Foodie Tuesday: Arroz by Any Other Name

Posted on September 25, 2012 by kathryningrid

It is conceivable that by now you have figured out that I am mightily fond of Mexican, Tex-Mex, Mexican American and Mexican influenced foods and flavors. Having grown up in rich farm country where the migrant workers not only settled eventually but brought a veritable second-town of family and friends to join them over time, I was blessed to be fed by a number of eateries in our area run by the fantastic chefs all trained by one little lady in their hometown. By rights, she should have a whole county in Western Washington named after her at the very least, though I might suggest a shrine as more appropriate, because thanks to her a whole lot of us have faithfully eaten exceedingly well on both roots food from her teachings and wonderful inventions and innovations based on them.

Having moved to Texas might even be considered a logical next culinary or at least dietary step in my lifelong love of La Cocina Mexicana.

In any event, I will keep today’s post simple but say that once again I was influenced by that saintly lady’s culinary offspring when I entered the kitchen to begin dinner prep. I had intended to make something with the big gulf shrimp I had tucked into the freezer, but until it was really dinnertime I wasn’t sure but that I’d repeat the recent quick, hot-weather meal of the previous week, where I simply poached the cleaned shrimp and served them as part of a sort of deconstructed Louis or Cobb salad cousin.

Which would’ve been fine.

But, you know, I opened the refrigerator and saw a carton of leftover broth-cooked rice and suddenly I got all faint and dreamy-eyed and (cue theremin music and wavy-screen fantasizing-fade here) thought with longing of one of Our Lady of Mexico‘s disciples’ lovely Arroz con Camarones–that beloved combination of rice and shrimp favored by all of the Latin coastal cultures–this one a favorite version I miss from back in Tacoma.

So this day’s shrimp were coarsely chopped and kept on hand with a finely-slivered slice of leftover ham (to add some bacon-y goodness, and to help clear out the fridge) while I sautéed about a scant cup each of julienned carrots, sliced celery and chunky-cut mushrooms in some flavorful bacon fat just until crisp-tender with a little black pepper and some cumin, added the freshly squeezed juice of one big orange and about a cup of slightly drained crushed tomatoes (I used Muir Glen‘s fire-roasted tomatoes, since I like the flavor spike they add) and cooked the vegetables and sauce until slightly thickened, adding the prepared shrimp and ham just long enough to lightly cook the shrimp through. Served over the warmed rice, and with a dollop of whole yogurt to stand in for the absent crema, it was almost as good as I remembered.

I did have to add the hovering Abuelita in imagination to complete the effect.

Rust in Peace

Posted on September 25, 2012 by kathryningrid

I flatter myself that I am improving with age. This morning’s Wordsmith offering from the fabulous Anu Garg of A.Word.A.Day was ‘crepitate’–one of my very favorites, thanks to the also fabulous S.J. Perelman‘s introducing it to me in the context of one of his typically scintillating, outrageously funny tales. I was reminded that crepitation refers to the creaking cracking popping grinding and other percussive noises of dusty old age, and that, not at all surprisingly, Perelman used it in self-deprecatingly hilarious description of his own antiquated joints as he gave what one must assume was–despite his stated intent of dash and panache–a dance demonstration to his date that was more rusty than rakish. Having done the requisite amount of damage to my own human machinery over the years by falling over and off of things, lifting things I had no business hefting, and in turn, turning, squeezing, smacking and otherwise torquing various portions of myself just enough more out of sync and syncopation that it’s remarkable if I only creak and don’t fall into syncope or crack up altogether.

So, whether dancing or just shuffling my slippered way around the hallowed halls of home, I consider myself very fortunate only to ‘boop, whoosh, queel and grake‘ like another of my pantheon of fabulous wordsmiths, James Thurber‘s, old family car, and not to simply disintegrate wholly on the spot. Grey hairs? Bring ’em on! (Best color of hair I’ve ever owned by nature, as it happens.) Wrinkles? Oh, my, yes. Smile creases are only a badge of honor reserved for people who’ve had long and happy enough lives to earn them. Aches and pains will generally come and go, with more of the comings than the goings as time passes and I forget to accommodate my crepitude a little, but by golly it beats lying around and dissipating into a dust bunny of boredom.

And honestly, lots of things get more beautiful not just in spite of but because of their evident age, so why shouldn’t I give it a try?

Matters of Perspective

Posted on September 23, 2012 by kathryningrid

Stormy skies can bring destruction . . . or the rains of growth and promise . . .

I’ve said before, and in ever so many ways, I’m a firm believer that we all live our lives wearing our own very distinctive glasses. By that I’m not referring to the glass-half-full vs. glass-half-empty attitude–but that’s indeed part of the whole idea. It’s about how we see the world through our individual filters.

