The Sweet Sense of Balance

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Photo #518: Balancing HeronLocation Taken: Multnomah Falls, Oregon
Time Taken: June 2008

Some days just remind me of the importance of balance. The hot midday, followed by a cool and rainy night. The way I keep feeling like I’ve been sitting too long and spend some time standing to stretch my legs. The two games I’ve been playing today. Things like that.

The first one is one of the games I play most often, Guild Wars 2. They just put out a new release, and Tyria is being invaded! Every hour, on the hour! Go to the map that’s currently being invaded, and well, you’re in for a heck of a fight. There’s a 45 minute timer, and you often use every last drop of it while fighting battle after battle all over the place. Well, technically if you use up all the time, you fail the event, but hey, it’s a tough enough fight that you only win about half the time. And in order to do that at all, you have to be constantly in motion, going from one hot spot to the next, clearing out enemies and barely having time to pick up your treasure before you’re off to the next place. It’s forty-five minutes of constant action and calculation, and it’s a blast!

The other game I’ve been playing is Terraria. It was one of the horde of Minecraft-esque games that came out when Minecraft first became all the rage, and one of the better of that horde. This one has 2D graphics (think old school Mario) and more of a focus on getting better and better gear and fighting bosses and all that, but it’s still a lot of mining and crafting and building. Which, of course, means you spend a lot of time mining and crafting and building, and well, that’s a rather slow process. You can spend hours just digging one mineshaft. It’s quite slow and peaceful, really, and you get a real sense of progress and accomplishment out of it.

So what I’ve been doing is alternating the two. I run around Guild Wars 2 until my brain’s as hyped up as it can get, then swap to Terraria for a while until I start getting bored of digging, and well, back to Guild Wars 2. It’s a day full of ups and downs, but it works for me. Both games have their place, and both are very fun, but rarely do I find quite as strong a contrast as this so enjoyable.

Oh, and the heron? That’s because the concept of balance always reminds me of the song Crane Dance by Julia Ecklar. It’s a lovely tune about the balance of life and cranes and dancing and all that, and probably a significant part of why I put a lot of importance in balance. And well, herons are similar to cranes, and this one definitely knows the importance of keeping your balance.

  

Pitted Rocks on a Tilted Beach

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Photo #517: Pitted RocksLocation Taken: Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008

Hmmm… Those sure don’t look like normal rocks. Normal rocks aren’t all pitted like that, ya know.

It’s probably the barnacle’s fault. Or the mussels, or any of the other rock-clinging shellfish that inhabit this part of the world. In the tidal pools right by the water, the rocks are full of them. But they’re long gone here.

I wonder if it’s due to a change in water level or a change in land level that hoisted these marked rocks far away from the surf. Probably the latter. The Juan de Fuca Plate just offshore is happily pushing up the coastal mountains and beaches of the region, as it subducts underneath North America. That can easily raise rocks away from the shoreline, or well, raise the shoreline above the waves. There’s a pretty good chance this beach will be flooded when the next big earthquake hits the area, just like happened in the last one. Maybe then, these rocks will fill with life once more.

I love how tilted these rocks are, also. That’s a near perfect 90 degree tilt there. The layers of rock, laid down in large flat sheets, are now sitting right next to each other like peas in a pod. It must form an excellent base for the tidal pools, with lots of crevices for water to get trapped in and lots of rock surface for animals to latch onto. No wonder the local wildlife flocks to these beaches, it’s a marvelous place for them.

Well, aside from the fishermen out hunting with those traps, that is. But then, the natural world is full of predators, so what’s another one, right? Right?

  

Unexplored Depths of the World – The Culinary World, that is.

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Photo #516: Striped MountainLocation Taken: Banff National Park, Alberta
Time Taken: June 2010

Hmm… What’s a good segue between the random mountain photo I chose and the cooking story I want to tell… Um… Mountains are caused by plate tectonics, which is powered by convection in the mantle, which works very similar to water boiling in a pot?

Eh, forget it.

I haven’t really talked about one of my favorite hobbies. I like to cook, from scratch. Now, if I was a normal cook, I’d probably have already filled this blog with all my favorite recipes. But alas, that’s not how I work.

I’m an experimental cook, neither working from recipes nor creating any of my own.

