Restarting The Machine

To anyone who hasn’t deleted the link for this blog from their RSS aggregators or live bookmarks, I offer a huge apology for the radio silence over the past few months. I’d resolved to keep the focus of this blog primarily on cooking cool stuff, but the cool stuff I’ve been cooking up lately is delicious for the eyes more than the mouth. I’m a visual effects artist by trade; this career is useful for not only affording me ludicrously-specialized cooking devices, but also for working on some neat things every now and then. For the past year, when I’ve not been in the kitchen, I’ve been working away on James Cameron’s “Avatar“.

As is the usual trajectory with any project in this field, you start off working semi-reasonable (standard 50-hour) workweeks, then, as deadlines approach, you try really, really hard (by which I mean “not hard at all”) to double that. By the end, you’re working 7-day weeks for months at a time in the hopes that this one might be the one that your mom actually enjoys watching (intrepid readers who look me up on IMDB will notice I’ve spent lots of long hours working on really terrible things). I give my mom maybe 50-50 that she likes Avatar, but I kinda don’t care; I think it’s pretty dang rad.

Having said that, we’re rolling off the project now, which allows me time to throw an eye back to cooking. We’re coming into Summer in New Zealand, and my first order of business last week was to buy a bee balm (bergamot) plant, from which I’ll be using the flowers eventually. I’ve also found a source for some dry ice, and have a fillet of nice salmon freezing in my fridge right next to some preserved lemons. You know, just some standard comfort food stuff.

In the meantime, if you go see Avatar, and happen to stay for the credits, look for “Allen Hemberger” and “Sarah Wilson” in the crawl. You know them.