This 2021 calendar brings together a few of my favorite things: calligraphy, cooking, photography, and messing around on my computer laying things out, and putting them all together.
Choosing the recipes was the easy part, as they are ones that I use regularly. Some of them come from Mom, some of them are more-or-less invented … and all of them are delicious!
Doing the calligraphy was the part that took the longest, but spending time at my desk, with pen in hand and stains on my fingers, is one of my very favorite things in life. I listen to classical music while writing … the time just flies by.
Next came the cooking and the picture-taking, then the photo editing. And lastly, I needed to figure out how I was to fit all I wanted to put in this calendar onto the paper! I meant to have English and French versions of each recipe (and I tried my best to convert the measurements to suit all. That’s not an easy task when you need to get from a ½ cup to grams or vice versa. Thank heaven for Google!)
Also, since “Momo” is an essential part of my way of cooking, I intended to adapt the recipes to my “robot”, too.
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome was to decide how to design a calendar that would suit both English and French speakers because, as anglophones, our calendars start with Sunday but in France the first day on the left side of a calendar is Monday. Hopefully, the grid, with its highlighted weekends, works for everyone. For note-takers and list-makers, there’s plenty of room for that, too.
As for the calligraphy, there are a number of different hands and variants shown in the calendar: Italic, Gothic, Uncial, French cursive, Foundational. Links to the online courses can be found on the creatuto.com site.
Here’s hoping that 2021 be a wonderful year after the annus horribilis (to quote the Queen) that 2020 was!
*Momo is the nickname for my Vorwerk TM6 Thermomix. Of course, that company does not endorse these recipes in any way.
