Reminder to do fun stuff!

I often find myself just kind of comfortable with the way things are now, with my current day to day lifestyle, with the status of my career, and so on. I clean my house and play with Miss Kizzi on the weekends, and generally watch movies with me friends and stay fairly local. This is a good thing for the most part, it's nice to be comfortable, but I tend to forget how quickly things can change, especially in the VFX industry that I call my own. But amidst this comfort, once in a while comes a jarring reminder that change is coming, and sooner than I would like.

Today it was an offhand comment from a co-worker, one of my favorites in fact. He simply said something to the effect of "...that will happen in 2015, but I probably won't be here to see it." A couple of us asked where he was planning on going, and he said he just meant that none of us are likely to be here at our current place of work in 2015, such is the state of our industry. Truth be told, I don't have work lined up for after my current show yet, and likely will have several months off in between this and my next project. I'm planning to travel and visit some family and friends. I'm actually really looking forward to this time and kind of hope that I do have it off, though the uncertainty of the future in this industry is still pretty unsettling.

The title of this post is referring to part of my overall reaction to that realization, that this job isn't going to last forever. I would like to take as many opportunities to see the area that I'm living in right now and experience it with my friends out here, because who knows when one of us is going to move to a different part of the world, or when we'll have our lives taken over by OT, or whatever. So yeah, here's to weekend warrior trips with friends!

Side note, I haven't been posting much lately because a) I've been busy with a SIGGRAPH project that I am very excited about and b) I haven't been cooking/experimenting with the vegetables much because we've kicked into OT at work and I have (regretfully) been hitting up the fast food a lot lately. I resolve right now to do better! I also will be posting some research and sketches and whatnot for this SIGGRAPH project as soon as I am allowed to. It's going to be a good one :)

Lots of little bits

I'm getting behind on this whole blog thing, busy week! Quick update on what I've been doing...

I spent some time in the ER Monday morning because a good friend of mine got in a bicycle accident. He's ok, nothing too bad happened, but he was lucky this time. The last time this particular friend was in the hospital it was a much more dire situation, so I think all of us in his world were happy it was only a sprained wrist. No big deal, right?

In preparation for losing my job in a couple of months, I've been hitting up all of my doctors for my annual exams. Last week was the dentist, this week the general practitioner. I don't usually do all of this preventative stuff, which I'm not saying is good, I'm just usually not on top of things like this. I end up only going in when I'm sick and never get the full work-up done. This time I did the fasting thing, got the full physical, had an echocardiogram, and had blood drawn. They've been trying to call me with the results today, which I'm sure are fine, but we've been playing phone tag. Still, I feel better already checking this one off the list.

I'm having a yard sale on Saturday, which was supposed to be an easy way to get rid of some nicer junk, and instead has become a big project. As it turns out, my city has some super weird restrictions on yard sales. You have to apply for a permit, and the small print on said permit states that you cannot hold a yard sale, wait for it, in your yard. There are also hour of the day and signage restrictions. It was almost enough for me to give up, but I already had several other people committed to coming to sell their own stuff, so on we go. We're two days out now and I have a million things to do tonight to get ready. I just hope we make some money, I don't want this all to be for naught!

I am one of the crazies who went to a Wednesday night midnight screening of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Let me tell you, it was worth it :) I had such a good time, that film did not disappoint! I have absolutely no complaints, there were several surprises, and the action was so good that I wanted to see it again immediately after. I am probably going to try to see it again this weekend.

Last but not least, another CSA box arrived today! I still have about half of the last box, so yeah, I'm falling behind on the cooking and veggie experimenting. This time around there was a lot of the same (kale, beets, onions, carrots, oranges, cabbage), with the welcome addition of fresh mint and zucchini. And yes, there was chard. Sigh. Yee is now the proud owner of some fresh chard. I'm totally making mojitos with the mint, if I can figure out how to muddle that is, other than that I have no plans for this food. I will have to try harder, after the yard sale!

