Because I grew up cooking in the great Southern "no measuring" tradition, I am the Zatoichi of the kitchen. I can hear when my waffles are done from two rooms away. I can feel when I've got the ratios just right in my cornbread mix or pancake batter. I can sense when it's time to turn the oven off.
It's awesome when you finally get the hang of it and can just get in there and wing it; but it is a frustrating way to learn to cook.
When my mom and grandma were teaching me how to cook, they did remember to mention that one could always consult a recipe, but for things like pancakes, cornbread, eggs, and other common staples, the conversation went much more like this:
"Okay, so you get your cornbread mix and your eggs and milk, and you do this." [Pours apparently random amount of ingredients into bowl and starts stirring.]
"Wait, what? How much do I need?"
[Grinding pausse.] "Uhh...well, you just kinda...here, this is what it's supposed to look like. You put in enough until it looks like this."
"O...kaaaaay..."
"Then you cook it until it's done."
"Wait, how long do I cook it? How do I know when it's done?!"
"When it looks done."
[My head asplode.]
I always wondered why--why cook like this? Why fly into the kitchen armed with an idea of what that bread product is supposed to look like at the end result and just ignore the plethora of gadgets and doodads and measuring utensils available to the modern kitchen? Why the heck does it seem like so many Southerners do this? From my great-grandma's Red Velvet cake (which she confessed she couldn't write out a recipe for, unless she "got in there and made one") to my mom's cornbread, it seemed like everyone was just winging it through a pretty damn complex skill set.
Then I thought about my great-grandma, sharecropping on a farm in rural North Carolina, with thirteen kids and virtually no money. If her biscuit recipe called for eight cups of flour, she might not have had it. And she certainly couldn't have just nipped around to the store and picked up some more. She would have had to make it work with what she had, no matter what she had. And if she was cooking with a wood stove, forget the fancy pre-heating timers and oven thermometers that keep our temperatures even and precise. When you live in poverty, like so many of my ancestresses have, you've gotta cook based on the end results, because if you get stuck on Step Two because you don't have enough eggs, you don't eat.
So you figure out how to substitute, stretch your ingredients, how to wing it. You can hop into any kitchen you're presented with and throw something together. You can tweak the heat of the oven and stove by feel until it gets to right where you need it. You can recognize the signs of doneness in a piece of meat or a pan of muffins and cut the heat at the right time, no matter what the timer says. You can re-create flavors, or adjust them, even when you don't have quite the ingredient called for. You end up learning a ton about food chemistry; even if you're no Alton Brown, you know what's going to happen if you use melted butter instead of softened. And there's always someone a phone call away who can explain to you why your pinto beans keep coming out tasting weird.
I must say, having learned a good deal of this slapdash way of cooking, it's very freeing. You learn to trust yourself and your instincts, you're not afraid of experimenting, and even if you lose all your recipe cards in a...*ahem*...freak accidental kitchen fire, you can at least still make beans and cornbread.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Did I Just Channel My Mother?
I had my first-ever Mom Voice moment today. You know that voice: the booming, authoritative, near-militaristic sharpness that suddenly explodes from somewhere above you and demands to know if you've lost your damn mind. The voice that grabs right ahold of your brain-stem and forces you to freeze in your tracks and drop whatever foolishness you were doing. That voice.
I worked my next-to-last day in the party goods store today. We were crazy busy, because we've had a break in the cold weather. I was helping a co-worker re-assemble a display, and I heard, from around the corner, the distinct "ting, ting" of two wineglasses knocking together. I poked my head around the corner and saw a little girl, maybe five years old, who had picked up two of our whisper-thin and overpriced wineglasses, and was banging them together. Like bells. I popped around there immediately, pointed my finger at her, and boomed out, "UNH-UH. NO. NO." Not in a panic; not as a request; as a command, not to be disobeyed under any circumstances, in a tone that brooked no argument. Her father sprang into action, snatched the glasses out of her hand, picked her up, and immediately started apologizing to me in a tone and body language that surprised me somewhat. He looked at me like a guy whose boss has just caught him looking at porn on the work computer. I just said, back in my normal customer service Inside Voice, "I'm sorry sir; we can't play with those." He nodded and skedaddled.
