OCTOBER 2012
Wednesday 2012.10.31, Halloween
Video Format Change
In coming weeks you'll notice a change in my YouTube videos. I've been experimenting with a new format. I am trying to style my videos more like the cooking shows on TV rather than as instructional videos. Here, again, I must thank my friend Eric because he was trained in cinematography. He looked at my initial attempts, pointed out some weak areas, and I have been making the appropriate changes.
The technique I'm looking for is judicious use of cutaways. I am focusing the camera more on me rather than the food so that I am speaking directly to the lens. However, my friend pointed out that cuts to me without an intermediate clip, a cutaway, look awkward. So I'm working on fitting in little clips to make the transition between scenes less noticeable. That probably sounds too technical (it certainly puts me to sleep), but it is something I learned in theatre many years ago. A scene works best when the audience never notices the technical tricks used.
I can give you an example. When I was in college we did a play in which convicts spent months on a prison ship. During the course of the play the same costumes changed from a crisp, new look to a dirty, worn look. These were the same costumes; the actors did not change costumes. We achieved the effect by dying the costumes a light chestnut color, and then dying them again with a green tint. When the curtain went up at the beginning of the show the stage was lit with amber lights. The green in the costumes didn't appear, making them look new. However, during the course of the play, green lights were slowly brought up. By the end of the play the costumes had a muddy, grimy appearance because of the green light. It was a fantastic effect that the audience never noticed because it looked so natural. Had the costumes looked as new and crisp at the end of several months at sea, they wouldn't have looked correct and some people would have noticed.
The new format in the videos is working. I've done three videos so far. After viewing and critiquing two videos with Eric, the third one finally came together smoothly. I only needed to shoot two pick-ups to cover problems. We viewed that video yesterday evening and we were both satisfied with the results.
The new format came about because, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I met the general manager of a local TV station and he said they are looking for content. I gave him my information, but I haven't heard from him yet. When I next drive down into the city I'll stop by their offices. In the meantime, I've had time to work on my technique. I'll have new DVDs to give him.
Obviously I can't make my videos look as good as the professionally done cooking shows on the food channel. They have two- or three-camera setups. Some are done in a real TV studio. Some are videoed in a real home kitchen, but the room is all tricked out with all the best studio equipment and techs—audio, lighting, camera operators, engineer, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there were as many as 20 people working a single TV recording. I am one person. I do everything. All by myself. Planning, shopping, writing, setup, preparation, makeup, costume choice, video, audio, framing and focusing each shot, photography, tear down, cleanup, and then I do all the video editing by myself, and I write the recipe too. From concept to computer to YouTube to web site, it's all me. No one else touches anything.
So I have to admit there is a feeling of accomplishment when I do something good enough for my friend to say, "This looks really good." He's not just saying that to get fed, either (even though he eats quite well here). He knows cinematography well enough to view something with a critical eye.
When the new video format shows up on YouTube, I hope people will notice a difference and like it.
Sunday 2012.10.28
Cool Weather Cooking
I have been waiting for cooler weather for longer than seems necessary. Here it is almost November and the temperatures outside have hovered around the 80°F (27°C) mark all week. We had a tiny shower of rain early in the week, probably not enough to be measurable. Other than that, it has been summer as usual. I like to say we have only two seasons here in Southern California—summer and sort of summer.
On Friday, despite an outside temperature of just over 80°F, I decided to bake bread. I hadn't made bread since spring. My bread of choice was pain de mie. There is a recipe under Breads in the Recipe Archive. For those unfamiliar with it, pain de mie is bread baked in an enclosed metal box. It has a lid on it. The box is often called a Pullman Pan. The bread is more dense, but not as dense as bagels. It makes good sandwich bread, toast, and French toast. Technically, the name translates to crumb bread because there is virtually no crust. The crumb is the white inner part of the bread.
My reason for choosing pain de mie was a recipe I wanted to try—Smoked Salmon Eggs Benedict. I've made eggs benedict in the past and the typical recipe calls for Canadian bacon. The smoked salmon intrigued me because I like smoked salmon. Classic eggs benedict is typically served on toasted English muffins, but this recipe called for a thick slice of toasted bread. Pain de mie seemed like the logical choice.
Yesterday I made the Smoked Salmon Eggs Benedict, doing a video and taking photographs. It did not disappoint. The recipe's preparation for the sauce didn't seem right; so I went with a classic hollandaise sauce, which is traditional. Julia Child gave an excellent demonstration of making hollandaise in one of her Fresh Chef episodes. I have it on DVD and for this recipe I sat in front of the TV, taking copious notes.
