All the vegetables

Scones made with grated courgette

Daisy last year

I have always eaten healthily, and these days I am 95% vegan, with no refined sugar and very little wheat. I do eat our chickens’ eggs maybe once a week, and I make the odd exception when eating out or invited somewhere, though I draw the line at meat. 

After stage III cancer I feel it is important to do everything in my power. Joe Dispenza says that when he worked as a chiropractor, the clients with most problems were those with 'perfect' diets and lifestyles, and I can see some truth in that as well. Putting pressure on myself and feeling stressed when some sugar or dairy passes my lips is perhaps just as ‘bad’ - or worse - for me as said sugar or dairy.

So instead of becoming too obsessed, I focus on including more of what is definitely beneficial: eight or more portions of vegetables and fruit a day, supergreens in the form of matcha tea and spirulina, and vegetable juices.

We grow some vegetables ourselves and get a box from Green Earth Organics every week, and we base our cooking around what is in the box. I always order extra carrots, as we juice every day (at the moment a mix of carrot, beetroot, ginger, kale and parsley). The day after I got my diagnosis I bought a juicer. There are stories of people curing their cancer with carrot juice, and while I would never have taken the risk of going for a dietary approach at the exclusion of other (including conventional) treatments and doubt those people did only this one thing, I am convinced by the benefits of juicing (and green smoothies). 

I make a lot of curries, chilli, soups and salads and I always throw in some extra vegetables. I have also mastered the vegan moussaka. Anke and I love roasting big trays full of vegetables that can then be eaten with anything and leftovers turned into a salad.

Another way of incorporating more vegetables is to use them in baking. Every summer we grate the abundance of courgettes into chocolatey tray bakes, and that cake always reminds me of home. I adapt a lot of the recipes in this wonderful book (see also photo above) by using other types of sweeteners and halving the amount. Each recipe includes a vegetable and alternatives to wheat such as rice flour or spelt. I have always liked baking, and now more than ever I think why bake any of the traditional white-flour, white-sugar, nutrient-deficient cakes when there are so many ways of baking healthier versions that don’t leave you with that sugar rush and crash. And they taste great, too.

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These are my go-to websites for mostly vegan cooking and baking (they have published books as well):

Minimalist Baker

The Happy Pear

Love & Lemons

In the kitchen | Quark bread and coloured walls

 Kitchen work-in-progress

Bread-making work-in-progress.

Illustration by Heather Gatley in this book, which has nothing to do with the bread and which I feel ambivalent about.

One of the things I wanted to get back into this year was making my own bread. Ideally sourdough, but I haven't started the starter yet. I used to make wholemeal spelt bread all the time and have stocked up on spelt flour, but I wanted to try some new recipes as well.

The other day I had to use up some quark that was past its use-by date. I always pick up quark when I see it in the shop, as it is a German staple, but then I never know what to do with it apart from eating it like yogurt or the two ways our family used it - German cheesecake, and potatoes served with quark whipped up with sparkling water and chopped chives and seasoned with pepper and salt.

A quick search online yielded quark oil dough, which apparently is a well-known substitute for yeast dough. In Ireland you cannot buy fresh yeast in the shop, only from bakeries on request, if they are happy to give it to you, and I prefer not to eat too much food containing yeast and haven't bought any dry yeast in years, so I was interested in how the quark oil dough would turn out.

There are various recipes, all very similar, but I didn't follow any particular one - I used around 180g quark, 4 tablespoons milk, 8 tablespoons oil (rapeseed), 1 egg, 350g flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt to make a braided bread (updated to add: I bake it at around 160 degrees celcius for about 20 minutes, though it might take longer, depending on the oven; with our oven, if you followed the recommended time, you would burn everything). You can add some sugar and raisins to make it sweet. It was so quick to make - no waiting, unlike with yeast - and came out well, despite my half-a***d kneading and braiding (hence the rustic look). It took only a few minutes to put together, still tasted fresh the following day, and we loved it, so this is where any leftover quark will end up from now on, and it will be great for making pizza. It is fluffy and moist, and I can imagine substituting kefir for the milk (inspired by my sister).

