On dyeing my hair blue

June 19, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

I started dreaming of electric blue hair in college. I even bought a blue wig later on so I could test it out, I just never took that last step. Call it elder child complex or what have you, but I felt caught in the pressure of maintaining this facade of conservativeness.

I mean, my hair pretty much stayed as it was until grad school – long, wavy, with some variation on bangs. I donated my hair to charity a few times, so I had variation in length, but that was pretty much it.

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This was my hair at the 2011 Google Holiday Party (photographer unknown), literally days before I chopped it off, and weeks before I joined social media to never return.

After the wedding and dealing with all that insanity, I finally scheduled a long overdue cut and hacked that mess down to a pixie cut. It was fantastic. Suddenly, drying my hair was the easiest thing ever, no army of ponytail holders needed, nothing to worry about but keeping my bangs out of my eyes. I also really liked not having a hairy scarf over my neck at all times in the summer.

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(This time, I know the photographer – it was taken by the lovely Elizabeth Mace Giosia.)

Yes, yes I am wearing a bizarre trenchcoat, a fascinator, and a veil. It’s part of the Traveling Red Dress project, which really needs to happen again this year.

I’ve let it grow out since then, because it’s a lot easier to forget to get your hair cut at longer lengths and not look like you got hit by a train wreck, but it’s still above shoulder length. It’s fluffy and light and cute, and I’ll probably keep it this way for a while.

Still, I’d never dyed my hair an unnatural color. All I’ve done are tiny highlights during a short phase in late high school. I liked the blonde and red streaks, but it was too high maintenance for a college budget, so they went away.

This year, I finally decided to get past all my neuroses, swearing to myself I could dye it darker if needed, and booked that appointment. And then, with my health issues, it got delayed – again and again and again.

So one sunny Friday, I finally went in. I originally planned to only get a little blue, but we instead added panels of azure all over. It’s mostly hidden, as I didn’t want to be too showy, but when I shake my head it peeks out. The blue we ended up with was rather dark, but that’s to prevent it fading to green over time, and there are hints of violet.

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Some quality time with the tinfoil hat later…

It. Was. Epic.

Seriously, I was beaming when I left the salon. I went to Bakery Nouveau, grabbed a slice of cake, and later held the back of my hair up for the roommates.

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The front’s awesome, too, but I couldn’t get a sane picture of it at all, no matter how much I tried. I’m sure it’ll pop up at some event photography soon enough.

In the interim I’ve been holding the back of my hair up for a lot of my friends. I think most were in shock that the visually conservative firecracker me would go for the hipster-punk hair. (I don’t think the hipster glasses help there, but the hair still rocks.)

A few days later, and I’ve lost some color, but my hair now ties back into this awesome turquoise puff. I love it. But I’ve also learned that my hair bleaches with ease, and takes color fantastically. I can fix it. And if I get bored of it, I can dye it again. I’d even love to go rainbow once my hair goes fully grey.

After all, it’s only hair.

Posted in Grand adventures, Random thoughts Tagged , |

Being surprised by food

June 18, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

(Warning: food discussion ahead to make Andrew Zimmern proud. Vegans, I’d go read my sundae post or something.)

In one of my management classes, we discussed surprise and how vital it is. One of the takeaways was that surprise is one of the best ways to learn, and that not being surprised means you’re not growing. I love being surprised by food.

Continue reading »

Posted in Everyday adventures, Food, Photography, Random thoughts Tagged , , , |

Play With Your Food: Getting up close

June 17, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

So in case you couldn’t tell from my previous posts, I have a slight obsession with macro photography. Slight. Ever tried to do super crazy macro photography, though? I haven’t, and I thought it was time to play around.

Now I shoot with a 100mm macro lens, which gives me the joy of not having to practically put the food in my face in order to take a shot I like. (It’s also so heavy I can use it for lifting weights, but that would make it some of the most expensive exercise gear ever.) That doesn’t mean you need something that overkill. In fact, I’ve used my cell phone for macro work on more than one occasion for pretty spiffy results, or even my kit lens in a pinch.

