Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Kitchen witchery

Published on January 28, 2009 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

I’ve been a real whiz in the kitchen this past week. Recent menus have included…

1. Greek squid and prawn stew, with waxy potatoes and smoked paprika
2. Curried arctic char with homemade naans and pilau rice
3. Miso-marinated grilled tofu with lemon pepper crust, sweet onion mash and mustard sauce
4. Vegetarian moussaka with pine nut cream
5. Samosa stuffed baked potatoes
6. Antipasto with garlic flatbreads (made from leftover pizza dough), sundried tomato dip, white bean aioli and quinoa pilaf

I RULE. I’ve been very inspired by this cookbook, which I bought on impulse recently. I was vegan for a long time, and really loved it – I gave it up mostly because travelling in Europe is SO inconvenient when you’re trying to maintain a vegan diet (especially if you can’t afford to eat in fancy restaurants all the time). The French don’t actually have a word for ‘vegan’. Even when I explained to a waiter in a VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT in Paris (one of a whopping three that I could find on the internet), in coherent French, that I didn’t eat meat or eggs or dairy, he looked completely baffled. I mostly survived on falafel from street kiosks in Montmartre. Thank god for immigrants.

Anyway, since my life has become relatively settled, I’ve really wanted to go back to eating more vegan food. I’m currently vegetarian-except-fish, which is sort of necessary if I want to share any meals at all with my enthusiastically carnivorous husband. However, I’d like to start having a couple of ‘vegan days’ a week, partly because it’s very healthy and I enjoy it, and partly because it’s CHEAP. I can make a delicious gourmet meal for less than a fiver if I’m not paying for any meat. Also I’m a big softie and generally prefer not to eat anything with feelings. Also it’s better for the environment. Sorry, I’m done now.

‘Veganomicon’, I say without hesitation, is the best cookbook I’ve ever owned, vegetarian, vegan or otherwise. It’s an all-round cookbook, so there are recipes for everything, from breakfast to brunch to salads to entrees to puddings. It also has advice on cooking techniques, like how to prepare all sorts of different vegetables, grains, and pulses (it’s amazing how hard it is to find good instructions for basic things like roasting aubergines or cooking wholegrain rice). It’s written in a very informal style, too, which actually manages to come off as relaxed and informal, rather than coming off as patronising and affected (I’m looking at you here, Jamie – please start using proper verbs instead of “bang” and “chuck” and “whack”. You are not Batman).

And every single recipe from Veganomicon that I’ve tried (about six now) has been DELICIOUS. Especially the moussaka. It was probably the best moussaka I’ve ever had, ever, including expensive restaurant stuff. The pine nut cream is beyond description. Seriously. If I could pick one dish to make to impress a vege-sceptic, it would be this one. Come round for dinner and I’ll show you.

In non-gastronomic news, I’ve created a couple more fairy tale collages. I’m planning on putting them all together in a calendar very soon…


Mother Holle
“Only you must take care to make my bed well, and shake it thoroughly till the feathers fly – for then there is snow on the earth.”


Jorinda and Joringel
“Joringel looked for Jorinda. She was changed into a nightingale, and sang, jug, jug, jug. …At last Jorindel dreamt one night that he found a blood-red flower, in the middle of which was a beautiful large pearl. Then he picked the flower and went with it to the castle, and that everything he touched with the flower was freed from enchantment.”

Shop makeover – The Desert Rose

Published on January 23, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

I’ve recently had the chance to work with the lovely Karen at The Desert Rose. She bought a banner from me last year, really liked the graphic, but wanted a bit of a ‘lift’ to the feel of the banner. Karen had the idea of working roses into the graphic and adding some colour to the girl’s face (from ‘Ophelia’, by Arthur Hughes…now in the public domain, hooray!). I think the final result is fantastic! I really like the sepia and dusty rose colour scheme, which goes so well with the name of the shop.

Paris Pennsylvania – custom banner set

Published on January 21, 2009 in General. 0 Comments

Well, they say marriage is all about compromise. Occasionally, this can be a good thing.

I’ve always been very anti-Scrabble, despite my mad spelling skillz and large vocabulary. Because – dude, spelling is homework. Not recreation. Am I wrong here?

