Inspired by Nirmala's yellow dal soup, I made this lentil soup without my favorite herbs, garlic and onion. I used what typically constitutes a bouquet garni—Italian parsley, fresh thyme, and bay leaf—with diced carrots and celery. To add complexity to the flavor I added Italian tomato paste with Italian parsley and California sherry whose alcohol content burned away with the cooking so should not affect the sattvic quality of the soup. The chives and parley sprig are edible garnish.
I am shame-faced to say that I had not organized my digital photo collection until today. Amazing, huh? I had a sense of the year the photos were taken and would search in Bridge to find them. Actually I usually didn't view the photos I took away from home when I got back home! This is from our 2004 trip to Central Europe. We visited Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria, basically staying in each country's capital city. In a way I am glad I had not worked on these images. I know more about how to process digital images today than I did when I started shooting with a Sony Mavica digital camera in 1999!
I was at Nirmala and Thakor the other day. As usual, before I could leave, Nirmala had a bag of food for me to take home. I had them for lunch yesterday and called her later. The cauliflower and broccoli flowerets were wonderful! They had a fresh taste, simple, without a hint of the Indian spices that she loves to use with her food.
The secret was to put a little oil and salt into the water in which I boil the vegetables, take them out when still crunchy, and voila! She uses soy oil but it tasted fine with the canola oil that I use. Simplicity wins the day! The oil brings out the flavor in the vegetables. Nirmala told me the technique works for carrots and potatoes, too, except they'd need a little longer boiling.
This image is from an unfinished photo shoot with Greg and his girlfriend, Jazmyn. More from this shoot on http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/
It's a lazy, summer's day. The air conditioner is humming away at the ninety-degree heat outside. I went out to the pharmacy and came back to the cool as soon as I can. Time to catch up on processing images. More of these images are posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/
The best meal sometimes is what I put together in a rush. This was chicken salad in olive oil stuffed with Romaine lettuce, green pepper, and ranch dressing between two thin slices of Italian sourdough bread. Magnifico!
The Lumix continues to provide me with images with which to learn to use the Camera Raw 5.3 Tone Curve, to use the basic adjustments for shadow and highlight. I especially like the effect of increasing black to make the colors richer and balancing that by increasing brightness a little.
Summer is in full swing. Just days after the summer solstice, it stays light past nine o'clock when the dark then suddenly falls. The light for an hour or so just before the light disappears makes for wonderful images. Summertime, the song says, when the living is easy but in the middle of the day the sunlight is relentless and cruel. I have to water the tomato, pepper and basil plants on the deck nearly everyday or they wilt in the intense abundance of sun energy.
Colors and shapes are becoming more important to me as an image-maker. After a day working at the computer I take a walk in the evening after the heat has dissipated somewhat. With Indiana now on Daylight Savings Time, the light lingers till after nine and then suddenly is gone. I have taken most of my pictures recently when I go for my walk in the evening, taking advantage of the quickly changing light.
I have been taking my Lumix DMC-FX50 when I take my evening walks. It takes good images but the main advantage is its small size. My Canon cameras are too large and heavy to lug. A similar experience is using my small Sony HDV handycam instead of the heavy HRV-Z1U to shoot video. The small size devices have allowed me to take more shots than I would have with the heavier devices. No wonder the industry keeps miniaturizing. Digital videomakers are especially prone to take unlikely consumer devices to create content that they then post-produce with software into amazing products!
Reflections on the water are a common enough ploy but there are few things in land-bound Indiana to compete with the gorgeousness of sky and water, especially late in the afternoon.
Life is what happens while you're busy planning it. Two days already into official summer! It feels like just days ago that winter cold and snow were upon us, just weeks ago when I began my sabbatical in December 2007 that led to my departure from Lafayette Clinic. A lot of changes!
My morning routine has stabilized. For a while, no longer having to get up early to prepare to leave the house for work, I slept late. With daylight arriving earlier in the spring I began waking up as I used to when I had to drive 70 miles to Lafayette. I take my shower, do some yoga and meditate, then get my cup of Senior's coffee at McDonald's, visit in the garden for a while, maybe take a few photos with my small Lumix, then come back inside to start working at the computer. I break for lunch after one o'clock, fix the meal, sometimes cooking enough for leftovers for supper on another day, watch Charlie Rose or a cooking program on Create.tv, and start doing tutorials or working on photo or video projects until six or seven. I take my walk or go to the gym for a couple of hours. Alas, Bally is closing today. I bought my membership there a year before my condominium was finished in 1986. I've been going there for 23 years. I am sad to see it go but the change also opens up opportunities. I prefer to walk outdoors in the summer anyway. I might inflate my exercise ball and start doing weights at home again. I stopped weight training three years ago. Every morning in the shower I look at my wasting muscles and think I should do something about them.