Well, sort of. I almost never cook the exact same meal twice, but I do make certain types of dishes, like burritos, quite often. I just add a slightly different mix of ingredients each time. I also will work off of recipes if I’m trying out a new technique, or when I’m baking. Baking’s rather reliant on getting the proportions correct so all the chemistry creates the marvelous results that we know as cakes and cookies and breads, so following a guide makes all the difference. I almost never bake.

Instead, I experiment, fiddling around with ingredients and spices and cooking techniques to find something that fits what I want to eat for that particular meal. Sometimes it’s simple: another variation of my standard burrito recipe, the meal I make most often. Other times, well, I get creative.

Let’s use the meal I made earlier today as an example. I bought some okra the other day, and well, okra goes bad fairly quickly so I need to use it up fast. There’s two ways I like it, with a light breading and fried, and boiled until it’s soft in a soup. I’d made the fried okra yesterday, so today I went with the soup. So I chopped up a bunch of okra and tossed it in the soup pan. Then I tossed in some black beans. That’s my bean of choice, and since I do like having burritos so often, I always have some on hand, and they go well with okra.

Then, well, I like having some meat in my meal. I didn’t feel like chicken or ground beef, my usual standbys, so I poked around the fridge until I spotted a container of lunch meat. And that’s why I tossed in a bunch of thinly sliced Honey Maple Ham into the pot. And what the hey, I’ve already got some sweet elements thanks to the ham, let’s chop up some of this butternut squash as well. That goes well in soups.

Add some water, and you’ve got a fine start to a soup. But it was still missing something. I’d only added two vegetables, the okra and the squash. I like having at least three in every meal. But none of my usual stock of veggies seemed quite right, so I started adding spices. I pulled out the packet of fennel seed from the cupboard – and noticed my bag of dried seaweed. Perfect! Just the texture and nutritional value I wanted!

After the fennel and seaweed went in the pot, I topped it up with water and set the burner on medium high. And let it cook for a bit so the flavors of the ingredients could enter the water. It’s tough to season things properly if you don’t account for that. After about ten minutes, I tasted the soup to judge the base flavor, and started playing around with the spices. Sea salt, cracked peppercorns, cilantro, some chicken broth, and a Moroccan spice mix all went into the pot. It was close, though not quite right. A bit more salt and pepper were added, since I under-season with those at the first pass, and then I pulled out the lemon juice. I don’t use it for soups too often, but it can really brighten up a meal, and this one was tasting a bit dull. That got it a lot closer, but it still wasn’t hitting all the taste tones I wanted. A bit of soy sauce brought it closer, as did even more cracked pepper. And then I just tipped the remnants of the cup of orange juice I was drinking into the pot, and that did the trick. A bit more time cooking and it was done!

So how did my okra and butternut squash soup with ham, seaweed and black beans come out? Rather tasty, of course. Not quite perfect, alas. Thinly sliced ham doesn’t take too well to both long cooking times and the acid from the lemon juice, so that part of the soup was a bit too tough. It would have been better with cubes of ham instead, but I didn’t have any. Otherwise, it was very good, with the butternut squash the star of the soup.

Don’t ask for an official recipe, mind you. This description is the closest I’ll get. Even if I do make this dish again, it’ll be a bit different each time, and I never measure my ingredients anyway. It’s more fun to play it by ear, or well, by tongue.

  

The Balance of the Heavens

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Photo #515: Yin YangTime Drawn: December 2004

You know, I should do a new version of this nine-year old piece. It’s still a good concept, and even a decent execution of it, aside from the fact that I was obviously freehanding the circles.

There’s a lot of strong symbology in the Yin Yang. Balance, opposites, togetherness, all the things in this world that have two sides to them. Which is why it made sense to pair that symbology with another classic pairing, that of angel and demon. And turning the inner circles of the Yin Yang symbol into mystical spheres was just fun.

Hmm… I’ll have to play around with other ways to present this idea. Can’t just copy it, after all… Hmmm….

  

Don’t Feel Like Typing out a Thousand Words Today, have a Mountain instead.

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Photo #514: Moraine LakeLocation Taken: Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta
Time Taken: June 2010

Some days I’m just not that good at coming up with something to say. That’s when I break out photos like this one, which speak for themselves.

I think it’s saying something about mountains, glaciers, lakes, and really pretty scenery. Oh, and fantastic rocks, but then I’m biased towards rocks. What do you think?