Shrunken Heads in Cider? Damn you, Martha! Why didn't I think of that?

Iron Chef: the whole fridge

It's one of those lazy days where I feel 2% like getting my act together, and 98% like padding around all day in my robe.

To integrate my conflicting parts, I am cleaning out the refrigerator by cooking some its contents into one tasty dish.

So far it seems to be going well. I had a little leftover browned sage butter from the most recent batch of orange cauli/tart apple soup in which I sauteed a thing of pre-sliced mushrooms. I boiled a cup of fresh shelling beans and added them to the pan along with a 1/2 of uncooked orzo pasta. I used the hot bean water to parboil an orange heirloom tomato which I then mashed into the pan. I had a couple cups of leftover homemade chicken veggie broth which I poured in with a spash of sherry, and let the works burble on low, covered, till the liquid thickened. I've tested shelling beans - still a little toothy - maybe I should have waited to salt & pepper the mixture. I've added a little more liquid and scooped out the flesh of a  half-delicata squash I had previously roasted with lemon olive oil & thyme, so now the goopus has sweetened and thickened a little more.

I'll just leave it covered till the beans seem truly tender. Very autumn-y!

How to Peel Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds

requires 2 lightweight same-size-rimmed bowls

know your apples

Ahh, the Fall. Apple season, baking season! Via hunch.

Lemon Flip: 0th set

So. I got this new scanner. It used to be someone's grandma's, so it's not new new, but it's new to me, so now I can start showing off some things I've been up to (as long as they are not bigger than letter-size).

Did I tell you I've been working on a flip book of the weird lemon I found in the early 90's? I didn't? Goodness me, it's all I've been working on! Not really, but almost!

So I'm making 4 monoprints at a time of each photo in a roll of film I took while the lemon was still green-tipped and fresh, of the lemon slowly being turned in my father's hand. The light in the garage where we were standing was a little dim, and I was unused to shooting at close range, but I opened the aperture and went for it anyway. Perhaps because of minute changes in aperture from shot to shot, or perhaps because I just confused the overnight photo place developer, who can't have known what the hell he was looking at, and who may have been wildly guessing from print to print how on earth to color adjust the creepiness, the photos swing from citrus pale oranges and yellows to girly pinks and purples. I love the photos, and feel like they are a collaboration between me and the anonymous developer. I've since reprinted them teeny tiny, as a sort of flip book test, and turns out the negatives don't yield the same sequence of gorgeous color in reprints - so the original photos are a unique piece all by themselves.

The idea all along was to make a flip book from them, but I also experimented with displaying the photos in a grid like a Muybridge. I hit upon the idea of making a multi-media flip book a few years ago, supplementing the photos with same-size monoprints and, like a dash of pepper in random places in the run, an occasional reductive woodblock. So since the winter of 2008 I have slowly and steadily been making my way through the series of photos. When the print lab opens back up ion the fall, I'll complete my 12th set of images, taking me to the halfway point of the monoprint portion of the project.

So, first up, here is image #0, one of the few prints to come out more or less "true color." There is some really gorgeous back-lighting going on in this image that I tried my durndest to reproduce, not all that well. But I am proud of how loosely I laid the color down. I have struggled in subsequent images to be that painterly ("Well there's your problem right there," you say. "Stop struggling." Shut up.)

Above are the 4 monoprints I made from the photo below. Which one do you think I should select to include in the flip-book?

Playing Iron Chef with the fridge

Tonight's session is going pretty typically.

I've been eyeballing my basket of heirloom toms for more than a week - at this point they're saucers, so I've parboiled them and set them aside to peel. I have a big zucchini that needs tending to, so I've cut it in half and scooped out the middle bits & set the halves aside. I've minced the middle bits, a leftover half-onion, the last 5 good cloves of my garlic bulb, and some fresh minced thyme I had saved back from last weekend's project, and sauteed the mixture; I used the parboil water to cook up a little orzo pasta; I peeled the toms and saved the peels and juices (along with leftover onion bits and the garlic cloves that were too small to bother with) for veggie broth, currently coming to a boil along with the bits I had frozen till I had enough for a broth-batch.

I chopped one of the toms and let it burble down to a paste in the sautee; I've added the orzo and stirred it together to simmer briefly together; I rescued the last bit of pesto dressing from last week (which was itself leftover pesto with a little more olive oil & red wine vinegar) and tossed it over the rest of the parboiled, peeled and chopped toms - and put that in the fridge to add to salad later in the week. To snack on, I saved back a scoop for myself and added a handful of overflow roasted pumpkin seeds I had from yesterday's Esalen-style kale salad.

I used the oil clinging to the pesto dressing jar to coat the exposed surfaces of the zucchini and a little baking dish; I scooped the finished sautee into the zucchini in the big baking dish- and the leftovers of that into the little baking dish. I mixed together some breadcrumbs (which I had from a stale baguette I didn't get to while it was still fresh), salt, pepper, and the last of my grated parmesan and sprinkled that over the zucchini and the little baking dish; and set those in the oven at 375 degrees (thinking a little melted butter should have gone over the crumbs, enh).

