another change of address

GASP SIGH SWOON HI. GLOSS. RED. They’re PULLING. IT....

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:05:58 -0400

*GASP* *SIGH* *SWOON*

HI. GLOSS. RED. They’re PULLING. IT. OFF.

One day, we will be able to commit such daring acts on our walls because we will own them. Maybe. Hopefully.

Yes please

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:29:42 -0400

Yes please

NOW I know what to do with the mannequin I saved from the trash!

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:26:00 -0400

NOW I know what to do with the mannequin I saved from the trash!

Quiche for a Week

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:57:00 -0400

In an effort to cut food costs down to the utter minimum, I’ve been researching recipes for things I can stick in the fridge and reheat for several days on end without getting sick of eating it. I’ve also observed that if I don’t eat something substantial before noon, my whole day goes to a comatose crap. The solution? QUICHE!

This quiche I just made is magical, though I fear it’s so rich it might not pass the week of leftovers test.

I’ve also learned, in my recent internet recipe madness, that the “quick” and “simple” versions of recipes usually skip something important. Omitting that extra step, though non-fatal to the final product, usually just makes it a little… eh. So my latest strategy, when rifling through hundreds of online recipes for the exact same thing, to go with the slightly-more-complicated version. In this case, it means bringing the milk & cream just barely to a boil before mixing in the eggs and other things. I think the food chemistry of this is that it helps the whole thing become more solid without the “cheat” of adding flour.

So, based on this recipe, I bring you the glory that is the Dill-Spiked Ham & Cheese Touchdown Quiche. Best prepared to the sounds of weekend football on TV and good coffee gurgling in the pot.

Ingredients

1 9-inch deep dish frozen pie crust, mostly thawed
1/4 lb sliced cured ham steak, cubed (see note 1)
1/2 small red onion
1/2 cup frozen mixed bell peppers (see note 2)
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup whole milk (see note 3)
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3 large eggs
2 oz cheese of your choice, coarsely grated (1 cup) (see note 4)
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp smoked spanish paprika
1/8 cup chopped fresh dill (or whatever fresh herb you want) (see note 5)

Preparation

Bake the pie crust according to package instructions, then transfer crust in pie plate to a rack. (Preheat, stab it all over with a fork, etc.)

Reduce oven temperature to 350°F.

While the pie crust is baking, heat cream, milk, pepper, cayenne, paprika, and salt in a 1- to 2-quart saucepan until mixture reaches a bare simmer, then remove from heat.

Whisk together eggs separately. (I used the measuring cup I used for cream.) Gradually whisk eggs into hot cream mixture until combined. Stir in ham, onions, peppers, 3/4 of the dill and cheese and pour into piecrust. Sprinkle the rest of the dill over the top, and top that with another few shakes of paprika just to make it pretty. Bake until filling is just set, 25 to 30 minutes. Transfer quiche in pan to rack to cool slightly, about 20 minutes.

This is how I made it. It turned out beautiful but possibly a *tiny* bit wet. It could have cooked for a couple extra minutes, but I also think sauteeing the onions & peppers down beforehand and draining off the moisture would also have served to firm it up. Obviously, the veggie version of this could easily sub mushrooms or a bunch of spinach for the ham, but again, watch the moisture content. I also lightly glazed the edges of the pie crust with the whisked eggs to give it a nice glaze and protect it from burning. It’s stupidly delicious. I’m going to take a nap now.

Notes on Ingredients

1. I could have used bacon, but the ham steak - one big flat round - was the same price as the bacon, and doesn’t require cooking. One less step - plus the extras can easily be tossed into a chef salad sometime later this week. My new cooking strategies are always geared toward eliminating waste.

2. Trader Joe’s has a great selection of frozen prepared veggies for good prices. Peppers are wonderful, but at $2-$4 a pound, you can never have the green, red and yellow variety unless you’re cooking for a dozen people. For $2 or $3, I got a pound bag of already-sliced peppers, used very few, and now I still have peppers for the next time I want them. That was my best guess at quantity - I don’t measure stuff unless it’s crucial to food chemistry.

