Where sustainable foods, women-artists' work and the new design assignment cross paths!

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Pumpkin goat cheesecake- nutritional feasting: defining personal Winter holiday traditions!

This winter holiday break, I am taking advantage of all the time that I have, to continue researching, anxt-ing, and reading, to further prepare for this new year's next stages.
Having devoted 2.5 years into a traditional and mobile fine art access project, I am now learning about how to pitch, market and attract a different group of funders/(ing) for the ARt project.
I am also preparing the holiday feasting for my 1-person household, and hoping that my independent off-spring will choose to share some time with me.
This multi-layered approach to holiday preparations has evolved over years, to suit the rhythm of personal needs for restorative hibernation, and deep nutrition throughout this winter time of year.
I experience management of these multilayers, as a more fluid approach to the ideas of tradtional, more stress-filled holiday making, that began taking shape during my young, single, and intermittently, more communal adulthood, as well as, throughout the past 23 years- on-duty full-time, single parenting.
When generally reflecting back, it's easier now to recognize both individually and as a family, that we've created a contemporary history of what satisfies truly more relevant definitions around holiday SEASONAL celebrating.
Seasonal traditions defined according to our own lives in the present, versus assuming some implicit rigidities about one big intense meal event- a table of many fraught with overwhelming, and unexamined layers of expectation(s), for example.
All this is to say that, as an artist, I love that I can find how to create, crossover, and live- into changing social norms, in order to fully enjoy and appreciate more spontaneous practices of holiday. Non-tradtional milieux of health, being conscious, and of living into my own evolution right now- concerning differently devised forms of socially relevant and seasonally-centered creativity!

Just think about, marinate, and experiment attentively with this- for a few decades. 😉 We, and now I- return to individualized celebration in stages, over the entire season itself.
In essence, I do my best to live in a celebration of conscious rhythm within my own life in the present; in rhythm with nature, as I am integrated and consciously present- in this earthbound and mystery-filled journey of consciousness evolution; of life experiencing itself through me.
Because western religion celebrates certain rituals this time of year, on a personal scale- I reclaim this pagan-origin of the harvest- a season of transitioning from growth and production, back into dormancy and rest- and as the enjoyment of noticing what my life has accomplished, what habits/patterns I conitinue to need more consciously to release, and what restorative support is required and desired, in order to continue living consciously productive, over my whole life.

This winter, my restorative celebration includes- adding more dairy back into what has been a longtime, mostly, dairy-free way of eating. This holiday season, I am trying a more digestive-friendly, dairy in the cheesecake recipe I baked last night.

Today, as I also continue in the momentum of the winter break- that of writing in preparation for the first pitch of the ARt project, happening on Jan. 14, I'll likewise, finish dressing the table in red, green, and white- for this season's holistic and on-going celebratory focuses on- quality of energy, self-care, and generally under-lying attention, needed within the whole of (my) life.

To make the goat cheesecake, I took my favorite hardcopy recipe, did some googling- figured out that the goat to vachon (cow) cream conversion was 1:1
I also used local honey as my sweetner, and only 3 tablespoons of rice milk, versus condensed milk, as the batter was already liquified by using honey.
Try your own holiday seasonal experiments!
Have fun with your exploratory efforts in the kitchen, as well as, throughout your life, et bonne chance, et bonne santé!

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