Say good bye to Fisch nach Burgenlaendischer Art! Sigh! That’s the scrod dish that everyone loved. Here is a much better picture of the plating.

Of course this was my own special and super secret recipe. Perhaps it should have been called Fisch nach Marks und etwas Bugenlaendischer Art! If that’s even good German. Sigh. My German is in bad shape.

And also say good bye to the shish kabop!

Bye-bye shish kabop! Say good bye to the Persian flat bread! Either hard or soft. But don’t worry. I’m keeping the pretzels! But only if you’re good! 😉

People working. People having fun. People creating beautiful and satisfying art. Wish you were here.

First, La Maestra herself.

Now the students and their art. Also please look for the printing photos at the end.

And now for the printing pictures!

First the print set up.

And now the printing and the product!

I took these on day 2 of the workshop:

These I took on day 4 after the class had set up a printing workshop. Those pictures are coming. Enjoy these in the mean time.

And finally, the entire class made us this quilt! That is the first time a class has gotten together and presented us with jointly created art. We have paintings from individuals and a host of wunnerful thank you cards but this one was the first coordinated work. Thank you. And now, here it is!

Next entry I will post the printing photos and everyone working hard to create this beautiufl art. But for now, I’m too tuckered out. That was a lot of photo to process. This class was great and for those that missed it: sorry to hear that. And for those that miss all of our fiber art workshops this year all I have to say is, “Where were you? We had a great time.” Of course, if you took a painting workshop, then you’re excused! 🙂

InnSane

Deer food, indeed. I think NOT!

We’ve already signed up Laura Cater-Woods for next year at the end of the year. And the people in the workshop are already starting to sign up for it. Yes, this workshop was that good. As were they all. As ARE they all. The artists who teach here are a cut above. The cream of the crop.

Kim will be sending out dates to Lesley Riley and Melody Johnson. They’ve both expressed an interest to come back.

InnSane

This has to be the laughingest workshop we’ve ever had and I can’t seem to get any pictures of anyone laughing. I THINK, think mind you, I have some in the camera. However, pictures seem to be disappearing between the camera and the blog. Kim!

Here are some pictures of Laura’s Workshop.

What’s Deb thinking?

Here’s a shot of everyone…

Here’s Carol and Pat…

Here’s a great picture of Pat…

And here are two of Laura…

Everyone is having a greeeeaaaattt time!

InnSane

Well, all three of the art quilt teacher (so far) want to come back (and why wouldn’t they, it’s like a vacation) and we’d love to have them back. So, hang on to your hats because they’ll be back. (Wait a minute! It IS a vacation. 😉

As a matter of fact, Laura Cater-Woods was asking us, so soon!, if she could come back. Of course she can.

So, they’ll be back. Look here for schedules. Oh, by the way, painters, we’ve had lots of painters taking these classes. You just don’t know what you’re missing.

InnSane

The first night of Laura Cater-Woods’ class is here. I served them the Salmon with the new trinity, turnips, carrots and fennel with just a few diced onions. They also got obleas with ice cream and a little bit of truffle ganache. The obleas with arequipe were a hit. I love them. Yum. I used to have them occasionally in Bogota, when I was but a wee lad of 22. Sob! 😉

Look at these serious students!

See? Here are more pictures of serious students!

Well, OK. Everyone’s having fun all the time. What can I do?

Starting May, I wont be doing any Austrian food at all and we’ll have transitioned into Latin and Spanish Food. This means 3 days of ethnic food and 3 days of non-ethnic-semi-neutral food. Got it?

Here is the Paella Pan that I’ll be using.

Oooh!

Aaaah!

I got this from Paella Pans.com. They have a great service and a dedication to quality pans. I’ll be reporting back on how it cooks when I use it in May. I have high hopes.

Paella Pans.com is the brain child of Sarah Jay!

Sarah Jay, folks! Let’s give her a hand! Paella Pans.com, the one stop shop for all your Paella needs.

InnSane

Need I say more?

InnSane

Here are some wunnerful Lesley class pictures. First, La Maestra, herself.

Now her students!

Are they happy campers or rather quilters? Yes, they are! Uh huh. And just look at the beauty they created.

And look, no retouching. Just the raw photos. Enjoy. We hope to see you, gentle reader, here at the Hudson River Valley Fiber Art Workshops!

Or rather, outside the house. My tulips are holding up! Nay, they are thriving! Flourishing! My combination of Invisible Fence and Deer No! is working! (Yes, I know, I’m uploading another set of images tonight when I said I was going to bed. However, I’m up and since Kim gave me so many images at once, I figured I better get cracking on it.)

(Working, Deer No! IF…) Keep your fingers crossed and enjoy these photos.

Beautiful enough to eat! Nooooo! Deeeeeer! Nooooo!

Well, Laura arrived and I’m going to bed. Night-night!

I’m waiting for Laura Cater-Woods to finally arrive. Unfortunately, she’s been very delayed. So, no soup for her. It was the pozole tonight.

Here’s my Venezuelan chicken dish with blackberry sauce on one side and a pea, cilantro and tarragon sauce on the other.