3. I didn’t have whole milk, so I used half & half, and used 1/2 cup heavy cream and 1 cup half & half.

4. The original recipe called for Gruyere. That would no doubt be awesome, but c’mon. I couldn’t find any plebe cheese at Trader Joe’s, but the cheapest hunk I could find was this utterly ridiculously great New Zealand sharp white cheddar. It’s just hard enough to do the work of something like a Gruyere, but is half the price, and retains its zing nicely.

5. I had dill left over from making potato salad earlier this week, so I threw it in the quiche. GOOD CHOICE. Dill served to add a freshness and cut the richness of so much cream. New strategy: since you can never buy just a little bit of fresh herbs, I’m going to plan a bunch of meals that can make use of the same bunch of basil, dill, cilantro, etc.

Now you can have your quakes and read them too!

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:17:03 -0400

Ever since visiting the Science Museum of Minnesota and seeing a very large (as in three stories of atrium space large) installation of an “instrument” that used an algorhithm (or several) to turn a constant feed of seismic information into notes played in this giant… suspended… plunky reverberating thing, I’ve been obsessed with using seismic information in a similar way. Now that I live in California, any time I feel even the slightest of rumbles I immediately go to the US Geological Survey to see if there’s indeed been an earthquake.

As always, the answer is yes. Every day there are a hundred earthquakes just in the Bay Area, none of them typically felt or noticed. If I have the time, I usually end up spending at least an hour reading (or trying to read) the graphs, charts, maps, information, historical earthquake readings, information pages about volcanoes or tectonic plates, etc. In other words, I fixate like a six-year-old in a dinosaur store.

After last night’s earthquake, I’m up this morning still thinking about how to get some kind of feed when LO AND BEHOLD, I see that my dear, charming, lovely friends at the USGS have provided

AN ENTIRE PAGE OF FEEDS TO FREAK OUT ON.

I nearly spilled my coffee. You have to understand, the fixational lobe of my brain, the one that controls repetitive thoughts and has caused me to walk out into oncoming traffic while stuck on an idea, has been seeking this Holy Grail ever since I saw those giant musical vertebrae of seismology. I can now have, delivered straight into my Google Reader, updates for every 2.5 magnitude earthquake or higher within five minutes (domestically) or 30 minutes (internationally).

FREAK OUT! That’s not all. If you haven’t experienced the shock and awe and flight-like 3-D awesomeness of Google Earth, please do. Do it on my behalf - it’s a huge program, and my crapped out little iBook can’t run with the big boys anymore. The feeds page says that it’ll map earthquake data RIGHT ONTO GOOGLE EARTH.

I can’t express to you the ferocious agony I am experiencing at not being able to do this RIGHT NOW. Will someone please send me a very large gift card to the Apple Store so I can get a computer that can actually display letters at the same time I type them - not five seconds after?

I’ve now set up feeds so I can see every legit earthquake, everywhere in the world, for the past seven days. I can also see “shake maps” that are color-coded by intensity for the US and Canada. The best part about the shake maps? If you look very closely, down at the bottom, you will see the extra-sciencey disclaimer “NOT REVIEWED BY HUMAN.”

It may well be that the robots are taking over, but the darling, wonderful scientists at USGS - clearly the best government agency ever - want to make sure that you know the difference. I wish I could vote for a seismologist in this election.

Oh man. This is the first commercial “home decor”...

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:41:01 -0400

Oh man. This is the first commercial “home decor” piece I’ve ever seen on a mainstream site that touched on the mournful side of politics. Usually politics are used as an aesthetic, just a short-hand way of grabbing on to what’s essentially a fad. This is something else. I call it the Rug of Grief, and most of my “home furnishings” projects act in a similar way - I just never thought anyone would actually sell such a thing. Who knows if there are buyers, but if I had thousands to throw at a rug, I can tell you I’d prefer this over happy slappy BS. Go see all the pictures.

Hijacked.

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:19:32 -0400

Hijacked.

$500 for unlimited prints. No lithography needed.

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:58:12 -0400

$500 for unlimited prints. No lithography needed.:

Maybe I was slow to pick this up, but it seems there are Etsy-based artists using this printer to make limited edition prints.

I’ve been looking for a way around offset or lithographic techniques. This is interesting.