Kitchen Misadventures: Chard on the Grill

My last experience with chard was not great, but it was in the CSA box again this time around, so I wanted to try again. I asked friends for recipes and searched the net, but the easiest/best sounding idea was Jojo's suggestion to grill it. Sounds great, right? I wanted to grill some hamburgers, hot dogs and marinated chicken anyway (when I grill I do a lot at a time so I don't waste the propane by turning it on and off for short spells all the time), so I thought this would be a great I read another suggestion online to massage the chard with a little olive oil and sprinkle in some salt and pepper, so I did that.

 

 Doesn't it look so pretty in the bowl? I REALLY want to like this stuff! 

I laid it out on the grill after I was done cooking all of the meat. The "recipe" (tips and tricks really) said to only grill for a minute on each side, so it was a quick process. I could kind of tell while it was cooking that I was in trouble. Frankly, it just doesn't smell good to me.

Still looks kind of pretty all grilled up and ready to go inside! I took it in, tried a piece and immediately dry heaved over the trash can. Sigh. This one was not a success. I think those who actually like chard would think this was great. I, on the other hand, clearly am not a fan. I don't like the smell, I don't like the taste, I don't like the texture of cooked greens.

Chard, I'm sorry, I think this is where we have to part ways. It's not you, it's me. You'll find someone new, I promise.

Please don't let there be chard in my CSA box next week.

Kitchen Misadventures: Bubble 'n' Squeak

What, you've never heard of Bubble 'n' Squeak? Just kidding, I hadn't either, until I started Googling "what to do with cabbage" that is! Then I found this:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/bubble-n-squeak/

Which turned out to be pretty good! On the first day anyway, but I'll get to that in a sec. It turns out that it is called Bubble 'n' Squeak because while you're making it the potatoes bubble and the cabbage squeaks. Cute, eh? Also noteworthy is that in Googling the correct usage of 'n' (is it 'n or n'?) I discovered that it is actually 'n'! I did not know that. The thought is that you replace the letters removed from the word with an apostrophe, so since you're removing both the a and the d from and, you end up with 'n'. Go figure.

Anyway, I feel like this was a fairly successful venture into the world of cabbage. If you read up on Bubble 'n' Squeak at all, you'll find that it's a British recipe intended to use up leftovers. It's basically potatoes (baked or mashed, there are versions with either), cabbage, whatever spices you feel like throwing in there, and whatever leftover vegetables or meat you happen to have in the refrigerator at the time. It is often served as part of a full English breakfast. Sticking fairly close to the above recipe, I made mine with baked potatoes, cabbage, ham, bacon, salt and pepper.

 

I've never cooked with cabbage before and the insecty-looking holes in this one were weirding me out, so I Googled (how would I live without Google?). It said to soak it in salty water for a while to get any buggies out. I did, and none came out, so I hope it was ok?

Below are my dedicated helpers in this project! Kizzi on the left and Sammy on the right. Kizzi belongs to me, Sammy was just visiting for the weekend. I'm pretty sure they were less interested in my vegetable project and more just hoping I would drop something for them to eat.

So I baked the potatoes, cubed them, cut up and cooked the cabbage until it got tender, cooked the bacon, ham and onion together in a little olive oil, and then threw everything together in a skillet.

I'm happy to report that the Bubble 'n' Squeak tasted good! I actually liked it, and ate a bowl full. I liked the taste of the cabbage, though I probably should have cooked it a little more so it was more thoroughly tender.

Because I had oranges galore, I peeled and cut up an orange, threw it in a spinach salad with some walnuts and Brianna's dressing and had a lovely side salad for this meal as well.

The only downside here is that I did not like the Bubble 'n' Squeak on day 2. I'm pretty texture sensitive with food and biting down on some of the less cooked cabbage kinda made me gag :/ As a single person household, I run into the day 2 problem a lot. I had already cut this recipe down to about a third of what it originally called for, and I still had enough left for like 3 more meals that just didn't happen. How to solve this problem?

