Wayne Cardinalli salt glazed bottle

Here's a salt glazed bottle by American potter, Wayne Cardinalli, whose been living in Canada since the 70's. I had his work in my gallery at that time and wish I had kept more of his pieces.

Yesterday is a bit of a blur. It feels like my entire day was spent cooking and researching recipes! The Tuscan bean soup was good, after a shaky start. I served it with some broiled, sourdough topped with Asiago cheese, which Jim said made the whole dish.

Seems I had two recipe cards for two different versions of a Tuscan soup, picked up the wrong card and had half the ingredients in the pot before I realized that recipe didn't have the white beans or fennel. So I spent some time trying to merge both recipes and wound up with a HUGE pot of soup. Guess what we're having for dinner,again, tonight, with two more dinners in the freezer!

The rock crew arrived in the morning, and left pretty quickly. They didn't realize it had snowed here. I expect we'll see them back this morning. The truckload of topsoil to fill the soon to be newly raised terraces was delivered and I hope they finish soon, because I have a lot of broccoli, spinach, cabbage and brussel sprout starts to plant.

After finally getting the soup finished (it was now lunchtime), I decided to do more research on pizza making, got all the information and with recipe in hand, took out the sourdough starter which was looking pretty flat. To make a long story short - my sourdough starter is dead from lack of feeding it. I tried reviving it - even left it overnight in the oven after feeding it and there's no sign of life. So this morning I have to see if I can find some new starter on line. I read that King Arthur Flour sells some, so I'll be googling that in a few minutes. I also ordered a pizza making book from Amazon. One of my projects in the next year or so is to get an outdoor, wood burning, bread/pizza oven. Seems you need an oven to get to 800F to make the best pizza.

Studio time was less than an hour yesterday - just enough time to cut off a couple of pots and trim a platter and later in the evening covering them; but I should get a full day in today.

Before my first cup of this mornings tea I got some of my smallest tomato seedlings transplanted and tonight I'll try to do the same with some of the flower seedlings.
Looks like Jim didn't kill the planter filled with mesclun lettuce by leaving it out the other night. The snow cover, as I suspected it would, protected it. I should harvest it for salad tonight. You can get three full cuttings before planting another crop.

It didn't get as cold last night as was predicted a couple of days ago, so I'm hoping that means the fruit trees and Japanese maples will be OK. Two years ago we have overly warm temperatures this time of year, followed by several days of twenty degree nights which killed a couple of my Japanese maples and killed every fruit bud. We didn't have a single piece of fruit from any of our trees that year.

Well, time to have breakfast and head to the studio.

Till later,
June