In a fairly concrete fashion, that means that the quality of my actual eyesight–my acuity, ability to detect and distinguish colors, textures, shapes, depth of field aided by stereo vision, and all of that sort of thing does, in fact, have a profound effect on my world view and how I experience my passage through it in life. As a longtime visual artist, I am dependent upon all of this stuff for my very sense of self.

But I’m also convinced that each of us has a life history that includes our adventures from birth to the present, our nurturing or lack thereof, our environment and resources and social contacts and political influences and educational progression, and that whole reality is so distinctive for each of us, right down to a cellular level, that I can’t quite imagine how even the closest of kin could possibly have identical points of view.

I’ve been reminded of this in the last few days as I’ve been reading the latest Oliver Sacks book on which I’ve laid hands: The Mind’s Eye. Every book of his that I’ve read thus far is, since he’s a neurologist, a humane and humorous thinker, a deeply curious scientist, and a citizen of the world with wide-ranging interests, bound to be an adventure. Given the visual theme of this particular collection of case-studies (including his own discovery of and treatment for an ocular tumor), it is indeed a confirmation of my sense that such complex inventions as human bodies, multiplied by the almost infinite variants those influences I mentioned above can infuse, create and incubate an incredible range of possible ways to see and experience life in this world and whatever we can conceive of beyond it.

Yes, I am enjoying this latest Sacks book as immensely as I have all of his thus far. It’s been rather striking, too, to add to the layers of my own filters, many of which I’ve only come to recognize rather more recently in my life. I have sussed out and confirmed to my own wildly non-medical satisfaction that I am very probably distinctly dyslexic or cognitively ‘different’ in a whole bunch of ways, and having looked at this good doctor’s descriptions of face-blindness, or prosopagnosia, I’ve a feeling that my realization sometime not long past that I might have a degree of face-blindness might well be accurate. I’m certainly no less inclined to believe it since immediately before the book arrived on scene at the local library, I was working in our front yard when a car pulled up and the nice driver called me by name and conversed with me pleasantly until I could identify by her voice, questions and comments that she is the neighbor who lives directly across the street from me. Sigh. Sometimes the ol’ filters do get a little blurry.

More importantly, though, I’m convinced that how we respond to our life experiences and our histories–the choices we make and what we do with what we’re given and who we are within it–those are the truly telling filters. They’re the things by which we’ll be known, be remembered (if we’re remembered), and that offer us ways to define ourselves and our place in the world. So while I’m happy as an artist to play (as you saw in the last couple of posts) with my reality in the artificial world of visual imagery and how I attempt to show others what it’s like to see through my lens, I realize that my moods and attitudes are a part of that process too. Can I get others to understand or accept my point of view? Rarely, if I’m mighty fortunate. Can I help them to see it? More likely, if I work hard. Can I give them happy access to their own filters that might improve their moment or their day? That, I hope, I can do if I am true to the better of my instincts in responding to the world as I know it and expressing, the best that I’m able, with passion and with compassion. With love and joy.

Heavens! What started as a grim and ominous day can become something bright and hopeful . . .

Art, Before & After

Posted on September 23, 2012 by kathryningrid

Today, another little glimpse of artful goofing to re-imagine an existing piece of my work. I almost never tire of reworking/revisiting my old artworks from time to time. In part, it’s a way to critique and edit my stuff and see how I can grow and change over time. Mostly, it’s just good technical practice–a little bit of re-training my eye and hand and, when I get lucky, learning a new skill or two. In this instance, I took another of my pipeshade designs done in 2007 in preparation for Martin Pasi’s carving the wooden screen panels for his Winnetka instrument and I did some Photoshop playing with it to turn a pair of the panel designs into a merged single image and then ‘hand coloring’ it digitally to redefine it as a wholly new looking picture.

The whole Winnetka project was based on the church’s part of the collaborative team’s desire to have their organ artwork reflect local character. Since Congregational churches don’t tend to wish to fill their worship spaces with traditional religious iconography but rather prefer a more generally meditative space, so it made sense to aim for a design more simply nature-based and reflective of regional beauty. I decided to incorporate some of the Illinois state symbols into the design. This pair of panels featured the state bird, Cardinalis cardinalis–the Northern Cardinal. Is a cardinal too religious a symbol? Oh, that’s right: not a Roman Catholic church. Okay, cut me some slack.

