Easy Winter Meal for a Snowy Day

Whole Wheat Bread
& Raspberry Jam










Easy Lentil Soup











Aroma of Baking Bread










Bread Is Moist and Chewy










No Preservatives, Chemicals




or Plastic Packaging










Use Any Vegetables On-Hand for Soup










Bread Dough Should Be Sticky











Kneading the Dough















Water, Lentils, Oil, Salt,
Pepper and Bay Leaves











Rinse Lentils in Fresh Water






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"Easy Winter Meal for a Snowy Day"
by Charleen Touchette, 2009
One Earth Blog

Cold snowy mornings are the perfect time to bake bread and cook a vegetarian lentil soup in the crock pot. Baking bread is a lot easier than it looks and simple if you are at home on a snowy day. If you think you do not have time to cook, try these easy simple recipes and surprise yourself and your loved ones with a wholesome healthy dinner that costs next to nothing.

I began baking whole wheat bread in a farmhouse kitchen in Clinton Hollow in upstate New York while still in college. The first time, I killed the yeast and my bread was as hard and flat as a brick. My boyfriend, who learned to bake bread from hippies in Eugene, Oregon, taught me yeast is a living organism. Everything it touches has to be lukewarm so the yeast can grow. Anything too hot or too cold will kill the yeast and the bread will not rise. Once I learned that it was easy to take any bread recipe and modify and tweak it to knead and bake any kind of bread.

Whole Wheat bread is simple and easy to make and tastes so good, as well as being good for you with no preservatives and chemicals. There is really no reason to buy store bought bread in plastic wrapping.

Vegetarian Lentil Soup is a nourishing inexpensive and easy soup to make for busy young mothers or anyone who needs to make a quick dinner in an hour for pennies that is loved by children and people of all ages.

All you need is a stock pot or crock pot, a bag of lentils, water, a bay leaf, oil, salt, pepper and whatever vegetables you have on hand. Serve with short grain brown rice. This lentil soup is a perennial favorite with our four children and their friends from toddlers to adults.

Lentil soup can be cooked on the stovetop for 1 hour or slow cooked in a crock pot for 4 or more hours. This soup is perfect for days when you need to put dinner in the crock pot in the morning before going to work and come home to a hot meal.

For variety, pour the lentil soup atop fresh washed beet greens or spinach leaves from the garden just before serving. The hot soup cooks the greens instantly. It is a delicious variation rich in iron and other good nutrients. I also sometimes ladle the lentil soup into bowls and top with barbecued or roasted beef, chicken or fish and steamed vegetables.

Baked Apples are delicious and soothing for dessert on a cold winter night. Place 4-6 apples (pricked with a fork) in a Pyrex oven-safe dish, add ¼ inch water, juice or wine and pop into the 375 degree oven with the baking bread to conserve energy. Bake and drizzle honey on top or sift or sprinkle powdered or brown sugar on apples when done and serve.

This easy winter dinner warms the tummy and heart on cold winter nights when snow outside makes you want to cuddle by the fire with a bowl of steaming soup wrapped in a blanket by yourself or surrounded by loved ones.

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One Earth Whole Wheat Bread

Preheat oven to 375 degrees
4 cups warm water
2 pkgs. active dry yeast
1 T brown sugar
8 cups whole wheat flour
1 T salt

- Stir brown sugar into 4 cups warm water. (Sugar feeds the yeast.) Water should be lukewarm, warm enough to grow yeast and not so hot that it kills it. Sprinkle yeast on top of sugar water and cover with a dishcloth until it has bubbled up (about 7-10 minutes). Measure out 4 cups of flour into large bowl and add water/sugar/yeast mixture with wooden spoon. Add remaining 4 cups flour plus 1 T salt mixing with wooden spoon then kneading with hands until dough is elastic but still somewhat wet and sticky.

Oil bowl and return dough to bowl turning it to coat with oil. Cover with dishcloth and put in warm place to rise for about 1 1/2 -2 hours until doubled. Punch down. Separate into 2 sections and form into loaves. Let rise in warm place for about 20 minutes until dough is above loaf pan. Bake in 375 degree oven for about 40 minutes.(Optional glaze - Paint loaves with beaten egg or egg white diluted with eggshell of water after 20 minutes of baking. Sprinkle with sesame or poppy seeds. Return to oven for another 20 minutes.)

