Layouting with food, fire & wood.
Sitting all day in front of a laptop can drain your brain out. To feed myself I still do layouts. Without a laptop. But with fingers, food, wood and metal.
So one of the things I do out of office or home office is not running, yoga or series, it`s dealing with food and building tiny things like tiny houses.
So, first let`s have some food. And then build a little house.
So, talking of food, to me it`s about gathering uncommon, forgotten ingredients and strange cookbooks, going to markets, researching cool restaurants (not the pretentious michelin ones), scribbling, kneading, whipping, pressing, rubbing, grating, sifting, fine-crafting, watching, waiting, hoping, crying, being redeemed.
Sounds like a promising dinner, no?
Pop-up Dinner.
Inviting 20 people to a nice space like a pub, gallery or restaurant. 10 plates for 25€, that was the tarif back then. Mostly with things a bit away from what you normally see and get.
Actually it`s very similar to art-directing.
Doing Dinner events: You brainstorm, want to be "cutting" edge, come up with ideas and discard them, do layouts on a round plate not a square screen, put together a presentation and show the effort and passion you put in the past weeks to an audience full of expectation. And you hope they digest it easily and can`t get enough of it.
The difference between a pop-up and a keynote presentation is that everybody drinks a lot more wine.
And people are mostly more cheerful, hugging you with red cheeks at the end. So I do this as often as I can. Makes sense, no?
I like to give value to neglected or simple ingredients, leftovers or things you throw away.
Giersch (ground elder) is regarded as annoying weed, but way better than parsley. Autumn leaves give a wonderful broth. You can do a fantastic sourdough bread from any dried out bread. A fermented romane salad is more spectacular than a steak.
Obviously there is more to a sophisticated meal than caviar and lobster.
Cooking shows
Together with the artist Dagna Jakubowska I did some content driven cooking performances.
The idea was e.g. to cook with invasive plants and demonstrate how useful and delicious they can be.
20 different neophyts and invasive plants were the ingredients. A supper with a lot of different unknown tastes and stories. I loved the nice warsaw audience who was very interested and ate everything!
Cookbooks
Many of the dinners I composed were inspired by cookbooks. They are a wonderful method to autodidact yourself. And the more edgy and obscure they are, the bigger is the fun.
It`s a bit like deejaying.
You browse your material and pick what makes a nice mix.
Combinations of modern and old-fashioned, raw and refined, punk and ambient and so on are being played one after the other with a kind of dramaturgy.
I also love to announce the story and the names behind each dish. That makes it a bit more exciting to eat. (it`s the Alfred Hitchcock effect "The bomb under the dining table")
By the way – I did one cookbook (with Melanie Grundmann and Claudia Frickemeier), it`s about what the Dandys ate in the 19th century. see here
Cooking at JAJA
Together with Daniel Salomon I kind of pioneered the kitchen of the very succesful JAJA natural wine bar. They still do the bistronomy style we initiated.
It was a nice excursion into the world of being a "real" chef earning money with it. After a while advertising got me back at the laptop again, which is also fine, because at the end what matters is the change.
co-working chefs: Daniel Salomon, Christian Crepaldi, Pierre Lejeune, Avishay Cohen
Floraphilia – The Edible Map of Migration: with Dagna Jakubowska, Aleksandra Przegalińska
assistance and service: Joanne McPhee, Hen Bird, Jasmine Justice, Tomoko Mori
Tiny Houses on wheels
Besides cooking I do wood crafting in a sustainable way.
That means, I find a lot of abandoned or 2nd hand material and use it.
In this example of the tiny house I built, the base is a old caravan, that got wet inside and was deconstructed. The metal chassis was still good and I put the rest on top.
Yakisugi
To avoid painting the wood I did the Yakisugi technique. It`s burning the wood`s surface in a special way, so it gets a highly protective shield.
Ancient over 1000 years old japanese or norwegian buildings treated in the same way are still standing.
You don`t use gas burners to do so and save a lot of energy. Just same papers to start the fire.
But how does it work, don`t you burn the planks? No, when you hear the crackles, it`s ready
(play Video on full volume to hear the crackles)
So, that`s our little escape space No. 2.
About one hour off Berlin with a luxurious double-sided chimney and an air-supplied cast iron oven. The door and some windows are from a dismounted danish holiday house I could favorably acquire.
Also works great in winter.
If you need help with your project or vision, we could sit together, brainstorm and get things done!
Happy to hear from you!
nwillborn(at)gmx.de