Maebius Musing

Two friends and I are engaged in a fun Iron Chef challenge, using Artichokes as our secret ingredient.

See my blogroll (Kwitchery, andalso Nettle’s Blog) for details and updates.

My own entries, are all cold dishes, making a subtle nod the Northern regions we live in (relatively speaking). Simple picnic fare mostly, representing the humble joy of country life, and it’s casual connection to nature, yet still holding within it’s myriad ingredients a mirroring of the complex web of life. Each dish is topped with a fresh violet, symbolizing the spring season, and offering a token of friendship towards this chef’s lovely challengers. (Sound sufficiently Asian/esoteric?!?!)

-=- Appetizer -=-

First, we have a Artichoke Pâté, served on a bed of fresh Romaine leaves, surrounded by various multi-grain crackers and pita slivers. Garnished with a fresh violet leaf and flower. Recipe was mostly followed, with some minor adjustments in terms of slightly less olives, slightly more garlic, and a touch of cilantro-sprout to bulk out a slightly insufficient quantity of Parsley.

* 15oz artichoke-hearts, drained
* 4oz low-fat cream cheese
* 1/3 cup grated parm cheese
* around 3 Tbls fat-free mayo
* 1.5 tsp minced garlic
* 1-2 tsp lemon juice
* 2 Tbls finely chopped parsley
* 2 Tbls finely chopped black olives
* 2 Tbls chopped, roasted red peppers
* Salt and Cayenne pepper, to taste
Process the heck out of all ingredients, then leave in fridge for a while to let flavors blend. (will it blend? Yes!) Serve with starchy/firm accoutrements like crackers, breads, or melba toasts.
The taste was pleasingly subtle, with the initial tartness of the peppers, lemon, garlic, and artichokes offset by the cooling firmness of the cream cheese.

-=- Main course -=-

Artichoke pasta salad with grilled chicken. Grilled chicken tenders, marinated in artichoke juice & minced garlic, rubbed prior to grilling with a mix of paprika, oregano, salt and pepper. Served on a nest of linguine pasta tossed with more artichokes, black olives, peppers, olive oil, and cider vinegar, plus the seasoning mix used on the chicken, atop a plate of fresh romaine lettuce leaves. Served cold, except for the chicken, which was added at the last moment steaming hot off the grill.

While using similar ingredients to the appetizer, this meal was quite tasty. More tangy and very full of marinated artichoke flavor. The kid loved this a lot, especially due to “slurpy noodle” potential.

-=- Dessert -=-

I had planned to make an artichoke-based ice-cream (since EVERY japanese recipe seems to involve some sort of frozen treat using almost any ingredient you can imagine), but ran out of time to prepare it again, as the initial attempt did not work right. More of a sorbet, I rinsed marinated artichoke hearts to remove most traces of the vinegar and oil, and pureed them until smooth. Then I added about a quarter cup of table-sugar and some more water (less sweetness than traditional European Sorbets, more like Asian “green tea ice-cream” in palate).

Unfortunately, the making of good sorbet requires a constant freeze/mix cycle that I was unable to work into our schedule properly, and am not submitting without a proper consistency and last-minute tweaks of recipe to ensure a quality entry. My initial result either froze solid and needed quite a lot of blending/refreezing, or started to separate a bit and freeze mostly sugar-water on the top of a denser artichoke-dust.

While this entry may sound rather off-putting, it was not too bad by my initial test. The artichokes, once rinsed, became more of a binding agent than a flavor, and added merely a slight subtle ‘greenish-bitter’ taste to the otherwise sweet frozen sensation. I think removal of a bit more vinegar, or using fresh artichokes blanched/boiled, then powdered, might work better. Still nothing earth-shatteringly well received, but a unique dessert which does compliment the other two dishes in flavor.

Summary, the initial sweeter appetizer, with crunchy crackers, followed by a more hearty and savory-salad made for a fairly well-rounded meal. While the desert course was initially unsuccessful, it was mostly due to time and technique rather than a failure of ingredients, and got a head-shaking (semi-sarcastic) bonus point for creativity and risk-taking.

Bon Appétit!

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Not much to muse about lately….so here’s a brief update on random life.
It’s the grind of tax season for Mrs Maebius, so my evenings are filled with the joy of playing with the sprogling while she does the hermit-thing in the computer room.

