This weekend’s symposium, “Filipino Flavors: Tradition + Innovation” at The International Culinary School at The Art Institute of California-San Francisco is set to bust through, in a metaphorical sense, the picket fences of lumpia as a barricade between, on the one hand, the concept of pedestrian home cooking in your typical Daly City household and, on the other, the development of Filipino cuisine as ripe and intricate culinary subject matter.  The beautiful thing about ACF’s events are that they’re not all talk; there are some serious eating occurrences planned this weekend!  I suggest you cast your spoon and fork into the adobo deathmatch assortment and cast your vote for your favorite contender at Saturday night’s Adobo Throwdown:

Whose recipe reigns supreme? Considered by many to be the national dish of the Philippines, adobo is personalized by household with each version passionately championed. Enjoy a gustatory tour of long-held family recipes and innovative variations on the theme. Taste, drink, mingle, move and groove to live music, then cast a vote on your favorite entry. Competition is open to all community members and amateur cooks. (Competitors are set – see below!) Top prizes will be awarded by popular vote and by our panel of distinguished judges. Keith Kamisugi will serve as our gregarious master of ceremonies and Lumaya will provide music. $20 per person.

Ticket sales end May 12! [buy now]

THE COMPETITORS:
Fred Briones | NAME OF DISH: Not Your Mom’s Adobo
Aimee Crisostomo | NAME OF DISH: Adobo
Clemente P. Escopete | NAME OF DISH: Uncle Clem’s Abobo Bicolano
Lizelle Festejo | NAME OF DISH: Tuna Squidobo
Steffany Farros | NAME OF DISH: Howard Family’s Awesome Adobo!
Jennifer Kirk | NAME OF DISH: Captain Kirk’s Adobo
John Melana | NAME OF DISH: J’s Tomadobo Chix and Ribs Recipe
Pauline Rivera | NAME OF DISH: Jalapeno Pork Adobo
Chummy Sevilla | NAME OF DISH: Slow Braised Pork Adobo

THE JUDGES: Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Assistant Professor, Department of History, San Francisco State University; Marie Romero, President & Publisher, Arkipelago Books; Vice Consul Leah Victoria Rodriguez, The Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco and, the toughest judge of all….YOU!

Then, on Sunday, we’ve placed a creative interlude amidst the furious cooking and exploratory academic and industry panels:

Literary Reading | EATING OUR WORDS: WRITINGS ABOUT FOOD & FAMILY

Sun May 16 | 1:00–2:30 pm, with light refreshments

Local writers share their poems, fiction and essays about two of the most important facets of life: our families and our food. Barbara Jane Reyes, Rashaan Alexis Meneses, Aileen Suzara, Aimee Suzara, Lizelle Festejo, Yael Villafranca and Lisa Suguitan Melnick read from their books and works-in-progress. Oscar Bermeo emcees.  $5 general admission, $3 students. Ticket sales end May 12! [buy now]

Designer Max Medina at The Mystery Parade created the superb symposium poster and collateral.  Thanks, Max!

But, at least this week, we are supposed to be even more conscious and emboldened to do things like drink tap water instead of buying bottled water, walk or bike to work instead of drive or choose neither paper nor plastic and, instead, BYOBag.  This latter tip I blogged about in 2007, the year that San Francisco banned plastics bags.  Unfortunately, the article, “The Environmental Cost of a Free Canvas Bag“, which I read last year in Utne Reader online conjectures that you would need to reuse a canvas bag perhaps 400 times in order to really give the planet a helping hand: “Judging by the cost, producing one tote is equivalent to producing 400 plastic bags. That’s fine if you use a tote 400 times, but what if you just end up with 40 totes? The environmental promise of reusable bags becomes dubious when there are closets full of them in every home.”  Ironically, “[t]he plastic bag itself began as an environmental salve.  Before the introduction of ultra-thin plastic bags in the 1980s, groceries were primarily packed in paper.  Plastic was touted as a way to save trees.”

I confess that I probably do have over a dozen or two reusable bags in varying sizes kept as give-aways, purchased while waiting at the checkout counter and received as gifts.  I might even have 40.  And still, I will sometimes forget and leave them in the trunk of my car or find that the one that I do keep in my purse at all times is not enough for all of my purchases and I end up coming home with another disposable bag anyway.  Still, I think I’ve likely used a few of them greater than 52 times, i.e. once a week for a year across several years.  Do you keep a stash of reusable shopping bags?  Does your use–say 400 uses per bag–justify the environmental cost (or even the cost to your home budget) of the bag; or are these bags just more stuff?

]]> http://www.linocat.com/2010/04/its-earth-week/feed/ 0 http://www.linocat.com/2010/04/we-are-all-april-fools-but-some-of-us-are-looking-in-our-mailboxes/ http://www.linocat.com/2010/04/we-are-all-april-fools-but-some-of-us-are-looking-in-our-mailboxes/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:35:33 +0000 Debbie http://www.linocat.com/?p=613 April and National Poetry Month are upon us again.  To jump start my running-on-two-years dormant writing efforts, I and 19 other Kundiman fellows have committed to another postcard poetry exchange this month.  We have names.  We have addresses.  We have stamps.  We have postcards and we’re ready to go, starting today!

