The fall semester is underway, and incoming students can usually use some extra orienting material on how to function, well beyond where the academic advisor’s office is located and what hours the library is open.

Art school, if you work at it, can be way more taxing than maybe most people assume. You end up in the studio with all that youthful stamina, staying out till, like, 4 AM, covered in paint and probably coughing on the charcoal dust wafting in from the freshman drawing classes. Meals can be spotty, but they’re essential to surviving a last-minute productive blitz and the next day’s high-tension crit session.

So here’s a few sustaining snacks to get you through. They’re all low-responsibility, so you can make them easily and quickly without a lot of tools (like a stove or a blender or whatever). That way you can put them together even if you’re stuck in the studio building or live in a dorm or you’re just super busy with, you know, adding to culture. And almost all of these should fit any diet, since they’re meat-, milk- and flour-free, no added fat, low sugar, with few allergens to avoid — all that stuff. Plus they taste good.

The After School Snack
1 large pink apple (Fuji, Macintosh, Pink Lady, etc.)
About 3 Tbsp Nut butter of choice (peanut butter is great, but if you want to get really gourmet about it you can use almond or cashew butter)
1 Tbsp Honey or agave nectar
1/2 tsp lemon juice
Pinch of cinnamon (optional)

Prepare ahead of time or clear a space in the studio so you aren’t making food right next to a wet painting or your laptop. Using (preferably) a Victorinox Swiss army knife, cut the apple into slices, discarding the seeds and core stuff. Toss in lemon juice and cinnamon until evenly coated. Lump the peanut butter on top and then drizzle with honey. Alternatively, you can put the peanut butter in the middle of a bowl or plate and then fan the apple slices around the edge, dipping then into the honey like a chip dip.

Iced Coffee
3/4 cups coarse-ground coffee
4 cups cool water

In a jar cover coffee with cool water. Close and leave in the fridge overnight, at least 12 hours. Strain with a colander. Dilute as desired and pour over ice and add whatever you like with your coffee. It’s going to be rocket-fuel strong, but unlike chilling hot coffee it won’t get bitter and it won’t get so watered down with the ice. And it’s way cheaper than buying it at the local coffee place or cafeteria or whatever, so you’ll have more cash to blow on whatever art students buy… Cocktails I guess.

Chocolate Chia Pudding
1 1/2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1/3 cup chia seeds
1/4 cup cacao or unsweetened cocoa powder
2-5 Tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

Add all ingredients except sweetener to a mixing bowl and whisk vigorously to combine. Sweeten to taste with maple syrup. Let rest covered in the fridge overnight or at least 3-5 hours (or until it’s achieved a pudding-like consistency). Serve chilled with desired toppings, such as fruit, granola or coconut whipped cream.

Put some goji berries on it, or bananas, or pecans, or, like, raspberry jam or something. Go totally nuts.

Guacamole
1 medium avocado
1 lime
Torn-up cilantro (optional)
Salt to taste

Juice the lime and mash it up with the avocado, with the cilantro if you use it. This should come out a rich cadmium green, with the fluffy texture if cheap oil paint (think Richeson brand). Eat it with chips, obviously, or by the spoonful of you really, really like avocados.

Cold Oats
1/3 cup regular oats
1 cup almond milk, and more if needed
1-2 Tbsp chia seeds
1 ripe banana, peeled and smashed
1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract

Mix ingredients in a bowl and place in fridge overnight. Like the chia pudding you can add all sorts of stuff, like dried mangoes, or blueberries with pecans and maple syrup, or whatever kind of color/flavor combinations your palate digs.

Green Tea Mousse
400gm silken tofu
3 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 1/2 Tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp matcha green tea powder
1 tsp amchoor (dried mango powder, optional)

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whip together until smooth. Makes four servings. Put some strawberries or raspberries or roasted nuts on it if you like them. Pine nuts are great.

Fresh Vegetables
Cucumber with salt and pepper
Celery with peanut butter and raisins
Tomatoes with Spike seasoning
Haricot vert, with the tips removed
Carrots, bell peppers, olives and/or kale with hummus

And plus just a lot of nuts and fruit and stuff are always good to keep on hand.

These are freshman-level recipes. More advanced sophomore and junior-level culinary aesthetes can experiment with some actual cooking, baking and even fermentation.

The post Back to School Special: Recipes for Artists and Students appeared first on artcritical.