My co-worker smiled knowingly at me and said, "You're going to be a great mom."
Hells yeah.
I worked my next-to-last day in the party goods store today. We were crazy busy, because we've had a break in the cold weather. I was helping a co-worker re-assemble a display, and I heard, from around the corner, the distinct "ting, ting" of two wineglasses knocking together. I poked my head around the corner and saw a little girl, maybe five years old, who had picked up two of our whisper-thin and overpriced wineglasses, and was banging them together. Like bells. I popped around there immediately, pointed my finger at her, and boomed out, "UNH-UH. NO. NO." Not in a panic; not as a request; as a command, not to be disobeyed under any circumstances, in a tone that brooked no argument. Her father sprang into action, snatched the glasses out of her hand, picked her up, and immediately started apologizing to me in a tone and body language that surprised me somewhat. He looked at me like a guy whose boss has just caught him looking at porn on the work computer. I just said, back in my normal customer service Inside Voice, "I'm sorry sir; we can't play with those." He nodded and skedaddled.
My co-worker smiled knowingly at me and said, "You're going to be a great mom."
Hells yeah.
Tutorial Tutorial
Oh boy. One of the difficulties I'm facing in my career as an artist is terribly embarrassing: I'm not a master of Photoshop. I can do many things with it, and have in fact been given some basic training and great tips on using it to color comics, which is what I need it for. But, like I said, I'm no master, and there are some basic functions and tools in that program about which I have just not got a single clue yet.
Unfortunately, Photoshop isn't one of those intuitive programs (for me at least) where you can just dicker around with a tool or setting for a few seconds and go, "Ohhh, that's what that's for. Neat," and then immediately apply it to maximum effect. Nope. That mofo is technical and complicated, and while the help menu manual is a good place to start, sometimes you just need someone to show you how to do something specific.
Enter the helpful masses of friends and colleagues with a single piece of advice: "You can just Google Photoshop tutorials." I don't know which Google they're using, but so far I have not stumbled upon a rich cache of applicable knowledge. No, in my often fruitless searches, I've learned pretty much one thing: there's not hardly a soul on the planet who understands what the word "tutorial" means, much less how to make a good one. So here it is:
Mama's Tutorial Tutorial.
The point of a tutorial is to teach someone something. Someone who knows nothing about what you're about to do in your video. With me so far? Okay. Let's start with some common mistakes:
Questions to answer at every flapjackin' step of the process:
I know this sounds tedious, maybe even frustrating, but remember: you decided to make a tutorial. You need to teach this to a bunch of people who may not know jack shit about what you just did. If you're just sitting there saying, "Now we grab our Pen tool" and using your hotkeys, some poor kid in the audience may be eight steps behind now, going, "Wait, what? Hold on, I still haven't adjusted my Tolerance!"
One last piece of advice, for the more advanced tutorial makers: it's cool to discuss theory; please remember to pause a bit when you do, and keep discussing those basics--which tool, where, and why.
Now, armed with this pearl of wisdom...get out there and...somebody help me with my Photoshop. (Or, if you do know of a particularly good video/text tutorial that hits all the high notes, feel free to send me a link.)
Unfortunately, Photoshop isn't one of those intuitive programs (for me at least) where you can just dicker around with a tool or setting for a few seconds and go, "Ohhh, that's what that's for. Neat," and then immediately apply it to maximum effect. Nope. That mofo is technical and complicated, and while the help menu manual is a good place to start, sometimes you just need someone to show you how to do something specific.
Enter the helpful masses of friends and colleagues with a single piece of advice: "You can just Google Photoshop tutorials." I don't know which Google they're using, but so far I have not stumbled upon a rich cache of applicable knowledge. No, in my often fruitless searches, I've learned pretty much one thing: there's not hardly a soul on the planet who understands what the word "tutorial" means, much less how to make a good one. So here it is:
Mama's Tutorial Tutorial.
