Quilting Run

Had a chance to catch some more rural urban. The wife needed a quilting supply run. We have a choice of Topeka, Lawrence, Eudora, Manhattan, Kansas City, Overbrook and Burlingame. I don't know how she chooses but she has her favorites depending on what she needs at the time. Today it was Burlingame. It's drizzling out and it's cold, but a short road trip is always fun. I stayed in the car to sketch as she shopped. I liked the descending lines looking down the street and it needed to be sketched.

After sketching/shopping, we hit a local restaurant. Aunt B's. They had fresh scratch-made potato soup with a scratch-made dinner roll for me. Wilma had a fresh biorock. I love this place! I talked with the owner couple and they spend a lot of hours in that little shop. We'll need to come back on a Saturday morning for biscuits and gravy.

Followup on Biscuits

In my last post, Jane Angell responded and was supportive of my quest to understand the English Biscuit. To help in the dialog, here is the recipe I found on allrecipes.com: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cinnamon-Biscuits/Detail.aspx, submitted by Rhonda Warhol, called Cinnamon Biscuits.

Mix these in a large bowl-
   All-purpose flour  2 cups (250 g)
   salt  1/2 tsp (3 g)
   ground cinnamon 2 teaspoons (5 g)
Cut in-
   butter, softened  1/2 cup (115 g)
Mix with a fork until crumbly.
Add-
   white sugar  1/2 cup (100 g)
   vanilla extract, 1 teaspoon (5 ml)

Mix to a stiff paste. Mix in one beaten egg. Knead dough on a floured surface until smooth. Wrap in foil or plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350F (175C). Grease cookie sheets. Roll out dough thinly and cut into 24 rounds.

Bake 12 to 15 minutes, or until lightly gold in color. Let cool on wire rack.


Comments on the site for this recipe said they missed the milk. I found it too dry, too, so I added some. However, I'm American and the recipe isn't. Do the Brits use milk to form a tacky dough? The recipe said roll out thin. I did, and got closer to 50 biscuits so I went too thin. How thin is thin? And is this really "The basic English biscuit,with a dash of cinnamon." as specified on the recipe? Does anyone have a recipe they could hold up as a prime example to a classic English biscuit?

BTW: Sketching will continue. This blog has NOT been converted to a food network channel. This is a food compulsive tangent that must be satisfied, though.

Tea & Biscuits (?)

I just don't know what an English Biscuit is. That's not something we run across in Kansas.We don't have fine china tea cups (Corelle works fine). I don't know what you do in a Tea Room. But I do know I like hot tea. In an effort to drop a few pounds I've tried to cut out late night snacks like cookies or ice cream, but I need something. Recently I've gone to hot tea, but that causes late night bathroom runs. Then I figured out that, in true American fashion, portion size was excessive. I was drinking too much tea with my 12-16 oz cup. Maybe the British have something with their 6 oz. serving. 

Also their biscuit idea may have merit. Low sugar and nice and bland. That would be good before bed. So, a quick Internet search yields a recipe that claims to be a traditional English biscuit. The results were fine by me but I still don't know if they are the "real deal". They'll work just fine.

So, one small cup of hot tea with a little milk, and a couple small biscuits. That beats down the craving for REAL calories. I will continue my quest to understand the Brits cuisine, and to question the American super-size and super-sweet approach.

If anyone has exposure to the British tea and biscuit cuisine, I'd value your observations. Also, what IS a retail tea room and its rituals, as Liz and others talk about? And with that I end my not-so-masculine post.

Process notes: I used my Noodler's Ahab flex nib on this post again, followed by watercolor pencils, waterbrush on Arches Velin text woven. The ink flow tends to be finicky at the start, after not using the pen for a few days, but it does wake up. I still like the responsiveness of the nib. The ink is Noodler's Lexington Gray.

Community Jam

Time for our monthly jam. Our hobby music club, the Kansas Prairie Pickers Association, hosts a monthly jam at the Auburn County Community Center. I don't make it to all of them, but today I made it. It's a nice community gathering of players and listeners.

Auburn is a small town. It seems the small towns understand do-it-yourself music as a community event. Don't need a TV or video games. It's face-to-face networking. Most of our club members are from the smaller towns around Topeka. "T Town" doesn't get it. The small towns make their buildings available for our type of activities, the small cultural non-profits the build community. It's a nice atmosphere.