This isn’t as much of a game as it is a challenge, a challenge to get you to shoot big for shooting small.

How to play:

  • Go into your kitchen, right now if you can.

  • Find the smallest things you’ve never photographed. Skip the truffles, the tiny cookies. Let’s go for grains of rice, individual oats, nuts. (If you go for something as small as rice, no more than a tablespoon or so.) If you’re using a cell phone or you’re not liking what you’re finding, absolutely go larger, but the goal is to have teeny, tiny things.

  • Pick three or four.

  • Arrange and photograph however you think is most awesome.

My Games

I decided to try two versions, one with toys and another following the rules.

For the first, I finally put my miniature food erasers to work. One of these days I’ll build a full tiny tea set, but for now I just have the two, the taiyaki and sakura mochi. (For those not in the know, taiyaki are fish-shaped cakes, usually filled with azuki bean paste, or anko, and sakura mochi are mochi filled with anko and topped with edible cherry leaves.)

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These erasers are too cute for their intended purposes. They’ll make great food models, though.

Once out of the bag, the tiny erasers were just adorable – and I only had one thing that would work as a prop: a tiny cupcake wrapper.

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And again, just in case that dinky strawberry didn’t imply how small these are, I added a normal-sized spoon to the mix. I was really wishing I had one of my five centimeter scale bars from college, but one makes do when lacking proper scientific equipment.

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Maybe I should just order calipers.

Next I raided the shelves and grabbed dry sushi rice, some hazelnuts, popcorn kernels, and some chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberries from an older review that were still good and wouldn’t make it to my next trip. (Well, now they’re not going to make it because I ate them all while writing this post, but that’s okay. I can claim otherwise.)

PWYF-Week3

I realized when I started shooting that not only did I have no clue what I was doing, but that I’ve never even shot rice before at this level. And, honestly, it’s hard to make a single piece of rice interesting. First I tried moving individual grains around to form lines, as I thought spirals could be awesome, but apparently rice follows its own polarity or something at the granular level. Every time I put one down it would rotate 90-130 degrees, and generally in the direction I didn’t want them to go.

I did try to salvage these shots by adding other objects, but they just got… boring.

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Yeah.

So, back to the drawing board.

Since I couldn’t get them to cooperate in thin lines, I scooped up all the rice into a pile and started pushing it around into twists and turns. Now that worked, and worked rather well. In fact, this gave me an idea for an all-rice shoot I’ve been avoiding.

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This was fun. I love the idea of building solar systems and galaxies on a plate, less awful variations on those dioramas I somehow avoided through childhood. (Given that they happened at both my middle and elementary schools all the time, I’m whispering a small thank-you to the teachers that let us mummify chicken carcasses instead.) It’s not the most creative photograph I’ve ever made, but I could see spending a few hours making rice zen sculptures with clean hands, photographing it all, then making rice with it all for dinner.

So go shoot something small, and see what happens.

Posted in Everyday adventures, Food, Photography, Play With Your Food, Uncategorized Tagged , , |

Things I’m thinking about: weekend of June 14

June 14, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

Congrats, class of 2013! Commencement is on the 15th, so that’s a great day to not go to the University District – or Century Link Field, where they’ll be stuffing 5,000 newly minted graduates and their families. Really. Go be downtown; it’ll probably be less crowded.

It really feels like summer, so here’s a list of Seattle pools. Go get your feet wet.

If you’re like me, though, you’re more likely to be pulling out your scuba gear. I’m giving a shout out to Underwater Sports, who put up with me through Rescue Diver, but there are a lot of great places out there. And the Edmonds Underwater Park has crazy huge ling cod.

If you need a dessert fix, it’s seriously icebox cake time. I may stick to the old classic of chocolate wafers and whipped cream, but this lemon cream looked awesome, or there’s caramel cream or chocolate peanut butter or chocolate hazelnut or chocolate raspberry or meyer lemon or chocolate ginger peach or even that angel food cake disaster I made that will be getting its own post next week.

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It was delicious.

