I’m in a mad rush to finish off art for Archon, the local scifi/fantasy convention happening this weekend. I’m particularly excited about how the inks turned out for this piece and I wanted to share a taste:

I will be posting all of the pieces to the gallery on my website when they are ready, and of course they will be on display in the Archon Art Show. If you are attending, please drop by the show and take a look (at everyone’s work, not just mine!), and drop me a line that you did either here or on twitter.

Back to art-making!

That may not have been the best decision.

However, this allowed me to make a delicious Korean chicken dish. Above are the vegetable-like objects included: potato, onion, carrot, and bell pepper.

Unfortunately, I realized after I’d already chopped all the vegetables (and halfway-thawed the chicken) that the chili sauce that I thought I had was rather expired. It was one of those things that my Mom kept on hand for the occasional use, but rarely ended up using, and so she sent it along with me when I moved out. Fun fact: it expired the month I moved into my new apartment. I don’t really use that sort of thing much either, apparently!

In place of the chili sauce, I threw together some white vinegar, ketchup, and lots of red chile pepper flakes. I’ve grown rather fond of those recently :3

Toss the sliced chicken in the crockpot, then the vegetables, and pour the sauce atop all of that, and you end up with something like this:

The recipe told me to cook it for 6 hours on high, so I did. I am not sure if the chili sauce would have made it considerably juicier, or if my cooker cooks particularly hot, but it came out a little drier than the pictures on the Can You Stay For Dinner blog suggested it would. It’s possible I made the chopped chicken pieces too small too. All the same, I thought it was pretty tasty and will likely make it again – next time in winter, and with actual chili sauce!

Erin and I decided to make the above cake for 4th of July (which we celebrated, in part, at her parents’ house). It’s Smitten Kitchen’s lime yogurt cake with blackberry sauce – perfect flavors for summer. Erin liked the two combined, but I thought they were better separate – for me the flavors somewhat canceled each other out, making it difficult to appreciate the delightfulness of either.

Baking a singular cake is not all that crazy, but when we put it in the oven we were already struggling with the fact that we would not be able to partake of it until the next day.

I suggested we make a second cake.

We made a second cake.

We didn’t use a recipe – I just threw ingredients in and guessed when I was about right in terms of ratio and hoped for the best. We also dumped in a pile of spices (coriander, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, ginger..). It turned out quite moist and tasted a bit like applesauce cake.

We also improvised a frosting, which went slightly less well, but still came out fine:

Unfortunately I did not get a chance to take a photo of the assembled cake (more accurately: I forgot to), but we put chocolate shavings on top of the frosting.

A week and a half later, and I’m baking again today. Already baked, actually – I made another Smitten recipe, the chocolate yogurt snack cakes.

Quick sidenote: can I say that I adore my new wooden spoon (seen in the batter picture)? I bought it as a birthday present to myself from Kitchen Carvings. It feels perfect in my hand and the texture is lovely – smooth without being slick. I am highly anticipating purchasing more utensils from them in the future.

Back to the snack cakes!

These are lovely summer chocolate desserts – light, moist, but still chocolatey enough to count as actually being chocolate.

I’ve also been working fairly steadily on comics. Here’s a character sheet for the comic I’ve been working on the most, with a mini-comic for the blog in the background:

I am also developing a new body of work to submit to galleries, but I don’t have any sneak peek images available for that right now – most of the work is in a very early stage, and I don’t want to give away too much right now! However, I can show off some of the new character pieces I’m working on at the moment:

In an effort to create a more balanced fantasy world through art, I am giving these female casters (you can decide for yourself what type(s) you think they are) actually-covering clothing. I had a bit of fun with the one in the foreground by deliberately putting her in a somewhat suggestive pose, while still making her not sexualized. I’ve taken to drawing more menfolk lately, so there may be some absurdly-unclothed male characters on the blog in the future – I’ll be sure to put warning labels up for those of you at work! We could do with a little more sex role reversal in fandom, and I intend to help that along :3

Also, a quick plant update: the smaller basil got really fried a few weekends ago when I was not home to water it in the evening. I’ve been trying to nurse it back to health, but it’s pretty much a lost cause at this point. However, pretty much everything else is doing fine – the sage, the large basil, the chives, and the sensitive plant are all doing especially well. The chamomile is looking rather droopy and will probably be given to a friend to put in her large garden plot, as I think they’re overcrowded.

The first is needle-felting onto a piece of cloth:

I started playing with needle-felting quite awhile ago, as a sculpting technique, and quite liked it. I still need to finish off the dragon sculpture I started in March, actually… I’ve been wanting to draw with it since I first got the supplies though, and I’m pleased to say that so far it is going as I expected, though the real fun won’t happen until I’m ready to start putting down details.

