Saturday: Dumpling Story

Well, I guess it's more like a dumpling recipe, with a little prelude:

I decided to make and share my Grandma May's maple dumplings as part of our dinner party. It seemed like an appropriate dish-it's warm and doughy and sweet-the epitome of comfort food, and it fills the space with a mapley good scent. There's really nothing better or more delicious on a cold fall day. There is also an element of improvisation to this recipe-my grandma's family moved to Saskatchewan from Quebec, and this recipe is sort of a Fransaskois take of a Quebecois dish. My grandparents, unable to find, or maybe unable to afford, real maple syrup, boiled the dumplings in a sauce made of brown sugar, water, and Mapeline brand imitation maple flavouring. The first time I made them, I used real maple syrup, and while the dumplings were really very tasty, they didn't taste a thing like the ones I remembered my Grandma making. The version I made was the Prairie version--it is the one that reminds me of home, and it is also the one that seems the most appropriate to make in a makeshift, cobbled together kitchen for new friends and strangers.

Grandma and Grandpa Dumplings

You need:

1 cup white flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 tablespoons shortening
1/2 cup milk
2 cups brown sugar
2 cups boiling water
1 tsp maple extract

* as a note, you can substitute 2 cups of maple syrup for the brown sugar, boiling water, and maple extract if you are interested.

And what you shoud do is this:

Sift the flour, measure and sift again with baking powder and salt. Add the shortening, cut into the dry ingredients and mix as you would for ordinary pie crust. Pour the milk in all at once and mix quickly. The dough should be quite firm. Heat the 2 the water, brown sugar, and maple extract in a sauce pan, and when it boils, drop in the dough by spoonfuls. Cover the saucepan, lower the stove to a simmer, and let the dough poach without boiling for 12 to 15 minutes. Do not lift the lid during this time. Serve each dumpling with spoonfuls of maple sauce and a drizzle of cream.

As an aside, I doubled this recipe, did most of my measuring with a New Gallery coffee mug, used Vitasoy instead of milk, and decided to forgo sifting altogether. The dumplings were still delicious.

Blair: so late on Wednesday night.

Well, I'm tired as hell again, which is perfect. I'll be all ripe for another nap tomorrow afternoon. This project, for me, is becoming an exercise in sleep deprivation. I hope that I'll be able to function properly when it's all done and I have to go back to school and a regular style schedule.
The gallery is right beside (sort of on top of) a big, noisy, kinda crappy dance club called Mynt, and tonight, it was thumping until quarter to three...things were falling off the tables because of the bass. It was stupid. I indulged in a little private performance, dancing by myself in the TNG office, whilst reading documentary texts of the Golden Streams project with General Idea and NE Thing Co. and Image Bank and all those kids. People from the bar would occasionally glance up and see me dancing, but it was pretty unsexy--I'm a fairly disappointing dancer, I'm afraid, and I kept all of my clothes on, even my toque.
It's quiet now, and I should probably go to bed soon.
Some good conversations about the project were had, during this thumpy and ridiculous late night, but no real conclusions were reached.
Some bits of that conversation, paraphrased, and mostly reflecting my opinions, not necessarily the opinions of my esteemed colleagues:

- There is a place in the world for big idea art and small idea art, although small ideas are best expressed in small ways. Occasionally, I see work that is big and beautiful and impressive, but reflects ideas so simple and slight that the presentation seems extraneous and kind of ridiculous. The result is work that reads as not being very conceptually sound. I don't necessarily think that means that that little idea isn't valid, just that it needs to be expressed in some little way.
- there also seems to be difficulty in finding a place somewhere in between didactic and ambiguous, where real dialogue can happen. My favorite work looks simple and easy at first, but reveals layers of meaning and becomes more interesting after spending some time with it. I don't like feeling alienated by art, and generally prefer work that looked like it was easy and fun to make. I like democratic art practices.
- I also don't want to make work that is gimmicky, but recognize that if there isn't something immediately appealing or interesting in a piece, that it's pretty hard to get people to care about it. Another tough line to walk.
- I sometimes worry that my own work is a little bit too slight, or too easy. I also realize that I have a strong bias towards work that is fuzzy or tiny, or features charming little drawings, or is about animals, If one were to present me with a tiny, charming little drawing of a fuzzy animal, all criticality would go out the window and I would fall madly in love with it.

My birthday is June 1, if anyone would like to make art dream happen.

Love,
Blair

Blair:Sleeping and writing, writing and sleeping

And this little portion will be from my perspective. I am probably the laziest ONO, so I have decided to sleep in lieu of making art that is difficult or challenging.

But perhaps I should give a bit of background information. Having recently moved from Regina to London, Ontario to go to grad school, I don't quite feel settled in my new home yet, or in my new student lifestyle. I feel like my critical thinking skills are a bit rusty, and my apartment is still sort of chaotic and it's easy to get distracted and have to spend ages finding something that should be RIGHT OVER THERE. And I live with two lovely boys, who always distract me with prospects of dancing or rich and tasty desserts, or other kinds of random fun, when I really should be working. So, I have a theory and criticism paper due, well, it was due today, but I had been working on it before leaving for Calgary, like, fairly diligently, but also at what could be considered 'last minute.' I don't really get started on stuff unless someone lights a fire under my ass.

And M:ST was sort of the fire under my ass--I really wanted to finish the paper before coming here. So the night before I head out, I stay up all night writing all about psychoanalytic theory and the uncanny and the perverse pleasures of collecting and yukky Mike Kelley. And that morning, I keep on writing, and about an hour before I have to catch my plane, I throw a bunch of completely random things into a suitcase and fly away to Calgary.

I experience similar problems at the B&B (see Felix's first day post) and I am in a grumpy mood because of all of the Freudian stuff and because I have eaten nothing but Sunny Mix Plane Snax all day. Oh, and a Skor bar. So I have Thanksgiving supper alone at Boston Pizza and it's sort of sad, (although Thanksgiving supper at Renato and Hollie's was lovely and friendly and fun and totally made up for the overpriced and underdelicious pizza I had the night before) and then I keep on writing on my bitchy paper.

And in the morning, the other lovely ONOs are there at the breakfast table and things are much better. And we move on over to the gallery and now we live there.

Last night, I stayed up all night and I finished writing my paper in the dark little archives room, and today I was completely sleepdrunk and incoherent, so I had to have a nap in the afternoon. And I awoke to about 20 students from NSCAD, in our space for a little tour/artist's talk. And I was all groggy and confused, which was interesting. Apparently, people did enter the space and spend time there while I was sleeping, and I didn't wake up. Sleeping puts you in a pretty vulnerable place, and I thought it was interesting, and kind of really exciting, too, that I was able to think of the gallery (pretty much public) as my bedroom (really pretty private) and allow myself to be vulnerable, possibly in front of strangers.

I even dreamt. I dreamt of a new flavour of ice cream, called 'toast-ice.' I think I'm gonna try to make it sometime. It was a good sleep.

So I think I'm going to try and nap some more.

That's all for now.

Kisses,
Blair