Here are some general ground rules that can be used for your own poetry exchange, after you’ve recruited some willing participants and compiled a list of names and postal addresses:

1. The challenge is to write one poem a day.
2. Find your name on your group’s list.
3. Write a poem that fits within the size of a postcard to the person listed below you.  You can buy, make or find postcards with images or without (with is more fun to receive).
4. The next day (or the next time you write a poem), send it to the next person on the list.  e.g. Send the first poem to the person listed below your name on the list, the second poem to the person below that name, etc.  Keep cycling through the list every day, sending the last poem out on 4/30.  Or, for example, write 30 poems in one day, and send one out each day until 4/30.
5. Your poem can have something to do with the postcard image or not at all.
6. You can receive a poem from someone and decide to write a response poem  when you reach his or her name in your cycle–but that is just extra overachiever (though welcomed!) writing.  Your only challenge is to try to write a poem a day on postcards, sending them on down the list.
7. Keep a copy (transcription, photocopy, snapshot, whatever) of what you wrote and, if possible, your image.  They will come in handy as poem drafts to revise or build upon or, perhaps, they are already awesome and it’s time to submit them for publication.

Or, stated another way (by Tim Yu), “[W]e each send a postcard to the person below us on the list, then move down the list each day after that, wrapping around to the beginning until we’ve sent one postcard to each person.  Then repeat until the month is over.  This way we insure that everyone (ideally) gets a steady stream of cards.”

Here are some of the postcards I’ve collected that will be going out to my list of recipients this month:

May 1, 10 am – 2 pm & May 8, 10 am – 3 pm
Location: 1246 Folsom St.
Registration: $95 (includes cost of all materials)

This is a hands-on workshop for novice screen printers. Learn the basics of screen printing on all media and the complete screen printing process from artwork preparation to image burning to ink application. Make your own DIY notecards, business cards, or even a handy tote bag! After two Saturdays, you’ll be equipped with the savvy to screen print future projects on your own. Screen printing has been a tool for social and political change, and was one of the earliest classes offered by KSW. Workshop instructor Scott Louie will give you the historical context to appreciate this art form.

Day 1: Print Gocco with Debbie Yee
Learn how to use the Print Gocco, an all-in-one tabletop screenprinting machine from Japan. Produce your own small art prints, notecards, business cards and other small paper goods from images sized up to 3 1/2″ x 5″.

Day 2: Traditional Screen Printing and Yudu with Scott Louie
Screen print one artwork onto your choice of substrates (paper, cloth, wood, etc.) Then take your screen home to continue printing on your own. In addition to traditional screen printing, this session includes a tutorial on modern screen printing with the Yudu.

Registration fee is $95. To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, P.O. Box 14545, San Francisco, CA 94114-0545. Register online. Please include your full name and contact info.

Peapod Fabrics

1 and 1/4 yards each of 2 coordinating fabrics will yield 6 reversible placemats sized about 14 1/2 by 19 inches, with 1/4 to 1/2 inch allowances all around.  It’s been so long since I did anything other than hem pants, that I’d forgotten or perhaps never realized how awesome a rotary cutter is for making straight cuts through fabric.

The result, reversible owl print placemats in neutral taupe and khaki tones:

(Today’s Sunday Brunch at home consisted of cinnamon french toast made from Greenlee’s Bakery cinnamon bread, Niman Ranch dry-cured applewood smoked bacon and Four Barrel Ethiopia Mordecofe coffee!)

Whoops!  Was that one year ago?  I had several ideas in mind on what I would make for Rosie, Thy, Phayvanh, Tamiko and Christina in this pay-it-forward craft challenge, had ideas in mind, several false starts, a bold email to them in August that something in the mail was forthcoming (*blush*) and then radio silence.  So hard to motivate even when it’s going to be something that might be fun.

Well, a week or two shy of the year anniversary of the Facebook note, I did manage to put something together, add postage and send something handmade to the gals.

This is a linocut illustration of a Ball glass mason jar laminated and mounted onto a magnet, suitable for your fridge or workspace.

I decided to take small prints of a tiny linoleum cut of a Ball mason jar and turn them into refrigerator magnets.

How this item was made:

This is an original small edition linocut I carved from a San Francisco Center for the Book “tiny linos” workshop I took a few months ago, taught by artist Marsha Shaw.  What was neat was that, instead of printing press/proof press equipment (very large and industrial) that is usually used to make linocut editions, the “printing press” was actually a modified manual credit card imprinter!  (Check out SFCB’s website: the class is being offered again on May 1.)

I cropped the image and applied a magnet backing to the print.  The magnet was made with a small Xyron brand sticker/magnet/laminating manually-operated machine that is widely available at craft and scrapbooking stores, Amazon, eBay, etc.  The price has really gone down ($25-55) since I first bought mine 10 or so years ago!

Craft to-do: Done!  And, hey, I’m blogging again too!  Do you procrastinate in your creative life?  Or, are crafts or hobbies an exercise in procrastination over other necessary tasks?

I was inspired to spruce up a previous blog and name it after a linocut print of a contemporary Japanese Lucky Cat illustration I created at a printmaking workshop I took with Billy at 3 Fish Studios in Dogpatch, San Francisco this summer.  The proprietors of 3 Fish Studios, are Annie Galvin and Eric Rewitzer.  They are a husband-wife artist duo with day jobs. They were so warm and welcoming, each with his and her own artistic style and preferred medium, that Billy and I wanted to be copycats (with the highest regard, of course) and have fantasized about having our own studio one day where we, too, could have people come by just to make stuff. 

For now, seeing as how we aren’t even close to carving out a space in the garage, little projects begun and finished at the kitchen table and the other bedroom will have to do.