Still, I'm counting this one as a success!

Oranges Galore!

I have an orange tree in my yard. Let's call him Caesar (See what I did there? No? You don't follow my convoluted naming logic? Orange tree -> Orange Julius -> Julius Caesar -> Caesar the Orange Tree. Shut up, it makes sense to me.). Below is a picture of Caesar on Saturday morning.

It's a little hard to see here, but he had a lot of fruit. He's also got a lot of dead spots :/ So much so that I've been worried about him. I would say about half of the foliage is now dead (it's worse in the back). Caesar has been neglected because, while yes, I'll claim him, I rent the house that I'm living in and he technically sits right between my house and my neighbor's house. So not only is it questionable which house he belongs to, probably if it does belong to my house my landlord should actually be taking care of him. Regardless, he's being neglected and if the 8 months I've been waiting for my window to get fixed, 4 months for the screen door and 3 months for the stove burner are any indication, I don't really have time to wait for the landlord to come through on this one.

Last weekend I took a couple of pictures and leaf samples to the Marina del Rey Garden Center and they advised me to prune and fertilize Caesar, like a lot. I bought some iron supplement from them and in reading the directions it mentioned that you shouldn't apply it to trees with fruit on them. Oh. So Saturday morning I got out the orange picker and a couple of bags and went outside.  Three and a half full bags later I had all the orange fruit off the tree, and I was tired. That's a LOT of oranges folks!

I had planned to keep going and pull off all the green fruit and prune the tree that day as well, but it became clear to me during the picking how hard the pruning would be. I need a ladder and some heavy duty shears. Or I need a professional tree service to come out. I haven't decided which yet, but I'm leaning toward paying someone to do that work for me. Regardless, all I did for the orange project for the rest of the day was give the oranges a bath.

Note, that's only half of them pictured here. And yes, I know you don't have to clean the outside of oranges, thanks very much, but they were really dirty and I didn't feel right handing dirty fruit out to my friends. Anyway, this will be a continuing project. Here's hoping I don't accidentally kill Caesar!

Kitchen Misadventures: CSA Part 2

They're here! The new round of vegetables is here! And they're...largely the same. Ok, so that's not bad, right? I did fairly ok the last time. I'm definitely going to try different things with the kale and chard, since I didn't really like the results of those two last time. I'm thinking a soaked salad with the kale and grilled chard (thanks for the suggestion Jojo). This week's box had...

• carrots
• parsley
• kale
• chard
• beets
• red onions
• garlic
• an orange
• clementines
• avocados
• cabbage

Here's how it looks when I open the box to find all the goodies inside!

And here is everything unpacked and laid out on my dining room table. Pretty good spread, eh?

 So in the plans for using all of this are the soaked kale salad and grilled chard, along with roasted beets and carrots and guacamole using the avocados, onions and maybe a little garlic? I already attempted something with the cabbage that I'll talk about in a post coming soon. What I'm running into now is that I can sort of come up with ways to cook the vegetables, but what do I put with them? I'm going to have to start trying to figure out how to prepare main courses as well. More to come!

Kitchen Misadventures: Kale, Beets, Fava Beans and Parsley, What the Heck Do I Do With All This?

With only a few days to go until the next CSA delivery and lots of produce left to use, I spent an evening early this week almost entirely in the kitchen. On the menu: kale chips, roasted beets, and fava beans.

I prepped the kale much like the chard, wash, dry, rip from stem, tear into small pieces. Instead of sautéing them though, I drizzled olive oil over them and then sprinkled on some seasoned salt. 350 degrees, 15 minutes, moved on to other things while that cooked.

Fava beans, it turns out, take a lot of preparation! First you have to get them out of the pods, which takes a few minutes. Then you have to boil them for a while, say 5-10 minutes. Have some ice water in a bowl nearby and when removing from the boiling water, put them immediately into the ice water and let them sit long enough to become sufficiently chilled. Take them out and, one by one,  you'll have to peel off the whitish layer to reveal a the bright green bean inside. If you're anything like me, at that point in the prep you're thinking, "These things better be good!" Um, that remains to be seen.