My World of Warcraft playing has gone down slightly, though I am currently at a nice lvl 64 with Kanandi the Holy-troll priestess. Lots of fun with playing healer, moreso than any other class I’ve played, which is reflected in the fact that while Kanandi is the second-youngest character I created, she is my highest level now…. and my guild is awesome. (also have a lvl 12 rogue just to have an unused bank-mule who can craft me some minor potions for everyday use).

Otherwise, the official spring-time holiday is fast approaching. Birthdays coming up for Varulv and Mrs Maebius…Easter just around the corner, so last night we coloured a few eggs (more this weekend when company visits).

I’m sure I’ll have more time in the evenings to wax muse-ical [sic] and include a slighty more thought-provoked posting here. Until then, we are just sitting around, enjoying the slightly warming weather, seeing the light at the end of winter’s tunnel just ahead, and getting ready to head back outdoors to play before it gets dark too early.

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While I have more than a passing interest in the current cultural and societal future, in regards to Hubbert Peak, and it’s affects on oil and pretty much our entire economic/technological infrastructure, there is another Peak which has been crossed, and have not found any good references to help explain it.

I’m talking about my self-referenced “The SpongeBob Artistry Phenomenon”, and how it relates to the animation industry. In essence, I think that while computer generated imagery continues to make huge improvements over time, the classic animation styles are suffering for it.

There is a really, really good article regarding the decline of “Saturday Morning Cartoons” which highlights a different facet of this troublesome situation. Perhaps the cheapness to produce lower-quality shows is the result of the more general inclination of today’s internet-enabled kids to not be sitting at home watching TV much, and the resulting budget constraints. But my musing here is specifically related to the quality of animation, which is only the partial story in that article.

This situation is also not directly related to the phasing out of hand-drawn Cel-based animation where artists penciled and painted on transparent sheets which were photographed in sequence. Digital ink and paint has now replaced pencils and pigmented liquids, but still maintains the procedural style of this type of traditional animation.

(side note, Princess Mononoke (1997) was one of the last feature-films to incorporate largely hand-drawn cel-colored techniques! Disney has been using digital methods since 1989. [source=wikipedia])

A few years ago, Disney closed one of it’s larger hand-drawn animation studios. Back in around 2003 or so, they even made an announcement to the effect that they would stop all 2D animation projects and concentrate more fully with Pixar and the 3D CGI market. Luckily, they have recanted that and are doing a decent mix of 2D and 3D styles now. I found a decent blog write-up to this shift (though it’s not specifically about Disney).

I also can not argue that today’s CGI-enabled effects are becoming more and more realistic. This is nothing to complain about, as long as movies don’t get stuck in the Uncanny Valley. The movie “Jurassic Park” made headlines for their use of believable CGI ‘actors’, and a no less honorable effort was made with the memorabe Jar-Jar Binks in the Star Wars films.

The issue I take is with the current popular 2D cartoon styles. Why do fingers need to be blocky? Why does every single thing on Saturday mornings either have to be manga-themed, or else so squared-off, unproportional and hyper-accented? Spongebob is debatable, since he is not based of any sort of real person-shaped figure, but do so many other shows and movies have to follow that style?

Take for example, some getting-outdated movies and current shows, as examples of this bothersome trend. Atlantis: the Lost empire, the 1999 adaptation of Tarzan, The Emperors New Groove (and the current Saturday cartoon “Emperor’s New School“, Kim Possible (which is actually a quality show), The Replacements, and Chaotic. All of these I have seen on TV in the past month with the exception of Tarzan, which can go hide in a cave for all that I enjoyed it.

I may be a bit nostalgic, or even more than a bit perhaps, but I remember while the plots of my favorite shows are potentially just as vapid and predictable as these new shows, at least the animation style looked a bit more polished and clean. People looked more like people. Cartoon animals were allowed to look more impressionistic.

Hanna-Barbera was king in my youth, and is a great example of the quality I am talking about. Likewise, if you ignore the cheesy 80’s references, Jem and the Holograms, Dungeons & Dragons, and G.I. Joe had characters that looked (to me) more like real people than today’s current fare. (Though both G.I.Joe Sigma Six, and the newest “He-man: Masters of the Universe are strikingly more manga in their newest incarnations, which isn’t bad.)