There’s ever a sense of dailiness in Nguyen’s poems, which are full of life — right now as well as the past. Reading these poems one imagines her dancing around the house or office or grocery store, thinking and feeling these curious things — in the same way that, while you read them, the words arrive as if dancing along the page to have you perceive them just so. You can hear laughing, cooking, talking or sometimes yelling; you can smell, taste, and see the poems as they change. With the common basis of technical experience — our language — it’s a rare treat to read the work of a poet who is so in control and yet loves language enough to let it do new things. Even rarer is the chance to get to talk dinner with someone like this.

Paul Maziar: How can we think of recipes in the context of myth, song, and poetry that gets passed on from one generation to the next, and does this aspect of food (or recipe) inspire in a similar way that the poem can?

Hoa Nguyen: Your question brings to mind the mythological symbol of the ouroboros, the tail devouring snake. It is the symbol for sustaining life, infinity, cycles and renewal, and creation out of destruction. The need to eat to live.

Recipes are about taste combinations: the right proportions of flavors and textures, a mouth feel. That really does sound like what I’m after in poems and what I see in the songs I love — harmony (or discordance), layering, variety, and how it lands in the body.

I also think of recipes, and sharing them as a transference of deep hearth knowledge, hearths tended by women.

That sounds like what you’re after to me, and it’s why I thought to talk recipe with you. I’m now thinking of tradition. What have been some of the major influences on your recipe-gathering?

When I moved to Austin in the mid-‘90s, I was introduced to poet Ronald Johnson’s cookbook The American Table (Silver Spring Books: 1984). In his acknowledgements and introduction he talks about how, over decades, he had clipped recipes from little spiral-bound cookbooks, newsletters, and church gazettes or written down recipes after having been invited into the kitchens of a renowned neighborhood chef here or cook friend there.

This resonated with something that Joanne Kyger said to me years before. She said from Robert Duncan she received a transmission of knowledge on the “religion of the household,” that he “unabashedly made a wonderful magical home.” I was sitting on her porch when she told me this and remember how that knowledge settled inside of me, astonishingly. A few years ago, she recalled that moment too — that she could see the clarity of her statement reach me.

So I think of nourishing meals as that kind of magic, the magic of keeping a home hearth and consider how the hearth acts as a place for other kinds of energy transference. It’s partly why our Skanky Possum Presents reading series has been held in our home. Food is part of that scene, as are music, candles, books, conversations, laughing, and flowers.

The link between you and Joanne Kyger seems a rich one. First coming to her work, her apparent sense of dailiness is motivating. It seems like the activities of the everyday, like writing poems and cooking, are both ordinary and sacred at the same time. Do you see this as the merging of art and life? Incidentally, I just passed over your quotation from Kerouac, “swimming in a sea of English,” used as an epigraph for your “Birthday Poem,” which seems in keeping with something Kyger wrote about “bathing in the poem.”

I love how you phrase that, both ordinary and sacred at the same time. In a review of Kyger’s selected poems, As Ever (Penguin: 2002), Dale Smith wrote, “the distinctions between self, body and landscape, and God and domestic gods of place blend into the vibrant fabric of every day.” What I learned from Kyger’s work is that those distinctions are fluid (to extend the bathing metaphor). It’s part of the richness of experience and they texture the poems.

This is perfect. Trying to find the Kyger bathing line, as you go between laundry, this interview, and making dinner, I’ve come back to “The Pigs for Circe in May”:

I almost ruined the stew and Where

is my peanut butter sandwich I tore through the

back of the car

I could not believe

there was One slice of my favorite brown bread and my
stomach and

I jammed the tin foil and bread wrappers into

the stew

and no cheese and I simply could not believe

and you Never

TALK when my friends are over.

This is known as camping in Yosemite.

Already I wish there was something done.

Odysseus found a stag on his way to the ship

I think of people sighing over poetry, using it,           I

don’t know what it’s for.”

Do you memorize your recipes, going from intuition and spontaneity, or do you adhere to a guide?

You quote one of my favorite early poems by Kyger! Her use of myth in feminist modern retellings is one of the influences I cite as I think about a new project that I’m forming — this in addition to her attention to and writings on place, and her biography of Madam Blavatsky in verse.

I forgot to mention I’m also running around trying to get ready for a reading tonight in Toronto, writing a grant proposal for a project, AND making stock out of the chicken roast we had on Sunday night. I’m making ph? gà from it.

What’s the project you mention?