In August it will be two years since we moved into this house, and we still have a lot of work to do. The kitchen is one of two rooms where we left the old floor, and we also kept the kitchen that was there, but painted it (as well as the airing cupboard, on the left in the photo) and took out all the hanging cupboards. It is the only room that has colour on two small areas of wall (everywhere else is some shade of white, pale grey or charcoal, or - half the house - still unpainted). A few weeks ago, with the help of John's brother-in-law, we finally connected a lamp to the cable that was awkwardly sticking out of the corner between the blue wall and ceiling. Usually there is a small armchair in that corner by the stove - currently in the sitting room, as we had visitors and not enough seats -, so it is now a reading corner.

Slow

I find myself getting the biggest sense of achievement from small repetitive tasks, and it seems as if I am only learning how to live now - I mean that on a big, philosophical level as well as in the most mundane sense. I have been an adult for long enough to have certain things figured out, but I keep catching myself thinking, if only I had started this ages ago. This evening I made a batch of granola and a tray of banana muffins, and I feel so prepared.

I am only getting the hang of meal planning and grocery shopping now. Having grown up in a household where nothing was wasted, I am always horrified when I read how much food people throw out in the West. I have always endeavoured to continue to live the way we did at home and generally succeeded at the not wasting part (if not the preparation), but during a recent crazy busy time we ate out a lot and ended up throwing out food, including a very black banana (this had never happened before. The one thing I can make in my sleep is banana bread). So now, with two trays emerging from the oven in one evening and an idea of what we are going to cook for the next few days (and nothing dying at the back of the fridge), I feel I have conquered this part of domesticity. 

Buddhism tells us that tasks such as weeding or mowing the lawn teach you the point of pointlessness, and I am really enjoying that. I remember as a child when it dawned on me that the joy of having just washed my hair would not last very long before I would have to do it again, and again, and again, and the panic (some sort of existential angst) that I felt. I cannot quite claim that I have mastered a zen-like immersion in everyday tasks, but I do derive genuine pleasure from them most of the time. It's as though I have finally pushed aside that daunting mountain of 'shoulds' and 'to-dos' and am living in the moment more, for now at least.

MITs and simple pleasures

 lemon-blueberry-cake

soaps

gardening

It is rather difficult to work from home when the weather is as good as it has been for the past week. In fact, I cannot remember the last time it rained, and this is the west of Ireland. I keep making excuses to get up and do something that involves fresh air and sunshine (such as finally peeling off the foil on the new door frames, which clearly states "Remove immediately after installation"... oops.).

In an attempt to tick off at least some of the items on my to-do list, I have dug out one of those productivity tips I had stored away in a corner of my brain, which is to set the three most important tasks (MITs) of the day first thing in the morning. While I always have a million things I ought to do swirling around in my head, determining and writing these three down - and, crucially, thinking of them as 'most important' - helps me to focus. I have two sets of threes, one for work (both the Uni work and my freelance work) and one for everything else (these days, at least two of that second set are house- or garden-related, and the other one tends to be something to do with correspondence or organising, for example meal planning or scheduling things). It is so simple and works so much better than my overfilled and overwhelming diary (which I still keep, but I now try not to stuff sheets of paper covered with more scribbles into it).

I know I always go on about aromatherapy, but there is such a strong link between smells and wellbeing, and, perhaps accentuated by the sun, I am noticing them much more, and 'stop to smell the roses' throughout the day. The soaps pictured above were housewarming gifts, including a cinnamon soap from Germany, and they smell and look amazing.

We had friends over for lunch on Friday and Sunday, and I ended up making the same cake twice. I used to make this lemon-blueberry cake a lot a few years ago, but this time I made it with coconut sugar, which gives it a darker, more wholesome appearance (even if the health benefits over white sugar may not be that considerable). I love using citrus peel in baking and cooking (grating lime peel onto stir fries is a favourite).

