well, it’s late but it’s going out anyway. so much for my engagement. so much for my metrics.
today i finally hit print on a big set of drawings i have been working on basically the entire summer and have been “finishing” for the last month or so. perfect timing: it is thanksgiving week, and i also just got the booster shot. two things i think you’re supposed to feel bad about in some capacity. three things if you count working.
i didn’t really have any side effects from the first two shots but this one has been hitting me. i felt feverish, i felt achey. i felt cold and chilly but then i turned the heat in my apartment on. and for the first time in a long time, i got to experience one of life’s most sublime pleasures, as far as i’m concerned, which is going to bed feeling vaguely bad and spending the night in a feverish delirium of extremely vivid dreams. and then having that fever break in the small hours of the morning and getting up and having a cold glass of water and tucking yourself back under your comforter and three quilts and turning the fan up one click and feeling the fading echo of the unnatural heat your body was just recently pumping into your bed. and not quite remembering what you were dreaming about but maybe enough to take just a few notes. to look at later.
if there’s a drug out there that replicates the above experience, you better not tell me about it. because i’d get hooked.
the four things this week:
1. painting
a while ago, i got the first book in the series of François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters’ comic book series Les Cites Obscures - i think some of you have probably heard of it but i think it’s likely that many of you have not. i’ve only read the first book in the series so far. as far as i understand it, each volume presents a different fantastical city, along with some kind of adventure or predicament or something that the characters face. but as it is with so many things, the characters are not really important. and their stories, to me, are really only interesting insofar as they are vehicles that propel Schuiten’s incredible artistic eye through these imagined metropolises.
The art rules, in other words.
i had a vague idea of what i wanted to do on this one. And after the past few weeks, i was determined to actually draw from reference this time.
the idea is of a big, empty loft space with cool art nouveau type windows. and a puddle of blood oozing across from off-page. and maybe a little guy poking his head in there like, hey, what’s going on? like, hey, what’s all this then?
after roughing out the basic ideas, i went over with a nice clean pen and refined all the linework. kinda gave up on the rug in the foreground but just ignore that.
one hallmark of Schuiten’s work that i noticed when i was observing from reference is big cityscapes in the backgrounds of things. as a guy who has a tendency to get lazy about things like that, it was very tempting to just put a horizon and some clouds back there. but the buildings in the far distance and especially the ones up close do add a sense of place.
and now we get to my nemesis: color palettes. again, i drew heavily from reference on this. i knew i wanted a warm, golden tone for the city outside - a sunset vibe - and that some of that light was going to pour in through those giant windows. but i also wanted a cool, shady foreground because that would set up some interesting opportunities at the threshold, where the crime and the crime’s investigator were to be located.
you will notice at this point that although the blood puddle is looking pretty good, i have opted to omit the man peeking in. he’s running late, i think.
i scrapped my first pass at colors and rethought the approach. instead of going painterly with it, instead i applied flat planes of color to all the items in the scene, and then went back and airbrushed some grainy texture over them, either darker or lighter, depending on the location, and ended up with the result you see way up there. not bad! wish i had put the guy in.
2. poem
“secrets poem” - winter 2021
your edges just above the surface of your skin
shining, smooth, worn down by now
still flashing, ahead, in the dark, sometimes
and isn’t it funny how women think you’ve never heard bad news before?
string up your lights, secret-keeper
we’ll still be here in the morning
3. “roast” “chicken”
i guess “roast” doesn’t need to be in irony quotes, really. i guess “chicken” probably doesn’t either but that’s tougher. you never really know when you can just say Chicken and when you have to say “Chicken” or even worse when you have to say, like, “Chiknn.” sometimes people misunderstand. sometimes they get mad. this is vegan, though.
once again i’m trying my hand at something i saw school night vegan do. we are having a big friendsgiving this year and i signed up to bring “Entree (Vegan)” so i thought this would be perfect. this was a test run and it identified some minor-to-medium problems that i still have not solved. if you’re reading this and you’re attending the friendsgiving, don’t worry. it’ll definitely be edible by thursday.
basically, this is just seitan. we love seitan! don’t we folks. i’m going to be flipping back through my little notebook called “Lists” soon to find my notes from last winter when i made corned beef seitan for reubens (“corned” “beef” seitan for “reubens”) so look for that soon. for this you make some seitan with some integrated flavor, then you brine it in more flavor, and then in this case you use some tofu skin (not pictured) to replicate chicken skin. to medium success. but you can do it without the skin too. in fact i think i recommend that.
here we have tofu, cannellini beans, oil i think, wine (for drinking), uhhh maybe another portion of oil or it could be white wine (for cooking), garlic powder, vital wheat gluten (the key to seitan), some salt, some white miso paste, and if that’s not oil it’s definitely white wine. not pictured are the brining ingredients we’ll get to that.
