I have never seen something quite like this!

 The ante has been definately upped. I think its time to take food as art to new heights. 

Have a look at  GOLUBKA

and this post

Building Block Cakes on Sasha's Birthday 

'Making Time' exhibition by Makeshift in Perth

Dear friends,

We’ve just begun a new project in Perth called ‘Making Time’, as part of the P4 (pilot) initiative from Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts & Performance Space. It’s happening at PICA, where we’ll be pickling, preserving, making jam and having conversations about our practice with participants this weekend only (11am – 6pm Saturday/Sunday) in the Westend Gallery. After Sunday, our improvised test kitchen can still be viewed (without us) until December 19, as part of the Now! Right! Now! live art program.

If you know anyone west side who would be willing to share their pickling skills or recipes with us, has an overburdened olive, fig or lemon tree (or any other surplus backyard produce, native or otherwise), knows where some good public fruit can be found, or who might be interested in visiting us to hear more about what we do … or for any other reason, please send them down quicksticks. We only have a very short time here, so any personal connections would be very much appreciated.

We’re taking appointments for mini preservation workshops by phone (0411 873 322) and email (makingtime@makeshift.com.au). Preservable foodstuffs can be brought in anytime, and recipes can most certainly be emailed to us if you’re too far away to attend in person. We promise to try our hand at anything you send in...

The project can also be followed online here: www.making-time.net
 
Best regards,
Tessa & Karl

makeshift
--
www.makeshift.com.au
& www.makeshift.com.au/journal
0411 873 322 / 9357 1528
mailbox@makeshift.com.au
--

I took this photo last year in barcelona, i just found it, it wanted to go here. maybe i will post more of my archives, from the time when I used a real camera. 

Nasturtium: Vegan Supper Club in NY

I've blogged about Scott Winegard and his awesome Celebration of Vegetables before, but this morning I was reading this article on the Underground Dining NY blog and got all re-inspired-and-excited about Scott's Supper Club Nasturtium.
1. I would super like to go to New York and partake in the eating
2. I would super love to go and meet and cook with many of the other amazing living foods and gourmet vegetable chefs that seem to exist far away on other continents.
3. I would love to start my own supper club and hold events like Nasturtium. A quarterly seasonal celebration of life and vegetables. I love planning menus and responding to ingredients. I also love the printed menu and asthetic of the whole production.
4. I think I will make my own supper club. It seems that there is a lot of support for it in New York, but travel is not so feasible and so we shall just continue to keep on making here cool.
5. How formal should this kind of thing be? In a house? In a restaurant? In another kind of venue? In a gallery? As an interactive performance art piece? Everything being carefully curated? What kind of space could I use? Handy if it had a kitchen...

Folding wonder

Today's zine making workshop at Signal. Houmous and pumpkin dip, crackers and almonds. I took along all the walnut shells I cracked this morning to make my carob fudge and threw them on the photocopier, this created hours of amusement especially when I discovered colour photocopying onto trace paper.
see Folding Wonder blog for more

Drawing weeds

At the moment I'm doing a drawing on the windows of Signal in the city (behind flinders street station on northbank). The breif was to create an unexpected environment so I've decided to focus on weeds, in particular edible ones. It's super fun, you can see more on my Drawing on glass blog, and i reccomend popping by sometime. I'm not sure how long it will be up, it is definately the most interesting and well drawn thing I've done on glass thus far.

On the way to see the delightful and endearing Emma Bathgate sing, I walked past Books for Cooks on Gertrude St and was sparked by this window display. What an incredible looking book, the picture obviously taken through glass while I was on the steer, I thought to my self how great it would be if I was given cookbooks like this to review, and a review meant trialing out all of the recipes. I want to make a cookbook oneday. I also want to go into the shop and look at this book oneday.
Quay, Food Inspired by Nature by Peter Gilmore

Artist Business Workshop

Today I attended an Artist Business Workshop hosted by ABaF (Australia Business Arts Foundation) at the Meat Markets.
"Artist Business will strengthen your business skills and help you build a sustainable art practice. This practical workshop includes presentations by industry experts, leading visual artists, gallery professionals and arts managers. "

I've gone to a few of their workshops lately and they are very informative, inspiring and well catered (I don't usually eat caramel slice but tiny ones cut in triangles are hard to resist especially when they are sitting there patiently on a plate, luckily there always seems to be an abundant platter of amazing fruits next to these rather cheeky cakes).

ABaF have lost their workshop funding and won't be running most of their workshops any more, there are a few more scheduled interstate and in regional centres - Arts Business on 20th Oct in Warragul and Exhibition Planning in Ballarat on 14th Oct - if you were keen you could pop out on a Vline for a day trip, it's really not far. They are really high quality workshops and it's worth taking up opportunities like this while they are there, as it seems if things are too good funding usually mysteriously disappears.

