Jellypress

BIG

2013-05-18T15:05:00Z

Masher

Whatever you think of the sometimes over-inflated (pun intended) Jeff Koons, artist of the shiny and controversial, this Venus de Willendorf is undoubtedly hilarious and thought-provoking. Even more thought provoking is the excellent review by the excellent Roberta Smith of his current exhibition in the New York Times. Spend some quality time with some quality text next time you have five minutes instead of googling your exes.

I’m in Love With This Guy

2011-12-10T18:41:01Z

Masher

Gabriel Kreuther

Did you ever fall in love with a chef (or two!) you’ve never met by eating his food? Swoon, right? You want to run in the kitchen and beg them to marry you. In this case, both of them: At The Modern, Danny Meyer’s place three doors down from the front entrance of MOMA, Gabriel Kreuther, chef, and Marc Aumont, pastry chef, are making such delicious food it’s really unfair. My friend Mary, chef, entrepreneur, beautiful person and wonderful friend, of Mary’s Marvelous in East Hampton (which should also top your list if you find yourself out in the Hamptons in need of great coffee and simple delicious meals) treated me to dinner at The Modern. Yes, it’s pricey, but hey, that’s what that holiday savings account was all about right? Or maybe you have a marvelous friend like my marvelous Mary to treat you. If not, treat yourself. You deserve it. And if this economy remains an obstacle, you can google these guys, whose French-American recipes and pastries are all over the internet. Just eat at your own risk. If you fall in love, I can’t be responsible. I’m just saying. P.S. (If you get out to the Hamptons and fall in love with Mary by eating her amazing food, she’s taken. FYI.)

Marc Aumont

Star Ledger Reviews Nancy’s Solo Exhibtion

2011-12-01T22:13:01Z

Masher

Alchemy, Nancy Gail Ring, oil on canvas, 36” x 48”, 2011

Such a wonderful review of my work in the Star Ledger today. Thank you to all who have shown their interest in my art. Enjoy.

Art bits: Romantic fragments in West Orange
Published: Thursday, December 01, 2011, 7:13 AM
By Dan Bischoff/For The Star-Ledger

West Orange artist Nancy Gail Ring is showing a mix of her limpid portraiture at the Incubator Gallery through Dec. 18, and it’s really worth a visit. Titled “What You Get Is To Be Changed,” the show consists of romantic fragments, pictures that suggest without defining a fuller realism. Ring’s powers of observation are acute, but she never lets her technique become claustrophobic — there’s plenty of white space left for the imagination to roam.

Ring is a graduate of Syracuse University School of Visual and Performing Arts and earned her MFA in painting at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she was nominated for the Robert Motherwell Foundation Dedalus Award in Painting. Ring is the co-founder and artist for the blog jellypress.com: Old Recipes, Modern Life. The New Jersey Arts Incubator Gallery is at 495 Prospect Ave., West Orange. The Incubator Gallery is open Saturday and Sunday by appointment: call (973) 669-0602.

Nancy’s Solo Art Exhibit

2011-11-19T12:37:00Z

Masher

Thanks to everyone who helped make the opening of my solo exhibition, “What You Get Is To Be Changed” at the New Jersey Arts Incubator in West Orange a huge success.

Professional Development Workshops for Artists with Nancy

2011-10-01T13:34:01Z

Masher

Nancy Gail Ring, Self-Portrait (As Father Lay Dying) oil on canvas, 2010

Come to my workshops, yo!

NJAI (New Jersey Arts Incubator)
495 Prospect Avenue, West Orange, NJ 07052 (973) 669 - 0602
presents
“Saturdays with Nancy” (some workshops may be taught by alternate instructor to be announced)
Professional Development Workshops for Visual Artists taught by award-winning professional visual artist and writer Nancy Gail Ring

Today, Saturday, October 1 (Still time to drop-in!)
All levels, emerging to mid-career
How to Find and Apply for Artist-in-Residency Programs
From upstate New York to Barcelona and Beyond, artist-in-residency programs offer studios, and room and board to hundreds of artists each year. Learn how to file online applications, upload jpegs, and write convincing artist’s statements to try to win one of the coveted spots.
$15 non-members, $10 members
1pm - 2pm
laptop recommended but not required

Read on for more workshops and Art SLAM! for showcasing your work to an audience of peers and art lovers:

Nancy’s Three-person Art Exhibit

2011-09-17T14:10:00Z

Masher

My recent exhibition, “Pale Language” a three-person show at The New Jersey Arts Incubator got a favorable review in the current publication of the online journal The Patch in the West Orange edition. Take a moment to read about it and see some images from the show, and if you are anywhere near West Orange, NJ, come see our exhibit. Questions? Use the contact form on my website for additional information and read on for details:

How to Make Pizza (and more importantly, why?)