my blender was not big enough for this. i had to portion things out. blend up all the wet stuff, then add the vital wheat gluten and keep blending until it forms a dough.
seitan!
for this test run, i pulled off two hunks from the larger blob and roughly shaped them into chicken shapes. i guess the one on the left could have been a little less round. you don’t really see that many spheres when it comes to chickens.
next step is to get out the tofu skin. also called yuba. as in Yuba: The Delicious Reward from Soy Milk which is a funny thing to call an article. i’d never used it before but i wrangled some up from an asian grocery store and it looked like it was gonna be pretty perfect.
the product i chose was preserved in some kind of alcohol that had a very strong and pretty unpleasant smell and taste. so i rinsed it and soaked it a little bit in water. but the taste didn’t really go away, so heads up on that. fortunately i think it’s easy to find either much fresher stuff or stuff that’s dried that you can rehydrate. i think i picked like exactly the wrong brand.
you have to cook seitan twice, kind of. at least as far as i understand it. you steam it once, which takes it from dough to like a set, firm texture. and then you cook it in whatever final dish you’re making. roast chicken in this case. so i laid the yuba down, and wrapped up the seitan balls in foil. nice and tight for the steamer.
i didn’t really check my steamer height clearances before wrapping these up. it’ll expand when steaming, which is why you wrap it tightly, to avoid that, but the rounder one here expanded quite a bit, which pushed the lid of the steamer up. not really that important but just something to think about.
i’m running out of space here so i’ll skip ahead a little bit - you steam the seitan for an hour, then you marinade it in stuff that’s actually going to give it most of its flavor. if you’re making it without the yuba skins i think this would actually work way way better, since the flavors don’t have to try and penetrate that skin and can actually get into the seitan. this is like, miso, mushroom bouillon, garlic, some sugar, some oil. some vegan chicken broth too. i let this sit overnight.
once it’s marinated, simply roast in the oven. i kept brushing more marinade over the top to keep it from drying out and cracking while cooking. also roasted some vegetables on there. the texture is pretty close to chicken! but the yuba still had that awful preservative taste. so i did not eat that much of this. and the version i will be bringing to thanksgiving probably will not involve yuba at all unless i find a much better type.
4. secret popcorn recipe
i think everyone has their own personal popcorn recipe. or actually, i don’t think that. i think everyone who likes popcorn has their own personal popcorn recipe. or everyone who likes popcorn enough to make their own, in a pot, on the stove. in a kettle. in a pan. whatever.
when i was in college dealing with some kind of long-term semi-mysterious mental and physical malaise, i went to one of the campus health people at the campus health center. i don’t know if she was a doctor or a nurse or one of the new kinds of doctors or nurses they have, or what. but anyway she asked me all the usual questions and then asked me what i usually ate in a day. and i had to think for a minute and then i said, well, i don’t usually eat breakfast, i’m not really hungry in the morning. so i’ll have an iced coffee or something. then i usually come home between classes for lunch and i’ll have a bowl of pasta with an egg on it. and pesto, or red sauce. and then i’ll usually have some popcorn.
at this point she looked at me like i wasn’t supposed to have stopped listing things yet, and then she realized i was done listing things, and her expectant-but-slightly-dubious expression transformed into an extremely-dubious-and-exasperated expression. you eat pasta and popcorn, she said. that’s what you eat on a normal day. i said yes. do you eat, for example, any vegetables? she said and i said well the red pasta sauce is made of vegetables i think. and she said you can’t just eat pasta and popcorn.
the secret popcorn recipe has evolved over the years, most significantly when i went vegan, but here it is in its current form.
pop your popcorn. on the stove. heat up the oil and put two kernels in and when they pop you’re ready to put the rest in.
shake it around while it’s popping and then when it’s done popping, or pretty close to done, or done enough, dump it into a big popcorn bowl
melt just a little bit of butter in the microwave, for 10 seconds, or 15 seconds, or 30 seconds even though you know that’s going to be too long and it’s going to splatter everywhere.
pour just a drib of hot chili oil into the melted butter and swirl it around, then pour half that mixture over your popcorn. toss it around. up, back, side to side. then pour the rest on and toss again.
sprinkle salt, chili powder, just a little cayenne, and quite a bit of nutritional yeast on there and toss again. then one more pass with all those things, in much smaller quantities, just to ensure even coverage.
enjoy. with a book, probably. be careful about wiring your brain to expect a giant bowl of popcorn whenever you open a book. it’s too late for me but you can still save yourself.
that’s it for this week. happy holiday everyone. have a good week, and see ya next tuesday. bye.