Cooking Topless—err… Tapas.

Happy Birthday, mom! Thanks for always having good food in the fridge.

AJ & I had a lot of fun experimenting with different combinations of tasty things. Here are a few tasty ideas, because everyone’s mom has a birthday at least once a year. (Pardon the shitty quality phone pictures)

Pan tomate:
Every good tapas spread needs some bread to accompany the cheeses, spreads, and charcuteries.
Grab a french baguette, cut it in half horizontally. Squeeze/rub a tomato all over the bread, until the tomato is pretty much juiced, and kind of gross. (set the rest of the tomato aside, you can cut it up and put a few diced pieces on top, or use it for other things too!). Spread olive oil all over the top, and some garlic. I experimented this time with a little bit of oregano and pepper. Not a bad idea. Throw it in the oven for a couple minutes and viola. Tomato bread! Tastes great with a bit of prosciutto or cheese on top.

In this pic you can also see some garlic shrimps, hummus, patatas bravas, and lots of cheeses & crackers, etc.

Veggie mix:
This one isn’t too hard to figure out. We were going to make veggie kebabs, but couldn’t find any skewers. So frying up some eggplant, zucchini, red peppers, onions, and garlic did the trick.

Patatas bravas:
Basically fried potato wedges, spiced with garlic, paprika, onion, tobasco or chilis, and cumin. (though I think we cheated with a bravas spice packet) These taste delicious with a bit of aioli sauce. (a mixture of egg whites, olive oil, garlic, and lemon) For a slightly less complicated but still delicious sauce, you can always just use ketchup & mayo combination. Don’t knock it til you try it!

Garlic shrimp:
Get some shrimp (not cocktail shrimp! My roomies and I made that mistake a couple years ago. So weird.) Basically, just fry it up with lots of oil and garlic. The best garlic shrimp I ever had was in Barcelona, with fresh shrimp from the Boquería. mmm.

Avo wedges:
Another super simple plate. Just cut up some avocados, and throw some olive oil and salt on it. This is also a tasty snack if you’ve just got an avocado, take the pit out, put the oil and salt into the middle and eat it out of the skin with a spoon. mmm.

Cream cheese dill pickles:
Spread a bit of cream cheese over mini dill pickes, and wrap it in turkey. (Also tastes good wrapped in salami, but turkey is a bit healthier.)

Spinach & Feta Guacamole:
In the red pepper ‘bowl’, in the middle of the pickle plate, is probably my favorite concoction—discovered late one night while playing around in AJ’s kitchen with a bunch of random ingredients in his fridge. Cut up some baby spinach, avocados, and feta cheese. Mush it up a bit, and throw in the rest of those juiced / diced tomatoes from the pan tomate above. It’s kind of like guacamole, but the spinach and feta really make it tasty. I honestly don’t know why we put it in a red pepper for a bowl, it just looks nice and makes it not so awkward to lick, or even eat, the bowl afterwards.

Bacon dates:
These. Are. Amazing. One of my favorite things to bring to potlucks and parties. Take some dates, cut them in half (but not all the way through), take the pit out and stuff it with gorgonzola cheese. Wrap with half a piece of bacon (depending how big your dates are), and put a toothpick in it to keep from coming apart. Put it in the oven at 350° for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese is kind of melty.

Goat cheese bread:
Behind that, we’ve got some baguette slices with goat cheese. You can top this with fried slices of red pepper or avocado slices.

Anyways, I’d say overall it was a pretty successful birthday party. This actually made a lot of food for just 6 people, and didn’t take too much prep time (about an hour and a half?). I mostly just use a lot of the same ingredients with the things I cook and try to find new combinations. People sometimes get overwhelmed with tapas if you have too many choices and have to add things together yourself, so the pre-made combos really seemed to go over well. And for dessert, you can never go wrong with chocolate mayonnaise cake and port wine

Late Night Crafts, vol. 2

Partially inspired by Able Parris, partially in continuum of my recent midnight art projects, and partially in tribute to the hours I used to spend cutting things out of magazines and pasting them wherever I pleased… I have decided to start a new moleskine dedicated solely to collaging, drawing, & type. Basically a sketchbook. Sort of.

This one in particular (to be expanded upon soon) is my attempts at drawing type freehand, based off of Hoefler Text (Black Swash!). Time to bust out of these winter blues and start making stuff!

Animals: crackers vs wild

I guess you could say I’ve seen some pretty sweet animals this year. (and not just at the circus)

Late night crafts

Sometimes it’s hard to break out of a creative slump. Instead of going out to the bars it’s generally more satisfying to be productive with this time. Therefore, I cut up newspapers and see what happens. It’s probably not a finished piece, but it’s 3:30am and I generally like it, although it doesn’t look as much like an airplane as I might have hoped. Also, please excuse the shitty quality phone pictures.

Horoscopes are really creepy sometimes.

“Which metropolitan areas in America have the most brainpower? Not the best sports teams or the richest businessmen or the most powerful politicians, but the smartest people? “The Daily Beast” did a study and declared that the top two were the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina and the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it so happens that those are the two places where the brilliant people congregate. And I’m quite sure that they have been a very good influence on me. My recommendation to you in 2010, Cancerian, is to cultivate this knack. Gravitate towards genius. Surround yourself with deep thinkers and innovative dreamers. Hang out in the vicinity of brainstorms.”

Alright, February. Where are you with my one-way ticket?

The New Minimum

Ladies and gentlemen, your mind is about to be blown. The New Minimum, released today, is an online magazine-style blog started and curated by Jacob Heftmann.

