Tag Archives: Erica

The Cooking Disaster Chronicles, Part 1

It was called “Summer Garden Delight”. It was summer time. We were bored. I was young and innocent. The kitchen seemed like a great place to do something highly amusing. We threw some vegetables in a pot. We threw in some chili powder. We added water. We threw in some more chili powder. Did I mention that I was young and innocent?

Thank you, Mom, for letting us go at it with no instruction or guidance. It was an important step in our maturing process.

The perpetrators of the Summer Garden Delight

Look at the blond one. It was all her fault! She led me down the primrose path! She instigated the chili powder debauchery, I swear!

Years later: a more mature approach to the kitchen

(please disregard the leopard print underwear hanging from my belt)

Our concoction was completely inedible. I wish there were a “lick and taste” option on the computer screen so that y’all could understand exactly how inedible this was. Then again, I just got an image of people in offices across America dragging their tongues over their computer screens—OK, bad idea. At least that mental picture is saving me a trip to the patent office.

Also, can anyone explain why I just said “Y’all”? I’m not Southern. The blog made me do it!

Back to the point: since that fateful day, I prefer to cook edible things. I generally abstain from heaping in tablespoons upon tablespoons of chili powder, for example, which my husband appreciates–I just know he does. So in the spirit of human progress, and to celebrate my personal and culinary growth between ages 9 and 27, tomorrow I am posting a recipe called “Mush”. Just as “Summer Garden Delight” was a poetic name but a hideous substance that only an alien freak would consume, “Mush” is a hideous name for a delicious dish that no alien would ever consume. Are you confused? Well it’s kind of like one of those “this is like that” questions on the SAT. Right? Right. OK, try not to get hung up on the name and instead envision a very simplified form of ratatouille, in a skillet. I’ve even thought of re-christening it “simple stovetop ratatouille” … but it’s been “mush” for so many years that renaming it might throw the universe off its orbit. Its simplicity makes it the perfect work night meal. And the garlicky flavor … out of this world (not literally “out of this world”, because that would make it alienesque, which as we have already covered, it is not).

Playing with Photoshop

Enterprise, Alabama

Photoshop is a recent acquisition of mine. And due to certain family members being enrolled in certain graduate schools, I get to have it for CHEAP. And that was the only way I was going to have it, man.

I am terribly excited about learning how to navigate it. And terribly frightened that I will get sucked into the obsessive vortex that can be image editing (do you like it–“image editing” as opposed to my old activity of “messing around with pictures on the computer”?).

I’d like to state for the record that my goal is still to take great pictures SOOC (straight out of camera) so that I don’t feel compelled to mess with them. It’s all about having options and not obligations.

As I learn, I plan on posting some step-by-steps . . . but right now I feel like a small child lost in the woods. And if this small child just knows what roots to dig and eat, what berries won’t poison her to death, how to create a blanket out of leaves, and how to befriend the local fauna, she could have a blast playing in this woodland realm with no adults to tell her what to do! Have I lost you? Layman’s terms: Photoshop is going to give me amazing freedoms to edit, beautify, and get all artistic up in the crizza, but first I need to learn about the roots and berries and leaves. And I need to befriend the local fauna.

In the meantime, here are a few pictures that I have played with. There is so much potential to be unpacked, and I am not only on the tip of the iceberg, but I’m only touching the tip of the iceberg with the smallest part of my tiniest finger, straining my arm from the deck of a huge boat that’s about to take me far, far away from the iceberg. My mission is clear: jump off the boat, embrace the whole iceberg, and avidly kick my legs to avoid hypothermia.

Thank you for allowing me to get lost in metaphors. It gives my brain a workout.

All these pictures were taken with my Nikon D5000 (love that thang) on our March sisters reunion in Enterprise, Alabama. Maybe one day I will understand what I did to these pictures, but all I remember is–layers? Layer masks? Something with a filter?

Photoshopping my lovely sister Erica

 

Photoshopping my lovely and pregnant sister Heidi

Photo courtesy of Erica; Photoshopping courtesy of me =)

Ditto on previous photos–thanks Erica.

 

A halo of light

The picture above was fun to play with, and I used a cool eye-enhancing technique which involves sharpening the blue part of her eye and whitening the white part … and something with dodging and burning maybe? (Note to self: must enhance long-term memory via a diet of nuts and berries.)

Heidi and Mike! Photo courtesy of Erica.

Eye-whitening/enhancing tutorial coming up! In the very distant future. Unless the nuts and berries work.