I Grew My First Radish!

I am an aspiring gardener. I find it that gardening is a great exercise for the patience muscle, and a very rewarding experience for someone who enjoys looking at plants and tinkering with things! I sowed some seeds of radish in the fall and watched this pot being soaked by a series of wet winter storms, while little leaves started to grow, and then bigger and bigger ones. And then one morning, I saw my very first radish poking out of the ground. If you do not know, radishes stick a bit when ready to harvest. I pulled it out right away and shared it with my family - right after I sketched this beauty! Now, with the next one (almost ready to be gathered), hopefully I will be patient enough to sketch it still in the ground and then on the plate. At least that is my intention. 

I planted about 12 seeds, some did not make it, but quite a few did - so get ready for a spring series lol :)

Send me your favorite ways of eating radishes! I am also researching some interestingly-shaped and unusually-colored ones to try growing next :)

Recent Cooking Adventures

Holidays are usually a non-stop baking situation in my household, and this year was not different. However, there were some new-ish and quite colorful cooking adventures which I sketched: Sobolo, Fermented Cabbage, and Pickled Veggies. Should I go back to making a cookbook? :)

 

Summer Bounty

No matter how I look at it,  there is no denying that we are heading into the fall. But summer is still on my mind - especially since the San Francisco Bay Area does not get fall weather till the end of November. To compensate, people are trying to introduce the upcoming season with decorations (pumpkins are everywhere!) But there are still a couple of weeks left on the schedule for the farmer's market that I frequent in the summer, so I will still count this as a summer-themed post. 

I already reported on a few things that were especially memorable this growing season (avocados, figs, and eggplants). But some beauties - found, grown, and purchased - were left out of the conversation:

Neighbor's tree had an abundance of plums - I carried them in a little bag improvised with my handkerchief. We also picked up some apples and a tasty, yet angle-shaped asian pear (they are in the peak of the season by the way!) 

This strawberry was something from the other world - and helped me to make my choice of the strawberry basket an easy one (I usually struggle for at least a couple of minutes before deciding which one to buy). 

Persimmons!

Persimmons have one of the best orange colors in the fruit world and what a festival of shapes! As long as these fruits are in season I eat and draw them daily - sometimes in that order that is why there are fever drawings this year - it was very good for persimmon eating :)

More Fall Fruits!

As I wait for the persimmon season to start and thoroughly enjoy apple season, another fruit made it to my sketchbook: Pineapple guava also known as feijoa!

I enjoyed layering several different techniques in these three versions of the same group of fruits: monoprinting with acrylics, gouache, ink, stencils, color pencils. 

A Great Reason to Paint Apples

Apples are one of my favorite things in the whole world. And Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) is an excellent reason to eat (and draw) apples. 

So - Shana Tova Umetuka! to those who celebrate and all around them!

I made a list of things I want to get rid of,  reorganized a big part of my working space and started a few new projects - all while eating apples.

It's a season for pumpkins and persimmons

This is my favorite pumpkin (when cooked) - Kabocha. Technically it is winter squash but I like the word pumpkin. It has an amazing variety of greens outside, the skin is delightfully knobby and the insides are my favorite orange-yellow becoming bright orange when cooked. It has a lot of individuality in the way it tastes and I like baking it - each slice covered with different spices. This particular beauty I sketched with acrylic markers in my sketchbook. 

Real Cucumbers!

Real cucumbers - with a prickly, thick skin, with a bitter, darker end, and with so much taste in a salad! In my sketchbook - painted with watercolor and gouache and some wild brushes. I got them from someone who grows them (Thank you, U!) and enjoyed painting them, not to mention eating!

And here you can find a real-time video of me painting these with my watercolor + gouache combo portable palette that I am still fiddling with.  

Illustrated recipe: fermented carrots

 

Bunch of Dill

As I am approaching the end of my sketchbook, I try to look back, and sometimes I find things that I completely forgot. This page was the first one in this book, and I just got a monster bunch of dill. How fragrant it was!

 

Illustrated Recipe: Three ways to cook beets and three salads to make with them!

Beets are a great addition to a salad when they are raw but they are amazingly versatile when cooked! These savory and dessert salads are in constant rotation in our household!

Illustrated Recipe: Carrot Salad

 This is a very easy, sweet, savory, a little spicy and always festive recipe for a carrot salad.

Illustrated Recipe: Sharlotka

One of the simplest baking projects I know - and one of the easiest to experiment with :)

Illustrated Recipe: Layered Chicken Rice Pilaf

Layered Chicken Rice Pilaf! This is one of the staples in our household though we change the number of carrots and raisins based on the season and we used to make it with other dry fruits and nuts and not only raisins. But right now this is what's in my oven. Also - I like adding all sorts of spices to the rice - but since it changes every single time there is no way to put it in the recipe :)

Recipe: Mushroom Soup

Mushrooms are amazing - they are not plants and they are not animals - they belong to their own kingdom of Fungi and the part that we eat is what a huge and very happy organism produces - a fruit. I love drawing mushrooms, looking at them, learning about them, gathering them - and eating them too. This is a soup that I make out of dried mushrooms or fresh ones. 

What is on my table? February 2021.

Things that were happening in February, things that will happen in March - sketches, notes, doodle pages used as protectors in my sketchbook (gouache smudges if you carry your sketchbook everywhere and surprisingly enough even these days I carry it a lot!). Masking tape to mark area on my table for the video I was recording. 

Recipe: Forshmak (Jewish and Polish versions)

 

Both of these are old recipes from two parts of the family. Polish version takes more time and I personally prefer Jewish one - but in any case it all starts with the salted herring and goes from there! Enjoy! Oh and it looks like some people spell it as Vorschmack!

Recipe: Lobio

I had so much fun drawing the borscht, and it inspired so many lovely online and offline conversations that I decided to draw more from the kitchen lore of my family - here is Lobio! 

What is on my table? January 2021.

Imagine you just walked into my studio in the middle of the day - this is a typical January 2021 table mess view: recently revived ackerman pen that made my January a very inky month, pencil sharpener (I found it in my drawer) that is working really well for some finicky color pencils (thick luminance pencils for example), gouache palette and notes and sketches on a project I am working on. 

Recipe: Borscht

There are many wonderful spellings of this word БОРЩ in English but I will stick to this one: BORSCHT. It is a very tasty Ukrainian beet soup, winter version of which is eaten warm. I will draw the cold one when it is more appropriate for the season :)

I drew this for my friend Suhita and she followed this recipe to make it and liked the result - so it is proven to work :)