Pastry hacks at the speed of light

This is more of a watching video than a doing video. Fun and fancy, but I'll probably never try them. I'm more of a butter tart person myself, or a cheese straw person (mmmmm . . cheese straws. . . ). I haven't made a pie in a very long time. Eons ago, I would turn out a raisin pie with a lattice crust (I mean a true lattice, weaving the pastry strips in and out like a basket, not a faux lattice such as you see here). The kids didn't like it, but I think it kept my marriage together through many a storm.

Pastry is a hereditary condition, like certain diseases. I inherited the knack from my mother, who got it from HER mother, etc. etc., all the way back to Old Ireland and the most primitive, poverty-stricken kitchen, where women nonetheless turned out warm, juicy, delectable fruit pies, the cherries and apples picked the same day from their own trees. The pastry would be like a bit of heaven in the mouth. It must have helped to make a scraping, strivingly hard life more bearable.

We had a sour cherry tree in the back yard in Chatham, a gnarled thing with a big branch at the bottom that kept almost falling off, so that we had to tie it back on with rope. It didn't help that I kept climbing it to get over the picket fence to my neighbor's house and their fascinating pigeon coop. Once I saw the Dad flick the head off a live chicken and watched it flap around, while the head sat on the step, its beak opening and closing.

The sour cherries, when combined with just the right amount of sugar, were the kind of Proustian memory you take to your grave. I can see them now, and feel them in my mouth, the tart pink slipskins. Too bad the best stuff in my life had to happen so long ago.

My daughter picked up pastry-making from me, her light hand making her a natural. Caitlin then got it almost right away, perfecting it on second try. She just got it, understood that you must handle the pastry gently but firmly, not working the gluten. 

Many people never learn the knack. I don't put much into it, don't fuss, don't use a marble slab or ice water or anything (but I DO wipe the plant dirt off the counter first), sticking the bowl under the tap, when it's supposed to be some sort of distilled Alpine water or whatever. The pastry tells you when it is right.

(If you want to hear the sound track to this, click play, click on the Facebook symbol on the bottom right corner, and you'll get a sound version. Not much to write home about, but there it is.)

Julia Child's Classic French Madeleines




Prep time
1 hour

Cook time
20 mins

Total time
1 hour 20 mins

Ingredients
2 eggs
⅔ cup sugar
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon All purpose flour (Maida)
140 grams unsalted butter
¼ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon lemon juice
¼ teaspoon lemon zest
pinch of salt
Powdered sugar (optional)


Instructions

Slightly beat the eggs in a bowl. Measure ¼ cup of eggs into a bowl. 

Then beat in the sugar and the cup of flour. Add little more egg ( a tablespoon at a time), if the batter is too dry. When thoroughly blended, set aside and let it rest for 10 minutes. 

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a sauce pan, bring it to the boil, and let it brown lightly. Set aside.

 
Place the 1 tablespoon of flour in a small bowl and blend in 1½ tablespoons of the browned butter. Paint the Madeleine cups with the butter-flour mixture. Set aside. 

Stir the rest of the butter over ice until cool but liquid. Mix the butter with the last of the eggs along with salt, lemon rind and juice and vanilla. 

Add this mixture to the resting batter and stir well. Allow the batter to rest for 10 more minutes. If you want a big hump in the middle which is so characteristic about Madeleines, allow the batter to rest for one hour at room temperature or couple of hours in the refrigerator. 

Preheat the oven to 375 F, and set the racks in upper and lower middle levels. Divide the batter into 24 lumps of a generous tablespoon each, and drop them into the Madeleine cups. Bake in the preheated oven until the cakes are slightly browned around the edges, humped in the middle, and slightly shrunk from the cups. 

Un-mold onto a rack. When cool, turn shell side up and dust with confectioners sugar for serving. (dusting is optional). They will keep in the refrigerator for a day or two in an airtight container.

Are You Lost In The World Like Me

Just stumbled on this when looking for something else - specifically, the animated Facebook cover for Meowingtons (which I MIGHT be able to post a link to). This just started playing on Facebook, as videos are wont to do, and I was snipped. I mean, snapped - I mean, soaked into it, because it is so very real. It humbles me to think that a real cartoonist (someone named Steve Cutts) animated this, when I aspire to make jerky little figures move with a rinkydink gif program. It's based on the animation style of my beloved TerryToons from the early '30s, with a macabre side of Max Fleischer expressionism, but its message is as "right now" as it gets. It expresses everything I feel about Phone Culture, which I still refuse to join (though I do have one, and you'll never guess what I do with it!. . . That's right.)

