My friend is a film archive student at UCLA and she got me in free to a double feature Friday of Take A Letter, Darling and Bachelor Mother. They're pretty incredible. Unfortunately they're not on DVD, but if you can find them anywhere in screenings or VHS it's worth it.

Here's the "blue pencil" sketch I posted last week:

Labels: comical

We had this phone when I was growing up. It's a red base with Kermit sitting in a mod executive chair holding a yellow phone up with his crossed legs.

When I was doing the musical I thought the bold colors would fit right in and I asked my dad to ship it to me but he'd just taken it to Goodwill. A few years later I decided it was time to have this phone (even though I still haven't used it) so I started searching eBay and flea markets until I found a reasonable price. Now I plan to buy the PhoneLabs' "Dock'N'Talk," a device that runs your cell signal into a landline phone. It's sort of overpriced though so I've been putting it off.

Labels: comical

...burlesque?

The phrase chubby chaser always strikes me as odd. Seems like a dated phrase to me, like fag hag.

Here's the burlesque sketches I posted Monday:


The unshaded comic (with original dialogue in the last panel that I cut cause I felt was clunky and wordy)

Labels: comical

Making ice cream and brownies was much more important than drawing the comic this weekend. If my comic ever ends, chances are it will be because of the ice cream maker.

Here's the marshmallow picture I posted in delay of Monday's comic:

Labels: comical

Last week I got my usual at Jamba Juice: chocolate/peanut butter/banana and as I was sipping away I realized "hey, I could make this!"

So I did!

Using my base recipe I added three mashed bananas, a quarter-ish jar of peanut butter and five ounces of dark chocolate.







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Holy wow that's thick! When I was done with the sauce portion of the recipe it had the consistency of cake batter (note to self, make cake batter ice cream -NO- red velvet cake batter ice cream! *patent pending*) and then it spent the night in the fridge and a half hour in the freezer. It was at milkshake constancy before I even dropped it in the mixer! It came out thick and fluffy and ready to eat (which as you can tell by all my pictures is not always the case with my ice creams). This one is still in the process of being eaten. It's delicious, thought I guess I was a little disappointed that it tasted so similar to the Jamba Juice inspiration. I don't know what I expected it to taste like, but I thought it would be different somehow.

PS - Posting these all at once makes me look like some kind of crazy ice cream man (which my friends would say I am I guess), I actually made all these ice creams over a few weeks not a few days. I've been making 1-3 batches a week since I got the machine just cause it's so fun and easy and tasty and ice cream.

Labels: icecream, snappy

I hate coffee but I love coffee ice cream.

So I bought some Trader Joe's Instant Coffee and tossed a few scoops in with about five ounces of dark chocolate into my base recipe.







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If peach is the winner of my vanilla flavors than mocha is the winner of my chocolate flavors. It came out a little runny, but they still made great milkshakes. I need to remember to put the ice cream in the freezer for an hour so it gets that head start on freezing before I pour it in the mixer.

After the hot chocolate attempt I decided to give chocolate another go, this time being more common sensical about it. If I want chocolate ice cream. Just add chocolate.

So I took my base recipe and added about six ounces of melted dark chocolate (I think I tossed a scoop of cocoa powder in anyway for good measure, but I can't remember).





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Now THIS tastes like chocolate. I didn't need chocolate chips to cover up any flavor here. The only thing that happened was, since I made this less than 12 hours after I made the peach ice cream, that the mixing bowl wasn't as frozen as it should have been, so it came out more like a milkshake than ice cream and I had to refreeze it before serving. And just like real chocolate ice cream it freezes harder than vanilla. For whatever scientific reasons that may be.

Labels: icecream, snappy

Peaches and cream!

This was a test batch for a friend who requested it (I'll make it again for real in a week). I just used my "base" recipe and added half a jar of Trader Joe's Peach Sauce. Doesn't get any easier than that.







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This was easily the BEST "vanilla" style ice cream I've made and was a big hit with everyone who tried it. Can't wait to make it again.

I also learned that whipping the cream and letting the mixture chill (and even freeze a little) makes for a much better results with the ice cream maker.

Labels: icecream, snappy

A few weeks ago Gen Lekma, our resident teacher at the Buddhist center moved to Santa Barbara to start a center there. We had a pot luck goodbye party so I whipped up my tried and true Red Velvet Cupcakes.









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It's fun to show up somewhere new with a cupcake carrier. It really says "this is a man who is serious about cupcakes."

Labels: icecream, snappy

Apartment Therapy let me down on this one. Their ice cream articles are partly what inspired me to finally buy my ice cream maker but this recent recipe didn't quite work out the way you think it would.

Ingredients
1/4 cup powdered unsweetened cocoa (I used Hershey's Special Dark)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 water
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 cups half and half (or 2 cups cream and 2 cups whole milk)
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions
Whisk the cocoa, sugar, water and salt together in a 2-quart saucepan. Heat over medium heat until boiling then simmer for 2 minutes. Whisk in the half and half and heat just until bubbles appear around the edges. Pour a cup of the cream mixture into the egg yolks and whisk until tempered, then add back into the pan. Cook, stirring constantly, over low-medium heat until it reaches a temperature of 170ºF.

Chill overnight and then process in an ice cream maker.

Makes 1 1/2 quarts.







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I added chocolate chips cause they're my cover-up when it comes to ice cream. Chocolate chips gloss over my mistakes. In this case they helped make up for the fact that this tasted more like hot chocolate than chocolate ice cream. At first it was really disappointing but by the time I finished it I decided it wasn't so bad. It wasn't chocolate ice cream but that doesn't mean there isn't room in the world for a hot chocolate ice cream flavor.

Labels: icecream, snappy

I've never painted ceilings before
or molding
or two colors in the same room
or a two colors on the same wall

Should be fun!

Monday update: Results!

First order of business (easy order of business) was my cereal shelf. I have a pretty built in molded shelf above my sink that I've been using for my cereals (like Seinfeld). But cereal boxes are covered in ads and promotions and sort of ugly even though I dig the colors and cartoon characters. So in my old apartment and this new one, I'd just been placing them ingredient side out (lame). Then I got the jar idea and found these tall narrow ones at Ikea for $4 and got a wooden dowel from Lowes and screwed it in front as an earthquake precaution. Safety first!


The big project of the weekend was painting. This was my original paint plan:


And here's the before picture of one side of my apartment. The blue bedsheet was a quick-dorm-room-solution to no drapes that turned into a three month solution for no drapes. But as you can see new drapes are there on the theater seats to be installed:


Yay color! I took this picture before I installed the drapes but I did it, honest. My friend and I could only finish the aqua and the orange before we went to see 3:10 To Yuma, but afterwards I decided that I really liked the aqua/orange/white combo and I'm not going to use the green. It took three coats of orange to cover the gloss white finish on the shelves and the ceiling was a pain in the butt to paint but so pretty.


Me being pleased with my new apartment. I still need to clean up the edges and corners with white cause we were planning on using the green paint to cover our mistakes at the time. Can't wait to do the bathroom and the kitchen!

Labels: comical, inspirado, snappy