It’s a book of poems; part verse meditation and part documentary poetry on 1960s Vietnam. The narrative will include a verse biography of my mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, and investigate historical, personal, and cultural pressures of the time. I consider it a project that I’ve been gearing up to do for 20 years.

I’ve read a little about your amazing mother in an interview you gave last October, and I’m very excited about your biography. And I wonder, was the aforementioned ph? gà recipe handed down or gleaned from your mother?

I’m fortunate to have access to living first-person narratives and that my mother is more and more willing to share stories from this period in Vietnam and of her childhood, growing up on a Mekong Delta farm in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I also have letters that my father wrote home to his family in Minneapolis from 1967 to 1969, as well as family photographs, though some of latter are lost due to rupture.

My mother didn’t learn to cook Vietnamese food growing up, because, the story goes, when she entered the kitchen as a girl, things would break or something would burn; this was considered most unlucky! And so she was discouraged from working in the kitchen. I’ve invented all of my Vietnamese recipes based on instructions found in cookbooks or online and from experimentation guided by meal memory (and yes, intuition, as you mention earlier). Which I guess rhymes with the challenge I am facing in my developing project; when one lacks a direct link between past and present, you have to do some delving, intuiting, and inventing.

By the former criteria, my kitchen must be the unluckiest! The analogy between your project and recipe-invention is a good one; gleaning from history to make something now (not necessarily new) is great — a recipe for interesting, surprising results. If you and I were to sit down to enjoy some ph? gà this evening, how would you go about preparing it?

When I was a girl, I used to pore through a 1950s Betty Crocker three-ring-bound recipe book that my mother had (was probably given when she settled in her home in suburban Maryland) and especially remember this entry. I was horrified by it! It’s a liver-sausage pineapple. The recipe is here if you are tempted to try it.

When I think of the cuisine of South Vietnam that my mother left behind in 1969, I can’t help but wonder what she made of that recipe for a meat-covered jar in the shape of a pineapple!

So, here, in contrast to that meat pineapple is a picture of ph? gà:

The chicken soup recipe I am sharing is a very simplified version. I designed it as a recipe that I could make even if I was dog-sick with the flu (this soup is amazing medicine as well as being delicious).

The blog Eat4Fun has a great recipe that is also simple (but contains more steps than mine below) and closer to traditional. It is also the source for the photo above.

Easy Ph? Gà For What Ails You

Broth
2 boxes organic chicken broth or homemade equivalent (always superior to boxed)
Shallots or onions, minced
Garlic, minced
Cilantro stems
Fresh ginger grated
1 star of anise
Dash of soy sauce
Dash of fish sauce
½ teaspoon sugar (palm is traditional) or rice syrup
Vermicelli rice noodles prepared to package instructions

Additions
Shredded chicken
Bean sprouts
Cilantro and basil
Scallions/red onions
Hot sauces/peppers
Limes

Directions
Over medium heat, soften onions in vegetable oil (coconut oil is best); as it softens, add garlic.

Once both are soft and fragrant, add broth, cilantro stems (coriander), anise, and ginger. Let simmer on low for 20 minutes. It will smell amazing. Remove star of anise and stems — you can also pass the broth through a sieve to remove all other solids for a more elegant soup.

To serve, arrange piles of rice noodles into soup bowls. To these add a generous squeeze of lime, fresh cilantro (rau r?m if you have some), basils (Thai basil is great here), scallions or red onion, shredded meat, and bean sprouts. Ladle on the broth. Add slices of fresh hot peppers or prepared hot sauce of your choice.

The post Poetry and Pho: Hoa Nguyen Shares Lyricism and a Recipe appeared first on artcritical.

Todd Mauritz, founder and director of M23 Project Space, recently hosted a cocktail party for friends, including gallery artist Daniel Herr. After badgering everyone I could think of for summer recipes, Mauritz was the only one gracious enough to oblige me, which he happily did. In between drinks and pizza, we talked about the Kennedy assassination, art, politics of the past 15 years, Mauritz’s recent trip to Shelter Island, and the surprisingly temperate weather we’ve had in New York all summer.

M23 maintains a project space uptown, but has also held experimental offsite exhibitions in Brooklyn, Miami, London, and the Chelsea Hotel. Mauritz explained his project space in this way:

I’ve been doing M23 for three years. We’ve done a couple of really fun things, some in collaboration with other people. We did an Armory after-party at The Hole NYC in 2012, working with ArtStation. Then, the following August, Matt Maust and Sam Owens approached me to have a show at Danese. At that point I decided to make a bigger go at it.