Look at that deep color on the berry sauce. On both sauces!

And now here they are enjoying this dish. Can you tell they’re having a great time?

I just have too many photos to actually get them loaded up tonight. So, I’ll stop here and put more on later. I’m also pooped.

And guess who’s coming for dinner? Laura Cater-Woods!

Everyone is having a great time and if I could just get Kim to download the photos you’d get those and MORE!

Lesley gave us a copy of Quilted Memories, her book. We’ll put that out for the students to use. It’s a lovely book.

The tulips are in bloom and everything looks just beautiful. Check out these pictures. I just can’t wait!

I bought some Liquid Fence and Deer No! Wish me luck! Boy, this stuff stinks.

Well, we’ve found a beautiful little Dalmatian boy puppy to call our own. He’s a show quality dog and we’d be back on the show circuit but the great thing is, it’s year round in NY where as in California, it’s only in the Summer. Figure that out. That makes it much easier to show a dog.

All the puppies at Erin Dalmatians were so sweet and cute and this little guy is very well put together. He’ll be a champ for sure.

We’re trying to name him. So, here’s your chance. Submit your names. If you come up with the winning name, you get a free hot cocoa! Or cold cocoa. Or just some cocoa! If you can even come up with a name that we haven’t thought of. In any case, we’ll have a new inn dog. Yeah!

Here he is! For more pictures, go to Kim’s Crazy By Design Blog!

What a cute puppy!

What a champ!

But only for Melody’s workshop. The party continues for you!

Why are these people laughing?

Because they just had this wunnerful Fisch Nach Burgenlaendisher Art with Red Caviar Blinis! (Translation: Fish al la Burgenland {Translation of translation: Fish in the style of Burgenland.} And where is Burgenland? Austria! Burgenland is the 7th largest of Austria’s 9 provinces.) Another out of the park Austrian recipe. Of course, the blinis are Russian but whose counting?

This dish has Point Neuf Potatoes under the crispy golden scrod with anchovy butter, sour cream, garlic spinach and finally a topping of julienne multi colored sweet peppers! How good is that? You can smell the flavors. The caviar blini? It’s salmon roe, buckwheat pancakes, sour cream, fat free, of course, and a drizzle of butter. Heaven!

Well, if you haven’t attended any of the Spring Quilt Art Workshops or the Winter Workshops, you’ve missed this dish. It was voted best loved dish of the Winter Workshops. Instead, you’re going to have a Valencian Paella! Yum! Because the Maple Salmon was voted best loved from last year, it stays in for the rest of this year.

Kim helps me plate!

And boy do we have fun!

And so, we say a teary good bye to Melody Johnson, the first Art Quilt Workshop.

But indeed, we did have fun! Didn’t we girls!

You missed a good time and a great learning experience! See you next workshop.

InnSane

Indeed, not only does the dessert have all that richness, while being not too sweet, actually, Melody said that it wasn’t very sweet for all the chocolate, but it also has rose buds and cocoa nibs garnishes. Yes, you heard it right, roasted cocoa nibs. That’s what is on the plate. The cocoa nibs are wunnerful and the rose buds are interesting.

I promised Mark that I wouldn’t wait several months before posting on this blog again!

So I snapped some shots of Mark building his Life of Chocolate dessert.

First he pipes some thick chocolate on the dark chocolate crispy disks.

Next, he adds some marscapone to the center, just incase you thought it wasn’t sweet enough already!

And finally he adds the spun sugar basket on top of the whip cream and adds a couple blueberries and blackberries for that healthy touch!

Aooooouuuuuuhhhhhhwiiieieeieeeeeeee! The windows shook last night! They rattled!

We had a GREAT thunderstorm last night and beautiful mists this morning. It was the loudest thunderstorm I have EVER heard. I thought Coxsackie, a neighboring town, was shelling up. And I’ve lived in Texas and worked in Kansas, MO, and other states that are known for their thunder and tornados.

Kim saw the lightening that accompanied the storm. She said it was spectacular.

I slept though all but the worst of the shelling, I mean booming. It was wunnerful.

Here’s another picture of Life by Chocolate. Not bad. Melody took this one.

This is two disks of 58% dark chocolate and sandwiched between those disks is a truffle ganache ring made with 74% cocoa with a sweet mascarpone filling. Then the whole thing is topped by unsweetened whip cream and a sugar basket filled with blue berries and black berries.

More coming. Watch this spot for more pictures of Life By Chocolate and other inn related events.

Here are some good pictures of Mr. Spot and Guster Bunny.

Spot was our inn dog and Augustus is our inn bunny.

Kim and I are looking at Dalmatians and Ridgebacks. We’re thinking one of each. We are trying to decide if we want show dogs. If we get show quality dogs, we have to show them. We used to show quite a bit but we aren’t sure if we have the time.

We need a nice inn dog. Ade is a good temp dog. She’s actually Kimberly’s dog.

Here, she is in the daffodil’s on our property.

She’s a very intellectual and contemplative dog, a dog with a vision. However, we need a dog who knows how to take care of the guests. Spot was very good at that. Guster bunny has too many other duties to also double as an inn dog.

