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This is not a cooking blog, though good food and alcohol are two of my passions.

As a woodworker, it makes me crazy that we don’t have a functioning wood-burning stove (this is something that will be rectified with our new place). So I use my scraps, sawdust and shavings as mulch, I burn them in our outdoor fireplace and I use them in cooking whenever I can.

Today I applied the first coat of oil to a French oak workbench for a customer and used the scraps from the piece to make one of my favorite things: a smoky tomato sauce that is fast and easy. You can use almost any wood for this.

Here’s how: Take shavings, offcuts and what-not and scatter them on some foil on your grill. Crank the grill up to high and char the shavings for 10 minutes.

Take eight or so Roma tomatoes, slice them lengthwise and put them cut-side up on a metallic vegetable steamer. Place the steamer on top of the smoldering chunks of oak, close the lid and cook them for 15 minutes or until the tomatoes are soft and the skin of the tomatoes is blistered and a little charred.

Place the tomatoes in a blender and liquify them. Add 1/4 cup olive oil, salt and whatever seasoning you like. It’s ready to eat.

— Christopher Schwarz

Joshua Klein, a woodworker and conservator in Maine, is now accepting pre-publication orders for the first issue of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, which looks to be very interesting reading.

You might have heard of Klein through his blog, The Workbench Diary, or some of the stories I’ve written about his research of Jonathan Fisher (Klein is writing a book about Fisher for us, by the way).

In addition to his conservation work, a young family, taking apart a house for later reconstruction and writing a book for us, Klein has poured an enormous amount of energy into Mortise & Tenon Magazine to make sure it is a high-quality, well-made publication.

Take a look at the table of contents for the first issue here.

Then click on the “Pre-order Now” button. The first issue is just $24 – a bargain for such a labor of love. I ordered mine as soon as I got up this morning.

Whether you like old furniture, handwork or conservation, you’ll find a lot in the first issue to love.

— Christopher Schwarz

Recently I saw a painting that really should not have featured any furniture at all. My reaction was, “Well that was unexpected.” Have I become more attuned to the presence of furniture (the non-upholstered kind) after reading and indexing several books for Lost Art Press. Have I been spending more time finding images of furniture and woodworking than watching cat videos? Yes, I think that must be it.

So, I did a review of some of my saved images, a few books and films and started noticing…Windsor chairs. I guess in the past the birthday cake and the cats in 1950s-era dresses distracted me.

One of my favorite books is “Under the Cherry Blossom Tree – An Old Japanese Tale” retold and illustrated by Allen Say. Maybe I should have noticed this before with all the time I spent on “Campaign Furniture.”

In my 1968 copy of “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame and illustrated by David Stone I stumbed on this cozy scene. Previously, I focused on all the cute little mice crowded together and warming themselves by the fire. Now, all I can see is the (Furniture of Necessity) settle.

In Hitchcock’s 1954 film “Rear Window” James Stewart lives in a really neat studio apartment. The focus is on him, what Grace Kelly will wear in the next scene and what are the neighbors up to. Did you know he had a tansu in his apartment? In 1954?

I have a tansu so maybe I’m a little tansu-sensitive. But did you notice the two in last year’s animated “Big Hero 6”?  A fairly large tansu with sliding doors and multiple drawers was in the workshop where Hiro is putting armor on Baymax.

The better tansu is in Hiro’s bedroom. The bedroom is stuffed with detail and it was hard to get a good long look at the tansu. By watching one clip about 30 times I did get the configuration figured out. The top two-thirds: five square equal-size drawers run lenghwise on the right; on the left side there are four drawers with the top three of equal size, the lowest one is about half again as deep. The next section has sliding doors; the bottom section is one full-width drawer.

 

You might be wondering which painting started this whole thing. It was an 18th-century Korean painting with tansu. Since this is a somewhat family-friendly blog only the edited version can be shown:

I was searching for examples of traditional Korean furniture and this painting was in the search results. It is from “An Album of Erotic Paintings.” There’s no need for furniture in this type of painting! By the way, the giggling girl is pointing at something hilarious.

I’m going to make my searches much, much more specific in future.

–Suzanne Ellison