You can put up this bread dough before leaving for work in the morning and put it in fridge to rise slowly all day. When you get home, remove, cut into 2 parts and form loaves, put in warm place (oven with pilot light on or sunny window work well). Let rise and bake for 40 minutes. If it is not ready for dinner, this bread makes a great dessert with butter and is delicious with raspberry jam and honey from the Farmers Market.

One Earth Vegetarian Lentil Soup

Combine in big soup or crock pot the following ingredients -
2 cups lentils (rinsed)
~ 16 cups water (stock pot or crock pot full)
1 T salt
2-3 T Oil – olive or safflower
2-3 bay
ground black pepper
Add coarsely chopped vegetables - I use whatever I have in the refrigerator or pantry.
1-3 potatoes
1-3 carrots
1-2 onions and/or leeks or shallots
1-3 celery stalks (optional)
1-3 tomatoes or 18 oz can (optional)
1-3 garlic cloves (optional)
Optional - Add 2 T Fresh Chopped Herbs as available. I add fresh basil, homegrown, organic, Herbes de Provence (basil, sage, rosemary, lavender, thyme, tarragon, or dill depending on what is growing well in the garden.)
Mix all ingredients into large soup stock pot and put to boil on stove, cover and simmer for 1 hour or place in crock pot for slow cooking all day. Serve over steamed brown rice or noodles.
Vegetarian Variation – Pour over ¼ cup fresh beet greens or spinach in bowls just before serving.
Meat/Fish Lovers Variation – Barbecue chicken, steak or fish and place atop lentil soup in bowls and serve. Steamed fish also works well.

One Earth Easy Baked Apples

Prick 4-6 apples (core, if desired)
Place in baking dish with ¼ inch water, juice or wine.
Bake 40 minutes to 1 ¼ in 350-375 degree oven.

Test for doneness with fork.
Optional – drizzle with honey, sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg and/or confectioners or brown sugar.
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Text, recipes and photos by Charleen Touchette 2009
http://www.oneearthblog.blogspot.com/

Three Generation of Woman Painters at The Golden Dawn Gallery

Fun lunch and visit with fellow painter Margarete Bagshaw on Friday, October 16, 2009. Margarete is from a long line of artists and daughter of the late great Helen Hardin and the late Santa Clara Pueblo painter Pablita Velarde. Hardin returned home to New Mexico this past August from three years living in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

To the delight of ndn painting aficionados, Margaret and her fiancé Dan opened The Golden Dawn Gallery just in time for Indian Market to feature the paintings of three generations of her family and a few other select established and emerging painters. The gallery is located in the bright, airy space previously occupied by the Joyce Robbins Gallery on the east side of Galisteo Street near the corner of Water Street. The space is a wonderful venue for the bright, intricately drawn, expertly painted and totally original art of Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin and Margarete Bagshaw.

Pablita Velarde, who passed last year in 2007, was one of only two women students at Dorothy Dunn's Studio School in the 1930s. Pablita defied the Santa Clara prohibition against women painting to become a prolific beloved artist and the first American Indian artist awarded the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in New York City in 1990.

Helen Hardin gained early success in the Indian Art world painting in a traditional style, but stunned collectors by creating her own brilliant original art style that combined intricate geometry, precision drawing, and luminous application of multiple layers of paint to evoke her deep personal understanding of Pueblo spirituality and culture. Helen Hardin was at the height of her career in the mid-1980s when she was struck with cancer and tragically died when Margarete was just 19 years old. Her art was featured in the historic Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage exhibit that toured the United States in 1985-1987 and was dedicated to Helen Hardin’s memory.

Margarete Bagshaw whose complex ancestry includes her Santa Clara indigenous ancestors on her mother’s side and Daughters of the American Revolution on her father’s side, grew up surrounded by daily art-making by her mother and grandmother and witnessed their courage and tenacity in pursuing art despite adversity and pressure against women making art in their culture. Margarete observed their practice of challenging and breaking boundaries and has shattered boundaries in her own right as an artist with her own unique sensibility.

Margaret Bagshaw has developed a personal painting style that draws from strengths of both her mother and grandmother to create an impressive body of luminous complex geometric large paintings that embody the spirituality and power of stained glass cathedral windows and the primal understanding of light and shadow and experience of earth and sky of ancient American Indian pictographs as well as the complex symbolic geometry of Pueblo pottery.

