More cooking....

I promise I'm not going to make this a regular thing, but just to let you know I can put my money (or spoons) where my mouth is, and that I am actually going to start using my spoons, here are the spoons I used today:

This is where some of my spoons live, on the kitchen windowsill. 

This is one of my 52 spoons, but I never showed it with the decoration on the handle. It's kolrossing with a paste of paprika and water rubbed into it. Unfortunately, it stained the whole handle so I had to rub it back with sand-paper, which actually gave it an older, more vintage look.

We call this simple chicken dish 'Angela Chicken', named after our American friend Angela Jones who taught us how to make it. It's chicken breast, fried in the wok with black pepper, leek, sweet peppers and frozen peas. Add a tub (or two) of low fat cream cheese, a splash of cream and milk to loosen it up a bit, and simmer till chicken is cooked through. A tasty, quick week night meal.

Served on rice, using my 'tortoise shell' serving spoon.

I'm still being a bit precious and rather than leaving the spoons in the washing up bowl, I wiped them straight down with warm soapy water and returned them to the jar.

Someone stage an intervention....

It's official - I'm addicted to spoon carving!
I came in from a really busy week last Friday; I ate and did some school work and was determined to get an early night. Then I made the fatal error of just looking at a few of the blogs I like to follow and, after seeing some of the spoons that other people had been carving I simply couldn't resist the urge to fumble around in the back garden for a bit of wood and, at 11:30, when I was too tired to be trusted with an axe and it was too dark to see which finger I was most likely to loose, I carved this little spoon.

There's nothing particularly special about it - it's carved from ash and is now waiting for some form of decoration on the handle, but it's significant in the fact that it was the one where I had to admit how much I need to carve.

You can't just look at them forever......

The above is a quote from my wife, commenting on the strange relationship I have with the spoons and other kitchen utensils I have carved over the past few years. Whenever I have sold an item I have always stressed it's utility and the fact that it is a practical tool and is made to be used. I have even included a small leaflet with items in the past explaining as much and with care instructions for those who chose to do so. And yet, ironically, paradoxically, hypocritically - call it what you will - I don't actually use them myself. Well, that's not actually true; I have a jar full of spreaders in the kitchen that we all use for butter, jam, chocolate spread etc, and my wife, despite never quite managing to get them the right way round (there is a definite handle end and blade end), claims they are good for a variety of kitchen tasks. I also have a single eating spoon that I have used when out camping. But apart from that, I have a bag of about 100 items that I get out to show friends and visitors who I either think might be interested or who I would like to scare away (and telling someone you carve wooden spoons for fun is as good a way of doing that as any!), and they look at them, turn them over in their hands, compare, contrast, discuss and often even admire them, then I put them away again.

So, thinking it's time I put my money where my mouth is, I decided to take the plunge yesterday and use a pair of silver birch spatulas that I must have carved at least 2 years ago. And they worked really well - not that the job they had to do was rocket-science. You kind of scrape and flip and agitate and that's about it.

So what job did I use them for? What my family call 'stove top stuffing', to be eaten with roast pork loin, potatoes dauphin noir, roast spuds, parsnips and sweet potatoes, Nigella Lawson's cumin seed savoy cabbage and Yorkshire pudding. Delicious!

I know this is not the traditional English way of cooking stuffing, ala up the bird's bum, but it is the way my mum has always done it and the way that is very popular in the States. I grew up in Banbury near Upper Hayford American Air Force base and I suspect Mum got the idea from American friends we met there.

My recipe is simple but effective - 1/2 a packet of regular stuffing mix, the dehydrated kind; add enough boiling water to rehydrate; add roughly torn bread, preferably dry and with seeds or something of a farmhouse nature; add a fairly finely chopped red onion; (I also like finely chopped chorizo, but my kids tell me off for this as they say I put it in everything); add an egg and lastly a glug of cooking oil. Mix together, but try not to break the bread down too much - it needs to stay chunky.

Heat a pan with some more oil. When hot, add the mixture and keep frying and turning the mixture until it is cooked through and the bread bits have gone caramelized and crunchy. My kids love it.

The spatulas performed well, I have lost my spatula virginity, and I look forward to them developing a bit of colour and patina through use.

And on a completely different note, the weather people have been saying for some time now that Britain is in for the coldest winter for a long time, and it hasn't quite materialized yet, though there's plenty of time yet. Anyway, we had our first real frost yesterday - clear blue skies and sunshine too - and while I didn't have the time to go out properly, it all looked really pretty in the garden.

Bowl no. 2

So far so good, two bowls in two weeks. I know that to many that might not sound like a big deal, but with a full time job that doesn't include making bowls and two young children, it can sometimes feel like a mammoth task. Anyway, this is another one in apple, this time painted with blue over white paint.

