Painting - Lighthouse and Skyscape

Just started a  landscape including a lighthouse (oils, canvas wrapped edges, 24" x 18")

Here is the original print from which I am painting:

(picture was taken in 2009 while visiting New Zealand and Australia)

This is one of the books I am referencing for painting clouds above the lighthouse:

(by Willilam F. Powell, 1998, ISBN 0-929261-48-8)

Dutch Mustard Soup

A friend visited Germany several years ago and was impressed with a mustard soup she had enjoyed several times while on both the cruise ship and in the local towns.  She never found a recipe using mustard as the main ingredient, so my husband, The Cook, found one and made it very quickly.  We consumed it on a painting break, and she was impressed with the flavor and happy that he had found a replication of the recipe she remembered.

Here is the recipe from Dutch Mustard Soup:

Ingredients:

4 cups water
2 vegetable bouillon cubes
1/2 cup creme fraiche
2 tablespoons coarse grain mustard, with whole mustard grains
1/2 cup spreadable soft cheese, you want it to melt well
4 tablespoons cornstarch
salt and pepper
1 spring onion, chopped

Directions:

1  Bring water to boil.
2  Add creme fraiche, mustard and cheese.
3  Stir until smooth.
4  Add cornstarch.
5  Continue stirring.
6  When soup thickens, add salt and pepper to taste.
7  Garnish with chopped spring onion.

 Substitutions: sour cream and cream cheese in equal proportions saves a search (and also saves money) for creme fraiche.  Velveeta cheese could also be substitued, and will result in a more yellow color.

We ate it so quickly that I failed to get a picture of the soup, so this one will do from Flickr:

Ash Wednesday

A solemn day in the ecumenical calendar, today is the day when

the priest, dipping his thumb into ashes previously blessed, marks the forehead -- or in case of clerics upon the place of the tonsure -- of each the sign of the cross, saying the words: "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." The ashes used in this ceremony are made by burning the remains of the palms blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year.

From Rock Hill, SC the Herald reports this is a day when Christians

“...confront our frailness, our failures,” ...“and the ashes symbolize our broken dreams.”

Services will start today around sunrise and will go far past nightfall. It will happen all over the earth. People with ashes on their foreheads dispersing into the day and night to try to make a world of record unemployment, broken dreams, and foreclosures.

The ashes do not always inspire.

“One time, years ago in Rock Hill, so many people left a service at the Oratory on Ash Wednesday and went to the old Revco pharmacy there in the Beatty Plaza on Cherry Road...the clerk thought it was a cult coming in. She called the police.”

The cops came to find people with gray forehead smears in the shape of the cross, hands clasped in prayer. There was no cult.

Just hope.