The sabbatical was to explore doing professional videos. I had taken a certification class in FCP in the summer of 2007. Instead I found myself going into digital photography. I shot my first model in May 2008 after a trip to the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy. That was the first trip I took without my usual travel companion, my older sister, Merma. Shooting Kaleb was an eye-opener. Shooting landscapes and travel scenes is one thing but to have a live person in the studio (the shoot was my first using studio lights) was an inexpressible joy. My video camcorders gathered dust.
I started using the small Sony consumer camcorder again early this year but didn't shoot anything significant until I shot Babu and Visha's Jain guests this past weekend. I started learning iMovie '09 last month and am halfway through completing my first video in two years, a travel documentary of our Adriatic Sea cruise in 2007. For starters, I am doing just a portion of the cruise, the stopover in Dubrovnik. My next project is editing the interview with the Jain nuns. The more I work with video-editing, the more ideas come for other shoots I'd like to do. Travel videos have a commercial potential although I would have to shoot better videos first to produce professional videos that I could maybe market to tour members or tour companies. Next I want to do a documentary on the spiritual lives of ordinary people. I already have three video shoots for this project. These clips are a little better than the travel clips. Shot indoors, I've used a tripod for the camcorders so the clips don't need to be stabilized, a vital feature of iMovie. I'd like to be working in Final Cut Pro Suite again before summer is over.
The AT2020 USB mike arrived yesterday from B&H Video in NYC. It is solidly built and plug-and-play on the Mac. I used it for a short voice-over on the video on Dubrovnik that I am working on. Nice clarity. The tone is warm and my mouth was more than a foot away from it. I am very happy with it. My next tool for video: a battery-powered daylight-color Litepanels MicroPro released at NAB last April. But I can wait to get that. I have tons of video tapes to practice on. I am still using iMovie and learning to use GarageBand. I figure I can start with the simpler video and sound program and advance to FCP, Soundtrack Pro and Shake as I get some experience (and confidence) putting together complete videos.
Soup is easy to fix for supper and with home-made stock it is delicious. I am always amazed at how easy and simple it is to fix a satisfying meal with a minimum of ingredients.
I have not done any more work on learning Photoshop other than what I learn by trial and error when I process my daily batch of photos. I should. There is so much yet for me to learn. This is from Brandon's first photo shoot with me. I've processed a tiny fraction of the images. I was struggling to use a new Canon 70-200 mm lens during the shoot. If I had the space in my studio, the lens would be perfect. In the limited space I have, the 24-70 mm lens works better for me. I want to do more figures studies in future shoots. Meanwhile I am slowly, laboriously, moving back to doing videos. I am starting with literal baby steps. I am a fourth through finishing a travel video on a cruise to Dubrovnik in Croatia in 2007.
So many times we get so self-absorbed that we begin to believe we are the sole source of change and inspiration in our lives. Religions help some people realize they are not alone and that many and more powerful forces abound outside the realm they control or dream they own. Since having more time to spend at home I've slowly gotten back into cooking meals for myself. In the 1980s, after my first encounter with American Buddhism, I became lacto-ovo-vegetarian in an excess of excitement and devotion. For a while adopting the restriction was exhilarating. Going out to eat became a joy because choosing what I was going to order was so simple! Alas! I gained weight on the diet and a couple of years later developed gastric ulcers from subsisting on raw vegetables at lunchtime at work.
Back to the drawing table. In the last couple of years, as work became more intolerable, I found myself seeking comfort food and ingesting more sugar and fat in my diet. I threw caution to the wind and even started eating red meat again. My body swelled up again. Deciding to eat at home and cook my own meals was in part motivated by a desire to eat carefully and joyfully prepared meals again and healthier foods.
I didn't realize that I had gotten stuck again until last November when a random blood sugar showed my fasting level in the borderline. My bad cholesterol was high but was balanced by a very high good cholesterol. I could return to metabolic balance if I lost weight. Easier said than done. I did lose some ten pounds after I left the clinic but my weight has stayed steady for the past year.
