A while back I agreed to take care of a friend’s bonsai tree. I did warn him that I’m not very good with plants. In fact, I kill them on occasion, sometimes unconsciously.  Long story short, the bonsai decided to loose all its leaves within one night, after just about three weeks in my care (was it suicide?). It was too sad to accept, so I started a resurrection project. I can’t do wonders and bring the actual tree back to life, but I can at least make a bunch of new leaves, I thought. And so I did.

I didn’t count how many leaves I made, but there are probably around 130 of them. I made them according to a simple crochet veined leaf pattern that I found on Ravelry. I made a bunch with the original pattern, then made a few with just half of the stem, and then I figured that it was easiest and prettiest just without the stem, so I went with that for most of the leaves.

In other news, the other plant that I took into my care liked – and still likes – it much better here. It even got two beautiful blossoms!

Yesterday, I invited people over to cook and eat together. It’s so easy to get into the habit of making the same food over and over again, and only for events like these do I look into my cookbooks. This time around I decided to give raw food a(nother) try; raw food as in: raw food that looks like cooked food.

I don’t exactly know what’s in the stuff we came up with, partly because we just made things up, and partly because I focused on making the sushi. But, here’s details about what I remember.

Smoothie

I actually have no idea what went into the smoothie. Bananas, and I don’t even know what berries. One of the frozen berry mixes maybe? All I can say is that it tasted awesome, and that I’m having the leftovers for breakfast right now.

Green Squash Pasta

The pasta was made by spiralizing green squash (the spiralizer looked much like the Lurch Spiral Slicer). You get REALLY LONG pasta that way, which I love.

The sauce was, as far as I know, not much more than orange juice, avocado, and pomegranate seeds. But I really don’t know…

Sushi

I love how the sushi turned out, even though none of us had ever tried to make raw sushi before. Turns out it’s not very hard to make. We concluded that it’s faster, tastier, and healthier than the cooked version

We made the “rice” out of one cauliflower head, around  1 1/2 cups of cashews that I had soaked for 2+ hours, and a little bit of lemon juice. I ground up the cashews into paste-like consistency, separately ground the cauliflower using a food processor, and then mixed them together in a bowl, with the added lemon juice. We didn’t use any salt. The filling consisted of: red peppers, cucumber, carrots, avocado (all cut into thin sticks), and sunflower sprouts.

Apple Pie with Banana (Ice) Cream

The apple pie was really something I was looking forward to trying. Fruit pies are my favorite kinds of cakes, so I was eager to have a somewhat healthy version of it.

The pie crust was made out of a mix of hazelnuts and almonds, a whole box of dates, and some added vanilla (I think).  The filling was made of ground apples, lemon juice and, of course, lots of cinnamon. The pie was topped with crushed hazelnuts. The pie was really good, though I wouldn’t consider it light food. We had the pie as our first course, and I was already pretty full before even getting to pasta and sushi.

The ice cream was a one ingredient ice cream as described here. The bananas weren’t completely frozen when we processed them, so the ice cream was on the very creamy side. But still very yummy!

Coconut!

We also had coconut. I’m not used to having coconuts, so the process of opening it, getting the coconut water and meat, was very exciting to watch. Especially when the only tool around is an old kitchen knife. The result was super-tasty nevertheless

All in All…

Our kitchen experiments were a big success, I’d say, and I’m looking forward to trying out more (raw) food soon!

So I’m always mesmerized when I see artists that use books as the base material for their sculptures. Here’s a list of book artists and cut/carved art works that I find especially beautiful. I found most of them via blog posts on My Modern Metropolis and Brain Pickings.

Nicholas Galanin: Faces

American artist Nicholas Galanin combines traditional and contemporary art in his work. With a Master’s degree in Indigenous Visual Arts from Massey University in New Zealand, he integrates indigenous culture into his work. The above works, he says, “retain the elegance of traditional masks, but their contemporary forms have an eeriness, a feeling of being there and not there – perhaps because of their pale color, their blurry, almost shrouded, features, and their seemingly sightless eyes. And, just as they seem to be materializing from the book’s pages, they also hover on the point of dissolution. There is an implication that they will never fully take form – resulting in a haunting sense of loss and longing.”

Wim Botha: The Human Condition

Wim Botha, a South-African artist, creates large-scale sculptural installations out of books, carved from dictionaries, bibles, encyclopedias, and also wood. He combines them with other everyday and symbolic objects, to create works with a whole new symbolic character. Very powerful artwork that I’d love to experience in person.

