it’s labor tuesday. if you have to work today you can thank a union.
i am writing this week’s edition from a little cabin up in the foothills of mt hood, where i am staying for a few days because i don’t have an apartment until thursday and because several weeks ago when i was charting a course through the chaos that i knew the end of august would be bringing, i figured i would sure benefit from staying in a place with a hot tub instead of on a friend’s couch. and you know what? i was right. one nice thing about getting older is that i can now spot a trouble area on my calendar from weeks away and take appropriate hot-tub related measures.
if my planning in that one specific area was commendable, though, i did miss some other big opportunities. such as, the opportunity to say “ah no thank you i don’t think i’ll be in town” when some clients wanted to have a site meeting at their under-construction home that is one hour from portland and therefore two hours from this little cabin. and also such as, the opportunity to politely excuse myself and go to bed around 9pm on the night before my 7am flight from anchorage to seattle, rather than what i did end up doing, which was to have three too many drinks, fall “asleep” at 1am, get up at 5am, and combine one of the worst hangovers of my life with a day full of mid-pandemic airport & airplane travel.
you can only know yourself so deeply, is the lesson i am choosing to take from this. you can plan ahead as much as you want, but life will always find a way to surprise you, is what i am telling myself is the moral of this particular chapter. there’s so much beauty out there, in the order as well as the chaos. and if you breathe really deeply through your nose and pipe the rain sounds app through your noise cancelling headphones and pinch the pressure point between your thumb and forefinger really hard and almost bite through your lip, you can make it through 2 flights without puking.
let’s go.
1. painting
hey, is that o’malley peak? well, in some ways it is. hey, is that some fireweed? i’ll be darned.
being back in anchorage reminded me of how psychologically important it is to have a big range of mountains behind your home town. i know many of you did not have that privilege growing up and that’s probably fine. but probably one of those things where when you get to be about 50, you’ll want to talk to your doctor about maybe doing some screenings a little more regularly than other people.
this is based on a series of photos and also views from the south anchorage area, where i grew up and where i was staying these past couple weeks. it was mostly gray and wet and around 50 degrees and regular readers will know that those environmental conditions, to me, are like sluicing hot tar out between the folds of your brain with an icy cold rivulet of water. water from the sky! green plants everywhere! sweaters! socks! an indicator that in some highly geographically specific areas of the planet, human life may survive the next four decades!
there are a couple roads that slice straight up the hillside, perpendicular to the slope, and from the bottom, when it’s wet out, they light up like mirrors reflecting the sky. and the way the clouds move over the city, usually some of the mountains are catching sunlight and some are not.
so the goal here was to capture those two elements.
this first pass at the colors was created late at night, squinting at my phone screen for reference, and you will notice they mostly suck. no real change in contrast from background to foreground. the background colors are always way way closer together than you think, and way closer to the sky than they are to anything else. the context makes it seem like they aren’t. i’m sure there’s a life lesson in there too.
the next pass at the colors, from the next day, looking at a much bigger picture. starting to get some idea of how the road might reflect the sky. layering up the hillside in a more realistic manner. and dropping in some ideas of how those ridges and shadows fold together on the peak.
this is a big jump, i guess i could have saved one more pic in between. but once i get to this point, and all the colors are basically on the canvas, it’s easy to get into much more of a rhythm. a composition sketch and a color palette, that’s all you need. i’m always saying this.
at this point i will note that i am already nervous about the foreground. i know that i do not want to spend a ton of time on the foreground trees, but i also know that historically, half-assing the foreground trees — or at least awkwardly straddling the line between stylized and more realistic — has led to some pretty bad results. some of you are nodding along like yes, definitely, i’m glad you said something. i was gonna say but i didn’t, well, i thought — i’m glad you did.
reworked the sky. classic move! i am getting better at painting clouds and one thing i have discovered is that if you’re painting digitally it really helps to select a digital brush that someone else has already labeled “clouds.”
there are some warmer tones in the background cloud layer and in the lit-up parts of the mountain.
i don’t have another shot between this and the final but obviously the foreground got totally finished between this one and that one. also some more light on the hillside, and some suggestions of buildings back there. and finally, a nice tonal wash to bring things together. scroll up to check that out. scroll back and forth for a while if you want, i don’t mind.
2. poem
soup poem - fall 2021*
sometimes, out here under these first few stars
before it’s time to head in
i catch myself thinking —
could it have worked out?
could we each have chiseled off enough of our edges
to fit together without shattering
— and how long ago was too late, when was that last exit?
and sometimes, out here
under whatever planet comes up first, over there
i catch myself thinking —
if you put a ramen noodle flavor packet in the detergent dispenser
or like a whole bunch of packets, and put the noodles in the cylinder part
and set it to hot and caught the cycle just at the right time
could you make a whole washing machine full of soup?
*it’s fall
3. swedish dill meatballs
those of you who follow me on social media probably saw this one coming. oh great, you’re thinking, more meatball content. we already saw this, two and a half twitter-decades ago. and if you’re reading this and you don’t follow me on social media, how did that happen. who are you. where’d you come from.
as i have mentioned i was staying at my parents’ house in alaska this past week-and-a-bit and one thing they like to do with their vaccinated friends is host little dinner parties (i guess you’d call them parties) on sundays. and out of some combination of wanting to have something vegan i could personally eat and wanting to push some very predictable buttons of one or two of the attendees of a certain political persuasion, i decided it would be fun to recreate the recipe mom was going to cook, but veganize it.
i have never made meatballs before i don’t think but the recipe was very simple and nearly everything had a very easy 1:1 vegan swap. so i thought: this will be fun. and i thought: dave* will definitely find this whole exercise annoying.
