Friday Followup

 

Didja Miss Me?

Hey, so I know it's been a while, and I know I've been spectacularly bad at keeping up on my blog commitments, but... I have been a busy lil bee!

Last week I was waiting impatiently for my Arteza Watercolor Pencils to arrive from Amazon and while Amazon could shoot their founder into the upper atmosphere in an embarrassingly phallic rocket with no issues, they could not send my pencils in a timely fashion. It felt like it took forever. It didn't, and I've already whined about this ad nauseum, but there you go. While I waited, I plopped my paints into new containers from a discount store and stressed.

After they showed up, I started getting ready for a really cool trip to Boston with some friends, and that was a total blast! We ate a lot of food.

I took the pencils with me and... never really used them because we were busy as heck lol.

And yesterday, I couldn't post my art because I was dogsitting.

But here we are! And here are all of the pics & stories I wanted to tell you since last freaking week :P

THE REPOTTING SAGA

While testing my paints a while back I noticed that a lot of the paints were gummy or solid in the tube. They're watercolors, though, so I figured I could still use them if I found some way to reconstitute them inside the tube (I couldn't) or took them out of the tube and put them somewhere I could find them!

Enter: Cheap Dollar Store Containers

I bought three packs of cheap little containers for about a buck a pack, and each pack had 8 containers, so I had plenty to repot my tubes into tubs! Some were very liquid (one of the greens actually filled the bottom!) but especially the brown tones like Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber were totally solidified and unsqueezable.

My dad's utility knife with epoxy-gummed blade plus the gutted tubes of paint

Fortunately, once I had everything all untubed there wasn't too much of a mess - just a bunch of sharp metal tubes, some wrappers off of the sleeves of containers, the box the paints came in, and a few napkins!

And some paint splotches on my fingertips

Mostly of the runnier blues

Two days after the repotting experience, though, part 2 of the saga commenced:

THE WATERCOLOR PENCILS

Yay Pencils! In a box that made sense and was the right size!

My poor mail carrier must've thought I was going (more) crazy when he pulled up with the box - I actually did the "fist-pump for joy" thing you see in 80s movies. I was so excited I'd have hugged the poor guy if he hadn't high-tailed it back to his truck and rumbled down the street at top speed lol.

What a weird day that was! One mail truck pulled up across the street and delivered to my neighbor before leaving and then 40 minutes later, our mail showed up!

The Pretty Pretty Tin

I don't know why I was under the impression that the pencils would be coming in a cardboard sleeve when it says "comes in a tin" in like four places on the order, but I was very pleasantly surprised! The tin is heavy and sturdy and has a pleasant matte finish everywhere except the outline of the red box, the words "WATERCOLOR PENCILS" and the box around the word "EXPERT", which are shiny metal.

The tin itself is very difficult to open one-handed, which is very good, since it means it won't just randomly open if you're bringing it with you to sketch on the go, and the inside of the lid has swatches, numbers, names, and lightfastness rating of all 72 colors!

I'm planning to swatch each color by lightfastness rating, which ranges from + (Extremely Lightfast) to +++++ (Less Lightfast), though it does not say anywhere what those distinctions mean. By the Wikipedia page on Lightfastness, I'd guess they're using an ASTM rating system so + level pencils will hold color for over 100 years and +++++ pencils will hold theirs for only up to 2 years. Wild!

So. Many. Colors!!!

I haven't finished with my swatches yet, so my apologies for not including the whole gamut.

I packed the pencils for my trip to Boston, and here are some of the things I ate and where to find them (when I can remember where lol).

Go Go Curry! Medium Pork Katsu curry with a boiled egg and sausages
H-Mart food court

An amazing roast pork bun from a food court in an arts college
which was... an adventure!

12 Dollar Bento lunch at Karma in Westford, Mass
My lunch was:
A9 (Sweet & Sour Chicken), Miso Soup (not pictured), Chicken Fingers, Spicy Tuna Maki, White Rice
10/10 would recommend!

I was in the Boston Area from Sunday til Tuesday and I only drew a couple times while I was there because the adventure was non-stop! But now that I'm home here is:

THE ART:

"A Cool Pylon Seen on the Way to Boston, July 2021";
Watercolor Pencil & ink on watercolor paper; 2021

"Highest Colorfast Pencils 1"; watercolor pencil on watercolor paper; 2021

"Highest Colorfast Pencils 2"; Watercolor pencil on watercolor paper; 2021

"Undersea 1"; watercolor pencil on watercolor paper; 2021

And there you have it - a lot of the things I have been up to since I went radio silent!

All watercolor pencil pages were then gone-over with the water brushes, and I'm really looking forward to playing around even more with them! I still really want to go back over my old Pokemon teams and try to draw the trainers, so maybe that's what I'll do next?