I’d worked for a few galleries before that, and I learned a lot about the business, so it seemed like kind of a no-brainer. I was preparing to leave and had a temporary space already. I named the project M23 for a lot of reasons: my name is Mauritz, but I’m shy and don’t want or like it to be about me, like “Mauritz Projects” or something. The M23 is the bus to Chelsea and I lived on 23^rd Street. M23 is a guerrilla group and the things we’ve done have been guerrilla, insurgent-style events. It’s also a motorway out of London, a male-to-female cable-connector, and a type of semi-automatic pistol. So the title came loaded with all these powerful allusions.

Daniel Herr: So why did you decide to make it a project space instead of a more traditional white-cube gallery? Or is it a kind of hybrid? How did that come about?

Mauritz: It kind of happened quickly and what I’m doing is, I think, kind of a response to the way that the market is changing so quickly. Part of it was noted in that “Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show” essay — clients don’t even need to come into the gallery anymore, but you still need a space to create your vibe. You can create your vibe online, like I do with my Twitter and Instagram posts, but you still need that space where you can show people that you’re organizing and hanging beautiful shows and that people are showing up and taking you seriously. So part of my business model is to have three or four big events each year, in addition to the exhibitions. I still plan to have a regular exhibition schedule, but I think having too much can kind of burn out your base. So I aim for that and for maintaining mobility.

Noah Dillon: You move around a lot and do a lot of your events outside of the project space, right?

Herr: But the first one was at the Chelsea Hotel.

Mauritz: That’s right; that was the first official M23 event. The project had been going for about a year, but I wanted to mark the gallery’s initiation and have it born at the Chelsea Hotel. A photographer named Tim Nazzarro approached me for the launch of his book No Bad Faith (2013), which had as its subject Liza Thorn. She was Courtney Love’s protégé and had been the muse for several fashion houses, including Yves Saint Laurent, and she had a band called Starred. So it felt like a good fit and the hotel jumped at the chance to sponsor the event. We had security people with black suits and earpieces, and it looked really official. And they work with Nadine Johnson PR, which was great and started a relationship with them; we’re looking forward to future events with them.

Herr: It was a really good turnout. That place was packed. I felt obliged to Instagram the pre-war-era tub overflowing with empty Heinekens.

Dillon: Yeah, I remember that. There was a video, and the space was under construction so it gave it a kind of punk rock flavor.

Mauritz: After that we had an event in London. We wanted to make it event- and artist-driven, bringing the art to where people would be interested rather than waiting for them to come to the gallery space. At the Ace Hotel we installed a permanent mural by Matt Maust, which debuted during Frieze. (It’s also where I stole these tumblers we’re drinking from.)

[laughing]

The space was small, so we limited attendance to RSVPs and we had about 30 amazing galleries, curators, and artists show up. We served duty-free Hendrick’s gin and we’d produced a making-of video and projected it in the room during the reception. It was dark, everyone was ginned-up, and it felt really intimate and sensitive. The room the piece was installed in wasn’t completed, so they had us on a second floor and someone from the hotel was working with me. They gave us a key so we could take people downstairs, a few at a time, and let them into the space so they could see it in a really personal way. Coming from my previous gallery experience the whole thing felt totally surreal: I’m in London, at Frieze, people are showing up here, and we’re doing something that isn’t done in a normal gallery but works really well.

In Miami, the collector Craig Robins set us up with a space in the Design District, where we did a show called “Video Vaudeville.” I brought a projector in my bag and showed videos in a suite there. Francis Alÿs let me show his 1997 video Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), where he pushes a block of ice around Mexico City until it melts completely.

Dillon: That’s a great video.

Mauritz: Yeah, I was really happy that he gave me permission, which lent it some cred. And it’s so perfect for Miami.

We participated in “Pyramid Scheme,” a group of shows with curators selecting curators who organized simultaneous exhibitions under one umbrella program. We did the first one in Brooklyn and are going to do another one in Los Angeles. In October I’m going back to Frieze, but I’d like to hold an M23 event in Berlin for a couple of weeks prior to that. I’m really excited by the itinerant nature of our programming. And I’m really proud of the events and we’ve had really great crowds. But with my social media work, with people following me on Twitter and Instagram…

Herr: You’ve got like 5000 followers on Twitter, and the Times says at least 70% of them are likely to be actual people!