 The garden is bursting with activity. You can watch things grow; the neighbours' dogs and cats visit; and we have added a bird bath (another gift) to the bird feeder - a safe distance from the cats' reach. I spent a good chunk of my work-from-home Friday weeding, which has got to be one of the most therapeutic tasks there are. The specks of orange in the photo above are calendula, which is not a weed, but we have tons of it (I need to ask my mom for her recipe for calendula balm), and a couple fell victim to John's polytunnel tidy-up.

Four senses | December 2015

Taste  |  Aphrodite Nerve and Energy Tea by Solaris. I used to drink this all the time, then other teas took over and I kind of forgot about it, even though it was one of my favourite teas - it's strange how that can happen. This is a blend of rose, lavender, lemon balm, lime flowers and red clover and lovely in the afternoon or evening.

Smell  |  Christmas baking. Jars with almonds, vanilla sugar and other ingredients are lined up on the kitchen counter, and I got a set of star-shaped cookie cutters. This year I really wanted to mark the seasons more (the extent of my Christmas decoration used to be one bauble and three other ornaments, because I always go home for Christmas, but I'd still always have at least three weeks in December in my place), so the German tradition of baking Plätzchen (cookies) is a big part of it.

Hear  |  Podcasts. During the last class of this year yesterday we had Christmas music on in the background, but I have mostly been listening to podcasts, usually while doing housework or painting. One thing I want to do over the next few weeks is to get some new music. I haven't really listened to many new releases or discovered new-to-me older material.

See  |  Books - Reading and deciding what to read next. I loved Michael Harding's Staring at Lakes, and I finally got his new memoir, Hanging with the Elephant. I wanted to save it for my flight home, but I couldn't wait. His weekly newspaper column is such honest beautiful writing from the heart, and I would like to read his fiction, too. Too much of my reading has been online, so in 2016 I am hoping to read at least two books a week again.

Apple bread

Usually I wouldn't go near anything Christmassy until December 1st, but this week is the last week of the current term of my classes, so I wanted to bake something to go with our early Christmas coffee. One thing I made was Apfelbrot, a staple in our family in the lead-up to Christmas. It is a rustic cake/bread, moister than stollen, lighter than fruit cake and beautifully fragrant.

There are a lot of variations of this, and I have experimented with different nuts - chopped roasted hazelnuts instead of whole ones; almonds; mixed nuts minus the peanuts, as I felt they wouldn't work that well - but here is my aunt's recipe (which I just realised happens to be dairy- and eggfree):


   Apfelbrot 

• 750g apples (peeled and grated)

• 250g sugar [I use less, around 200g]

• 250g raisins

• 250g whole hazelnuts

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1 teaspoon ground cloves

• 1 heaped teaspoon cocoa powder

• 1 dessert spoon dark rum

• 500g flour

• 5 teaspoons baking powder

1. Mix the grated apples and the sugar and let stand for at least six hours or overnight.
2. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (160 for fan-assisted ovens).
3. Put the raisins in a sieve or colander, rinse vigorously under a fully opened hot tap and drain. 
4. Add the raisins, nuts, spices, cocoa and rum to the apples and sugar and mix to combine.
5. Mix the flour and baking powder and sift onto the apple mixture. Mix to combine.
6. Pour into two medium-sized loaf tins. Bake for 45-60 minutes.

With the oven in our new house we have noticed that everything is cooked much sooner than expected. After years of having an oven where you had to add at least 20 minutes to the given time, this still surprises me every time. So I would advise checking after 45 minutes.

---------------

Speaking of preparation, this year I even managed to buy a diary (Moleskine; the price seems to go up every year, but it is the best weekly planner I know of) before January. I am one of those sad people who get antsy and panic when they enter the new year without a diary (and yet I almost always end up leaving it until mid-January). So between the baking and planning ahead to such an extent that I have a planner for planning ahead I feel a bit more ready for the winter months.