The second method is wood burning:

Isn’t he cute? I need to develop a little more patience with this technique (the wood is not getting as dark as I’d like as quickly as I’d like), but it’s definitely quite fun.

Hopefully I’ll become less lazy about taking (and consequently posting) progress shots of what I’m working on/playing with so you can see more of the process in the future. That’s all for now!

This is my lovely little Sage plant. It’s getting along, but it’s certainly not as bushy as most of the other plants – the only one smaller than it is the Thyme (and the Chives, sort of, but those don’t really get bushy).

I accidentally knocked my Nasturtiums over when I was removing some yellowed leaves, which was another reason I delayed in taking photos. They were climbing up the window before, and now they’ve toppled over onto the Thyme. Poor Thyme. I’ve been meaning to put some skewers in there or something, so that they’ll stand upright again, but I haven’t found the particular things I was going to use and so I’ve been putting it off.

Ah, so bushy! Plush Chamomile, tall and bushy Basil, surprisingly-tall Sensitive Plant (which I still find adorable every time it recoils), and the older Basil (which would probably look more plush if I hadn’t harvested some of its leaves for pizza. Twice.). I’m pretty excited that I could probably start harvesting the younger basil soon – multiple types of basil! Yum :3

Speaking of pizza… I can’t believe it’s not gluten:

Yeah. No gluten. Crust was made from Bob’s Red Mill crust/dough/whatever mix, and was arguably a better texture than the normal gluten crust I make. I had pizza for dinner Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and for lunch yesterday, and I cannot express how absolutely delighted and pleased I was about this. Back to eating not-pizza today.

Speaking of which, I’m still on a gluten-free diet. I got sick right when I was supposed to switch back to eating gluten, and that was not going to happen…so, here I am still gluten-free, but not sick anymore. I did eat out at a not-gf restaurant on my birthday a week ago, so technically I broke the diet then (and the day after when I had the left-overs for dinner), but I went right back to g-f after that. I will be returning to fully-gf soon so I can do a reasonable cross-comparison before seeing the doctor (which is not yet set), and so I will definitely have internal damage so as to be properly diagnosed. Yay.

Also for my birthday, Abby took me to see Dave Foley do stand-up. It was a fun show, but easily the best part was seeing her get completely fangirly about the experience. We also invented a card game while she was visiting, which I will be blogging about soonish – I need to make sure I have all the photos edited, and then I have to type up the rules in an orderly (they’re sprawled across a few pages of a memo pad).

I had a somewhat-unfortunate experience with gluten-free pizza on Monday. I went without pizza for the entire four weeks prior to Monday, simply because I did not want an early disappointment and end up craving pizza the remaining time. I was not entirely surprised at the pizza failure – the way the recipe was written seemed like it would not really give the yeast anything to munch, and I was also lacking an ingredient which was supposed to give some extra chew and body to the dough. The resultant mess crackled (though stayed together for the most part, assuming a light touch) and kind of powdery on the lower half. It didn’t help matters that I forgot to put garlic and oregano in the dough =o/

I am going to eat the hell out of some (gluten) pizza when this is over.

I also haven’t been eating quite as much chocolate (I think), mostly because I am annoyed with trying to bake anything ^_^;; I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and the first half wasn’t quite properly cooked I think, so those were, while malformed, chewy and stayed together. The second half was properly cooked, and crumbled upon contact. Agh.

Next time there will be plant updates!

In less awful news, yesterday the plants got to move into roomier homes – behold!

I decidedly need to add more soil to the larger basil, but we ran out, so I figured it could wait a few days. My sad tree got a much larger pot too, but also needs extra soil. I hope he makes a comeback.

Despite researching on the internet, it was a bit unclear what size pots I should get for everything. I found a resource that suggested 6″ pots for three of the herbs and an 8″ pot for another, but that left me with three question marks – I ended up just getting 6″ pots for the ones I didn’t know about, because I can always go back and get a different pot later if I need/want.

This weekend I also rediscovered why I don’t like making my polymer clay sculptures in neon colors: photographing neons is kind of difficult. The problems I was encountering were that a – the pink would lose it’s shading and become flat, and b – the pink was getting too hot and and lost vibrancy. The photos ended up having to be a little darker than my usual because of the neon – luckily, this was for a custom sculpture so I don’t have to hope that a buyer will overlook potential color inaccuracy, but I’d still like to figure out how to overcome the problem. If anyone has any pointers, they’re most welcome!

…okay, maybe more plants and knickknacks.

As a matter of fact, most of the window sill is filled with knickknacks. There are a few plants in this half though! The majority of my plants are between these two parts of the sill, still working on being large enough to be replanted:

I intend to eventually move my little pine tree to the sill as well, but I need to repot him first – he desperately needs more space. I will likely keep him in the corner next to the Jade plant so that he doesn’t break up the window area. Eventually I will probably bring home some flowers to keep my current plants company too – I love gomphrena and I think it could do well in the space I have.