Kyle Kirkpatrick: Miniature People in Book Landscapes

On his profile, the UK-based artist Kyle Kirkpatrick states: “My practice is primarily concerned with the notion of the imagined landscape. I present man-made objects and natural materials simultaneously to form carefully and meticulously composed installation works. I capitalize on intrigue taking objects out of context reinventing their use, pushing the viewer to see beyond what I present before them.”

Guy Laramee: Book Landscapes

The artist from Montréal carves elaborate mountains out of big encyclopedias. He says: “Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS.”

Alexander Korzer-Robinson: Encyclopedic Storybook Art

I really like the approach that the British artist Alexander Korzer-Robinson has: he carefully cuts out parts of image-rich books like encyclopedias, so that what you see is a layered composition of the book’s illustration. A brilliant idea!

Brian Dettmer: Book Surgery

Having gushed about Korzer-Robinson, the Atlanta-based artist Brian Demetter uses a similar approach, but takes it to a whole new level. Images and words from within the book come to the fore; in addition, he shapes the whole book in such a way that it becomes a whole new entity. Simply stunning!

Su Blackwell: Scenic Storytelling

The London-based artist Su Blackwell creates incredibly beautiful artwork within the realm of fairy-tales and folklore. “For the cut-out illustrations,” she says, “I tend to lean towards young-girl characters, placing them in haunting, fragile settings, expressing the vulnerability of childhood, while also conveying a sense of childhood anxiety and wonder. There is a quiet melancholy in the work, depicted in the material used, and choice of subtle colour.”

Honorable Mention: Book Planters

Last, but not least, here’s an idea for a DIY book carving project: make planters out of books. There is a few tutorials around, for example at Green Wedding Shoes and Apartment Therapy. If you end up making some, let me know!

Another thing I made for Global Village (see previous post) is a rendition of Linzertorte, a crumbly dough torte with a lattice design on top, named after the Austrian city Linz.

Here’s what I used:

• 250g flour
• 150g ground roasted hazelnuts
• 100g ground almonds
• 10g baking powder
• 150g sugar (typically powdered sugar, I used Muscovado sugar)
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• a pinch of clove powder
• 200g milk-free margarine
• egg replacer powder for one egg (in Norway, you can buy it at e.g. Rema1000 or Meny)
• jam (typically redcurrant; I used rosehip)

Mix the dry ingredients; then quickly knead in the margarine. (If you knead it for too long, the dough is going to break when you try to roll it out.) Put it in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Grease a cake pan. Roll out about 3/4 of the dough, and put it in the pan. Make the dough a little higher around the edge. Spread it a little with your fingers, if necessary. Then spread the jam over the dough, maybe half a centimeter high. Roll out the rest of the dough, cut it in stripes, and put the stripes in a lattice design on top of the jam.

Bake it at 180°C for 20-30min. The Linzertorte tastes best if you let it rest over night first. Enjoy!

Last Friday, we celebrated the multi-national culture at Opera Software with a Global Village, an event where employees served samples of traditional foods from their native countries. I’m the only Austrian at Opera, so I got to choose what to serve on my table.

I grew up in the Pongau  district of Salzburg (Salzburg is both the city and one of Austria’s 9 states), in the middle of the Alps. A very typical dish for the region is ‘Pongauer Fleischkrapfen’, a sort of meat dumpling, typically made with smoked meat. So for Global Village, I created a modern rendition of the dish. It is 100% vegetarian, though I must warn you: that doesn’t make the dish much lighter.

The recipe is for 6-8 people. Fleischkrapfen take quite a bit of time to prepare, so it does make sense to make a bunch. The good thing is that you can make them in stages. I did it like this:

• Day 1: prepare the filling
• Day 2: make the dough and make the Krapfen
• Day 3: deep-fry the Krapfen

The measurements are not very exact, since I usually cook by approximation rather than by book.

The Filling

• ~100g TVP (Textured vegetable protein)
• 2 blocks of smoked tofu (the smokier the better)
• 2 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 large potato, cooked
• vegetable stock
• soy sauce
• vegetable frying oil
• herb salt, pepper
• parsley

Cover the dry TVP with boiling water, add a dash of soy sauce, a whole bunch of vegetable stock, and herb salt. The liquid should be a lot saltier than the usual vegetable broth. Let the TVP rehydrate for a couple of minutes (the package will tell you how long exactly). Mince the smoked tofu and mash the potato. When ready, drain the TVP and press it with your hands to remove all excess liquid.

