Category — Projects

For Christmas, Stark bought me a copy of Lidia’s Family Table, and much like our friend C. and a certain Halloween magazine, upon presentation of this book Stark announced “I expect results.” So, for Stark’s birthday, I attempted to deliver some of those results.

For anyone interested in cooking, I highly recommend Lidia’s books and TV shows. Unlike many of those schmucks on Food Network, Lidia actually teaches you how to do things. She’s to Italian food what Julia Child was to French food. Her recipes aren’t intended to just show you how to make one very specific dish, but instead on how to combine a series of different skills and base ingredients to create an endless variation of dishes. Unlike that bobblehead, Giada, she looks like she actually eats the food she makes, and unlike that slob, Guy Fieri, she didn’t just steal all her recipes from her grandmother and never give her credit. In conclusion, you know Lidia is the best of all the Italian TV chefs because you can find her cookbooks in places of pride in the kitchens of real Italian mamas. So that is my opinion of Lidia Bastianich. I share it often and widely.

First up for Stark’s birthday dinner was sweet onion gratinate. You can actually get the recipe for this on Lidia’s website. I highly recommend you make this shit, like, NOW. It’s that good.

It does involve slicing up a lot of onions, though. Like, a lot of onions. Three and a half pounds of onions to be exact.

Then, like in so many of Lidia’s recipes, you cover them in cheese and butter and olive oil and more cheese. Lidia’s recipes are not exactly ummm… low calorie, let’s say. Her favorite ingredients are grana padano cheese, butter, olive oil, more cheese, breadcrumbs, hot pepper flakes, and more cheese.

But oh, it is all so worth it.

Then I set about to make pasticiatta, an apparently thoroughly unpopular dish, because I cannot find one solitary photo of it on the internet. I only mention this because there is a printing error in the book. It says “Turn to page 216 for a photo of pasticiatta,” but the photo is nowhere to be found. So I have no idea what Lidia (or anyone else, for that matter) thinks pasticiatta should look like. Now that I have tagged my photo on Flickr, I think I have officially set the internet standard for what pasticiatta looks like. Pasticiatta, for those of you who are wondering, is like lasagna, but instead of pasta there are layers of polenta.

This recipe was very involved. First I had to make marinara sauce. Then besciamella sauce. I was not a huge fan of Lidia’s fresh marinara sauce. I think I like my sauces thicker, richer and more blended. But then, I also didn’t want to be cooking sauce for ten hours like my grandmother used to do, so I guess that’s what I get for picking the twenty minute recipe. Next time I will try the longer cooking sauce from the book. The besciamella sauce was another bit of confusion, as I have never made a roux and had no idea what one should look like. I spent twenty minutes whisking flour and butter and mumbling to myself, in the manner of the little bird in that Are You My Mother? book, “Is this a roux? Is this a roux now?” When you find yourself pondering the question “What is a roux?” in the kitchen as if it’s a major philosophical quandary, you know you’ve been cooking for too long and the heat from the stove has melted your brain.

Then I turned to polenta. We have a very weak electric stove, as compared to Lidia’s gas burners, which probably have the power to melt rock into lava. It took forever to bring this stuff to a boil (Lida said ten minutes – HAH!) and then forever to thicken. It sure was delicious though. Not that I was licking the cooking spoon every five seconds… I swear!

Once the polenta was done, I spooned some besciamella sauce into a butter casserole dish, then a layer of polenta, then a layer of ricotta, then some grated parmigiana, then a layer of sauce, then more polenta, more besiciamella, more cheese, etc., until I reached the top of the dish. It was in the oven for a bit more than an hour until it got nice and crusty.

I served it up with some broccoli rabe cooked in garlic and olive oil, et voila. Dinner is served.

I have to say, usually I fret over whether or not my cooking has come out well and whether or not it tastes good or whether or not everyone is lying to me about the quality of my cooking, but this meal left no question in my mind. It was TASTY. Mmmmmm. And, since Lidia’s recipes are aimed at feeding a small militia or a incredibly reproductive Catholic family, we have many, many, many yummy leftovers.

For dessert I made struffoli. Struffoli are a Neopolitan dessert. They are fried balls of dough covered in honey. You can find a variation of this dessert from pretty much every culture on the planet. Fried dough and honey just go so well. Anyway, struffoli is the Southern Italian variety and my mother makes them every Christmas. I wasn’t back in New York for the holidays this year and missed out, so I decided to try my hand at making them. They didn’t come out as perfectly as my mom’s, but they were pretty damn good (and are almost gone already).

For any interested parties, this is the family recipe, which my mother ferreted out of an Italian mama in Bay Ridge many, many decades ago.