Meanwhile I discovered an olive oil spray and non-stick pans. Soon I was pan-roasting everything. Vegetables, including greens we normally think of as salad stuff, tasted wonderful caramelized with a smidgen of extra virgin olive oil. The food didn't even need salt. But once again I got stuck.
The Banthias have re-ignited my interest in vegetarian meals. I've always loved the many cuisines of the world. Many classic and traditional dishes in these cuisines are either vegetarian or can be easily cooked without meat products. I am not sure I want to go all-vegetarian again. Weight is a consideration. For now, I am going back to chicken breast and seafood along with lots of vegetables.
I stewed these boneless chicken breasts with a bouquet garni, refrigerated them and when cool pulled them apart into slivers. I was going to use the chicken meat in Oriental noodle soups and keep some for a mayonnaise-based chicken salad. While making the latter I found myself concocting this salad that used red-wine vinegar, lemon juice and olive oil as dressing. The taste is refreshingly light. It's tasting the basic ingredients again, without overwhelming them with fats and sauces.
I am amazed, and not a little humbled, how the quantity of light affects the evocative quality of images. Sunbursts through clouds, starring effects of light, and, of course, the way we use studio lights to utilize highlights and shadows–all are tricks of the trade, but tricks are the core of what makes images so powerful. Shooting world-shaking events or exotic landscapes and people does not require much attention to light short of making sure your subject is well enough lit but taking pictures of the workaday world in which we live that we see these images with reawakened eyes requires a closer study of light and its effects.
More images of this shoot at www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71
Swiss Chard is expensive, compared to other greens, but pan-roasted with a little extra virgin olive oil, crumbled Chinese hot pepper, and garlic slivers, finished off with a tad of unsweetened butter, it is a treat worth the price! After I turned off the heat, I covered the nonstick pan and allowed the vegetable to rest and re-moisten. It is great as part of a grilled-vegetable lunch platter.
I have two chapters left before finishing the two tutorials on using iMovie for making videos. iMovie has come a long way! I think I can make decent videos just with this software. After completing at least one video using iMovie I plan to go back to using the more complicated Final Cut Pro that professional moviemakers use to create digital movies.
My first project is editing a short video on the Dubrovnik part of the Italian cruise I took in 2006. I love travelogues. Before my sister persuaded me to take my first trip to Europe (Spain in 2001), I was content to be an armchair traveler. I still have one huge bookcase laden with thick photo-filled books about every conceivable country in the world. Through the years I have accumulated dozens of video tapes that I shot on many of the trips I've taken. They were unusable prior to iMovie coming up with this stupendous ability to stabilize shaky video clips. I handheld them because, after 9/11/01, carrying tripods and other pointy items in your luggage became difficult to impossible. Frankly I also just didn't know what I was doing. I have enough videos for dozens of travelogue movies although the quality of the finished product would be low, lower especially compared to what I have come to learn about professional or commercial movies. Still it's a start and I think I can make entertaining videos even with what I have. I aim to make cutting-edge movies, movies that really show creativity, new ways of looking at familiar sights, new ways of thinking familiar thoughts.
I want to combine travel shows with culture and history. I have been reading Bruce Feiler's three books on the Hebrew Bible that he wrote while actually traveling to the places in the Middle East where biblical events happened. What a powerful formula! The first book, Walking the Bible (2001), was a runaway bestseller and established Feiler at the top of this oeuvre of mixing travel with religion, archaeology and history. That led to his being asked to make a documentary based on the book for public TV in the U.S.
Next on my list are documentaries about people, how individuals choose to live their lives. I want to shoot ordinary people from different cultures talk about what coming to America has allowed them to explore and live about their native cultures, traditions and religions.
Finally, by 2010 or 2011, I want to start shooting videos in the Philippines, interviewing people and documenting the music and religious traditions that are quickly disappearing.
What I want to do is very ambitious. I don't know if I'll have the time before my body and/or mind give out on me. I just tell myself to do what I can.
