For this assignment, I made beet soup with crème fraîche and pear garnishes. To make the soup, I boiled two pounds of beets, peeled and diced them, then blended them with a cup of chopped shallots (cooked with a quarter teaspoon of fresh ginger and lots of olive oil), 2 cups of vegetable stock, 3 cups of water (reserved from boiling the beets), one cup of red wine, and some red wine vinegar. I also mixed the crème fraîche with horseradish, lemon juice, and red wine vinegar, and tossed the pears in water I reserved from boiling the beets.
I think the product was relatively successful (although I'm sad that less than half the class actually tried it). Approaching the assignment, I thought about the meals that I enjoy most and what I like about them. My mother is a major foodie (and an amazing cook herself, I might add), and my father is very knowledgeable about wine, so my favourite meals tend to take place when I'm around them - whether I'm eating a family dinner at home or out at a wonderful restaurant they've discovered; my mother knows about all the best foods - the kind of food that melts in your mouth - and my father knows the perfect wines to complement them. When eating these meals, the air usually seems to become more viscous (if that makes any sense), with the delicate, buttery food, the wine, and the candlelight all blending together. I thought that soup might be an appropriate representation of such an atmosphere, and chose to make beet soup because of the time of year (beets soup is a very wintery dish), as well as the fact that I've been on a bit of a beet kick ever since this past summer, which I spent studying in Poland (the country in which my father was born) - beets are emblematic of my tastes and my experiences. I also thought beet soup would go well with red wine, i.e. I could add some red wine to the pot as a sort of symbol of my father and the soup would still taste good.
If I could do the assignment again, under different circumstances (say, at a dinner party in my apartment), I would probably have chosen a different presentation. The aesthetics of a dish can influence whether or not a person wants to eat that dish, and I would have preferred to present my soup in low bowls rather than Dixie cups; people would have been able to see the beautiful pink of the beet soup, the bright white of the crème fraîche (which I might have placed on the soup with a more graceful hand), and the pear cubes would not have sank to the bottom of the soup. I also wish the soup had been hotter and the crème fraîche a little cooler; balancing contrasting flavours, temperatures, and textures in different ways can make a good dish a great dish.
Bread Exercise
I think that the combination of the cooking exercise and the bread exercise brought into focus for me the idea that art can be made from any kind of material. I've always subscribed to this concept, and had the utmost respect for chefs as artists, but I've never worked, as an artist myself, with media like dough. I guess my definition of art was a little more limited than I believed it to be, and hopefully, now, it has been somewhat expanded.
But, to be honest, I hated the texture of the dough (I tried adding water, adding flour, etc. but none of these additions changed my opinion of the dough), and I find that if I don't connect to the medium I'm working in, I don't produce very good work. I kind of shut down a little bit after realizing that I wasn't particularly interested in making anything with the dough, and shifted my attention to the dyes. My treatment of the dough became more painterly than sculptural. I might focus more on this "property" of the dough next class (the dough as canvas), unless the texture of the dough has been altered in some way.