In truth it was a pig to turn as there was a rather large hidden knot (which you can still see on the rim) which caused a problem in its self but also meant that there was some twisted grain that needed to be dealt with. There is some very subtle carving which I think works well.

As it's quite small (about 7 inches) I wanted to turn it nice and thin. I don't have a strong light behind the lathe, but still managed to see a change in colour as the wall thinned.

Sorry about the poor pictures. My memory card has broken so a phone will have to suffice.

Bowl number 1

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year. I had a great time, but haven't had much time to do any woodwork. I made a few Christmas presents, a leather wallet for my Dad (sorry  no pics) and this little tool I made for Laura.

It's a button hole chisel for dressmaking and it works a treat if I do say so myself.

One thing I'd really like to do more of in 2014 is bowl turning. I reckon I've turned just over 20 bowls so far over the last three years and having followed Richard's 52 spoons challenge I realise that i'm really just beginning and if I want to get better then I've got to do more. So I'm going to go for a 52 bowls challenge and possibly even more. I reckon that if I' m going to be successful in achieving this then I need to try and be as efficient as possible. It's going to help that my mate Nick is now getting into it and is very proficient with a chainsaw, so he may be able to help me out as getting the log into a blank ready to mount can be quite time consuming. I know that I should probably get a chainsaw myself, but aside from the cost, I don't really like the things, so getting Nick to do my dirty work for me could help. I also ant to spend a bit more time with a pen and paper rather than my usual approach of just seeing how it will turn out.

So for bowl number one I decided to do a few sketches first to give me a better idea of what I wanted to  achieve. This was my first go at turning apple, what a fantastic wood. It was also very fresh (cut that morning). Unfortunately I made a bit of a mistake and failed to clean my tools properly after Nick borrowed them to turn some oak, so the horrible black mess from the reaction of the steel to the tannin in the oak ended up transferring from the tool to my fingers and then on to the bowl. Oh well, it's all part of the learning process.

So that's bowl number one, made from apple and measuring 10.5 inches in diameter. It looks quite chunky in these pictures, the actual wall thickness is about 7mm, which seems about right of a bowl of this size. I think that next time I do one like this I'd really like to make the beads a bit more defined and also smaller.
 Only 51 to go, I just hope I can get enough wood.

Wood Club

I've spent a fair bit of time in the workshop over the last few weeks. I haven't made much, instead I've been helping my friends Nick and Dave turn some bowls and make some oak chopping boards. It's been a lot of fun and we've had regular meetings of what Nick has now named 'Wood Club'.

Dave turned two big sycamore bowls out of two halves of the same log. These were both made as presents for his colleagues.

And here are the finished bowls:

It was a really interesting experience teaching someone how to turn. Having taught myself and not really understanding why I do what I do, it was a good learning experience for me to have to explain the process and through doing so, gain a better insight into what's going on.

Here is Nick's bowl:

Though it is a fair bit smaller than Dave's, it was a bigger challenge because of hollowing out in a smaller space. Both lads did a great job and are hooked on turning now. Nick has already got himself a lathe and I'm sure Dave will follow suit just as soon as he can get a dedicated space.

Wood Club in full swing

Tortoiseshell serving spoon.....

I made this spoon a couple of months ago. It's laurel and it was a copy of a spoon Julian bought from a charity shop some years ago and uses a lot for cooking - or at least he did until I nicked it to copy!

Not sure how this picture came about?

Anyway, It's not a bad spoon, as spoons go. The bowl wasn't as deep as I'd have liked it to be, but that was dictated by the size of the piece of wood I started with. It's about 10" long. It's not particularly decorative in design, but I absolutely love the natural colour and patination (I'm sure that's a real word, but spell check says 'no') of the wood. It was quite colourful to begin with, but after a little bit of oil and a couple of months in the spoon jar on the window-sill of the kitchen, it has gone even darker. At first i thought it looked a bit like cow-hide, but now it reminds me of the fur of a tortoiseshell cat.

I haven't used the spoon yet, but am convinced with use, and washing and subsequent oiling, the colour would come out even better. Oh the eternal dilemma of using or selling spoons. I haven't made that many spoons yet - a couple of hundred maybe, altogether, which may sound a lot, but there are those who would do that in a month or two - and so I'm still a little bit precious about them all. They are a bit like my children and all live in a drawstring canvas bag in the garage (the spoons, that is, not the children). I guess I can't go on carving for ever and never getting rid of any. I've given away and sold the odd one here and there, but one day I'm going to have to get serious about them.

Anyone out there got any tips on how to cut the apron strings (again, I'm talking about the spoons, not the children).