A little perilous adventure in the kitchen

I am in a cooking rut!  I have been cooking dinner for over 50 years!  Both of my parents worked so it was up to my sister and me to get dinner on the table at night after school and I have been cooking dinner ever since.   I pulled out a chuck roast to make into stew the other day and I just stared at it.  What could I do to get beyond the usual wine and herbs de Provence to flavor it up.  Fortunately, I have an extensive library of cookbooks also dating back 50 years.  (Cookbooks may not qualify as being "creative" but you have to begin somewhere) Suddenly I spied an old Good Housekeeping International Cookbook that I got in the dark ages using S&H Green Stamps collected from the A&P.  I told you it was from the dark ages because who even knows what green stamps are and what exactly is an A&P?  So I was perusing through the cookbook and discovered that just about every country has one kind of stew or another.  I found a recipe that met my main criteria which was that I did not have to drop everything to go to the grocery store to get more ingredients.  It was for a Guinian beef stew.  Now I have never cooked African before so this would be an adventure!  The peril would be if it resulted in a stew that my husband, George, would or would not eat!  So armed with beef, beef broth, tomatoes, onions, spinach, cayenne and ---------peanut butter (yes, I said peanut butter), I forged ahead!  Dinner time arrived.   The stew was simmering on the stove, the rice was ready and waiting, and the salad was made.  George lifts the top off of the pot of stew and says "This looks good!  Stew just like I like it with lots of gravy!".  A glimmer of hope quieted my beating heart as I told him what was in it -  but left out the peanut butter part.  So we sit down to eat, my eyes warily glancing at George's face to see his reaction to his first bite.  "Wow, this is great!  I think I like it better than regular stew!!!", he says!  So I let him eat on and finally confess that the magic ingredient in the stew that thickened it was actually crunchy peanut butter!  He never even slowed down his eating to comment. This recipe was a keeper! 

I may not be Julia Child but I do have all of her cookbooks and cut my teeth on the Art of French Cooking as a young bride,  I may not be Julie and have no plans to cook every recipe in the Good Housekeeping International Cookbook but it has earned a place of honor on the shelf of my favorite cookbooks and it has opened a door to being more adventurous in cooking.  Peanut butter in beef stew??  Really???  I mean really????  I hope George is ready for this.

Yup! I actually picked up a paintbrush

On Saturday I arrived at class early (over achieving Virgo that I am), and set myself up in what I thought was the perfect spot to view the instructor painting his canvas.  WRONG!!  It was the worst spot in the room.  All I saw all day was the instructor's back blocking the canvas!  And I was hemmed in between two other painters so I could not move to see what he was painting.  Ah well.  In retrospect, it made me concentrate on what I was doing, what was actually coming from me not copied from the instructor.  Sounds good in theory, but I soon realized that without some basic knowledge about color, technique, value, edges and composition I was totally clueless.  There was no way I could put on canvas what I felt inside without some rudimentary knowledge of what it was I was doing.  Naive, right?  Right! 

So class begins.  We all introduce ourselves and give a little background in our art endeavors.  Since I have NO background, my introduction is short and sweet!  GROAN!  Everyone else had been painting since childhood it seems or had parents who were artists, etc, etc,etc.  And then there was me.  No chance to escape because I was hemmed in, remember?  I had no choice but to start opening my brand new paint tubes, lay out a palette and at least pretend I knew what I was doing.  Fortunately, the instructor had us read Carlson's Guide to Landcape Painting so I wasn't completely in the dark and had a little advantage over that 5 year old boy I met in the art store a few days earlier. 

At the end of class, I wandered around and looked at everyone's paintings.  I was amazed!!  No one had one that looked even remotely like the instructor's!!!  There was hope for me yet!!  By far my favorite was the painting done by a  fiftyish woman who shared with us that she had been painting since she was a child but quit when she found out she had cancer.  This class was the first time she picked up a brush again and I loved, loved, loved her painting.  It had a brilliant yellow and orange sky!!  Talk about hope!  Talk about knowing what you want to say and having the skills to put it on canvas!!  Beautiful, simply beautiful!!!  I packed up my things, gingerly picked up my wet canvas and headed home with a little smile on my face and a heart full of contentment.  Maybe this isn't going to be so hard afterall.  I do not know.  I will find out on Wednesday when I begin a 6 week course on still lifes.  In the meantime I am reading the book in preparation for this class.  It is entitled ALLA PRIMA- Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid.  It is a magnificent book!!  He is a magnificent painter.  Oh to be able to paint like that!!   A girl can dream!!!!

I made a New Year's resolution this year to try to be more creative; to draw on the right side of my brain more instead of the organized Virgo left side.  Sooooo, I sat down and made a list of what really drew me in, what rang my bells, what would make me throw caution to the wind and just go for it!  Needless to say, I had quite a list!  One day two weeks ago I brought a picture into a picture framing store to have it framed.   The store was also an art gallery and they were offering a one day class on landscape painting in oils.  Well, I live in a place surrounded by mountain landscapes so I signed up on the spot!  Not exactly the behavior of an organized Virgo.  Not exactly the behavior of someone who never even picked up a paintbrush!  What had I done???  The day before the class, I was in an art store spending a fortune on art supplies.  There was a class of 5 year olds in there taking their first art lesson with real paint.  A little boy ran up to me to show me his painting on real canvas.  He was so proud of what he had done!  Well, I learned a lesson from that little boy.  No matter how much trepidation I felt at my hasty decision to join an art class, I would be proud of what I did and just proud that I had the guts to leap out of my comfort zone and try something totally new.  I mean, if a 5 year old could do it, so could I!  Right??  I also had another realization - when did we lose the spontaneity of early childhood?  When did we become afraid or embarrassed of just being who we are, who we knew ourselves to really be, independent of anyone else?  I want to get back to that again.  To be a child at heart again!  And so I started with the first class in painting last week.  I have a debt of gratitude to that little boy, and to my juicy crone sintwister friends who prodded me along with encouragement and advice in starting this new phase of my being.  By the way, that is also how this blog began!  Join me, if you will, in sharing your adventures!   Hang on to your hats!  It could be quite a trip!