Well, we have more pictures coming. In the meantime, enjoy these that are now on www.fibermania.blogspot.com. Better would be to go to Melody’s blog and see her comments with them. I guess I got my wish and now have an artist who is as shutter happy as we are.

Here are more pictures of us, the staff, and the food! Love that food.

Yum! A deconstructed bananas Foster.

Here’s my sous-chef, chef de garde manger, our art director, and Kim, my wife (believe it or not, that’s just one person):

Here’s John our wunnerful head waiter:

And here is your very own chef, moi! Known to the people that call to enroll as “Mark the Gardener”. 😉

Have at you! Mange!

Oh, yeah, bringing back the glory days of the Catskills! Oh yeah!

Here are some great pictures of Melody’s class!

You know, I haven’t put pictures of the new plugs in the studio or any of the additional electrical work I had done in the kitchen. The new plugs are, shown below, on their own circuits. So, one set of two plugs, one 15 amp circuit. And we have 16 of them.

Melody took that picture and I just scraped it from her blog. It’s nice having another blogger to steel pictures from. Check out her blog for more pictures of the art work that her class is making.

Speaking of bloggers, don’t forget about Kim’s blog! She contributes to this blog but her new blog is all her. And don’t forget about her website,

If you aren’t in any of these pictures, I’ll be putting up the studio pictures just as soon as I get them from Kim. 🙂

Here you go! Look at the fun these people are having!

And for good measure! Yummy!

BTW, today I brought back the shishkabap! Yummer. Kim did her lemon meringue pie and I gave everyone a nice spinach, cabrales, walnut and pinole salad!

In honor of all this fusing that’s going on here, I decided to fuse my American Maple Salmon with Japanese cuisine. So, that’s Soy Maple Salmon with maki! I prepared 3 rolls. The Greenville Arms 1889 Inn roll, the Hudson River Valley Fiber Art Workshops roll and finally the Maki Mark roll! Well, all you painters, you’re getting a traditional Valencian Paella instead. You’ve already had the salmon last year and this last Winter as well. Though the rolls are new for the art quilting workshops.

You may say, “What fusing, Mark? Kim?” Indeed, we have not only added Winter Workshops, but we’ve added Fiber and Art Quilt Workshops. Fusing is a technique for composing, collaging fabric without sewing. You fuse rather than piece. Well, we fused the painting workshops schedule with some great quilting classes. That’s art quilt and fiber art to you! So, now we have 39 workshops.

Here’s me preparing the final dish. Note the new plates. Again, we need a food photographer. Hey, any of you artists out there interested in photographing some food?

Getting the Maki ready to put on the new plates. No, those are the old plates. Look at the final plate to see what the new plates looks like.

Here’s the final plate:

Here’s the luscious dessert:

Here we are serving. John, Kim and I served them. These new plates are big. Check them out. They look like painter’s palettes.

Here I am explaining what the dish is about.

And finally, here are the people that ate them! Yum! Are these people having fun or what?

Ooh, look whose eating tons of carbs! 😉

If only blogger would let me upload my photos. I’d have the rest of the photos up as well. Sigh! Technical difficulties. I had to do major work to get some of these up. Normally, I shop them myself and just reference them via a URL off of www.artworkshops.com

Melody Johnson’s workshop has just complete their first day of class and they are already asking if they will be able to buy some more Wonder-Under. I asked them about the 4 bolts of W-U that Melody brought for them and they all chimed – It’s almost gone! They must be fusing up a storm out in the art studio. I’ve too been busy catching up on all the paperwork, that piled up in our absence while we were in Chicago to promote the fiber art workshops, to spend much time checking on what was going on in the studio but tomorrow I’ll be out there as often as I can.

Lucky for the students, there is more Wonder-Under to be had! We have on-site our own mini fabric shop provided by Log Cabin Fabrics. Log Cabin Fabrics is a fabulous little shop just 30 minutes away in Ravena. Londa, the owner, put together a great little selction of fabric, beads, threads, books, and other goodies. And more is available with just a phone call.

Another new item around the inn are some cross-stitched little “Do Not Disturb” pillows that I made for the interior room doors. I thought they would be a little nicer than the plastic signs I originally made as a temporary measure. I still have to figure out what I’ll do for the rooms that have exterior doors.

Yet, another new sight at the inn is the extension of the fence at the back of the property on one side. We were getting a tremendous amount of trash blowing over on our propery from the mini-mart/gas station that abutts our property in the back. So we asked our handyman to extend the fence all the way back to the property line. Yea! No more trash.

We have started to clean up the underbush around the trees and will start putting in a meandering path through the woods.

And what will you find on her blog? Well, our inn and workshops! Check it out!

OK. You’ll find other interesting things as well. But you will also find some stuff about our workshop and what a wunnerful time everyone is having. Just this link out as well.

Go Melody. If you aren’t here, you’re missing out.

Boy, this was an easy entry. Pictures forthcoming!

Well, today is the start of the first ever Art Quilt Workshop at the Hudson River Valley Art Workshops.

So far, so good.