Monthly Archives: March 2026

Mar 03 2026
3 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Holi

Purity of Purpose, or Your Convivo Book of Days for March

Piet Mondrian might just be the artist I admire most. This Dutch artist, who worked in the early 1900s mostly, sought to free visual art from the constraints of its past, and in doing so, he was not about to give us paintings of landscapes or portraits or anything depicting the natural world. Pure painting, to Piet Mondrian, was painting that referred to nothing outside itself. His formula was ingeniously simply: Squares, rectangles, grids, in primary colors (red, blue, yellow) plus white and black.

As Mondrian’s art refers to nothing outside itself, using it as the cover star for the Convivio Book of Days Calendar for March feels both exciting and a bit jarring to me. My search for an illustrative painting to use as a synthesis for March was getting me down, to be honest. The First of the month came and went. Air strikes were carried out on Iran. I fell into an all-too-common-these-days feeling of despair over what’s become of the world. It’s been the persistent underlying feeling in my life for these past fourteen months. This month felt suddenly like it needed something new: something pure. In its strange way, Composition II, which Piet Mondrian painted in 1929, when my mother and father both were 3 years old, brings that, at least to me. I don’t know if it’ll bring the same to you, but if it does, so be it. There is intelligence and there are lofty goals in this painting, a feeling, to me, of universal hope. That we can do better.

By the time you read this, the Hindu festival of Holi, the springtime festival of color, will have begun. I don’t know much about Holi but my friend Pranoo invited me to a Holi celebration once and it very well may have been the most joyous thing I’ve seen. Color exploding everywhere, everyone covered in the stuff. I remember asking a man, as I left the celebration, if I might take his picture. He said yes. He was a grown adult, he was bald, he was carrying a shopping bag, and he and his bag and his clothes were covered in red and purple and blue and he stood there beaming. He was so happy. How can you possibly capture that in a painting?

COME SEE US at the SHOP
We’re opening the shop the middle two weekends of March for our Springtide Markets, where you can stock up on special things for the upcoming Easter season: handmade pysanky from Ukraine, handmade wooden bunnies from Germany and Sweden, paper egg containers from Germany, Swedish sweet and sour candies and licorice for your Easter basket, books and cards and more. Saturday & Sunday, March 14 & 15 and March 21 & 22, from 11 AM to 4 PM each day. Plenty of nice things for St. Patrick’s Day, too! Shop online, too!

And come see us at the Taco Fiesta this Saturday, March 7, from 2 to 8 PM! We’ll have a pop-up shop there with lots of our traditional Artesanías Méxicanas. This festival celebrating tortillas and Mexican culture is held annually in nearby Palm Springs, Florida. There will be a marimba band! I’m very excited about that.

 

Image: “Composition II” by Piet Mondrian. Oil on canvas, 1929 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Mar 01 2026
4 Comments
St. David's Day

Welsh Cakes for St. David’s Day

Your Convivio Book of Days calendar for March will be late (we’ve been wrapped up in Lake Worth’s Midnight Sun Festival all weekend and we will still be there today, this First of March… and we’d love it if you came to see us, if you’re local, on this final day of this festival of Finnish & Scandinavian culture: it’s located at Bryant Park, where Lake Avenue meets the Lake Worth Lagoon, and the festival runs from 11 AM to 5 PM today). But as it is the First of March, and since the First of March each year brings St. David’s Day, sacred to Wales, I thought perhaps you’d like to make a batch of Welsh Cakes. Here’s our recipe. Serve the cakes with strong tea with milk and sugar:

W E L S H   C A K E S

It’s not uncommon to find recipes for Welsh Cakes that call for regular granulated sugar, butter, and nutmeg, but the traditional recipe will add lard to the mix, use caster sugar in place of the regular sugar, and will be flavored with the more mysterious flavor of mace. If you want the best Welsh Cakes, stick to the traditional version. If you can’t find caster sugar, make your own: pulse regular granulated sugar in a blender until very fine. Do not use powdered confectioners’ sugar, which has added corn starch.

3 cups all purpose flour
½ cup caster sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground mace
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons lard
6 tablespoons butter
¾ cup dried currants
2 eggs, beaten lightly
3 to 4 tablespoons milk
granulated sugar

Whisk together the flour, caster sugar, baking powder, mace, cinnamon, and salt in a mixing bowl, then work in the butter and lard with your fingers until the mixture has the texture of course crumbs. It’s ok if some larger chunks of butter remain. Mix in the currants. Add the beaten egg, working it into the mixture, adding just enough milk to form a soft dough that is not too sticky. Wrap; chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until you are ready to make the cakes.

Turn the dough out onto a floured board and roll to a thickness of about ¼”. Using a biscuit cutter (scalloped, if you have one), cut into rounds. Gather up any remnants to roll out again and cut more cakes.

Heat a lightly buttered skillet (cast iron works great) over low to medium heat, cooking the cakes until each side is lightly browned (about 3 to 4 minutes… if they’re cooking quicker than that, lower the heat). Let the cakes cool for a minute or two, then set each in a bowl of granulated sugar, allowing sugar to coat both sides and the edges. Best served warm, split, with butter and jam, or, for a more savory treat, with cheese and leeks, at a table set with a small vase of daffodils.