Freshly Baked Bread in a Mica Bleassing Bowl from the Sacred Heart Cafe!

I baked four loaves of bread yesterday.  Two in standard baking pans and two in mica clay blessing bowls.  What a lovely globe of golden bread emerged from each of the bowls!  A bowl for baking bread?  Yes!  Because mica clay is ovenware, you may bake bread in mica pottery bowls.  And so I did, using an heirloom Sonoma whole wheat flour grown locally at the Huasna Valley Farm, owned by my friends Ron and Jen.  I consulted my favorite bread recipe of all time from the Tassajara Bread Book by Ed Espe Brown, a Zen monk.  If you have a desire to learn to mix, fold, knead, shape and bake exquisite breads, this is the book for you. The basic bread recipe has 14 pages of clear instructions, each step illustrated with pen and ink drawings.  It will teach anybody to bake bread.  Try it!   http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/978-1-59030-704-5.cfm

Recently I had the good fortune to meet Ed at a book signing of his reprinted Tassajara Bread Book.  I brought my battered (literally!) book for him to sign, and bought the new edition as well.  When I asked him what the difference was between the two editions, he said with great solemnity "The new one has chocolate (pointing to the new hardcover) and this one doesn't (pointing to my antique, bedraggled paperback from 1970)".  But he signed each book with a tender personal message in a slow and mindful penmanship, careful loops, full of grace.  I felt a dharma transmission from my bread baking guru that night as his pen slowly formed each letter in his notes to a stranger. 

Here's one of Ed's poems:

The truth is you're already a cook.
Nobody teaches you anything,
but you can be touched, you can be awakened.
Put down the book and start asking,
"What have we here?"

Though recipes abound, for soups and salads,
breads and entrées, for getting enlightened
and perfecting the moment, still
the unique flavor of Reality
appears in each breath, each bite,
each step, unbounded and undirected.

Each thing just as it is,
What do you make of it?

Edward Espe Brown


~~

About my Mica Blessing Bowls:

Food can be a sacrament when baked with Love, and served in Beauty. Holy Food deserves a mica clay blessing bowl. An elegantly shaped bowl luminous with mica and blessed with magnificent fire clouds, where no glaze chemicals were used. The clay is a tawny russet, infused with a constellation of mica stars. The smoke patterns from the final pit fire, are called fire clouds. A mica blessing bowl is mesmerizing as you gaze into the starry universe of its interior curve.

The Sacred Heart Cafe has two of these bowls suitable for baking tasty loaves:
"Magma"     http://www.1000markets.com/users/pattymara/collections/3076/products/71014

"Calico"        http://www.1000markets.com/users/pattymara/collections/11631/products/114421

They are kiln mates, born from the same litter of New Mexico clay.

April Musings

April is my birthday month, and of course, my favorite month.  Gardening, loving the longer days of spring light, throwing pots in my studio and cleaning/shedding/packing for our move to New Mexico in the summer.  We harvested our winter potatoes yesterday, and tomorrow I'll be planting organic romaine, basil and tomato starts.  Many orders are flowing in to DolphinSmile Studio, and I'm dodging April showers to throw and trim and polish the mica pottery. 

The New Love of my Life

After nearly forty years of being a potter, I have found a new clay that has won my heart in a way unknown to me. "Clay?" you say. Yup. Clay.

Clay recently, lovingly dug from northern New Mexico. Clay full of MICA, which is a powerful insulator, numinously beautiful and energetically medicinal. Pottery made from this clay can be used as cookware on the stovetop. That's right. Over an open flame. It is durable and holds the heat for a long, long time. Food or beverages cook and served in it tastes.....enchanted. And it sparkles, sparkles, sparkles.

I just got back from a week in northern New Mexico, where I met Felipe Ortega, while staying at his eclectic Owl Peak Pottery and B & B in La Madera. He is a Jicarilla Apache traditional potter and medicine man....and gourmet chef and baker. The cup in the photo is one of his mugs, which I purchased there, hugged all the way home on the airplane, and loved for two weeks. Then I heard the voice of my friend in north Idaho, sliding into her winter sad, and I realized I had to send my mug to her to shine up her dark days. It was the thing I loved the most, so I knew I had to send it. Now, I hear the lilt in her voice when we talk long distance.

See the black markings on the mug? Those are called fire clouds. It is where the wood of the fire rested on the pot during the firing. Fire clouds are ephemeral, uncontrollable and a true gift of the fire. This mug's entire inside is black, with cloud shapes kissing the outside in certain places.

I have fifty pounds of Felipe's hand dug micaceous clay and slip in my studio now. Working with it is all I really want to do now....but I have a big illustration job on my desk with an impending deadline. So I think about that clay as I do my work, and know that soon I will have the unbroken time to make its acquaintance in my studio, on my wheel, in my hands. This clay. It carries the medicine of the Earth. And I have fifty pounds of it, two big dark brown bags of it waiting for me.