I’m into the social media and web presence that you’ve developed. You seem really careful about curating it. Sometimes people can let it get out of hand.

Mauritz: Yeah, and with that I’ve found that I’ve got as many followers in London as I do in New York. I never got this stuff, never had a Facebook page or anything, but it’s been really great in building the brand. The physical space, which I kind of stumbled into, is a beautiful old French-style apartment. It’s packed with work and people can come and see the work. As cool as the event-driven nature of the project has been, I’d like to make a bigger commitment to developing the space as a locus for all this work. The artists that I work with — like Daniel, who I am such a fan of — I am really happy to have their work and have been very selective. I thought, How is he not a huge star?

Herr: Because I haven’t reached my Jesus Year.

[laughing]

But I’m honored to be included in the space. I think the programming is really solid. It’s cool the idea that you can get this group of artists together that make really different kinds of work and then grow from that, instead of getting a space and then trying to decide who to show.

Are you doing something in Miami this year?

Mauritz: I’ve already got my ticket, but I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it if I didn’t get in.

Dillon: Well, here’s hoping. Cheers!

Mezcal23 Cocktail

Ingredients:
Mezcal
Tequila
Triple Sec liqueur (Cointreau preferred)
Limes
Whole black peppercorns

Tools:
Shot glass
Cocktail shaker + strainer
Pepper mill or chef’s knife to crack peppercorns

-Juice the limes and set aside
-In the cocktail shaker start with 3 parts of your favorite tequila using a shot glass to measure
-Add 2 parts Cointreau (or another triple sec) and one part fresh limejuice
-Add ice and shake for 20 seconds
-Using the strainer, pour the mix into an 8 – 12 oz glass over ice (depending on your glass you may want to use large ice cubes)
-Top the cocktail with one part Mezcal, which should be at room temperature and poured slowly so that it floats on top of the cold drink
-Add cracked black pepper to taste and garnish with a slice of lime on the glass’s rim
-Most importantly, be sure to multiply the formula to accommodate all of your guests — sharing is important

Enjoy!

M23 Project Space is at 61 West 74^th Street. Todd Mauritz tweets at @m23co and can be found on Instagram at mauritz228. The gallery’s website is m23.co

Daniel Herr is an artist living and working in Brooklyn.

The post Mezcal23: Todd Mauritz’s Summer Cocktail Recipe appeared first on artcritical.

We  had a big vegetable garden with all the usual summer fare, our favorites being corn and tomatoes. Chives grew along the driveway and pale yellow and black Tiger Swallowtail butterflies haunted the dill in the herb garden. My father was a great cook and I remember especially his Chinese-style dishes stir-fried in an electric skillet with ingredients he’d brought up from Chinatown in NYC, like elephant ear mushrooms and baby corn.  His other specialities were pea soup with a dollop of sour cream and pancakes in animal shapes.  These same shapes took form inbright red mercurochrome on scrapes on our legs; and in pale orange calamine lotion for our mosquito bites. Tall spokes of asparagus grew between the tea roses and the peonies in the flowerbed. My father was a great forager. When we took hikes in the woods he knew all the plants and could find things to eat everywhere. We often pulled the car over to the side of the road at a certain spot on Finkle brook where he had planted watercress and he would collect some for a salad. After it rained puffballs would bloom in the field (spherical mushrooms sometimes as big as a pancake) and he would harvest them and sauté them in butter. My father had a small rifle (a .22) with which he would hunt, venturing no further than his patio, to shoot pests threatening the garden. It was before my time, but I heard stories from my mother of his presenting Clement Greenberg and other city swells with meat pie made from woodchuck (David knew how to remove the glands that rendered woodchuck inedible) — revealing the provenance of the mystery meat after the fact. My sister Candida and I enjoyed eating frogs’ legs, even though they were probably the same ones we had been chasing around our ponds that day. We had winey, fragrant maple syrups bottled in old green Coke bottles from neighbors and homemade root beer at our neighbors the Neumanns.  For my sister’s August birthday we ritually breakfasted in our nightgowns on the patio on lobster and champagne (really ginger ale, but the small dash of real champagne and the bottle on the table convinced us). When we were babies our parents had the questionable practice of hanging bunches of grapes on nails near our beds so we would have a snack on arising – and keep quiet a little longer in the morning. What was perhaps most exotic for us was the row of glass jars of candy and the banana splits David made for us in fancy glass dishes.   We were very impressed because we knew his expertise came from working as a teenager at a soda fountain in Indiana where he learned such touches as dusting the sundae with malt powder, called “a dusty road”.