Anna Conticello’s Struffoli

3 tbs. butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups Bisquick
Vegetable oil for frying
Honey
Confetti

1. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, vanilla, the flour and the Bisquick. Knead dough with hands on a floured board.
2. Divide dough into pieces. Roll into long ropes about 1/2 half inch in diameter. Cut into little pieces, about 1/2 inch squares on a lightly floured surface.
3. Heat 3 quart sauce pan of oil (about half full). Put eight to ten pieces of dough in a frying basket and submerge in hot oil. Dough will form balls which will rise to the surface. Keep stirring them around until they are golden.
4. Drain the balls on paper towels. Repeat until all dough is used up.
5. Slightly mound the balls on two aluminum foil pie plates. Drizzle honey (slightly warmed) over balls. Sprinkle with confetti.

Guaranteed yummy! This recipe makes a lot of balls, so plan to give at least one of those trays away, unless you want to go into a sugar coma.

I have been on a bit of a cooking kick lately. Stark’s enthusiasm for the kitchen is contagious and as I’ve successfully completed smaller tasks, my confidence to try bigger and better things has been growing. Stark and I have been trying to cooking big dinners on Sundays, enough to feed us for at least part of the week. Also, with the holidays coming, there has been more of a need to dig some of those more ambitious recipes out of the cookbook. First up was ribollita.

It has been my great goal to make ribollita for about… well, three years. I kept saying I was going to do it and then never put in the effort, despite looking up recipes numerous times. Well, I finally gave in and got ‘er done. I used a modified version of Lidia Bastianich’s recipe, from her book Lidia’s Italian American Kitchen. I’m sure if you’ve known me for more than five minutes, you’ll know how much I fangirl Lidia, so I thought it best to go with her version of the Tuscan stew. Also, the woman isn’t totally irrational and toned down a lot of the “And then, since you are an Italian housewife who lives in the kitchen, make sure and stand over the stove and stir the pot for twelve hours and then don’t eat it for three days” aspects of this dish. When I spend a few hours cooking, I better get to eat the end product immediately!

Have a lot of veggies and cans of beans to get rid of? Ribollita will take care of it. It uses a lot of leafy greens, as well as potato and onion and such. A lot:

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“Project Finish My Halloween Costume Before Halloween” is moving along smoothly. Party prep is in full swing on this fine Halloweek. The decorations have been up for weeks, all we have to do is switch out some light bulbs for spoooky ones and set up the epic number of Jack-o-lantern candle holders I bought at Dollarama. Grocery shopping for various secret ingredients was done on Sunday and baking will commence on Thursday.

As for the Worm Bum, the costume has been fully assembled and now only needs several dozen layers of paint. I just realized that with my poor understanding of color theory, I neglected to buy yellow, but I’m going to see if I can make do without it.

After finishing the bottom armature, we started on the top piece. This came together quickly and efficiently, if I do say so myself:

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Last week, work began on Project Worm Bum, otherwise known as “Michelle’s Most Epic Halloween Costume Yet.” Each year I promise to have a fantastic Halloween costume and each year I let costume supply shopping wait until the last moment, when I typically lose enthusiasm for the effort and just do a crap ass job. See: the sailor outfit that consisted of a sailor shirt and jeans and the Cyndi Lauper outfit that looked nothing at all like Cyndi Lauper. But not this year! No! This year I resolve to finish my costume with time to spare.

Stark and I had an amazing idea for a costume while watching a movie that shall remain nameless. This led to elaborate plans for a costume that quite possibly will be too awesome to even fit in the apartment. It involves acrylic paint, a wire armature, and yards and yards of the same stretchy fabric they use to make figure skating costumes. WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY BE? You’ll have to wait and find out.

But here, in the interests of posting something to this blog so it looks like I actually work on projects instead of just procrastinate, are the first photos of Worm Bum construction. No one involved has any experience with making armatures, so it was an adventure, to say the least.

Here are the beginning stages of assembling part one of the armature:

And the final product, with cat:

When I checked for updates to the Shameless blog this morning, I was treated to a disgusting bit of misogyny via Mir’s post on the new Bacardi Breezer ad campaign. This campaign, with the tagline “Get Yourself An Ugly Girlfriend” is one of the most offensive, sexist attempt at promoting alcohol that I have ever seen, which is saying a lot, considering the general grossness of alcohol advertising. I’m not sure how Bacardi thought it could convince women to drink Breezers by insulting their looks, but, well… that’s what they’re trying to do. Certainly the best way to sell a product is to remind women of all the things they hate about their bodies, right? That makes total sense.

I have been looking for an excuse to do some more feminist adbusting since Your Mom Had Groupies, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Thus, I present a new ad campaign that I like to call Take A Beach Stroll With Sally (Click the image to make it bigger):

Or, if you don’t feel like spending your day messing around with Photoshop, you can just tell Bacardi exactly how you feel about their new campaign.

EDIT: Sources in Israel (oooh, I love saying that) have informed me that this is an old campaign, dating from 2007 or 2008. They are not sure if it was dropped by the company or even if it was ever officially used by Bacardi. McCann Digital is an Internet exclusive ad agency known for its disgustingly offensive campaigns. McCann recently listed the ad campaign on Best TV Now, dating it as being from this month and listing the client that commissioned it as Tempo.