Watch this more than once. More than twice. I'm going to watch it again later. And again.

LOOK - a real live PONY!

This is one of those sinister comic book ads from the 1950s that promised naive, trusting children all sorts of extravagant "free gifts". They claimed to be just GIVING away dolls, wristwatches, jewelry, guitars, strange dark rectangular things (?), and - most seductively - "a real live PONY". (Note that they don't say "we're giving away a pony" - no, we're just supposed to look at it.)

Coyly displayed below the splendid image of a "free" rifle is the announcement "OUR 60th YEAR" - our? Who or what is this "our"? Look closely - no, don't, because you can't, the type is too small. But back then, when we all had better eyesight, we would eventually realize that to attain any of these "free" ponies and radios and cameras and other things, we had to do something.

To sell something.

To sell something door-to-door. Cloverine Salve, to be exact. As a kid, I had no idea what salve was, and even now I wonder what could have been in it. Goose grease, perhaps?  I guess it was something like Vick's Vap-o-rub, stuff that you smeared on yourself or others. At any rate, you had to sell a tremendous amount of this stuff to earn any of these premiums, and I really doubt if anyone ever had a live horse slipped through their mail slot.

Just the tone of this ad and its feverish captions (GIVEN - GIVEN - GIVEN, ACT NOW, ONCE IN A LIFETIME, BE FIRST, WE ARE RELIABLE, and, strangest of all, WE TRUST YOU) - all these exhortations have an evangelical quality to them, a sort of religious fervor which reminds me of Elmer Gantry at the pulpit. This is old-timey salesmanship at its cheesiest, and I can only imagine those poor children trudging up and down the neighborhood having doors slammed in their faces. Child exploitation at its most heartless. 

But soft! Cloverine had not yet  finished its cruel deception. In subsequent ads, likely in the early '60s, children were lured by exciting comic-book adventures, only to be seduced by the promise of "getting stuff". One wonders if some sort of legal boundary had been crossed with that early ad, with its dastardly "look - a real live PONY" scam. The premiums look similar, but they are actually squashed down at the bottom of the comic-book adventure. This time you actually see a can of Cloverine salve (which I couldn't even find in the older ad). Truth in advertising?

I found a lot of these, so I made a collage. You can't read the typeface anyway, but they're pretty much the same. Two of the four still mention the Live Pony, so I wonder if you actually DID get one if you sold a million dollars worth of salve (and owned a farm).

I don't want to think about all those unsold cans of Cloverine salve. As with those waxy chocolate-covered almonds my kids had to sell for Brownies and Cubs, parents no doubt took up the slack. But at least you could eat the almonds.

And I found this. I don't know what to make of it. An old-fashioned meat grinder, and a. . . 

Black Arabian stallion

NOTE. Some of the Facebook videos I've been posting have no sound. I'm working on it. Maybe a silent movie is better than the lame music behind some of them! This has only a wind sound, so try whistling while you watch it.

Abomination: the Spaghetti-o gelatine ring

I have no words for this, so will say naught. My never-ending quest to find the most abominable retro recipe might just have come to a dead stop. 

Put a smile in your smoking!

Wings Tracking Shot

Explosion in the sky!

A meteorite exploded dramatically in the night sky over Western Canada tonight. And I didn't see it! But everyone was talking about it on Facebook, and someone posted this from their security camera. Some felt their house shaking, heard loud bangs, others thought of North Korea and that fat little man that everyone hates. Fortunately, nothing happened. This is just about the coolest video ever.

Bentley does nothing. . . again

Bentley knows how beautiful he is, and yet he's modest about it. He is a gentleman cat. Bill and I agree he's special. There's just something about him. He knows when the camera is on him, and glimmers his eyes accordingly. He becomes Majestic. He would be great in commercials or something, because he knows how to work the angles, but we'd never let him. We're waiting for a feature film, with his name above the title.