I’m also working on raiding and clearing out my pantry for summer cooking, which will show up soon enough in a post. In the interim, though, I’m living at World Spice Merchants and dreaming of a clean kitchen.

For next week’s Play With Your Food: Raid your pantry for the tiny things you keep on not wanting to photograph. Now go tinier.

Things I did this week:

I rolled more dice, and there was Aion cat plush mug-sharing action.

Kiri took over yet again, with epic waffle s’mores. Epic.

Then we got taken over by tiny doughnut cakes.

I wrote for the designated driver, who is usually me.

Posted in Everyday adventures, Random thoughts, Things I'm thinking about Tagged , |

How to: Attend alcoholic events as a Designated Driver

June 13, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

Since PROOF, Seattle’s first Distillers Festival, is this Saturday, I thought I’d touch on something not everyone’s going to discuss: being the designated driver. While Uber and taxis in general are way better now, there are still cases where someone’s not drinking, or maybe you’re not that interested in chugging down beer for three hours straight.

I attend a lot of wine and spirits events. A lot. I also, believe it or not, barely drink at them. I love the culture, and I know my spirits well enough to keep up with most bartenders, but I’m usually at these events as a photographer and tend to limit my alcohol intake, and often don’t imbibe at all. (Would you with a macro lens at your hip? Noooo.) So here’s what I do as a sober person attending spirits and wine events, or even some stuff that will work for just going to bars, which I hope will help you or your Designated Driver.

Give mocktails a chance. Seriously, the bartenders and mixologists out there are making things besides Shirley Temples even in most bars, and spirits events are taking the hint.

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Taste Washington, for example, had ‘Tude Juice  boothing for the first time this year, who makes crazy delicious apple juice, and I was even at an event recently at ART where I got a virgin Bird of Paradise, a drink with pineapple juice, basil, ginger, and jalapeno. It was light on the heat, but not so weak that you couldn’t taste the pepper, and the ginger rounded it out against the pineapple. I will absolutely order one the next time I’m at that restaurant.

If a Shirley really is all you can get, ask them to add orange juice at least; it’s the Canadian version, and it’s usually tastier.

Use this time to check out the food. All these spirits events? They want you to not be rip-roaring drunk – and the food tends to match the awesomeness of the spirits. We’re talking everything from food trucks to top chefs. I was seriously impressed yet again by the food offerings at Taste Washington this year, which ranged from Bluebird Ice Cream to Sweet Iron Waffles. I wish they’d offer a Designated Driver badge – maybe only 1-2 alcohol tastes, tops, and unlimited food. They also had things like strawberry-stuffed mochi and huge sliders. I would have made my friends all buy that pass and they still would have had a fantastic time.

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I mean, seriously, you want to miss out on bites like these? No, no you don’t.

Go talk to the staff. I can’t stress this enough – ask people questions. The woman who runs Project V Distillery, Mo, is one of the kindest, loveliest people I’ve ever met. Steven Stone of Sound Spirits? Super cool guy. Pretty much whoever you talk to will have stories, and it’s hard to both appreciate what they’re saying and drink with them, especially if Mo just pulled out the Double Silo, her 160 proof vodka. Also, they might have new flavors coming out, or events, or who knows what. Go say hi.

Proof-Distillers

Stay hydrated. This sounds blindingly obvious, but I’ve seen people miss the water stands – and there will be several – in their quest to fill up on tastings. Whether or not you’re drinking spirits, attending food events can be tiring. Grabbing a water before you start exploring will seriously tone down your body’s stress levels, giving you time to help out your friend who tried too much ice wine.

Posted in Everyday adventures, Random thoughts Tagged , , |

An army of teeny tiny doughnut cakes

June 12, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

I’m all for doing things in miniature – that way, I can eat more of them – but I’m also ridiculously lazy. Oh, I just made marshmallows from scratch, but that was after trying to save time by buying premade, locally produced ones and failing miserably. (I also had run out of the delicious, delicious Guimauve Confections mallows. So it goes.)

