Friday, January 3, 2014

Whole Wheat Crackers


This post is actually from a while back. I am not sure why I was saving it.

I have been looking for a cracker recipe that's easy enough to memorize while also tasty enough to make it worth memorizing. I think I finally have come up with a potential candidate. This time, I went with all whole wheat flour. Absolutely yummy. Next time who knows? Possibly chocolate and orange peel. With Celtic salt crystals.
Here is what I used.
Four TBS unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/8 cups stone ground whole wheat flour
2 TBS brown sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

I cut these ingredients together with a pastry cutter until they were pretty well blended.
Then in a cup, I mixed up

1  egg
2 TBS water

I spooned about half of this into the dry ingredients, and barely mixed them. Then I gave the dough just A COUPLE of kneads to pull it together. That is A COUPLE, as in TWO. Not five or twenty or any other such number. If two kneads won't pull the dough together, it is because it needs a tiny bit more liquid. It is NOT because it needs three more kneads. I think I have made my point clear.
I rolled the dough out to 1/8" thickness, cut it with a biscuit cutter, and placed the circles on a parchment lined baking sheet. I poked holes in them with a fork.

They were baked for 19 minutes at 350f. Oh, I forgot about brushing the tops lightly with the left over egg water before baking. It makes them pretty. I sprinkled salt on the wash. On some of the crackers.
Oh, shoot. I forget how many I made. And now we ate them all. Sorry.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Drawing Monsters


Drawing monsters. Volume 1
Start by drawing the part that is scariest. This is what differentiates a monster from a non-monster.
Some possibilities:
Claws
Fangs
Eyes
Feathers
Closet Door

You get the idea.
Here is an example of a monster for advanced drawers only.

Fangs (and Claws)
Most scary things are made up of basic geometric shapes – triangles, ovals, rectangles and so forth. So make that shape first. The easiest way to do this is to find something in your immediate vicinity that has that shape, put it on top of your piece of paper, and draw a line around it with your pencil.

For example, a piece of pizza is somewhat triangular. So put a piece of pizza on top of your paper, and draw a line around it. And you have a fang shape. Sort of. However this fang shape might be as large as your piece of paper. Which could be an advantage, because a fang that large is REALLY scary, compared to a teeny tiny fang, the size of a piece of candy corn, which is also triangular.

Some fangs are kind of curved. I have had pretty good luck drawing around a toothpaste tube (after bending it a little) for this type of fang. The cap of the toothpaste tube can represent the root of the fang. As if you had extracted the fang. Although an extracted fang is not nearly as scary as an intact fang, to me, anyway. BUT, if you drew an extracted fang, you could get your pair of pliers out of the basement tool box, and draw a line around them on the piece of paper, next to the fang. Then color the pliers silver, if you have a silver crayon, and make some blood spots in random places on the paper. You can use food coloring straight out of the bottle for the blood spots. Now THERE is a scary picture. An extracted fang AND a pair of pliers. To me, anyway.
Everything I just said about fangs goes for claws. Except drawing claws is boring, because you have to keep doing it and doing it even when you think you’re tired of it because you have probably only drawn about three claws at that point, and you need a lot more than three. Like eight, anyway. So if you HAVE to draw claws, remember you are going to need to fit at least eight on the piece of paper, and don’t fill the whole sheet up with the first claw.

Eyeballs
Jar lids, cups and plates are good to help you draw eyeballs. You can draw around the jar lid, move it over, and draw around it again. Voila! Eyeballs!

Similar to fangs, the larger the eyeball, the scarier. Case in point. Remember the fairy tale about the dogs with eyes as large as teacups, dinner plates and so on?
If that is not enough to convince you that larger eyeballs are scarier than small eyeballs, just think about eyeballs the size of grape seeds. How scary is that? Not. At all.
So if you are going to draw eyeballs make them large. Now, another thing that makes eyeballs scary, to me anyway, is how close they are. Like, if they are right in my face, THAT is REALLY SCARY. I am not sure how you are going to draw this, unless you want to carry your monster picture around with you, and when you ask “do you want to see a really scary monster?” and your friend says “yes” then shove the picture in his or her face.

You could draw some fangs inside the eyeballs (see Drawing Monsters: advanced techniques, volume 2). That’s about all for eyeballs.

Feathers
I just put feathers in because I had an aunt who was afraid of feathers. If you are afraid of feathers, anything with feathers on it is a monster. I’m not afraid of feathers anymore, and I never was afraid of feathers, except on owls, which is a different situation entirely. So you might be afraid of something that HAS feathers on it, but not actually afraid of the feathers. But you still might need to draw the feathers, if they are part of the monster you are drawing.

Feathers take waaaaaay too long to draw. They are like tree leaves, or bricks that way. So here is an idea, but I haven’t tried it yet. You know how you see a feather sometimes, all by itself? Like on the sidewalk, or in the parking lot. Well, keep a little plastic bag in your pocket and start collecting feathers. Ask your friends to collect feathers for you too. Pretty soon, you will have a whole bunch of feathers, and you can just glue them on your drawing. Lots easier than drawing them. And here’s even an easier idea. Just find one feather. Put it in the Xerox machine and make a hundred copies of it. Cut them out and glue them on your picture. And here is even an easier idea. Don’t be afraid of things with feathers. Then they aren’t monsters anymore, and you won’t have to draw them. Case in point. I stopped drawing owls a long time ago.

Closet doors
Super easy. That’s a rectangle. Put a book on top of your piece of paper. Draw around the book. Take the book off. There is the door. If the closet door that is hiding the monster has a handle, that is the hard part.

It is SO hard to draw around a very small round thing. It is easier to put one drop of glue on the door, where you want the handle to be. Then put a cheerio or a small button or an eye from a stuffed animal (oooh, extra scary!) on the glue. If you get the button from your shirt, don’t cut this off the part of your shirt that is going to show, cut a button off one of the sleeves and then roll it up to hide where you cut it off. If you use a cheerio, you should draw a line around the cheerio after the glue dries. It is very hard, but worth the precaution. Then, if a mouse eats the cheerio, you will still have a door handle.

Why even bring up closet doors, you may ask? Even though I never had a monster in my closet, some of my friends did in theirs. If you are one of those people, I am including this section so you can draw your monster too.

You might need to figure out if the closet door is part of the monster, or separate from it. You can find out by opening and closing the door. The real closet door, not your drawing. Does the monster go away when you open the door and look in the closet? That might mean that the door is the monster. But if the monster is still there when you open the door, that means you need to draw what is in the closet. (Drawing Monsters: professional tips and shortcuts, volume 3). There are many angles to this closet door monster business. I don’t claim to have answers to any of them because, as I said, my closet didn’t have monsters.

3 Easy Suggestions to save you 100% frustration while drawing monsters

1- Erasing more than five times in the same spot on your paper will make a hole in the paper.

2- All monsters are scarier in the dark, so it is tempting to use black to color everything dark. Careful. If you do color everything black, you will wind up with a plain old sheet of black paper. This may sound scary, but it does not look like any kind of monster. Don’t do it, no matter how good it sounds at the time.

3- Draw big. Tiny monsters are not scary. They will cause you to do suggestions 1 and 2 which will wreck the drawing.

That’s all. So go draw a monster, and don’t forget to have fun!