*his real name
impossible meat, onion, bread crumbs, oat milk, coconut cream, mustard, plant butter, ground flaxseed, white pepper, salt, nutmeg. i am not current on the impossible vs. beyond competition so i don’t know which one is better right now. they are both probably just great for this. one thing i would do differently i’ll tell you right now is to use “plant milk” instead of “oat milk.” the oat milk, even the unsweetened kind, was noticeably sweet.
mix the flaxseed with water and let it sit. for about 30 minutes, i am given to understand. 1 tablespoon flaxseed to 3 tablespoons water allegedly equals one egg, for the purposes of binding things together. i think this ratio breaks down at some point and i don’t think it’s ideal for every form of cooking. but it’s a nifty little trick for a lot of things.
minced onion. i threw this in the cuisinart which was absolutely overkill. some more onion texture in the meatballs i think would have been nice. brown up onion in some plant butter
toss it all in together. this is the smaller test run from saturday, when i was trying to figure out the best swaps for certain ingredients. so this is everything but the 1/4 cup “buttermilk.” mix it all up.
one of mom’s hand-written notes on the original recipe was to swap out a quarter cup of regular milk for buttermilk. i have made vegan “buttermilk” before when making batters for fried things — plant milk plus a dash of apple cider vinegar, stirred up and left to sit for about 30 minutes, seems to do the trick pretty well.
i only used the buttermilk in one half of the test batch, though, and i ended up preferring the version with coconut cream instead.
on the left is the buttermilk. on the right is the version that uses coconut cream (not milk!) instead of buttermilk. spoilers but the one on the right was better. less sweet.
form into meatballs and then bake at 350 ish. the real meat ones called for 375 but that was too hot for the plant stuff, i think. 350 for about 30 minutes then take a peek and see how it’s going. i would also make the meatballs themselves maybe 20% smaller. they were pretty chunky.
meanwhile the sauce. this is a roux of plant butter and flour (equal parts), then slowly whisk in plant milk & veggie broth and let it simmer and thicken, then whisk in mustard salt and white pepper. at that point i divided it into two batches — bottom batch i added more plant milk, top batch i added coconut cream instead. the original recipe calls for like 1/4c whipping cream. do not be stingy with the white pepper, in my opinion, it and the dill are the 2 things that really make this delicious.
chop up some fresh dill and add it at the end, after your sauce has thickened. also if you are eating this right away, toss your meatballs into the pan with the sauce and let it all cook together for a few minutes before you eat it. you can also serve the sauce separately if you want though.
4. why do you care
lots of photos already this week and substack gets mad at me when i do that. so the pictures of the cool anchorage houses will have to wait. they’re also on twitter though. great place to see at least half of the stuff that ends up in this newsletter when it’s still in the draft stage, to be honest. and a bunch of other annoying tweets as well.
so this week i just have half a thought, based on many experiences over the past (mumbling) years and also on some specific experiences of this past week-and-a-bit. i think a lot of you have had similar experiences, probably in similar contexts. i think this currently is mostly a right-wing phenomenon but definitely not exclusively and also in this case right-wing in this country i guess means anything to the right of like, ed markey.
i am speaking of course about the phenomena of people having very strong opinions on things that are never ever going to impact their life in any way, simply because one of their hobbies has somehow become consuming media by people whose only job is to make people angry and/or frightened, instead of oh i don’t know for example doing crossword puzzles. or restoring old cars. or whittling.
for my grandparents who never leave their house anymore, this might be immigration, or the worsening housing crisis forcing more and more people into homelessness. you don’t leave your house. you meet three new people per year. why do you care.
for some people my parents’ age, this might be spending tax dollars on solutions to this housing crisis that appear suspiciously generous or helpful. even if you only care about cold hard numbers, renting people apartments is way cheaper than paying a bunch of cops to harass them every three weeks and shuffle them off to another piece of the city you never would have set foot in anyway but now you think is ruined and/or dangerous. you suddenly have a bunch of strong opinions on where your tax dollars are going, despite multiple eight-figure corporate bailouts and literal trillions going to defense contractors in just the past decade, and despite the fact that a housing-first approach would actually be more cost-effective? get real. why do you care?
portland is a war zone. trans folks are getting too uppity. commercials these days are too racially diverse. a podcaster i like has some inscrutable beef with a different podcaster i like. a media personality has a bad opinion. we need to talk about x. so here’s what you need to know about y. here is an issue that forming an opinion on, and sharing that opinion, and shoehorning that opinion into only-slightly-tangentially-related conversations to the gradually increasing irritation of your friends and family, will be a better use of your time than withdrawing $20 from an ATM and handing it to the person at the stop light and then looking at like a flower or a leaf or some kind of bug.
i am not a perfect person and of course i do get emotionally invested in things that ultimately have no real bearing on my life. but one of the things on my list of things i like about myself — which i keep folded up on my night stand so i can set down my big drippy candle and put on my big fuzzy nightcap and read it to myself every night before i tuck myself into my big four poster bed — is that in general i have a pretty good sense of what is and is not ultimately important to care about. i would credit this somewhat to having a good sense of right and wrong and somewhat to the admittedly very limited reading and learning i have done about the theories and perspective of mister karl marx, but maybe you have arrived at this point by a different route. or maybe you are working in that direction, or maybe you are further along the path than me. but it’s something to think about, at any rate.
okay well that’s it for this week. another long one. another late one. i am not out of the churning rapids of self inflicted logistical chaos yet but i am getting close. so have a good week, everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.