The Cooking Blog, part two.

First of all, it is really surreal and kind of stressful to suddenly have to figure out where I am going to live next year when I am back at Wellesley. It seems bizarre to still be dealing with Wellesley paperwork bullshit in the middle of my St. Petersburg apartment. It's really going to fuck with my head when I have to choose and register for classes in the next couple of weeks.

Secondly, this weekend was completely, and wholly uneventful. As was the end of last week, full of midterms and crap. Everyone has had this kind of gross, lethargic cold that has been going around, and by Friday it hit me and I came home and didn't really leave my house all weekend, just watching movies and sitting in my bed. I did finish King, Queen, Knave by Nabokov which I enjoyed, instead of going on the cold, rainy trip to Vyborg on Sunday, once again sleeping through that day trip (same thing happened this summer).

The only time I did leave the house was for a long, painful few hours on Saturday when I had to go into Smolny at 10AM for a make up 16MM class to shoot some film in the freezing, terrible snow. It would have been fun if it hadn't been wet and frigid, and so upon coming home, I was inspired to try making the mushroom soup that Olga always made for me last semester, and, I must say, it wasn't a complete failure.


The recipe goes something as follows:

Chop some mushrooms, a bunch of them, and cook them with butter in a pot on the stove for about 3 minutes.

Add in one whole onion, chopped up, cook a little further with those mushrooms.

Add in a whole bunch of water to the pot.

Add in a bunch of cut up potatoes to the mess on the stove.

Add in some chicken broth mix stuff (as we had no bullion, we used this chicken broth powder that Zhenya, the girl who used to live in my room, had left behind.)

Let the whole mixture boil for a while so the potatoes will cook, then let it simmer until you feel good about it.

See? Not hard at all. A little bland, but that's the way I know and love that soup, plus you can always add pepper and salt and things afterwards to your taste.


The only shame is that soup really does not photograph well.

And then afterwards we made a little pizza too, but we really cheated on that. They sell these really good frozen pizzas at the produkti on our street, so we got the four-cheese variety and just added some frozen spinach and fresh tomato to it before cooking (Lauren's stroke of genius).


But we still cooked it, you know, so it counts.

Crafting.

Probably the best part of living with Lauren is our mutual crafting sessions in our kitchen. We had a great one last weekend, and finally, now that the illustrious Adams Carroll has received his letters in the care package that Lauren sent along back with the Reed professor who brought me my debit card, I can post our good work.

Here is my rendition of our crazy night on Stephen's roof from this summer, for my card to Adams:

THE ORIGINAL:

THE INTERPRETATION:

by E.B. "I edited out Ilana and Jonah to make it easier to draw" Bartels

And then here is more "response art" to my self portrait project, as depicted by Lauren, for a little book she made of images of our apartment to get Adams excited for coming back in June to intern on the summer program and crashing with us in our fabulous pad:

THE ORIGINAL:


THE INTERPRETATION:

by Lauren "I wasn't really trying to make it look exactly like E.B." Abman

Something else found by my roommate:

Is the dork on the left Vladimir Putin?

Artist book project:

It has occurred to me that my faithful readers, who knew so much and saw so many of my printmaking projects from last semester, have no clue what I have been up to in that class this term.

I still have printmaking class on Saturday mornings, and this semester there are about 10 more Americans in it -- it is a really popular class, not just me and Cathy and Lauren sometimes and Dasha, the one Russian girl, anymore. But as the new kids learn the techniques from Yuri (and it is always Yuri this semester, Pyoter makes a point to never come in) that we went through last year, Cathy and I get to work on our own on our individual projects which are artist books using printmaking techniques....

Artist books are handmade books of prints, limited in quantity, usually a very small edition of maybe only three to five, that tell a story or have a theme. For example, Cathy is going to make a cook book of monotype prints of recipes from chaotic times in her life. My idea started out as sort of an encyclopedia of family members for Agnes, but evolved into something quite different....

In the style of some women photographers who I adore -- Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle and Nikki Lee -- I decided to take on fictional identities and basically play dress up in my house for hours while taking mug shots of myself as different characters. I came up with twenty-two different people, and now am in the process of creating their histories and identities so I can make criminal, secret files of their lives to compile into my book.

I'm excited about this project, and at least having a shitload of fun doing it, and when I talked to Yuri about it on Saturday, he thought it would be great if I showed the photos to people and got their opinions on what kinds of people these characters are, maybe how old they are, their genders, their ages, their professions, what crimes they could possibly be accused of committing.... so, I thought, what forum better to show a bunch of people a bunch of photos than my blog?

So, here I present to you the twenty-two characters I came up with. I would love to hear what you all think of these people, which one you think could be a serial killer, which one would be accused of bank fraud, if you think one is a prostitute or a junkie or a professor.... whatever weird shit first comes to mind, I want to hear it. So let me know -- leave comments, or send me along an email response.

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