Cake for calm

 

I would like to think that when I am quiet here it means life is just so full there is no time to document it, but the opposite is true: I find that when things are good, I have more energy and can do all the living and creating and blog about it all, and there is a nice flow to it. The more you do, the more you do.

At the moment I am so stressed about money, health, work, deadlines, problems with the car and the house that I haven't had the headspace for much else, apart from certain commissions and some passive planning and researching (i.e. listening to podcasts - this is a treasure trove for creative people). As a result of being stressed my energy levels dip even lower than usual, and I neglect my relationships with others and cancel or avoid social situations, which stresses me out more because I feel I cannot function and that I am a terrible friend/partner/daughter/sister/... I just about manage to pour energy into my relationship, but almost every other area of my life seems to be suffering.  And so goes the vicious cycle.

People close to me would point out that I have a tendency to catastrophise, and I am aware that in the grand scheme of things, my current situation is trivial, and I certainly don't want to turn into a hypochondriac, analysing each physical complaint when most likely the majority of my health issues are psychosomatic. But I am just so aches-and-pains-cannot-face-the-world tired.

As usual I am not doing an awful lot of the things that I know would make it all better (I am still convinced I would be a much better person if I meditated every day...), though I did get a run in this morning - as part of my attempt to make my working-from-home days more productive, I am implementing little tricks such as pretend-commutes, and it does help to get the exercise and fresh air and sunshine first thing. But somehow my 35-min jog (and some yoga) ended up taking up most of my morning, or so it seemed.

Our exhibition in August is suddenly panic-inducingly close, and I still can't get myself to work towards it.

Sometimes I try to have more compassion towards myself and remind myself that all the work stuff doesn't matter that much at the end of the day, and that I place too much value on doing, but the fact is that my sense of self is inextricably linked to my work as an artist and illustrator, and it is important to me. And that exhibition is a real deadline, one of many. And I love what I do and made this choice. And of course while I am working on something, I am in the zone and that begets energy.

So I am rereading Art and Fear, though I already know the reasons I am stuck.

And I am adding more of the things that help me calm my mind and feel energised (see photos):

|  I made another cake from this book - this one has butternut squash in it, and I used coconut sugar instead of caster sugar. It is so good.

|  Fresh flowers and finishing illustrations.

|  Being with dogs and cats and babies.

In a child's world

Print, mounted

Illustration and wet palette

A beautiful book

In the time that has passed since my last blog post I became an aunt (my older sister had a beautiful baby boy), which has opened my heart in  wonderful and wondrous ways.

Lately, a big part of my work has been populated by illustrations and paintings for children, and what a happy dwelling place it is. Several prints of the festival artwork have found new homes in nurseries and children's bedrooms (but not exclusively; it is nice to see that adults want the picture for themselves, too), and I am planning to do more in that vein. After years of teaching mainly adults, a new opportunity has come up to teach children again. Children's books and illustrations are such a big passion of mine, it is lovely to now be so immersed in this world as an aunt, artist and teacher.

Just before I was offered the new teaching job, I had made the decision to free up some space in the summer (the fringe festival I worked for over the last five years has been put to rest and will be replaced by a new festival, which I chose not to be involved in). I have a two-person show in August and hopefully another exhibition in September, and it feels good to see the next few months shaping up in quite a different way from previous years. Not least because this summer will bring another nephew or niece!

On a much much smaller scale than the truly life-changing events of my sisters becoming mothers, my working life has been revolutionised by the purchase of a wet palette. It keeps acrylic paint wet and means I can snatch 20 minutes here and there working on a painting instead of spending 20 minutes cursing the tubes that are so hard to open, running them under hot water in order to be able to open them, trying to gauge which colours and how much of each I need, mixing the colours, sticking the palette in the fridge afterwards in the hope they'll stay wet until the following day, when inevitably I won't have time and end up with hardened paint yet again. Now all my colours are there for me to use straight away, and when I'm finished I just put the lid on the palette and rinse the brushes. Increased productivity lies ahead.

