Wine...and I watched Eat, Pray, Love...

Life lost me. Perhaps somewhere in the woods between Langford and Lithuania. Perhaps before, in university course loads and career misdirections. It wasn't the first time, and I'm nearly certain it won't be the last. The quest to find Life is somehow more defining of a characteristic for me than is the life I live itself.

Don't think of me as unhealthy.

Think instead of a traveler who's quest to free himself from the bonds of self has set him apart and to the shores of Turkey, Iran, India and occasionally the flaccid hanging dong of North America known as "Florida".

Once I even lost Life while searching for it abroad. In the overpopulace of mainland China I both discovered and rediscovered the grail of me. But when it slipped from my hands I left again and the jetstream took me further south. I even brought a camera.

In South East Asia I drank and wrote myself on riverbanks and road edges. I glimpsed the past and what might be of the future. I felt again, the fibers that made my chest expand and my eyes focus. They were in there, sure. But they were deep somewhere. Layers of city grime and humanitarian guilt clogged them up.

So I met a girl.

I didn't want to meet a girl because sometimes I feel that it was meeting a girl that left me lost in the first place. But I met one anyway.

She was strong.

Hell, she was even tough, but I felt in her something muscular and fibrous and undeniable. Hell, her musculoskeletal self pulled me right out of my little quest to find me again in all the wrong places. She pulled me right opposite and like an elastic in a test faucility it snapped right back, bounced, split, reverberated and came to rest right where I was headed away from. And here, here where I was headed away from I sensed a presence that I hadn't in awhile:

Me.

Me was sitting there, deep inside an unconscious ignorance that I had been ignoring. Here was Me and Me was Here. Here was Me with Her and Her was showing Here how to fucking step aside and let Me be. Nice. I liked that.

So I put aside the fight to find what I was looking for and let the world slide by; somehow just like I had done before, just this time without the Syrias, Finlands or dangerous near encounters with Bin Ladens. Here was some kind of love. Love for me and love for her and though I couldn't explain or rationalise it I knew it.

Cut.

Drift.

Be with her because she was the moment. She was the now. And now she is the now and I drift unconscious through the space and time around her; observer of the world at large. The world that drifts through and around me. Life, the essence that the Skeksis tried to distill in the Dark Crystal is the stuff I'm drifting through now, again. No more searching, because in allowing her to be I've found the life around me. She is my current and I am her sailboat. Together, we're reaching land.

Bitchinest Vegan Enchilada Sauce Recipe

What's Inside:

• 3 tbsps vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp all-purpose flour
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 1 dried Ancho chili
• 10 oz tomato paste
• 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tbsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• salt to taste
  

First ya gotta make or buy some vegetable stock (the non-tomato kind). I made mine with a mirepoix (pictured below) plus portabella mushroom stems, garlic, thyme, oregano and bay leaves:

Mirepoix Ratio - 2:1:1 (Onion: Carrot: Celery)

Then, in 2 hot cups of said vegetable stock, you gotta soak yourself a big ol' dried Ancho chili (rinse it first, then cut open to remove seeds, veins and stem). Eventually your veg stock will get crazy spicy and full bodied. Don't worry if it's overwhelming at first because once the other ingredients are added it will tame down to a medium-spice. (Hint: this is a variable in your dish and will depend on your taste...you may even want to use more than one of these chilies if you like it hot).

An Ancho Chili - Sweet and robust

In a separate sauce pot on medium heat mix together about 3 tbsps of vegetable oil and 1 tbsp of flour with a wooden spoon and cook for about 3 minutes (but not so much as to start browning the mixture). This is called a roux and will add thickness and body to your sauce.

Roux Blonde - a lipid and some flour cookin' away (keep stirring to avoid browning or burning locally)

Once your roux is cooked up, pour in your stock that has had that chili steeping in it (remove the chili; it's like a teabag to you now...but if you want to add more chili and body to this recipe and happen to have a blender of some kind you can just purée the thing into it all later). Use a whisk to blend together the stock and roux and watch as it magically thickens!

Now that you've got a solid flavour and consistency base going on, you're going to want to chuck in about 10 ounces of tomato paste and whisk it all together, at this point you'll see what your end consistency will be. Feel free to thin it out by adding a bit more stock (or water, if you've run out of stock) till you reach the thickness you want. Ideally, an enchilada sauce is thicker than a traditionally described French sauce cos it's meant to really stick to things.