Food on the table

Just looking at Eating the City and found a few interesting tangents to follow. Sibling/Condiment dinner and a very interesting project by Sydney artist Simryn Gill Food on the table
"My offering for the laneways project is a celebration in a sort of reverse potlatch. Let us understand potlatch to loosely mean (from Wikipedia) “a gathering…where a…leader hosts guests and holds a feast….the main purpose [of which] is the redistribution and reciprocity of wealth.’  If we replace ‘wealth’ with ‘ways of being’, we must try to understand how we might enact, for an afternoon, a redistribution and reciprocity of ways of being. A sharing from across various understandings of what can and cannot happen and be permitted to happen, in our civilised society, as we all try to step lightly through the tangled undergrowth of the rules and regulations which seemingly hold everything together.
What I have in mind is a genuine reciprocity through the form of a brief and open mutual giving and taking, across the boundaries and fences that keep us neatly corralled in the places and roles that we chose for ourselves, or that society gives us. I propose a meal to be made from produce and products from refuse sites - supermarket and restaurant dumpsters.
...
This process will take us into categories, which in the main we receive as givens: about what is good and bad, clean and dirty, possible and impossible. We will find ourselves at that door we often reach in our activities, alone and collectively, as individuals and as card-bearing members of various walks of life, interest groups, even nations, which has a sign on it that says: can’t be done; impossible; wrong way, go back. In my line of work, this is often the most important door to open. 
...
You eat what is available, and give the surplus away to your friends. So this will be the spirit and the nature of any celebration built on the largess of waste: what you will find cannot be known in advance, you cannot make definite plans, just a general one: we will feast on what is to be had. A kind of awkward mirror image of the time when we ate what grew in the season - the bins offer to their gleaners feasts or famines formed in the weather patterns of consumers’ whims."
Read the whole article here

Botanical Cuisine

"Recently I announced my new raw food culinary vision - Botanical Cuisine - which seeks to use only seasonal, organic, fresh produce, almost no nuts and seeds, and no dehydrating techniques in order to create simple and artful raw dishes. This new philosophy is based on the idea that raw food cuisine should ideally be created using only raw food, instead of making raw food “copies” of cooked food recipes such as quiche, pizza, ice cream etc. In other words, if we still mimic our past habits with what we used to consider comfort food, then we are not truly embracing the raw food philosophy."
-- 0mid Jaffari
Shitake Blog

Omid Jaffari and Kate Quinn will be giving some incredible looking living raw food workshops in October, have a look at Botanical Cuisine Tour

If I had a food cart...

what would you like to eat from it?

I am thinking that it would be part live growing green garden, part bookshop, part smoothie cart. Here's a little picture I started working on yesterday. The beginning of making a dream real...

Inspiration from Nic

My friend Nic is living in Portland at the moment, and after yesterdays amazing internet discovery of the food cart scene there I sent him a message, this was his reply -

oh yes, you would totally be in love.
Especially this one.... only closed down not too long ago, but I know the guy and his friends who had their invented country (the cart sold the "country's" food). They were actually at the Melbourne Arts Fest a few years ago. Anyhow, the remnants of his cart are currently included in a "Peoples Biennial" curated by Harrell Fletcher. Really awesome.

He does icecream, amazing icecream. Corn on the cob, S.Salmon cream cheese n dill, "Bluegrass" Lemongrass n blueberry, omg, it goes on.
OH, gingersnap cookies n basil..... amazing. 

Mostlandic's, or Mostlandaganders as they are referred to in the South, eat so much ice cream that it can be said that every meal and beverage is made and consumed in that form.  The flavors come and go with the weather at Junior Ambassador's.

You may not find Mostlandia on a map, but that won't prevent you from being there.
Getting there is not a question of Where? But, rather, How?
It is nowhere, and now here.
It is a fanatasical psychogeographical destination happening anyplace, anytime, anyhow.
The cuisine found in Mostlandia is simple, fun and full of love, sometimes presenting subtle exotice undertones.  At it's core, it is comfortable, experimental and healthy. Mostlandian Official Website



Junior Ambassador's Icecream ingredients!!

Design

Community bike cart design
Low cost bike cart designs for community independance

Underground dining
Supper Clubs and Hidden Food... this is how I found Scott Winegard

Scott Winegard Food designer and chef, have a look at his blog it's quite amazing (you can see from the pictures below why I am excited about Scott's food love!)

Thought

This blog isnt a straightforward nutritional guide, or how to prepare easy recipes, it is not intended to be a place of personal dogma; it is a
process based research into life and art practise through the medium of food, grounded in my experience, of engaging with food, plants, and people; growing, preparing and feeding. It is open ended, multi-faceted and experiential. I 'think' by doing, and quite often 'I do' by reading or simply being. I research through direct experience. I am in awe of plants. The revolution is made out of plants and healthy cells pulsating with light.

Food as art practice?

So many possibles here.
this is the question I'm investigating at the moment.
Life as art practice.
Living a conscious engaged artful wonderous existance.
Sustaining.
The clarity with which we do things.
All research being art, all art; research.
What is a practice?
Where are the lines between myself and my art? Obviously when posed as a question the concept seems redundant. There is no separation.