This year, Margarete has created a new body of work in clay from New Mexico that she paints with the intricate, very personal iconography of her paintings. These clay pieces, which Margarete has collectors hold in their hands to experience, are provocative challenges to the closed mindset of many used to the ordinary distinctions accepted and expected in Indian Art. Are they paintings or sculptures? They appear like vessels, but are much too shallow to actually hold anything the way traditional Pueblo pottery can. This new work evokes the memory of pottery shards that inspired Pueblo potter matriarch Lucy Lewis to revive Acoma pottery and that many Pueblo potters still grind and knead into clay for new pots. With these new three-dimensional painted sculptures, Margarete Bagshaw continues in the tradition of her grandmother and mother of breaking with tradition and shattering boundaries to create art that is at once rooted in tradition while evoking and critiquing it, and something totally fresh and new.
The Golden Dawn Gallery, named for Pablita Velarde’s Pueblo name, has a serious collection of important historic works by Pablita Velarde including her traditional Pueblo life paintings, storyteller images and her innovative pictographic sand paintings made with natural earth pigments she collected and ground herself.
There are also several significant original paintings by Helen Hardin that have been unavailable for decades, but are now being made available again for collectors as previous owners have passed on, as well as the rare, only remaining lithographs of Listening Woman and Changing Woman still available on the market.
Golden Dawn also has a wide selection of Margarete Bagshaw’s luminous work that gives the collector the opportunity to acquire the art of an important American artist continuing and expanding the impressive legacy of three generations of art-making in the United States.
Visitors and local art lovers looking for a feast of color, line and texture displayed in a professional museum-like setting should make The Golden Dawn Gallery a not to be missed stop on their itinerary. It is rare to see so much important art in one place in Santa Fe, and reminds us that this work by three generations of New Mexican painters deserves its own museum and support by collectors, arts administrators, Museums of New Mexico and the people of New Mexico, America and the world.
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Text and Photos by Charleen Touchette 2009
http://www.oneearthblog.blogspot.com/

Facebook | Your Photos - October Saturday at Santa Fe Farmers Market

Facebook Your Photos - October Saturday at Santa Fe Farmers Market

Knitting/Walking Meditation on Santa Fe, Me and Miss O'Keeffe

First day of October brings brisk winds and biting cold that makes colors of sky and mountains bright and crisp. Pass morning workers as city of Santa Fe wakes up on morning meditation knitting and walking across town. Pause to knit in front of Museum of Fine Arts, a reminder that artists in Santa Fe are living, breathing creatures not all hidden behind adobe walls sequestered in private studios. Visitors from California offer to snap a photo of artist knitting with dog. Turns out the charming, intelligent tourist was born in New Mexico, but raised in California and her great, great uncle was archaeologist Adolph Bandelier, namesake of Bandelier Monument and infamously banned by the Pueblos. The ladies were on their way to see the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and we conversed about how irritated Georgia would be about the irony of a museum of her art in Santa Fe, which ignored and denigrated her paintings when she first lived here.
Walk continues while sun warms up city streets until I arrive at Miriam’s Well where bright fall flowers are an array of colors in the sharp morning shadows and light. Miriam, who is elated that the current U.S. President has arrived in her native Denmark, greets me with a smile and the second batch of Chunky Baby Alpaca to continue knitting Sage’s LDK Cable Line Blanket.
Taj and I bid her goodbye and retrace our steps across town while I knit until we reach Saveur for a lunch meeting with Jacques about TouchArt Books publishing plans and marketing strategy, then return home to the studio for an afternoon of painting.
Think about choices artists and women make and am grateful. Remember that Miss O’Keeffe was famous and paintings collected for millions, but died alone in her nineties at her gated estate on Old Santa Fe Trail after being tricked by Juan Hamilton into signing away rights to much of her art thinking she was signing a marriage contract to her decades younger assistant who bedecked the mansion with flowers for a sham wedding. Art-making is a constant in my life, but it is woven into a rich tapestry of joy, laughter and sharing stories and food with husband, grown children and many diverse and interesting friends. Painting is at the center of all my work and life in Santa Fe, but it may take my death for the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts to hang my paintings on its adobe walls. Figure I share that with Miss O’Keeffe, but thankfully, I won’t share her lonely end.
Photos and Text by Charleen Touchette 2009
www.OneEarthBlog.blogspot.com