Berries and Tea

I made a little berry plate today to pair with some Fu Shou Shan spring harvest oolong tea.

It's made up of green and red strawberries, blue berries, black berries, and red currents.
I laid them in a shallow pool of coconut milk, and crumbled some pie crust on top.

Montana

I went to my cousins wedding in Montana.
Why Montana? Aren't I Persian? Do Persians live in Montana?
The answer is yes, one does, my cousin.
He's a surgeon, and a few years ago he took a position
at a hospital in a small town in Montana,
I think he may even be the only surgeon there.
He owns a huge ranch and is the most happy I ever saw seen him
in overalls smeared in dirt fresh from bailing hay.

It was a culture shock to say the least to have a gaggle of Persians
roll into a small Montana town.
At the rehearsal dinner the grooms side showed up, ninety percent doctors,
the women wearing chiffon dresses and pearls and black stiletto heals
and the men in Armani suites.
While the brides side wore mud caked work boots and t shirts.

But I have to give due credit to both sides,
they tried their very best to mingle and understand each others world.
The whole time I was in Montana I experienced no prejudice or small minded racism whatsoever.
Quite the opposite in fact, almost every person I met showed a genuine interest and curiosity
in learning more about my family and culture.
I'm always struck when traveling through America
how kind, earnest, hospitable, and polite small town people are.

Montana has these unbelievably huge skies stretched over beautiful rolling hills.
The last few days of the trip we spent at glacier national park
and I was overwhelmed by the beauty.
Quite possibly the most beautiful natural scenery I've ever seen, which is saying a lot.


Click image to see photos:

Tea and Persian Sweets

I won't even get into my tea obsession for this post.
Really it would be too much.
But suffice to say my interest in tea
(high mountain Taiwanese oolongs in particular)
is actually rather frightening.

When people find out how much time, money, and work
I've invested in tea they look at me
as you would a well meaning deranged social outcast.
it's a look that's equal parts alarm, confusion, sympathy and pity.

So I will simply say that the tea in this photo is a formosa oolong
called Tung Ting Mi Xiang
it's like the Tung Ting except harvested later in the year
after cicadas are allowed to bite the leaves
the tea plants release a compound in response to the bites
that partially oxidise the leaves and gives them a unique sweetness.

The rest of the plate is covered with all the Persian sweets my
mom brought back from Iran, or made herself, or made by her friends.

The fruit roll looking thing is called "lavashack"
which my parents made from the plums in our backyard
it's freakishly good.

The marshmallowy thing is called "gaz"
and are sort of hard to describe,
kind of like firm mild marshmallows with pistachio nuts mixed in

The bready cubes are Persian Baklava,
distinct by their soft bready-ness and perfume of rose water

and the toffee looking thing is something called Sohan Asali

Squash With Wehani Rice and Basil
Flavored Water

This afternoon I threw together a simple dish of wehani rice on a bed of basil.
Roasted acorn squash and sauteed asparagus and mushrooms.
topped with a little bit of feta cheese, lemon juice, and olive oil.

I also flavored some water
with slices of cucumber, basil (mint if you want to be a bit more daring), and lemon slices.
The trick with the water is to use only good fresh ingredients
and to not let them sit in the water for more than a few hours.

Shredded Carrot
Coconut Milk Variations

I've always been against the idea of grating food.
But if pressed to explain why I wouldn't have an answer.
I think on some level I had this samurai code
of wanting to rely on nothing but a sharp knife for my cooking,
and the idea of using a big ugly grater clashed with my sensibilities.

But lately I've felt a weird urge to try and see what I could do with grated carrots,
and how to include them in some of the summer salads I've been making recently.
For the second salad I tried marinating the shredded carrots in lemon juice
for a few minutes to sharpen up the flavor
and give it a bit more crispiness,
It didn't make the carrots too tart, and worked great.

I also started experimenting with coconut milk and have been having a blast!
I don't know why I never thought of it before, but coconut milk is awesome.
It's such a team player, it does so much to bring order to chaos in a dish.
It tethers possibly competing flavors and directs them in a single direction
better than anything I can think of.
I think it's due to it's versatility.
It's good when paired with sweet, savory, good cold, warm, hot,
thickened to a sauce, or diluted with stock or soup etc.
It's mild and smooth, yet specific in flavor,
doesn't taste heavy but still has a richness to it etc.

Given how much leeway the coconut affords me, I made a couple ballsy salads:





The first was made with grated carrots/radishes, cilantro/parsley, and tomatoes.
I poured on the coconut milk and accented it with
honey, chili sauce, orange juice and toasted pumpkin seeds.




The second was a mixture of carrots, blueberries, mango, tomatoes, and grilled julienned radish
(grilled this time to be more in line with the sweeter elements of this salad)
and the same coconut and accent bath as the last one (minus the orange juice).

Bargain Produce!
Dear God...


I came back to the studio after grocery shopping the other day completely freaking out!
I was ranting hysterically to everyone at work at the amazing grocery store experience I had just had.
and truly it was amazing.
Normally I get my groceries from the Berkeley bowl.
It's a large kind of hippy dippy supermarket where you can get lots of unusual produce
and they have a huge bulk foods section, are reasonably priced, and carry lots of really great stuff.
But it's primarily the produce and bulk foods sections I shop at.
I can get honey made from bees who live on an exclusive diet of black berry flowers,
red quinoa, tropical fruits, weird freak sized eggplants etc.