I did make one change. She mixed lemon juice and water, then concentrated it on the stove. I couldn't see why; so I simply added more lemon juice and skipped the concentration. Many of you might know of the blender hollandaise sauce recipes, in which you mix everything in a blender, finally drizzling in hot butter as the blender churns the mixture. It works, but this time I did it the traditional way—sort of. I used a whisk, but it was in an electric gadget that did all the work for me.
I actually made everything twice because I needed to repeat the preparation for the photographs. And still I made a mistake. I forgot to garnish the finished dish with chopped fresh parsley before taking the final photographs. Oh well. I need to video a few pick-up shots later today anyway, so I'll get the final photo I need and then this cooking project goes into the vault.
Wednesday 2012.10.24
Meat Loaf? Again?
I am not a huge fan of meat loaf. My mother made meat loaf regularly. It was the same recipe every time. She had a mental catalog of recipes, tried and true, that she stayed with year after year. Very seldom did she ever experiment with something new. Her meat loaf was good enough to eat. As kids, we were satisfied.
My mother was a very practical cook, and frugal. She would not use butter because margarine was cheaper. We never had olive oil because vegetable oil is less expensive. My mother, coming from an Italian family (her parents were immigrants from Italy), was raised with olive oil. Even eggs were fried in olive oil. She learned to hate it. As a practical cook, she kept her family fed. Little thought was given to nutrition (we ate canned peas and corn) and her food safety practices left a lot to be desired. Food poisoning was not common, but it happened often enough to leave its mark. I like to say, "It's better to learn from the mistakes of others," but when it comes to food poisoning, that is not the case.
I think her meat loaf can best be described as a large meat ball with sauce on top. She didn't use bacon. Most meat loaf is very similar in flavor to the meat balls often served with spaghetti.
An amusing side note: I have a food encyclopedia that covers more foods and ingredients than I can imagine—nearly 7,000 entries. I keep one copy on my desk, next to my computer, for consulting when writing. For this blog entry I looked up margarine. But there is no entry in the book for meat loaf. Maybe the author assumes everyone already knows more than enough about that subject.
Therefore, it is with the usual "ho-hum" that I breeze past any recipe I might see for meat loaf. However, I saw a meat loaf prepared on TV, in one of those cooking shows on the food channel. The meat loaf was supposedly a popular menu item at a restaurant. Meatloaf? Popular? In a restaurant? Intrigued, I found the recipe on the Internet and printed it. Nonetheless, many months passed before I finally experimented with it. I had put it, naturally, at the bottom of my list of future projects.
Several issues struck me. The sauce used for garnish was little more than concentrated stock and butter. Butter goes well with the flavor of beef. However, I have been experimenting with reduction sauces lately and the idea of bourbon kept popping into mind. Another issue was the onions. Sautéing onions until tender is okay. But when working with beef, I think onions need to be caramelized to really complement the flavor of the meat.
And so I set about making my own version of this meat loaf on Monday of this week. Everything went perfectly. Caramelizing the onions was obviously the correct choice. When I got to the reduction sauce, however, I began to lose confidence. The sauce tasted of bourbon and was not only bad, it was repulsive.
Undaunted, I forged ahead with the reduction, simmering it down to less than half its original volume. Something happened along the way. The sauce ended up with a rich flavor, a little woody, that was delicious. Inspired, I also prepared some mashed potatoes. I sliced the meat loaf, garnished it and the mashed potatoes with the reduction sauce, and ate with enthusiasm. Magnificent! I went back for seconds, and thirds.
The recipe and video will be on this web site in coming weeks (maybe months, as I have enough recipes in the queue to take me into next year). One point about stacking up recipes "in the vault" as I like to say: I am trying to put enough finished projects away so that I won't need to cook for this web site during the hot summer months—July, August, and September. Therefore, I have a full production schedule planned for fall, winter, and spring.
Sunday 2012.10.21
Another Trailer Park Party
Friday evening we enjoyed yet another social gathering here in the trailer park. This time the food theme was finger foods—nothing that required a dinner plate with a knife and fork.
Back when I was in college a girlfriend taught me to make egg rolls. One day I got the bright idea to use won ton wrappers rather than egg roll wrappers. I came up with mini egg rolls, the perfect thing to bring to a party and place on the buffet.
So on Friday morning I set up my mobile home to video the project. All the prep work—chopping vegetables and the chicken meat—was done by noon; so I packed everything in the refrigerator and took a break. At 3:00 in the afternoon (the gathering was scheduled for 4:00) I seasoned the filling mixture and I began wrapping egg rolls. By quarter after four everything was cooked and arranged on a platter—just in time to be fashionably late.
