Chef Jes -

Comics, Life, Toys

May 25, 2009

Anime Central ‘09

Earlier this month we travelled to Rosemont, IL for the illustrious convention, Anime Central. This was our first time at this particular convention and I have to say, we were really treated like kings. They set us up with non-stop flights on Southwest. This alone was awesome! I don’t think I’ve ever been on a non-stop flight; but it was awesome! This was also our first time flying Southwest. Aside from the mess that is getting on the plane, the flight staff really cracked me up.  I’d like to fly them more just for that. We arrived in the area the day before the convention and were taken to see Star Trek that night. Not only was it a great movie; but the theater we saw it in was so posh! Everyone had their own reclining love seat. The convention staff was particularly helpful in every way, especially a gentleman named Kevin. Thanks Kevin! The days were filled with panels and fans. The nights were filled with awesome and food.

A few highlights:

I got to meet the voice of Lord Zedd.

JM showed up to hang out.

My family came and they got to experience their first anime convention.

We made a new drink called “The Steve”.

Lots of great food.

A poor fan dressed in white got an epic nose bleed in front of our table.

We got to see Dave, Scott, and Karian.

Food, Life

March 24, 2009

Food of note.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on my weekends now broadening my culinary horizons. That’s not to say that they aren’t fairly broad for your average 25 year old. I cannot say in absoluteness that I know an entire facet of food. For example, I know much about pastries; but in the entirety of pastry I know, maybe, 1/100th of what there is out there. That’s a daunting thought.

I’ve had the pleasure to work with a man who knew and had tasted nearly every culinary petit four out there. I will forever envy him. I man so passionate about food that for his final journey of gastronomic discovery he travelled to Egypt, where he is today.

While I have a perhaps a serving of sugar’s worth of knowlegde (1 serving of sugar being 4 grams) in a bag of 5670 servings, I like to think that in perhaps another 5 years I may have 3 or more servings under my belt.

I’m attempting to do this slowly on my own. My recipe rolodex for what I make at home tends to revolve around an axis on meat, potatoes, and Italian. Having decided in this new year to making things I’ve never made before or never made successfully, I have started my slow trundle up Culinary Everest. Last weekend I made salmon successfully for the very first time. Next I’ll try and successfully break down a salmon instead of letting the butcher do it for me. I’ve also revisited Learning the Art of French Cooking Volume One. We’ll see what happens in the future. For now though, Julia Childs is far to imposing for me.

Life

March 2, 2009

The big wedding post #1: Pre-wedding

I’ve finally finished compiling all I can remember from the wedding. Also, all the pictures are in. I’m going to be posting about it in segments. It is a little too much information for one post. So please enjoy part one.

I am not sure how I can possible begin to organize the last two weeks into a coherent string of syllables. I beg your patience with the grammatical and punctuation errors to follow.

After countless phone calls, months of Sunday pow-wows, and asking every living thing “what am I forgetting?”, six months to the day of Ian proposing to me, we finally got married at 2:30 P.M. on December 20th in Millersburg, Ohio. At 3 A.M on Sunday, December 21st, we finally got to sleep.

Backing up a bit though, we actually arrived in Ohio on December 13th. I don’t remember much of that week. I know that we racked up 1000 miles on the rental and I listened to the same MC Frontalot CD an absurd amount of times. On Monday, Matt arrived. I explained many times just how far in the middle of nowhere my parents lived; but even Matt sounded surprised to admit at I grew up in the BFE. On Tuesday, Dom arrived and a stronghold to WoW was erected in my parent’s livingroom. I think my parents were bemused by this, even though my mom plays WoW and, in most cases, is better at it than me. On Wednesday, we got our marriage license and met with the DJ. He had no idea what half the music we requested was. I still do not think he does. On Thursday, we rested. Friday was a fun flurry of activities between decorating the reception hall, rehearsal lunch, rehearsal, getting car sick going to pick up one of my bridesmaids, and trying to get back to bed at a decent hour. I think I went to sleep around 1 AM and got up around 6 AM. Not a stellar rest. Really, don’t sleep on a couch the night before you get married. It may be the most comfortable couch in the world and you might have slept like a million babies on it countless times before; but you won’t the night before your wedding.

Please enjoy some post wedding pictures.

Life

February 23, 2009

Sorry Dad.

Remember how I said I would post about the wedding and put up pictures this weekend? Well it’s almost Tuesday and I haven’t. I will! I promise! Eventually…..

I don’t have a good reason for not properly posting anything. Really I spent all weekend grinding pointless reputations in World of Warcraft (the game Mom plays) and cussing at a game called Dokapon Kingdoms. Though today we actually got Mac Hall’s taxes started.

If you want, then you should have Mom subscribe to the S-Words Podcast and listen to it. It’s a talk show done by Dom and his friends at our kitchen table where they talk about topics that begin with S’s.  This week was SEGA. Remember the first handheld game thing I had that took like eight AA Batteries and needed a magnifying glass to see the screen? Yeah, that was a SEGA thing. I’ll be on the show one day. I think Ian is on next week’s show.

Really, for everyone, go listen to S-words. I think it’s really interesting. Join its Facebook group! Talk in the forum!

Comics, Life, Toys

February 18, 2009

Trials and tribulations of a fan girl.

Most people don’t have to spend much time with me before they discover that I have unique tastes. For example, I will pretty happily eat raw ramen, and I prefer sitting upside-down in a chair as opposed to the proper way. This weekend my longest running example of unique taste was tested at Animation on Display.

