hello again everybody.
tuesday snuck up on me this week. the pattern so far that’s emerging with this project is spending wednesday and thursday in a kind of mental state of decompression. a steam valve that you pushed on or a pot of rice taken off the heat. then usually by thursday night i have some ideas kicking around that i want to get on some kind of paper, and through the weekend some ideas get more developed than others and some things get chipped away at and some things get left in notebooks to ripen, and then everything comes together monday night or tuesday morning.
this week part of that thursday-monday stretch was occupied by a bike project: i’m switching my single-speed back over to fixed gear, more out of boredom than any kind of ideological evolution or commitment, and that’s not strictly speaking a ‘four things’ type of project. so tuesday came a little faster is all.
alright here we go.
1. painting
like last week in some ways, this one is a combination of a compositional idea i had (big spike of ice in the mid-to-background of a frozen waste) and a thing i wanted to try (i have never painted ice, or really much of anything translucent, and it looked hard, and this whole thing is about pushing myself to think about art a little differently.)
so there it is: a big chunk of ice.
digital painting is great in a lot of ways. one way i find it more challenging is the freedom it gives you to endlessly re-work things, quickly erase them, scale them, chop them, crop them. for a lot of stuff, and for most of the pieces of this painting, actually, those features are great. they give you a lot of freedom to explore. but one specific way it usually trips me up — i will probably dedicate several future tuesdays to this — is skies. i just have not found a digital brush that’s quite right for the way i would like to push and smear clouds and sky across the canvas, and almost invariably the more time i spend on them after the first initial strokes, the more static and overworked they start to feel.
there’s some kind of lesson there, i’m sure. the kind of obvious thing that puts a little half smile on your face and makes you shake your head just a little bit before you tap through to the next instagram story. he overworked it, something something, goes to show you, doesn’t it.
but the quick-first-strokes skies are also missing something. that’s why i keep fucking with them, of course. and that, my friend, is the real lesson.
here are the composition sketches i started with.
here’s the digital version. you can see the color at the right side - i just doubled the width of the canvas and painted the actual thing off to the side so i’d have a bit of a reference. helps to make sure you’re keeping some of the character of the little originals, sometimes.
2. poem
“apartment poem” - winter 2021
there’s an ad for the thing i’m about to listen to
on the thing i’m about to listen to
my eyes are scratchy
i don’t think i took the tylenol in time
on those watch repair videos
on youtube
there are some gears in there that never stop spinning
3. poutine!
at the risk of sounding like a recipe blog intro, i love poutine. vegan cheese has come a long way in the past few years (i hear) and there’s very good stuff that’s very nearly cheese that’s very good for a lot of purposes — sandwiches, burgers, pizza, sauces — but i don’t think the cheese curd code has been cracked quite yet. which is a shame because this is one of my all-time favorite foods. it might be number 1.
there’s some very good vegan mozzarella out there now, though, and making it yourself is actually pretty easy too. so i think we’re getting closer.
last time i tried to make poutine, i made the cheese myself and it turned out OK. you use cashews and nutritional yeast and tapioca flour (for the stretch) but i really half-assed the gravy, and as a result the whole exercise was a giant disappointment.
so this time i took it more seriously.
doesn’t that look great. i’ve never made a stock or gravy from scratch before and after poking around it seems pretty straightforward. miso paste and soy sauce for that thing cooking videos call “depth of flavor” while unconsciously doing the italian chef thing with their non-stirring hand. i don’t think ive touched a leek since i was 16 but a lot of people recommended to use them.
all the stuff is in. the veggies cook by themselves for a bit, then you add some flour (used a little too much), then you deglaze with wine (used a lot too much), and add some stock for more liquid, and let it all kind of simmer itself thicker for 20 minutes i guess.
at this point i will note that in my head i was picturing a pretty thick gravy for the poutine. so i went a little overboard with the flour because i didn’t want to end up with that thin translucent stuff the brits seem to love.
since this section is seemingly almost equally about the things that went wrong with the stuff i made, i will say that this was a mistake.
all the veggies strained out and this is what you end up with. since it was so thick it was difficult to strain really properly, but i wrapped the whole mess in some cheesecloth and essentially wrung it out like laundry.
i have an air fryer now but making french fries in oil is actually not as intimidating as i’ve spent my life thinking. i triple-fried these to get them extra crispy, so they’d stand up to the gravy. then tossed them in sea salt, pepper, and some rosemary.
what’s the point of having a mini cast iron skillet if you don’t use it for presenting and serving stuff like this.
fries in, cheese on top in smallish chunks, then hot gravy over the top so the cheese will melt a bit. this stuff does melt like real cheese, too.
mistake log: i should have thrown this whole skillet in the oven under the broiler for like 2 minutes. the gravy was hot, but the fries were only warmish by this point, and the cheese didn’t really get melty until i was almost done eating it.
it was good! much better than my first try.
if you’re going to try this here’s a mistake summary:
gravy too thick
little bit too much wine when deglazing
cheese was not quite right but honestly, good luck solving that one
serving temp when eating should have been warmer
veggie gravy i think is always going to be a little subtler than meat gravy. last time i tried to compensate for that with a little too much salt. it turned out way too salty and was gross. so heads up there.
i had quite a bit of gravy left over so the next night, i defrosted some of the seitan i made to make reubens with a month or so ago, and roasted some vegetables and made a nice little 50’s dinner plate.
i’m now realizing the seitan / reuben project was pre-newsletter but that’s a project i’ll definitely be returning to in the future.
4. rules for a house
here’s what you can put on the sides: wood, steel, brick
here’s what you can color the sides: gray, black, blue
your siding must always turn the corner
two materials can’t meet on the same plane: push one in six inches, or push the other out six inches
your roof needs a slope
your roof needs eaves, 3 feet to start with
if you work in advertising, subtract 1 foot of eave
if you work in software, subtract 1 foot of eave
if you work in marketing, subtract 1 foot of eave
if you are or aspire to be a landlord, subtract 1 foot of eave
the tops of your windows should align
the bottoms of your windows should be the proper height for the smallest member of the household to stick their nose against
here’s what you can put in the yard: string lights, horizontal cedar slat fence, sign with all caps futura writing
another newsletter come and gone. next week i will be celebrating my birthday alone in a little cabin up near olympia, which i am really looking forward to. don’t think that will impact any of you in any way, but just so you know!
hope you all have a good week. see ya next tuesday. bye.