TNM’s manifesto: The New Minimum is a magazine about unique perspectives. We realized that the web has lots of good ideas but has a hard time with presenting them in a compelling manner. Our priority is to match good content with great art direction.

In the midst of job searching, Jacob’s first feature touches on some of the more interesting and overlooked jobs for designers. In this case, war propaganda. This ties in nicely with some of his latest infographics, tracking his job search progress.

I’m excited to see what new features will be rolling out of this. As we start to roll into a new era of really understanding and grasping the power of designing & displaying content on the web, I think TNM will definitely be a key player in driving bloggers, designers, and idea-makers to push the quality of their online content to the next level.

My life is complete.

A note on modern movie-goers

I’m generally disappointed in the American movie-going culture.

There aren’t many IMAX movies that I’ve seen in my life, and definitely none in 3D. Despite a few frame rate or minor projector issues, and vibrations that I think were caused by the speakers booming against the back of the screen, it was an exhilarating experience. I drove 3 hours up to Chicago, paid $17 to see Avatar 3D IMAX, and drove 3 hours back home, breathless and with my mind racing.

To me, it’s important to get really into a movie if I’m going to watch it. I don’t want to pay to sit there and criticize every little piece of the story, I want to be taken from my seat and transplanted into another world. Somewhere along the line, I learned that it’s really important to stay until the very end of the rolling credits, if nothing else to show support and respect for all of the people who worked hard on the movie.

This is why it was disappointing to me when the entire IMAX theater was emptied before the screen even cut to the black rolling credits. As soon as the names started appearing, the people started leaving, despite the few extra seconds of flying through the scenery. This especially shocked me for an IMAX theater. For a movie like Avatar, this extra minute or two was just about the time I needed to digest the movie.

Avatar aside, another one of my pet peeves is when people judge movies too quickly and without much reasoning. “I didn’t like the story”, “the graphics looked cheesy”, “the dialogue sucked”, “the message was too literal”, “in 3 years this won’t be relevant anymore”. Thank you, for single-handedly murdering the magic of film. You don’t leave the Louvre saying, “Van Gogh’s colors blow”, “the paint is too dry”, “the statue didn’t look real enough”.

Movies are story-telling devices. What good is a story if you don’t learn something from it? We are internally connection-builders. If you can’t find a way to relate the message and the stories to your life, at least make an effort to figure out how this movie reflects our culture. Perhaps film appreciation classes should be just as mandatory in schools as art history.

This year, I’d like to challenge both the film industry and the audiences to make a shift in attitude towards film. Stay until the end of the credits, even if there isn’t an extra scene!

Happy Holidays!

Dear friends & family,

Christmas is about… camels. For some reason, there always seems to be some kind of camel theme in our family for the winter holidays*. Perhaps it’s because they signify some kind of sandy, warm environment (exactly the opposite of winter in Illinois). Or perhaps there’s some kind of metaphor hidden in there about saving up and storing water for a long trek throughout the year.

Whatever the significance, our family has been blessed with a lot of metaphorical “water” this year. Between graduating, retiring, beginning college, and traveling the world, our family has been quite busy. Fortunately, we’ve been able to enjoy some quality time together.

Wherever you are in the world, or in life, I hope you’re all enjoying a warm and safe holidays with your families & friends!

Looking forward to what the new year has to bring,
Much love,
Madelin

*The history: It must have started a few years ago, when I went to Tunisia shortly after the holidays and rode a camel through the Sahara desert. Last year, I painted dad a watercolor camel, to replace a lost treasure that never quite made it from my grandma’s inheritance. Through some crazy coincidence, he also got me a camel figurine to add to my growing collection of wooden animal figures from around the world. This year, while visiting my little brother in Mizzou, looking for a pretty location to take our family Christmas card picture, we drove by a farm that had a camel & a zebra. (wtf Missouri?) Immediately pulled over and snapped a nice little photo shoot with this midwestern dromedary.

T’is the night before…

… and I just finished my shopping. So I tend to do most things last minute, especially when it comes to holidays. Despite the fact that none of this will probably wind up under the tree, here are a few things that were on my list this year.

1. A “real” Job. Or at least some healthcare
   Probably not very likely to happen before tomorrow, but it would be nice to get my parents off my back about this one. Researching healthcare companies is a nightmare (trying to interpret those websites just makes me sick), and while I’m tolerating life at home it’s still tough to have all my stuff packed in boxes in the garage.
2. Books!
   If I can’t get a job, I might as well continue learning. These are a few of the books on my list:
   • 
   • 
     I don’t know why I don’t already have this one.
   • 
   • 
   • 
     English version, please!
3. WD My Passport 500GB External Harddrive
   It’s a little hard to drag around my giant Lacie all over the place, and the storage on my laptop is getting a little out of control.
   
4. Black leather calf-length low/no-heeled boots (size 11!)
   C’mon, every girl needs a nice pair of boots
   
5. Monocle magazine subscription
   I discovered this magazine in an airport bathroom in Johannesburg, and immediately fell in love. Luckily, South Africa is a month behind in their stock, because I finished the entire November issue on the plane and bought the December issue in Madrid.
   
6. Laptop messenger bag
   I’m not a student anymore, it’s a little dorky to carry my backpack around everywhere.
   
7. Frequent Flier Miles
   I may be grounded for a while from any more international adventures, at least until June. I’m saving up for Mongolia, fools!

Happy holidays everyone!