the reckless abandon

I’m just going to throw this out there: I’m afraid of cooking desserts. I think it’s the waiting that kills me, you mix all this stuff in a bowl, throw it in the oven, and hope that in an hour it’ll be perfect. And if it’s not? There’s really nothing you can do at that point. Unless you’re willing to completely start over and wait another hour for another inevitable failure.

That’s not to say that I have particularly bad luck with desserts, they usually come out okay. It’s just that they freak me out. I’m paranoid the entire time I’m putting it together and it’s all I can do to not check on it every couple minutes once its in the oven, fridge, or freezer.

So last night I decided to embark on the frightening dessert to end all frightening desserts: Limoncello Mousse. Specifically, I would be using a limoncello mousse recipe written in Bulgarian.

First, a defense of my recipe choice. When the recipe was posted on my Facebook wall – more as a “Hey look at this thing that is a thing!” post than a “Make this!” post – I took it as a challenge. So I wasn’t about to try to use another recipe even though they’re easy to find.

The recipe calls for a few items I had never heard of before. Caster sugar I was able to find, gelatin leaves I was not. I ended up finding a conversion between sheet and powdered gelatin even though one site notes that, “Substituting sheet gelatin for powdered gelatin is perhaps the most controversial ratio known to the baking world.” Regardless, I had never cooked with gelatin before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

Luckily, Laura Caroline offered to help me out. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but it worked! In retrospect, it’s not that hard to make. Basically you melt gelatin into the limoncello and then add some cheese (who would have guessed?) and some cream and you’re pretty much done. Of course, there are some things that the recipe doesn’t include. For instance, you obviously need to be eating wings while cooking this dessert. Plus, if your apartment isn’t being decorated for Christmas at the same time you won’t be nearly as successful as we were.

All in all, this was a definite success. Next time I probably won’t make it at 11 at night – which means it’s ready to eat around 2am… – but then again knowing me, I probably will. Oh, well.

Photos from this culinary experiment are available here.

From UNC Football v. Louisville

It was a pretty frustrating day as far as photography goes. Today was the first football game I’ve shot this season and it was abundantly clear from start to finish that I was pretty rusty. I just didn’t have the reflexes or intuition I had at the end of last season. Luckily this wasn’t a huge game for the Heels so I was able to use it as a refresher course – with 30 seconds left on the clock I realized, far too late, that I should switch the lenses on my camera before running out to catch the coaches meeting mid-field. So it was a lot of little things like that, but whatever. It was fun to be back on the field.

Photos are here.

The latest Bon Iver album is (caution: link to nyt.com) available in full on one of the many blogs from The New York Times.

First of all, awesome. For Emma, Forever Ago remains one of my favorite albums even now, three years after its release. Plus, Justin Vernon has been doing some really great stuff outside of the Bon Iver world – most notably on Kanye West’s latest release. So I am very excited for the new Bon Iver album and I am just as excited that I am able to listen to it earlier than expected. And while I’m not exactly qualified to give a review of the band’s eponymous new album I can tell you that after a few times through I love it and will be buying it when the album is released in about a week.

That said, The New York Times does feel like an odd venue to stage this pre-release stream. And I think my discomfort is very telling about how confused I am about the reinvention traditional (“print”) media is going through these days. Ultimately, isn’t The New York Times a newspaper? And a newspaper that will eventually report on (review) this very album it has made available to me? In some way I’m uncomfortable with this. It seems odd to distribute something you will later report on without bias. Clearly someone at The New York Times isn’t just receiving a press copy of the album. The release of the album on The New York Times website must be the result of a series of talks and agreements with the band and its management. Why shouldn’t this fact cloud my reading of the eventual album review the newspaper will print? Read the rest of this entry »

I was not looking for that kind of home. I was firmly in the “home is where you hang your hat,” cliche camp. I had lived in Cleveland and Charlotte and Rock Hill and North Augusta and Augusta and Cincinnati, and they all felt like home to me, as far as that goes. When I took the job at the Star, I expected to like Kansas City about as much as I liked all those other places. Why not? My second day in town, high on my new salary, I bought the biggest television I had ever bought — 32 inches, or something — and the hot girl who worked into the apartment offices helped me carry it into my place, and I watched an NFL game while sitting on that broken couch and eating Nacho Cheese Doritos and I was home. Lower case: home.

I really enjoyed reading this post from Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated about finding Home in Kansas City and now having to leave it. It ties into something I’ve spent an unusual amount of time thinking about over the last few years.

Obviously, growing up home Home was in Greensboro. That is where my parent’s owned a house, where my school was, where my friends lived, and where I spent nearly every moment of my life. I knew that city from front to back. I had my shortcuts as well as longer-than-normal routes for when that was necessary. I knew exactly where I could find cheap food at 2 am, and I knew that I needed to leave my house at exactly 12:48 if I wanted to make it to Taco Bell before they closed. So Greensboro was Home for me.

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Just found out that the entire series of 3rd Rock from the Sun is available on Netflix (and just in time for finals!) so obviously I had to look up this gem from the early seasons of SNL. A few years ago as I was going through the DVDs of the first few seasons of SNL Jane Curtin was easily one of my favorite cast members. And I remember always enjoying her character on 3rd Rock in the few episodes I saw back during it’s original run.

I had the amazing opportunity to shoot the UNC v Duke game in Chapel Hill last week. I pulled together a few of my photos from the game (Well, okay. More than just a few…) and have started to upload them.

I’m genuinely happy with these photos, I feel like this is the best game I have shot all season – which isn’t something I was expecting. About 5 or so minutes into the game I started to get the sense that the photography was going well. To make a basketball analogy – which seems appropriate here – it felt like all of my shots were hitting. It was a really great feeling and made the game twice as much fun to be a part of.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremy On A Couch.

I hate shooting with a flash. This one worked out though.

We’re all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.

I watched Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” tonight. I enjoyed it, bleak though it was. The above is an image from Allen’s “Manhattan“, a movie I still cannot get out of my head nearly a year after seeing it. The quote is from “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Well, I’m finally starting to get this site running again. Sadly, I have been similarly negligent of my tumblr account. I hope to slowly get that back up to speed soon (or I’ll almost certainly sell the url which I still find amusing for whatever reason).

Anyway, I just thought I’d mention it because I recently added a fantastic cover of Arcade Fire’s “No Cars Go” (courtesy of Copy Cats) which is probably my favorite song from their second album. The site is mostly multi-media – It’s where I’ll post stuff I see online that interests me but I don’t have anything to say about.

You can always get to the site from the link at the top of this page, or by just going to www.theWhatWhatWhat.com.

On December 30 I shot 2590 photos while on the field in Nashville. It was by far the most exciting football game I’ve ever seen, let alone been to, let alone been on the field for. I will attempt later to describe what it was like, for now you’ll just have to settle for my first photo set from the game. I’ve picked out 90 photos that I like (or are of particularly important moments in the game) and I’ll be posting them in three sets over the next week.

The photos are available here.

I hope you enjoy – leave comments!