Not really necessary to elaborate, is it. I just decided to show you the Before and the After versions today, and dispense with the intermediate steps–they’re not entirely thrilling to see, being a series of steps mainly devoted to converting the graphite drawing to a crisp black ink-outline appearance (only moderately laborious with the help of Photoshop) and then using my digital ‘coloring crayons’ to fill in the blanks to create a full-color version. This time, I opted for something much more cleanly graphic than yesterday’s reworked image. Who knows what happens next time? That, in fact, is the fun of both making art in the first place and then, in having the option of revising it, maybe even more than once. Can you say, mercurial? Nahhh, we know that I’m still just a big kid with a short attention span. No need to dress it up. I’ll just spend the dress-up energy on the art, if you don’t mind too much.

It’s that Time Again

Posted on September 22, 2012 by kathryningrid

It’s a time of year when a whole lot of concerts and recitals are reawakened in the College of Music hereabouts, so tonight we headed out for the usual eight-in-the-evening music making. The sunset led us west to the concert hall–but just barely, as the evenings are shortening already by now–and the house was well crowded with people eagerly pressing in to hear their first of the orchestra’s season of performances. Arturo Márquez – Danzón No. 2, Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58, Béla Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra—the latter, a scintillating performance of the virtuosic, wonderfully evocative and cinematic piece to set the bar very high for the year.

It’s also time to get another day’s post up on the blog, if I’m to meet my ‘local midnight’ deadline. Time to gather up my thoughts for the day into whatever package has offered itself, arrange my neurons into a more restful, sleep-invoking mode than last night’s (not another wake-every-half-hour one, please! What was that all about?) and recharge my batteries for tomorrow. Time also to look ahead in the autumn and think of when we can invite friends for visits, what is next on my long list of projects and chores and art making events that fits with my current resources and mood.

In short, it’s That Time: life as usual. The good, the busy and the unpredictable continue to flood my days and nights with change and, as it’s said, the more things change the more they stay the same. I don’t know for certain what tomorrow will bring beyond the few enigmatic things noted on a fairly bland and unadorned seeming calendar, yet every hour that ticks by in my existence brings with it some new piece of knowledge, a surprise visitor, events not planned or expected, a whole array of shifting atoms that make each moment quite different and generally much larger than I feared or hoped it would be. And that is how, in a sort of cosmic conundrum, I manage to find mystery and adventure and the impossible all utterly normal and quite the logical thing to happen to me, time and again.

‘Work in Progress’ is a Lifetime Commitment

Posted on September 21, 2012 by kathryningrid

I think of myself, as many people do I suppose, as a Work in Progress. What started out as a small, wiggly, colicky mass of spittle-covered humanity just over a half century ago is progressing, ever so gradually, into something like Iteration No. 10,000,022 or so, and will (if all goes as hoped) continue in the same unpredictable path until death do me part. I like it like that, if you want to know. I have no idea where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing, who I’ll be, a mere matter of months from now let alone in years yet to come, and that seems perfectly okay with me. Life continues to be a big adventure, and I’ll take it as it happens.

As a visual artist, I can say pretty much the same thing. Some works take their own sweet time to develop. Some take their own tangents and I just hang on for dear life and hope I can keep up with where they’re headed. I don’t always know what I intend to make when I begin a project, and I almost never know what I will make, given that art things sometimes cooperate and turn out similar to my imaginings and more often than not, they assuredly don’t. Sometimes the uncooperative piece ends up being much better than I could have conceived of it or even than I thought I could accomplish. A lot of the time, the end result of my artistic machinations ends in my being pretty surprised. Whatever happens in my life and my world, I’m pretty sure I’ll die surprised. Not a bad way to go, eh!

Just as an illustration, I thought I’d share a glimpse of ‘process’ that spans a fair amount of time and a couple of widely separated playtime brainstorms. Thanks to my exceedingly slow-simmering artistic processes, this piece incorporates a color background I scribbled a few days ago in colored pencil on paper and digitally melds it with an organ pipeshade design I did a few years ago (designed for Martin Pasi‘s pipe organ, an instrument made for Winnetka Congregational Church in Illinois, 2007), photographed as it was executed on wood panel in graphite and markers to prepare it for cutting and carving. Bit by bit and frame by frame, two rather disparate art projects merged into one, and that’s how it all went. This time.

A simple abstraction in colored pencil, scanned from the sketch paper.

Taking the original colored pencil drawing through a few painterly paces via Photoshop, I got a more cohesive background ‘starter’.

Rearranging the proportions of the digital artwork makes it a better fit for the mash-up I now have in mind.