Once the beans were all ready to be cooked, I heated a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet and threw them in. Add salt and pepper, mix to coat evenly with the oil, and let them sit for a bit. After a few minutes I went back and squished a couple of the fava beans and mixed them up again to make a little thicker "sauce." So far so good, but I think this is where I went wrong. I had looked at a tutorial on YouTube for preparation instructions and it mentioned that adding a little chicken broth for flavor would help. I didn't have actual broth ready to go, so I cut a bit off of a bouillon cube and put it in with a little water, mixing it up. It looked legit, but in the end my fava beans tasted like...chicken broth. Next time, I'll skip that part and maybe figure out what fava beans actually taste like.

Back to the kale, oh no, it burned! Yeah, and burned kale doesn't smell great friends, so be careful of that (though frankly not-burned kale doesn't smell fab either). Also in this round I very clearly put too much seasoned salt on. I threw that batch away (outside) and fixed up another two cookie sheets worth to put in the oven, going easier on the seasoned salt this time around. I also only put them on for 10 minutes this time. Success! My kale chips actually tasted pretty good. In fact, if they weren't so darned stinky I might make that again. As it is, I probably won't be making these again anytime soon, but if you like kale I recommend.

This left me with beets and parsley left to use. Why not combine them? Nope, only kidding, that would be gross! Beets at least I was familiar with, but only in their salad bar form. I was surprised to discover that their texture is similar to a potato when raw. I washed them, cut the stems and roots off, peeled them, sliced them up like a would a potato (thick slices, kind of uneven, ya know, like a little kid would do, because that's my level of cooking technique), and put them in a sheet to roast in my little toaster oven on 350 degrees for an hour. Why the toaster oven you ask? Because it's more reliable than the antique oven in my kitchen. No really, it's an antique oven from the 50's. Very cute, but not particularly accurate in temperature and it always, without fail, sets off my smoke detector. Every. Time.

Anyway, I digress. The beets came out beautifully and were just like I expected! Success! That leaves the parsley. I still haven't figured out what to do with that, so I washed it, dried it, chopped it all up, and put it in a baggy to freeze. I'll figure that one out later.

So, for the record, that's CSA kale, beets, fava beans and parsley (sort of), check!

Stay tuned, because CSA Part 2 happened today!

Kitchen Misadventures: Stuffed Peppers and Chard

So if you read my first post you are aware that all of a sudden I found myself with a lot of vegetables and no idea how to use most of them. It should be noted that after a misguided attempt at doing the Atkins diet for a week to jump start some weight loss (I lasted 5 days) I also had a couple of peppers, an avocado and a LOT of baby spinach in the refrigerator just begging to be put to good use.

I had a few friends over on a Sunday a couple of weeks ago for some early birthday shenanigans. We cooked out on the grill and I made a pretty spinach salad with strawberries, walnuts, and Brianna's Poppy Seed Dressing. Spinach and CSA strawberries, check!

My first real attempt at cooking some of these veggies was to make stuffed peppers and chard. I usually use recipes I find in Google searches, YouTube videos, Goop newsletters, Cooking Light magazine, or whatever Yee or Michelle has mentioned about how they cook particular dishes. The chard was a Yee recipe, the stuffed peppers recipe I used can be found here: was a YouTube video that I can no longer locate (I swear I'll do better at this documentation bit next time).

I'm going to make a long story short here and say that the stuffed peppers, while looking very nice and sounding like they would taste good from the list of ingredients, were kind of meh. The sauce was pretty ketchupy, actually reminding me a lot of the special sauce at Steak 'n Shake (what up Mid-Westerners!). The mixture inside and the peppers themselves were edible but just kind of bland. The recipe didn't call for any of the sauce to be mixed in with the stuffing, which I think was a mistake. Next time I'll try a different recipe, hopefully something with a little more punch. Still, peppers and CSA onions, check!

