Six cooks, no spoilt broth: Mike Emanuel built the oven. Aya Brackett took the photo for the NYT; see link below for the rest of her slideshow. "Communal table: A 36 Hour Dinner Party" The NY Times Magazine recently published this article by Michael Pollan about a 36 hour dinner party cooked in a mud oven. Best, for me, was how he explained the purpose of the oven: The idea is to make the most efficient use of precious firewood and to keep the heat (and the danger) of the cook fire some distance from everybody's homes. But what appeals to me about the tradition is how the communal . . .
Spoons
carved from green wood: roughed out with a hatchet and/or a northwestern style adze, then shaped and finished with crooked knives and a straight blades (click on the thumbnail for an uncropped view of the entire photo). Some of the detail work is done w/little burins. The bowls I carved with a crooked knife, straight blade, and a neat jig designed by Bill Coperthwaite (author of A Hand Made Life). Bill's spoon is the little yellow (birch) ladle with the scooped indents where the handle meets the bowl -- his addition to the tradition of spoon design. After I started carving spoons, a friend . . .
Teaching with Mud, Sand, and Straw
Working with mud, sand, and straw is a way to teach geology, engineering, physics, history, drawing, composition, and design. It is also a way to teach social skills, like cooperation. But more important than just what it teaches is how it teaches: Jon Young is a wilderness educator who takes kids into the woods, and teaches them to identify and track wildlife, among other things. He cites Microsoft research suggesting that tracks in the mud were an original source of writing, that alphabets are like birdprints, and that reading a set of tracks, from a brain science point of view, is the . . .