Now that the busiest time of the year is over I am looking forward to doing things that have been neglected because they were neither work-related nor crucial for survival. One of them is to bake something from the book in the photo above, which my sister gave us. These cakes include vegetables and alternatives for regular flour, and, while far from healthy, are certainly better for you than cakes made the traditional way.

Making - eat, bathe, wear

 

|  Eat: Christmas cookies, as per German tradition: very rustic-looking Elisenlebkuchen (my sister's are perfectly round and smooth) and Engelsaugen (angel eyes), and with the leftover egg whites I made coconut macaroons (not pictured).  The Lebkuchen have all the Christmas flavours - ground cloves, cinnamon, mixed peel and rum. I also made several loaves of hazelnut-studded Apfelbrot (recipes for that and the Lebkuchen to follow in time for next year's seasonal baking - I have been meaning to add a page with recipes here, for archiving purposes - the internet is chock-a-block with food blogs, so I'm sure the world isn't waiting anxiously for my contribution, but it will be nice to collect some here, as a back-up to my notebooks and folders).

|  Bathe: These bath truffles were easy and fun to make. I used six drops each of geranium and lavender essential oils and both rose and calendula petals. Due to the coconut oil, they create quite an oily bath, which some people don't like, but it means no need for moisturising. They were sitting on the kitchen counter, which confused visitors to my house, as they look edible (white chocolate and rose truffles sounds good). I love having baths with Epsom salts - they are a good way to absorb magnesium via the skin and have numerous healing properties.

|  Wear: I knitted this simple scarf for John a while back; unlike many other projects (where did this year go??) I managed to finish it in time for the colder weather. He knew exactly what he wanted; he picked the colour and requested the white strip. Sometimes I like being given instructions.

Making things has been an antidote to the stress of the last few weeks. Using my hands is so therapeutic, a way to get out of my head - the thoughts it stimulates are of a less frantic kind. I have prescribed myself daily doses of knitting for the holidays.

Recently

I was absent here for a while for various reasons - family visiting, work in the Uni starting again after my long summer off, needing time away from the computer after long sessions of teaching myself Adobe InDesign - and came back only to find Blogger stubbornly refusing to cooperate, so I have temporarily lost bits in the sidebar. While I attempt to solve this, here are some glimpses of recent happenings and be-ings:

View from the prom in Salthill. Galway Bay was eerily still for a few days - a mirror-like surface, coupled with thick warm air and people moving slowly; it felt like walking through a dream.

 

Encountered on another walk. I must emphasise I do not approve of people dumping old furniture in the landscape, but this was at least aesthetically pleasing. It also reminds me of that famous Cranberries album cover. 

My sister and I are busy preparing for crafts fairs, Christmas markets and online shops. I am trying to establish whether buttons or hooks and eyes or snap fasteners work best on crochet cuffs.

Baking. There has been a lot of baking, for birthdays, hikes, visitors and visits. I found out that liberally substituting honey for sugar is not always a good idea (banana mash instead of banana bread) and that a cake described as "really moist" in the recipe still can turn out excessively moist (pear mash instead of pear cake), to the delight of my visitors, who thankfully were all family and brave and ate it anyway.

Rab and I presented some of our collaborations at the first ever Cong Arts Festival. My sister and brother-in-law kindly helped out in various ways, from driving to filming our show. Cong is a picturesque village most famous for the film The Quiet Man. We loved this sign plus painted ducks' footprints.

