear stock to the stove to reduce. It happens in among all the other jobs, slowly and steadily, filling the kitchen with a warm, delicious fragrance that is so welcoming on a cold windy day. Domestic jobs can be really engaging and fulfilling sometimes. This is one of those times.You’ll notice that I don’t write too much about cleaning the grease trap! Our enigmatic friend Annabelle Sloujé sent me this image that she saw somewhere, after I wrote about making a beef bone stock last week. Best wishes from Steve who is making the most of winter – while it lasts.
We have just emerged from a sudden cold spell. We were glad to find a few jobs to do inside for a while until the cold winds blew themselves out. Our good friend Annabelle Sloujé lives a little bit farther south of here and a lot higher up, she had a low of -9oC, I’m glad we live here in Camelot where it doesn’t get so cold. My friends in Korea report a range of -35 to + 38oC. They probably think that I’m a wimp for talking about a winters day of -1 oC. They possibly think that -1 is quite warm, in comparison.
However cold or hot it is, we found things to do out of the wind. I shelled nuts and Janine made a cake from the last of last years hazelnuts that she milled into flour. It’s one of those recipes with reduced flour and usually almond meal. The Lovely down loaded it from the internet, but as we didin’t have any almonds left to shell, she used all hazelnut meal instead. All recipes are just a guide. Living where we do, we have learnt to compromise and use what we have rather than drive for an hour to get something specific. We save all our jobs and shopping list for that weekly trip.
Glazed with melted 85% dark chocolate and a few chunks of chopped crystallised ginger. It was just right for cold weather and didn’t last too long.
For my part, I made a beef marrow bone and vegetable stock over a couple of nights, using the free heat from the wood fired kitchen stove after we cooked dinner.
I make stock like this a few times each year, especially during the colder months when the stove is always on. I have come accustomed to always having our own personal, giant, frozen stock cube in the freezer. We don’t own a dedicated freezer, so we only freeze what can’t be preserved by other means like vacuum sealing ‘Vacola’ jars. The special conditions required for safe preserving in vacuum jars is that the food must be boiled in the jar to seal it, so that counts out pesto. Also, it is best if the food is naturally acidic like fruits and vegetables like tomatoes. Meat can be preserved this way, but it is recommended that the vacuum sealing be done twice to make sure that it is perfectly safe. A bit of a bother.
After the cold spell blew itself out, we have had a few glorious cloudless sunny days with no wind. I took the opportunity to move my chair out into the sun and get a little vitamin D and finish decorating my last few pots doing scraffitto, carving into the surface with a sharp tool. This will show the pooling character of my local granite blue celadon style glaze when fired in the reduced solar fired electric kiln.
When the poppies arrive, spring is almost here!We still have 2 weeks before spring is officially here, but we have been enjoying a nice steady display of the red Flanders poppies for a few weeks now. The night time frosts are still continuing, but the poppies don’t seem to mind.
They brighten the kitchen breakfast table. The shaft of early morning light illuminates their semi-translucent fragility. They only last such a short time in the vase, but they make us happy while they are here.As it is still winter, we have been enjoying all the varied brassicas that are maturing in the garden. We picked a gigantic cauliflower and had to think up a variety of ways of eating it. Fresh picked, we like it best cut into small florets and dipped in a little mayonnaise and eaten raw. We also add it to stir fry and risottos, but the classic has to be cauliflower au gratin. I have to make it at least once each winter. I melt a little bit of butter and add in some flour, for us, that happens to be wholemeal. I make a roux using approximately equal parts of each, but I only cook it to thicken it, I don’t want it to colour up, so I only cook it off on a gentle heat and soon add some milk a little at a time. The first few drops instantly thickens it to a stiff paste. I have to work at dissolving the first few drops of milk into the mucilage, as it is adsorbed, and the mixture loosens, I continue to add the milk slowly while stirring to avoid lumps. I only want a pale sauce for the gratin. I think that it looks most appropriate with the pale cauliflower.