I also really loved drawing that underwater scene! I used some references from WikiSpecies by hitting "Random Page" over and over until images of sea life appeared lol.

But that'll about do it for me tonight. If I find out were I got those awesome roast pork buns from I'll add it to a future post.

I hope you're all doing alright out there, and...

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Survival Sunday 228: The Aporkalypse Cometh

Sometimes, there comes a time in a person's life when there are leftovers no one wants to eat in the fridge. It may be that you've had a large party in the last few days and one of your entrees wasn't the favorite. It may be that you just had to cook up a large package of something that was about to go bad so you can extend its potential shelf life. It might just be that you kind of didn't succeed 100% at the recipe you were trying, but while the food isn't great it's still edible.

Regardless of the reason you've had the leftovers, you've probably had them. You've probably also looked at them several times over the ensuing days and thought "boy, I do not want to waste food. I'd hate to chuck it, but I'm just not that into it."

So here is the story of how Z and I survived the Aporkalypse.

My mom is a great cook, but pork products are very difficult to keep tender when you're cooking them en masse (or if they're porkchops, but we gave up on those years ago...), and as she still has the mindset of a mom cooking for six or more people, she tends to cook big.

And that's how we ended up with a container of bone-in pork spareribs in the fridge for several days.

Now, I usually love my mom's pork spareribs. They're always coated in tangy barbecue sauce, cooked in the oven in one of her pretty pyrex or ceramic dishes with the flowers and vines painted on, and they're usually really flavorful and good.

For whatever reason, however, these ribs came out tough, bland, and unappetizing. My dad, who usually takes leftovers in to work for lunch, refused to touch them, and so they sat for days in one of the tall Tupperwares in the fridge.

I needed something to cook with. We were out of meat or meat substitutes that I could bring with me to the kitchen where Z lives, and I wanted to cook. I really, really wanted to.

My choices were thus: I could try my best to make bao buns with the pork ribs, I could attempt pork floss with them, or I could make soup. Since I only had just so much time, the seven hour process of making the bao just wasn't going to work, and since I was not confident in my abilities to remove the bones and properly fry and pound the meat, the floss would have to wait for another time, too. Pity - both would've been great.

Instead, I got the biggest pot with a handle I could find - the one we usually use for mashed potatoes, and I dropped all of the ribs inside. Then I added about 2 cups of chicken broth and dumped in some soy sauce for good measure (probably 1/4 cup, to be honest, and that was a bit much). Then I let it simmer and boil for several hours while I did my blog and drew. That's right, this was a Thursday endeavor.

Here they are with the bones still in, simmering merrily away on my stove!

After several hours simmering away, I started probing the once-tough meat with a slotted spoon. The spoon sank into the meat, so I used it to fish out the bones and set those aside. I should also mention that these ribs were fatty as heck, which made their earlier toughness even stranger.

The ribs are now de-boned and swimming in... far less liquid than before...

I let the pork soup sit on the stove for another hour or so to cool down before dumping it into the same Tupperware it had come from. After washing the Tupperware, of course. I'm not gross.

Here's where things get... weird.

See, I don't visit Z on Thursdays, more often than not, so I wasn't going to be bringing the soup over then. Instead, I waited a day, then brought it over. It took a couple of tries to get the right-sized pot, but then, when I tried to pour the "soup" out, I found it had completely congealed. That's right. I'd simmered all of the broth out, leaving only the rendered fat and soy sauce. How unappealing!

But we saved it with water, more soy sauce, and some frozen corn! Ah, frozen corn, most noble of the bagged freezer aisle veggies. Blessed among the grasses. Yes, corn is a grass.

Regardless, we let that simmer until the pork was beginning to shred into nothingness, and then we went completely mad.

We added a brick of ramen. These were buckwheat soba, so they were pretty umami to begin with, and when we added the packet of flavoring to the soup, it was even better. The seaweed and extra soy flavors really brought out the flavor of the pork, and with the subtle barbecue flavor from their first cooking, this was a really pleasant meal

Even if it looked faintly terrifying.

So why do I call it the Aporkalypse?

Well...

Remember how I mentioned that my mother cooks like there are still half a dozen people living here?

Yeah. Only two people ate ribs the night she cooked them.

I packed four or more servings of pork ribs into this weird noodle stew, and we absolutely felt it. For days. That's way too much meat for two people!

So my only caution for you all is this: if it looks like there's a lot of food, then there probably is a lot of food, and therefore you should try to consider whether to hold some off for later or just invite at least one more person to eat!

...

I'm totally making it again someday, though.

Maybe with more curry flavor than bbq...

Go Enjoy Something!
FC