Finally, you're just going to season this thing with the necessary flavours which are traditionally: Oregano, Cumin and Black Pepper. The potency of the spices in your cabinet will vary so feel free to adjust this to taste. Keep in mind that dried spices take a moment to release their flavours into a dish...so let 'em cook for a few minutes before adding any more. Then, of course, you'll have to season this with a bit of salt to bring out all the flavours (this one's up to you).

Enjoy!

Enchilada Sauce - ...this is pretty much what it looks like...

Podcast - Autumn Ampersand Kaare

California, the land that is not Florida but has orange groves, the birthplace of Tom Petty('s music career, but not of Tom Petty), the land that is the theme of our podcast here...

Shutter Speeds

The endless clicking of shutters
has stuttered the words in my pen
where before
thought would undress
for the chance to find expression
in language
I am left dumb
and empty as the space
16 to 200 millimetres
between the last focal element
and the digital sensor

for the image rendered
is not imagery
it does not
as poetry
read

too two-dimensional to have voice
too .raw to express nature
too honest to have depth

Tonsai, Yangshuo, Chiangmai, Halong Bay, sigh...

Dear Asia,

I miss you and your people and my people and my people's people who are all up in there.

Your rocks are nice, your opportunities are fruitful...if only I could seed my photography career there somehow...

What America Does

America: a land of plenty; a land of opportunity; a land of stuff.

This is what America has that Australia didn't:

$15 Mobile Phones
Strobist: bare 580exii with 1/2CTO gel from close right of subject
and slightly elevated, left fill from white bounce card (aka some
cardboard from Cindy's Halloween costume package). bare 430exii
with 1/2CTB gel bounced off ceiling. (The vignetting was done in
Lightroom though...)

Drip Coffee
Strobist: foolishly bare 580exii from 45 deg
right of camera and close to subject with
left fill coming from afore mentioned
bounce card. bare 430exii from directly
behind subject with wide beam (a few
metres back)

Pancakes (not crepes)
Strobist: Same as above, but back light is
set at 45 deg back left of subject.

Hybrid Revolution
Strobist: 580exii through 8" softbox 45deg
right of subject, 430exii with full CTO gel
bounced off back wall

Carnivore Adventure!

Autumn and I are, right now, riding out the last few stressful packing days of our Tasmanian chapter. Before we bid this little island farewell though, we wanted to tick a couple of little achievements. One of these was to see a Tasmanian Devil and a Spotted Quol in the wild. Muthauckahs is cute afterall!

So, with an inquiry to the local carnivore expert, we determined a location in the south of Tasmania called Cockle Creek which promised to be rich in meat eaters.


View Larger Map

Here is the unfolding of our little adventure:

As with any good adventure, wine on the beach
was how it all started.

Then with a good head of lower-economic-
bracket house red, we pitched our tent...

...cooked up a feast of leftover soup...

...and set up a camera trap!
*Strobist: 580exII into softbox infront of and 45 deg to right of subject
430exII bare behind at 45 degrees to left of subject and elevated
~all triggered with Cactus V4

We used some ground up Kangaroo bits (read: "Roo Mince")
as bait for any carnivores brave enough to walk around the
tripods and ominous lighting equipment.

Some critters (read: the army of Pademelons endlessly
patrolling our campsite) were curious enough about the
lights at least...

One of the Paddies was even a little bit curious about the
ground up blob of her (you can tell she's female by the
bulge in her pouch) larger cousin, making us a little
curious about the eating habits of these "so-called
herbivores" ...

...

The pademelons eventually gave up on the meat though,
generally freaking out a little when they got close enough
to smell it. And so we waited into the night...until it
started to rain and we had to pull down all the lights and
retreat into our tent (which survived the near-Antarctic like
conditions quite admirably). Without the lights, we didn't
stand a chance of getting a picture in the dark, so we gave
up and bunkered down for a cold night (well, I didn't
think it was that cold, but Autumn has Californian
blood and she found it pretty chilly...granted, as soon
as it got dark, the ground froze solid and winds started
harassing the tent).

...

Of course, in the morning the meat blob cum bait ball
was gone without a trace, save for some trampled bush.

We didn't find any tracks though, but the fellow pictured
below was flying awfully low to the ground, as though
his belly was laden with a lead weight, or, perhaps,
fist-sized ball of raw kangaroo flesh.