This mug is magic. It carries the Corn Blessing that Felipe offers as each pot goes into its final fire. As my friend holds it to her heart, its medicine flows to mine.

Update! I have made three mugs and a vase from the clay and I've added photos. Since they were my firstborn, I impressed rock art images of a birthing woman and Kokapelli, the humpbacked flute player of the Southwest.

These pots are now "leather hard". When they dry, I will apply mica slip and polish them with a smooth rock.. The last photo shows a chunk of the mica slip, which I will soften with water to apply it to the pots. It will add a glistening sparkle to the surface, and become the glaze.

Update 2: Handling the Handles.

As you can see from the photos, I am experimenting with handles. I followed Felipe's lead on the first one, attaching the handle to the plane of the rim, to create a continuous line. With this design, the thumb rests on top and serves as leverage when lifting and tipping the mug to drink. The other two handles are more traditional for me, "pulled" and attached to the wall of the mug, a bit below the rim, with a depression for the thumb to nestle into.

Update 3: Four More.

Today I finished four more mugs, experimenting with shapes, trimming a foot on the bottom of three, and leaving the cutoff wire scallop pattern on the bottom of the fourth. I left these mugs smooth, to practice the burnishing process, which is next. I used Felipe's handle design on all four. Pictures soon.

Update 4: Mica Slip and Burnishing

I was able to "slip away" from holiday revels and spend a happy hour or so in my studio today, sanding the drying mugs, then applying a first coat of micaceous slip with a sponge. After it dried somewhat, I burnished the mica surfaces with a smooth river stone, a quartz rock and a rubber rib. Experimenting with several to see what seems to work best.

The burnished clay takes on a smooth shine after burnishing. I get the impression that I am smoothing the platelets of clay molecules so the mica has a reflective surface to shine on. I'm not really sure if this is happening, but it seems so.

When I was finished I walked home through the woods, passing the eucalyptus trees where hundreds of monarch butterflies are clustered together beating their wings to stay warm as the evening chill descends. As I stood watching the wings fluttering, it seemed the tree was breathing. Monarchs are orange and black, the same colors as a golden orange micaceous clay pot with black fire clouds. I may add some butterfly accents to a future pot in honor of the monarchs who migrate here in the winter, on their way to Mexico.

Update 5: Bowls and a Butterfly Today (Dec. 28) I threw seven bowls on my potters wheel. I will trim the bottoms tomorrow by flipping each one upside down onto my wheel and finishing the bottom with a trim tool and rubber rib. I have learned that the smoother I make the pots on the wheel, the less hand smoothing/sanding I'll have to do later on. This clay requires so much hands on sanding and polishing. The mugs on the top shelf of my drying rack are now polished and are awaiting the fire. Once I trim, sand, slip and polish the bowls I will have enough to fill my kiln. Just for fun, I made some beads, bear, raven and corn goddess pendants from the clay. I shot the photo of the monarch butterfly in the woods by my studio. There are about five hundred more of them in the branches above!

Felipe Makes a Pot and I Get to Watch

On the day we left Ojo Caliente and La Madera we returned to Owl Peak Pottery to pick up pots which we had purchased, and Iwas fortunate to be in the studio with Felipe as he made a traditional bean pot from the native micaceous clay.

It was a treasured interval of time to watch Felipe make pots. In this photo at the left, he builds the wall of the pot with coils. In the photo below, he is shaping the pot from the inside with a rib tool. He said "I tell my students that the beauty of a pot is not the outside shape. The inside shape is the beautiful soul of the pot." The finished pot is drying on the woodstove. Next it will be coated with micaceous slip, polished with sandstone and then fired in a wood fire. After this first firing, a corn blessing is offered then the pot is returned to the fire to call in the fire clouds, the black and silver colorations that are unique to each pot. Only then, after all the forming, polishing and firings, Felipe signs his pot.

Felipe Ortega's Micaceous Pottery

We stayed at Felipe Ortega's Owl Peak Pottery Bed and Breakfast, in La Madera, New Mexico, for three wild nights of meeting new friends, enjoying fabulous food cooked in his earthenware pottery, bread baked in the outdoor "horno" adobe ovens and marvelous stories flavored by the flow of good wine in good company.

http://www.felipeortega.com/index.html

Here are several of Felipe Ortega's and his students' pots.

See that glow? This is traditional hand built "coil and scrape" pottery made with local clay called "micaceous" because of the high mica content (40%). It is so thermally sturdy, it can be used as cookware on the stovetop. We bought mugs from Felipe and bean pots and a bowl from his apprentice Ben. They are on the middle shelf in the photo awaiting their final wood firing, for the smoke patterns ("fire clouds") to emerge. I will treasure these pots. Someday I will return and take classes from Felipe. The mica slip that is used for the final polish is exquisite. I can already feel that my own pottery will be changing, just from watching these potters at work and at play.