However, last week I broke down and agreed to play Simon a game of Scrabble (which he enjoys), just so as long as I could play a Robyn Hitchcock album during the game. You must understand that I adore Robyn Hitchcock to a nearly irrational degree. He writes catchy, sing-a-long-able pop songs featuring existentialism, surrealism and death. And trains. And Gene Hackman. He’s totally no-shit crazy, but in a charming, amusing, eccentric English way. He makes speeches onstage between songs about being kidnapped by minotaurs, swaddled in gaffer tape and dropped like a bomb over central London, causing panic and mayhem and terrible traffic congestion (particularly on the A4 – he’s very specific about that). He’s one of my top recording artists of all time. The first time I saw him play was on his single stop in Canada on a North American tour – which happened to be on my birthday. The second time I saw him play was in a tiny pub in Clerkenwell, where he happened to be playing the very first day I set foot in England. At that gig I actually met him, and he was wonderful and charming and lovely and I love him.

Understandably, Simon has been a bit put off Robyn Hitchcock just because of my ranting about him all the time, and generally turns him off after one song.

However, that night, a crazy thing happened. I really enjoyed the game of Scrabble. And Simon really enjoyed the Robyn Hitchcock album. Like, enjoyed it so much that he immediately asked me to play another one.

Since then, we’ve made a regular ritual of playing Scrabble and listening to Robyn Hitchcock. And I’ll tell you what, it’s a really nice change from watching TV all evening every single day. Man cannot live on South Park alone.

In other news, I’ve snared an awesome new client on Etsy! Linda at Paris Pennsylvania recently consigned me to do a whole set of banners and a business card for her shop. She and I share a love of Art Nouveau and Klimt, and with Linda’s expert guidance we’ve come up with a really cool set of graphics. I really enjoy working with people who have a strong sense of their own aesthetics. Etsy is such a fantastic community – so much more than an online marketplace! (And thus is my Etsy speech for the day! All hail Etsy!)

New Fairy Tale prints

Published on January 7, 2009 in Find Me Here and Prints. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Well, Christmas here at Rowan Tree Design HQ was entirely satisfactory. We did have a minor mishap with our Christmas cockerel – Simon bought it a good few days in advance and put it out in the shed, since it was too big to fit in the fridge. He thought the weather would be cool enough to preserve it, but we had a few unseasonably warm days, and on Christmas morning when he went out to the shed, there was a distinct odour of Not Right, and he found to his dismay that the cockerel had partially disintegrated into foul-smelling goo. (This of course led to plenty of jokes along the lines of “Oh dear, my cock smells terrible – here, sniff my cock”, etc, etc.) Fortunately our guests Tom and Dawn had a duck stored in their freezer, which saved everyone else from having to eat my Christmas tofu.

WHICH WAS DELICIOUS, by the way. I’d pressed all the water out of it and marinated it for a couple of days in a mixture of miso paste, stock, lemon juice, oil and herbs, then roasted it. I made everyone try a bite, and to their surprise they all agreed it was genuinely tasty. I think a lot of people are turned off tofu simply because they don’t know how to prepare it – it’s basically a blank slate. A very healthy, cholesterol-free blank slate. (I should have a T-shirt or a badge made up that reads ‘Ask Me About Tofu!’)

We stayed at our house all day apart from a brief visit to friends, imbibed plenty of Christmas cheer and enjoyed ourselves immensely. The one real downer of the day was that my parents’ gifts, which my mom had sent from Canada IN NOVEMBER, never turned up. Damn crappy Canada Post and/or Royal Mail! The package still hasn’t arrived, so my mom is going to try and track it, or at least claim the insurance. Quel bummer. Knowing my mom, she went to a lot of effort and picked out some really cool stuff. (The clothes she sent me last year are still the nicest things in my wardrobe.)

New Years Eve was similarly chilled out and low-key – we went round to Tom and Dawn’s along with a few other choice folks, murdered about five bottles of champagne, and petered out not long after midnight, because we are officially IN OUR THIRTIES. Which is fine by me – my liver won’t take much more of the pounding I’ve inflicted on it during previous Auld Lang Syne revelries.

Over the holiday, I did a few more Fairy Tale collages, inspired by Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel.


View on Etsy


View on Etsy