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Dried cep- a painting a day
size 4″ x 6″ 12cm x 15cm approx.
These are the little slices of dried cep which make the most fantastic soups, sauces and scrambled egg possible. They are such good quality, being home made , that a slice can be crumbled into scrambled egg just before serving or even just eaten as it is. They have none of the stringy dirty look of the commercial dried cep you see in the supermarket and elsewhere. I like their shape too – an angular folded version of the slices which went into the dessicator.
We have collected about eight kilos of cep in the last ten days, most has been dried as the crop can never be guaranteed and I would hate to run out.
#186
Cep with child – a painting a day
SOLD to another mushroom hunter!
size 5in x 5 in, 12cm x 12cm approx
I went with no1 son, who is very fond of mushrooms for breakfast, to see if anything had come up…There was, as the day before, nothing… but on the way out of the woods I nearly trod on this little beauty. The little side one is often pictured in German and Polish illustrations, not to be outdone I painted it.
No2 son has cooked his goose over a stuffed chicken thigh recipe for food DT (that is what they call lessons in cookery at school in the UK now). Having made all the effort to buy his raw ingredients I then spent the evening reminding him to get it all prepared for the morning.” Don’t leave it to eleven o’clock!”, I said, not thinking that he would leave it until 8.15 the following morning…I was out of sorts for everything , late, furious and forgetful. Boning out chicken thighs in the morning hustle when I could have BOUGHT ready boned had I not been told to get them bone in is so far from my idea of fun there will be consequences for this.
#185 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
#185
Three very red apples – a painting a day
size 6 in x 12 in 15cm x 30cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
These are the last of the early apples they have turned yellow and shiny red. I think they are past their best in terms of eating but the next tree is ready so that doesn’t matter. They are very pretty for a painting however. It’s a pretty rough and ready painting but I like the colours.
There was a mini apple day today at the back of the Mayflower pub, this all went very well as a mixture of people came to look and try the apples and juice. The organisers were not allowed to use fruit from the community orchard site as the council have not yet tested it ….for landfill contamination. As the apples are growing on what was a farm (according to some) and next to a nature reserve this seems quite farfetched.
I started this sketch in between helping set up a juice maker and the official opening time. Trying to juice apples with a press but no apple crusher was hard going, I did improve our yield by half freezing and then defrosting some ripe fruit and cutting it up.
There are still ceps to be found but the cold nights are going to discourage them. I am bored with the same old wood and want to go and check some different places. That’s not to say that I don’t get a thrill when I see a neat and prim baby cep sitting in the moss where there was nothing yesterday. When they are young they are very upright and straight-laced, as they age they get more wild and blowsy…no parallels there then. I have been watching a round ball slowly emerge from the woodland floor by a path, I had decided that it was not likely to be a cep, now it has sprung up and it stinks. See the photo below, the stinkhorn- it does what it says on the can.
#129 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
A Sussex Cep – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Ceps ready for slicing and drying
The end of the summer holidays –
The what? It can’t be , that means uniform and packed lunches, No2 son is in a decline just thinking about it.
However before he went into his decline (i.e. lying in bed- hard to see the difference on normal existence over the summer really),the clever little sprat found a way to sell paintings over the internet in a site of one’s own using Paypal. It’s a BT government initiative so I got a call from a pleasant young Scotsman asking if I was planning to sell bulk quantities of paintings..”.ah, um, I could try, but honestly not very likely”. He was very nice about this in fact I think he used the word groovy which always makes me laugh (fresh young thing using jaded old hippy words).
Anyway, No2 and I have set it up as the Lemonaday Shop http://www.lemonaday-shop.co.uk/gallery-shop . On this you will find some of my older blog pieces and some other paintings that make an attractive addition to the site. The prices reflect that there is no chance of competitive bidding and include postage for simplicity at the moment. The prices also reflect my own attachment to the painting, some pictures fit into groups that could be exhibited together so may not appear.
There were a few more outings to the woods in the last week. (understatement, we went nearly every day) In the last two days we have picked over ten pounds of ceps, this is one of my favourite edible fungi, one which I didn’t find when I was a teenager and started collecting fungi to eat. Some years we find two or three in a season, even when you know where it grows, you have to get there on the day it produces its fruit or toadstool, before someone else takes it or kicks it over. This year is phenomenal and we have found a quiet wood where, it seems, no-one else collects. They will be sliced and dried and stored for winter soups and rissottos for years possibly. We are going to have a lot at the end of this year, the season could go on to November.
In the garden the red apples are finishing and the Ellison’s Orange is ripening. Ellisons orange is a fantastic apple when you get it just ripe and before it goes grainy. The official line is that it has a spicy taste: to me it tastes just like the ice lollies that ice cream vans used to sell called cyder ices. The tomatoes are showing some sign of blight but not much, they are ripening up fast now.
I am very pleased to see the creamy flowers of the Hedychium opening out in its new position and in its original site.
#122 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Red apples on the ground – a painting a day
size 10 in x 6 in , 25cmx15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper.
Today was beautiful the grass was sparkling in the sunshine this morning, the heavy dew which makes for ideal fungus hunting weather….yesterday we found about two pounds of bay boletes, today we went back and found three and a half pounds of edible fungi including three ceps, amethyst deceiver, and birch boletes. I will put some pictures in. The dessicator is now full and the Christmas soup is assured….it needs woodpigeon, ceps , cream and brandy in addition to the normal soup making things like stock and onion.
Yesterdays painting still needs to be finished, it is very wishy washy at the moment. I put off cutting the grass to get today’s painting of the early apple tree, it has got to where I can no longer rely on picking the apples that do not show from the view point so it HAD TO BE DONE. I wanted the windfalls to be in the picture too so had to pick them up in a great hurry at six this evening, in order to get the mowing done. It’s hard to believe that we have eaten pounds from the tree already, there are plenty there. The problem is now getting to be that if there is a windfallen Ellisons Orange apple I will eat that in preference.
Yesterday was our duty day at the sailing club, sadly we have been very little this year and it’s a waste of the membership really. Earlier in the summer there was a lot of work on the house to get through-there still is!
The woods where the boletes came from are a lovely mixture there are pine trees, coppiced hazels and sweetchestnuts, heathy bits and a little steep valley (a ghyll they call it in Sussex, but it’s supposed to be a Scottish word). The boys found a rope with a stick hanging from a tree , it swang over a watery hollow full of dead wood and mud. Naturally one of them fell in it.
Alison
#121 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Todays ceps
Yesterdays Bay Boletes
Sunflower and Banana plant in the new flower bed,by tomorrow the Hedychium should be out.
Lemons on clear glass – a painting a day
SOLD 6″x6″ 15cm x 15cm watercolour on rag paper, for sale on Etsy search for lemonaday
I moved the lemons and did them in extreme wet on wet, I like the random way the paint flows sometimes, ok not entirely random, if it goes in completely the wrong direction I just blot it up with bog roll and try again or tip the pad so it flows off somewhere better.
These lemons are sat on the plate glass I use for rolling printing ink; I really like the watery blue that you get in thick glass.
I forgot to mention yesterday I found quite a lot of ear fungus growing on some sickly looking elder trees half way up the downs. As I think they taste like crunching on a real ear they are not my favourite so I dropped them off at my favourite gastro-pub on the way home.
Alison
#3 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Lemon a day 
