Inspiration: Renoir’s Girl With A Hoop

Creation: A Curlified, Renoir-ied Floral Centerpiece

My parents gave me a framed print of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Girl With A Hoop on my 14th birthday. It hung in my bedroom since then, up until the time we had to move to another city. There I found a spot for it, along with Degas’ Ballet School, on the walls of the new bedroom. When I visit Dumaguete, Negros Oriental, I know I am truly home when I’m in bed in my parents’ house and I look up to see Renoir’s Girl keeping vigil. I’d like to think that she keeps watch over my room while I’m away.

As you may have read below, I visited the LA Flower Mart this past weekend. It was partly curiosity, but mainly because I’ve always wanted to learn floral arrangement. I’ve been too scared to try my hand at it because of all the colors! I am so bad with colors. So in an effort to understand them and to try my hand at more interesting color combinations, I thought of a plan before trekking off to the Flower Mart.

I decided that my first floral arrangement would be in the palette of a painting that I knew by heart. This way, I could borrow the artistic eye of a master. If the colors don’t come together – I can always blame the painter! I’d be able to consider colors other than those I’d normally use. Plus, it would give me a framework to craft with; I didn’t want to end up getting all these flowers I wouldn’t be able to use.

You know, this little experiment worked! I’m so happy I had a plan before I got there. There were so many flowers of all shapes and sizes that I would’ve been overwhelmed. But I kept referring to the small visual of Renoir’s piece in my notebook and went around with the singular purpose of getting all those colors together.

The best blooms I had to work with were these hydrangeas, because they come in bunches of varied blues and were the only ones with deep blue flowers.

Everything else was either on the purple side or was dyed to look blue (like roses). I didn’t want no dyed flowers!

To add touches of green, pink and yellow, I worked with two other flowers (I had to ask the flower seller the name of each. Some of them looked at me like I was crazy. I guess other people who shopped there knew their flowers in and out!) You’ll see them below. From L to R: Hydrangea (got these in yellow, peachy orange and different shades of blue), Rice Flowers, Soledago Flowers.

Mama also showed me how to flatten the Hydrangea ends with the flat side of a wide knife before putting them into water. I didn’t know about this before, but you apparently need to do this to woodsy stems so that there’s more surface area for the water to seep upwards through the plant, keeping it fresher for a longer time period.

More pics of how the whole thing came together:

I had a lot of fun taking something I loved and transforming it into a creative project. I hope you get the chance to try this out yourself. Have a flowery Earth Day!

How interesting is this? They actually make biodegradable paper plates from bagasse! Well, this is interesting enough for me because I grew up around bagasse, when my family lived in a compound around a sugar mill. Bagasse is the leftover sugarcane fiber after all the juice has been pressed out of the cane stalks. Aside from being used as fuel for the mill’s furnaces, it’s apparently gaining value outside of the mills, for household items like this paper plate.

The one above is from Worldcentric.org, which has many earth-friendly products. Yay to bagasse! We’re going camping soon. I hope we can find bagasse plates. Teehee.

EDIT: I just realized that BAGASSE sounds funny. Ahaha.

So, my “writer/actor/radio guy” friend Charlie Schroeder linked to my site from his. He wears yellow shoes like me. If that doesn’t convince you he’s cool, head on over to www.charlieschroeder.net. Check out his stats, subscribe to his podcast and support public radio while you’re at it!

Salamat for the link, Charlie! (I didn’t just put a hex on you, Schroeder. Salamat is “thank you” in Tagalog. Tee hee.)

My last name has had many interesting spellings in the US: Florian, Florets, Flors, Florez…the list is long. And frustrating! I finally figured out a way to make sure people get it right. I say: “It’s Flores. Like ‘flowers’ in Spanish.”

Everyone understands flowers!

And not only do I understand it, but yesterday, I found my last name fleshed out in all its colorful glory at the legendary Los Angeles Flower Mart.