We were fortunate enough to be asked to be guests at AOD this past weekend. Maybe it was because Three Panel Soul really is a convention draw; but I’d rather think it was because we live 20 minutes from where the convention is held in San Francisco and we’re friends with the staff. In any case, we were there with the likes of Ken Pontac, Richard Epcar, and my ultimate crush, Jonny Yong Bosch (JYB for future references….and there will be lots of them).

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers came out in 1993. I was 10 or so and had never really seen an Asian in television. Then the Black Power Ranger, Zach, was replaced by Adam, the new cute Asian on the block. I was smitten on sight….or about as smitten an 10 year old can be. After three or four reincarnations of the Power Rangers I stopped watching. It had gotten a bit too ridiculous even for me and they took Adam away. *By this point I still had not received the Zords as a Christmas or birthday present (something to this day that I’m a little miffed about and should rectify with Ebay; but this is actually totally irrelevant to the point I will eventually make.)

I lost sight of JYB at this time and was forced to love Ensign Harry Kim from Star Trek Voyager instead.

In 2002 I met my husband Ian and somehow convinced him to let me come to Otakon 2003 with Mac Hall. I didn’t actually know anything about anime at the time and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I think Trigun must have also been very popular at the time because who else was at the convention? JYB, that’s right. Unfortunately, Mac Hall got slammed that year and I was unable to see him. I sat down at my terminal at the airport to go home sad and dejected, Trigun card and silver sharpie in hand, when a friendly gentleman who had also attended Otakon asked, “Isn’t the JYB over there?” pointing to the adjacent terminal. After a bit of hyperventilating and adjustment of my DigiCarat hat, I shuffled over, sharpie and card in hand and blurted out

“MR.BOSCHYOU’REMYFAVORITEPOWERRANGER

CANIHAVEYOURAUTOGRAPH?!”

I think he must have thought that I was special; but I got an autograph and a picture none the less.

Many cons have come and gone since then, many with JYB at them; but this year I finally got my head together to talk to him like a normal person. After all, we were guests, he was a guest. Equal terms right? Nope. I couldn’t muster up a single word to him until a friend on staff at the convention, Albert, conveniently placed him beside me at the guest dinner. (Ian was on the other side of me and is well aware of my crush.) I realized where I had been placed and shot Albert a nasty look as he smiled largely at me. (My crush is pretty well known amongst my friends.) I really spent most of the dinner talking with Ken Pontac, who is a real treat to talk to if you get the chance. Occasionally JYB would share a story or have a bit of input; but for the most part I really only talked to him while explaining the food on the menu. I left that night saddened by the realization that JYB is just a guy.

All my friends on staff couldn’t wait to hear how my dinner went and whether or not I actually talked to JYB. I told them with a sigh that I had and that he was really just a guy. I’m sure this sounds silly; but I’ve been crazy about him since I was 10, so this realization was ruff for me. I felt though that this was maybe better for me to know. JYB is just a guy. I don’t need to hyperventilated around him and can talk to him like a normal person; but I still wanted him to be the Power Ranger I was smitten with. Now my image of what I wanted him to be was lost.

Sunday night I listened to the special podcast by S-Words interviewing JYB. It was an interesting interview and quite amusing; but the end is what really made me smile. At the end of the podcast everyone did a sound off of things related to JYB. I only wanted to hear one thing all weekend at the convention. Those three little words that would rekindle my love of JYB….that’s it…..just three little words….then JYB yelled into the microphone…

IT’S MORPHIN TIME!

I’m smitten all over again. ^_^

Here’s some pictures from the convention.

Food, Life

February 17, 2009

Things I’ve neglected to mention.

So obviously I have not posted about the wedding yet. It’s been surprisingly hard to get my thoughts in order to do this, so there are a few other things I will be posting about.

Firstly, last month was Ian’s 27th birthday. We did a nice supper and night of video games for him. He also got two cakes, one for work and one for home.

Can you guess which one was which? ^_^

Life

February 16, 2009

Working out the bugs.

As you can see, I’ve changed the look of the site thanks to people that are better at these kinds of things than me. Unfortunately I had to update my version of Wordpress and it seemed to do screwy things with the gallery. So, rather than try and redo the gallery at this time, I’m just going to post random pictures as I see fit until a time when I have the gallery back up! Watch for random updates cause I’m back baby!

UPDATE:

Gallery is back up and updated!

Life

December 4, 2008

Antediluvian

I’m not sure why I bother to have a blog attached to my gallery anymore, it’s not like I post anything in either.
Good news though! I am getting married this month. So I’m sure I will post some pictures for a few days then go back to forgetting about the blog until I’m out of holiday cookie hell at work and get to do something else……

Life

October 19, 2008

Still not a real post…

but here is a little image to tied you over as to what’s been going on.

rings

Food, Games

September 2, 2008

Pixel Cookies

Awhile ago this article caught my geeky-culinary eye. It combined 3 of my favorite things: video games, play-doh, and pastry. After contemplating the idea for a few months, I finally found an appropriate subject matter to emulate. I’ve talked about it before; but if you haven’t checked it out yet, then you should really head over to Whirled. There is a brilliant game over there called Dictionary Attack that I decided to use as my subject matter.

I have got to tell you, these cookies took forever to make. Wow. They’re massively tedious. I’m sorry MDB, I’d planned on making a few different types; but they will have to be saved for a later date.  Here’s a picture of the cookies and the game they’re based on.

Dictionary Attack Dictionary Attack Cookie