CHERRY COBBLER

In the early summer, the apple people at our farmers market in Tribeca have four different varieties of cherry (sour , Bing, yellow Queen Anne, and one more that is inbetween); this cobbler would work with any of them.

Rinse and stem the cherries. Poke the pits out through the little stem hole with the round end of a bobby pin and  throw them in the compost. (We put all our compostable waste in bags in the freezer and take them to the farmers market on Saturdays. It seems like a big deal but it isn’t).

3 cups pitted cherries
¾ cups juice
2 Tbs and 2 teaspoons instant tapioca

Mix and let stand for ½ hour

Add 2/3 cup sugar (less if you are not using tart cherries) and ¼ teaspoon almond essence. Put in a saucepan and heat, stirring gently, till the tapioca softens and becomes transparent. Scrape into a buttered 9” x 9” ceramic or glass baking pan (no metal and no plastic-coated; slight variations in size and shape are fine).

Preheat 450 degrees F and make the following sweet biscuit dough:

1-3/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
A tablespoon sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into chunks

Cut butter into dry ingredients with two knives; or rub with your fingers until the butter is in pea-sized bits; or mix quickly in a food processor.

Add carefully:

3/4 milk or cream

Stir briefly just to mix and turn the dough out on a hard, lightly floured surface.  Roll out to about 1/2″ thickness, remove about 25% of the dough (you can make a big biscuit from the extra but don’t bake it as long).  Spread the cherry mixture in the baking dish and arrange the dough layer on top.  Pierce all over with a sharp fork.  Brush the top with milk, melted butter or granulated sugar.  Bake 15 minutes.

Serve warm with runny yogurt (mango, blackberry or vanilla are good – Ronnybrook is a great brand).

The post Welders and Cobblers: Sculptor Rebecca Smith shares a recipe and more from Bolton Landing appeared first on artcritical.

Growing up in small town Virginia, neighborhood children of Jewish, Armenian, Greek, Irish, you-name-it descent did everything from making mud pies, building forts in the woods, sledding, and trick-or-treating together.  We were inseparable.  Like other ethnic communities, my family also tried to assimilate: pancake dinners, the country club, carpools, leaving out cookies for Santa, etc.  I was even baptized in the local Methodist church, despite both my parents being of Druze ancestry. Unfortunately, I wasn’t taught the Arabic language and I only know the names of food and curse words as a result.  We still managed to travel a few times to Lebanon as a family and I have vivid memories of those fascinating visits.

For Arabs, hospitality lies at the heart of who they are. My father owned restaurants and nightclubs (one after another).  Number two was called The Shiek and it had a Middle Eastern theme.  My mother was known for the delicious desserts she made for this establishment.  I have fond memories of listening to great live music at my dad’s club with everyone from Chubby Checker to Fats Domino, and of meeting celebrities like Frank Zappa and the Herman’s Hermits. Pre-rocker Pat Benatar made up part of the house band along with someone accompanying her on a grand piano.  She belted out slow, beautifully pitched songs while guests dined on exquisite Italian cuisine.  On breaks from college, I enjoyed bartending, hostessing, and waiting tables at The Farmer’s Market, my father’s last restaurant.

My mother was an amazing cook and she helped plan the menus throughout my father’s career.  At home, while our neighbors were chowing down on TV dinners and tuna casseroles, the Rafeys were happily trying out the many recipes my mother had gathered from Julia Childs and others.   And my parents entertained often, which had a huge influence on me. It’s always rewarding to share food with friends and family, who appreciate my joy which is a big part of it all.

After I moved to New York in 1984 to complete my degree in Museum Studies, I began taking in my baked goods to share with colleagues at The Hispanic Society and the Cooper Hewitt Museum, where I had internships.  After 30 years, I continue to make the same chocolate cookie crusted cheesecake with its hint of Crème de Menthe and Crème de Cacao, for staff, artists, and art handlers at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Along with new artist friends, I’ve added many new recipes to the mix, exchanging recipes with artists who have come in over the years to help install their work for the Academy shows. Bob Yasuda, for instance, is one of the most inventive and adventurous cooks I have encountered.  Justen Ladda gave me a simple recipe for delicious cheese filled popovers that I continue to use; and, in exchange, I gave him seeds from my terrace for the public garden that he designed and maintains on the Lower East Side.  Just last year, Robert Chambers and Mette Tommerup, both having been included in Academy exhibitions, gave me a most unusual cake pan before they returned to Florida.