Birds again! Done right, could be a $5 job sold for $60

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:52:00 -0400

Birds again! Done right, could be a $5 job sold for $60

Bird prints, beautiful, simple, bold

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:21:26 -0400

Bird prints, beautiful, simple, bold:

I’m telling you - people LOVE this stuff. And I don’t blame them.

Complete madness working really well for art

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:52:31 -0400

Complete madness working really well for art:

But it didn’t make the paper until 30+ years after Henry Darger’s death. Bummer. At any rate, fascinating.

Process as product: 1,000 journals

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:50:29 -0400

Process as product: 1,000 journals:

From today’s Datebook section of the SF Chronicle - one idea spawned an internet sensation, an art show, and a documentary.

One example of stuff that people like to buy

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:57:34 -0400

One example of stuff that people like to buy:

Whether screen printed, block printed, collaged, or hand painted, what makes these enticing is a) seeing them in a series b) their small completeness c) bold, bright, and slightly ironic graphic designs and d) the wood panel substrate is interesting and different.

Southbound aboard melancholic fog, craving motorcycle chrome.

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:53:18 -0400

Southbound aboard melancholic fog, craving motorcycle chrome.

Beating the blank page

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:19:54 -0400

How do you will yourself to type when you’re thoroughly creeped out by the stories in your head?

This problem is one reason I find myself continually less inclined to socialize.

The now fully-pimped corner of the kitchen. I’m stupid for...

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:28:46 -0400

The now fully-pimped corner of the kitchen. I’m stupid for Apartment Therapy and one thing I always like seeing on there are open shelves. I like how the bowls complement the equally bright colors of our ripe farmer’s market produce. Color me bourgeois. Seriously, though - this takes our kitchen from “empty and mostly clean utilitarian apartment kitchen with cabinets that don’t fully close” to “fun warm place that smells spicy and home-like.”

The absence of something either necessary or not

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:12:00 -0400

Pelicans, at least the brown variety that fish Lake Merritt, are shaped like tanker trucks with dinosaur heads - a creature that looks like it has no business flying. I watch these birds for their narrative: an exhausting-looking awkward takeoff, precarious circling, and then suicidal dives into the shallow lake. When successful, this is followed by great gagging motions as they choke down minnows.

Today is Sunday, and some sort of small orchestra with lots of brass is playing across the lake. When the wind is still, I hear horns of the various orders play exaggeratedly adagio renditions of familiar-ish music that may or may not have religious roots. This is the kind of thing Californians do in lieu of religions that have behavioral requirements. This is the land of post-Protestants.

The brown pelicans seem to easily find schools of fish today, as they don’t circle for very long before splashing down. I try to organize my mind, again, as I’ve done more times than makes sense in the three weeks since I quit the job. The people with their picnic blankets spread over the lawn by the orchestra clearly knew to come to the park this morning, prepared for the layer of goose crap, and picked out spots to maximize their enjoyment of sun, music, and a lake view. These are the people of routine, who set for themselves schedules to attain a wholesome and unimpeachable balance between work and leisure. In contrast, I have been paralyzed by the bottomlessness of unstructured time and an unending list of projects I both need and want to do. It’s a stupid and cowardly-feeling problem - to have too much time - but it is one that will only last for a while. I also know that it has taken me this long to hear words in my head again, and to feel my old content self again, even through the constant anxiety.

The band plays their saccharine versions of hymns and they sound lost, like the memory of where those songs came from is lost in the lake, drowned by a madman of amnesia. The world has clearly ended, but no one can remember exactly how or when it happened. Canadian geese fly past me in partial formation, and this too is decorative farce. These birds don’t migrate. Lake Merritt is their year-round home. They have no need whatsoever to form their Vs, but they do, even though they can’t remember why. On cue, the trumpets hit a climactic high note, held, predictably, way too long, and I’m disgusted with myself for being here to make this same tired observation.