Smoked!

I guess I needed to start the new year with a piece of equipment failing. At least I get sketching time out of the expense. This time it's our blender. We're not sure how old it is, but it's a nice one. WAS a nice one. I was making a batch of hummus when it spewed some electrical burn/melt smells and slowed down until it stopped. Puff of smoke and all! Luckily no fire.

New appliances don't tend to impress me. Too many stories of people buying kitchen appliances and never using them. Out cupboards were full so we weren't going to get a food processor until the blender died. We had to wait a couple decades, but now is our chance. In a few days we had our food processor.

As soon as we got home I had to make something. We viewed the DVD and the breads looked good. They always look good to me. So I chose one that looked like cinnamon rolls (labelled Breakfast Bread?) and went to town. The mixing goes SO fast in these things. Results came out great. This thing is going to work fine.

As for this sketch, it's using my Noodler's Ahab flex nib pen again, with Lexington Gray ink. I still like it but I'm learning some things. This ink takes much longer to dry than my art marker pens. That would go for any fountain pen that lays down as much ink as this does on wide lines. I need to keep my fingers away or ink smudges everywhere! Also, once in a while a mysterious ink drop comes from nowhere. It just shows up. I can't tell if its from the nib or the feeder under it or from the pen body. Time will tell. I still love the ink feed rate and the ease of changing pen width. It's still a keeper.

Manhattan Meeting

Had a meeting in Manhattan last night. That's Kansas, the "Little Apple". Our State 4-H Venture crew is planning our summer backpack trip with the teens. I've been a volunteer for a few years. This time we met at a coffee house in the little business/beer district near campus we call Aggieville. I decided to get there a little earlier so I could sketch the storefront. It was getting dark but with street lights it would still be sketchable.

I set up my little three-legged stool in a nook along the sidewalk across the street and was sketching away, in my own world, when I heard "Hello, John!" in an unfamiliar voice. Nobody knows me here and I'm invisible! I kept sketching but the voice got closer. It was a cousin of my brother-in-law that we camp with a couple times a year. He hails from the Topeka area like me, 60 miles to the east. K-State basketball is playing tonight so he must be here for the game. We exchange pleasantries and he leaves with a couple others I didn't know. Then I had a vision of a future conversation. He'll go back home and strike a conversation with my brother-in-law - "Say, I saw John huddled in a dark corner in Aggieville secretly doing something by himself, oblivious to the world. Is he OK?"

New Pen

This journal entry is just one more combination of pen, ink, journal and coffee house. I'm at Juli's Coffehouse, taking a couple lunch breaks to test a new PEN! Gee, I love to do this. I thought I was happy with my current art supplies. But no, a friend (that's you, Cheryl) mentioned the Noodler's Flex Nib pen (at only $20, gouletpens.com). She knew I use a Namiki (msrp $180). Now I'm not proud of what I paid for the Namiki. I'm not a fountain pen snob. I'm a pen and ink addict with no 10-step program to save me. Anyway, Cheryl wanted to know how these two pens would compare and if I would conclude that the Namiki is worth the money.

Short answer - the Namiki is worth the money from the standpoint of quality material and construction and it's visual presentation. This thing's a piece of art and joy to use. And it PERFORMS. I'll pay for performance. That's probably why I'll never have a $350 fountain pen (which I lust for), because they may be build better yet, but won't perform better.

Back to the Noodler's. I'd like to meet the company CEO. He wanted a fountain pen for the common person, at a reasonable price so that the fountain pen could take its rightful place as a price-viable mode of written communication, and he did it! The features that mean the most to me - nice fit in hand (I like the fuller barrel of the Ahab), impressive ink flow rate (maybe too fast for some when you spring the tip for a wide mark), variable width (easy to shift from fine to broad), massive ink capacity, and colorful bodies.

Now, to get to a $20 product you need to shave some corners. They do that through cheaper parts and design. I don't know about fountain pen design (what you don't see in the pen) but from a performance standpoint the Namiki is not 9 times better. I'd be happy with the Noodler's alone. I love them both. I think I saw on the Goulet website they refer to the Noodler's pen as a "novelty" pen. Not sure what that means. It's a full function pen that does everything I want. I'm hooked. I'll be using both fountain pens.

Spend what you're comfortable spending on a pen. It's how you use it that counts. Both pens will get me to the paradise of pen and ink sketching.