Actually, this is Southern California. The people who were brought up to be punctual arrived at 4:00. The California natives wandered in between 4:30 and 5:00, if not later.
As usual, the party was a lot of fun. Plenty of laughing, lots of talking, and more than enough food. One thing I appreciate about these gatherings is the fun we can have without alcohol. The park is not insured for alcoholic beverages to be consumed in the common areas; so no alcohol is allowed. You really don't need wine or beer. We had more than enough fun just drinking soda and eating goodies.
There were sandwiches made with croissants, sushi, my egg rolls, chocolate cupcakes, four different flavors of ice cream, lemon tarts, and Halloween candy. Maybe 25 to 30 people were there at one time or another. Everything was delicious, but I appreciated the company most of all. It really was a fun party.
As for the mini egg rolls: I videoed the preparation, but this time I did it more like a TV show. If you're familiar with my other videos, you know I start with an introduction and then move into a shot of my ingredients, my mise in place. Little my little I show stages of the cooking. I don't appear on camera again until the end when I taste what I cooked. For this video I was on camera nearly all the time.
I didn't do the mise en place shot. I went straight into the cooking, with lots of cutaways showing the preparation. The day before, I shot nearly 80 stock clips with all my pots and pans on the stove, four shots for each pan—flame on, flame off, flame up, flame down—with the camera focused on the stove burner under the pan. I can now use these in videos when I mention turning to heat up or down, etc., without having to film them each time.
Almost every video is a learning experiences. I watched the video yesterday afternoon (after encoding it to DVD). It was obvious that I need to go back to using a wind screen on my lavalier microphone. There was too much wind noise from my breath and from plosive consonants. Nonetheless, it looks great. Just one more step to eventually seeing myself on TV.
Wednesday 2012.10.17
Another Festival
On Sunday, a day after attending the Seafood Festival, I went to the Lemon Festival. This one was more civilized. There were plenty of people, but the festival was held in a park, with plenty of open space for people to mill around. I was able to speak with many of the local vendors and hand out plenty of my cards.
The highlight of the day was meeting a representative from the local TV channel. They are moving away from "public access" in which locals go on air to complain about the noise the garbage trucks make at four in the morning and they are looking instead for content for their Local Style and Culture programming. The conversation became interesting when I started talking about my content—120 cooking videos, so far. We talked about my kitchen being a TV studio, how I control lighting and sound, how I do all my own editing and encoding, the software I use, etc. Ultimately I went home (on my bicycle because the festival was close to home) and brought back one of my DVDs with six videos on it, and a photograph of my professional 1080p video camera and lavalier microphone system. I hope he will be duly impressed.
If you've seen cooking videos on YouTube—some wannabe pours extra virgin olive oil into a hot skillet to brown potatoes, all of which still look raw ten minutes later, despite billows of smoke—you know to keep your expectations low. My videos are not cooking channel quality, I know, but I'm a cut above many of the others. So, I might be on local TV soon, if I can bring my videos up to their submission guidelines. If I do well, they'll promote me out to other local channels in other parts of the country. This could be the next step in my career.
The rest of the festival was disappointing. I only took 55 photographs (compared to more than 150 at the Seafood Festival) because there was so little having to do with lemons. There were very few lemon foods. Most of the booths were selling things like t-shirts, jewelry, candles, soap, or hawking local services such as chiropractics or trash removal. There were bouncy castles for the kids, horse rides, little go-carts, and face painting. There was some food—tacos, pizza, churros, cotton candy, doughnuts, and a few others that would have turned Michelle Obama apoplectic. No one heard of lemon squares? Lemon tarts? Lemon meringue pie? There was, however, a stand selling fresh lemonade. Actually, I learned later there were lemon tarts.
At one booth a man was selling peelers, for peeling vegetables and fruit. The booth was a horrendous gallimaufry of butchered produce, but I bought a set of peelers anyway because they looked like something I might use in a video. They weren't expensive. He didn't offer them for free (and I didn't ask); so I won't promote them. He had kitchen knives, too, but I changed the subject quickly. I don't mean to be a snob, but I have professional knives in my kitchen. No "made in China" POS will supplant them. He did give me a free paring knife, which might make a good steak knife, if nothing else.
It was an entertaining afternoon. I met friends at the festival and we enjoyed visiting. And, who knows, there might be prospects for my videos in the future. (Although, here it is Wednesday, and I haven't heard from him yet. Hmmm.) So this week I started changing the way I do videos, making them look more like those on TV. They won't make it to YouTube until late December—my production schedule is filled until then—but do look for them. I'll try to remember to make a little announcement.
As for the cookbook in EPUB format, I finished the proofing and editing yesterday. Now what?