Yee's chard recipe went like so:

1. Wash the chard thoroughly. 
2. Make a fist and run the stem through it, grabbing the leaves as you pull the stem through. The leaves come right off! (This worked really well.)
3. Warm some olive oil in a skillet, a couple of tablespoons for a big bunch of chard.
4.  Tear the chard up into smaller pieces and drop into the skillet. 
5. Season with salt and pepper. If you like, throw a strip of bacon in for added flavor.
6. Sauté until greens are cooked.
7. Drizzle a little vinegar on top when serving. 

So I did all this and had two major reactions. The first, chard is pretty! Until you cook it that is, then it just looks kind of gross. Second, cooked chard with vinegar on top tastes a lot like cooked spinach, of which I am not a fan. It probably goes without saying that I didn't really like the chard. Oh well, at least I tried! CSA chard, check!

Apologies for the horrible photography. I promise that too will get better as we go.

Hummingbird Encounter

This isn't a cooking blog, did I mention that? Probably a lot of posts will talk about my adventures TRYING to cook, since I'm focusing on that a little right now, but my intent here is not a cooking blog. Besides, following my cooking advice could be hazardous to your health ;) The aforementioned CSA Kitchen Misadventures will be posted soon, but in the meantime, here's a fun little story.

I have a hummingbird feeder in my backyard that, to my knowledge, has not really had many visitors in the month or two that it has been hanging up. The liquid inside it did disappear over time though, so I assumed that either it was being used by sneaky hummingbirds while I wasn't looking, or that it was evaporating. Regardless, it was empty and I wanted to fill it up again.

On my lunch break today I got one of my tall dining room chairs (not many ladder-ish options in my house) and climbed up to take it down. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that it would have some leftover liquid in it, so I rather unceremoniously spilled sticky, red sugar water all over my chair, my jeans and in my hair (I was standing in kind of a weird way to reach the feeder). I climbed back down and surveyed the damage. Sigh.

I took the feeder in to the sink and spent about 10 minutes try to rinse it out thoroughly. One of the little holes was very stubborn, so eventually I figured out how to take it fully apart and realized what a mess it was inside. A spider had crawled inside it and made a web that had then gotten sticky and wet from the sugar water, so it took a surprising amount of cleaning to fix it up. Finally satisfied, I put it all back together, dried it, and poured the refill of red sugar water in, and promptly spilled more red sugar water all over the sink because the feeder wasn't closed correctly. I fixed that and thought it was still leaking, so I left it sitting in the sink as a test while I went back outside to start cleaning up the chair.

I got out the hose and was about to spray down the chair when all of a sudden a beautiful green hummingbird flew down to my eye level, about 2 feet away from my face, and hovered there for a good 20 seconds or so making direct eye contact with me! He (she?) looked like this guy pictured below:

Image Credit Flickr User GJJ ML

I assume that I smelled of sugar water and my bright red hair (we're talking unnatural, dyed, fire-engine red here folks) was pretty attractive to him. I was so surprised that I'm pretty sure I said, "Oh, hi!" out loud. I imagine our conversation to have gone like this:

Me: Oh, hi!

HB: Hello. I'm a little confused, you do not seem to be of the food persuasion after all. 

Me: Um, well no.

HB: Well, while I have your attention anyway, let's have a little chat.

Me: Ok.

HB: So there used to be this food thing here, I liked that a lot.

Me: Ok.

HB: Can that come back?

Me: Why yes, yes it can. In fact I was just working on it now, that's why I'm doused in sugar water.

HB: Great! I'll be back later then, holla!

And he took off. It was fun while it lasted though! I hosed down the chair, checked the feeder, which seemed to be fine by that point, and hung it back up outside. Did my little hummingbird friend immediately return to say thank you? No. I'm sure I'll see him again soon though!