Denison Tour Events

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SPBOM II: Opens March 27

The Sunday Morning Art and Coffee Club art group plans to host a second SPBOM (an acronym for the actual title Shoes, Panties, Bras- Oh My!) show during the Denison Spring Fine Art Tour at the Freshlight Gallery & Studio inside the Katy Depot in Denison.  An opening reception will be held at 6:30 pm on Saturday, March 27. All are invited to attend.

The first SPBOM show was the brainchild of Steve Black and SMAACC artists several years back as a way to explore the aesthetics of  clothing, accessories, and unmentionables. The show touched on various topics related to the theme such as consumer culture, beauty, and sensuality with a fresh and humorous viewpoint.  SPBOM II:The Return won’t disappoint those interested in creative interpretations of the aforementioned. Expect to see work in all mediums ranging from tame to extreme.

For more information about SPBOM II: The Return, visit the Sunday Morning Art and Coffee Club website at www.smaacc.com or call Steve O. Black at (903) 463-8662.

Call for Artists

The Bonham Creative Arts Center just issued a final ‘call for art’ for their Annual Judged Art Show. Entries received on or  before March 2 will still be eligible for judging and awards.  All area artists over the age of 18 are encouraged to participate. Please call the CAC for an entry form and submission instructions at 903-640-2196.

A reception, award ceremony, and opening for the show will be held on Friday, March 5, at 6 pm in the Creative Arts Center.

Wildlife Photographers Needed

The Friends of Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge are sponsoring the 1st Annual HWR Photography Contest.  The goal of the contest is to increase awareness and appreciation of the refuge, as well as recognize wildlife photographers.  Cash prizes will be awarded in six categories and ribbons will be issued for Best of Show and 1st through 3rd place winners.  Winning photos will be displayed at the Refuge Visitors Center and on-line on the Friends of HWR website.

Entries are being accepted until March 1, 2010.  The contest is open to all photographers with the stipulation that all images submitted must have been taken within the boundaries of the Refuge.  There are no restrictions regarding the date the image was captured, so older photos are still eligible for entry. For full details, visit the News section at http://www.friendsofhagerman.com/.

While on the website, also check out the schedule for the Refuge’s periodic photo safaris, Photographer of the Month galleries, and Second Saturday youth activities and nature talks.

Julie-Julia by Edward Southerland

Last month I went to the dollar movie, which now costs a dollar and a quarter, and saw Julie and Julia. It’s about a woman named Julie who cooks her way through every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child’s first cookbook. It was pretty good, though I later read that the actress who played Julie was considerably more personable than the real thing. Meryl Streep made an admirable Julia, although she had to wear lifts, work at undersized tables and have the camera man scrunch down and shoot up to make her 5’6” look like Child’s 6’2”.

I was a Julia Child fan. I got interested in cooking when I got a copy of her first book and decided to make a soufflé. Soufflés are tricky. Treat them rough, and the beaten egg whites will collapse along with your hopes for supper. I didn’t know that, so my soufflé came out high and fluffy.

Cooking shows were popular on television from the early days, but most of the shows were local until 1963. That’s when the Boston public television station decided to shoot a series featuring a former employee of the World War II spy agency, the OSS, who had a voice like a piece of cracked china and a passion for French cuisine. With the debut of Julia Child’s The French Chef, food shows became character driven. Even if the viewers were not particularly interested in cooking, the shows were fun to watch.

No, Child swears she never dropped a duck or a roast or anything else on the floor and then stuck it in the oven. She does admit to once flipping a potato pancake into the air that missed the pan and landed on the stove. She scooped it back into the pan with the admonition that, if you were in the kitchen alone, no one else need know.

In one of her cookbooks, Child tells numerous stories of culinary disasters she had to deal with on the show. Icing that fell off a too-warm cake, soufflés that didn’t rise and a Charlotte aux pommes made with the wrong type of apples that “collapsed like an old barn in a windstorm” when it was turned out into the pan.

Après Julia la deluge, and TV cooks were all over the tube, especially on PBS. One could tune in on a Saturday afternoon and watch Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Southern and French cuisine presented by all manner of chefs. Cajun comedian Justin Wilson parlayed his bayou wit, the ability to pour exactly one teaspoon of salt into the palm of his hand, and knowledge of the unique cooking of South Louisiana into a long-running PBS series. Martin Yan, whose Chinese cleaver could slice and dice a scallion in a nanosecond without causing him to lose so much as a hang nail, offered up the dishes of the Far East.

Another favorite was Frenchman, Jacques Pepin. Pepin, who grew up in his family’s restaurant, Le Pelican, studied with the best France had to offer and cooked for Charles de Gaulle, before coming to America. He has had several television series, cooking alone and with his daughter Claudine. He also joined with Child to entertain and inform audiences with his cooking and repartee.

There were others, hosts of others, who flourished, then faded like flowers in the snow as their on-camera presence grew stale. The ones who lasted had something going for them besides a way around a sauté pan and a balloon whisk.

Of all the chefs, however, the one I liked to watch, for reasons unrelated to cooking, was David Wade of Dallas. First locally and then later on cable, Wade, who always wore a crested blazer and ascot, was a wonderment. His way with the language was far more interesting than his cooking.

Wade didn’t prepare a recipe, he “actualized” or “negotiated” or “staged” it. Why turn up the heat when you could “increase the calefaction?” He strove for the “hint of redolence” with an “insignance (sic) of salt” or a “slur of potato water.” The “sanguine staccato of flavor” was often “assuaged” by a “swaging the butter” while avoiding a “butterish attitude.” And if the food was sticking to the pot, he would increase its “lubricity” by “collapsing butter” and doing a “Mark Twain”—(“all the way to the bottom,” he would add for the literary types who couldn’t figure what Tom Sawyer had to do with cooking)—with the “tasting baton” after adding each “trapping.”

If one avoided “extraneous runoff” in a dish, one could always enhance the “diminishing crescendo of flavor” with a “wisp” of Wade’s own invention, Worcestershire powder. And of course, you had to keep the “eggs in cognation with the meat loaf” to give it “attitude,” and heat the whole mélange “to a chuckle.”

Working on the food section for each issue of the magazine is a lot of fun. Chef Robert Aranson and I get together and dream up menus, how to make them happen, and how Jacki Lee can photograph them. Afterward we get to eat the props. Thanks Julia.

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