Finely cut the onions and fry them in oil until lucent. Then add some more oil, the TVP and the tofu, and roast for a little while. Then add the rest of the ingredients (potato, crushed garlic, spicery). To make it taste authentic, make sure to use a whole bunch of oil and salt. The filling shouldn’t taste dry. Let the filling cool down before you use it. Ideally, leave it over night, so the TVP can take on some of the smokiness of the tofu.

The Dough: “Abbrennteig”

• 250g wheat flour
• 250g rye flour
• ~ 250ml unsweetened plant milk (e.g. soy milk or oat milk)
• 100g milk-free margarine
• 1 tsp ground caraway
• salt (1 tbs?)

We call this dough “Abbrennteig” (burn-up-dough?). The idea is to ‘burn’ the flour with the hot liquid, so it thickens immediately. It can be a little tricky to get the amount of liquid right, since you shouldn’t have to add too much flour or cold liquid later on. The dough should be hard enough so it doesn’t stick and is strong enough to hold in the filling. If it is too hard, it will be tough to roll it out.

To make the dough, mix the dry ingredients. Boil up the milk and margarine, then mix the hot liquid into the dry ingredients. Knead a little and let the dough rest for a little while, so it can cool down. (I had it rest over night even, covered with plastic foil).

The Krapfen

• Cooking oil for deep frying (I used coconut oil)

Take a bit of the dough and roll it out thinly, around 15cm in diameter. Put filling on the lower half of the circle, and fold over the other half. Make sure there’s no extra air in the pocket. Press the edges shut with your fingers, leave around 1cm of edge; you don’t want the Fleischkrapfen to open up while you deep-fry them. Cut off excess dough with a pastry wheel.

If you end up with leftover dough (or if you want a simpler/faster dish), roll out the dough and cut it into large squares. The deep-fried squares are called “Blattlkrapfen” (leaf krapfen). We’d usually wrap them with Sauerkraut and eat them with our hands.

Deep-fry the Fleischkrapfen (brown them a little on both sides), and put them on kitchen roll paper to remove extra fat. Serve them immediately, together with sauerkraut. Good luck!

The process of decorating my apartment is a slow one. I want every part of it to be special. I want to have a positive connection to the items I own, and not own too much of them. So I want to put some effort into the decoration I put up, without spending much money on it.

When I saw the family tree on All Things Paper, I knew I wanted to make something similar myself. As in the original project, I used toilet paper rolls for the leaves and cardboard for the branches, but I also used cardboard instead of photo frames. I made mine purple (because purple is awesome), with some black shadows and golden highlights. Finding the right pictures is still work-in-progress

The tree with pictures.

Before I put pictures up.

Detail.

Time for another upcycling project!

So I have this big-ass dining table in my apartment, extendable to fit at least 6 people. I finally tested it in its extended form last week, when I had people over for the UX book club. There was only one problem: It was empty. I had no decoration for it whatsoever. Well, I have candles, but one tiny candle on a big table doesn’t really do much. So I decided, in a cloak-and-dagger operation, to dig through my paper trash and make something out of it.

I ended up using just three paper bags – the ones bread comes in. I opened them up into one flat layer, and colored them with acrylic paint: two with purple paint and white highlights, one with golden paint. Then I cut 2cm wide stripes, and wove them together. I glued all the overlaps. Voila!

Oh, and for the white part I cut three circles out of a white plastic bag, cutting around a pot with a Stanley knife. I stuck them together in the middle using double-sided tape. Then I added a simple line of golden acrylic paint.

The reverse side of the paper part looks like this:

The bread was a little oily, that’s why there are some dark spots

I didn’t document the process, so I can’t give you a step-by-step guide. But maybe you can tell by looking at the leftovers. Here you go!

And now the final frame:

Yes, it is the typical tirade
The trouble letting go

No more Melody, or dreams of D
No more Home outside of me

While I cherished what we tried to make
I never got the flow

Ah, heck, I wish I could just turn my back
And leave it all behind

The bad, the good, the dearth of time
The things I couldn’t find

No more masquerades, no fait accompli
No closets with no room for me

The irony in all of this:
While having what is most alike
Myself I could but miss