The point of a tutorial is to teach someone something. Someone who knows nothing about what you're about to do in your video. With me so far? Okay. Let's start with some common mistakes:
- A speed video of you blasting through a color job, start to finish, is not a tutorial. It's a demonstration of your skills, and more entertainment than education. If you're going to do a time-elapse video of you coloring a piece, you are hereby not allowed to call it a tutorial.
- Consider the fact that your audience is going to need to follow along with you. If you're not going to be featured talking, put whatever music you like over your video and position your damn camera so that people can get a good, clear view of your workspace. They will need to see what tools and settings you're using to achieve the effect. Maybe throw in some pop-up labels and info.
- If you are going to be talking, for blog's sake, be specific as hell! If your video features long pauses in between you giving lame, "I'm not comfortable talking to people" statements like, "Well, we're gonna use some green for this...there, that's pretty much done...I guess you can kinda get the basic idea here," UR DOIN IT WRONG.
Questions to answer at every flapjackin' step of the process:
- What tool did you use to do that?
- Why is it the best tool for the job?
- Where can I find this tool?
- What settings, if any, need to be applied beyond default?
- Where can I adjust those settings?
- How does one apply the tool? Do we need to double-click? Hold down Shift?
I know this sounds tedious, maybe even frustrating, but remember: you decided to make a tutorial. You need to teach this to a bunch of people who may not know jack shit about what you just did. If you're just sitting there saying, "Now we grab our Pen tool" and using your hotkeys, some poor kid in the audience may be eight steps behind now, going, "Wait, what? Hold on, I still haven't adjusted my Tolerance!"
One last piece of advice, for the more advanced tutorial makers: it's cool to discuss theory; please remember to pause a bit when you do, and keep discussing those basics--which tool, where, and why.
Now, armed with this pearl of wisdom...get out there and...somebody help me with my Photoshop. (Or, if you do know of a particularly good video/text tutorial that hits all the high notes, feel free to send me a link.)
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Well, I'm Still in My Pajamas
One of the great things about being a Fake Housewife is that you're not always on camera, so nobody expects you to dress up just to flit around your house on a Prozac-and-Cosmopolitans high. But hey, I made the effort to at least coordinate my pajamas outfit--these fuzzy leopard pants match my pink robe perfectly, dammit. I've even got matching slippers. How's that for fancy?
I'm still in my pajamas because one of my standing rules for a successful day is to never do any work before breakfast. You may be wondering, "Who the heck works before breakfast, anyway?" Scattered housewives who've always had to adhere to a pretty regular schedule and have no clue what to do with themselves now that they're home all the time, that's who. Really, I think the biggest adjustment to "Work From Home" life has been having to set my own schedule, all day, every day. I know, I know, "Oh, boo-hoo, you poor thing, you mean you get to do what you want, all the damn time? Call the ACLU, it's a human rights violation!" But, like many people my age, given an inordinate amount of free time, I will do fuck-all with it. I will sit and dither and realize that the entire day has gone by and I have accomplished absolutely nothing. So I've had to start making rules. And I've discovered that if I pop out of bed and just start working on things, I get bogged down in little details, lose my "big-picture" focus, and forget to eat at all. No work before breakfast.
Speaking of breakfast, here's y'all a simple recipe. You can make it in the microwave, so you know it's extra-classy!
Mama's Mexi-Mocha Mix:
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp baking cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Cayenne pepper
1 cup milk, or something like it (soy milk if you like, or straight half-and-half if you're feeling decadent)
Freshly brewed coffee of your choice.
In a substantial mug, combine your sugar, cocoa, vanilla, and cinnamon. I use just a dash of cayenne when I make this, but if you want more, have at it. Pour your milk in and give it a little stir. Your cocoa's going to float to the top pretty much no matter what you do, but it's fun to watch, so that's all right. Put your mug in the microwave on a middlin' setting (if you've got a "Beverage" setting, use that), and nuke it for a minute at a time, stirring in between. If you've got a small whisk, that works even better, because it breaks up the cocoa. Once you've got that hot, spicy chocolate steaming like you like it, add some fresh, hot coffee and enjoy the hell out of it.