The Flower Mart in downtown LA is a mecca for florists and Floreses. I first heard about it from the women in my family, because many of them garden like it’s an Olympic sport. The Flower Mart is where all the flower growers in Southern California go to sell everything from the delicate Baby’s Breaths to bold Dendrobiums. I finally made up my mind to see it for myself this past weekend.

Here are some photos from that floral excursion.

Here are some classic blooms. I loved how they were all just within footsteps of each other!

Tulips

Irises

Roses

Orchids (dressed in a lovely shade of green!)

Anthuriums are my favorite flowers. Too bad they didn’t have any green (Midori) ones.

And here are some blooms that I made flowery friends with after meeting them for the first time.

Coffee Bean flowers

Bells Of Ireland

Pussy Willow

Cobra Lily

Green is my favorite color, and as luck would have it, there are ACTUALLY green roses. Who knew? But look at this variety’s name. It cracked me up.

The LA Flower Mart is at 754 Wall St., Los Angeles, CA 90014. For more details, visit their website HERE.

Say hello to Spaghetti Squash. Perhaps the strangest squash I’ve ever met.

Growing up in the Philippines, the only squash I ever had the pleasure of meeting was the kalabasa, which you see below. I found out that the variety is called the kabocha squash in the US. But for 25 years of my life, the kalabasa was all I knew!

Back home, the kalabasa sings in the popular duet of string beans and coconut milk (as in ginataang sitaw and kalabasa), has a starring role in Pinakbet (a vegetable stew flavored with bagoong or shrimp paste) and is the diva of the Dinengdeng (Pinakbet’s less complicated cousin. Thank you, by the way, to Ate Christine for introducing me to the comforts of Ilokano cuisine!) Nanay Manet who was my Yaya Extraordinaire and was the first great cook in my life, used to make candied squash by cooking the pulp from mature ones with lots of sugar.

So you see, kalabasa was, to borrow my friend Bona’s term, my “homegirl”. We hung around each other for something like 25 years. And then, I came to the US and met the quite-eccentric spaghetti squash one random day in the produce aisle.

Its name comes from the fact that after it’s cooked (baked or steamed in a small amount of water), the flesh is scraped off the skin with a fork and it comes out in strings (!), just like spaghetti.

After being so used to kalabasa, this was one of the strangest moments in my cooking life.

It’s often buttered and herbed, sometimes served with pesto or, as in my case, topped with a simple marinara sauce. (Yes, from a can. I was lazy.) It was yummy with some parmesan cheese. I wish I had pictures of this with the sauce on it, but it was unfortunately consumed at the most rapid of speeds (that’s code for we were too busy eating it to bother taking pictures.)

Happy weekend to all. Hope it’s filled with the comfort of familiar food and the fun of strange, new ones!

Thank you so much to Noel and W. for working on the new design for GWAC. I’m so blessed to have your pearly and flowery artistic muscles behind all this. Thank God I have you guys. For all the crafts I do, I can’t draw to save my life. Take, for example, my attempt to draw the two of you:

See?!?

Salamat guid sa tanan tanan! Thank you for everything!

I owe you cookies.

This was actually on CNN.com. Renal failure, the poor thing. Why they’d report on it is beyond me though. I love dogs, don’t get me wrong. It’s just strange that it was on CNN’s Popular Stories section. Maybe Paw Paw had a fan base!

Even more strange was the dog’s full name: Kublai Khan Paw Paw Chow Chow Chow. I am not kidding.

The 60-pound chow, whose full name was Kublai Khan Paw Paw Chow Chow Chow, was almost 13. Stewart had owned him since he was born, and had named him Paw Paw for his large paws, a spokeswoman said.

“Paw Paw was a spectacular chow and an even more spectacular dog,” Stewart wrote in a blog post on his death Saturday. “He was always my loyal companion, displaying the most agreeable temperament.”

Stewart wrote that Paw Paw was a willing model for the camera, appearing in television commercials and national print ads. She said in his final days, he stopped eating and drifted off into deep sleeps.

She has two other dogs, Sharkey and Francesca, along with several other animals, including cats, horses and donkeys, at her home in Bedford, New York.