Sunday 2012.10.14
Seafood Festival
During the weekend, down in the city, at the harbor, the annual Seafood Festival was held. Thousands of people were present. To move around, the only practical method was to flow with the tide and angle off where you hoped to exit.
One of the highlights each year is the paella, a Spanish seafood made with saffron-flavored rice combined with a variety of meats and seafood, such as shrimp, crabs, clams, muscles, and various types of fish, along with chicken, chorizo, garlic, onions, peas, olives, peppers, green beans, and tomatoes. It is named for the special pan that is used to cook it. A typical paella pan is wide and shallow, with two handles. The pan used at the festival had six handles and was very large.
We watched the entire preparation, which starts with oil as the pan is heated over a wood fire. The chicken pieces were added first, as two men with long-handled spatulas walked around the pan, turning the food over as it cooked. Little by little, more ingredients were added, including fish stock and tomato sauce. The last ingredients added were whole clams and muscles, fresh in the shell, and whole cooked crabs.
I know what you're wondering. What did it taste like? I don't know. I wasn't hungry enough to buy any. I only drank a can of cola and was satisfied. One of these days I'll make paella for this web site. I have a recipe. I'll use a smaller pan, though.
Wednesday 2012.10.10
Cookbook
Sometimes it amazes me how slow my mind works. I say sometimes because usually my mind is very quick when someone says something amusing about me and I quickly respond with a witty comeback. However, there are times when my mind puts two and two together at an appallingly languid pace.
One of my dreams of owning and building this web site has been the prospect of someday publishing a cookbook. I've been waiting until I have at least 200 recipes before I take the idea to a literary agent. I'm more than halfway there.
Several times I blogged about my conversions of printed books to EPUB format, because one of my favorite pastimes is reading books on my NookColor tablet. I've also mentioned that I have more than 300 cookbooks in EPUB format on a CD and I have a DVD containing nearly 7,500 EPUBs. Had it ever occurred to me to create my own cookbook in EPUB format, for possible distribution on Barnes & Noble? Not until last week.
Throwing all modesty to the wind, I admit (boast?) I am a bit of a wizard when it comes to EPUB ebook formatting and structure using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and a program like Sigil. CSS is great.
Style sheets go way back. Sometimes you see them as stylebooks. When an author is typing a manuscript and comes across something like, "The murder occurred at 3 a.m. in the neglected and misty gardens behind the dark and decrepit mansion," the issue of how to write time comes up. Three in the morning? Three o'clock in the morning? 3 a.m.? 3:00 A.M.? And so the author keeps a style sheet next to the typewriter with chosen styles on it. Each occurence of time is written in the same style, because editors love consistency.
For web design CSS is all the rage. I have two Cascading Style Sheets for this web site: One for layouts and one for text.
EPUBs take full advantage of web site stuff. Files are in XHTML format, a strict form of HTML, the language of web sites. Tags like <i> and </i> for italics work properly in EPUBs. CSS is the backbone of EPUB formatting. And, to be honest, I love CSS. It puts style sheets on steroids.
And so, as if I needed yet another project, I've been assembling a cookbook of my recipes in EPUB format. It won't have all the Step-by-Step photographs from the PDFs, which would make the EPUB prohibitively huge, but I included many of the better photographs of the finished dishes. It was fun.
One of the best aspects of the project is that I don't need to write the book. I have nearly 125 recipes already written. I only need to copy and paste, and then apply a few CSS classes to format the pages. Job done. Easy. In fact, this was the easiest book I never wrote. I started it last week and I finished it earlier this morning. Finished might not be correct, because I will continue to add my newest recipes to it.
On the down side: Reading all these recipes makes me want to cook them all, and eat them all, in the same day.
What will ever come of this book, if anything, I can't predict. At the very least, I'll make it available here for free download, and maybe I'll convert it to the format used on the Kindle. I have a computer program for that, too.
Sunday 2012.10.7
Heat and Spice
I'm not writing about hot flavors, like chili peppers or cayenne, but heat and what it does to herbs and spices.
This subject came to mind as I was experimenting with blackened salmon, a common and popular way of preparing salmon. Normally I don't eat salmon. Unlike steelhead trout, which I really enjoy, salmon doesn't have much flavor. Nonetheless, the warehouse store had wild caught coho salmon, which is far superior to the farmed salmon I avoid like a disease.
My food encyclopedia gives credit for blackened fish to New Orleans's chef Paul Prudhomme, who seasoned fish with a Cajun spice rub and then seared it in a very hot cast iron skillet. However, do a little research and you learn that high temperatures destroy many herbs and spices.