You can also use a milk steamer if you've got one, or you can put your ingredients in a small saucepan instead of a mug and slowly heat it on the stove. You'll have to stir it pretty constantly to keep it from sticking or forming a skin, and that's where the whisk comes in handy again, but you end up with a very smooth mixture. I like the kick that the cayenne adds to it; it's a real eye-opener. Mmm, delicious spicy coffee.
Now that we've had our coffee, here's what's on the To-Do for today:
Well, it's Thursday, so that means I'm heading over to reddit/OneParagraph to do maintenance. I co-moderate this great little forum dedicated to very short stories--only one paragraph long. On Wednesdays I publish the "Weekly Challenge" feature, where I give the writers a subject, technique, or idea to incorporate, and on Thursdays I update the master list of all the challenges we've had. It's a great place; lots of good reads in there.
There's always an ongoing cleaning and organization project at the old homestead, of course.
And I'm going to try to figure out a crochet pattern for an amazing bacon and eggs scarf I saw online, because it kicks ass. (And hey, it's breakfast themed!)
Then I've got to start cataloging the art pieces I've got lying around; I'm set to do a big scanning project later this week or early next week, and that stuff isn't going to organize itself.
Anyhow; wherever you be, and whatever you're wearing, pajamas or otherwise, I hope you have a kickass day.
I'm still in my pajamas because one of my standing rules for a successful day is to never do any work before breakfast. You may be wondering, "Who the heck works before breakfast, anyway?" Scattered housewives who've always had to adhere to a pretty regular schedule and have no clue what to do with themselves now that they're home all the time, that's who. Really, I think the biggest adjustment to "Work From Home" life has been having to set my own schedule, all day, every day. I know, I know, "Oh, boo-hoo, you poor thing, you mean you get to do what you want, all the damn time? Call the ACLU, it's a human rights violation!" But, like many people my age, given an inordinate amount of free time, I will do fuck-all with it. I will sit and dither and realize that the entire day has gone by and I have accomplished absolutely nothing. So I've had to start making rules. And I've discovered that if I pop out of bed and just start working on things, I get bogged down in little details, lose my "big-picture" focus, and forget to eat at all. No work before breakfast.
Speaking of breakfast, here's y'all a simple recipe. You can make it in the microwave, so you know it's extra-classy!
Mama's Mexi-Mocha Mix:
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp baking cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Cayenne pepper
1 cup milk, or something like it (soy milk if you like, or straight half-and-half if you're feeling decadent)
Freshly brewed coffee of your choice.
In a substantial mug, combine your sugar, cocoa, vanilla, and cinnamon. I use just a dash of cayenne when I make this, but if you want more, have at it. Pour your milk in and give it a little stir. Your cocoa's going to float to the top pretty much no matter what you do, but it's fun to watch, so that's all right. Put your mug in the microwave on a middlin' setting (if you've got a "Beverage" setting, use that), and nuke it for a minute at a time, stirring in between. If you've got a small whisk, that works even better, because it breaks up the cocoa. Once you've got that hot, spicy chocolate steaming like you like it, add some fresh, hot coffee and enjoy the hell out of it.
You can also use a milk steamer if you've got one, or you can put your ingredients in a small saucepan instead of a mug and slowly heat it on the stove. You'll have to stir it pretty constantly to keep it from sticking or forming a skin, and that's where the whisk comes in handy again, but you end up with a very smooth mixture. I like the kick that the cayenne adds to it; it's a real eye-opener. Mmm, delicious spicy coffee.
Now that we've had our coffee, here's what's on the To-Do for today:
Well, it's Thursday, so that means I'm heading over to reddit/OneParagraph to do maintenance. I co-moderate this great little forum dedicated to very short stories--only one paragraph long. On Wednesdays I publish the "Weekly Challenge" feature, where I give the writers a subject, technique, or idea to incorporate, and on Thursdays I update the master list of all the challenges we've had. It's a great place; lots of good reads in there.