But a friend revealed to me that a new Berkeley bowl had just opened closer to me
and that she had heard mixed reviews from her friends but it seemed like something worth checking out.
I had just gone grocery shopping a few days earlier and only needed more produce
so I told myself that this was going to be a surgical strike, in and out,
no being seduced by esoteric superfluous things like Bolivian vanilla pods or marinated plums from Madagascar.

So I started perusing the produce isles being quit impressed by the variety and overall clean open space,
when I asked the guy working if there was a bargain produce section like at the other Berkley bowl.
I usually buy my produce from such a section because i don't have any produce prejudice whatsoever
and am just as happy cooking any vegetable really.
The bargain section usually has good and often unusual produce at greatly reduced prices,
and introduces a delightfully random quality to my cooking,
as it forces me to cook with produce that I may have otherwise not considered.

The guy directed me around the corner to a bunch of large wooden shelves covered with bags of produce,
being prodded at here and there by old hunched over Chinese women.
(A good sign in the bay area, as old Chinese women are the best at sniffing out good deals on produce,
whether it be a farmers market, fruit stand, or whatever)

... I don't remember much of the next fifteen minutes.
It was a blur of drunken produce intoxication.
Before me lay countless huge bags all marked a dollar or less
of amazing and often very expensive produce.
One bag was full of about fifteen avocados, another with four huge mango's,
another had two giant bunches of asparagus, another had two huge eggplants,
bags of artichokes, zuchinni, mushrooms
still others were full of peaches, strawberries, black berries etc.
I couldn't believe my eyes, and greedily snatched at the bags
only to find that the bag of avocados was only one of many such bags,
and that there seemed an endless supply of obscenely cheap high quality produce ready for the grabbing.
So I piled the bags into my hand basket far above it's rim,
(until one of the Chinese women couldn't resist pointing at me and laughing)
and made my way to the register.
The following picture shows the fruits of my labor (ba-dum chee!).
That entire table of produce much of which is being obscured from view cost me only fifteen dollars!
Crazy times!

No Talking Tuesday # 96



The List:


i need guidance about something:

so i went to bed really late last night
so i thought well maybe i should give them like half
their food now before bed or something.
since it was only a couple hours from seven

but i noticed their food dish was still full
so i figured alright well i'll just do it when
the big fatso wakes me up

but i wasn't woken up by any fatso
and i haven't seen them yet this morning

so i'm guessing their just sleeping somewhere,

but if there is food in their dish should i feed them anyway
or wait until they eat that first?

this is a clean cmesh type thing
so i can very easily add those rocks
in the sculpt if it saves a hassle

and should i arrange my layers or collapse them in some way
that will aid in the transition shot?

cause it's all sort of procedurally built up
with

isn't it like falling away in parts or something?

so you just need the final sculpt as a target

i don't fully understand what your saying
but you cant use a normal map on this level 0?

it's got right topology

we can also try dividing level 0 in half poly count wise

i think it would still hold up

so this is the low rez mesh reduced from xsi
with the displacement map from my mudbox scene applied

now do you want me to generate another displacement map
using this

ok gotcha
so i saved this file already

do you want me to render out an ao map while i'm at it?

so i can also start texturing it with overhead photos if
we have any

i mean the whole reason i had to model without ref
was because there was no photos

and this is granite right?

ok well i can look into that

there

ok so the best use of my time is to hunt these rock ref right?
i just want to make sure nothing is waiting for me

ok so there is no drama from other shots waiting for me
so others can work or anything?

ok

ok, well

ok

well should i check in first once i find ref photos

just poly reduce, since it's organized

i mean we would have to test to make sure it looks right
with normal map, but hopefully it would

yea i think so

i would bring in the reduced low rez as a different object
and choose it as a target when making the normal map

i wouldn't have to re apply a displacement map

i'm always nervous about applying displacement maps
since it always in my experience but not jun's
introduces all these little artifacts i have to paint out
that take forever

but i'll try and see

ok

i thought that the layout reel looks pretty good
if no one is complaining

how is it falling away now?

is there just two meshes and you animate verts


diss

hmm so we need 15 different objects all low rez
with high rez normal?

so should i still poly reduce this low rez?

so as far as what i'm doing right now
it's poly reducing the mesh and applying a displacement
and get everything together in one mudboxfile?
ok

wasn't this whole shot going to be done in that illustration
texture/render style?

like that palma video you showed me where it was kind of
water color esque?

we can't just dissolve to the realism at the end when it's all scan data?

so for whatever reason when i try to export the decimated
mesh from xsi the obj won't open in either maya, or xsi or mudbox.
the xsi running over there now how up the ready to go obj,
but i can't for the life of me get it out of the scene in
a way that can be recognized by anything. i'm sort of
at a loss of what to do, if this doesn't work we can decimate
in gsi i suppose but i'm not really sure how to work in gsi etc.

i resolved the issue

truly this is a moment in ridiculousness
the good news is that nothing was wrong with xsi
the problem if you can believe it was there was
no more space left on the local drives

so i tried writing to my external and it was fine
that's also why each subsequent attempt got smaller

so it's fine