Tastes as good as it smells

Cake

400 Years in 4 Minutes

                 The ultimate in time-lapse.

Everything emptying into white

I built my house from barley rice
Green pepper walls and water ice
Tables of paper wood, windows of light
And everything emptying into white.

A simple garden, with acres of sky
A Brown-haired dogmouse
If one dropped by
Yellow Delanie would sleep well at night
With everything emptying into white.

A sad blue eyed drummer rehearses outside
A Black spider dancing on top of his eye
Red legged chicken stands ready to strike
And everything emptying into white.

I built my house from barley rice
Green pepper walls and water ice
And everything emptying into white

- Cat Stevens

CORVETTE!

                  You know you waaaaaant it.

Small Men for Scientology

Still the best place on earth

Helmcken Falls, Wells Gray Provincial Park,  B. C. (Canada)

(Sorry about the lack of sound! Click play, then click the Facebook symbol on the right for sound version.)

Two-tone '53 Oldsmobile

Magic words!

Don't you wish you could do this?

Having absolutely no ability to draw, paint, or make any sort of art, seeing even this kind of clever doodling impresses me. I don't know how people do it. It must be innate, like being able to see maps in your head or doing feats of mathematics without a pencil. I can only look on in awe.

A duck's ass

There was this duck, see, and all I could see was its ass. It went on that way for a long time, so I filmed some of it. The duck's feet were coming right up out of the water, a strange sight, so its bill must have been touching the lake bottom. As humourous as all this is, it's a sign of something not-so-funny, and we all know what it is. Climate change affects everything, from falling lake levels to tropical storms, not to mention forest fires. We separate them out, push them away from us - because don't we have to laugh, once in a while? Especially when a duck keeps showing its ass.

Amazing predictions! (and why none of them came true)

This series of weird futuristic paintings was done around 1900, in an attempt to project an image of that War-of-the-Worlds-sounding, impossible date: The Year 2000. The strangest one of these has to be the device that fits on the kid's head to force learning into his brain. I guess back in 1900 or so, they predicted information would be beamed in directly, perhaps through electricity, or injected like so much brain juice. 

These are interesting, but of course almost none of it came true. We didn't end up flying everywhere on bat wings, after all. It echoes what I kept hearing all through my childhood: "By the year 2000, we'll. . . " (be able to levitate off the ground, eat all our food as pills, have a talking robot to clean the house, etc.)

None of THAT came true either, but the phrase "by the year 2000" hung around until. . . well. . . you know.

Does anybody remember Y2K? Remember the panic and doomsday feeling everyone had, running around in tiny little circles waiting for the end of the world? Whole books were written about the mass rioting, famine, billions of refugees and general-all-around catastrophe that would happen when the date rolled over from all those 9s to all those 0s.

None of it happened.

My favorite moment in 2000, perhaps in my entire life, was when I looked in a remainder bin at Chapters and saw fourteen titles on the same subject: The Y2K Disaster, Millennial Catastrophe, Mankind's Final Hour, Goodbye to the Human Race, So Long It's Been Swell,  and blah blah blah, pure bullshit!

My point is. . . if I have one. . . humankind does tend to brace for the worst, and it usually doesn't happen. I'd like to apply this to Trump, but it's difficult. When the "worst" happens, it usually jumps out of nowhere. But there are times, my friends, there are times. There are times we have plenty of opportunity to prepare.

And we don't.

Now that I look at it more closely, the schoolroom scene is even more sinister. Textbooks are being fed into a giant machine with a crank, presumably ground up, then fed into the brains of the zombie-looking children. They look to be wearing headsets. Did they have headsets back then? If not, then this painting at least predicts something about the future (though they left out the iphones).

Or are the kids' brains actually producing those textbooks? This is getting too weird.

BOMPH!

National Catfish Queen, 1954

I honestly do not remember if I posted this already. If so, here it is again. I refuse to believe that she caught this, and with that puny little fishing rod! But they made women tougher back in 1954. The fact this took place in New York City is even more mystifying.

Hardest instant noodle to cook!

           Noodle or science experiment? You decide.

Cactus flower

Fleur de Cactus, ma petite sœur, tu es choisie par le Seigneur
Pour fleurir en Sa maison tout au long des jours de ta vie.
Fleur de Cactus, ma petite sœur, tu es choisie par le Seigneur
Pour chanter la gloire de son nom sur les sentiers du Paradis.

