Brian Crick

Soggy Popcorn Texturing

Been a while since I made a development-as-cooking post. I think it’s time for another one.

I tend to think of cooking in terms of problem solving, and the problems I’m solving are always the same: spend less time cooking; make the management of meals and ingredients easier. I dislike cooking, and that’s why I’m trying to do it better.

I’ll pick one problem and just keep at it until it’s been solved to my satisfaction. The latest problem is microwave popcorn. The full-size bags are too much for me, and the single-serving bags always end up both burnt and barely popped. A 10 pack of popcorn bags takes up a lot of space in the pantry, for very little food. There’s also lots of waste, with the box and the plastic-wrapping around each bag and the bags themselves.

The solution is homemade popcorn. A small jar of kernels can produce way, way more popcorn than a large box of popcorn bags. There’s less waste. I can portion things the way I want.

But despite trying a different recipes, the popcorn I’ve been making has been pretty unappetizing. It comes out oddly stale. The salt doesn’t stick. The butter feels greasy.

I still haven’t made popcorn to my satisfaction. But there are still new things I can try here. In the long term, I’m confident I’ll solve this problem; I’m confident that eventually, this will actually feel more convenient than popping a bag into a microwave and pressing a button, because of the vastly reduced frequency with which I’ll be buying boxes of microwave popcorn, and because of the vastly improved likelihood that I will have raw ingredients on hand any time I want them.

And here’s the point of all this: I still eat the popcorn. Greasy, burnt, bland, chewy popcorn. I eat it all. Because whether it’s a snack or a dinner gone horribly wrong, it’s food you prepared, and you’re gonna sit and you’re gonna eat it. I’ve made some really bad food here and there, but it’s hard to think of calling dinner a loss and pitching it (though sadly, I have done this a couple times). You gotta eat.

Which brings me to video game authoring.

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A seeming difference between completely digital artwork and dinner is, I have no qualms about pitching reams and reams of art and starting over. You don’t have to eat everything you make.

Unless, maybe, you do.

Street-1-August-2013

I’ve been working on this walkway for Tinselfly for six days, using drawing technique in my modeling program that I didn’t know existed before Saturday.

For six days’ work, I think this is looking pretty good. The only problem is, I spent way too much time on the cobblestone, and I’m still not really happy with it.

I made something, and threw it out. Then I made something a completely different way, and threw it out. Then I made this.

But I certainly would have learned more — and worked more efficiently — by just putting an ugly texture into my scene and moving on — sort of like eating the bad popcorn. The things I learned making this look better, I would have learned just as well while making something new for the scene. And then I could have come back and fixed this quickly.

The only disadvantage to moving on is that you’ve got this ugly thing in your scene for a while. I don’t like having ugly things in my scene. Even though this is of course a work in progress. I feel compelled to drop everything and immediately work on whatever looks the worst.

So here’s something new I’d like to try doing: at the end of the day, ugly or not, whatever I’ve worked on is going into my scene, and the next day I’ll start working on something else.

And it may be there for a while. And it will annoy me. And that’s something I need to get over.

 

Symbols

Last night I uninstalled a bunch of games from my computer. I hadn’t been playing any of them in a while and had pretty much decided I wasn’t having much fun with them; it wasn’t really a spur of the moment move to make me more productive or anything.

And yet, I felt an immense sense of relief. It’s symbolic, and symbols can have real weight.

I’m usually good about changing my habits when necessary, but there are a few specific things I’m not really making progress on. So I’m wondering to myself what sorts of symbolic gestures could help me there.

A good symbol should be highly visible, have a design or form that immediately reminds you of its meaning, and maintaining the symbol must not become and end unto itself. With that in mind:

having real fun

Since I don’t tend to have much fun playing video games, I’ve already started looking for ways to truly unwind — and the roller coaster thing mentioned yesterday is part of that.

I’ve made a map tracking our progress, and that’s sort of a symbol. It will be important to keep that up, though the goal is, of course, to have fun — not to fill in the map or obsess over numbers like percentage of U.S. roller coasters ridden.

diary

Posting journal entries helps me think, and I’ve been neglecting that lately.

In the interests of getting me posting more, maybe I could designate different days for different types of content. Music Mondays. Coding Tuesday. Stuff like that.

Not that I’d post every day, but limiting my options on any given day could actually get me to organize my thoughts better because there would be less flailing about finding post subjects.

diet

I’d like to reduce my soda intake, and increase my homemade food and veggie consumption… though I’m not doing a very good job lately. I’m not sure what a good symbolic gesture is there.

Though going with the journal subject days, it would make sense to make Thursdays about cooking, since I’m trying to do more Wednesday game night cooking, and those sorts of things are high-stress, experimental endeavors that are frequently worth doing postmortems on.

However, regularly doing large scale cooking isn’t necessarily going to encourage me to do more ordinary cooking. It’s getting into symbol-for-its-own-sake territory.

Going with the ‘highly visible’ definition of a good symbol, it might help to have my crock pot stored in a more visible place (right now it’s at the bottom of a pantry that’s not even visible from the kitchen proper.

I keep forgetting simple meals are an option. Yeah. I like that.

A friend of mine posted this thing about using a simple calendar to develop good habits, and I may try that too.

Pasta with Porcini Cream Sauce

Been cooking a lot of porcini cream sauces lately. I had some in a restaurant somewhere in like December, and have been obsessively trying to perfect on my own.

I made it for some friends yesterday, even though it was stupidly hot in our a/c-less house… probably not the best timing there, but I thought I’d share, since that batch came out about as good as I think this is going to get.

I hardly measure anything and rarely use recipes, so this is a bit rough.

* * *

Serves 3-4.

3 cups heavy cream
2 cups grated parmesan cheese
3 cloves garlic
dash of thyme
olive oil
1-2 oz dried porcini mushrooms
bow tie pasta

Put heavy cream and mushrooms in a pot. You want as many mushrooms as will fit in the cream and still be submerged, and more cream than you think you’ll need, since much of it will be absorbed by the mushrooms.

Heat on low, being careful not to let the cream boil. Stir often and squish the mushrooms with a potato masher every now and then — use the kind of potato masher that’s flat with holes, not the skinny grill kind. You want to squeeze the juice out of the mushrooms, not cut them up.

After about 30 minutes of this, strain the cream into a new pot.

Working in small batches, put some mushrooms in a bowl and squish them some more, holding the bowl sideways and letting the last of the juices drain into the new pot.

Discard the mushrooms (they’re kind of rubbery and unappetizing left in the sauce).

Put the new pot on low heat. Slowly add all but about 1/2 cup of the cheese over the next few steps, stirring often.

Start boiling some water for the pasta.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan.

Mince the garlic, and add to the frying pan. Cook until the garlic is browned and fragrant, then add the garlic to the cream.

Add thyme to the cream. Just a little bit of thyme can overpower the other flavors, so be careful not to overdo it.

Add pasta to your boiling water, and cook until tender.

Drain pasta, mix with cream sauce, and sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top.

Serve.

* * *

This tends to taste pretty robust on its own, though I frequently add some brined, broiled chicken too, and want to try this with crumbled chorizo… I think that might work well.

* * *

edit

Whoops, read the porcini label wrong. 2 oz is plenty. 😉

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.