2011-08-25T12:25:00Z

Masher

Pizza Dough (adapted from Food & Wine Magazine)

1 envelope active dry yeast
2 cups warm water (90° to 105°)
1/2 teaspoon sugar
4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading
2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
Extra-virgin olive oil

MAKE THE DOUGH In a large bowl, mix the yeast with 1/2 cup of the warm water and the sugar and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes. Add the remaining 1 1/2 cups of warm water, the 4 cups of flour and the kosher salt and stir until a soft dough forms. Turn the dough out onto a well-floured work surface and knead, adding flour as necessary until a silky, but soft dough forms, about five minutes. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl and brush all over with olive oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight or for up to 3 days.
Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface; punch down and divide into 4 pieces. Form each piece into a ball. Rub each ball with oil and transfer to a baking sheet. Cover the balls loosely with plastic wrap and let rise in a draft-free place for 1 hour.
PREPARE THE TOPPINGS Meanwhile, set a pizza stone in the oven and preheat the oven to 500°, allowing at least 45 minutes for the stone to heat. Prepare toppings of your choice. Remember to pre-cook vegies or meats that need longer than 10 minutes to cook. Sky’s the limit here. Use your cook’s intuition and imagination. Experiment!
BAKE THE PIZZA: On a lightly floured surface, stretch one ball of dough into a 13-inch round; transfer to a floured (you can also use cornmeal) pizza peel, adding flour where the dough sticks. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with kosher salt to taste. Bake the untopped dough for 5 minutes to lightly brown it and firm it. Remove from oven, top, and bake 5 - 10 minutes more, being careful to check the bottom of the crust so that it doesn’t burn.

Okay, back to food. This pizza costs approximately $3.50. It’s a potato, roasted garlic, olive, ricotta salata cheese, roasted tomato pizza. Sounds good, right? You can do it too, and you will be rewarded if you do, because it will save you money. But more than that, it will save you. Even if you are one of the fortunate ones who are wealthy right now, it will still save you, because we spend too much time in the virtual world, and in motion, running here and there, working, a blur of production and distracted incomplete thoughts. Come home. Get your hands in some dough. We humans need to touch. We need to be IN touch. And you can’t get a pizza like this on Facebook. Even if you find a good artisan pizza maker, you won’t get the memory imprinted in you of satiny dough under your palms, of the light coming through the olive oil as it streams from the bottle, of your body making the thing that you will eat. And that’s good for the soul. Too busy? Tips for fitting it into your crazy life here:

I Found A Teenager Who Hates Texting

2011-08-21T11:34:00Z

Masher

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.
Neil Gabler writing in “The Elusive Big Idea” for the New York Times, August 13, 2011

Nancy Gail Ring, Loss of Innocence, oil on canvas, detail of destroyed canvas

I felt compelled to write this (non-food) post after Laura shared an article with her community about the author’s concerns that not enough thinking is happening these days. We are deluged with information, writes the author, but nobody is thinking about it. Coincidentally, that evening, I had the pleasure of traveling by train with a teenage friend of my son’s. That’s his portrait I did above. It’s significant for two reasons:

Harris Lieberman: A Painting Show or My Once in a While Not About Food Post

2011-05-29T13:51:00Z

Masher

Susanna Coffey, Stream, 2003, oil, 12” x 15” in

Okay, here’s how it happens: I enter the Harris Lieberman Gallery in their temporary space on the ground floor of 508 West 26th Street to see “A Painting Show.” I hadn’t planned on it; my friend Martha and I were gallery hopping and most of them were closed for the Memorial Day weekend. We start perusing the works and I’m saying to Martha, “Wow. This work is great. It’s really incredible. This is some of the best work I’ve seen in a while. I can smell the turpentine. This is really about painting . . who are these artists?” and then we decide to go find out who all these new wonderful painters are.

Greek Pastitsio: File Under Easter Lasagna 2012

2011-05-21T12:46:00Z

Masher

Greek Lasagna (Pastitsio)

FOR THE MEAT SAUCE:
1⁄3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 green bell pepper and 1/2 red bell pepper, cored, seeded,
and minced
1 medium yellow onion, minced
1 lb. ground beef, veal, or pork
2 cups canned crushed tomatoes
1⁄3 cup red wine
2 fresh or dried bay leaves
powdered cinnamon, to taste
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper,
to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste

FOR THE BÉCHAMEL AND PASTA:
Note: Double the bechamel sauce if you like a lot. Erasmia does.
8 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 cup flour
4 cups milk
1 cup grated Greek “Kefalotiri” cheese. In Greek markets like the ones in Astoria, Queens NY they sell it already grated. You can substitute Parmesan.
3 eggs, separated
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper,
to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
1lb. No. 2 Greek macaroni, bucatini,
or elbow macaroni
2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

1. Make the meat sauce: Heat oil in a 12” skillet over medium-high heat. Add peppers and onions and cook, stirring often, until soft, 8–10 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer onion mixture to a plate and set aside. Add ground meat to skillet and cook, breaking meat up into tiny pieces, until browned, 6–8 minutes. Add reserved onion mixture, along with tomatoes, wine, bay leaves, and cinnamon and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring often, until sauce thickens, about 15 minutes. Remove sauce from heat, discard bay leaves, and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg; let cool.