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I’m even lazier when it comes to cakes – cupcakes involve no cutting of layers, and are much easier to hand out, so they’re my standard for cake-like treats. But I wanted to make tiny, tiny cakes, the lazy baker’s petits fours. I think they’re awesome, but making one batch of petits fours was going to be a lot of cake and marzipan, and I only really wanted a single serving, maybe two.

I decided to try doughnuts. I mean, if you slice a cross section of the doughnut, you get thin discs, which sounded perfect. With two of those and some fillings, you could make the tiniest, easiest cake ever.

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So, onward I went in search of baked tori. A quick hunt to the QFC, which normally carries all the Top Pot I could dream of, showed they only had their in house doughnuts. I decided it was at least worth a shot, and I didn’t want to keep on delaying these plans. On their own, though, the doughnuts were dry. If I voluntarily repeated it with bad doughnuts, I’d probably brush them with simple syrup first or anything to get the moisture content higher. (The jam helped considerably there, as did the berries.)

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Once I got home, I tried using the floss technique for cutting cakes to slice the doughnuts into thin slices. It worked well, but it was just as fast in this case to use a serrated knife. Use whatever makes sense. After I got the knack of cutting cross-sections that weren’t full of holes or tears, I started layering them with fruit and jam. This took seconds, and my reward was cute and plentiful.

I had some frozen custard from Old School in the freezer, so in the goal of having the tiniest wee dessert, I pulled out the two teaspoon cookie scoop, stuck some custard on a cake stack, and drizzled some melted chocolate on top to make what you see above. Squee-ing may have occurred.

In the end, I still had some doughnut scraps, so I piled them in a bowl with the leftover jam, some strawberries, chocolate, and a scoop of frozen custard, and had one awesome sundae.

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Now, this tale of slightly sad doughnuts gets better. A few days after I wrote and shot the first attempt, I got into a silly tweet-off with Postmates, who decided to send me a half dozen from Top Pot on National Doughnut Day. The moral: tweet a ton, and sometimes Twitter will heed your call. With sugar.

Sugar bribery is delicious.

I had originally wanted to work with chocolate cake doughnuts anyway, so I grabbed the single chocolate cake doughnut (after I ate the one with raspberry glaze) and repeated the process, this time using jam and peanut butter.

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Three of these would be a good serving, and you can get 3-4 sets of rounds out of a doughnut if you cut carefully. And it could be so much fun to cut up a half dozen doughnuts of different flavors and mix and match the tiny cakes and build a cakelet army. Or, even better, top them with toasted marshmallow. No matter how you slice it, tiny desserts are best when shared.

 

Posted in Baking, DIY, Everyday adventures, Food Tagged , , |

Marshmallow Madness: Gimme S’more

June 11, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

This is part two of a guest post series by the ridiculously amazing Kiri Callaghan, continuing the collaboration with us and the masterminds at Guimauve Confections. We regret nothing except that the marshmallows disappeared all too quickly. Photos are by Elizabeth Mace Giosia, who I still really need to drag out for tea.

Mmm s’mores, need I say more?

Well, of course I do, otherwise what kind of post would this be? Geeze.

But I have a litany of dietary restrictions and while marshmallows somehow sneak by that, regrettably graham crackers and milk chocolate bars do not.

Besides, I hope you know how to make a traditional s’more.

In case you don’t but are too embarrassed to say so: Take one marshmallow, roast it over a fire until golden brown on the outside and warm and gooey on the inside. Break graham cracker in half to make two squares. Break off a square of chocolate as close to the size of the graham cracker as possible (As a child, we tended to use half a bar of Hershey’s milk chocolate, because it was cheap and you didn’t feel bad if it fell in the dirty while you were trying to construct this around a camp fire.). Then place the chocolate on top of one of the crackers, place the roasted mallow on top of that and smoosh it into a sandwich using the top cracker. Proceed to nom.

My mallow of choice this time around was something different to be sure: Cactus Pear-Lime Marshmallows by Guimauve Confections. A citrusy-s’more? What? Surely not.

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Surely yes.