I’m a lazy cook, I don’t have any bread crumbs and I’m not about to start making some, and I certainly won’t ever be buying any ready-mades, so as soon as it comes to a slow, gentle bubbling boil, I add in my steamed cauliflower and I stir in a little grated cheese, with a little more added on top, and the whole lot then goes under the grill.
It’s a lovely warming veggie winter dinner. We have been in to have dinner at our sons restaurant, Bistro Sociale in Bowral, <http://www.bistrosociale.com.au>
Always a lovely time, good, interesting food and not too expensive. We almost never eat out in restaurants, but we make an exception for our son. He made a beautiful desert for Janine and our friend Annabelle Sloujé. A prune creme brûlée with fruits and flowers.
Geordie managed to get me a fresh black French truffle recently. The weather has been so dry here. We are in drought, and this has affected the truffle harvest this year. It turns out that the Southern Highlands is a very good place to grow truffles, but not in a drought. Our own truffle trees have not shown any inclination to produce a truffle as yet, but we live in hope. Maybe in the future, if it ever rains?
We managed to get just one small truffle. Since Ted retired and sold his truffiere, we have been cut off from our supply. Geordie has contacts though! So we had truffled eggs for breakfast. You can’t be mean with a truffle. They may be expensive at $1.40 per gram, but it’s best not to think about the cost and just inhale deeply and enjoy. We made scrambled eggs with a little cream whipped in and some fresh grated pepper, and then grated the whole truffle over the top. No point in rationing it out over several meals, such that you never really get the full flavour experience. Just go for it and enjoy it to the max. You only live once.
We have had absolutely no mushrooms come up in our garden this winter. It is just so dry. There is still just enough time, if it rained in the next couple of weeks, we could get lucky.
After storing the truffle in the fridge for a few days with the eggs and rice. We used the rice to make a risotto for dinner. It’s amazing that when I opened the container and poured the rice into the big pan to roast it a little before adding the wine. There was a very noticeable smell of French truffle wafting up to me. Beautiful! It became a winter vegetable risotto.
I added a bottle of our preserved, concentrated, summer tomato, sugo as well. It really fills out the flavour like no other vegetable can.
We are lighting both the wood fired stove in the kitchen and the fire in the lounge room to keep the place moderately warm at night. As the kitchen stove also heats our hot water tank in the winter, it is a necessity. But most importantly, its carbon neutral, as we collect all our kitchen stove wood fuel off our own land, from our own forrest. However, it’s also a beautiful way to cook.
The garden can look a bit barren at this time of year, but there is still plenty to eat. We have all the brassicas doing very well with the frosty nights. Cabbages, cauliflowers, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and kohlrabi all bountiful and gorgeous. We also have leeks and celery, and we have just finished off the last of the autumn/winter crop of carrots.
Of course we always have spring onions and lettuces for salads when the days are suitably sunny and warm, as is often the case these days in the global emergency. Winters as we knew them in the 70’s are over. No more snow and many fewer frosts that are much milder in intensity. Fruit trees are flowering now just past mid winter and not in spring. Everything has advanced about 4 to 6 weeks earlier over our 43 years here.
peaches
almonds
blue berries
At this time of year, the days are getting longer and the soil temperature is just starting to warm up a little with the soil just starting to hit 10oC. The asparagus is responding to this minuscule change and starting to sprout. We have our first couple of spears poking their heads up.
Although the beds look barren under their winter mulch, there is the beginnings of spring growth.
There may be some benefits to a warmer climate, but the down side for us is the prolonged drought, with only one significant rain event of 30mm over winter. We are preparing our selves for a long dry and very hot summer with July breaking many records for the hottest winter month. This past July being the 3rd hottest July ever recorded. On the positive side, there are lots of people starting to wake from their media/Murdoch induced stupor, and starting to take action. I am seeing a lot more positive articles in journals indicating creative, affirmative thinking.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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