Possibly, and this is entirely my speculation, it was going to be submitted to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Does anyone else have any clues? I, for one, would love to hear from Bacardi on the matter. Adbusting remains very satisfying, whatever the response.

EDIT: McCann has pulled the promotional minisite down and removed it from their website! Heh, feminists either crashed their site or… they feared the bad press. I wonder…

EDIT: An apology (Corporations apologize? I have never heard of such a thing!) from Bacardi can be seen in the comments. Also, the lovely Mir submitted her own ad-busted version of this ad, which I think is hilarious (and suffering from far fewer rage issues than my own:

After weeks (months?) of planning, cutting tiny holes, testing paint samples, running to Curry’s for some random supply I didn’t realize I needed, the tiny scale model of the Wonder Wheel is finally complete!

Sketching out a circle this size was a real bitch, let me tell you. But cutting out tiny lattice work with an exacto knife was even worse. Hello, early onset arthritis.

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Stark and I had an adventure in the kitchen last night. She made fresh ravioli and I made stuffed artichokes. My family used to have Sunday dinners of ravioli, sausage, meatballs, fresh Italian bread, and stuffed artichokes, and it was enough to food to kill a horse. I remember these dinners very fondly, but I always doubted my ability to recreate the culinary delights of my Italian grandma.

Last night I finally took the plunge after a thirty minute phone consultation with my mother, and I have to admit, they were really good! Just like I remembered my grandma making them! So, in effort of spreading the yum, I will share the recipe (now with photo illustrations!):

Today I started planning out the background for the main credits sequence, which will be an animated view of the beach, boardwalk storefronts, and the Wonder Wheel. I decided to track the equipment I’ve been using as well as the process of making this movie. This will either succeed in recording my path to success or, well, help me learn what methods fail spectacularly.

Here is the electronic equipment that has been used so far in the making of this movie:

Pictured: Canon GL2 Digital Video Recorder, Zoom H2 Digital Sound Recorder, MacBook Pro, DV Tapes, Canon Powershot Camera
Not Pictured: Maxtor 1TB External Hard Drive, Canon Rebel XT

Here are the art supplies that we purchased for use in the animations:

Pictured: Coney Island: Lost and Found (reference images), sketch book, portfolio, some sheets of heavy poster board, a set of gouache paints, several synthetic brushes, a palette, a glue stick, an Exacto knife, thumbtacks, a cutting board, a protractor and compass set (from Dollarama! this is a low budget film after all), and a pencil case filled with pens, erasers, white-out, pencils, a bone folder, and a hole punch/awl.

Today, I did some color tests with the gouache paint. I wanted to make sure it could produce bright, circus-like, opaque colors with a minimum of effort. I haven’t worked with gouache before, so I was worried it would be too washed out. Luckily, it was perfect!

I also decided to plan out the background for the main credits sequence by making a scale drawing in my sketch book. I wanted to make sure there was enough room for the letters and puppets to move across the beach and be legible. It was important that the puppets also be of a size that is reasonably easy to cut-out and manipulate for the animations.

After struggling through incredibly simple math, I finally managed to hit upon proportions that I think will work rather well for the project:

I think it can finally be said that production is fully in motion for our movie about Coney Island, currently titled Shoot the Freak.

After a recent brilliant decision to get in way over my head and add animated transitions and credits to the movie, I have felt newly inspired to get things moving again.

So far we have:

1. Went to Curry’s and picked up some basic supplies for paper cut out animation. Purchased: Notebook, portfolio, some sheets of heavy paper, cutting board, a set of gouache paints, paintbrushes and palette.
2. Made some preliminary sketches for the credits sequence, some basic animations, and a parachute jump transition.
3. Perused Flickr commons for public domain images of Coney Island, went through Coney Island: Lost and Found, adding post-its to every image that might be of use for transitions or flashbacks.
4. Installed Joomla on this domain to test it out for possible use as movie website.
5. Downloaded Celtx for use organizing storyboards, footage, sounds, and production materials.
6. Took notes on three DV tapes worth of footage, spanning from Summer 2007 to Fall 2008, and audio recordings from Summer 2008. Now I just need to transfer that to a searchable database before my handwriting becomes unreadable.
7. Finally finished cutting up the interview tracks, labeling them, giving them basic descriptions, and loading them to the temporary website.

I recently noticed that my favorite target, Canadian Club, was back with new and even crappier “Damn Right” ads, so I used my forum at Shameless to blog about it to a (hopefully) wider audience. Not that it would appear that Beam Global has any intention of pulling the campaign, but I suppose every little rant helps. I hope.

On the bright side, the discontent continues to spread. Fresca at Astronave was kind enough to link me to her post on the campaign, as well as Mark Simpson’s take on the use of the word metrosexual.