In other news, I baked my first gluten-free bread last week! It was a little flat, but not horridly so – this is what it looked like when it rose:

Not exactly the plump dome I’m accustomed to with glutenous breads, but still better than I was expecting. However, it was at about this time that I realized I forgot to add any butter or oil into the bread. Oof. I decided not to fix it, since it had already risen for an hour and I didn’t want to mess with it.

When I baked the bread, it looked like this:

I used a lot of eggs for this bread, and I can’t say I love how that flavored the bread. My next attempt (which may be tomorrow) will involve butter and far fewer eggs. I might separate the yolks and whip up the whites before adding, to see if that fluffs up the bread in a favorable way – I haven’t decided yet. Overall, I don’t think this was too bad though – very eggy, not particularly tasty on its own, but works just fine for sandwiches.

I decided being gluten-free for a set amount of time and then returning to a gluten-inclusive diet for the same amount of time after would give me the opportunity to more properly compare the my body’s response to gluten. Four weeks on and four weeks off also means I will be able to have normal pizza and cake on my birthday, though that wasn’t an intentional part of the plan (just a wonderful bonus).

In my first week without gluten I haven’t been minding the lack of bread as much as I expected. It’s not pleasant during lunch (the corn tortillas I bought are overly-flavorful and not as soft as wheat tortillas, and certainly nowhere near as awesome as bread), but the rest of the time I’m not particularly concerned with it. I think it helped a lot that I bought some gluten-free goodies when I went grocery shopping, to make sure I’d have snackery while I was first stepping into g-f baking. As it is, the only thing I made besides peanut butter cookies (which I very quickly got sick of) were flourless chocolate cake and flourless chocolate cookies. The cake was really tasty (but moist-dense in a way that, while no doubt typical of flourless cakes, is not quite what I want out of a cake) and I will almost certainly make it again. The chocolate cookies are also pretty good and similarly moist-dense – I think I like them better cooled down than when they were fresh out of the oven (the edges had a texture from the egg that reminded me too much of plain eggs).

Back to the snackery I mentioned before: I got chocolate chip cookies, cheddar rice crackers, plain rice crackers, plain rice chex, and honey rice puffins. (I also bought g-f tamari sauce in place of soy sauce, but that’s not snackery – all the same, it makes me so happy). The cookies are actually pretty fantastic, and I’ve been doing a good job of not inhaling* them. The rice crackers were a little dense, but still pretty crackery – I only tried the cheddar variety, and they were rather delicious (and not overly salty or faux-cheesy). The rice chex is super-boring – it was slightly better when I put rice milk on it, but then I found out that the rice milk I was drinking had been processed with barley! I can’t have it! (Luckily, that was the only (known) mistake I made this past week.) I did look up information on how to make rice milk, though, and it’s surprisingly easy, so I may do that in the near future. Lastly, the honey rice puffins are a bit too sweet. I was hopeful that, being from whole foods and such that they would be a mellow honey, but holy snout was I wrong. Might be better with milk, but I’ve yet to investigate due to not having usable milk atm.

*Normally I will eat a ton of cookies at once, but even with the cookies and cake I’ve baked this week, I’ve tended only to eat maybe 2 at a time, if that. I don’t know if this is just because I understand them to be more expensive (which doesn’t make sense for the cookies/cake that I made, because those didn’t have any of the new/expensive flours), because I am stuck in the idea that I am on a diet and therefore need to not eat sweets (which would be odd, but as I’ve never put myself on any sort of a diet before could be the case?), or because my body simply does not want them in such quantity anymore/right now (because of the removal of gluten from my diet??). I’m not complaining, but it is curious. I do wonder if this means I might lose some weight (not that I’m trying), because normally I do not gain weight despite eating a fair amount of dessert-type things. Will update if I do – I’ve been exactly the same weight for at least the last two years (since I graduated college).

In the realm of deliciousosity, the boyfriend and I made g-f sesame chicken last night from this recipe. I didn’t take any pictures and I forgot a step (lightly beaten egg whites + corn starch on the chicken before cooking it), but I highly recommend it for anyone who likes sugary Chinese take-out but can’t have it for gluten reasons. I found this doubly-exciting, because it means there is yet another thing that I want to eat that the boyfriend is actually willing to try without coaxing.

Lastly, I’ve decided that today I am going to attempt bread. This might go poorly because I think the humidity is going to get a little weird today – we’re switching from the general coolness of the last few days to 65 right now/high of 82 with a possibility of incoming storms. All the same, better to start now than to keep putting off.