2. Make the béchamel: Heat butter in a 4-qt. saucepan over medium-high heat. Add flour and cook, whisking constantly, until smooth and slightly toasted, 1–2 minutes. Add milk; cook, whisking often, until sauce coats the back of a spoon, 8–10 minutes. Remove from heat, add 3⁄4 cup cheese and egg yolks; season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Stir until smooth; set aside.

3. Heat oven to 350°. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil; add pasta and cook halfway through, about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk egg whites in a large bowl until frothy. Stir in remaining cheese; drain pasta in a colander and then toss with egg white–cheese mixture to coat evenly. Set aside.

4. Grease a deep 9” x 13” baking dish with olive oil. Place half the pasta mixture on bottom of dish and cover evenly with meat sauce. Top with remaining pasta mixture. Pour béchamel over pasta, spreading it evenly with a rubber spatula. Bake until the top is golden brown, about 1 hour. Transfer to wire rack; cool 20 minutes before serving.

SERVES 10 – 12

Okay, I’m busy. Okay, okay, ridiculously busy. I admit it: I couldn’t get my friend Erasmia’s Easter Lasagna up here until almost Memorial Day. But why do we have to save this fabulous lamb and cheese lasagna for one day a year? If I didn’t know it was traditional for Greek Easter, I would make it anytime. It’s incredibly delicious and decadent. So, for all your calendar slaves out there, file this in your recipe files (you know you have one - alphabetical no doubt) and for the calendar rebels (you know you’re eating turkey and cranberry sauce at the diner all year long, don’t deny it) here’s one for you. Read on for some other great shots of Erasmia’s amazing cooking and her funny, bittersweet stories of cooking without the matriarchs, long gone, who made all these family traditions possible:

Orange Mystery

2011-04-04T12:38:00Z

Masher

I have a warm spot in my heart for explosion or ray patterns found in nature. Oranges in particular have a beautiful radiating ray pattern as do sunflowers and octopi and fireworks. Imagine my surprise when cutting open this orange and finding this unusual packing pattern of sections inside. If you’ve ever seen this too, give a holler. Just a reminder of the random beauty and mystery of our world I suppose. Or an errant gene . . . file under “cool stuff.”

I’ve Got (Candied) Crabs

2011-02-23T21:28:00Z

Masher

Right now the world is divided into who will and who won’t eat these. They’re Thai Candied Crab. They smell like the sea. Okay, let’s amend that. They smell like the garbage cans outside a seafood restaurant kitchen where the cats hang out. I don’t know what they taste like cuz I refused to eat them, as predicted by my friend Nancy. I love my friend Nancy for a. buying these to begin with, and b. popping one in her mouth. Nevermind that she had a moment just like Tom Hanks has at the buffet table in the movie “Big” if you know the scene, spitting the dang thing out as fast as it went in. She still rocks. My thirteen year old son, however, devoured one happily and said it “tasted like crap” but he’d eat it again if he had to. Nancy has since bet him twenty bucks that he can’t eat twenty of them, no water to wash them down. He took the bet. Would you?

Foodie Gift Par Excellence, Silver Palate’s Five Star Pecan Bar, and the Old Cookbook Blues

2010-11-26T13:44:00Z

Masher

Look at my Silver Palate Cookbook! Isn’t it amazing and hilarious? I love it. And I can’t part with it. Seriously. I go onto amazon.com thinking about finally buying a new one but I can’t bring myself to do it. I just love this old crazy pages falling out stained and loved to bits edition I bought around 1982.

I was a twenty-something painter then in my first post-college apartment in Manhattan with a kitchen the size of a broom closet. I fell into serious lust with the ginger cookies and carrot cake at the tiny, jewel-box-like Silver Palate shop in my neighborhood. They kept them in huge glass jars. As soon as this book came out I had to have it. It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit if you know the story. All its buttons loved off.

Whisk Tree

2010-07-17T21:45:00Z

Masher

We call this the “whisk tree.” It’s real. Lombard Street, Philadelphia, Pa., July 17th, 3:30 p.m.

Dining Room Art

2010-05-16T12:22:00Z

Masher

This is called “Holiness Passes By the Everyday World” and is another large study in the series I have been painting of my dining room. it’s about six feet high and four wide and the title comes from the text of Norman Bryson’s fascinating book Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Enjoy the painting. Check out the book. Take the book to the beach with you like I did yesterday. Glorious day. Blackberries and chocolate in the cooler, and the boys rescuing big crabs by throwing them back into the waves . . .