Canadian Archives - The Curated House

Make Something Mondays | Graham Blair Woodcuts

For today’s edition of Make Something Mondays, I am sincerely delighted to feature a printmaker hailing from the salt-of-the-earth East Coast of Canada. Based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Graham Blair specializes in woodcut prints made using methods in keeping with the oldest form of printmaking.

This beautiful video offers a glimpse at the delicate and tender process of creating Graham’s art prints.

I am rather swoony for the authentically Canadian content of Blair’s chosen subjects – truly a collectible body of work. All of Graham’s limited edition prints are hand-carved and hand-printed without the use of a press, and once the limited edition prints are sold, the image is no longer available. Blair begins with a sketch transferred onto a raw piece of wood. As you can see in the mesmerizing video above, he then meticulously uses a variety of knives and gouges to carefully carve the relief image. Finally, in the style of Japanese printmakers, Graham uses the warmth of a bamboo spoon to burnish the print onto heavy paper.

I hope Graham Blair’s beautiful process and has inspired in you a deep appreciation for the value of the handmade process that makes his work so lovely. The beauty of his subject matter, his process and his art all make me truly proud to be a Canadian.

By Sarah Walker The Curated House|December 17th, 2012|0 Comments

A Cherry Good Tree – Braised Lamb Shanks with Cherry Sauce

HAPPY (belated) CANADA DAY!! What a beautiful long weekend we’ve had to celebrate our home and native land. I think it’s going to be a pretty spectacular summer!

In honour of this good earth we call home, I thought I’d share some of her harvest from our own back yard. We bought this little home of ours 4 years ago this coming September. We were motivated to move to this part of Oakville in large part because of the mature trees. As it turns out, this particular neighborhood was once an orchard. Apples and pears (the Cockney slang for “stairs,” though in this case I’m referring to the actual fruit) can be found scattered on lovely old trees in backyards for blocks. As luck (or grace) would have it, our particular yard is home – not to a crab apple or gnarly pear tree – but to one very large, very lovely cherry tree. Being the arborists (read: neohphytes) that we are, we did not realize we had this treasure in our literal backyard until our first Spring in this home when our tree came into breath-taking full bloom.

Gorgeous, black, ripe and juicy Bing Cherries are truly one of my all-time favourite Canadian delights, so we were pretty much beyond ourselves when we gathered our first harvest that Spring. Last year, we had our first year of blooms with no fruit (still not sure what happened), but this year the harvest was SPECTACULAR. Truly the best yet. I think we may have picked as much as 10 pounds of cherries from our very own backyard. Pretty terrific if you ask me. Here’s a shot of just one of the several bowls we filled with this early summer’s harvest:

In addition to gorging ourselves on this ruby goodness straight from the tree, the abundance of fruit inspired an abundance of cheesy puns: “What a cherry good tree!” “I love you cherry much,” “This was a cherry good meal,” “See you cherry soon!” etc. Basically think of any opportunity you can imagine to swap out “cherry” for “very” and we took it. I blame it on being drunk on these Bing Beauties. Cheese and cherries go well together, right?

Once I recovered from OD-ing on groan-worthy puns and freshly picked cherries, I decided that this was the year to work on some new recipes to make the most of this delectable fruit. So, inspired by the lamb shanks I had at 1000 Tastes of Toronto, I created today’s recipe for some truly inspiring and heartwarming friends who came to visit us last weekend. The verdict was that it was cherry, cherry good. (Sorry…had to squeeze in one more pun to round out the cheese plate.)

BRAISED LAMB SHANKS WITH CANADIAN BING CHERRY SAUCE

Ingredients:

12 lamb shanks

flour for dusting

salt + pepper

2 Tbsp Grapeseed Oil for braising

2 large Vidalia onions, finely chopped

1 large carrot, finely chopped

A handful of fresh rosemary

4 cloves of garlic, crushed

6 oz good Balsamic Vinegar de Modena

10 oz good red wine (I like a nice Australian Shiraz for this one)

1/2 pound or more of Organic Canadian Bing Cherries, pitted + halved

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 300° F. Season the shanks with salt + pepper on both sides and then dust with flour.

Heat grapeseed oil on high heat and add lamb shanks to braise on both sides (2 mins or less per side).

{A quick aside: I use grapeseed oil rather than olive oil for braising. It is considered one of the “good fats” as it has a high concentration of unsaturated fat, is low in saturated fat and is cholesterol-free just like olive oil, but it has a much higher flashpoint. This means that it doesn’t start smoking until 419° F (i.e. SMOKIN’ hot) and doesn’t absorb into the food as much, thus not changing the flavour and also reducing the fat absorbed into the dish. In simple terms: it’s the healthiest choice for frying and it works really well. I love a good extra virgin olive oil for salad dressings, but I always stick with grapeseed oil for frying, braising and sautéing.}

Once you’ve braised the lamb shanks, they should look something like this:

Remove the shanks and add the chopped onion and carrots. Cook 10-15 mins on med-high heat until the onions have softened and are translucent. Add the rosemary and crushed garlic and cook for a few more mins. (I left the rosemary on the stalks and just removed the stalks from the sauce after I pulled everything out of the oven – easy peasy once it’s cooked). Add the balsamic vinegar and the wine and bring to a simmer to reduce. Pour the sauce into your roasting dish and add back the lamb shanks, layering them so they look something like this:

Cover with parchment paper and place the lid on the roasting pan. Roast in the oven for 2-3 hours at 300° F. Remove from oven and transfer shanks to a serving plate. Cover with tinfoil to keep warm and let rest. Meanwhile, transfer the sauce of onions, carrots, balsamic and wine to a sauté pan and add the cherries. Sauté on high heat for 2-3 mins until the cherries have softened a bit but still retain their shape and some of their firmness.

