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Not Quite There Yet

Was again planning dinner while waiting for processes to run at work. Thought of this the night before and set the plan in motion when I got home.

This is a recipe for a chicken wrap. Jamie Oliver cooked something something like this on his show revamping British school meals. I’m pretty sure the only resemblance is having chicken in the wrap, and nothing else. Heh.

I feel a kitchen needs two chopping boards, one for vegetables and one for meat. At the moment, I cut up all the vegetables before the meat to avoid contamination, but this just means there’s less time for the meat to sit in the marinade.

Some chicken, used thigh meat for this recipe, cut into strips. Marinade with soy sauce, honey, paprika and cornstarch. Chop up ginger in thin strips. Chop up some spring onions. Fry both in oil for a few minutes, letting the flavours seep in. Chop some cherry tomatoes and add in. Let it sit for another few minutes. Add the chicken and the marinade. Stir fry until golden brown and cooked. Add cracked pepper and sprinkle some freshly cut spring onions on top.

Put on pita bread, add some fresh salads, and you have dinner. Not quite as tasty as I’d hope, could have used either some lemon juice or vinegar to add some tang to it. Might have needed some salt or extra soy sauce on the chicken as the flavours got lost in the bread and the salads. Might give this recipe a go again at some point.

Improvise

Work is not too glamourous now, so all I have to look forward to at times is just being able to cook.

Had some fascination with a garlic based pasta, so oogled on Google and found a basic recipe that used garlic, olive oil and flat leaved parsley. Using that as a base, I put together some basic ingredients to spice it up enough to make my dinner tonight. So here’s how it goes for one serving.

Chop up 5 or 6 cloves of garlic, a handful of flat leaved parsley, some mushrooms and cherry tomatoes. Also prepare some chicken/bacon just to add meat to the dish. Chicken was marinated with salt and some cornstarch.

To maximise time, you put some spaghetti to boil before chopping up your ingredients, and add a very big dash of salt to infuse some saltiness with the pasta. Stirfry chicken until brown and set aside. For the pasta sauce, add say 5 or 6 tablespoons of olive oil. Saute garlic untli golden brown but not burnt, adding the cherry tomatoes in between to bring out the flavour of the tomatoes. It also adds a slightly sweet and sour body to the oil. Throw in the mushrooms and lightly cook it. Turn off heat and add the parsley and pasta. While tossing pasta, add some grated parmesan cheese. Season with cracked pepper to taste.

Heh, dish fits within my 20 minute limit for any cooked meal. This is an alternative to the more common tomato or cream based pastas I’ve been feeding myself all these years.

Self Critique

Wednesdays are like a marathon now, surviving through work and then attending photography class. I’m usually awake only by around 8pm towards the latter half of the class, as by then I would have switched my brain entirely towards photography.

It’s interesting, the things you learn about yourself in an open environment. At work, with friends, or with family, you start to make comfort zones in these areas and you know what you can do and what you shouldn’t be doing. I find I don’t push limits very much, so a lot of things in life are kind of static for me.

Just looking at pictures by other people, and everyone going through with their own ideas and critiques, you learn a lot. I also find that looking at pictures from a different source (in this case, a projector), you have a different mindset going into the picture. Heh, in this sense, the projector helped a lot in clearly identifying the strong and weak points of a photo, as you are watching it from afar and just focusing on the details.

This week’s topic is on portraits, and I find myself lacking in this area of expertise. I am capable of capturing the moment, but getting people to be comfortable to be photographed, and ‘manipulating’ them to pose in the manner you want, this is something totally new to me. Another reason I like about this class, it pushes boundaries. I have to do things beyond my own comfort zone and I’m starting to realise what I’ve been doing wrong, from my own perspective anyway.

I guess my problem with photographing people, is essentially one of my personal characteristics. I won’t say it’s a flaw, but it’s holding me back sometimes with ideas I have on what I want to accomplish. People are a very different subject from buildings, flowers or even animals. You have the static objects, which you can partially take your time with, and with patience (and just that magical light), you can capture a dramatic or even poetic moment in time to describe something. With animals, it’s just competing to see who is quicker in catching them at play or whatever they are doing.

The thing is, I’m comfortable with shooting these other objects as I can frame the picture as I see it, unless there are physical restrictions that bar me from going closer. My teacher’s mentor (haven’t introduced my teacher, his name is Benjamin Coopersmith, and he has short blonde hair, slightly thinning and he has a subtle hint of Jim Carrey in him, with his impersonations and hand gestures, but not quite the facial expressions) would say something along the lines of “if you are not getting the picture, you are not getting close enough”.

I find with people, I put an invisible barrier between myself and them. It’s trying to overcome the many issues that you have with photographing people. Some are shy, some don’t like to be photographed, some do. Some don’t mind having their photo taken, but dislike seeing photos of them in a non flattering pose, or all the facial blemishes showing up. Then there is the privacy you need to respect, of whether you can show their pictures to people. As much as I think I shouldn’t, I like to follow a certain pattern in doing things to know at least I can have an expected outcome. With people, everything is unexpected, you don’t know how they will respond to your pictures, whether they care, or not. In the end, I put these restrictions on myself, where I have to compensate to what I think their needs are, and this hampers the creative process as you are always trying to not tread on people’s toes.

Heh, I probably have known this for a long while, but I’ve never needed to overcome it. I still don’t need to, but if it stops me from taking the pictures that make a good narrative (a picture is worth a thousand words), I need to overcome this shortcoming of mine.

In essense, it’s not just with photographing people, it’s also with my interaction with people that I overcompensate sometimes. I do not want to put people in distress or anger them, to the point where I cannot be myself and I have a conflict of interest between what I am and what I need to do. I freeze up when I am faced with these situations.

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Just needed to pen this down somehow as thoughts are fleeting, just like the events of a dream starts fading away when your eyes open and lets in the light. It washes away all memory of it.