So I wonder, are my eyes just stuck in the past in terms of popular style, or is this trend more symptomatic of more/faster/cheaper cartoons in today’s financially competitive market?

And if this trend is due to slacking style on the part of the animators (likely due to cost constraints) are there any ways to recover? Or have we passed the peak of cartoon coolness?

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As a follow-up to this posting, regarding being mindful of food, here are my thoughts after doing that practice for two months.

Initially, the process of stopping for a brief moment was irritating after the first week. Intellectually, I understood that my process for this experiment was going take a bit of determination, but it still seemed that my “monkey mind” rallied against the effort for a few days there. Interesting….

Eventually, that rebellious nature gave up and I actually started to enjoy the vague challenge of tracing foodstuffs to its’ sources. It became almost second nature, and did not require much effort at all. Towards the end of the month, I didn’t even mentally make the connection in compartmentalized terms of Sandwich >> Bread >>Wheat + Sandwich >> Meatloaf >> Hamburger >> Cow + Garnish >> Gardens. ( alternately, Egg salad or marinated chicken strips for the protein part of the sandwich innards)
It became more of a matter of “Sandwich > process” and even that was not so much words and images as it was a vague sense of feeling “I understand the origins of the meal”.

In retrospect, I am very glad I did this little experiment, and while I no longer mentally rationalize the matter, I think it has helped subtly steer me towards a better eating regime. I still do not got out of my way to be totally organic, free range, and all natural, but when faced with a fried chicken sandwich at work or a salad for lunch (on the Rare times I do not pack leftovers) I am leaning towards the salad instead.

A side benefit of this change has made me not nearly so snacky during work. I used to nibble of sunflower seeds, or a bag of popcorn (bulk from this store, not the microwave kind), or more usually, a bag of candy. More recently, I skip the salty nuts and either grab some gorp I made, or just chew a stick of gum all afternoon to cancel the oral fixation of chewing something.

As part of my next experiment, since this one I consider a success, I will begin setting aside 15 minutes a day at work to sit quietly and meditate on some subject or other. At first, I am thinking I will just concentrate on de-stressing and relaxing while at work. I’ve done it for two days this week mostly to see if I could remember to take time out of my lunch and sit quietly in my car, instead of not leaving my desk and surfing the web. Seems like it will work out.

I’ll check back next new moon, to report on the newest incarnation of mindful moon-musings! See you then!

PS: Since twinkies were referenced in my original musing, and I am still an avid world of Warcraft player…here’s an image I found quite humorous.

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A little thought-experiment to keep my brain from draining through my ears today at work…(It’s hectic-slow, meaning lots to do in terms of build PC images, which involves sitting at desk for 3-87 hours watching status bars load and switching out CDs to load all the necessary software) Busy, but mindless and chains me to my desk for too long.

I’m coming up with cool scavenger hunt ideas which resolve around common turns of phrase, yet still provide a physical object to collect! And you get to help!

Mainly, this will be used by my guild in World of Warcraft, as a fun little event to break up the usual grinds and game quests, plus encourage social time between guild members. The challenge will also be judges on creativity of entries. Such as the first example of ’sword’. I’ve already had someone mention their gnome character will be grabbing a dagger off a giant yeti for his submission. “Hey, in my hands, it’s probably a 2h Sword, right?!?!!”

What I’ve come up with already are listed below. Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to comment on this post with other tasty tidbits of tongue-tickling tangibles.

Examples:

The pen is mightier than the ___sword___.

Birds of a ________ stick together.

All that glitters, is not ______.

Better your own ______ than another’s gold.

Those who live in glass houses, should not throw _______.

You can not judge a ______ by it’s cover.

Don’t put all your _______ in one basket.

An ______ a day keeps the doctors away.

Blood is thicker than _______.

The early bird get the ______.

A rolling ______ gathers no ______.

A watched _______ never boils.

Sticks and stones may break my ________.

You hit the ______ on the head.

April showers bring May ________.

Strike while the _____ is hot.

No smoke without _________.

Still ______ runs deep.

One bad ______ spoils the barrel.

Enjoy, and have fun!

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