Serve with Cauliflower Purée (recipe to come) and steamed French Green Beans. Plate by serving the Cauliflower and green beans and then creating a bed of the cherry sauce and finishing with the braised lamb shanks. The meat fairly falls off the bone, and the slightly tart sweetness of the cherries is the perfect compliment to the earthy goodness of the lamb. Dee-LISH!!

Hope you’ve all savoured a great weekend and – for those of you north of the border – I hope you’ve taken time to celebrate all the best of what it means to be Canadian! More cherry goodness to come in the days ahead… Happy Monday!

By Sarah Walker The Curated House|July 2nd, 2012|1 Comment

Herriott Grace: For the Love of Wood

I have a confession to make. OK, I have a LOT of confessions to make (as you’ll learn over time). But today’s confession? I. Love. Wood. I love trees. I love all the verdant and varying shades of green that come alive in springtime. I love raw wood, turned wood, solid wood, hand-carved wood, exotic woods and all the potential they hold for creating something new. And that is why I am in swoony-heartsick-LOVE with Herriott Grace.

Recently introduced to me by a lovely friend, this heart-warming, Canadian father-daughter duo have me utterly smitten. Their story is a cross-Canada romance of familial love and the now-nearly-vintage charm of receiving packages via Canada Post. (It’s a real thing! People still send packages in the mail. Even brown paper packages tied up with string. It really is one of my favourite things.)

Lance and Nikole Herriott live 3400 kilometers apart: his workshop is in Victoria, British Columbia, and her studio is in Toronto, Ontario. When she first made her home more than halfway across the country, they started to send packages back and forth.

In some of those packages, Lance began to include his own hand carved spoons. He had been collecting wood since the early seventies, and used his best pieces for these gifts. Nikole loved them; their balance and shape, the pieces were made with unmistakable care. She knew they were something special.

One day it dawned on her that others might appreciate her father’s talent as she did, so Nikole asked if he would ever want to share his work. Lance took a few days to think about it. And, after some convincing, he agreed to her plan, but only with people that understood and cared about the time and effort spent on each piece.

She told him, “Leave it to me, I know just the sort.”

And with that, Herriott Grace was born.

(italicized copy via the Herriott Grace website)

There are so many reasons I love this story. First and foremost, it’s about the warmth of relationship between a daughter and her father. It’s about love and belief and possibility. It’s about transcending distance to remain meaningfully connected. And this beautiful process of love and care results in – as you can see below – a stunningly beautiful product. Here are just a few of the lovely pieces now on my personal wish list:

These feather cookie cutters are positively delicious. No doubt the feel of the smooth wooden handles in one’s hand makes the process of creating these lovely cookies all the more delightful.

These gorgeous teak spoons are the sort you will pass on to your grandchildren. Perfect for a fig compote served atop freshly baked scones on a sunny afternoon. To be enjoyed with a cup of tea and conversation with a sweet friend, of course.

I don’t think I would be able to choose which cutting board would be the one for me! Perhaps just one of each, please and thanks.

I might just have to take up the art of pie making if I come to be so lucky as to have one of these lovely, hand-turned rolling pins in my kitchen one day!

This simple, raw-edged, hand-turned bowl reminds me of the one atop a stack of books in my living room. I love the collaboration between artist and nature. As Lance says: “the wood decides.”

On creating the art: “Wood should be treated with hands, not machines. Once you take the money value out of something and do it just because you want to do it as a passion, that’s when you get quality. If you’re doing it for a dollar, pretty soon your value drops and drops, and pretty soon you’re just the same as anybody else. If it’s about how many you can make for a dollar, it isn’t art. It isn’t carving. It just becomes another job.” – Lance Herriott

On receiving the packages: “That box comes and it smells like my parents’ house, and it smells like his wood shop, and it smells like home… I like the mail. I like the post. I like it when things arrive “just so” and when a package is “just so” and when things are put together in a way that is reminiscent of the past. Like a box of just beautiful things with tissue and string and a tag, and as much care went into packaging it and wrapping it and sending it in the mail as went into making it. I like the tradition in that. Things used to arrive in the mail with string around them, and if a little object that we can send can be like that in even a small way, I think that that’s a nice thing.” – Nikole Herriott

I look forward to the day my first Herriott Grace package arrives in the post. No doubt it will be a very nice thing, Nikole. Thank you for inspiring me with your relational, beautiful process and your heart-warming-ly beautiful product.

xo
s.

All photos courtesty of Herriott Grace

By Sarah Walker The Curated House|June 28th, 2012|0 Comments