Recipe time again

For dinner tonight I made a soup. I suppose you could call it a kind of pho maybe? It was a mushroom/veggie broth with rice stick noodles, egg, and napa. For someone like me, whose tastes tend to run toward the mildly spiced, it was quite yummy. It may look similar to the tricked-out ramen I posted earlier, but it tasted completely different. The ingredients:

a handful of dried oyster mushrooms
two shallots
two small cloves of garlic
1/2 cube of vegetable broth
handful of maifun rice sticks
1 egg
couple handfuls of coarsely chopped napa
tamari
sesame oil
salt/pepper/ginger

I soaked the mushrooms and shallots in ~two cups of water over low heat, for maybe 20 minutes. I then removed the mushrooms and shallots and added the broth cube and the finely chopped garlic, a splash of tamari, a splash of sesame oil, a wee bit of salt and some pepper. I also added a sprinkle of powdered ginger (in a fit of laziness; I had some fresh ginger and it would have been super included in with the initial step). I turned up the heat to medium and added the rice sticks. Once they looked to be nearly done, I scrambled the egg (vegans: cubed tofu can be deliciously used in place of the egg, I only used egg b/c we were out of tofu) and drizzled it into the simmering broth. I then dumped in the napa and let it all simmer for just a few minutes. That's it! Easy, not bad for you, delicious.

Shooting shows

I haven't been to a rock show with my camera in months (quite a drought for me, I've been ill), but I've been thinking about concert photography lately. I've recently come to a realization about what kinds of concert shots I like best and which particular kind I am beginning to find rather stale. This particular decision is probably something that pros might feel is rock show photography 101, but to a rank amateur like me, it's something of a watershed.

So here to the left is a good example of the type of photo I've realized I no longer really like (I'll use photos of mine to illustrate, since I don't want to use others' photos as examples of stuff I don't like (we're all love here at SVD)): a singer, often with a guitar though not always, standing in front of a mic on a stand, in the act of singing. The singer's mouth is always very close to the mic, so much so that the mic is obscuring part of their face. Because the singer is standing singing into a mic on a stand, and often playing a guitar, they're usually not doing much else.

Here (to the right) is another example--from slightly different angle but fundamentally the same deal. There isn't much motion in these, real or implied, and that's precisely why I've taken so many like this: I'm most likely to get a crisp photo and not a fuzzy blur when the singer has paused to deliver a line. That's just practical, but it's also kind of lazy. Sure, in some low-lit clubs, I'm just not going to get much else without a super-fast lens or a camera that goes up to 3200 ISO, but it's not impossible: looking over my Flickr set of rock show photography, I see that even in the darkest club in town I've had some luck.

And what good is a rule (for lack of a better word; in no way do I claim that this is an actual rule) without exceptions? Of course there are great photos of this type, though I'm pretty sure I haven't taken any. I do like this one, though. I also have noticed that I don't have this same distaste for photos of singers actually holding mics, but I suppose that's easily attributable to fact that they're usually doing something interesting with their hands. This is going to sound corny, but like so many things in life, I guess the best path is to keep challenging myself, to keep constantly trying new ways of approaching a situation and not to ever let myself feel like I know what I'm doing. April is a good month for shows here, I can't wait to get started (all over again).

Have mercy on these poor fools

Everywhere I turn lately I read someone else dumping hate on the new RJD2 album The Third Hand. Which is a shame to me, because I think it's a great record. I mean I understand--if you love an artist over the course of several albums, you can be forgiven for having a hard time adjusting when that artist fundamentally changes their sound. As a heretofore only casual listener to RJD2, I certainly had fewer barriers to liking a record made entirely of songs from a guy who's loved as a DJ and hip-hop producer, but I think they're good songs, and ones that I'd hope even those with serious misgivings about the format change could come to love. It's funky, synthy, catchy stuff; I liked it instantly. Seek out a track or two and see if you agree with me.

Avant

I've been listening to quite a bit of contemporary classical and avant garde music lately. Much of it came to me courtesy of The Avant Garde Project, which provides high-quality digital files of avant garde music that was only issued on vinyl and is now out of print. The list of recordings offered for download (as full-size .flac files) from the site is impressive: composers such as Morton Subotnick, John Cage, Jacob Druckman, Toru Takemitsu, and many others. New recordings are made available on a regular basis, first through bittorrent, and then subsequently archived on the site. If you're interested but don't want to make the harddrive space committment of downloading the .flac files, the Analog Arts Ensemble's ANAblog makes .mp3s available of some of the tracks from these collections.

Tricked-out ramen

This time when I had ramen for dinner, it wasn't quite so lazy. And boy, it was delicious! My recipe for tricked-out ramen is as follows:

1 bag of ramen (I used a mild-seasoned mushroom flavor)
a handful of cubed firm tofu
a handful of chopped mushrooms (I used fresh enoki)
a handful of chopped napa cabbage
a splash of sesame oil
a couple splashes of tamari or soy sauce

Boil 1 - 2 cups of water, add the tofu and mushrooms. Add the ramen seasoning packet and a splash of soy sauce. Cook for a couple minutes and then add the noodles. As soon as they begin to soften add the cabbage. Cook for 2-3 minutes. Remove noodles to a bowl, add back some soup according to your preference. Drizzle with sesame oil and soy sauce/tamari. Enjoy!

Other possible additions: finely chopped garlic or ginger, green onions, spinach, or other veggies.

The Moon Rose Red

Spectacular lunar eclipse tonight; I watched it rise through the trees, already in total eclipse by the time it came into view. It was beautiful, overwhelmingly so. The neighborhood dogs were going nuts. Now higher in the sky, it has brightened and whitened almost back to its full self.

I made zucchini muffins today, but I had ramen for dinner. One blow against laziness and one truly knockout blow for it. It's okay because I had fresh juice for lunch: two carrots (one medium, one quite small), one pear (bosc), one tangerine, some wheatgrass. Very sweet, super delicious. Still, I need to find more non-orange sweet things to juice.

Oh hi

Remember me? It's been some time. I abandoned this blog after I got my own domain & started writing there. But soon I started feeling very self-conscious about my posts over there, paralyzingly so. I'm not sure why, I think it has something to do with the fact that the domain name is my own name, and I felt like each post was presenting me to the world. That, and I didn't update that often, so each post was up for so long that I was feeling the pressure of making it good enough to withstand the test of time. And in internet time, a month is forever. So I redesigned my site into more of a personal portal, with links to my various internet presences--my pages on Flickr, Last.fm, etc. I only wrote on my LJ, and not that often.

So yesterday something possessed me to check out my old blog here, and I was surprised by how relaxed I sounded in those old posts--a quality that was certainly missing from my recent writing. I decided to revive this, because I think it's a good exercise for me to write more often, even if it's about everyday stuff like movies and music.