I’m no chef, I’m really not. I love good food and I love experimenting. Hence what followed.

Dark chocolate is something I’ve struggled back and forth with on loving. (I grew up on milk chocolate—it was sweet and creamy but now it’s sweet creamy intestinal DEATH for me and while I occasionally stray from my dietary restrictions, I will keep within their confines when I’m able… or in the mood to.) However, I did remember that I really enjoy dark chocolate and orange.

So (at least in theory), dark chocolate seemed like it would pear (Shut up, it’s punny!) well with our Prickly Pear and Lime marshmallow.

And really, who does dark chocolate like Theo Chocolate?

Graham crackers, even gluten free graham crackers, tend to have a very maple-like undertone to me so they would never do. I needed something that would be crispy, bread-like, and have a warm but otherwise fairly neutral flavor.

So I chose waffles.

…because WAFFLES, yo. Now since I’m also a little gluten intolerant I grabbed myself some Vans Gluten Free Homestyle Waffles. Yes, I know, I know. I used frozen waffles, how the hell can I call myself a foodie?

Well, I don’t own a waffle maker. So. There.

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Just in case you missed those ingredients, here’s what we’re looking at:

·         1 Cactus (Prickly) Pear and Lime marshmallow

·         2 Waffles (of your choice, you can even make them if you please!)

·         1 bar of Theo Dark Chocolate.

One hard thing about these marshmallows is since they’re so fresh, they melt a little differently. So trying to roast this over our tiny little flame proved a little difficult. It was pretty make-shift. We stuck a fork in and held it over a flame from the stove. It melted a little funny to be honest but it was pretty warm on the outside.

While this was going on, we melted the bar of chocolate in a sauce pan on a medium heat, stirring regularly so it didn’t burn.

Pop your waffles into the toaster. Or make them in your waffle iron because you’re cooler than I am. You’ll want to time this right so they’re warm and crunch by the time the marshmallow and chocolate are melty.

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Once this has been done, you can dip your bottom waffle in to the fondue (be careful of dripping!) and place it on the plate. Dip the marshmallow and place it on top.

We didn’t do this for the shoot, but I ended up dipping the top waffle in chocolate as well. Smush together and enjoy! You’ll probably want to break out the silverware for this one though.

In retrospect this was pure experiment than anything else but I had a lot of fun and the flavors really did complement each other. I’d like to try again and experiment with different ways of melting the mallow

Posted in Baking, DIY, Everyday adventures, Food, Guest posts of awesome, Marshmallow May Tagged , , , , |

Play With Your Food: Place your map, roll the dice

June 10, 2013 by jltupper | 1 Comment

Welcome to Play With Your Food, my June series on being ridiculous with styling. If you want to start from the beginning, go here.

So after last week’s warm up, today should be easy. The goal is to reassess how you look at your photography space, and to remember that all the camera shows is what you show it.

What I realized after looking at image after image on Pinterest is that most photographers, myself included, tend to stick to certain angles and object placements. Even some of my favorites, like Cannelle et Vanille and Smitten Kitchen, default to particular styles. It’s a bad habit, because it’s so easy to get images that look the same in terms of style when you’re feeling rushed.

What You’ll Need:

  • Objects to photograph
  • As many dice as you have objects (if you lack that many dice, use counters/markers)
  • A game board, grid, or whatever flat surface you have

PWYF-Day2

Continue reading »

Posted in DIY, Everyday adventures, Food, Play With Your Food Tagged , , , , , |

Things I’m Thinking About: Weekend of June 7

June 7, 2013 by jltupper | Leave a comment

First, thanks for checking out and being patient with the new site layout! I’m still working out the kinks, but the portfolio section is updated and so much more user-friendly. One day, you might actually be able to tell I’m a photographer. I also just got a tablet, so expect doodling to appear in future posts.

As a reminder, Play With Your Food is continuing next week. I’d get some grid paper, or something that forces you to put pieces on a map or board, though using just a plain board would work as well in a pinch. Serious bonus points to anyone who tries it with Settlers of Catan.