Long weekend plans

In an ideal scenario I will be diligent and finish a series of illustrations today and then have the rest of this six-day Easter weekend free for the following:

|  Reading. I started reading Authenticity at physio yesterday while my knees were getting the Sonopuls treatment, and it is so good. I hope Deirdre Madden keeps writing and there will be many more books by her. I remember feeling utterly bereft when I finished my last of Jean Rhys's books, knowing there would be no more, so at least with an author who is still alive there is always hope.
I also got my third Marion Milner book, An Experiment in Leisure, more or less a sequel to A Life of One's Own (I will post part 2 about the latter soon) - she is dead, unfortunately, but there is still a lot by her out there I haven't read yet; she made it to the grand old age of 98.

|  Baking. My mum and sisters are probably making lambs and rabbits (in cake form) as per family tradition. Since the only cake tins I have are rectangluar, whatever I end up making won't look as pretty, but at least I will do something remotely Easter-y. Although instead of egg-heavy creations, I would like to make this Earl Grey chocolate cake again. I am definitely in a tea and chocolate phase.

|  Spring clean. This includes giving my house plants some TLC, particularly dealing with the explosion of aloe vera. I was delighted to see that the peace lily I have in the bathroom is blooming again after three years, and I wonder whether spraying it with misty water from a spray bottle has something to do with it. And the rose I got a few months ago is still going strong.

|  Make it to a beach, perhaps one I haven't been to in a while or a completely new (-to-me) one. I know this would be an antidote to the lethargy I have struggled with all month. With temperatures around two degrees and violent winds, it is not very tempting right now, but I could dress for the weather for a change and brave the elements. And pick sea beet, a new green food discovery, thanks to Hugh.

Good right now

I have spent most Easter Sundays over the last nine years away from my family, often alone, and they never featured eggs. Or decoration. In the lead-up to Christmas I hang one bauble in my house; that's the extent of my festive décor. Easter, nothing. I like to surround myself with beautiful things and good smells, but I have never really changed my house with the seasons, and I will never be the person with boxes and boxes of decorations that come out at different times of the year.

This year, this Easter, I miss my family a lot, even though I only saw them last week. I think it's because I know that they are all together, with cakes in the shape of little lambs and egg cracking contests, whereas my Easter weekend is in danger of being just like any other weekend. Suddenly I feel the need to mark different parts of the year and the seasons and observe family traditions. So this morning I made an Easter cake. And we went away for an overnight island trip on Friday. The cake and the island have reminded me that there are a lot of things that are good right now, in between the fretting and doubts and general anxiety of late.

For instance:

|  Slow baking (even though I ignored the one-egg-at-a-time bit). Grating orange and lemon peel by hand is much more fun than tearing open a packet, and while it may not be ideal when in a hurry, a bowl and a wooden spoon are sufficient for most of the things I make, and also a great upper-body-workout.

|  Snail mail communication about one of the illustration projects I am working on - since this kind of thing is usually done via e-mail these days, it feels extra special, and handwriting can convey that little bit more (I really want to send more snail mail to friends and family).

|  Edible reminders of a friend's visit - a bag of walnuts in their shells from Spain

|  Sketching, and carrying a sketchbook in my bag even if I don't end up using it (I have been relying on the camera too much).

|  Watching a sheepdog in action on Achill Island (and then fleeing as the sheep ran towards us)

|  Great flavour combinations - wild cherry tea and Tunisian orange cake in the cutest little café in town

|  Roasted buckwheat muesli almost every morning (I go through phases of the same meal for days or weeks in a row)

|  An almost effortless-seeming run and feeling strong (swimming, on the other hand, feels like hard work at the moment)

Drawing, baking, reading

I keep using three-word headings for my posts... The solitary parts of my weekend consisted mostly of these three.

 Drawing (works-in-progress):

I am drawing a lot of animals. The above are illustrations for a story about a baby elephant. I am also playing around with the photos I took on our walk last weekend and other kids-and-animals pictures. Working on these is so therapeutic - I don't worry about the result, the subjects make me happy, and I am in the flow.

Baking:
banana bread (always halving the sugar):

 

Baking has become an integral part of my weekends - it is so relaxing. While I love my blender and the chopping thing that came with it, I don't feel the need for a stand mixer. I use a wooden spoon and an egg whisk for making cakes. Egg whites and hard pieces of butter can be exhausting, but I love the process.