This is precisely the predicament that my creative friends and I circle around constantly. We cannot take up the mantle of Pound’s injunction to “make it new” because every day brings us further confirmation that the world is in a poorly-written dénoument leading nowhere, refusing to end simply because the writer apprently feels there ought to be more pages still. Baudrillard’s essay on hate explains the phenomenon as an intense resentment, not of one another’s difference, but of our interminable sameness, set in a history that has ended but will not die. I wonder if this is why we are obsessed with process. It’s not a form of procrastination - we’re not enamored of any final product that looks like a replica of someone else’s final product. Novels, magazines, even performance art pieces all carry this inherent flaw. I think we’re trying to invent new processes because some atavistic sense of mysticism tells us that we might be able to find a way to bury history in an appropriately-marked grave and let the world finally, relievedly, rebirth itself into something else. A project like this seems like the only one worth getting out of bed for, the only one whose aim is set on a real accomplishment rather than mimicry of all the mistakes that brought us to this plastic-wrapped dead end.

Several more Canadian geese swim near where I sit, curious about whether I will toss them any crumbs. I once read a recollection of a music lecture given sometime around the mid-20th century, when the writer was a student of music. I believe they were studying Debussy, and the professor actually began crying. The students asked him why, and he said that it is impossible to hear the music the same way. The world did not know world war then. The lesson? There is no going back. The artifacts, the hymns, or the notes on the page may be preserved, but interpretation can and does get lost forever.

I cannot hear Canadian geese honking like they did in my childhood, when there was a world to believe in, one with progress and solutions. I’m mostly certain those ideas were myth then, too, and therefore not mournable in any way that is not essentially narcissistic. There is no way to believe in grand ideas without the self-conscious reflection upon making a decision to believe in grand ideas. That self-consciousness draws one back out of the experience of those ideas in the same way that people speak about how they “just couldn’t get into that book.” Those who persist in attempting to recapture unfettered belief find themselves plunging ever deeper into fundamentalism, the practice of which is ironically a series of declarations and self-examinations of their degree of devotion, where this far is never quite far enough. Those with ill-formed memories of belief go to the park to listen to sentimental hymns. They bring their children and tell them that this is sweetness, and pretend that it is not bitter also. The pelicans keep diving in their absurd way in this fake urban lake and I think we are all so profoundly sad but refuse to ever say so, and that this moment of silence on the matter may be the last unplayed note of Protestantism, final, but neverending, so smotheringly quiet that it muffles even our memory of there ever being sound at all.

Somebody else likes the sofa, too.

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:43:24 -0400

Somebody else likes the sofa, too.

Here, though blinking, is the most loving companion anyone could...

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:19:19 -0400

Here, though blinking, is the most loving companion anyone could hope for, sitting on the gorgeous sofa bestowed upon us by my mom & dad on the occasion of our very first wedding anniversary. Thank you so much. We celebrated by sitting right here, listening to nice music and drinking good wine, just talking and laughing, enjoying being together in our warm, safe, quiet home. I may have horrible jobs and no career to speak of, but times like this force me to realize how lucky I am.

The coolest sofa ever to exist ever in the history of the world...

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:09:05 -0400

The coolest sofa ever to exist ever in the history of the world ever! From EQ3’s nearly secret warehouse sale that only the intrepid and persistent craigslist troller discovered. Lovely salesmen - all big, strapping gay lumberjacks - who could possibly be Canadian imports along with the furniture. Thanks, boys!

another change of address

*GASP* *SIGH* *SWOON* HI. GLOSS. RED. They’re PULLING. IT....

Yes please

NOW I know what to do with the mannequin I saved from the trash!

Quiche for a Week

Ingredients

Preparation

Notes on Ingredients

Now you can have your quakes and read them too!

Oh man. This is the first commercial “home decor”...

Hijacked.

$500 for unlimited prints. No lithography needed.

Birds again! Done right, could be a $5 job sold for $60

Bird prints, beautiful, simple, bold

Complete madness working really well for art

Process as product: 1,000 journals

One example of stuff that people like to buy

Southbound aboard melancholic fog, craving motorcycle chrome.

Beating the blank page

The now fully-pimped corner of the kitchen. I’m stupid for...

The absence of something either necessary or not

Somebody else likes the sofa, too.

Here, though blinking, is the most loving companion anyone could...

The coolest sofa ever to exist ever in the history of the world...

GASP SIGH SWOON HI. GLOSS. RED. They’re PULLING. IT....