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Also, I need to get popsicles.

The 13th may be far off, but I’m really curious about what’s going on at DabbleLab. They’re hosting a free class on being a locavore, and I have one hell of a black thumb.

I’m hoping to spend the weekend making agua frescas or licuados, as I’m craving something cold that isn’t the lemon-spiked water in the fridge. This peach licuado looks pretty awesome post-translation, or there’s this mint cantalope aguas frescas. Here’s to hoping I can keep my body temperature self-regulating as this fever comes and goes.

There’s a pinball show today in Tacoma for those already thinking of hitting Portland for the weekend. I used to be more than a bit addicted to computer pinball games, but I love the look and feel of the machines. I can’t wait to see the photos from this, though I can skip on the noise.

In case you missed something this week:

I rolled some dice, and made a marshmallow mountain of pure deliciousness. So did Kiri, and they sound delicious.

There were cooking classes and heaps of epic Chinese takeout.

I told you everything you probably didn’t want to know just yet about grad school.

And I tackled a cleaning chart of doom. It has since been expanded, but I promise not to make you see the revisions.

Posted in Everyday adventures, Food, Things I'm thinking about Tagged , , |

Chores and the cleaning chart of doom

June 6, 2013 by jltupper | 1 Comment

In our house, chores are an issue.

I didn’t really do chores growing up. I did some, but they involved cleaning a dozen guinea pig cages, feeding iguanas, and checking on the rest of the menagerie from bearded dragons to cats. (I clipped a lot of matted guinea pig fur in my day.) My room was left to my devices as long as my grades were good, which meant it stayed a near constant disaster until I went to college.

I don’t know if it was my lab habits from college kicking in or what, but upon getting our current place I got the itch to clean. Still not by much, but enough that I’ve been spearheading the Keep The Damn Place Clean campaign. As for Chris, he follows my lead now, but that’s really it. (I asked his mother about his chore habits growing up once, out of curiosity, and his job/attitude was pretty much the same as mine, without the pets.)

There are two problems to getting chores consistent in the household: first, our roommate. As much as we love him, he never learned chores. Ever. He also doesn’t care until a mess blocks him, as he’d rather just clean a lot at once than do small amounts every day. On top of it, trying to get him away from code long enough to help out involves a lot of poking and prodding, and usually my swearing.

The other issue is we’re all lazy, with the added problem of non-overlapping schedules. I work evening events/go to school, Chris works at his tech job, Yoni keeps crazy hours from the house. Trying to get a pattern going is really hard when you can only guarantee two people will be home at sane times, and those two are probably not self-motivated to clean.

So we’ve been trying a bit of everything, from assigned tasks to just having a general cleaning each day. I love the idea of Unfuck Your Habitat – I mean, twenty minutes a day? Fan-freaking-tastic. But living with two dudes who believe answering “yes” to most queries can be way fun makes this challenging. Also, what I think should be cleaned does not remotely match what they think should be cleaned.

After much trial and error, I created the chore spreadsheet of doom.

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This is only a piece of the spreadsheet action. It gets worse, I assure you. And yes, it says POTATOES. We’ve had gardens grow in our cabinets when people buy tubers and forget to make them into latkes fast enough.

It’s a cobbled mash of two cleaning routines from The Kitchn and Apartment Therapy, plus my personal needs for extra house cleaning and towel changing. We’re hoping to add in more tech cleaning days – once we actually figure out how to sanely clean all our tech gear without making the house reek of Mrs. Meyer’s Lemon Verbena soap all day.

It’s a work in progress. In my quest to shove together spreadsheets that had the cooperation level of wet cats, there are some days with 4-5 chores and others with next to nothing. Things get moved around. Pouting happens. There have been attempts to add logs and timestamps and whatever we can figure out to actually keep track of what day we’re supposed to be on.

Still, it’s finally, barely, working. The kitchen has clean spots, the rooms are walkable – even on days where we’re not prepping for guests. We may act like adults yet.

Posted in DIY, Everyday adventures Tagged , , |