Following is the simplest recipe for a Middle Eastern dessert I know.  Some call it, Kanafa, while others say, “Kanafi”, or Knefeh…and its origin can also be disputed. Whatever they call it, everyone agrees that it’s delicious!

Ingredients

Kataifi (frozen shredded fillo dough)

2-3 bars butter

orange blossom water

sugar

water

ricotta cheese (2 small containers)

Directions

Thaw the Kataifi for an hour.

In a bowl, pull it apart and pour melted butter on top, making sure it soaks through entirely.

Heat ricotta cheese for 5 minutes in a saucepan, on low.

Add 2-3 tsp. orange blossom water and stir

Grease a glass dish or metal pan

Place one layer (1/2) of the buttered dough on the bottom.

Put the ricotta mixture over this

Place the rest of the dough on top of this

Bake at 350 for approximately 40 minutes

To crisp the top, place under the broiler for a short time

For the syrup:

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon lemon juice

2 tsps. orange blossom water

Just as it boils, stir in the lemon juice (which prevents coagulation)

Reduce heat and stir for 5 minutes.

Pour syrup over the layered dessert.

(I like to serve this with ground pistachios on top and mixed berries on the side.)

The post The Sweetness of Arabia via Small Town Virginia and Arts and Letters appeared first on artcritical.

Shaved Brussel sprout and toasted walnut salad

Half pound brussel sprouts shaved finely on mandoline slicer
Half cup walnuts, chopped and toasted
One cup olive oil, zest and juice of one lemon) whisked in bowl
One quarter cup grated parmesan cheese

Pan seared sweet potato gnocchi with pecans and sage

Sweet potato gnocchi (home made if possible, enough for two portions)
Fresh sage (about 10 leaves, to taste)
¼ cup pecans
2 cups fresh spinach
2 teaspoons truffle oil
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Boil gnocchi in plenty of salted boiling water until they rise to the surface (about 3 minutes for fresh gnocchi, 5 for frozen)

Meanwhile, add the olive oil to a pan on medium high heat. As the oil is heating up, add the whole fresh sage leaves.

Drain gnocchi and add to a hot pan with the olive oil and sage.  Allow them to sit in the pan until slightly crisp on one side (3-5 minutes) Turn them, and add pecans, crushing them just slightly with your hand as you drop them into the pan. Add salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste.

Turn heat down and sauté for a few more minutes, until pecans begin to toast. Add fresh spinach and toss until just wilted.

Serve on plates and sprinkle each portion with a teaspoon of truffle oil (or to taste, but a little goes a long way)

Greg Lindquist: How does your interest in cooking relate to your sculpting and installation?

Suzanne Stroebe: In my studio, I’ve been working with live plants and food in my installations, sculptures, drawings and performances, both as objects and through photographs. Art is an extension of life, right?

GL: Or is art an extension of life, in the sense that your practice is informed by such rituals as eating or growth in the natural world?

SS: I believe artists experience the world through the lens of their creativity, which extends to cooking, gardening, writing, etc. The best cooks are creative in that they experiment freely with new ingredients and methods, and allow for “happy accidents.” The work I make in my studio is the purest form of my creativity, because art is non- functional. However inspiration for my work often comes when I’m engaged in another creative practice, outside of the studio.

GL: And what about our rooftop garden, which really started in my studio, amongst my art making practices?

SS: In retrospect, we began gardening in your studio around the same time when you became more experimental in your practice (i.e. last summer right before you made your first outdoor sculptural installation at Art Omi). More recently, you have become interested in earth art and as the garden as become part of our daily lives, you have begun incorporating potting soil into your sculptures.

GL: Very true. We were talking earlier about whether entertaining was part of our interactions with other artists and the art world. When I suggested that it had little to do with the art world, you reminded me the majority of our visitors were people connected through our profession. Why do you think that is? For me, it creates an intimate setting, but also it’s that idea illustrated by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, that you can learn something about a person by his or her preferences, by how a living space is arranged and activities are performed: Does cooking reveal sociological, economic and politic preferences?