See the full gallery on posterousEver since I came across Burnt Lumpia's (www.burntlumpia.typepad.com) modified recipe of his grandmother's Chicken Sotanghon I've wanted to try my hand cooking the soup at home. Chicken sotanghon has mythic significance for me. It is one of a handful of menu items that I looked forward to indulging in at recess in elementary school in La Paz, Iloilo. The minute I read Marvin's blog on sotanghon, all the gustatory memories rushed back. I wanted to have chicken sotanghon again!
I had a tin of achuete or annato seeds from Dean and DeLuca of all places. Marvin's recipe called for extracting the color from annato seeds but adding ancho pepper and bay leaf to the concoction. I don't think we added anything to the oil when using achuete in Iloilo. I heated the oil and threw in a tablespoonful of annato seeds. Nothing. No characteristic brick-red color bleeding into the oil. Natch!
I started all over. First I soaked three small skeins of dry sotanghon (mung bean threads). I heated some cannola oil in the pot and sautéed minced garlic, and sliced white onions and Roma tomatoes. When the tomato was soft, its insides spilling into the oil, I added slivers of poached chicken thighs and slightly browned those. I poured in 3 cups of homemade chicken stock and when the stock was simmering added the bean threads. When the sotanghon was tender and most of the soup soaked up, I spooned the lot into a bowl, added more boiling chicken stock, white pepper and chopped scallions. Voila! Chicken sotanghon even simpler than Marvin's "lazy" recipe.
In my recipe, it's the sautéed tomato that gave the yellow-red color to the soup. Achuete might add a different flavor to the soup and I mean to try using them as soon as I get some fresh ones from Asia Mart in Castleton. For now, my urgent craving for sotanghon is assuaged. In fact now I am craving a sotanghon salad bathed in sesame oil that I love at Sichuan, the Szechuan restaurant in Carmel.
I continue my love affair with pan-roasting. This was chicken thighs that I marinated in lemon juice and garlic and quick-roasted in a non-stick pan along with tomatoes, mushrooms, and Romaine lettuce. When the vegetables were done, I sliced up the whole chicken thigh, turned the heat a little lower and covered the pan to cook the inside of the chicken. The result was wonderful!
Brownies are a breeze to make, with or without a mixer. You don't need to aerate the batter. Thick and chewy is how it should be. But topping it with thick, creamy, nonfat Greek yogurt is a taste sensation. A little sour, rich-tasting without that nasty greasy after taste, Greek yogurt is perfect when you don't want icing on your cake. Now if I wanted icing, I prefer not buttercream but sweetened whipped cream, what the French call Chantilly cream. Whipped with sugar and a hint of vanilla, it is said to have been created by François Vatel in the 17th century. Maitre d'hotel at the Chateau de Chantilly, he committed suicide when the fish was served late. We don't have that kind of suicidal reverence for food anymore and live to eat more culinary disasters than the poor guy ever dreamt.
I had planned a pot roast but decided instead to do a Julia Child recipe for Boeuf Bourguignon. I had to find a way to use the turnips. I searched for turnip recipes on the Internet and was going to do a creamed soup of turnips, carrots and peas. At the last minute I decided to fry thick chunks of pared turnips in butter and olive oil and was rewarded with I dare say a new taste sensation. I've always had turnips in stews before, not a star in its own right and it is! It joins the ranks of potato, sweet potato and plantain—crusty outside, tender inside but with a wonderfully complex taste that almost refreshes the palate because it is unusual and new.
It'll be decades again before I fix this Julia Child recipe. The kitchen has no vent outlet to the outside. Browning meats in fat disperses grease everywhere. Afterwards I have to wash everything in the kitchen—canister tops, countertops, even the floor. It is ridiculous work. But the result is worth it! I took two days to cook this dish. First I cooked the beef in the wine in the oven and let it cool overnight. I skimmed the fat off the top of the sauce while cooking the pearl onions, mushrooms, and turnips separately and putting them all together. The turnips are my addition. Turnips are plebeian compared to the haute origins of the wine-cooked beef but gently fried in butter and olive oil, turnip chunks hold their own. I love the snippets of cress atop the turnip, and their slightly bitter taste adds complexity to the total gustatory experience.