Destroying flavors with heat is not new. It is commercially profitable in the coffee industry. The popularity of French Roast was a boon to coffee roasters. They purchase the cheapest coffee beans, which have awful flavor, and they destroy that flavor by burning the beans. Then they mark the coffee as "gourmet" and sell it for a shameful profit. The public's embrace of French Roast coffee is a testament to the number of people who know so little about flavor and heat, and how they interact.
I tried making blackened salmon by following recipes on the Internet. Although the seasoning mix differed among recipes, the procedure was the same. Season the fish with a spice rub and toss it into a hot skillet or on a hot grill. In other words, burn the spices. I ate the fish, but I wasn't satisfied with the spice notes. There were too few. So I came up with my own procedure.
I heated my grill until it started to smoke. I only salted the salmon and I seared it skin side up for 5 minutes. Then I turned it and generously sprinkled the seared surface with my spice blend. The spices do not come into direct contact with the hot grill. The fish is warm and oily enough to engage the spices, helping to release their oils, but not so hot as to destroy the spices. I thus maintain and protect all that flavor.
I prepared the fish again Friday evening, having invited a friend to come test its flavor. I also made chorizo ragù for garnish (which I spooned alongside the fish, not on top) and my usual blend of rice and peas as an accompaniment for the fish. He's a good taster; he's analytical when tasting foods. He loved everything on the plate and asked if he could take the leftovers home with him. Wanting the leftovers is a good sign.
The comment that was most helpful was when he said there were many different flavors to the fish. There was almost a fascination with the complicated blend of flavors. That was the goal for which I aimed. My spice blend, modified slightly from a cookbook written by a local chef here in Southern California, is composed of 12 herbs and spices.
I did a video of the preparation. I will upload it to YouTube and publish the recipe on this web site in coming weeks. The recipe and video will include the formula for my spice blend.
Wednesday 2012.10.3
The Dominoes Fall
In my August 26th blog I wrote about an investment "opportunity" a friend tried to lure me into. Perhaps I should call him a former friend. He hasn't contacted me, nor has he responded to my efforts to contact him, since the scheme was shut down by the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission, which declared it a $600 million Ponzi/pyramid scheme. Ponzi schemes are illegal because they defraud investors, who risk losing their money.
If you're not familiar with a Ponzi scheme, it is a venture that cannot remain profitable from its own operation. Investors pump money into the system, hoping to reap a reward, thereby keeping it operational. Investors can earn more money by signing up new investors, who sign up more investors, who bring in even more investors, until the whole pyramid finally collapses, unable to sustain itself. There are only a finite number of people stupid enough to be tempted into investing their money in a Ponzi scheme. When the gullible investor pool dries up, the pyramid starts to crumble. This started to happen in June/July.
First-year psychology students learn how this process works. It's a simple cue-anticipation feedback loop that encourages continued behavior. The cue in this case was performing a simple task in a database on the Internet, which takes about five minutes per day. The anticipation is the expectation of eventually receiving money. Participants earned points, which they could cash in after a waiting period. My friend claimed to profit more than $30,000 before the scheme was shut down. The last I heard, nearly two million people claim to have lost most or all of their investment.
The receivership that took over the company, after seizing their offices and freezing their assets worldwide, announced two weeks ago that they would contact all persons who profited from the venture and force them to surrender all money received. Typically the forfeited money goes into a "recovery" account. Say they have claims totally $200 million and they have $20 million in the account. Each claimant would receive 10% of their initial investment. It isn't much, but it's better than nothing.
My friend, who invested $10,000, would receive $1,000 and the remaining $9,000 would be lost, his penalty for investing in an illegal Ponzi scheme.
He can't claim he didn't know. When he tried to get me involved (to increase his own profit share), I told him it was a Ponzi scheme. "No, it's not like that," was his claim. He wanted it to be legal and true because is wanted the money, lots of money. Sometimes I think he loves money more than he loves his wife. He certainly kept his dealings hidden from her.
And so the dominoes are falling. My friend should have known better. He saw a similar fiasco when the housing bubble collapsed, sending the USA into recession in 2010. His son-in-law mortgaged his home to invest in houses he planned to flip for a profit. The bubble popped. He lost all the houses, including his own, when the bank foreclosed. He not only lost his own money, he had lured investors into his scheme. I heard he was being sued.
I find no delight in the hardship of others, but I do delight in the fact that I was intelligent enough not to be lured into this scheme. I admit, I was tempted. I thought about it. My pension in retirement, although more than enough, is less than the salary I earned when working. Who couldn't use a little extra cash? But the knowledge that this was a Ponzi scheme, and could hurt me, kept me at a safe distance. I am thankful for that. You know the saying: "If it seems too good to be true..."