Oh, my stars and garters!

Jim's Food Thursday

I punted this week and convinced Eric to celebrate Weird Food Thursday by going to Jim's with me. Jim's is a regional 24-hour chain, like a downscale Denny's but with more dinerish charm.

The Jim's we went to has the pitched roof, natural stone walls, and soaring glass windows of a 60s coffee shop and a vinyl-heavy 90s-renovated interior, the combined effect of which was undercut by the cheap CFL bulbs in the glass light fixtures. In other words, exactly what you'd expect from a regional diner chain.

The food was plentiful and the slice of lemon meringue we split at the end was bright and not too sweet. Sometimes you just need a plate of unremarkable diner food after a dumb day's work, you know?

Last week's Weird Food Thursday was much more exciting. I can't believe I didn't write about it until now. A friend of a friend works at a deer processing place, and sometimes people--idiots--just want the head and don't bother to pick up the rest. Sometimes the meat makes its way to us, this time in the form of a deer tenderloin.

I used this recipe* and added red pepper flakes and coarsely chopped garlic and backed off the sugar a bit.

I ran into trouble when I took the meat out of the container it had been marinating in overnight because until then I had failed to notice there was silver skin covering one side. Ugh.

My knife skills border on the abysmal and my butchering skills are nonexistent, so it took a lot of yanking and mangling and discarding far too much good meat to finally get the thing free of tissue and swaddled in bacon.

I then had a pleasant, uneventful 25 minutes while it roasted in the oven, then another dramatic near-disaster when dinner almost caught on fire as the fat-coated toothpicks lit up and began popping under the broiler flame while I was crisping up the bacon.

I learned a lot that night, but it still turned out pretty well. I didn't overcook it, and anyway bacon and sugar will make almost anything taste good.

*Favorite steps, of any recipe, ever:

"5. Wrap a piece of bacon around the very end of the tenderloin, securing the bacon strip with a toothpick.

"6. Repeat this process until the entire loin is wrapped in ten or so bacon 'loops.' The tenderloin should look like an arm with a bunch of wrist watches on it, the watches being the bacon strips."

Sunsetting

Farewell for 12 hours, impiteous death-orb.

Projects! Plugs!

I've been trying to get my ass in front of my workspace at least once a day. After a few days of feeling forced and self-conscious, it's starting to feel pretty good. Here are some of the results:

Skull and crossbones lino cut, inspired by a pair of Halloween-themed boxer shorts Eric has had forever. I cleaned the edges up a little after I took a picture. They're too big for buttons, but they might embellish cards nicely.

A summer's worth of work doodles, cut, arranged, and pasted on an 8x10 art board. It doesn't look nearly as cool as I had imagined it--things rarely do, right?--but I'm glad I didn't just throw all these dudes in the garbage or stick them in a drawer.

I am by no means the first person to have the idea of saving and compiling work doodles; please see Dan's Tuesday Meeting Doodles for his take. I like this person's doodles too! And a search for the tag "work doodles" in flickr coughs up some pretty great images. I'm sure there are thousands more.

The workers, we doodle.

This was a test to try out different adhesives and matte mediums. I dolled up the faces with colored pencils first, and so I am a little in love with Prismacolor pencils again. They're fun to play with because the color just dumps out of the lead if you press down and barely shades in if you're gentle.

More to come soon, I hope! In the meantime, you should visit krotpong.com, a new site featuring Eric's artwork and selected items from his vast and wide-ranging toy collection. Really, it's very good!

A bold and controversial statement

Eric vs. the garage door

My husband is funny.

Parchings

I'm not the only person in Austin who finds it wrenching that the same cool* breeze that's making daily life so much more tolerable in town this week is what's been feeding the horrific fires just 30 miles to our east. Nor am I the only one who's nervously eyeing the neighbor's giant dessicated bamboo stand while hosing down a crispy mass of shrubs along the back of the fence.

They can put the fires out, but the danger of more won't diminish until we get some rain, and apparently we aren't going to get any ever again. So the hell with it, since I'm already logged in I'm going to pour a glass of whiskey and post pictures of a few things that made me feel good this week:

There's a new Mexican place in the strip mall at Manor and Loyola, the third or fourth one in as many years in that location. The sopes I got were so-so, but Eric's torta was good, they serve their free chips with refried beans and salsa, and they have fruit cups and paletas. We will be back.

I doodle a lot. My desk is littered with scraps of paper and Post-Its with hapless faces scrawled on them until I get sick of the mess, throw it all away, and start anew. The other day I thought it might be nice to do something with all these little guys instead of sweeping them into a trashcan. I'm just not sure what that thing is yet. 

The goddamn dog makes me happy every goddamn day. Goddamnit.

*Or cooler. I'm not being cute when I say that days that only get up to 95-96 degrees feel fantastic after the Hell's fanged anus of a summer we've had.

Weird Food Thursday, super soup version

Last time I wrote about Weird Food Thursday I was trying to get into a routine of sorts. Then my sister got married, and then it was 900,000 degrees outside instead of the 875,000 degrees we'd grown accustomed to since May, and then I gave up on pretty much everything for a while because seriously, fuck it.

I started it up again last week, heat be damned, and what I made was so boring that I have forgotten what it was. Oh, wait, it was something akin to, but not quite, parmesan chicken. It was fine. Its main virtues were that because it was so boring I had more than enough left over to take to work the next day, and it used up a drawer full of zucchini that was about to go bad and an open bag of Panko that was flirting with freezer burn.

This Thursday on the other hand, is pretty exciting, but it violated the "whatever's on hand" principle in just about every way possible. I made a batch of Tom Kha, which meant earlier this week we had to go to like three different places and spend $35 on ingredients like kaffir lime leaves and galanga roots.