Once the broth scraps have given up all their goodness I'll remove them from the broth and let it simmer down into a boullion so it's easier to store in the fridge. At some point the zukes are coming out the oven - I doubt I'll be hungry for them tonight, but they'll be easy eats between weekend activities or lunch on Monday.

Presently my neighbor is coming over for a homemade mojito and a little apartment complex gossip. Maybe she'll want a stuffed zucchini.

Looking with your whole body

from Richard Whittaker's interview with artist Jane Rosen on Parabola

'RW:  Who sees?'

'JR:  It’s a conference. It’s not a “who.” When I speak of seeing, I feel that the mind is open and in a relationship to the hands working, which opens a feeling of being more fully alive. That is what I call seeing.

More than one part of you needs to see. You can’t see with your head alone. You can’t see with your heart alone, because it’s very partial. You can’t see with your body alone because, basically, I don’t want to put down the cigarette or the cake.'

Put down the cigarette, Bonnie. 

Tony Orrico in action

Susie Bright's twitter feed tipped me off to this inventive and athletic fellow. Click the title of this post for a classic multi-color spirographesque circle.

Human Spirograph in a good groove

Hmm, wonder if I have enough endurance to try a less ambition form of this? Or how would I do something echoing this as a monoprint on plexi? Haven't been this inpsired to play with another artist's method since Andy Goldworthy's melting snowball drawings.

Lapham's Quarterly Summer Issue: Food

Hours of amusement. Click the title of this post to browse & browse. In this photo: the lovely Erika Adams of Eating Dog Press. 

Food timeline!

Click the title of this post to see when food got to us, from since forever.

Tiramsu Challenge Chapter 2

Get me a damn fine example of tiramisu, dammit! That's the idea.

The story so far: I had an atypical slice of tiramisu from Whole Foods: not much soakiness to speak of, no whipped creamish parts but a nummy buttery frosting; then I had a delicious if cartoonish version from Trader Joe's freezer section: a thin chocolate cake layer sponging up coffee goodness, then an obscene layer of creaminess, then a choke hazard of chocolate powder on top.

Enough of these national chains - let's get local. Gayle's Rotisseria in Capitola will sell you a tiramisu cake for like $32. Woah, okay, I'll have just a slice, how bout, thanks for the change. Now we're in multi-layer territory. The over-all effect is something fairly light in texture, up to the lightest sprinkling of choco powder on top. Pretty? You'll never know, I ate it before I thought to take a picture. Screw you, this isn't one of those shallow depth-of-field sensitive lighting photo-filled ladies-who-lunch vanity blogs. It is some other kind of blog. (That's telling 'em.)

Can we focus on the cake at hand, please? Gayle's tiramisu has a nice balance of white cake, whipped cream, and DAYAM that is some proofy coffee juice!!! I guess that's Kahlua? You guys, I think the coffeeness in tiramisu is supposed to be some sort of coffee liquor. Alert the media!

Anyway, nice balance of the elements, Gayle's. It goes cream, boozy coffee shloop, cake. Cream, coffee shloop, cake. Cream, coffee shloop, cake - in even layers, with the shloopdeshloo kind of hiding out, not looking that obtrusive... But maybe not for alcoholics? Watch out, alcoholics. Booze! You wouldn't think it packs such a punch, since it's not dripping or off-gassing or anything.

This quest is leading to more questions. Like this one: Uh, what is a classic tiramisu *supposed* to be like? Next time: I'll find out. Journalism!

Challenge: Tiramisu

A dear friend and I indulged a craving for tiramisu the other day by buying a single-layer one from Whole Foods. "Don't get me wrong," I told him, "This is a tasty cake. But it's not tiramisu." The bottom cake layer wasn't squishy enough with coffee, for one thing. And there was an awful lot of the cake layer, and a butter cream fosting...yummy & all. It just wasn't all that tiramisu-y.

Which led me to wonder: where does Whole Foods get off making so damn much of this imposter? Their bakery display case is lousy with tiramisi of 2 or 3 forms every ding dang day I go in there. And to think all of it is wrong, wrong, wrong. Which led him to wonder: where does one go for a good tiramisu around here? [music swells]

And so begins the Quest!

Chapter One: Trader Joe's freezer section
Defrost a couple hours in the fridge, gingerly remove the plastic band around the sides...and get chocolate powder all over your hands, fridge shelves, countertops, everything. I have never seen a cake so well dusted with chocolate. More on this later.

This one hits the tiramisu spot. Pleasantly squishy with coffee on the bottom chocolate cake layer, nummy custardy goop-de-goo making up the majority of the cake, then the Thickest Layer of Chocolate Powder on the Planet ZOMG. It's prevalent enough that you have to do that thing when eating powdered doughnuts, where you don't breathe in as you're biting because you'll cause a (tasty) dust storm in your mouth and start coughing. So, proceed with caution.

Trader Joe's prepackaged tiramisu is now the one to beat. Sad trumpet sounds for you, Whole Foods!