Reading:

At this stage I must have close to a hundred books I haven't read yet, and I keep buying new ones. I am also currently reading five books. Part of me would like to be able to read one book at a time (it sounds more mindful), but I seem to be unable to do that. It's not that each book isn't absorbing enough; I just like to have several on the go, and often they tend to be different genres (I rarely read two novels at the same time; that could get confusing). 

I am excited about these two books. Milner was an author, psychoanalyst, educationalist and artist. I had given On Not Being Able to Paint to a friend as a present and had been meaning to get my own copy. The title is self-explanatory: it's about creativity and what prevents creating and is illustrated with Milner's sketches. When I looked it up, I decided to get one of her other books as well, about her seven-year journey of finding out what she really wanted from life and what made her happy. So far I have only read a little bit in each, but I have a feeling they will be important for me and will post more on them soon.

Messy, chaotic, cute

At the weekend, I didn't do any of the things I usually do, as I shared my house with two little people. It was fun, but I am exhausted now. I really don't know how single mothers (or fathers) cope.

We painted (pictures, a canvas bag, and fingernails):

And baked: 

...and did a million other things.

They insisted on sleeping in my bed, with me in the middle, and I must have woken every minute or so.

I did get the Saturday and Sunday papers, but I only got to read two lines of one article. Which isn't so bad: I like to make the papers last the whole week, as reading material to accompany breakfast - as much as I like the concept of mindful eating, I just like reading while eating even more.

On Sunday morning we went for a walk by the sea when most people were still asleep, which made for a nice change. I tend to spend most Sunday mornings indoors reading the aforementioned paper. 

It was a weekend packed with activities, and somehow Friday feels like ages ago, considering how much we crammed into two days. So today I am taking it easy and will have an early night. It feels a bit like Sunday. And I am really enjoying my clean, quiet house right now.

Blueberry days

1. So excited about this book - I have heard so much about her. Plus: sewing on buttons - very Zen
2. Baking (see post from Friday) - blueberries are the best. And blackberries (still haven't gone to pick them)
3. Dress to go with blueberry cake (pure coincidence) - I have a newfound love of belts - belting everything
4. Late-night activity (that's 8pm in Marina-Land) - knitting, using up leftover yarn to make wrist warmers
5. My friend James made these huge mackerel for a science event this weekend

Quark!

I never thought I'd be able to make German cheesecake here in Ireland, because the main ingredient -quark- was never available here. But this has changed:
Nunca había hecho esta tarta alemana en Irlanda, ya que no se podía comprar quark -un queso blanco fresco- aquí. Pero esto ha cambiado:
 

This being rip-off Ireland and the quark imported from Bavaria, a 250g tub is almost 3 euro (if I remember correctly, in Germany you can get 500g for less than a euro), so making a cheesecake that requires a kilo of the stuff is a luxury. Since I had only bought one tub -before I searched for a recipe-, I made a small cake.
What's great about this recipe is that it doesn't involve any pudding/custard powder stuff, like so many of the newer cheesecake recipes.
 Ya que todo es muy caro aquí y el quark importado desde Bavaria, cuesta casi tres euros para 250g (en Alemania es menos de un euro para 500g), así que hacer la tarta (con un kilo de quark) es un lujo. Sólo había comprado una tarrina, así que hice una tarta pequeña.

Quark cake (slightly adapted from here -I used less sugar):
-250g flour
-1/2 tsp baking powder
-1 egg
-120g butter
-70g sugar
-pinch of salt
Combine the above ingredients in a bowl and mix by hand, kneading into a smooth dough. Roll out and spread in a round baking tin, pulling up the edges for the crust.

For the filling:
-1kg quark
-90g flour
-170g sugar (more if you like it sweeter -the original says 250g)
-4 large eggs
 -1/8 l milk
120g melted butter

Separate the eggs. Mix the quark, flour, sugar, yolks, milk and butter. Whisk the egg whites until peaks form and fold into the mixture. Pour onto the cake base in the baking tin.
Bake at 160 degrees Celsius for about an hour.

