time out.

I'm in love with my bed. This is awesome.
Unrelatedly, I'm finally taking 4 months' worth of cellphone pics off my phone. Let's catch up, shall we?

Here's the truffled egg salad/beef burger from Burgermeester:

Here's me about ready to go all Office Space on this FAX machine that WOULD NOT FAX my Italian bureaucracy back in October.

Here's a sunny afternoon at Stork.

Here's a very foggy night about two weeks ago, it was great.

Here's the tosti maker from the Grand in Groningen. One morning when the kitchen staff came in it was missing and there was near hysteria. It is everyone's favorite appliance.

Here's Mara testing the skeleton/Tele rig.

The next four pictures are one night. Mara and I started at De Prael, which was very pleasant until we got kicked out for crashing a private party. So we went to In De Wildeman, where we planned our attack on the Burger Bar.

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This recipe exists elsewhere on this site, but this is the updated version so yeah.

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carrot-ginger soup with creme fraiche.

1 medium onion
5 large carrots
2 inches of ginger, grated
4 cloves garlic
1 granny smith apple
1 red apple
1 can mandarin oranges with liquid
2 tsp cumin seed, ground
1 T ground coriander seed
1 tsp cayenne
2 cups vegetable broth

Chop ingredients where necessary, saute a bit, add liquid, then simmer until tender. Blend with hand
blender or alternatively, a food processor until smooth. Adjust seasoning if necessary.

Garnish with cilantro, croutons and creme fraiche/sour cream.

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satellite kitchen.

Above: real productivity in the studio. Coming soon to this post: documentation of Prod Ass's stellar cooking efforts during our tenure in Groningen. The Scimulon was really on her game, this was all pretty perfect home cooking, just not done at home.

OK, but then she just saw this below list of things she made at the Grand, and said "it looks like I can't cook. Look at how simple all that stuff is." Yes, but you're cooking for 4 to 6 people every night, one vegetarian, and the idea is to make something that is delicious without being incapacitating, interesting without being scary or weird, nutritious without being boring, and inexpensive enough not to break the budget. I thought these were all great solutions to the problem.

Middle: Fennel, Celery, and Citrus salad. Bottom: a Prod Ass product that ended up on the cutting room floor.

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Tuesday
Thyme-crusted warm goat cheese salad with blueberries and candied walnuts in a honey-mustard vinaigrette.
Carrot and coriander soup with creme fraiche and homemade croutons.

Wednesday
Polpetti di tonno with red sauce and tagliatelle.

Thursday
Salmon salad with chile-lemon dressing.
Smoked trout and corn chowder.

Sunday
Fennel, celery and citrus salad with apple cider-balsamic reduction.
Mango caprese with basil vinaigrette.
Pasta puttanesca and fettucini alfredo.
French apple cake.

Monday
Shrimp, sage, and saffron risotto.
Caesar salad.

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coming up from under.

Where to begin?

Maybe here: I just went to the grocery store to buy "everything" because we had "nothing". No crackers, no bread, no vegetables, no fruit, no fish, no nothing. Our refrigerators contained only condiments, butter, and milk. And old cheese.

Or we could maybe begin with some Lessons Learned. One is that sick people don't make awesome pallbearers. Over the past few days, Anat and I were experiencing varying degrees of physical malfunction, and when you're carrying a "dead" body on your shoulders, you can immediately feel any weakness in your fellow carriers b/c suddenly you're doing more work. And if there are only two of you and you're both a bit unsteady on your feet...it's exciting stuff.

But we managed to escape our four Amsterdam performances with only one minor meltdown: the night after the premiere (apparently well-known for being a night of potential trouble) I was kind of in a limbo of true sickness and untested cough medicine that rendered me incapable of walking properly, planning ahead, or dealing with anything unexpected on stage. So of course this is the night we paid someone 600 euro to come film the thing.

 I'd struggled through the first 40 minutes of the performance, but when it came time for my funeral, my guitar was suddenly distressingly out of tune, and it just got worse as the song went on. By the time the song was supposed to be building to its climax, the chords coming out of my guitar were neither predictable nor really recognizable as traditional elements of pop music. Apparently the amount of frustrated this made me was visible to the audience and received many positive comments afterwards ("It was so nice to see real anger onstage!"), but as a  musical performance I think "disaster" comes pretty close to summing it up.

Hopefully there's a happy ending: the person who was filming came back the next night (last night) and I'd say our performance was roughly 6000% better, wobbly pallbearers notwithstanding. Fingers crossed for an unblemished photo/video/audio registration.

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refuel.

pinned back.

Above: the same picture I always take of Groningen. Below: Vera, right around the corner, and below that, Pinback on stage at Vera in what turned out to be a surprisingly awesome show.

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like ships.

Still experimenting with light. Don't worry, I'm only showing things here that have been discarded already. .

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prod ass.

Prod Ass (aka production assistant aka Mara) cooked her first dinner at the Grand last night: warm goat cheese salad with blueberries and candied pecans + a lovely carrot and coriander soup with creme fraiche, cilantro, and homemade croutons. Meanwhile, I just took a (dirt) nap downstairs.

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light reading.

In Groningen, playing with light.

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status.

Light at end of tunnel. Let's hope it's not the proverbial train. Off to Groningen for 10 days of hard work and a hopefully proportional amount of fun.

Above: my first (and probably last) frietje kapsalon. An unintegrated and kind of pointless mashup.

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