The cartoon on wood panel, waiting for cutting and carving, was done in graphite and marker on the raw wood, crisp but not the look I had in mind for this use–more of a pen-and-ink appearance for now.

digitally converted 'pen & ink' look for

Photoshop to the rescue! Now we’ve gone back to black and white version and it looks more inked–almost tattooed, perhaps.

digital artwork from two original drawings, merged

So now, I can smash together the two images–the pipeshade design and the colored backdrop. I think I’m almost there . . .

digital artwork from the original Winnetka panel + colored backdrop

. . . ahhh, that’s better. Now instead of looking like the sun is underwater, I have a sense of sunrise or sunset. Now we’ll see if I can think of a *reason* for this image. Oh, who cares. I just like to Make Stuff when I get in the mood for it. So sue me. But if you can think of any reason for it besides personal entertainment, feel free to enjoy that concept!

A-Hunting We All Go

Posted on September 19, 2012 by kathryningrid

The Blue Lacy

He’s of a faithful breed, my dog, a hunting hound, a clever beast,

a lean and hungry Cassius, but faithful all the same–

He races me to the rotting log and runs to ground the boar at feast

who’ll soon be ours–Alas for us, the boar knows his Wild Game!

He lunges up in fear and rage: his tusks are aiming for my throat,

and I have tripped into my grave on roots as strong as sin–

But Blue has taken center stage, leaps on the boar’s mad, bristly coat,

gives me the breath my knife to save, hangs on as it plunges in–

The boar falls back with a bloody scream but turns on me his fiery glare,

and then, in an instant, strikes once more, for he means my dog to die–

I yank the roots, trip him into the stream! and Blue and I tear away from there–

and we relish our supper of beans–no boar–my faithful hound and I.

Foodie Tuesday: Getting a Menu Transplant

Posted on September 18, 2012 by kathryningrid

Sticking to my ribs, yes, but maybe with the barbecue sauce twisted into a (Southern) peach chutney style to suit the Basmati rice alongside . . .

It’s not what it used to be, moving to a different place. The world is so much smaller than it once was! We talk via computer and cell phone as though we were sitting right next to each other–and sometimes when we’re sitting next to each other. Language and culture and history are all getting a good mash-up in this shrinking world where we live.

One genuinely wonderful aspect of this not-entirely-perfect scenario of homogenization is that we have access to so much that was once unreachable to everyone but the most extremely far-flung intrepid explorers and have commonalities that our ancestors could never have dreamed remotely possible. Not least of all, we can indulge in the joys of cuisines and ingredients from places we can’t even pronounce, let alone afford to visit.

Most of these regional, national, racial, cultural treasures, by virtue of being intermingled with and sampled by so many others to such a degree that sometimes it seems something learned from the Chinese by the Dutch traders and then passed along to their colonial outposts in the south seas, who in turn brought it along when they immigrated to North America, well, these ideas and arts and recipes have been so transformed along the way that they, like the initial message in the old game of Telephone, are utterly new inventions by the time the Chinese ever experience them again. And yet, in a happy twist, we who create and share the first iteration often fall in love with it and repeat and refine it until it becomes part of who we are, so it’s not wholly lost in the translation, either.

For someone who grew up in one part of the vast American patchwork of a country and experienced East Coast specialties, Southern cooking, Midwest traditions, and Southwest cuisine as being no less foreign in their ways to my Northwestern experience and palate, it’s always been a pleasurable study to try out the fabled deliciousness of Other Places. So while I’ve long loved Chinese and Dutch and Polynesian and Italian and German and Thai and Indian and North African foods of various kinds, it’s no less exotic and thrilling and delicious to sample the comestible culture of different regions of my own homeland.

Fajitas today, quiche tomorrow . . .

. . . but you only have to switch from a Coronita to a Trappist ale to suit the occasion, right?

Still, it’s been an entertaining and tasty part of the adventure of moving from Washington state to Texas that I’m experiencing Tex-Mex and Southern and cowboy cuisines in places of their origins and that’s mighty rich learning and dining, too. So I’m more than happy to indulge in all of those special items here anytime I can. But you know me, y’all: rarely do I go into the kitchen without bringing my own machinations and deviations to the party, so I am more than likely to emerge bearing platters and bowls filled not only with classic Texan foods but also with Texan foods as filtered through Washingtonian hands, perhaps with a hint of Chinese cookery here, Dutch baking there, Polynesia and Italy and Germany and Thailand and India and North Africa and all of my other palatable favorites making inroads and appearances whenever I see fit.

A Texas-sized pork chop can also be cooked sous-vide, even if it’s getting classic Southern sides like bacon-sauteed sweet corn and coleslaw . . .

. . . and if you want to shake things up a little in a more cosmopolitan way, you can always make the slaw a variant of Waldorf Salad while you’re at it by adding chopped apples and celery and sliced almonds . . .