 I used a loaf tin, as I made a tiny cake

If I make it again, I will use spelt flour (wholegrain for the base) and maybe honey instead of sugar. For this one, I used brown sugar. I have only tried a tiny bit (waiting for my friend); it's yummy.

Para los españoles, disculpad que no he traducido la receta -si la queréis, avisadme!

Painting and baking, two of my favourite grounding activities

On the easel:
It's the painting for my friend, who requested a version of a small painting I have in my house (this is the second time I am painting another version of it -might make a whole series). I started it this morning, and it still needs a lot of work. I'm not happy with the colours, had something else in mind. But I am glad I got started on it, as I thought it would be another unproductive lazy weekend this morning. That feeling dissipated as I began to paint.

Another thing that always lifts my mood is baking. It is so grounding, and it turns off all the chatter in my head. I made banana bread. This year I must have messed around with ten different recipes for banana bread. I make it so often because it's the best way to use up ripe bananas, in my opinion. This one isn't necessarily the best, but certainly one of the healthiest. I was off sugar for a few weeks recently and still try to consume as little of it as possible (she says after having devoured cake and cream in town today...), and I have noticed that the amount of sugar given in most recipes can easily be halved (or, of course replaced by honey).

This looks violent...

Spelt banana bread (heavily adapted from a recipe for banana cake by the Guardian's Dan Lepard):
-1 large egg
-55g brown sugar
-1-2 bananas, peeled, of course
-75ml grapeseed oil (or sunflower)
-75ml milk
-140g wholegrain spelt flour
-2 1/2 tsp baking powder
-1 tsp cinnamon
-dark chocolate chips (optional)
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Beat the egg, sugar and bananas until smooth and bubbly. Measure the oil and milk together in a jug, then beat into the batter mixture. Combine the flour, baking powder and cinnamon, then beat into the mix for two to three minutes, scraping down once. Stir in the chocolate chips. Spoon the batter into a 2 lb loaf tin (buttered and floured) and bake for 45 min. Let it cool, then dust with icing sugar. It tastes better the next day!

El cuadro es el que me encargó mi amigo, que quería una versión de un cuadro que tengo en mi casa. Es la segunda vez que hago una versión de ello, a lo mejor haré una serie. Empecé esta mañana, y todavía requiere mucho trabajo. No estoy contenta con los colores, había pensado en algo diferente. Pero estoy feliz que lo comencé, porque esta mañana pensaba que sería otro fin de semana sin lograr nada. Estos sentimientos se disiparon cuando pintaba.
Otra cosa que siempre me levanta el ánimo es hacer pasteles. Pone fin a todo el parloteo en mi cabeza. Hice pan de plátano. Creo que este año ya he hecho diez variaciones de ello. Esta no es la mejor, pero la más sana. No comía azúcar durante unas semanas, y todavía trato de no comer mucho azúcar. Noté que las recetas suelen dar una cantidad larga que se puede reducir a la mitad o más o sustituir por miel.
Pan de plátano (adaptado de una receta de Dan Lepard del periódico The Guardian)
-1 huevo
-55g de azúcar moreno
-1-2 plátanos, pelados, por supuesto
-75ml de aceite de pepita de la uva (o de girasol)
-75ml de leche
-140g de harina de espelta
-2 1/2 cucharitas de polvo de hornear
-1 cucharita de canela
-chispas de chocolate (opcional)
Precalentar el horno a 180°C. Batir el huevo, los plátanos y el azúcar hasta conseguir una masa suave. Añadir el aceite y la leche. Tamizar la harina con el polvo de hornear y la canela e incorporar a la mezcla, batiendo bien durante dos o tres minutos. Añadir las chispas de chocolate. Verter en un molde y hornear 45 minutos. Dejar enfríar y cubrir con azúcar glas. Este pan es mejor un día después de hacerlo!