I am reading Paul Russell’s fifth novel, War Against the Animals. It pits the old-time inhabitants of a Hudson Valley town against the invading cultured, moneyed gay men fleeing Manhattan with their love for old things. The two protagonists come from the two camps. Cameron is an older gay man enjoying a remission in his AIDS illnesses. His last lover who had induced him to move to Arcadia had just left him. He reminisces about his past, about the boy who bullied him in grade school, about the Jewish boy he met in college who became his best friend, about the lover he was most fond of, the highlight of his love life. He talks about his continuing attraction to fresh, young men but when presented by the other protagonist, a 19-year-old closeted local, with the opportunity to act on his desires, Cameron chose to leave them in the realm of the imagination.
Writing fiction is beyond me. I recognize what makes up the artistic process. I dissected frogs in high school. That dissecting skill persists into the present. I can analyze how a group like Maroon5 worked to earn their first Platinum album. I can even see how a novel like War Against the Animals is constructed, how the Russell takes a piece of landscape and turns it into the stage for his work of fiction. I can see how characters are created and how they create the plot by being who they are. I can see how the reader can identify with the character and how this process too is created. On one hand, it appears so logical and too simple; on the other, how wonderful this sleight of hand!
Novels can be escapes from our ordinary lives. They can offer present conflicts beautifully solved. When written well, they are indistinguishable from the ordinary life we are living. Both, after all, are conceptual products, creations of the mind. What is real is long dead. When some event is happening, when it is still alive, we can't grasp it. We are in its grasp. Only after the moment to change direction has passed do we see what happened. The present flows through our fingers like the finest sand, impossible to keep in the hand; it must flow. Fiction is a reconstruction of flowing sand. It's art that I admire. It's art I envy but then if envy were horses, we'd all be riding!
See the full gallery on posterousHouttuynia cordata invades the border. It has taken over the largest border in the garden, even slipping under the concrete path to cross over to another border. I bought it for its many-hued leaves but most of the plants that come up every year have deep green leaves, which is fine with me. In early June, the plants are 2 feet tall and cover every available space in the border. They bring out tiny, stark white flowers that ordinarily may not be conspicuous at all but when there's a wide area of them the effect is stunning! After they bloom I hew them down to allow the other plants a chance to make it through the rest of summer.
Gardening is an ongoing revelation. I like the borders wild, packed with plants. It's survival of the fittest. I have one rose bush left. The others succumbed, choked out by the more invasive plants like houttuynia. Then again my modus operandi is laissez faire. I don't deadhead in autumn so plants seed themselves freely. I never quite know how the garden is going to look each year as the plants relocate themselves. I guess I am far from being a garden designer. I set some conditions for the plants and let them make their own space.
See the full gallery on posterousSummer is here! On the lake, families gambol and recline on colorful towels on the tiny beach near the entrance of the community. On the water pontoon boats float by silent as invading armies. Kayaks are the only speedsters allowed on the six-acre postage-size lake. On my porch herbs swelter in the sun. Soon they'll allow me perhaps summer's most splendid gift—fresh herbs and vegetables for the kitchen!
Last night was leftover night. After coming home from my 4.5-mile walk on the Monon I was in no mood to loiter at the stove. I dug up these leftovers from the fridge and just added raw carrots and Romaine lettuce leaves I drizzled with bottled raspberry-and-gorgonzola dressing. Anymore I eat everything with chopsticks.
Fruit is the ideal ending to a meal. The sweetness refreshes the tongue. The colors and natural textures remind us whence nourishment and even life itself come.
Preparing lunch with Tony yesterday I started with bits of ideas what to serve. I knew I had melon in the fridge but opening the fridge door to take it out I saw the container of blackberry. Purple and orange: one of my favorite color combinations. In an unopened container, nonfat Greek yogurt, and honey in a squeeze bottle from the cupboard and we had dessert.
As much as possible I try to prepare things ahead of time. I drizzled the honey on the yogurt and stored the compotes in the refrigerator. By the time I took them out, the honey had disappeared into the yogurt. Next time, do the honey at the last minute!
Greek yogurt is a treat. Even nonfat it is thick and rich, almost like cheese. With honey, it is heaven.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The Poet of Righteous Fury was right. In Auguries of Innocence he linked nature outside us with nature inside. Both spoke in the same tenor, really of the same life or source of life.
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage...
A Dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State...
And for me, most touching:
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the World we safely go.
To know that life inherently brings joy or sorrow is to try to name what joys we can propagate, what sorrows exterminate. Inside and outside, the same drama of loss and gain, of rejection and attraction, of hatred and love. I walk in the garden then come back in to compose my thoughts. Man is made for joy and woe....