There's always an ongoing cleaning and organization project at the old homestead, of course.
And I'm going to try to figure out a crochet pattern for an amazing bacon and eggs scarf I saw online, because it kicks ass. (And hey, it's breakfast themed!)
Then I've got to start cataloging the art pieces I've got lying around; I'm set to do a big scanning project later this week or early next week, and that stuff isn't going to organize itself.
Anyhow; wherever you be, and whatever you're wearing, pajamas or otherwise, I hope you have a kickass day.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Who the Hell Am I, and What the Heck Am I Doing Here?
It's a good question, and one I find myself asking just frequently enough to keep me grounded.
Who are you?
I'm a Fake Housewife. I'm a Southern gal and a progressive skeptical rationalist atheist feminist damnliberal who wants nothing more than to move to a country cottage with her husband and bake cakes and raise babies. I'm a Redditor and an artist.
What are you doing here?
Kind of a long story. I'm sure we've all felt that the economy in the last few years has been kind of like a cheap carnival roller coaster operated by a junkie. (Or at least I have.) I've been on one hell of a ride with that thing; employed, laid off, unemployed, underemployed, and mostly hanging on for dear life, wondering if I'm going to make it and why a smart kid with experience and a degree can't seem to make it out of poverty. A little over a year ago my then-fiance and I packed it up and moved to the big city of Atlanta to pursue my dream of becoming a freelance comic book artist. I had a part-time retail job just to get a regular paycheck, but I dumped it recently so I could focus on art and spend more time with my family. I keep house, I cook, I draw pictures, and now I blog.
That's How Mama Likes What Now?
If you're a fan of Amy Poehler and the twisted shenanigans on "Upright Citizens Brigade," it all makes sense. Some days I just feel like a cynical, slightly trashed and slightly trashy broad who's a step or two away from a few boozy shenanigans myself.
What's a Fake Housewife?
You've seen them "Real Housewives" shows, right? If not, you're not missing much. It's just a series of romps by a bunch of tarted-up skanks with too much money and attitude but a strangely low amount of self-esteem. They don't work, they don't raise their own kids, they don't clean their own houses; they really don't do much but drink and fight and go shopping, it seems like. If that's what it takes to be a "Real Housewife," then I'm a gatdamn fake. I still make time for drinking, though.
Who are you?
I'm a Fake Housewife. I'm a Southern gal and a progressive skeptical rationalist atheist feminist damnliberal who wants nothing more than to move to a country cottage with her husband and bake cakes and raise babies. I'm a Redditor and an artist.
What are you doing here?
Kind of a long story. I'm sure we've all felt that the economy in the last few years has been kind of like a cheap carnival roller coaster operated by a junkie. (Or at least I have.) I've been on one hell of a ride with that thing; employed, laid off, unemployed, underemployed, and mostly hanging on for dear life, wondering if I'm going to make it and why a smart kid with experience and a degree can't seem to make it out of poverty. A little over a year ago my then-fiance and I packed it up and moved to the big city of Atlanta to pursue my dream of becoming a freelance comic book artist. I had a part-time retail job just to get a regular paycheck, but I dumped it recently so I could focus on art and spend more time with my family. I keep house, I cook, I draw pictures, and now I blog.
That's How Mama Likes What Now?
If you're a fan of Amy Poehler and the twisted shenanigans on "Upright Citizens Brigade," it all makes sense. Some days I just feel like a cynical, slightly trashed and slightly trashy broad who's a step or two away from a few boozy shenanigans myself.
What's a Fake Housewife?
You've seen them "Real Housewives" shows, right? If not, you're not missing much. It's just a series of romps by a bunch of tarted-up skanks with too much money and attitude but a strangely low amount of self-esteem. They don't work, they don't raise their own kids, they don't clean their own houses; they really don't do much but drink and fight and go shopping, it seems like. If that's what it takes to be a "Real Housewife," then I'm a gatdamn fake. I still make time for drinking, though.
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