Burning reels

I wish this were mine. . . 

. . . but it isn't. It's the work of a filmmaker named Sam Spreckley, who has a number of interesting experimental films on YouTube. Some of them have only had 7 or 8 views. While this makes me feel just a little bit better about my own wretched, nearly-nonexistent total of views, it's a shame, and it shouldn't be like that. His sparse description of himself in the "about" section hints at a career beyond YouTube, which is merely a catch-all for his bits and pieces:

Description

Scottish video artist and film maker... here and there... dumping ground for assorted projects....

SURFACE ii is described as

Published on Feb 5, 2012
exploring sound and vision through the destruction of 8mm

It's one of the few which had a decent number of views, but that's after five years! Though the description of the film is very short, it appears to be old 8mm film which has been melted down or scorched and burned in some interesting way, with accompanying sound effects.

My own efforts at animation and making still things move are pretty weak, and I know it, but I work at it because it's fun. I can't draw or paint or do anything visual worth a damn, so to me this is new. But I need reminders of what real filmmaking is.

But seven or eight views? This is what is wrong with the internet, among many other things. 

On wings of strange

Bentley, doing nothing

The Baby

Birth of the Swan Queen

Nuns from hell

BARILLA!

Please note. This blog is becoming so gif-heavy that it's basically a gif blog, which is not what I set out to do. Early on, I used it as a place to express my opinions about all sorts of things. I know I shouldn't care about numbers, but getting 10 or 12 readers for a piece I spent hours writing (often on subjects that harrowed my soul) is pretty frustrating. Basically no one is interested in that sort of stuff, maybe because the internet is inundated with it.

I published three novels, a lifelong dream, and practically nobody read them. Nobody warns you that you have to actually SELL books. That part is left out. I'm glad I wrote them, but to have them fall into a black hole is one of the great disappointments of my life.

The things I post now, animations (which I know almost nothing about) and gifs, which I am learning to edit even after they're finished, is like playing with plasticene or collecting frogs or pretending I'm a horse, something I would have loved as a child. The process is everything, or almost everything. 

I post these Barilla pasta ads from Italy because they're so damn gorgeous, and resemble each other so much. They're a collection, a set. I love series of things, and old ads, old cars, old technology. I almost made a gif, but this time, not.

Hurricane Fur Wizard

The Hurricane Fur Wizard started life as the Fur Wizard, one of those handy-dandy products pushed on obnoxious TV commercials, but it didn't sell very well. It was nothing but an ordinary double-sided lint brush, the type with bristles that point backwards to collect the lint, fur, dust, etc. on your furniture and clothes.The only selling point was the scabbard that you stick it into, which supposedly scrapes off all the collected fur so you don't have to do it with your fingers.

Then at some point, seeing sinking sales figures, the As Seen On TV geniuses thought, hmmm! What if we "rebrand" it as the HURRICANE Fur Wizard? It sounds like one of those rotary cleaners that whirls an entire room into a vortex of cleanliness, except that really, it's the same product: an ordinary double-sided lint brush.

How a blue brush that picks up dog hair can even remotely resemble a hurricane is beyond me, and I have no idea if the name change helped sales. But I confess I love As Seen on TV ads. Lately they've been choked with tiresome pitches for faux copper cookware, and as for that old Southern lady (the one who makes pudgy pies in the toasting iron), how I wish she would go away.

But the older ones, the "has this ever happened to YOU?" ones with the "oh, NO!" and the "wah, wah, wah, waaaaaah", those I love. The newer ones are a mere shadow, but I suppose we have to be happy with what we have.

Don't we.

Harold Lloyd Dances!

This animation didn't go quite the way I intended! Harold's dancing is much more awkward here than in real life, but I had only one frame to work with. Getting his legs to bend at the knee was the hardest part. 

Harold was simply adorable in A Sailor Made Man, and in fact he really did dance. I never did figure out the scene where the men danced with each other, but maybe it was a sly reference to "those long ocean voyages" where men lost track of their orientation for the duration of the trip.

Cranes flying over the Loire valley

                   Watch on YouTube/full screen for maximum effect.

Safety Last in 28 seconds!