SS: Cooking can certainly reveal political and social preferences, but more importantly I think there can be an instant bond with other people we meet who are vegetarians, locavores, etc., or those who are also passionate about cooking. Social interactions with those in the art world can become more casual and friendly when we discover other mutual interests. It is also a natural way to invite someone into your home, which is automatically more intimate.  After spending an evening over good food and drink with someone in their home or in ours, there is a feeling of real friendship—not so after an evening at an opening, or other professional social setting. People tend to relax and become more themselves while eating a good, home cooked meal.

SS: Do you consider cooking/mixology/gardening to be an expression of creativity?

GL: Sure and it’s an expression of creativity that I think is largely driven by curiosity, experimentation and tastes. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at identifying the tastes of specific herbs in foods and perhaps that’s a little like developing an eye for color mixing.

SS: Do you see a connection between cooking and other culinary experiments and your studio practice? Have they ever overlapped or influenced each other?

GL: I think there’s a sense of alchemy in making herbal infusions in liquors. There is an excitement too for how it’s going to turn out. For example, I was amazed by watching the coffee beans float in the vodka and then, as they became saturated, sink to the bottom of the container and release their dark oils into the clear liquid. Maybe it’s something like in the studio when you have an assortment of objects and materials and even though you can imagine what happens when you put them together, it’s always different when you do it. Cooking or infusing/mixology can be a kind of experimental outlet for art making, perhaps being a place to play when I’m feeling stuck in the studio.

The post Two from artist-couple Greg Lindquist and Suzanne Stroebe, and a snatch of conversation appeared first on artcritical.

I start the day super-virtuous and don’t let my eating slide until coffee time.  When I was told I had high cholesterol I decided to start eating oats.  I’d always loved porridge and granola, but kind of decided I didn’t have the patience for cooking first thing in the AM, plus the sweetness and “fried” quality of granola turned me off, so I got into soaking.  If you use “quick cooking” soft rolled oats you don’t need to boil them – jumbo oats work too, but can be a bit too dry and chewy.  I buy the oats in bulk from Wholefoods and they work out dirt cheap.

I basically have two recipes, a cold and a warm version.

Soak about a half cup of oats in concord grape juice, with a teaspoon of Chia powder, which is rich in Omega 3s, calcium and other good stuff.

While that’s soaking, peel and dice half a pink grapefruit (whole if feeling greedy and/or it’s small), half or one banana (same principles), and about a half cup of either raspberries or blueberries.  I say either because in salads, for aesthetic reasons, I’m very much a three ingredients guy, but of course you could use both—and, though I really hate it when they say this in recipes—“you can use any fruits you like.”  But this is my breakfast, and these are the fruits I like.  The textures and flavors of these three work well together.  Sometime, I add a scoop of yoghurt, but truth be told, that makes for a heavy breakfast.

(Actually, the half or whole thing is about whether I’m making for one or two.  If for one, what is anyone going to do with half a blackened banana later on?  For two, who can be bothered to peel TWO grapefruits?)

My girlfriend finds the grape juice a tad sweet, so for her – or if vital ingredients have run out for the standard version – I vary the breakfast sometimes in a way I’ve come to like almost as much.

Soak the oats in warm soy milk, saving a little for her highness’s coffee.

While that’s soaking, chop in half an apple, skin on, and add to the mix with a handful of walnuts, and a smaller quantity of raisins.

With either version you can add a teaspoon of sunflower and/or pumkin seeds, if you are feeling virtuous, without spoiling the flavor.  The Chia tastes more pronounced in the warm version than the cold, by the way, and is bit metallic tasting. Whatever you do, don’t add linseed oil or flax seed as that tastes disgusting (I think).

CANDACE’S FAVORITE SALAD

Extending the three ingredients principle, here is my girlfriend’s favorite salad among those that I make for her:

In a bowl, make a vinagrette from mustard, dill, apple cider vinegar and walnut oil.

Finely chop and add one endive per person, not mixing yet; then peel, chop and add half of one apple per person; then add a dessert spoon of crumbled blue cheese – ideally Stilton, but Gorgonzola or domestic American are fine too – and then mix.

If you don’t share my three ingredients principle you can get clever and add other stuff like walnuts, say, and beets, but if you use beets then you’ve spoiled the novelty of…

MY FAVORITE SALAD

Chop and add one beet per person, half an apple, one herring fillet (pickled in dill, not in red wine or in any sauce) and a scoop of sour cream, and add a little extra dill for decoration.

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